365 Memories: 2009

The Butcher's Kiss

2009-09-16T21:50:00.007-04:00

I have a kitchen angel. He's been with me in every apartment I've ever had, watching over culinary endeavors from his spot on the wall, giving a blessing in the form of a kiss. The angel was once a living man, a butcher in a small grocery near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street in New York City. His name was Frank, and he was captured through the lens of my mother's camera in the 1980s. In black and white, his portly frame leans toward the viewer, lips puckered and hand lifted in the moment of having blown a kiss. He's in his stained whites, paper hat on his head, an average workday. There's a story behind the photo, and I remember it this way: My mother was taking a photography class, and for an assignment she was focusing on service industry workers on their breaks, "taking five" from the demands of their jobs. I am pretty certain Frank was part of this series, along with a shoeshine man named Neal—his chair in front of the N/R subway entrance on 57th Street—and also a woman in a Chinese laundry, bent over her ironing board. The photos really capture the day's pauses, taken with leisure, humor, or only partial acquiescence to the idea of repose. Frank worked with some other guys at the butcher counter where my mother sometimes shopped. She asked him if she could take his picture, and without warning he blew his spontaneous kiss at the decisive moment. My mother returned to the store some time later (days or weeks, I don't know), and she took a print of the photograph with her. I don't recall if that was the time when Frank first was absent, or if he accepted the photo. Either way, it ended up hung on the wall behind the counter. And then one day, it was no longer there, nor was Frank. My mother found out from the other butchers that he had passed away, and that Frank's widow, who saw the photo and loved it, had requested to take it home, which was of course impossible to refuse. The guys asked my mother for another print to replace the one that used to hang in their workspace, and she obliged, happily but with sadness, too. Frank's kiss had been a good-bye kiss, unbeknownst to everyone except perhaps him. I don't really remember Frank, though I assume I met him. I will always remember this story, though, and how it touched my mom, gave us all a shiver and a bow to fate. All these years later, despite being hopeless with meat—I can't remember my cuts, don't own a proper butcher knife—I have Frank to watch over me, and my kitchen has always felt comforting for his presence.

Catskill Camping

2009-09-15T21:45:00.009-04:00

Eight years ago today, my husband and I were watching stars in the night sky, listening to the sounds of a creek flowing through the Woodland Valley Campground in Phoenicia, NY. Woodland Valley is a beautiful site in the Catskills, at the foot of Slide Mountain, which is the range's highest peak. In our tent, we curled close together. We needed beauty, badly. Just four days earlier, our sense of normalcy was shattered, permanently, along with our sense of peace and protection, of safety and justice. A half-day previous, we'd met my father in Grand Central Station, and caught a train with him up to Connecticut. He'd been in the city for a meeting; we were heading out to borrow a car and escape to the mountains. It was the first time I'd seen either of my parents since the 9/11 attacks, and something in me cracked wide open when I saw my father's solid presence standing at the terminal's info booth, waiting. I hadn't realized how much I was feeling the shock and hurt; I thought I'd been doing a great job of holding it all together, and I guess I had—I even fooled myself—but I melted into tears when we hugged. He was the symbol of security to me (a heavy burden to assign a human), and a symbol also of continuity, of things-being-as-they-always-were. But as we stood there, embracing and then looking up at the boards to find our train's track, something else happened: a group of perhaps half a dozen firefighters came through the terminal, and every person in that great hall began to applaud them. We boarded our train, happy to be leaving the city. Once we saw my father home and borrowed a car from my parents, my husband and I drove on, in relative silence, heading across the Tappan Zee bridge where we could not tear our eyes from the smoky, gaping hole of the skyline seen down the Hudson. We arrived at Woodland Valley to find a nearly deserted campground. It was already late in the season. The time we spent there, a couple of nights only, was an escapist paradise. We hiked the Slide-Wittenberg trail to where the sun kissed the rocks and warmed the earth. We made love there—the desperate kind of act that tries to nullify death as it provides its corporeal comfort and release. We ate homemade quiche and peeled back the skin of oranges; we drank water, crossed a stream bed, picked our way across uneven ground. We've been back several times since, and it's always a beautiful visit. Our son has come to enjoy the place, also: the stars he doesn't get to see in the city, the ritual of a campfire, of s'mores and sleeping three to a tiny tent; he looks forward to completing the "Junior Naturalist" workbooks each year and earning patches as badges of honor. The place, for me, is always a reminder of the healing power of the natural world—for although we were not completely healed in that September visit, the healing process did begin in greenery there, in the Catskills, at the campground I will always think of as "ours."

Kiddie Crushes

2009-09-14T23:44:00.004-04:00

My First Crush

In first grade, I had a huge crush on a boy with the initials N. B. He had brown hair, bowl-cut style, long lashes over dark eyes. He was nice, not loud like many of the other boys. I remember a little kiss, but not sure if I'm inventing that—some small, innocent kid connection happened below an overhang on the playground where I was hula hooping with some other girls. At home, I took a tiny notepad my mother gave me and wrote a story in it in pencil about how we would be married. I didn't think again about marriage until twenty more years went by. I don't know whatever happened to N. B., and I haven't tried to find him. If I did discover his adult self on social media, I wouldn't contact him; it would be too weird, there's nothing to say. I don't know if he liked me, too, or what "liking" a boy or girl would even mean to a first-grader in the 1970s, but still, I remember him as my very first crush. Fondly.

First Crush on My Son

Things happen younger with each generation, it seems. While reading was the first-grade curriculum in my Chicago school, now it's taught in kindergarten. While first grade was also the time of my first crush, girls now apparently develop mini crushes in pre-K. I remember and want to preserve the memory of the first time I knew a girl had a crush on my son. She was a sweet girl, quiet—this mostly because of language issues, though: she was from Japan and this one school year was her first (maybe only) one in the United States. I'll call her Y. She had a difficult year, cried often when her mother dropped her off, but I suspect she was all right during classroom hours, particularly given the competence of the teacher. For a reason known only to her, Y. became attached to my son. Maybe he'd made a gesture of welcoming her into the class. Around this time, he had been reading the book Yoko, which is also about a girl (well, a cat character who is depicted like a girl) who comes from Japan to attend a kindergarten where other kids make fun of her lunch selections. My son loved this book, and he talked often about the sushi in her bento box, so maybe he was primed to be kind to Y. I don't think she followed him, probably didn't even try to interact directly (or not much). But she did draw him pictures and put them in his "mailbox" right outside the classroom. This is how I knew she liked him. He liked her, too, but in typical boy fashion, had no concept of her "liking" having any special quality to it. Her drawings were some of the sweetest I've seen—and definitely the best among the turning-five set. She'd left stick figures behind, and she drew bodies wearing smart clothes. She drew herself with a ponytail at the side of her head, wearing a dress; she drew my son next to her, and he was always wearing a T-shirt with a number on the front of it. In fact, he did always wear a shirt like that—he loved "number shirts," because they made it easy for him to pretend he was a professional player on some sports team. I was amazed that she observed this about him and thought to put it in her pictures. There was no mistaking who the two drawn people were! And there, floating in the sky between them, a heart. They only had that one year of school together, and I don't know where the family is now: they may have moved back to Japan. I wonder if Y will remember—as my own crush stayed with me, thirty years later—what she felt for my son. She may or may not, but I will always remember her, also fondly, because she's the first one who saw in my son something worth expressing on paper from her own observant soul.

Bushwhacking

2009-09-13T22:00:00.020-04:00

So, my mention of Irish colcannon in yesterday's Portugal post (both countries have traditional recipes with potato and kale) now has me thinking of Ireland. Ireland brings many memories, some I've already posted on the blog, but one I have not yet mentioned: bushwhacking. In September of 1995, my parents and I visited the Emerald Isle. It was my second of three trips and their first and only. My father made all the arrangements—he is personal travel agent extraordinaire, as I may have mentioned elsewhere—and he decided to rent a car for our travels up and down the rocky western coast. For small group travel through Ireland, car rental is a great way to go, but it does entail some hazards. Actually, this is another thing that Ireland has in common with Portugal: for some years, the two countries have seemed to compete fiercely for the unhappy distinction of having the most traffic accidents in Western Europe. For locals used to the lay of the land, things like extremely narrow roads, hairpin turns, roundabouts, and sheep crossings pose no difficulty. For tourists, these are all potential sources of stress, and you've got to pay extra attention. Which is what my father did, certainly. In fact, he overcompensated. His greatest challenge was not the traffic circles or the narrow cliff-hugging passages (those rattle my mom: read this post for proof), rather, it was driving on the opposite side of the road; that is, on the left. Generally, when driving in a different environment, a person can expect the acclimation period to last about a day. My father, however, really never did get used to driving on the left side. He did it, mind you—we had no incidents—but he was so concerned, and so unused to it, that he routinely ended up with his driver's side-view mirror scraping along whatever shrubbery lined the shoulder. Like most similar travel quirks, this became humorous after a while. There he'd be, so far over to the left, allowing room for any oncoming cars (on roads so narrow, any sane person would consider them one-way); he'd put us in the bushes again, prune the greenery, and we started calling him the "bushwhacker." Our travels in Ireland that year were lovely, the Ring of Kerry stunning with its cliffs and verdant hills—but by the time we left, I have to say, there were a few less leaves on the Irish branches.

Smoothies in Portugal

2009-09-12T21:00:00.010-04:00

Today, I purchased a fabulous cookbook: The New Portuguese Table, by David Leite. It has traditional recipes as well as updated recipes that bear the personal stamp of the author. The photographs are lovely, and I can't wait to try the recipes. But more than just whetting my appetite, this purchase brought back memories. In May of 1991, my parents and I had the good fortune to visit Portugal. This was following my college semester abroad in France, where I had stayed with an inhospitable host family and worked a job at La Defense. Study abroad is usually no holiday, despite how magnificent the surroundings and how eye-opening the experience; it's often quite difficult. I was in need of a vacation, and had a splendid one. My parents came to meet me in Paris, then we took a short hop to Lisbon and from there headed toward the resort town of Cascais. We stayed in a posh hotel by the the water—one that was at one time a private home, a royal summer retreat—the Hotel Albatroz. The hotel overlooked the harbor of Cascais and the Estoril Coast, and I remember the crisp, white-linen restaurant with its panoramic views of the water. I remember tasting a soup I loved, caldo verde, a peasant's soup made with potato and kale (a combination I love equally in the Irish dish, colcannon). I remember many sublime things about our time there, the beautiful black-and-white mosaic streets of Portugal, the church bell towers stretching into the blue sky . . . I also have an absurd family memory, one that my mom and I teased my dad about for years. My father does not talk much about his dreams; I can probably count on one hand the number of times he's told me of a dream he's had. One morning at Hotel Albatroz, we met downstairs in the restaurant for breakfast, and my father told us of the weird dream he'd had that night. He was sitting in a chair, and some man was asking him "How many smoothies do you want?" Although this was a reference to chilled fruit and yogurt drinks, in the dream my father understood that this was meant to be something sinister, as though a smoothie were some kind of bitch-slap and my dad was about to get worked over. Later that same year, around the time of the World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Minnesota Twins, we were visiting my dad's mother in Florida, and my father had another dream; this time he was apparently plagued by the Twins' player Chuck Knoblauch. The Portugal dream and this one ended up combined in family lore, so that we'd tease my father with spooky voices saying, "Knob-lauch, Knob-lauch . . . How many smoothies do you want?" It's all absurd, as I said, but so often our memories are just that: an odd mish-mash of time and place, strange associations that stick, such as the mixture of a refined Portuguese accommodation, a soup of potato and kale, sinister smoothies, and an all-star second baseman.

Memory . . . in Memory of

2009-09-11T22:00:00.001-04:00

It couldn't have been a gloomier day in New York City today, weather-wise. Lashing rain, wind whistling, dull gray sky. Outside this morning, with my umbrella not only flipping inside out but crumpling into a jagged mess of misshapen wires, I was about to recite a litany of complaints (running late, getting wet, and so forth), when I saw a group from our local fire department—Engine 16, Ladder 7, on East 29th Street; the guys who routinely wave to my son and who welcomed his kindergarten class to the firehouse this past spring. They were in dress blues, one wearing a kilt and carrying a bagpipe, and my selfish bones to pick about the weather fell away. I was left with gratitude—not just toward the fire fighters but for the fact that I am alive to feel the rain and wind. September 11. This date sneaks up on me now, which shows the effect of eight years' time. I used to anticipate it as soon as the calendar page turned from August to September. It has become perhaps too indulgent or exploitative to review 9/11 memories at this point, but although I considered avoiding the topic, that too seemed false. Eight years ago, I was living with my husband (then fiancé) on West 57th Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, with a direct line of sight to the Twin Towers from our 10th floor balcony. At the time, we were both keeping restaurant hours—I did so because I could, and if I didn't adapt to my husband's night-owl schedule, we'd never see each other. This is why we were still sleeping late into the eight o'clock hour on a Tuesday morning. Everyone knows now, how beautiful the day was, how the sun was shining in a bright blue sky. A perfect fall day in the city. The phone rang: it was my mother calling to tell me what she was hearing on the radio. I rolled out of bed, looked out the window. I could see black smoke streaming from the North Tower. Not long after, another column of smoke appeared; we were too far away to see anything more detailed. I turned on my own radio, got my husband up, and paced around the apartment. At some point, though, we decided to go about our day; most people in the city at this time were still assuming they could just continue with routine. No one realized yet—no one could fathom—what was happening. I began to get ready for a yoga class that started at 10:00. Since I was awake, I might as well go exercise. I put on workout clothes, still listening to the news. I remember the exact moment when I knew that something was very, very wrong and that whatever was happening was not accidental, despite having no idea what it was: I was stooping down in the coat closet, my eyes trained on the jumble of shoes covering the floor, picking out my sneakers, when I heard the report of the Pentagon strike. Somehow, that bit of information more than the sight of billowing smoke outside our own window impressed upon me the seriousness of the situation, and when I heard it, I sank down among the shoes. I'm not sure I had any solid idea why I started to cry, why I felt personally threatened and scared at that moment—we still had no idea what had truly happened, it was all confusion and speculation—there was nothing I could articulate, but dread washed over me. And the best thing I could think of to do was carry on, walk to the gym. Another thing I have been thankful for, is that I did just that, took myself away from the windows in this way. In the gym before class, a crowd stood around the lobby's television, and I saw more of the smoky scene unfolding downtown. Still, at a minute to ten, I was inside the yoga studio, feet now bare, (another row of shoes around the room's perimeter), my body stretching. I was spared a live view of the towers collapsing. The gym, however, did close down not long after the South Tower's destruction. Word was passed to the yoga teacher, who made the announcement and terminated class. We gathered our things, followed fire procedure, and left through some concrete stairwell I never knew was there; I was disoriented down on the street. We all were. I remember faces on my walk home: people's eyes, usually avoiding direct contact with others, were now seeking, questioning, searching for signs mirrored in the eyes of passersby. When I got back to the apartment, I went to the balcony and looked at a surreal patch of nothing where our small bit of recognizable New York skyline used to rise so solidly. My husband came home after me, everyone sent away from the restaurant where he had gone for his own distraction, for a semblance of normalcy. He had been at Windows on the World just the day before; the knowledge was a spectral finger caressing the spine. We held each other and stared into a hollowness that lingers still. And I am sorry for all the days since that I have neglected to fill to the brim with energy, love, precious life. I remember that day in 2001, of course. Always will. Tonight I post my 9/11 memory in memory of those who were not fortunate enough to be spared—including those from the firehouse around the corner. Their sacrifices remind me of what is truly important.

Thermopylae

2009-09-10T23:41:00.014-04:00

At one time or another, I think most kids are enthralled by some type of build-it-yourself model, be it an antique car, an airplane, train, or ship in a bottle. Ranking high on the list of parent-child "quality time" activities, model building seems almost cliché—makes me wonder how many models are built simply because it's something a parent is "supposed" to do with a child; one of those experiences like fishing or running a lemonade stand, that you are practically obligated to provide if you want your child's early years to be truly complete. And, especially if working on a historic model, it's a project with built-in nostalgia: even as you're only just beginning to work on it, you know you are making classic memories, constructing a keepsake treasure of time spent together, tweezers and glue in hand, brushes carefully caressing the miniature pieces. Something about the scene makes me think of a Norman Rockwell illustration. It's very Saturday Evening Post. Like many children, I have memories of such a project—but memories only; there's no finished product. I suppose that the model-abandoned-in-the-garage/basement/attic is not so uncommon. I don't know what happened to ours, but my father and I often joke about the clipper ship that never came to be. We joke about it largely because of the slogan that was written on the box: "Build a Legend in a Weekend!" Ha. The legend in question was the famous China tea-trade clipper, the Thermopylae. Launched in 1868, the Thermopylae gained notoriety on her maiden voyage, from Aberdeen to Melbourne via Shanghai, breaking records for speed all along the way. She was a fast, beautiful ship, with a green hull, gilded scroll work; her figurehead was a representation of the Greek King of Sparta, Leonidas. The Thermopylae got her name from the battle of Thermopylae, fought in 480 B.C. by allied Greeks against invading Persians, whose advance they blocked at the pass of Thermopylae (translated, according to some online sources, as "the hot gates." So mixed with the romance of the high seas, there was a nod to ancient Greek history. Here's what I remember about our model: hundreds of small, plastic pieces that needed to be separated, painted, glued . . . if we could only figure out where they went. It was a complicated undertaking. We had the box, the pieces, the instructions scattered over the dining room table. I remember my dad and I laying down newspaper, getting small jars of water, using the tiny brushes. I remember our two heads bent together over the work in progress. I don't remember if we focused only on the ship, or if we talked of other things, too, while we worked. I remember the time fondly, and yet—neither of us was motivated to push the project to completion. I don't know why really. We lost our patience, I suppose—though not with each other. Guilty, we'd put away the pieces, take them out again and add on a couple, put it away once more. Eventually, we put the model out of sight, and in time we got rid of it completely. The real Thermopylae also met with a sad end. Sold to the Portuguese Navy, the ship was sunk—some say by target practice—in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its remains were eventually discovered by divers off the coast near Lisbon. But ours was a failure we ultimately agreed to acknowledge in good spirit. We didn't need a model ship to force us together in hours of bonding, and these days, when something seems comically impossible, we will still look at each other and simultaneously say, "build a legend in a weekend," shake our heads and laugh. Family legends take a lifetime.

Girl at the A&P

2009-09-09T23:00:00.010-04:00

Another Chicago memory, this one very fuzzy. I was perhaps six or seven. It was the mid-1970s, and my parents and I lived in the Lincoln Park area of the city. All three of us had gone out grocery shopping, so I assume it was a weekend morning or afternoon. Back then, the family had a car, too (thematic connection with the prior post unintended). I don't remember being inside the grocery store, although I remember distinctly that it was an A&P, and I remember the orange and red colors of the letters in the logo. My father was driving. The reason that this day of mundane domestic activity stands out, always has, is because of a little girl who was possibly my age, maybe a little older. I don't remember her name, though I'm sure I must have heard it. My mom must have asked. I don't remember anything about this girl's specific circumstances; I don't recall for certain how it came to be that our lives intersected for even the shortest time. The sequence of events is lost to me, and understanding was never fully mine to begin with. But I did know this: the girl was likely a victim of child abuse. We all knew it, talked about it later. How did we know? Another missing piece of the puzzle. Was she disheveled? I don't remember anything like bruises or cuts. She was definitely fearful, very withdrawn. I think she was alone, standing out in front of the store, which is why my parents got involved, thinking she was lost. Was she lost or left behind? Did my parents ask her where she lived? Did she say she didn't want to go back home? Am I only imagining that we drove her home, despite suspecting that she could be going back to an unhappy family life, if not a dangerous one? This is how I remember it, though maybe we just waited, car idling, looking around the parking lot or in the store for the adults in her life. Maybe everything transpired right at the market. I was drawn to this girl, fiercely. She was mysterious, sad, and I quickly imagined that she could come to live with us and be my sister. If her guardians were abusive, she didn't have to go back. But she did have to. We didn't know anything about her, about her life. Even if we all suspected . . . it couldn't have been more than a suspicion, ungrounded in fact. I know my parents: if they had proof, they would have reported it. I remember thinking it was nevertheless up to us to take the girl's side, to uncover the truth and protect her. I remember being angry with my parents for not bringing her home to stay with us, impossible though that was. It was a six-year-old's sense of what was right, fair, helpful. I don't know what happened to the girl. I don't know what my parents remember about this incident, if they remember it at all. I have very often thought of this girl, though, and wondered . . . thought of her as a shadow sister, a ghost, hoping that whatever her problems—clearly heavier on her slight shoulders than should have been allowed—she managed to overcome them, escape them. Even if she had to do it alone, and in any case without us.

Vanity Plates

2009-09-08T22:00:00.013-04:00

I remember one evening in Chicago. This is when I was there as an adult, on my own. I was living in the Streeterville neighborhood, working at Edelman Public Relations. I still had my car, which was a liability downtown and not at all needed. I walked to work, but even if I hadn't, the public transit system is good enough to make owning your own wheels completely unnecessary. I would part with the car eventually, but for the moment, I was heading up Lake Shore Drive with a boyfriend in the passenger seat. He was visiting from out of town. We'd had an instant attraction at a friend's wedding, then started writing to each other, calling, and then he sent me cassettes (yes, they were still in use; that dates me!). He was a musician, a small-town guy, smart but hindered by an incomplete education and a general lack of exposure to anything beyond his backyard. His music didn't suffer for it—he wrote clever lyrics, composed catchy guitar riffs—but his emotional health did. It was one of those doomed attractions of unequal experience. The more he liked me, the more he wanted to impress, and the more he wanted to impress, the more insecure he felt. With insecurity came paranoia. I first realized this on the night in question. Driving along, and I don't remember how the topic came up—maybe we were talking about driving, about cars, or maybe I was explaining how I liked Chicago for its relative lack of pretension—but I made an observation about the general absence of vanity plates in the city. You know what a vanity plate is, right? Those custom license plates you can register for a fee at the DMV. There are a fair share here on the East Coast, but nothing like in L.A. This is something I remember as being rampant in Los Angeles, at least when we lived there in the 1980s. Maybe it was really an 80s thing, but with car culture being what it is in California, plus the Hollywood effect, well, the vanity plates make sense there. Anyway, I said something about all the vanity plates I used to see in L.A., and my boyfriend flipped out. He got seriously angry, offended, accused me of rubbing his nose in the fact that he'd never lived anywhere but in his one town. All I'd done was point out a statement of fact, based on an experience I had: L.A. has a lot of vanity plates. And it was like I'd hit him below the belt, on purpose. As I said, he got paranoid. Maybe it was the pot he smoked. Maybe it was just emotional retardation. I don't know. I do know that the next day in the office, I asked my coworkers for their take: had I been insensitive somehow? "Oh, my god," my supervisor said, "there are SO many vanity plates out there!" We went on about it, and then everyone gave the verdict on the boyfriend. Unanimous thumbs down. Not that I would dump a guy based on a survey of colleagues, but it was an accurate assessment. The relationship lasted some months, but it couldn't last. There was certainly no future in it until he got over his own bitterness and did something with his life besides stagnating. I am happy to say that although I wasn't there to witness it, he did do that—he moved several states farther away, took some chances finally. I don't know where he is now, or if he's happy, with someone, settled again or still moving around; he could be back in his hometown, for all I know. I do wish him well, despite how much of a jerk he was, sulking and miserable in the bucket seat of a car with standard-issue plates driving up L.S.D. It's easier to have compassion for someone with a buffer of time, when they're not accusing you of bad intent when you'd had none. Being falsely accused is one of the only valid excuses for anger I can think of . . . unless you count as justifiable the road rage that results when SIKBOY cuts off 2KOOL4U on the interstate.

Soft Batch Cookies

2009-09-07T21:00:00.004-04:00

I don't remember what year it was—sometime in the mid-1980s, I believe; I know my parents still had an apartment in Miami at the time, so that gives some clue—but I do remember that the appearance of Keebler's Soft Batch cookies on grocery shelves revolutionized the concept of bagged baked goods. Until then, all supermarket cookies were crunchy. If you wanted chocolate-chip cookies from a bag, you were pretty much buying Chips Ahoy (maybe Famous Amos, a much better choice) until Keebler introduced the cookies "so soft they taste like they're right from the oven." Soft cookies in a bag? No way. And yet . . . no doubt about it; they were soft. Not long after the product launch, my mother and I decided to try them out one day while grocery shopping. Maybe we broke the cardinal rule of shopping: don't do it when hungry. Maybe we were just looking for an excuse to linger up and down every aisle, because there was air-conditioning, and this was Miami in the summer, and we didn't want to deal with the suffocating heat of the parking lot any sooner than necessary. Anyway, we saw the Keebler Soft Batch cookies in their bright red bag, that stupid elf beckoning . . . We picked up a bag and, although this was not something we ever did, opened it up right there in the aisle to have a taste. In fact, we did more than taste. The way I remember it is that we ate the whole bag before getting to the check-out lines. If it wasn't actually the whole bag, it was close. We definitely over-indulged in a really gross display of everything wrong with American eating habits. The cookies were, we thought, not bad for having come out of a bag. No, they weren't like the ones we took out of our own oven, but they were hard to stop eating anyway. We got up to the cashier and grinned in a cat-that-ate-the-chocolate-chip-canary way, proffering an empty or nearly empty bag for her to scan. We felt a little sick by then—if not physically, then just disgusted with our behavior. I don't think I've eaten a single Soft Batch (or any other store-bought chocolate chip cookie) since. However, the thing that got me thinking about it today? A nearly equal, uncontrollable binge in my kitchen. I stopped counting after about half a dozen cookies: chocolate chip, made yesterday, pilfered from the cookie jar on the sly while my son was busy in his room doing who knows what. A day old, but still soft—naturally, wonderfully soft. So soft they tasted like they were right from my oven. And they were. Take that, Keebler.

Ferry Boats

2009-09-06T22:00:00.010-04:00

Warning: the content of this post is not for the faint. On our way to and from a baseball game today (the New York–Penn Minor League), my son and I crossed New York Harbor on one of the cheerful orange boats that make up the Staten Island Ferry fleet. The ride was fabulous, passing Lady Liberty on calm waters, and the second round-trip we've made on the S.I. Ferry. I hope we'll do much more of this. The thing about the trip, though, was that it brought up a not-so-pleasant memory of another ferry ride, in June of 2006. My son was three years old then, and my parents were celebrating their ruby (fortieth) wedding anniversary. Despite how not romantic it might seem to celebrate a wedding anniversary with a daughter, son-in-law, and three-year-old grandchild in tow, this was how my parents wished to celebrate: with a family vacation to Block Island, Rhode Island. I had never been there, though I had heard wonderful things. The island lived up to its reputation—it was charming, laid back, a great place for a family getaway. The problem was getting back to the mainland after our holiday. The day we were heading back, there was a sea storm. There may have been a question as to whether the ferry would set out as scheduled—maybe there was a delay in departure, I don't recall those details—but sail it did, with us on it. And I, who have prided myself for years on a stomach of steel (honestly, the number of times I've experienced any kind of stomach illness I can count with just my two hands, and this includes pregnancy) . . . well, let's just say that I was reduced to a whimpering, quivering, Saltine-eating weakling on this trip. I remember the pitching and rolling, the way the windows steamed up with the chill of lashing water on the outside and too many people trapped on the hot-and-humid inside, unable to ventilate the space much. I remember we had a table, the five of us gathered around it. There was some food I couldn't look at. A roiling bout of nausea came on somewhat suddenly, and I tried to just focus on not vomiting on the spot. I could never have made it to a bathroom, that was clear. All it took for the bile to surge was for me to lift my clammy forehead from where I had it buried in my arms, pressed flat to the tabletop. Because I am basically never sick in this sense—the same is true with headaches; I very rarely get them—I was at a complete loss as to how to cope. I just groaned and kept my head down. The other thing I remember is this: I felt like the biggest failure as a mother in that moment, because as one could expect, my son was also feeling sick, and I could do absolutely nothing to help him; I simply couldn't move. I was too busy imagining immigrant steerage compartments and reminding myself pessimistically that in Greek legend, it's a ferryman, Charon, who traffics the dead to Hades. So, with me in such a state, my husband was the one who cared for my son during that boat ride—which meant he was the one to hold him while, eventually, my son threw up all over him. I don't need to describe to you, I'm sure, the acid stink that would in and of itself cause others to gag. The tan, stringy, chunky mess that covered my husband's black (I think) shirt. They changed in the car, found some kind of bag for the filthy garments, big and small. Eventually, the ferry pulled into its mainland slip. The moment passed, and I managed to keep some composure if not much efficacy—but the unpleasantness of this memory lingered. It was a long time before my son expressed any interest in getting on a boat again. For months he was afraid something would make him vomit, and then when I thought he'd forgotten about it, he'd bring up the memory again, defeating my own efforts to stuff it into some dark, unused recess of the mind. More than anything, I wanted to block out the shame I felt at being helpless, at being unavailable to one who needed me; my body was such a traitor to my good, maternal intentions. But I'm happy to report there have been no more incidents—nothing dramatic enough to remember. My overall constitution is back to something resembling heavy metal, and my son seems seldom bothered with any kind of physical complaints. This summer, we are both gung-ho about the Staten Island Ferry, and this is a good thing. Now, if the Staten Island Yankees could just clean up their fielding and give us a home-team win next time we make the trip . . .

Manneken Pis...sed Off

2009-09-05T23:00:00.001-04:00

We made the best of an unexpected stay in Brussels. Eight years ago, my fiancé (now husband) and I were on our way back to New York following a visit to his family in southwest France. We were flying Sabena, the national airline of Belgium that was in service from 1923 to 2001 (they declared bankruptcy not long after our trip). September 3, 2001. We were of course ignorant of what lurked just around the corner of history. If I'd known it would be the last time I'd fly with my safety taken for granted (as silly as perhaps that always was), I would have enjoyed the flight experience more, despite the hassles we encountered. The hassles themselves, in fact, would have seemed like nothing compared to the immigration nightmares to follow. The way our "layover" started was this: Despite having boarded our originating flight in Toulouse without a raised eyebrow, once in transit (in a different country, where we knew no one and could not call for someone to return to the airport to fetch us) my husband was stopped at the moment of boarding, disallowed on the plane because of some oversight on the part of his employer. My husband was working in the States on an HB-1 specialty worker's visa, and the visa had been transferred from one employer to another not long before, but something was amiss despite the validity of dates shown on the visa (I can't remember the details anymore, they got lost in the years of green card hell that came after). My husband was thrown for a loop, upset, and in this situation powerless. I tried my "this is a simple misunderstanding" approach, then righteous indignation, to no avail. No way was he getting on the plane. What I recall with the most emotional immediacy is that the blonde Sabena attendant, standing at the gate in her blue uniform a) suggested that there was nothing preventing me from boarding the plane, as if I was going to just leave my fiancé stranded in Brussels while I flew merrily home, and b) when I said neither of us would fly, requested that I identify our baggage to make it easier to offload. I looked at her blankly for a moment before the anger took over. I know it was petty, belligerent, and "ugly American" of me, but no way was I going to help her evict us from our flight—a flight that I knew we had every right to be on. My husband was legal, damnit. I flat-out refused to cooperate. I mean, if they wanted to prevent our boarding, fine—we could hardly force ourselves onto the plane—but no way was I going to make it easier. I was pissed off. Ultimately, though, I was "manneken pis-sed." Maybe you don't know about the statue/fountain of the little boy urinating in the heart of Brussels. I had never heard of him. He's called "le petit Julien" in French. Apparently, he is costumed at various times of year, and he's quite the tourist attraction. We ended up paying him a visit. I will say that Sabena was nice enough to rebook a flight for us for the following day, plus (once they hauled our luggage off the plane), they put us up in a hotel with a meal voucher as well. Now that I think of it, maybe this is one reason Sabena folded—too nice; no one nice ever made it in the airline industry. Ultimately, we turned our surprise stay to advantage: once the visit to the consulate and the post office (for requisite money order or what have you) were complete and my husband's visa properly stamped, we enjoyed the Manneken Pis, some ale-brewing attraction, and a copious serving of moules-frites before heading back to the airport with our fatigued bodies, our tired luggage. The rest of our trip passed without incident, and we had a peaceful week back home before other, more shattering episodes rocked our lives. Thinking of Brussels in retrospect, our fiasco has humor in it and fun, adventure and a sense of "two for the road" (before things went bad in the movie by the same name). Still, someday I'd like to go back when it's a planned trip. We'll say hello to the little bronze boy, drink more monastery ale, buy socks and clocks and who knows what other Tintin merchandise for our son . . . and we'll have no cause for getting pissed. Maybe.

Red Licorice

2009-09-04T20:00:00.003-04:00

Animal crackers, now red licorice. Not sure why the return to sweet treats from childhood—must be some escapist compulsions (which I tend to get whenever I have to pay bills)—but sometimes it's better to not ask why and to just enjoy, even if only in a bout of nostalgia. In a prior post, I wrote about black licorice and its unlikely pairing with wasabi. Today, I remember a love of red licorice. It's nothing I'd eat now, because it generally tastes much more artificial to me, or else (depending on the brand) just sweeter—none of the spice I crave in my sweets today. But I used to eat it often. Frequently in the form of Twizzlers candy, and then most often at the movies with my parents. We'd get popcorn, of course, and sometimes Goobers or Raisinettes, but I often loved the licorice twists, the cherry taste of them, the texture of tough and chewy, and the way the outer spiral pattern would form what looked like a star pattern if you looked from the bitten-off end of the licorice stick. And, once bitten, there was that hole in the middle. Why? I have no idea why the hole necessarily resulted or why it might have been a design element . . . if not for the potential of the licorice to be made into a straw. It seemed an obvious thing to do, though I don't know if anyone else did it. Going to the movies was also one of the only times I was allowed to drink soda growing up, and I invariably ordered 7-Up or Sprite—whatever clear soda was on offer. I'd bite off each end of a Twizzler stick, and push it through the hole in the lid of the soda where a straw would go. I'd slurp up soda and bite down on my makeshift straw simultaneously, and I loved the way the gummy, usually warm licorice became tougher and very, very cold. I loved the way when I bit into it, there was more resistance; my teeth had to work harder and then it was I who made the candy soft again in my mouth, soda squirting from the part of the tube I'd bitten off. At some point, I stopped getting the licorice sticks, though. Then, I turned to cherry Nibs. They were slightly less plastic-like, not so glossy, and when you bit into these, they were solid and of a paler hue on the inside. They seemed more substantial somehow (though I'm sure they were really no less artificial), and a more sophisticated version of licorice candy. I had yet to find on the market anything resembling real, all-natural licorice, and sophisticated is indeed a relative term: I was in my early teens by then. My final red-licorice memory, though, is of red licorice laces. Quirky as I was in my later years of high school, I decided that I would use licorice laces to replace the proper shoelaces from a pair of black boots I owned and wore to death. (Even once the soles had fallen off, I just kept wearing them as they were—repairing them was not something I thought to do on my own up in boarding school.) I shouldn't have to tell you that they didn't hold up very well, but surprisingly I did manage to make them work for a while. The real hazard wasn't the wear and tear, of course, but rather the temptation to eat the laces, which I did; which my friends did, too. Now, if I buy licorice, it's black licorice almost exclusively. I will admit that my son is much more sophisticated in some tastes than I was at his age: he will happily swallow down a single stick or half a box of Panda black licorice, or the Kookaburra brand from Australia. Not yet with wasabi, of course—but really, the more I think of it, the less certain I am that I would eat that combination again myself. And the more I think of the flavor, the more I realize how far I've come from childhood: I tend to get my licorice taste in the form of fennel or anise seed (or ouzo!). But still, red or black—or brown, green, or clear—there's something about licorice in any form that's still appealing. Nostalgia aside, I wholly endorse it, with sincere apologies to my dentist.

Animal Crackers

2009-09-03T23:45:00.003-04:00

I remember how much I looked forward to a box of animal crackers. It was one of the simplest, best pleasures of childhood. I didn't have them too frequently growing up, just often enough to think of them as special. I loved the colorful box made to look like a circus wagon, loved how it had the little string attached to the top so that you could dangle it from your wrist like a woman's beaded evening bag, but the animal cracker box was so much better. I imagined the boxes as part of a long caravan, and I was always the circus master, deciding on the next destination. I was kind to the animals, or tried to be—I hated biting off their heads. I'd start with the feet and work my way up. (Really, though, is that any better? Maybe I should've just put them out of their misery, decapitating them after all.) But before getting at the animals, I remember that there was something very intriguing to me about the inner lining of the box as well: the waxy brown paper pouch suggested something nostalgic to me, before I could properly define the word; before I had lived long enough to experience the sensation of nostalgia myself. Something about that parchment, tacked to the inside of the box with glue so that you could never remove it cleanly—something about the way it was crimped at the top, the crisp crinkly sound it made as you worked to tear it open neatly (I liked neatness, even then)—its drab color, not caring to impress you, made me think of a grandmother's modest kitchen. I always hated and loved the moment when that inner bag was ripped: hated the tearing, loved that it meant access to the buttery vanilla cookies. The other thing I remember is that I would pull out all the cookies and lay them on the table in front of me. I'd start grouping them together: how many lions, how many gorillas, how many zebras (I loved the zebras!). I'd start eating the "extras" so that every pile ended up with the same number of cookies, and then I'd start eating the cookies in rotation, taking down the species with even-handed care. If ever there was an OCD process involved in eating animal crackers, it was mine, and I wonder now how good a predictor it is of future personality, how a kid approaches a box of animal crackers. I also remember wondering why there was a striped background on some of the cookies—later I figured out it had to do with stability: the manufacturers smartly decided there'd be less broken limbs if the space between front and back legs was filled in; still not sure why the striped pattern, but I liked that, too. I wondered why something so clearly a cookie was called a cracker. That never made any sense to me. I haven't bought a box for my son in a long time. I make so many homemade cookies that store-bought doesn't happen often. We get all-natural varieties most often, too. Still, sometimes . . . nothing quite satisfies the kiddie-food craving like a single, all-to-yourself box of the traditional, original animal crackers. It's about time I bought some again. And now I'll have to watch my son carefully, see how he eats them. Watch a child's delight in something simple, remember that too, what it felt like. If I'm lucky, my son will even share with me—a zebra for old times' sake. I can hear the ringmaster now: Ladies and gentlemen . . . Enjoy!

Recipe Box

2009-09-02T23:15:00.013-04:00

I remember an olive green, plastic recipe box. Really just a filing box for index cards, I think, not necessarily designed in any special way for recipes. I remember it sitting on the kitchen counter of the condominium we lived in during our last year or so in the Windy City. I remember the window at the end of that galley-style kitchen; I think I remember a loose plaid wallpaper pattern left over from the family before us (excuse: it was the 1970s). I remember sitting on the counter, swinging my dangling legs, talking to Mom while she cooked or baked. I also remember that it was here I saw my first ever big-city cockroach, perched on top of the paper towel roll that was mounted under the sink, attached to the inside of a cabinet door. The roach was big, brown and glistening, and it sent Mom running to the store for boric acid. End of roach. End of roach memories, because really, it's not something you want to linger on—certainly not in a post about recipes. Like all memories, my own surrounding the recipe box may be way off, but this is what my mind yields: the drab color of the box, misleading because inside, as far as I was concerned, the recipes were like multicolored jewels. Or maybe—more accurate but still on the hidden-treasure theme—I should conjure the image of a yellowed map marked with an X for extra tasty; a map of deliciousness, scrawled in a code of sorts: big T and little t, abbreviated c. and fractions that, at my age then, meant absolutely nothing to me. Mom had an assortment of neatly printed (or typed) cards and newspaper clippings stashed inside. I could guess at a lot of the recipes contained in the box, but really only one stands out, and I think this is because it's been the subject of conversation on several occasions; unfortunately, it's gone down in family history as the lost recipe. Lost because, sadly, the whole recipe box went missing somewhere between Chicago and Los Angeles, seemingly fallen off the Bekins moving truck that hauled our lives out West in the summer of 1979. The recipe in question was for a chocolate chip cookie that had rice crisp cereal in it. I have since tried to convince my mom (unsuccessfully) that we can duplicate it with an average Toll House cookie recipe and just dump in a half cup or so of the rice cereal. She is certain there was more to it than that, and I have yet to do a test run in the kitchen to prover her wrong. Who knows what else was lost in that box. I know my mom mourned it, though. I think there was a braised veal dish or something similar, also irreplaceable. Other recipes she could find again: they were perhaps for my grandmother's pastitsio or my other grandmother's cornbread. At the time, they were both still living, so all that was required was a call or visit, pen and paper in hand. Mercifully, the loss of the recipe box didn't stall my mother's culinary efforts—if anything, it increased them. We have since amassed a new collection of family favorites: the fresh-tomato pasta sauce, chicken jambalaya, pumpkin muffins, decadent chocolate "brownie" cake . . . the list goes on . . . though no box (just cookbooks and a system I no longer understand of filing handwritten recipes between the books' covers, a specific book I guess). The important part, of course, is just that there was a box in the first place—the memory of kitchen comfort, the knowledge that when I was young, instead of take-out speed-dial on a mobile phone, my mother was the kind of woman who had a small, boring-looking recipe box that she kept with meticulous care and dipped into on a daily basis to feed us all. It's a good way to grow up, a good thing to remember. And my next project? Those cookies.

Back to School Shopping

2009-09-01T21:00:00.011-04:00

Welcome to September—to the U.S. Open, to crisper air and lengthening shadows, to a return to routines, and above all . . . back to school. Although my own son is still enjoying the liberty of summer vacation (why is Labor Day so late this year?!), we've already done a bit of shopping to get ready for the upcoming term: some tan corduroys, two pairs of shoes, new pens and pencils and composition books and flash cards. It's a ritual I love, always have: unsharpened pencils and unsullied erasers equal a seductive, if fleeting, perfection. The new academic year holds so much potential, be it for high marks or team tryouts, or else a respite from whatever social tyranny dogged the previous year (because when the newness of the year wears off, the drama tends to set in—and I'm not talking about the school play!). Here is what I remember most about back-to-school shopping from my own childhood: First, new markers and glue; three-ring binders (that ubiquitous scratchy blue kind that looked like denim and that the kids all drew on with black Sharpies); filler paper, reinforcements; Hello Kitty pencil cases with matching erasers and sharpeners. Next, during early-grade years in Chicago, I remember the brown penny loafers I got each year and how the uppers were incredibly stiff and the soles dangerously slippery in their pristine, unscuffed state; they smelled like tanned and polished hide, and my mom always made sure to find the newest, shiniest copper to tuck into them for luck. Skirts and jumpers in studious fall colors and tweedy materials. Later, during middle school years in Los Angeles, the clothes shopping got more sophisticated. I recall how, in one trendy Brentwood store, my mother asked the salesperson if there were any clothes anymore that had the labels on the inside. I got my first lesson in marketing and free advertising on the ride home: why should we pay extra for a status label that everyone can see? They should pay us to be walking billboards for their companies, except forget it, we weren't buying. She was right, really. And I accepted this, agreed with it—not in small part because when it came to self-expression, my mom was easy. My mother encouraged me to experiment with fashion, and for an acceptable budget I got to test out fads and create my own looks, no matter how ridiculous. The fall season I will never forget? The year of the knickers. Not English knickers—which of course I now know are undergarments—but those button-below-the-knee, puffy ragamuffin half-pants that for some reason were the hot ticket for back-to-school that year. I had two pairs: woolly dark gray and (major confession here), lavender corduroy. God were they awful, but I wanted them, wore them . . . and somehow never managed to pull off the look the way the popular girls did. Oh well. By the time I was in high school, the back-to-school routine was different, more serious, involving laundry bags and lamps, bedding and a footlocker, along with the usual supplies. Because it was boarding school, back-to-school began to mean good-byes. At that age, a push-and-pull sensation of dizzying independence and anxious leave-taking overtook me toward the end of each summer. And then for many years— nothing. Entering the working world, I forgot about back-to-school; September no longer brought a Pavlovian trip to the stationery store. And I didn't realize that I missed it. Now, though, taking my son by the hand and watching him walk out of the shoe store, mesmerized by his own feet, I get this jolt of vicarious newness, too. I, too, feel a bounce in my step and a thrilling curiosity: what new path, what momentary triumph of perfection and promise, awaits us this year? The pencils are new, the notebooks unmarred by messy handwriting and spelling mistakes (though I've already put correction fluid into my 2009-2010 planner), and yet I know full well that if we are to learn and grow, nothing will stay that way. And really, that's okay, too. Let the school year begin!

See you in September

2009-08-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

You all know that song, right: "See You in September"? Well, that's what I'll be doing, seeing you then. Let's face it, August is hot and meant for the beach—and we all need a break sometime. If you would have been following my daily posts throughout the dog days, then I offer my apologies and ask you to check in with 365 Memories in September, when I'll be returning in time for the Back to School routine. Yes, believe it or not, like doctors in Paris and therapists in New York, I'll be on hiatus for the month of August! And in case you're wondering what this means for my count of 365 . . . well, although I'm not posting online, I'll still be writing up vignettes, so you'll get to double your pleasure this fall, as I post August memories concurrently with other posts. I hope that you, dear reader, will have a fabulous "last gasp" of summer, and if you're in the United States, then have a relaxing (if oxymoronic) Labor Day.

Fantastick!

2009-07-31T22:51:00.039-04:00

I remember lyrics to musicals; I can't help it, they get stuck in my head. I have mentioned this fact on the blog before, but I decided that there is one musical that merits its own post. I am willing to guess that many people today, certainly outside of New York City, don't know the show, and that's too bad. With Broadway musicals being what they are today, well . . . I don't want to be a snob, because pure entertainment without much thought required does have its place, but the show I'm thinking of is no Disney production. It has, in fact—despite my fear that it may someday sink into oblivion, at least in terms of any sizable audience—the distinction of being the longest running production in the history of American theater: more than forty years, a lifetime (mine anyway). Welcome to something amazing: a show called The Fantasticks. The musical opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in 1960 and closed in 2002 (its last curtain on my father's birth anniversary that year); it had a run of more than 17,000 performances. You can see its original cast, which included Jerry Orbach and Rita Gardner, here. I first heard the songs of the show while living in Chicago. I was perhaps eight years old. My parents had the album, but I don't know if they'd seen the play on stage. I remember the album cover: white with purple spiky-script lettering, no illustration or photo. The back of the sleeve had a black and white shot of the cast. I remember thinking Rita Gardner looked impish, sassy, in control; what an odd pose, I thought, her fingertips pressing down on the heads of the men in front of her. She plays "the girl," a rebellious daughter in a story about supposedly forbidden love. It's a very sophisticated story—too sophisticated, perhaps, for an eight-year-old to follow, or to fully understand. What does a child know about the movement from "scenic" to "cynic"? What can she know about a cardboard moon? It's a coming-of-age play, a play about innocence and disillusionment. Take away the golden moonbeam. But it's also very humorous at the same time. For me, the best songs were the ones that made me laugh. In particular this means a song called "Never Say No," which I memorized in short order and loved singing over and over again, performing it for my Mom at our kitchen table. It's a song that captures perfectly a parental technique (and dismay) we are all familiar with: reverse psychology, the power of negative motivation. Make it forbidden and drive them to it. "To manipulate children, you merely say no." Here are the lyrics to some verses I remember verbatim (you'll see why they appealed to my eight-year-old self):

Why did the kids pour jam on the cat?

Raspberry jam, all over the cat!

Why should the kids do something like that,

When all that we said was "no."

My son was once afraid to swim,

The water made him wince.

Until I said he mustn't swim—

been swimming ever since . . .

Why did the kids put beans in their ears?

No one can hear with beans in their ears.

After a while the reason appears:

They did it 'cause we said no.

The other song I remember really enjoying was the one that opened the disillusionment act. The beginning of the song contained a series of disgusted, angry statements and insincere apologies that I found hilarious, particularly the last complaint:

Girl: This plum is too ripe.

Boy: Sorry.

Boy: Please, don't watch me while I'm eating.

Girl: Sorry.

Father 1: You were about to drown that magnolia.

Father 2: Sorry.

Father 2: You're . . . standing . . . in . . . my . . . kumquats!

Father 1: Sorry!

Did I know what a kumquat was? Had I ever eaten one? If I hadn't yet, then I'm sure my piqued curiosity resulted in a mission to find kumquats somewhere to taste. (They are an interesting fruit I devour when I can find them: bitter peel eaten along with the ultra-tart flesh.)

Other songs from the musical became popular, especially the opening number by the Narrator character, "Try to Remember." There were also "Much More" and "Soon It's Gonna Rain." All of the songs can be found online and sampled here. I encourage you to have a listen.

Toast of New York

2009-07-30T22:00:00.029-04:00

I am not a makeup maven. I've never worn foundation, except the professional "pancake" kind for those handful of times I have performed on stage (a lifetime ago!). For everyday, it just feels like a slow toxic suffocation of crud in my pores. Ditto the blush. No fuss, no muss. Definitely no mascara; the wand is a serious hazard. The most I could cope with: eyeliner, some shimmery nude color on lids, and lipstick. The lipstick used to be bright red. At some point, I realized that my olive skin tone is hard to match to the right shade, though—all the reds I like when I see them in stick form end up making my skin or my teeth look yellow. Now, I opt for more tawny and brown shades, when I bother. I remember, though, a time when I loved to browse the cosmetics aisles and look at lipsticks and read the exotic, trumped up names of the colors. I would laugh at the outrageousness. Of all the hundreds of names I've read, and the dozens of tubes I've owned, I remember the name of exactly one lipstick, though. It was not the jazziest, sexiest name. It was a lipstick I found by accident, but it's the only one I ever went looking for in a store when it was time to replace the tube: Toast of New York, by Revlon. A creamy brown with undertones of red. I don't know whether Revlon still makes it—nor do I know if I'd still wear it (probably, but tastes change so who knows). Why I remember it is circumstantial, nostalgic. When I say I found it by accident, what I mean is this: In the bathroom of an infamous, grungy New York punk club in the late 1980s, I saw a black tube with a flash of gold trim rolling on the floor. The bathroom door opened and, after a blast of the band, closed again. I was with a friend—we were drunk, I'm pretty sure—and suddenly we were the only two there. Whoever dropped the lipstick was gone, not that it would have mattered much. I picked up the tube, dialed up the color, and thought it looked pretty good. And it was free: a five-finger discount, but completely legal. Did I even wipe off the end of the stick before applying it to my lips? I'm sure the thought never crossed my mind. To say that I was not concerned about germs in those days is a mild understatement. I pocketed the lipstick, and it was the only one I used for a long time. As I said, I replaced it when it wore out. I replaced it because it was a good color on me after all, but mostly because it reminded me of my friend, of our combat boots and scrappy, Guns-of-Brixton attitudes; our "finders keepers" mentality that grasped at any castoffs the world chose to let us have. Toast of New York. The name was, no doubt, meant in a high-society way, a socially acceptable way. To me at the time, though, it was just plain old New York—and a part of the city now closed down—and we were, if not the toast of the town, then certainly toasted. We left the club with mosh-pit bruises, voices hoarse with screaming and too much smoke exposure. But those hungry, youthful mouths of ours? They were at least well painted, beautiful—even if the beauty was not rightfully ours to begin with. Then again, isn't that what all makeup is: borrowed beauty? We can still toast to that.

Safe Light

2009-07-29T23:55:00.005-04:00

It's a faraway memory, nearly lost in the tide of zeroes and ones that shape our new digital world. Sometimes, though, I do remember the calming effect of a safe light: the soft red glow that spilled through the darkrooms of my adolescence. Years ago (decades now, I'm amazed to say), I pursued photography as a serious study. I didn't go far with it, never approached anything near a professional level, but I took it a tad farther than just a hobby. For a time. I was still in high school, and the darkroom was a comfortable place to be—hidden from sight, engaged in the act of creating something, seeing images develop from nothing. I remember the smell of chemicals, the eddy of the water bath, but most of all the light in darkness. Red is usually a stimulant—to passion, to action, to anger—and it's associated with all kinds of vice. In the darkroom, though, it was none of those things. I did not meditate when I was a teen. I had no informed opinion of meditation. Still, what I did in those hours standing in front of the enlarger, the trays of developer and fixer, was just that: meditate. My mind worked, and I observed its working, but I never over-thought anything in that space, and it was a relief to me. I remember especially being an unhappy girl on a medical leave from school, and my mother would take me to an art center in Norwalk, Connecticut, where there was a darkroom available for rent. I am not doing a very good job at identifying exactly what it was like, or really focusing on the memory. It is late now, and I need to be in a different sort of darkened room—one without light; one with only sleep. But I lost myself in that scarlet artist's space when I could, and no matter if there were others in the darkroom with me (sometimes yes, sometimes no), the safe light made me feel relaxed in a way that was like solitude. Peaceful and hypnotic.

Home for Boys: Tricky Plumbing

2009-07-28T22:00:00.014-04:00

A rhetorical question: What is it about boys and plumbing? It's not a question I will answer, except to sympathize with mothers of boys who have hit-and-miss aim or an aversion to flushing. You know what I'm talking about; I know what you're going through. But really, this post is not about those sort of plumbing issues. What I've remembered is something else. Namely, the fact that when I was in college I lived in Rhinebeck, New York (off campus), on Montgomery Street. My landlord was a veterinarian, and the apartment I rented was in a light blue house across the street. The house, I recall now, was at one time a home for boys. I never did learn what that meant exactly. Were they orphan boys? Was it a sort of reform house, where discipline cases were sent? What I did learn was that my living room was at one time the shower room. This explained the defunct spigots (Is that what they were? I confess I do not know my plumbing terminology) that you could see around the perimeter of the room, exposed where there were small square notches cut out of the hardwood floor. These never posed a problem. They were inactive, nothing leaked or clogged or anything. I did like to think about the room, though, the way it must've been: steamy and full of strapping, towel-snapping, naked young men. I didn't think of boys, of course; not little ones. I imagined teenagers, which was normal, since I myself was still one. A former boys' shower room was an amusing place for a college girl to entertain friends, I can tell you. The not-so-entertaining thing in the apartment was also related to plumbing—it was the day that I came back from a weekend's trip to visit my parents one summer and found my bathroom ceiling on the floor. A plaster mess covered the black and white tile; filled the very 1950s-looking pink bathtub; lay strewn in the sink. I don't know what caused it. There didn't seem to be water anywhere, or none that I recall. No active leak. It just looked like someone had tossed a grenade in my bathroom. Exaggeration, sure—but not much. To the veterinarian's credit, it all got fixed in short order. Maybe that same day, or the next. Nothing else eventful ever happened in that apartment; not in terms of the structure itself. Neighbors were quiet, too (except in the house next door, where the pot-bellied guy in the wife-beater shirt yelled at his kids a lot). No issues. It was just a nice place to live for four years, a unique place with history. Perhaps, of all the places I've lived, the place with the most charm . . . though not of the kind you'd experience if you were living in it when it was, still, a home for boys with tricky plumbing (modifier left intentionally ambiguous)!

Sleepy Sleepy . . .

2009-07-27T23:50:00.007-04:00

This is what I am, once again: sleepy. Bone tired. The kind of tired you are not sure you will recover from, and the kind that makes you feel like a child no matter your age. My memory of the moment springs from this feeling, which my son apparently shared tonight. This depth of fatigue is no problem when you are able to lie down and drop immediately into a profound sleep. Sometimes, however, that's not possible, which is when you'd be glad for someone to rub your back. For years now—since a particularly tortuous transatlantic flight with my then-toddler—my son has asked for someone to "rub my back and count to twenty." Counting to twenty is getting off scott free: the whole ritual took form on that cramped airplane, when the only way I could get my son to sleep was to start counting . . . and count all the way to two hundred before it had any effect. Now it's either one of us (my husband or I) who counts at night, but there's another thing that only I do; I was asked to do it tonight. It's something that takes me back to my own childhood in a heartbeat, since my mother would do it for me when I had trouble going to sleep or just wanted a little bit of extra company. She did this at home, but for some reason the most vivid memory is of a time when we were visiting her parents, and I was in a spare room, bundled under one of my grandmother's crocheted afghans (black background, granny square style with fluorescent colors that clashed horribly but somehow worked when all of a piece). I remember lying on my stomach while my mother patted my back gently, in time to a rhythm she created with her voice: Slee-py, sleep . . . go to sleep . . . nighty night . . . I love you . . . slee-py sleepy . . . Her cadence was slow, low, close to a whisper. This went on for who knows how many minutes, usually until I dropped into slumber—it worked nearly every time. Now the same is true of my son. When he is having the most trouble falling to sleep, counting to twenty is not quite enough. There'll be twenty, but then the lullaby of sleepy sleepy. I'll rub circles on his back, under his shirt. On those nights, I'm pretty sure that I myself—no matter my own state of exhaustion or agitation—will have no trouble when lights are out. I will curl up on my side, close my eyes, and remember the soothing lullaby of childhood. It still works like a charm, all these decades later.

Soupe au pistou

2009-07-26T23:50:00.006-04:00

I remember one year—was the baby born? only just, so it must've been around six years ago—deciding to test myself in the kitchen with a recipe from the series of books: Grand Livre de Cuisine d'Alain Ducasse. Not sure why exactly I would do this with a baby in the house—what, is plain old post-partum not enough torture for a lady?—but I set myself the task. I remember the heft of the cookbook, its silver jacket and the pages of exquisite photos, daring you to reproduce the color, the reflections of light on each fruit or vegetable. I went easy on myself, selecting the Bistrots, Brasseries, et Restaurants de Tradition volume. A sleep-deprived home cook without even the luxury of an automatic dishwasher, let alone other intricate culinary tools, I figured that tradition was more my speed than gastronomie. And even then, I selected what seemed to be the easiest recipe: Soupe au pistou, a lovely pesto soup. The pesto already made (that was easy; I make pesto frequently, though it's true I cut corners and do not use a mortar and pestle to pulverize the basil by hand), I remember the next challenge: "La découpe de tous les légumes doit être uniforme." Oh, did I fail to mention? I was also cooking FSL (French Second Language). I was to dice all vegetables uniformly. This should have been no problem, but I remember that it took me forever. It was an exercise in monumental patience for me not to give in to the temptation to start chopping faster and more irregularly. Not being a professional chef, and not having proper knives, generally I just chop whatever way gets the job done and if it all looks, well, not uniform, then who's to criticize? Imperfection is often a sign of home cooking and has its own charm. Yet, if I was going to cook Ducasse, then damnit, I was going to cook Ducasse; I would pass perfectionist Michelin-star muster. So, as I said, it took every ounce of patience I had; it took much longer than it should have. But eventually, my carrots, potatoes, turnips, and zucchini, plus the rounds of leeks, celery . . . all was diminutively sized, sized the same. And I have to say, neatness counts: the bowl of vegetables looked incredibly appealing, if more fussy than my usual melange. I don't really remember much else about preparing the soup. I do remember that when it was done—when the kitchen was quiet and the baby asleep—I was both tired and deeply satisfied. I remember that the recipe was a success, a wonderful comfort food, and that I wished the pot was bottomless. I could just feed on the soup all year. It was a shame how quickly it disappeared, in some inverse relationship to the time it took to prepare it. I have not made the soup since, but perhaps I will again. I will do it when I need an excuse to be alone in the kitchen for hours. I will treat it as meditation practice, and I will love every slice of the knife, every uniform cube of vegetable that results.

Vintage Baskin Robbins

2009-07-25T22:30:00.008-04:00

I've always loved ice cream. Always. Like many children, my first love in the frozen dessert category was Baskin Robbins. Blame it on my youth. In matters culinary as well as matters of romance, we are all a bit indiscriminate at first blush. By the time I reached age ten, however, I was outgrowing their allure—outgrowing them in both age and sophistication. I have, I confess, become a bit of an ice cream snob. And now that I make my own (and what a rude awakening: how many egg yolks?! how much cream?! yet it doesn't stop me), well . . . if I'm going to eat ice cream made by someone else, it's got to be sensational. All natural, intense taste, unique flavors. No plastic. I had heard once (was it true?) that Baskin Robbins used plastic in their ice cream, but maybe it was a vicious rumor; maybe it was just the power of suggestion, but I could swear I once did see something like a shaving of white plastic in my scoop of—what was it, rocky road? And yet . . . I do have a soft spot in memory for those "31 Flavors," a purely sentimental attachment. Baskin Robbins stores exist pretty much everywhere I've lived in the U.S., but I only associate them with one place, Chicago, and with one time in my life, ages five though nine. This is when my parents (mostly Mom) would take me out for ice cream and that's where we'd go. There was a Baskin Robbins in the Lincoln Park neighborhood that we would frequent: was it on Clark? I think it was. We'd go in, and here is what I remember: Those little chairs with attached half-tables, like a certain style of school desk; the chairs (the tables, too?) were pink. The waxy cups had pink and brown polka dots, and the tiny plastic spoon you were given to eat your treat with was also bright pink. If we got cones, I remember that I liked chocolate-based flavors, sometimes pink bubble gum or rainbow sherbet. My mother liked Jamoca Almond Fudge. My father, lemon custard or rum raisin. Someone liked Cherries Jubilee, probably also my dad, since there was a hint of rum in this one, too. But we didn't always get cones or simple cups. I remember that sometimes, my mother and I would share a hot fudge brownie sundae, and that seemed like pure decadence. I recall my mother letting me have the cherry, always. That she simply did not like maraschino cherries did not matter; it was still, to me, the ultimate act of maternal kindness to let me have the one-and-only anything. The hot fudge was sometimes not hot enough, often too thick, but it usually satisfied the craving anyway. And then there were those treats I sometimes picked from the refrigerator: ice cream (I always got the mint chocolate chip) slathered thick between two thin chocolate wafer cookies; clown cones, those goofy upside-down treats that made me laugh. So, while my tastes have gotten more complex, still there's a part of me that remembers the child's delight and manner of being easy to please. How could you be judgmental about something as giddy as ice cream on a hot summer day? Impossible. The dilemma now, though, since I know what goes into commercial ice creams (plastic aside), is whether to take my son to a store like Baskin Robbins. We've done it once or twice, but at six years old, he's already way more sophisticated than I ever was. His favorite store-bought flavor? Red bean ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. Barring that, the Mr. Softee truck—so I guess there's hope for a classic American childhood yet.

Recurring Dream

2009-07-24T23:50:00.015-04:00

I am optimistically calling this memory—pushing it safely into the past—which is not inaccurate. I haven't had the dream in a long, long time. Used to be frequent, this recurring dream of mine. I remember that it never failed to freak me out. I would wake from one of these dreams and feel diseased, tainted, unkempt in a mud-hut, Third World kind of way. I would experience a vague dread and need to take a cold shower to wake up and shake off these feelings. Before I could get up, though, I would have to check my teeth to make sure they were all there and none of them loose. The dream was simple: I would lose or be on the verge of losing my teeth. Often, the teeth would just be loose and not fall out. Sometimes, I would find them in my dream-hand. I remember one time, in the dream suddenly my teeth were rocking violently in my mouth, the gums giving way to them, unable to hold on. I clamped my jaws tightly together, knowing that if I opened my mouth to speak—if I let up the pressure keeping my teeth in place—the teeth would fall out and I'd be left without a smile at best; at worst, unable to chew or speak properly. When I woke from that dream, my jaws were truly locked together, sore from grinding. I don't know what the dream is supposed to mean. I remember that at one point I looked up the symbol in some sort of dream encyclopedia, but I no longer know the proposed significance. I think it did make some difference (in terms of portent) whether the teeth fell out or were only loose. I had both versions of the dream many, many times, particularly in my twenties. As I said, I haven't had it in a while, which is good. It's interesting, though, how deeply this dream experience always affected me; how it got at some archetypal fear, made me think of ruin, of my own mortality (though as I age the dream happens less). I wonder how much of this is cultural. Probably a lot. I know that Americans rank very high on the global chart of the teeth-obsessed, and that I'd be rich if I had a dime for every time I heard that "Europeans have bad teeth." To say nothing of people in places with neither orthodontists nor basic dentistry. It does sometimes seem frivolous to worry about teeth, at least from an aesthetic standpoint. I try to keep my twice-yearly preventive appointments, but don't pay for services or products to whiten my teeth. Still, I am concerned. I want to keep my teeth; keep them in my mouth where they belong. I don't know what's prompted this memory tonight, but there it is. Now, it's time to sleep. And hopefully to dream of something entirely different—no insufficiencies, no gaps, no gaping black hole where a smile should be. A world where smiles come easy and complete.

Shut Up and Jump!

2009-07-23T23:50:00.001-04:00

Nine years ago today, I sat in a trailer, wearing a fluorescent green nylon jumpsuit and watching a "safety and risk" video along with my then-fiancé and two friends. The trailer was parked to the side of an airfield, where Sky's the Limit offered people like me—ordinary, I promise—the thrill of falling thousands of feet through the air. I was about to perform my first-ever parachute jump. Outside, I remember, the sun shone bright: the sky beckoned, clear and blue. Inside the trailer it was dark. And it was dark inside myself. For months I'd been fighting depression. As anyone who has ever been depressed can tell you, a dose of guilt attaches, especially when by external measures your life seems full of good, happy events. Six months earlier, I had completed a Master of Fine Arts program, gotten engaged, and had found a job with a great group of people who would stay friends long after we went separate ways. But I found the transition devastating. After years of relative solitude, listening only to an artist's call, tracing out ideas and images that came to me from a mysterious process of patience and paying attention, my new life came at me noisily, from all sides, shouting down the inner voice that needed quiet and stillness in order to be heard. I was overworked, overextended, overwhelmed with the needs, demands, desires of other people. Inside the trailer, I signed the disclaimer form acknowledging that, put bluntly, what I was about to do could kill me. I did not want to die. I was by no means suicidal. And I am not a thrill-seeking fanatic: skiing of the most benign sort terrifies me. Yet we'd been talking about it for some time, my fiancé and I—he'd jumped once before. I was intrigued and, with life on the ground seeming so flat and heavy, maybe not as scared as I should have been. Plus, as a sort of rally cry, we all had Sky's the Limit bumper stickers to contemplate: "Shut up and jump!" they commanded. So there I was, strapping on a harness, climbing into a tiny plane with a gaping egress, a tandem instructor behind me, ready to push me out if I got cold feet. I jumped. Freefall. Knowing you are falling at hundreds of miles per second, exponentially faster, but perspective so distorted it feels like floating. You imagine, before you experience it, that it will feel like a rushing, forceful pull of gravity, all adrenalin and blurry vision and wind howling in your ears. But in the moment when you first fall, everything is suspended: space, time, activity, thought. I have never in my life experienced such complete silence. Not one sound. I wonder if I will ever again experience as much awe, as much peace. It is different once the parachute opens; it brings you back to yourself. you are aware of your relief (it opened!), aware as you get closer to the ground that, indeed, the land does rush up to meet you. But right then, in that first falling moment, everything falls away. It is not unlike falling in love: you lose yourself, in a good way. You find a new way of being. And if you can do this, you can do anything. Years have passed. I am now not only a wife but also mother to a little boy: I assess risk differently. I know that I will never again make that jump. Never again will I fall like that, physically, feeling weightless and full of wonder. But I carry the memory of perfect silence in the world, and often it helps when the buzz of the quotidian seems too loud. A framed picture of me and my husband hugging right after the jump—After the Fall—sits in our living room. Anyone can see I am more than happy; I am glowing. And this is the thing: although that willing fall did not itself fix anything, did not make depression disappear in an instant, my life is forever divided by it, just as it is by my marriage, by motherhood. There is before, and there is after. I will forever after be, nothing can change it: a woman who fell through the sky.

(Written in response to a prompt from the literary magazine, The Sun.)

Sparks

2009-07-22T23:30:00.024-04:00

Seven years ago this evening, I was in a New York steakhouse with my husband, enjoying a rare dinner out. Somehow he had managed to unshackle himself from his four-star job for a night, and we went to Sparks on East 46th Street. I am pretty sure that my sommelier husband chose Sparks due to its wine list—a Wine Spectator Grand Award winner many times over. It was all the same to me. I like a good steak on occasion, but I confess that I have never really understood the steakhouse concept. Meaning that while I get that it's all about the cut of beef, behemoth-like on your conservative china patterned plate, I have always been offended that the vegetables are ordered on the side, charged separately. When you pay top dollar for a slab of meat, can't they just include the side dishes? And can't they be more inventive than sauteed spinach or a baked potato? Truth be told, I would have preferred going out for sushi, or to a great Thai or Vietnamese restaurant. But meat and potatoes suited my husband just fine, and since it was a treat for him to be the one served instead of serving, I deferred to his choice. I don't mean to suggest that the food was anything less than delicious. The steaks were cooked precisely to our specifications; they were tender and bloody within reason. But there was something about the experience overall that made me feel out of place. Maybe it was the decor: staid burgundy, dark wood, white tablecloths; very conservative indeed. I am much more excited about modern design—or else the kind of place with sawdust on the floor, where you can drop peanut shells as you swill a beer and wait for your table to be ready (a table that, if it sports one at all, sports a red and white checked cloth). Maybe it was just the feeling of being a skirt in an all-boys, old-boys network sort of place. I will say, the magnums of wine on display were interesting. The other factor I consider is this: our wedding had been less than a month prior, and really, the whole wife thing was still a bit odd. Or I was just still coming down from international wedding planning stress, which our honeymoon only partially alleviated. But on top of wife, as it turns out, at this dinner I was also asked to think about filling another role, that of mother to a hypothetical child. Something about sitting in a conservative restaurant with a slab of bloody meat alone on a plate in front of me . . . well, it just didn't reconcile with any notions I might have had about parenting—notions that were blurry at best, totally alien in fact. Meat is easier to eat when you objectify it; when you divorce it cleanly from what you know it is, or once was. Our society is so sanitized, really, so protected from the meaning of the blood and muscle and fatty tissue there for your chewing enjoyment. Maybe some part of me sensed that parenting would be the same: that my view of it could only be a sanitized view, protected from the harshness of birthing a separate body that would have a will of its own; shielded from the reality that there'd be a thousand ways blood could be spilled. And you would be responsible, always, forever. It's not that I didn't know these things intellectually. I am not a naive person; I know what's what. It's the "who" I couldn't wrap my head around: who, me? And yet, I remember the eagerness with which my husband started talking about creating a family (as though two people together can't make a family all on their own). I remember, practical me, thinking that I had exactly a week and a half left on my dial-pack of contraceptive pills and no refills remaining; I'd have to get another prescription if I wanted to continue. And it seemed so easy to capitulate—particularly since "common knowledge" held that it routinely took a year to conceive when coming off the Pill. So we talked about it, agreed to "leave ourselves open," and tucked into our beef. I bit, rolled the buttery meat around in my mouth, and didn't think any more about all the things that could—that would, nine months later, forever have to be—ordered on the side, in small portions, if at all.

Chicago Fire Memory #2

2009-07-21T21:00:00.001-04:00

I was driving back into downtown Chicago from Midway Airport: Cicero Avenue to the Stevenson, which is I-55, connecting to 90/94 West. Friends from Saint Louis had come up for the weekend—my girlfriend, T., and the man she was dating at the time, whom we called Mr. Zima (though not to his face). Remember that drink of the 1990s? Alcohol that wasn't beer, wine, or hard liquor; a clear, citrusy, malt-based drink with an identity crisis. It became known in most circles as the ultimate wussy drink, so really I salute my friend's boyfriend, for being able to ask for it with a straight face and no shame. People can say what they like. But this is beside the point . . . unless we want to contemplate the potential value of Zima as a wet blanket to a fireball. On the expressway back from the airport, before the exchange with I-90, traffic slowed nearly to a standstill. Up ahead, the right lane was blocked, so cars were merging to the left. We saw black smoke and, when we got close enough, could see the burning shell of a vehicle on the shoulder, emergency workers establishing a safe zone around it. I don't recall anyone actually doing anything to douse the flames; I guess this was a case of police being the first responders, and perhaps they don't carry extinguishers in their squad cars? Anyway, fiery tongues licked the car clean, or if not clean then empty. The thing that stayed with me—the kernel of the memory—was the intensity of the heat as we drove past. Even with the car on the shoulder, the right lane empty, and everyone driving on the left, as we drew parallel with the blazing vehicle we felt a blast of heat that brought our hands reflexively to our cheeks, made us turn our heads as much as we wanted to look. We didn't know how anyone standing any closer could bear it, and I remember wondering, as I always do when disaster strikes somewhere: what if that were me? What if it were my car on the side of the road, or what if I were the car, so to speak? What would it be like to feel not the intense July sun or the first sunburn of the season on winter white skin; not the kitchen burns that blister fingers and wrists as you take sweet treats from the oven, but rather a searing conflagration of hungry flames? We all know that fire burns. We all know that burning hurts. But driving past that car and feeling firsthand, physically, a heat so strong it was as though the air had become solid, I remember in that moment being awed by the power of the elements. And then, silence. No one spoke, and I am quite sure that we were each unwilling to put words to our vulnerability, to this sudden reminder that our bodies—these fragile, earthly shelters for our worries, dreams, and myriad shortcomings—might as well be wisps of gauze or sheets of the most delicate tissue; no match for fire. No match at all.

Chicago Fire Memory #1

2009-07-20T23:30:00.022-04:00

No, nothing to do with Mrs. O'Leary's cow. How old do you think I am? But I do have two memories of Chicago blazes, each seen from my car while driving city streets or highways. The first was late at night, in Cabrini-Green, notorious breeding ground for all of America's urban housing-project woes. This was in the mid-1990s. I had just moved back to Chicago, alone, and I still had a car, although I lived in the downtown Streeterville neighborhood and really did not need one. I will mention the make of the car, only because it really does make a difference to the story: imagine a single, young, white woman driving through the projects in the middle of the night . . . in a Saab. What the hell? you might well ask. Well, I was returning home from a late-night excursion in Bucktown or Wicker Park, probably the latter. I really wasn't thinking about where I was, only about where I wanted to go, which was back to my apartment to crash. I was tired. But not too tired to be completely oblivious to my surroundings. Crossing the Chicago River, on West Chicago Avenue I believe it was, and suddenly I was stopped at a red light. To my left, I remember seeing blighted housing, hearing a sudden chaos of noise in the cross-street about a block and a half away, or its equivalent. The streets did something strange around there, didn't go through, so it was hard to judge a block—these were the literal and metaphorical dead-end streets of the city. Suddenly, more shouting, and flames shooting up into the night sky. A blaze of orange heat. Not a building on fire; this was in the street. Did someone ignite the contents of a trash can, or was it a car on fire? Worse, I imagined, a person? I saw shadow-cloaked figures running, and although the traffic light was still red, I stepped on the gas. I needed to shake the feeling of being a sitting duck for who knows what violations. And really, what did the red light matter? I remember, more than anything, thinking that if a patrol car wanted to pull me over for running the light, I'd be more than happy to pay a ticket in exchange for a police escort out of the neighborhood. Without incident, I made it home. It was not the first and not the last time I'd find myself in the "wrong" section of a city; this was not even a close shave, not really. Only in the realm of the hypothetical, perhaps. I have never considered myself a skittish person, but call it intuition—on that night, sitting in my luxury car at a red signal, a guiding voice told me to "Gun it!" and I did, before someone else could work their own gun magic in the middle of this agitated night.

Walking With the Dead

2009-07-19T22:30:00.001-04:00

When I was young, someone told me of a superstition: as when going through tunnels, if you pass a cemetery, you are supposed to hold your breath. I don't remember who told this to me, but I know we were in a car. It made some sense to me at the time. People are (perhaps rightly) a bit squeamish about cemeteries. But—at least while living—I actually enjoy them. Which is not to say that I seek them out in some morbid thrill; I am not in any way obsessed with them. But if I am passing by, especially in a foreign country, I will almost always wander in. And there are some that really do merit a visit for their landscaping and the ornate sculptures of tombstones and mausoleums. The marble cutting is often exquisite. I have never visited The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, nor have I been to Woodlawn, which is in the Bronx, although I have driven past them countless times. I do, however, remember two cemeteries that made impressions upon me: one is famous, and people do make pilgrimages there; the other is humble and not on any map so to speak. The first is Père Lachaise in Paris, and the second is adjacent to a church in Donegal, Ireland. I remember being two times in Père Lachaise, once with a good friend from high school. She and I were photographers then, and we wandered around the grounds on a cold January that conspired to give us a spectral fog we did our best to capture on film. The mysterious vapor drifted through the plots and gave its airy, ethereal embrace to the sculpted figures that lined the cobblestone paths. We saw the final resting places of Jim Morrison (where votives and other trinkets were left) and of Edith Piaf (buried under mounds of bright bouquets and floral wreaths). The other time was with my father. That was also January, I believe, a year later. But the weather was clear and bright that day. He and I paid tribute to Molière and Oscar Wilde. Going to the website linked above, you can take a virtual tour, such is the beauty and curiosity of the place. In Donegal, I remember Celtic crosses at the tip of the yard, looking out across the bay. I remember sunshine then, too, but also a hailstorm that passed as quickly as it arrived, which is the way of the weather there. I remember the graves of two sisters, Isabella and Mary Virtue. Yes, Virtue. I thought that name intriguing: were they virtuous ladies? Spinster sisters (there was nothing to suggest they were the beloveds of anyone but each other). The sisters died a little more than one year apart, at the end of the nineteenth century. Did I imagine in the breeze coming off the bay, a whispering woman's voice? I thought I heard it distinctly, but I was quite alone. I remember wondering, in case the spinster-sister theory was true, about women's bodies laid to rest, having never known a lover's touch; never having experienced the swelling of life played out daily around them, mirrored in the rising tides. So many stories in the stones, all over the world. Some true celebrations, others tragic tales, but all beautiful. I enjoy the contemplation, the reminder that descends upon me in these places, of my own mortality and of the blessing of life while I have it to live. Yes, I think the poet Michael Coady was right when he suggested that graveyards are not morbid; rather, they are celebrations of life for the living. Giant monuments to Carpe Diem.

Unexpected Bliss

2009-07-18T22:55:00.000-04:00

I am elbows deep in dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, lost in my own thoughts while keeping time with Collective Soul, a CD played for the first time in what must be ages—loud, or loud in comparison to the usual silence. Two small hands reach around my waist from behind, squeeze in a little-boy hug with muscle to it. A hug that hangs on. I hadn't even heard my son enter the kitchen. Then his six-year-old voice tells me, a mom who feels on the edge much of the time: "You rock!" I do? I don't recall using that expression around my son, so I figure it's something he's picked up at school or at camp. This cool-kid slang invading my son's speech makes me smile. It's so unexpected. Also, I am instantly high on this praise. How did I earn it? Was it the ice cream base we just made together and put in the refrigerator to cool? Was it the music I put on? Or was it the promise of going outside once clean-up was finished so that we could squirt each other with water, chase around in the summer heat? Maybe all of the above. The memory is just hours old. We've added others in the course of the evening, too: finishing the raspberry ice cream (the best I've ever tasted; my son says it's because of "teamwork" and I don't doubt it), dancing in the living room, making a homemade pizza and tossing the dough in the air, shouting "Pizza Italiano!" for no reason other than to be silly. I wanted to write this down tonight, because although they're the most recent of memories—they may well be among the very best. Life is still unfolding, memories being made every minute.

Dancing with J

2009-07-17T22:10:00.012-04:00

Lifting, bending, touching, twisting. The sensuality of dance with a connected partner, with a man who knows how to move. The shifting energy of give and take, fluid in the open air around us. The expanding and contracting distances, the invisible cord tethering our bodies, so that no matter the steps taken in opposite directions, still we could only describe a set circumference, an orbit we could not break. I remember only once in my life dancing with a man in a perfect rhythm. It may be significant that this was not someone I was involved with at any time, romantically I mean, and this was long after I had abandoned as lost my almost-career of professional dance. That world—professional dance and ballet specifically—was one I left before achieving any training in partnering, in pas de deux. That was a milestone for us adolescent ballerinas in training—a symbolic awakening to the adult world of coupledom—and I often wondered what it meant that my dance pursuit ended before I could achieve that marker. It has seemed to me often enough that maybe this fact, this lack, had broader implications: as though my life (dancing or not) was meant to be performed as a soloist only. But this man I danced with; he was a friend. We danced barefoot on the worn floors of a converted haybarn, barn doors open to grass and the smell of baking earth in July. We danced to Dead Can Dance. And I felt so alive then, not dead at all.

What Are You Afraid Of?

2009-07-16T23:50:00.000-04:00

The best thing any writer can have is a great teacher and mentor. This person could be a more experienced writer, a teacher in a writing program, or an editor—maybe someone who is a combination of all those things. Someone, anyway, who reads your work and does not praise it ceaselessly because you are related by blood or marriage, though there's a place for that in life as well; sometimes we all need an ego boost, however biased it is. But you need someone who will be both encouraging and brutally honest. I have been fortunate to have many such people touch my writing life, but today I remember one startling example in particular: one teacher, one moment. This was in my MFA program, perhaps midway through. I had worked hard all semester, and during a residency in July, there was a student reading. I participated, and I remember that in the audience sat a faculty member I had not worked with directly, but who was a person I respected greatly. After the reading, dinner in the cafeteria. I sat near a window, looking into bright sun, still strong in the long days of summer. This teacher sat down next to me, at the head of the table, and she opened up a conversation about my piece. She said it was good, but then paused. After a beat, she looked me in the eye and said, in a voice that was challenging but not at all aggressive: "What are you afraid of?" And I knew then that she'd intuited something about my writing, about my relationship to the creative process and the careful—too careful—placement of words on the page. It was the best question anyone ever asked, and I try to ask it of myself on a regular basis. I am not sure I ever found a satisfactory answer. Artists are so often made to fear everything about their craft. I wish I could say that even if I feared some unknown element of my writing life then, I am free of all that now. It's not entirely true. Creativity is still frightening in its mystery; it demands so much faith. But the fact that someone cared enough to ask—that question itself still goes a long way toward dispelling the grip of whatever fear lurks at the crossroads of creativity and the inner critic. It's good to ask, to know, each day: what are you afraid of? And how to you get down to work to spite it.

Dream in Naxos

2009-07-15T22:00:00.016-04:00

Exactly seven years ago, I was on the island of Naxos, in the capital town of Chora. My husband and I were enjoying the second leg of our honeymoon, having traveled from Crete to this smaller island, following Ariadne's trail. We stayed at a charming hotel, the Anixis, located in the Old Town area, where cars are not permitted and where you get hopelessly, fabulously lost—for just moments at a time—in the maze of narrow, whitewashed streets that turn every which way and bring surprises of hidden doorways, bright red potted geraniums flashing against blue painted doorways. (Perhaps we did not escape Crete's labyrinth mythology after all!) The night before today's anniversary—that is, July 14—we were celebrating at the harbor: not Bastille Day, but the festival of Aghios (Saint) Nikódimos. A splendid display of color streaked through the black night sky. There were fireworks, their red smoke lingering over the docks after each screeching burst of light. Never to be outdone in pageantry, the Church paraded the saint's icon through the town, lifted high under a gold canopy covered with red and white carnations. We sat on a sea wall and watched the procession on one side of us, the moored boats rising and falling in the explosive haze. The next night, we discovered a wonderful restaurant up in the Kastro district, where the Venetian castle dominates the hilltop. Or maybe this was the second night we dined there, as I know we were so pleased with it that we elected to return at least a second time rather than try anywhere new. The restaurant, a taverna called Oniro, which means "dream" in Greek, had a rooftop terrace where we could see the sunset colors washing over the ancient gate, the Portara. We loved the food, though oddly I don't remember exactly what we ordered. Seafood, certainly—and the ever-present horiatiki that I could never get enough of (as at La Miranda in Nice, tomatoes in Greece always tasted divinely like tomatoes). I do remember we drank wine, white and chilled. I also remember eating small-plate mezes to the accompanying duet of a couple's passionate lovemaking, their uninhibited groans and screeches coming from a house slightly downhill of us. Either no one else paid attention, or everyone did; it was hard to tell which. Of course, I provided my own public distraction when I leaned to far into my wooden chair and toppled backward. One sip of wine too many, to top off a lazy day of sun-addled beach combing? Certainly. Sloshed American newlywed tourist—lovely way to earn a stereotype. But despite a moment's mortification, no real harm was done. Actually, none at all. Nothing really mattered anymore, and certainly not ego; we were just living life, in the moment for a change. A perfect set of summer days.

Wasabi Chips and Black Licorice

2009-07-14T23:31:00.005-04:00

It's Bastille Day. I could write about the French Tricolor; about Marianne, berets, baguettes, and pétanque. Or about champagne; champagne's always good. But today was just another day of long hours and feeling depleted. Am I getting one of those rotten summer colds going around? I've got no real symptoms, but there could be something to it, since I'm craving licorice. What does licorice have to do with anything? With Bastille Day? Well, nothing except that I ate half a bag of it at lunchtime: deep, black, gooey, stick-in-your-teeth licorice. And it now brings to mind an odd home remedy from nearly twenty years ago. I was back from college for a stretch—I suppose it was summer vacation—and I had the beginnings of a cold coming on. I remember my mom and I driving to Westport, to a health food store there. I don't know what was originally on the shopping list (if we even had a list), but I do know what we came home with: a bag of hot wasabi chips and a box of black licorice. The wasabi chips at that time were a new discovery for us. They were white, flecked with seaweed, and laced with wasabi mustard that you couldn't actually see but that had a way of sneaking up on your taste buds, knocking them out with all the subtlety of a lead weight in a tube sock, and then going on a rampage up the nasal passages to do a little dance and singe your nose hairs. Being a bit of a masochist, I loved them immediately. I'd feel the sting and eat some more. And then soothe myself with licorice. My mom and I agreed on the oddness of the combination, but we both indulged. And, lo and behold, the next day, I never felt better. Symptoms completely gone. For some time after that, we were convinced we'd found the perfect remedy for any under-the-weather feeling. And it worked more than once, though not always. Today, I ate the licorice. Maybe tomorrow I'll go in search of wasabi chips, just to make sure.

Little Misses Mary Mack and Lucy

2009-07-13T23:40:00.001-04:00

My son is back in camp after the weekend away. Sometimes when I pick him up, he has a repertoire of chanting, singy-songs he goes through. Often these are unfamiliar to me, but sometimes I am stunned to hear the same words sung by him and and his classmates that I sang when I was in grade school myself, all those years ago and in a different city. The latest one is "Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack; all dressed in black, black, black" with those silver buttons down her back. How do kids all end up with these same songs? I have a hard time imagining parents teaching them. How do these silly, nonsense songs survive generation to generation? Who knows. But now that I'm thinking about these songs (and the clapping games that went with them), here's another I remember from when I was perhaps a couple of years older than my son is now. I haven't heard this one from him yet. Maybe you'll remember it, too. If you do (or even if you don't), hope it brings a smile.

Miss Lucy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell.

Miss Lucy went to heaven and the steamboat went to—

HELL-o, operator, please give me number nine,

and if you disconnect me, I will paddle your—

BEHIND the 'frigerator, there was a piece of glass

Miss Lucy sat upon it and she broke her little—

ASK me no more questions, I'll tell you no more lies.

The boys are in the bathroom, pulling down their—

FLIES are in the city, the bees are in the park,

The boys and girls are kissing in the

D-A-R-K dark!

Water Into Grape Juice, Bread into Cardboard

2009-07-12T23:00:00.000-04:00

It's Sunday. For reasons I will not go into, I spent two hours in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral this morning, for the second Sunday in a row. Yes, two hours. Orthodox services are long—double what I am accustomed to. My mother was baptized in the Orthodox Church, but I was not. I was raised, baptized, and confirmed in the Presbyterian denomination. I was married in a Catholic church but did not convert. Because I am not Orthodox, I am not allowed to take communion in the Cathedral. So, I watched the others in their solemn procession up the main aisle, watched them cross themselves, watched the priest administer the sacrament on a spoon. No individual shot glasses of sacrament here. My Protestant and very American mind kicked in: Was the spoon being wiped off each time someone used it? I couldn't tell, but I suspect not. Hygienic neuroses are a relatively modern thing, and the Orthodox Church is definitely not what I'd call modern, though they've progressed. Maybe I'm wrong about the reuse of the spoon. One thing I know for sure, though, is that the parishioners were not swallowing grape juice. I remember being young and thinking nothing of it—of the grape juice, I mean. It was just what you got in church, sometimes. In the Presbyterian faith, you do not have communion every week. Actually, I remember really looking forward to Communion Sundays when I was young, because it was like snack time. I loved deep purple grape juice, and the bread was real bread. I realize this may seem appalling to some non-Presbyterians, but I was a child. Grape juice seemed normal. And even now, to my mind, the "looking forward to" seems normal. It's supposed to be a celebration, too, isn't it? But I do have to wonder now: why grape juice? I mean, it's true, the Bible does not describe Jesus turning water into grape juice. The disciples certainly did not celebrate their Seder supper with plain old grape juice. I remember the first time I participated in a non-Protestant service and took communion. I was in Notre Dame, in Paris. I was twenty-one years old, living in France for several months and getting college credit for an internship program. I don't know what drew me to the Sunday Mass. At that time, I had long stopped going to church. Perhaps it was Easter, though I don't remember any extraordinary pageantry. But there didn't need to be; it was Notre Dame! I was overwhelmed with the beauty of it all. And when it was time to partake of the body and blood of Christ, I did. I didn't think twice about it, though maybe I should have. It was Easter (yes, I'm pretty sure now), and I lined up with everyone else. The actual procedure is fuzzy. It's weird that I can't remember whether we drank out of a communal cup or not. Did we even drink at all? Maybe it was only the priest who both ate and drank. But whether by firsthand experience or not, I knew it was not grape juice, and I was surprised. I just assumed all churches used it. That maybe wine was too expensive or something. But of course this was France. There would be wine. Which is why the Host was such a let-down. I feel flames licking my heels as I write this, but really, in France, I didn't expect papery, tasteless, super-thin "bread." What was this wafer placed on my tongue? Where was the blessed baguette? This morning, I couldn't help thinking that maybe the Greek Orthodox have got it right: they drink wine, not grape juice; they eat bread, not cardboard. Unless I want to convert to Orthodoxy, this is not something I will experience. But somehow, just watching the Eucharist and having these questions and memories of my own very different experience come up made it well worth two hours in a somewhat uncomfortable pew.

Light Headed

2009-07-11T23:30:00.013-04:00

No, the title does not refer to another fainting episode, despite what you may have read earlier in the week. It refers to the burden—rather, the unburdening—of long, thick tresses. It's summer now, and still a difficult period economically. I have started explaining to people who comment on my growing mane (mostly to say it looks nice, but still) that it is "recession hair." I've used the term in this blog before. It means, basically, that I simply cannot keep paying to cut it short the way I prefer. Every six to eight weeks in a salon—though I never went that frequently, no matter how flush my wallet—is not something I can permit myself. Actually, it's not just the expense of money but of time. Who has time for flipping through magazines as a stylist pumps you up and down in a padded chair? Definitely not I, not this summer. But, I have to say, I am getting very sick of the length, which has grown mightily since the last whack job. My head feels heavy. I am simply remembering now, with longing, the last time my hair looked like it does in my profile picture. If I could, I'd cut it short again. Perhaps not that short, but short. Short enough so that I don't have to think about drying it when I get out of the shower. Short enough so that I don't need any accessories or products. Short enough for someone to notice I've cut it and say something about it. I remember the first time I cut my hair short enough to qualify for "buzzed," though it wasn't really. I remember showing the stylist a picture of Jean Seberg, the doomed American actress who played in the French new wave film Breathless with Jean-Paul Belmondo—the one tragically married to Romain Gary, himself a tragic figure in the literary world—and asking for something to make me look as "chic gamine" as she did. Audrey Hepburn in the post-Paris part of Sabrina would have done nicely, too. "Are you sure?" the stylist asked, scissors in hand, timid, not knowing if I would soon become hysterical. "Absolutely," I said. "Cut it off." I wanted to see it come off in a couple of swift clips, right up close to the scalp, very dramatic. The stylist went in tiny, inch-at-a-time increments. But finally, the desired result was achieved, and I felt strangely light headed. It was a great feeling. That's what I'd like to replicate now, a lightness of being that's anything but unbearable. Of course, I'll wait. Knowing the historical pattern, I'll wait until winter, when it's too cold for short hair, and cut if then anyway. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll let it grow and grow. I hear Locks for Love can accept hair that's got noticeable salt in the pepper. But to do that, I've got a long way yet to go. Guess I'll see which is deeper come fall, my patience or my purse.

New York Banking

2009-07-10T23:25:00.042-04:00

Another entry in the annals of public embarrassment: I remember very well the first several months of the year 2000. I had just graduated from an MFA program; I was newly engaged; I had found a job that paid decently and that was not, I hoped, incompatible with my writing life. Really, I should have been on top of the world. And sometimes that is in fact how I felt. The rest of the time, though, it seemed I was trapped underneath it, and it was unbearably heavy—the sudden rushing in of worldly obligations and expectations. In March, my fiancé (now husband) and I went to France to visit his family, a trip I'd negotiated with my employer before I began work in January. By the time our vacation rolled around, I was very much in need of the break. My immediate supervisor kept telling me, in those first weeks on the job, that my early mornings, my very late nights, and the general frustrations I experienced daily were nothing more than a steep learning curve and that things would settle naturally. (They never did.) In the meantime, I was commuting an hour and twenty minutes to and from work, into and out of the city from Connecticut. My husband was living with two other bachelors in an apartment on East 92nd Street; the goal was to look for an apartment together, as soon as possible. Distinctly I recall being on a MetroNorth train with my husband, talking about searching in earnest, once the whirlwind visit with Gallic relatives was over. I explained—I know I did—that after our trip, I was coming up against an even busier time in my office, and that with details such as leases and logistics of moving, I would need as much support as possible. And I recall, just as distinctly, how one of the next conversations we had included his telling me how he subsequently agreed to take on additional shifts at his job, effective immediately. Cut to the week of our lease signing. Cut to phones ringing in the office, my juggling more than my share of tasks all around, coordinating a four-location move to consolidate my and my husband's physical belongings, and having to take a call from an insulting real estate hack. I don't remember what he said to me, but do recall it got me fuming. He was arrogant and nasty, rude and threatening. This was Manhattan in flush times, before 9/11, before the housing bubble burst, when it was a seller's (or landlord's) market, no question. I was stressed, overextended, and the latest development was this: lunch hour, when I could only spare thirty minutes, and I needed to get cashier's checks to cover first month's rent on a one-bedroom we'd found, plus security deposit and broker's fees (this was the last time we ever paid a broker, by the way). My own bank was a small, local bank in Connecticut, where the employees knew all the customers by name. From the bank, I had somehow managed to withdraw the money I needed (or more likely, I wrote a check to my parents and they gave me the cash), but I couldn't get cashier's checks there because I was in the city before the bank opened during the week and home way past closing hours every night. I guess this was naive of me—a thing I never considered myself as being—but I didn't anticipate having problems giving cash to a teller in exchange for the checks we needed. Think again. This is where the public embarrassment comes in. I tried Citibank first. There was one on Broadway, down in the mid 50s, not far from my office on Columbus Circle. I had a Citibank credit card, so figured I could pass as a customer if need be. Did I have a cash account in the bank? No. "Sorry, ma'am," the teller said. (She was calling me ma'am! Had I aged that much?) "But it's cash," I said. "Why would you need to cover it with an account balance?" I was turned away. Time was ticking, paperwork piling up back in the office, stomach growling but no time to think about food. Where else had I seen a bank? There was, at that time, a Chase branch on the southwest corner of 57th and 8th Avenue (which later moved a block or so farther north). I went in there, stood in line. "Do you have an account with Chase?" the teller asked. "No. I have cash." Again, all I got were condolences. Overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, with the frustration that can only come when you are thwarted by bureaucratic rules that seem to fly in the face of logic (a bank won't take cash?!)—exhausted with the sense of pushing boulders uphill, I gave out in the lobby of the bank. I tried to prevent myself from crying, but really, it was hopeless. The tears just came. And I remember thinking, I'm thirty years old, crying in a bank in front of everyone like a child. It felt unjust, humiliating. But sometimes there are mortal angels who step in and come to your aid. I felt a hand on my shoulder, saw a proffered tissue. A portly black woman in a neatly pressed jacket, wearing a brass name badge with the bank's logo on it, asked me to follow her to her desk. Her voice was gentle, but she didn't say much; she listened. And then she asked me for the cash I'd been carrying around, disappeared with it, and returned with forms I needed to fill out for the cashier's checks. I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, and a huge burden lifted. I wanted to hug that woman. Maybe I did, I don't know. I do know that I returned to that branch once our move was complete and opened an account. I've been a Chase customer ever since.

Fade to Black

2009-07-09T23:00:00.016-04:00

It's getting late. Not later, really, than my usual posting; maybe I'm just more tired today. I have a lot on my mind, mostly time-intensive work projects. And really, I feel empty of memory. I am having a hard time remembering even my name at the moment. Just a big, black void that—hey!—that reminds me of something. Reminds me of a big, black void, in fact. One I experienced when I was sixteen years old (though I suppose a person could argue that simply being sixteen is enough of a black void in itself). This, though, was physical. I remember it was a summer day, and hot. Not middle-of-August-and-humid kind of hot, but hot enough to be uncomfortable. I was home from school and home from the hospital. I've posted about my Sloan-Kettering experience already, so won't go into details, but will just toss out a bone to those who don't know (a reminder to those who do): I was, in the summer of 1986, subjected to surgery followed by nine months of a fiberglass cast on my right leg. For most of that time, it was a full leg cast, toes to top of thigh. Cumbersome, itchy, hot, heavy—I grew tired of lugging my own weight around on crutches. I tired easily. Especially when I forgot to eat, or just didn't eat enough. I am never very hungry in the summer. So, I remember this time when I went with my mom out to the grocery store. What was it? A Grand Union, I think. I see a red logo, some kind of white detail (dot?). When was the last time I saw one of those? Must have been when I lived in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Odds are likely that my mom requested that I go with her—I was not one to volunteer my company that often in those days—but maybe I was stir-crazy enough to have suggested going along. Regardless, there we were, the two of us. Mom with the cart, I hobbling along. I stood behind her in the checkout line. I remember, I felt fine, more or less. And then I didn't. The first thing that happened was that my hearing went. It was as though suddenly someone had stuffed cotton in my ears. I could almost hear, but not really. My own voice sounded very far away to me. I remember saying, "Mom?" and I must have had a wild look in my eye—a very raw, animal sort of fear—because when my mom turned to look at me, she could tell immediately something was wrong. The concern etched itself on her face, which alarmed me even more. I think I told her I couldn't hear. No sooner had I said that, then my vision started giving out as well. I remember like it was yesterday—how this grainy, shimmering pattern, like a moiré effect, or maybe more like television static, came in from the periphery, zooming toward the center of my focus. Then that, too, was extinguished. I remember being scared. I remember not knowing what was happening to me. I had never fainted before. I wish I could tell you what it was like, that actual moment of falling unconscious in a supermarket checkout line while on crutches. I can't. I suppose my mom caught me; I don't think I hit the ground. I know some strangers helped. I was sitting on a wood bench on the exit-side of the cashiers, just underneath the plate-glass windows that faced the parking lot. A stranger, a woman, was sitting next to me as well as my mom being there. Did she say something about God? I don't remember being embarrassed, but being sixteen, I may well have been. I remember being comforted by my mother's presence, and I remember being too stubbornly adolescent to tell her so. Hopefully she knew anyway. I guess my mom paid for the groceries while I waited, seated on that bench not six feet away. We went out to the car, drove home. This was not an event that ever repeated itself, and in the grand scheme of things, the incident was small. But it made an impression I will never forget. Not even in my mind's duller moments, like now.

Beach Bum Ballet

2009-07-08T21:00:00.019-04:00

A memory from early teen years. I was in Los Angeles, and it was the summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school. During the academic months, I was attending North Carolina School of the Arts, boarding there, chasing the passion—the obsession—of professional dance; of ballet. It was a profession with strong skin-color barriers, preaching an aesthetic, for women more than men, that did not embrace dark skin. Who could imagine a bronzed Odette? At that time, no one it seemed. In Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, even the Black Swan with her thirty-two fouettés was always white. Insulting (and I suspect largely unchanged, with mostly segregated dance companies)—and yet I didn't overthink it at the time. Now, remembering all the things it seemed permissible for the ballet teachers to say to us students, I am surprised that no one mentioned explicitly that we should stay out of the sun. That particular summer, though, it wouldn't have mattered. I remember going to the beach near the Santa Monica Pier more often than in any other year. A friend from the Bay Area came to visit, and the two of us would spray Sun-In on our hair, squeeze lemon juice on our long tresses, and bake in the midday heat, scorching our feet on the sand to get to the water's edge. I wore a one-piece suit with a plaid pattern of white, black, and two shades of gray. If we put anything on our bodies, it was baby oil, which would supposedly accelerate and deepen the sun exposure. We tanned—the darker the better—hiking up the hip edge of our suits to check the demarcation lines. We tanned smooth, even, and it seemed we never burned, ever. I wonder now how that was even possible. How I went out without sunscreen, and it all seemed fine. No one chased me down with a bottle of lotion. We laughed at the Coppertone ads, but didn't buy the product. Now? SPF 40, thank you very much. I'm a couple decades and the opposite coast away from that girl. Now, my legs are so white (even in July!), I would be the perfect model of a ghostly tulle-draped sylph en pointe, if only for the loss of motherhood's added pounds. Back then, though? Pointes traded for flip-flops, we were California beach bums through and through.

Watermelon

2009-07-07T23:50:00.008-04:00

July. Time for watermelons, which I'd always eat right down through the white and palest green of the rind, all the way to the very skin because I didn't want the sweetness to end. I remember someone telling me that swallowing the black seeds meant a watermelon would grown in my belly—I never was that gullible, not even as a child. Still, I spat those seeds out, held contests to see which friend could spit them the farthest. The white ones, thin and soft, I usually ate along with the red flesh of the fruit. There was never anything so good as a watermelon when summer was reaching its hottest temperatures and the sun sapped your appetite for anything substantial. Adulthood has done nothing to curb my summertime watermelon cravings. In fact, my husband brought a giant one home last weekend, cut it up and stored it in four large Tupperware containers in the refrigerator—I have nearly eaten every piece, all on my own, since my husband is not home much and my son for some reason does not like watermelon (or anything that is watery, like cucumbers). I remember, too, linking to earlier honeymoon posts, the sweet, round melon we purchased from a farmer on the side of a road that led down to the beach at Istro, on the island of Crete, where we were going (on the hellish moped) so that we could sunbathe for an afternoon. We saw the man's vehicle first. I call it a "vehicle" because I really don't know the proper word for it: not a truck, not a jeep . . . really it was more like a giant, souped-up tricycle; a seemingly self-made contraption with farmland dirt caked in the treads of the three thick wheels, nothing so fancy as a hubcap in sight. A blue tarp covered the open-air bench seat, the long skinny handlebars protruding right behind the exposed engine. The back was boxy, with some kind of high railings; it, too, was covered with a tarp, this one white. Most of the watermelons were under this tarp. But others were displayed on a folding table at the roadside, under an umbrella for shade. The farmer's chair a few paces away, in the shade of a tree. The man himself wore pants with the cuffs rolled high, as if in anticipation of some flash flood his mind invented in a stunning act of wishful thinking. He wore sandals. He wore a striped polo-style shirt, with his deeply bronzed neck and head poking up above the collar like a turtle craning out of its shell to take a look around. Except that this makes him sound timid, feeble in some way, when he was neither of those things. To contrast with his dark skin, a white brush mustache. When his lips parted, the mustache expanded, smiling with him. He smiled in the way that most Greeks smile at strangers: tentatively, probably thinking that tourists with broad grins are idiots. But there was no judgment in his eyes, only appreciation of our patronage, and maybe a touch of pride that we wished to take his picture. I am with him, and his arm is around me. Together we cradled the watermelon I purchased, holding it in front of us. It strikes me only now: we held it at the level of my midsection, so it does look a bit like the watermelon baby that friends threatened me with if I swallowed those seeds. Climbing back on the moped, my husband and I took this fruit-baby to the rocky beach at Istro. We split it open on those rocks, sucking the juice from each other's fingers, slaking our thirst with it in the hot, Cretan sun.

Cretan Moped Excursion

2009-07-06T22:30:00.031-04:00

My logical mind that likes order, my Presbyterian upbringing that makes me prone to sober reflection, taking things seriously . . . These aspects of my personality would have me believe that travel from point A to point B on the island of Crete would actually correspond to kilometers measured on a map. I am here to tell you: the one has nothing to do with the other. In July 2002, my husband and I honeymooned at the resort-heavy town of Elounda, a small dot in the northwest sector of the island. As it turned out, many of the things I wanted to see were at the opposite end of Crete. It didn't matter. We were adventurous, newly married, two for the road—on my husband's preferred mode of transportation, a motorcycle. Correction: it was not a motorcycle we rented but some kind of moped that had seen better days, but was serviceable. It put-putted along, my husband driving and I clinging to the back. I don't remember where we were headed for the first leg of our day trip, but we looked at the map and calculated the distance, and completely ignored the way the thin red line squiggled back and forth in serpentine folly. Or we saw it, but knew then that we were taking the most scenic route before hitting more major roads, and we had no appointments to keep. Indeed. It was lovely, that road we took out of Elounda. I remember going up into the mountains, making sharp turns and leaning into the curves together; we'd come around a bend and be awash in the smell of wild thyme, the sight of blooming, prickly pants. And then there'd be another bend, and another. Used to speed, my confident-biker husband had to slow himself down considerably. It didn't take long to figure out that distance on a map is like measuring travel by a crow's wing, no basis in human reality. Though the route was not long in kilometers, it was much longer in time. Space-time relationships as we knew them did not apply while in Greece. Marveling at how long it was taking us, we realized also that our itinerary for the day was in jeopardy from the get-go. Still, we pushed on westward, stopping for iced frappes and to stretch our legs in Heraklion, in Rethymnon, and eventually we ended up all the way in Chania, a good 200 kilometers from where we began that morning. Because this post is not a memory of sightseeing, not a memory of the gorgeous sea views, the fabulous cuisine (Tamam in Chania, in an old Turkish bath house, was excellent when we were there), I will end the musing on Cretan Moped transportation by saying that we did our best to drive straight back before it got too late, on the major road that bisects the island laterally. I will also admit that I was near tears halfway back, so sore was my backside from banging around on the purgatorial seat, so tired and cranky was I from burning my bare leg on the exhaust pipe. The next day, I remember making my first wifely demand: that we stay put, do nothing but lie on the beach and leave the cursed moped right where it was. Did we? I think we did—at least for the next morning.

Tomatoes at La Miranda

2009-07-05T23:50:00.010-04:00

Another food memory, once again in France. I would wonder if readers are tiring of this cycle of posts, and yet . . . who could tire of the undeniable romance of French fare? Done simply and well, certainly not I. This memory is of tomatoes. Other things, too, but mostly tomatoes; some very particular ones. Deep crimson and full of taut tomato flesh. Not the pale, dry, mealy disks that pass for tomato slices in many places. No, these were real, juicy tomatoes with more meat than membrane and seeds. Sliced and served up in a perfect rustic arrangement of a tart, with a quintessential French butter pastry crust, simple. I don't remember ever before (or since) tasting a tomato that was the epitome of tomato; a tomato in which you could taste the earth it was grown in, the sun that ripened the fruit, the farm freshness, the . . . terroir. Does anyone talk terroir when talking tomato? If they don't, they should. And these would definitely be AOC tomatoes. Where were they? Served at La Miranda, a tiny restaurant in Vieux Nice. The restaurant has an extremely limited menu, dictated by the chef's whims of the day—by the market of the day, certainly. Only the freshest ingredients, prepared in such a deceptively simple style. Tomatoes that are allowed to take center stage as what they are, no fancy foam of this or reduction of that. Simple. Maybe five or six ingredients in the tomato tart (ingredients for crush from scratch included). Yet somehow I know that if I tried to replicate it, it would not be the same. The restaurant was small, simple, and stunning for all that. The menu is presented on slate with chalk. There are no reservations allowed, and in fact there is no phone number that any customer can call—at least there was not at the time I ate there with my husband, during the first week of July 2002. We were led to the restaurant by ex-colleagues of my husband; people in the restaurant business, so it's no surprise they'd know where to take us. I don't know if they are still there, but I hope so. I hope that I might have the chance to return. Until then, I keep tucked away like a soft-skinned treasure, one of the best culinary gifts I have received: the memory of what a tomato tastes like when it's just a tomato, ripened to perfection and served up simply. A tomato as tomato. A slice of summer, luscious and bursting with flavor.

Independence Day Picnics

2009-07-04T22:30:00.032-04:00

The hiss and boom of fireworks are tapering off. Another Independence Day in the United States. Today, I think about all the reasons why I feel lucky to belong to this messy community of free thinkers and loudmouthed discontents. News in recent weeks is enough to remind us: we do have basic freedoms of thought, speech, and action that people (especially women) in other parts of the world can only hold in their hearts as hope. I don't have the strongest record as a patriot, but there are not many other places I'd rather be at the moment, barring the need for serious health care (knock wood). Well, on vacation, yes, but that's different. So this day of anthems and outdoor grilling is coming to a close, and what do I remember in this moment? Really, because of the fact that this afternoon our family did nothing to mark the holiday (traditional plans fell through), I am remembering the picnic we would have had—the one that we've had whenever possible, in the years since I came back East to be closer to my parents and start a new chapter of life in New York City. Our sort-of-annual picnic in Connecticut, when we coordinate it well, involves my immediate family (parents, husband, son), plus two groups of family friends from way back. When we started the picnics, none of us (other than my own parents, of course) had children. Then, in 2003, babies arrived on the scene. I am remembering a loose collage of memories, then, because since becoming a mother that's how everything seems: a loose (or maybe it's tight?) fabric of activity and intentions, things done accidentally or not at all, and a triumph when normal events like July 4th picnics manage to come off without a hitch, without anyone passing out from exhaustion, or dishes of cobbler getting knocked off the wooden picnic table. Yes, let's start there and dispense with it. It was, I think, in 2005, when my son was two—not a "terrible two" at all, but he wore me out nonetheless. I'd stayed up late the night before to make a cobbler, peach I think, and had cut pastry star shapes out for the topping, in keeping with the flag theme that would wave across our paper goods. I remember showing my son the top of the cobbler, and he was in awe of the stars. The cobbler was in a white dish and sat upon the bench of the picnic table; that was the mistake, too low. I am not sure how it happened, but one minute the cobbler was fine, and the next, our dessert lay among shards of broken Corning Ware with blades of grass run through it. I couldn't help being upset. It had taken most of my inner resources to get the cobbler done in the first place, but still, accidents happen. And I couldn't chastise my son when I saw a new kind of hurt in his eyes: the weight of responsibility that settled on him as he understood that "Mommy's beautiful cake [was] gone," and that he was the cause of it. The blame he took upon himself was punishment enough, and I wish I could undo the incident if only to keep him from that feeling (perhaps his first ever) of guilt. But there've been other desserts: the frosted cookie cut-out stars, the vanilla cake with cream, strawberries, and blueberries to form the flag, a peach-poppyseed cake, some shortcakes . . . I am the go-to person for the desserts, but here's what I remember of the rest: my father always the grill master, with some help from the other guys; the parboiled, fresh buttered corn, sweet and slightly charred over the coals; burgers, hot dogs, chicken breasts; chips and dip, fresh veggies brought by one family; salad provided by another. I have to pause on the salad. The woman who usually does the salad brought one year a simple but delightful combination: fresh baby spinach leaves, roasted pecans, blueberries, and (I think) blue cheese. I don't know why the blueberries took me by surprise, but they did. They provided just the right tangy sweetness to offset the oil-rich pecans, the bitter greens, and the pungent cheese. I also remember the wooden salad servers she used, which were not the typical set of long-handled fork and spoon, but rather a pair of little paddles shaped like bear claws, which my husband later gave me for my birthday. My husband would always bring wine—often a chilled rosé, of the sort I never drank until I met him. I thought rosé was for wimps, until I tasted some really fine French rosés (there, it's true, they are accorded more distinction). Out in a park near the water's edge, we'd talk and eat and drink in the sun, put the kids to sleep in Pack-n-Plays when they were little, but later we'd run them around the lawn, playing Frisbee or tossing balls. The other French twist to the Fourth (besides the wine, because it's only fitting; we do owe a debt of gratitude to them for our independence, after all): pétanque. Like Italian bocce for those who don't know, but the balls are different, probably the rules vary as well. Like a group of retired Frenchmen in the town square, we'd set about tossing the "cochon" (the target marker), do our best in teams to perfect our form. Thuds and clacks, shouts of friendly competition. The sun would slant down in the sky, and we'd pack things up, content. Drunk on sunshine and good humor. I am nostalgic for the experience this year, bereft as I am even of the colorful fireworks display since we moved to the East Side, while the fireworks were moved west, over the Hudson this year. Ah, well, there'll be July 4, 2010. And in the meantime, there are memories and enough thankfulness for independence to carry through to next year.

Remembering Meals

2009-07-03T23:37:00.017-04:00

At some point, a marriage becomes a matter of routine; taken for granted. It's something that, being human, we are all guilty of at some point or another, despite the folly of the practice. We tell ourselves that it's just a comfortable sort of being together, worn like a favorite shirt that's fading at the elbows but still intact; more often, though, it's stagnation. It's our duty, I believe, to fight against complacency. Some people do this with reminders of those early days, however long ago, when everything seemed new. Others seek to replicate the newness by seeking future adventures, possibly crazy ones (depending on how prone to midlife crisis one is). Past, future . . . the best way is of course to pay attention to the now. And when you do that—really pay attention—you can amaze yourself with the power of your memory. My husband and I seem to be people who look back on the first blush when we want to rekindle. And our collective memory, I must say, is all about food and wine. We don't really play this game anymore (too many nights around our own table, with too many rushed meals of lesser consequence?), but we used to test each other's memories as we made our way through romantic, gastronomic meals. We'd really pay such careful attention to each detail of the food presented to us; we'd dissect everything together, talk about it and quiz each other later, routinely—years later, I mean. Of the more complex meals (let's say five or more courses), there are probably two I remember in full—at least, remember what each course was, if now many finer points are admittedly lost—and they were both experienced at restaurants in France, much as I hate to perpetuate the national arrogance in matters culinary. One of these meals we ate before we were married (but we were there scouting possible locations for our reception), and the other was during the first days of our honeymoon. That's the one I'll reel off here, as it's an anniversary to the day: July 3, exactly seven years ago. Dinner at Restaurant Lou Cigalon, in Valbonne. Here goes:

– Champagne (because every meal started that way, once upon a time)

– "Gazpacho" of crayfish and tomato confit

– Salmon "declension" (a description which the linguist in me appreciated): variations on theme of a single ingredient; it gets fuzzy here, but there was a salmon mousse, salmon tartare, garnishes of cucumber, thinly sliced dried mango, lemon confit, with sauces of sesame, soy, honey

– A trilogy of shrimp with roasted squash, squash blossoms; something combining crab-mango-lime; a portion of mussel-saffron-kiwi (yes, kiwi!) soup

– Roasted squab with peach and fig, a phyllo-type envelope around pigeon with dates

– Soft chocolate cake with lemon confit

– Deconstructed Napoleon with raspberries and "fraises du bois" (wild strawberries)

Because my husband remembers wine, I let myself forget. If I ask him, I'm sure he will remember, or else will find it written down someplace. We fall into our ruts like any couple, but we are probably more sentimental than most. I'll post the wine here in a comment if we come up with it. And if not . . . maybe we're more complacent than I thought.

French Breakfast Cliché

2009-07-02T23:08:00.009-04:00

To enjoy your French breakfast:

1. Sit outside at a wrought iron patio table, in a patch of light.

2. Lift a warm bowl (not cup!) of creamy coffee to your lips.

3. Notice how the baguette, baked just minutes ago, is still warm; split it lengthwise through its perfect golden crust to expose the soft, white inside.

4. Demi-sel butter? Slather it on without hesitation.

5. Take the slim, long-handled wooden spoon resting at your elbow and dip it in lavender honey—pale, thick, creamy. Spread this over the buttered bread. Its aroma will make you want to sleep in a field in the sunshine, content.

6. Dip your buttered, honeyed bread into your coffee.

7. Smile at the man sitting across from you. There will always be a handsome man sitting across from you in France.

8. Sip the coffee. Bite the bread. Chew. Swallow. Repeat at leisure.

A charmed morning in Provence: waking up to love. Honeymoon, day one.

France forgives us our tired-writer clichés, seen through a newlywed's rose-colored glasses.

Sainte Victoire

2009-07-01T23:45:00.024-04:00

The honeymoon starts unfairly, with my love divided. Moving along the curving Provençal roads, shaded by plane trees, we leave the festivities of the (beautiful but exhausting) wedding behind us—hightail it out of the Southwest region, trading Dumas for Van Gogh, for Cézanne. We arrive on the outskirts of Aix, and there she is: Mont Sainte Victoire in all her rocky glory. I have never been here, but I feel a sense of homecoming and desire, like returning to a lover after a long absence, seeing again the delicate way she peels an orange in a single spiral for your pleasure. I spent years looking at this mountain, through the eyes of the painter Paul Cézanne; semesters analyzing his obsessive analysis of its geometry: the critical thesis for my MFA compared Cézanne and his modernist literary relation, Lawrence Durrell. But what can you really capture of a lifelong love? Which face presents itself to you, at what moment? A mountain, an Alexandrian woman, two people beginning their life as a married couple—we were all there in Aix. The car stops. Sunlight low and golden, slanting across the sky and the stone, slicing our own bodies. We walk through a patch of vines, try to come closer to the mountain, which only recedes in its illusory tease. Hair stirred by a breeze, surrounded by green and made small by purple-gray rock, I am captured forever in the click of a shutter, looking satisfied and fulfilled at the foot of time. Poor mortal man, my husband, how can anyone hope to compete with the grandeur of Victory in a Provençal sunset?

Tournesols

2009-06-30T17:50:00.000-04:00

We stopped at the side of the road, shocked by yellow. A full field of sunflowers, turning their large, open faces to the sun. Tournesols in French. My friend, D., and I jumped out of the car, went to stand at the edge of the field, and had our pictures taken. Saturated color: gold and cyan behind and above us. Kodachrome tribute. But even in black and white the shots are impressive, the flowers big as our own heads, a field of dark eyes glistening. Before France, I had never seen a vibrant field of growing sunflowers, only their kin, turning up sometimes in a florist's shop or else in the farmer's market. Bringing them home, there was never a vase large enough or heavy enough to hold them; their long, thick stalks had to be cut with knives. The flower heads would bow toward the table, stooped under the weight of their cheerful petal halos and spiky, mane-like leaves. Across the street from the house purchased jointly in name (post about that here), there are also fields like the one described above: vast, undulating fields of sunflowers, which I thought might not be wild but rather cultivated for seeds, oil, or for the marché aux fleurs. Rumor has it the fields will be plowed under before long—that some batch of government housing will be built on the lot, the sunflowers gone. It's painful to think of their loss. It hurts especially since there seem to be not enough flowers in the world, not enough sunny dispositions, and altogether too much of everything else.

Wedding Blur

2009-06-29T23:15:00.019-04:00

OK, so after choking on this post for a while, I have realized that it is pretty much impossible to create something that will live up to the expectations that we (people in general, I specifically) put on the "big events," in this case my hopes for a post to perfectly capture a single facet of my wedding day in stunning detail. In part this is because I am tired today, but in part it's also due to the fact that weddings are like this for the couple in question—at least for most brides, I think: hard to experience fully in the moment. This is one reason why a good photographer is worth every expense; you are too invested, too much the director of this production to set yourself aside and just live fully in the "now" of it all. Our ceremony was lovely, beyond a doubt. It was full of love and joyful celebration and outrageous indulgence and passion. All these things, and yet it passed in such a blur. My memory of the event itself is a fragmented collage, a culmination of months of exhaustive planning (past), and a hopeful gaze toward more relaxing days and a settled life (future). But not very mindful in the present; not very zen, I have to say. So I will, without further apology, spill the random bits that lodge in memory and give the flavor of this day, the 29th of June, seven years ago.

I remember: The coiffeuse who came to the hotel room to do my hair and makeup, and who, since I was basically hostage to her at that point, upped the price from what we'd agreed upon—how I sensed she must've had a conversation with someone the night before who told her that for heaven's sake she should charge more, after all I was an American and staying in luxury accommodations (a gift from my folks for the last night of single life; a room I shared with my best friend who served as my only witness of honor). The way this self-styled arbiter of fashion piled on more makeup than I could stand and, after she left, my friend helped restore me to a semblance of self I could manage. The photographer came, a "vrai artiste" without any arrogance at all, and he worked his wonder with light and shadow; he did a series of shots as I dressed, garters and all, and did it with such class I will be forever grateful. Coming down the carpeted stairs of the Hôtel de la Cité, seeing the groom in white tails at the bottom, impressed. We teetered arm in arm across the uneven paving stones of the medieval fortress town of Carcassonne, stopped for photos, and then it was time to drive to the church at the foot of the walled town, just outside the gates, under a light rain that began to fall. Good luck. Shouts as we were driven out of the old city: "Vive les mariés!" Trumpet prelude by Purcell (played on an organ); walking down the aisle with my father, misty-eyed. Sitting, standing, repeating prayers and vows. Tugging with an attempt at inconspicuousness at a beaded strap that kept slipping down my arm underneath the sheer, short "jacket" I wore to cover my otherwise bare shoulders. (This gesture and my vexed expression caught on video by a cousin-in-law, and we laughed about it later.) A bilingual ceremony, missed cues and confusion at having to say the Lord's Prayer in English while hearing it all around in French. Funny moments of language that made me laugh, and the sudden realization that to laugh—however innocently, nervously; even however briefly—was considered by the priest as an insult to the sacrament of marriage. Signing the registries, looking for the priest after the ceremony; he'd vanished, offended. Rose petals tossed at us on the steps of the church; a group photo; a long procession driving from Carcassonne to Cuiza . . . At the reception, a champagne aperitif in an outdoor château courtyard. My parents, kissing, taken by surprise by the photographer and a series of shots depicting love and mirth. Being announced as "Monsieur et Madame," as we entered the dining hall. A blur then of greeting guests, circulating among tables, finding it hard to sit at the banquet-style head table and eat, there was too much going on. But eating nonetheless, and everyone making way through a flight of fourteen phenomenal wines, the best from this region of Southwest France. Toasts, dancing (and how my mother-in-law cut in on the first dance with my husband, before the DJ changed over the music from waltz to Elvis Presley as he was supposed to do fairly quickly but missed his cue); this horrible DJ who played every song I asked him NOT to play (did I actually hear the "Macarena"?); the same DJ who demanded to be seated at one of the guest tables and eat the meal served to family and friends (the sweet and consummately professional photographer grabbing a sort of staff meal downstairs). A stunning "pièce montée" tower of caramelized pastry puffs and nougatine to serve as our cake—plus a decadent chocolate dessert served as part of the château's package menu. Guests talking, laughing, more dancing—the Greek faction taking over at one point. And eventually, as it grew late and guests got tired and gave their final blessings to us, my search for a back way—a secret way—to the bridal suite, room number kept in strict confidence, doing my best to avoid any nod to the French tradition of the "pot de chambre" (the "chamber pot," you can look it up!) . . . my husband and I, successfully escaping to our room, unnoticed, in the wee 4:00 hour of the morning. Exhausted, happy, ready for the next phase of a joint life. Slipping into welcome oblivion.

Driving, Dancing, Dad

2009-06-28T21:50:00.001-04:00

As a daughter who enjoys a deeply bonded relationship with her father, a memory springs to mind now, on the eve of my wedding anniversary; a memory concerning a tradition I imagine might be perfunctory for some, but that for me was anything but: the father-daughter dance. I remember, in the months leading up to the wedding, agonizing over what song we should dance to. Whose idea was it, finally, to choose a song by Alan Jackson? By default, I assume it was my idea, but I can't remember the notion actually coming to me; it's possible he made the suggestion. Really, it seems just as appropriate (emotionally, if maybe not technically accurate) to say that we found the song together, both of us owning the idea equally. My father had been a fan of Alan Jackson since way back. I remember being college age when I first borrowed his album, Don't Rock the Jukebox, and heard Jackson's accented voice and his clever lyrics, humorous and soulful, for the first time. I appreciated his songs, but I didn't follow his music on my own. I leaned toward Patsy Cline later on, then abandoned country altogether for a while. But country was how my father grew up, and some part of it—cornbread and chicken!—was undeniably my legacy to claim, too. The song we danced to was a song called "Drive," and it tells an intergenerational story of parenting and the way a parent and child can feel as a certain exhilarating freedom of control, of transportation, is transferred. The song's narrator recalls how his father taught him to drive—first a plywood boat, then a hand-me-down Ford—and then how he in turn taught his daughters. He imagines the girls, grown, thinking back and remembering with a smile:

It was just an old worn out Jeep

Rusty old floorboard, hot on my feet

A young girl, two hands on the wheel

I can't replace the way it made me feel

And he'd say, "turn it left and steer it right,

Straighten up girl, you're doing just fine"

Just a little valley by the river where we'd ride

But I was high on a mountain

When daddy let me drive

My father taught me to drive, too. We had some mishaps (including barreling in reverse through a closed garage door—don't ask!), lots of stalling on hills when I was learning a manual transmission, but he was patient and encouraging, and the words of the Jackson song capture perfectly how I felt when he gave me these keys to a more independent life. Of course this was always about more than just driving a car, which is why my next big life transition, this shift to being someone with a separate family life (no matter that our nuclear family would never suffer for it), was such an appropriate moment for this particular song. So, this was it. I couldn't recall having ever danced with my father before—though perhaps we did once, at some adult function I attended when still a teen or even preteen—and the wedding would be such a public performance, I decided to sign up for a series of private lessons at a dance studio on Broadway in the West 60s. I used half the lessons with my father, half with my husband-to-be (who, bless him, has two left feet and not much sense of rhythm on a dance floor). It was a series of four Tuesdays, in the afternoons. Our instructor was a young Russian dancer—the kind who was a pussycat, but also very proud of her reputation: she played the role of the strict Russian dance mistress to the hilt. She taught us a modified swing, and I can still hear us counting in fours: right, left, back-step . . . right, left, back-step . . . We worked on a routine that lasted the duration of the song, and at the wedding, nerves perhaps had us leaving out one step along the way, but otherwise the dance was perfect. I am willing to bet that if we were tossed together on a dance floor today and the song put on, we'd have that kind of muscle-memory to carry us through even now. Of course time has passed, and we've both aged somewhat. Neither of us is in the shape we were in back then, and my dad has since had knee replacement, so maybe the actual dancing wouldn't work out as well. It doesn't matter, though. The memory is there: of those Tuesday afternoon sessions we both looked forward to so much, and of the big day, when to be completely honest, the best dance of all was the one I did with my father—all the more valued in being a unique opportunity—a dance to a song called "Drive".

Sublime Chèvres

2009-06-27T23:30:00.014-04:00

Sublime:

We are standing at what seems to be the summit of the world. Cordes-sur-Ciel, France. A fortified town ("bastide"), founded by the Count of Toulouse in 1222 as a safe haven for the heretic Cathars. The old town juts into the sky, high above the valley below, even above the clouds. Our physical height begs for metaphorical application: a couple of days now before our wedding, and we are also feeling high on hopes for the future, the beginning of a new chapter of life. Inside the ramparts, we stroll with some of our guests, point out the sculptural details of 13th- and 14th-century Gothic architecture. All is beauty and bliss.

Chèvres:

Amid the tall stone columns of the open-air marketplace, under the thick wood rafters and medieval pennants in the center of Cordes, our sublime moment takes a turn toward the ridiculous. My husband is on a cell phone, checking in with the manager of the château in Couiza, where plans for our wedding reception are underway. Have I mentioned that, being a sommelier by profession, my husband has decided to serve fourteen different wines at our dinner? A flight of three wines to taste with most courses. And since we will have a head count of nearly seventy, you can imagine the stemware required. Something has gone wrong, or rather just has not been going on at all. There are complaints, and a suggestion that we will need to pay for additional staff. My husband, used to the turnover in New York restaurants and the demands of clients, loses his cool. Pacing the historic market in Cordes, our aerie of the moment, he raises his Gallic voice and asks who the manager has working in the banquet hall, a bunch of "chèvres"?! Goats. Lazy, inefficient staff. Content to give him space now, I busy myself by inspecting what looks to be a giant mill wheel, wondering why it took this long for pre-wedding stress to hit my "better half."

Note: Today, Cordes-sur-Ciel is a revitalized, year-round community, enjoyed by artists and others who appreciate the town's unique place in history and landscape. Albert Camus is reported to have said that "In Cordes, everything is beautiful, even regret." The official tourist Web site for Cordes-sur-Ciel is here.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

2009-06-26T22:25:00.002-04:00

A funny memory: Days before our wedding in Carcassonne, France, my husband and I were in Toulouse, playing host and hostess to guests arriving early from overseas. Some of my husband's family were joining in these festivities, but the main goal of the pre-nuptial evenings was to introduce my parents, some aunts and cousins, and some close (mostly American) friends to the pleasures of Southwest France. Toulouse, being the home of decadent, rich dishes such as cassoulet, foie gras, and the famous Toulouse sausage, is not necessarily known for seafood, but the rosy-bricked city does lie on a stunning river, the Garonne; a twilight meal on a "péniche," or houseboat, seemed just the right way to ease travel-weary guests into the local color and fine dining scene. We decided to take our party to the Bateau Restaurant La Daurade. My husband and I were running a little late that evening, coming as we were from a hellish (for me anyway) legal rendez-vous. The decision to visit La Daurade was a last-minute plan, so when we arrived at the hotel where my parents were staying, my husband asked someone at the front desk to ring the restaurant for us and verify that we could come over. I should say that this particular hotel, the Grand Hôtel de l'Opéra, on the Place du Capitole, was where my husband used to work—where he first cut his teeth as a sommelier in a restaurant of "haute gastronomie." The restaurant, Jardin de l'Opéra, was at that time the showcase for the culinary talents of Dominique Toulousy, one of the "Meilleurs Ouvriers de France" (a culinary distinction of the highest order). I believe it may have been his wife, Maryse, who called La Daurade on our behalf that evening. Or maybe not. Regardless, the message to the proprietor of La Daurade was essentially that the Grand Hôtel was calling on behalf of a former sommelier of Jardins de l'Opéra, and that we were a party of however many who wished to come at such-and-such a time, and could they reserve space for us under the name Parker? Or maybe they gave both my husband's name and my own family's both (that would make more sense). The reply was an enthusiastic "bien sûr," and after an aperitif at the hotel, we made our way down to the river. Assumptions are funny things, as is celebrity. Especially funny is to realize what passes as celebrity in different parts of the world. Here in the States, my last name is common, and generally no assumptions are made about who we are when we we make dinner reservations. Appropriate enough: we are a not a family of note, not in that sense. At best, I have been asked if my pedigree has anything to do with writing implements (the association suits my writerly self just fine, though it's untrue). At worst, during the peak in popularity of the television show Melrose Place, I was asked at a CVS pharmacy if I was joking when I said my name was Allison Parker—it took seasons for me to uncover the fact that I shared a first and last name with a character on the show (though maybe hers was spelled with one el?). But this is in America. In France, there's really no danger of anyone mistaking me or others in my family for either of those Parkers. But put together allusions to luxury hotels, sommeliers . . . I have to say the poor man who greeted us at La Daurade was completely crestfallen (though he did try not to show it, and we were ultimately treated very well during our dinner) when he realized that my father, though he cuts an impressive figure, was not Robert Parker, the international wine celebrity! It was an "only in France" moment, I have to say, and one we laughed about for a long time. As a side note, we drank a lovely white that evening: Château Tariquet. Not 100 points from Robert Parker (if you care; we didn't), but a damn nice wine.

Acte de vente "sans profession"

2009-06-25T14:30:00.001-04:00

What things plow through a woman's mind just days before her wedding, making her fertile perhaps but also furrowing her brow? If, like me, you are overseas, marrying someone from another culture (albeit one you are familiar with; it is European, Western, and you speak the language), the wedding ritual is made slightly more complicated, concerned as you are with the comfort of international guests and the possibility that any of your own faux pas will be magnified through the lens of difference: different customs, a different church, different any- and everything. A destination wedding is beautiful, but it is also an act of loyalty, courage, and maybe insanity (or at least masochism). All this to say that a lot was going on in my head space four days before taking vows, much of it logistic. An abundance of logistical detail of course means that you do not have to think too deeply about your emotional state. But here's what I remember about June 25, 2002, exactly seven years ago today—an event having nothing to do with the wedding or marriage, per se, and everything to do with that core of emotion rubbing raw despite my efforts to ignore it: at 18h30, I was in the office of a "notaire" in the city of Toulouse, to finalize paperwork on a real estate transaction that I had opposed, but which was going through anyway with my name attached to it. The story is long, complicated, and involves other people I do not wish to expose in this blog. Let me stick to the thing that haunts me most, with the open admission that it does so due to misplaced pride, perhaps, and also some rage against the machine of bureaucracy and a woman's historical place in society. So, I am sitting in the notaire's office, listening to a pompous man read aloud pages of legalese in French. A side note here: do not make the mistake of confusing a "notaire" with an American "notary public," despite the similar sounding terms; in France, a notaire is a function of higher standing and apparently quite lucrative—it's closer to a lawyer's role, though it isn't that either. (Which makes me wonder how common these hybrid positions are: there are the gendarmes, too, an additional mid-level we do not have in the States, something between police and military.) Sitting in this office, it occurs to me that our English word "bureaucracy" does not derive from the French for nothing. So I'm trying to focus, and then something catches my attention. It's a description of me as a spouse "sans profession," without a profession. Excuse me?! I am particularly ticked off when I hear and read this in official language, typed black-on-white, because my husband and I had been in the French Consul's office in New York City just weeks before, reviewing a copy of this paperwork we were to sign—reviewing it for any corrections to be made—and we had in fact corrected this same error on the spot when it came up the first time. Another bit I remember, this from said visit to the Consulate: When asked to supply my occupation, I said "writer and editor," because that is what I am, what I do. I am a professional, published writer; I also make a living as a freelance editor. Yet I was told, quite clearly, that this was not possible; I could not be two things, I was one or the other. I wasn't sure I was hearing right, but that was the case: there is no such thing as a solidus in a French career path. If you want to make me angry, try to stuff me inside a narrow box of bureaucratic thought. I am perhaps a square peg in the world, but there are many of us, and not every hole is perfectly round. Despite this, I had made a choice because I had to. I probably said "writer," but anyway something was meant to go in that gaping blank space on the form—something other than "sans profession"! In Toulouse, in the notaire's office, four days before I'd walk down the aisle and therefore remove the last barrier to actually becoming, legally, French (I knew the language, I would just have to wait a few years to qualify automatically for citizenship by marriage), my cheeks burned with an indignation I could not or would not express. It was too late, anyway. And what does it matter, really, what a document says about me? It doesn't. And yet, being a matter of public record, it does. Even now, this memory is enough to flip my stomach and quicken my pulse. Why? Is it because I know what my mother sacrificed for family life (motherhood being in fact a fine "profession" of hard work that she did exquisitely well), and for good or ill, I knew even before marriage that I could never make the same choice and feel satisfied? Is it because of the history of women who were, no matter what work they did, labeled as having no occupation . . . and the backlash of feminism, growing up in an era when the old rules no longer applied and the idea of being without a career began to carry a stigma? To hell with it all; however, as I sat there in that office, I couldn't shake the realization that, because I did not receive a weekly paycheck from a single employer, assumptions were made about me and about the worth of my work and contributions. I couldn't shake the suspicion that maybe this—a woman "sans profession"—was actually how the large population of my soon-to-be in-laws viewed me. And I couldn't help feeling misunderstood, unappreciated on a level that went deeper than a description on legal paper. At the end of the hour, we signed the documents that needed signing, and we left the office to find some members of the wedding party and head out for one of many celebratory dinners to come. Socializing was the distraction I needed, and I remember the ease with which a glass or two of champagne went down, the resulting lightheadedness a relief to me—a more appropriate way, I thought, to spend those few precious days left to me as a single woman, when I was still only just myself, a square peg that did not need a round hole.

Kleinfeld's

2009-06-24T23:30:00.001-04:00

A good twenty-five years after I made that little girl's purchase of a doll in bridal attire (yesterday's post), I found myself shopping for my own wedding dress. I remember the process as a bit surreal, particularly for me—my friends will all attest to the fact that I am not a natural shopper, and often I will go out of my way to avoid the task. When I do venture into a clothing store, I am one of those customers who rebuffs the advances of overly solicitous salespeople. I prefer that they act like the best staff in the top restaurants, moving invisibly among clients, never intrusive (you shouldn't notice that someone refilled your glass), yet there at the exact moment you need them. I prefer that the salespeople ignore me, basically, and I almost never have an answer for the cashier who asks: "Was anyone helping you today?" No, thank god, I managed to give them all the slip. Of course, shopping for a wedding dress—perhaps the most significant, and likely the most costly garment you will ever wear—means you can expect the opposite: you can expect to be the center of attention in an obvious way, with someone there to both advise and serve you; a someone you couldn't shake off if you wanted, as you've made an appointment with them, and their job is to talk to you, shadow you as you peruse the racks (if there are racks), guess your tastes, size you up, and make suggestions. Although I made a couple of appointments, the one I remember best was the one at the famous NYC institution, Kleinfeld's. When I visited this bridal mecca for the first time, in late 2001, the store was still located in Brooklyn; I remember it took much longer than I thought it would to get there on the subway, my mother gamely in tow. The store is now in Manhattan, which would have been much more convenient for me, but I am actually glad I had the Brooklyn experience. It felt more authentic somehow, joining sixty years' worth of women who had traveled to Bay Ridge since 1941 to become "Kleinfeld brides." Plus, the transit gave my mom and I some additional, valued time together. I was glad she was with me—and I would turn out to be especially glad, since it was on this visit that the magic happened, that I found the dress. OK, yes, I apologize: I did just fall into the land of horrible cliché, but really that is what it was. I remember being skeptical as we were introduced to the "consultant" assigned to me, Renée Pinto; even more so when she added a dress I never would have selected, ever, to the batch in my dressing room. It did not seem to fit at all the style of the others I had pulled from the racks. And yet, sure enough, when I put it on, obedient in a way that was foreign to me, a transformation took place—not just of the dress, but of myself. I remember standing in front of a three-paneled set of mirrors, looking at my mom reflected behind me, and before saying a word, she confirmed what I knew: this was it; I was the image of a bride on her wedding day. As a stubbornly self-aware person (of the "no one knows me better than I do" type), I would never have believed that the person who'd be most responsible for the selection of my wedding dress—the perfect dress for me—was not myself, not my mom, but a woman who'd laid eyes on me only ten minutes earlier. It was spooky, but there you have it. And there I was, standing in that soothing interior of beige, cream, satin, silk, flattering lights, and all variety of white dresses, feeling that I'd been transported into a garden of trailing vines and wild flowers, a romantic country garden, rather than anything pomp and circumstance. The style of the dress captured exactly the spirit of the wedding (and marriage) I hoped to create: free flowing, natural, and poetic. The contract—yes, such dresses come with contracts!—was signed on the spot, and the next couple of times I'd travel to the store, it would be to meet the seamstress in charge of my alterations, who, if I'm not mistaken, was a Turkish woman named Feride. Today, if you go to the Kleinfeld's Web site, you can read promotional copy that suggests that "the magic lies in the hearts of the most professional staff anywhere" and that their bridal consultants possess "listening ears, a keen sense of style, and a vision of perfection" that will lead you to the dress of your dreams, worthy of the significance of a wedding day, should you believe in the power of a garment such as this (which I confess, heading in, I did not). It sounds like bold hype, but, at least based on my experience with Renée, I can say: believe them. Do I have issues with the wedding industry? You bet. With emphasis on the material trappings of the day? Indeed. But even close to eight years later, with the dress sealed in an acid-free box, having been cleaned and a small tear in the hem repaired, I don't regret this particular experience, or the purchase. It was an extravagance, and eventually I will bring myself to part with it by donating the dress to charity so that it can give new life and dreams to another, future bride—but I'll always remember the enchantment I felt when the delicate layers of this one dress, selected by a stranger, swirled around me in a whisper of answered desire.

Bride Doll from Marshall Field & Co.

2009-06-23T23:50:00.004-04:00

So what exactly did I do with those Chicago summer lemonade stand profits? What do you do with pocket money when you're younger than ten and the basic necessities (food, shelter, clothes, books for education) are provided by your parents, as they should be? I remember the first significant purchase I ever made exclusively with my own money, and although I can't be 100 per cent sure without asking my mom, I'm willing to bet that the lemonade stands in Lincoln Park were partly responsible for funding my acquisition. And what I acquired was a little girl's dream: a delicate bride doll, the kind that while not made of porcelain (my generation was, sadly, pretty plastic already), was in that china-doll style. What was it about that doll? My girlhood was not, in fact, filled with tales of weddings, marriage—not in the sense that this what I was "supposed" to aspire to; not at all. I was raised reading books like The Practical Princess, a beautifully illustrated collection of fairy tales with a feminist slant, a "you don't need to rely on anyone else just because you're female" guidebook for my earliest years. I was not, in fact, much interested in things bridal—not unless it pertained to my mother's experience, which I loved to hear about—but it's true that I was captivated by the fashion of lightweight "meringue" layers of material, lace, veils, and so forth. So, this doll. I'd seen her in the downtown department store of Marshall Field & Co., the one that is no longer Marshall Field's but was acquired by Macy's in 2005–2006. The Field's store itself merits a Chicago memories post: its flagship location on State Street was a landmark I loved, a treat to visit. I remember the green patina clock jutting from the store's corner, out toward the intersection of State and Washington. Inside, I was awed by the open arcade galleries that housed the individual departments of wares; looking up, the glass mosaic Tiffany Dome mesmerized me with its opulence. It was the perfect setting for this doll, which sat (stood?) in a glass display case and summoned me to her with blue eyes that could blink a dark shelf of lashes. The doll had real hair (blond), pale skin . . . I imagined she looked like my mother did when she got married, although by that time I'm sure I'd seen the pictures, which revealed a more elegant, tailored, off-white dress and no veil. When I asked my mom about the possibility of having the doll, her answer was a wise one, opening a door to the life skills of saving, of delayed gratification. It was not my birthday; it was not Christmas. I could wait for those, or I could save my own money and buy the doll for myself, which is what I did. I was so proud that day that we counted my savings and realized that I had achieved my goal. I don't know how much the doll cost, and I have no clue how to guess without doing research, considering inflation and all. But however much, it was worth every penny. The feel of the doll in my hands after weeks or months of only imagining what it would be like to hold her; the knowledge that I could want and provide myself with this doll . . . it was priceless. And although in time the white of the doll's dress would turn yellow with age, her feet would become bereft of their satiny slippers, and she herself would be packed up in a cardboard box for storage—still, the magnificence of this purchase for a child, the power of self-sufficiency in meeting this one small desire, stay with me.

Douglas Ranch Camp

2009-06-22T23:30:00.029-04:00

Today was my son's first day of summer camp 2009. When I asked him how it went, on a scale of 1-10, he was quick to give it a ten. He talked about swimming and how he can put his whole head underwater for "ten minutes" ("You mean seconds?" "Yeah, seconds."); he mentioned kickball and an art project and making a new friend . . . all great to hear, especially described in an enthusiastic tone of voice. Camp, of course, can be a good or a bad experience. Last year, camp was not so great for my little guy. This year hopefully will be different. Meanwhile, I am reminded of my own summer experiences—most of them good, some not; many blogged about already. The hardest for me (and maybe the most memorable for this reason) was the summer sleep-away camp I attended one year when we were living in Los Angeles. This was probably 1982, maybe 1983. I should say that the camp is a traditional, family-operated camp with a long history, a great reputation, and lots of fabulous activities, and I really don't know why it didn't appeal to me. It seems now like it would be a kid's paradise. Perhaps my discomfort there had something to do with the other girls in my cabin, with whom I had a hard time bonding (despite some congenial poker games with M&Ms as stakes). Or else it was the threat of "pink eye" that was going around, along with the exaggerated, graphic rumors of what it was like to come down with it: I was told that your eyes got crusty overnight and you couldn't open them at all, so it was like being blind (!) with gunky, oozing eyes. Maybe I was just missing home too much; missing my parents and my usual, obsessive routine of dance, dance, dance—not campy "barn dancing" either, but ballet. Anyway, for whatever combination of reasons, I remember discussing with my parents whether I should come home sooner than originally planned. I believe, however, that I did stick it out for the two sessions I was registered for. The camp, because you must be wondering by now, was the Douglas Ranch Camp in Carmel Valley, CA. Douglas Camp is coed for kids ages 7-14, is located on 120 acres, and has a camper:staff ratio that would please any parent. The days, I remember, were very structured; maybe that was one of my complaints: I felt bullied into a specific routine, with mandatory participation in all activities regardless of interest level. The activities I remember most were swimming (because the pool was freezing and we had to pass tests and learn CPR), tennis (which I didn't want to do), crafts (which I loved, lanyards and all), and the two that were most unique to me at the time: archery and riflery. Archery I hated, because, frankly, I was not good at it. The bows were too big, the arrows too hard to pull back, and nothing ever hit the bull's-eye. The rifle range, however, proved interesting. I couldn't believe that I was shooting a real gun. I was fascinated by this, despite the fact that weapons of any kind generally held no interest for me; in fact, they have always repulsed me. Still, there I was, shooting from a prone position, feeling the kickback into my shoulder when I pulled the trigger and also being amazed to find that most of the time, I hit my target dead-on. (Mind you, I am now the mom with the "no guns" rule; we live in a different era, though!) The other thing I remember about Douglas Camp is something my parents also remember well: the fact that the camp was so strict about etiquette at mealtimes that I came home with impeccable table manners. As I said, the camp was family run, and the matriarch of the clan, who was probably in her seventies or eighties back then, used to rotate tables. She'd sit first at this one, then that, and the campers were all warned of her eagle eye and intolerance for elbows on tables or talking with mouths full or what-have-you. I remember my dad telling me that this aspect of my experience reminded him of his boyhood camp, where the instructions were to drop a serving dish full of food if the person you passed it to served himself without taking the dish from you first. I don't remember what kind of penalty system was in place to keep us all on our toes (with napkins in laps), but it was effective, whatever it was. So, camp was tough, but I got through it. I laugh about it now, especially because I think Douglas Camp is a camp my son would love—and of course at the time they selected it, my parents thought I would love it, too. But sometimes there's no accounting for taste, preference, experience. For now, I just remember a challenge I met; and I renew my wish for my son to have no challenges this summer . . . just a riotous good time.

With Dad: Gatlinburg, TN

2009-06-21T23:30:00.039-04:00

Father's Day is coming to an end. I have been thinking of my dad throughout the day, though, and wondering what I could possibly write to do him justice, to honor him. A lifetime of memories—forty years of them, shy some months—often simply blend into a constant, comforting knowledge: less a specific image or recalled dialogue, more just an ongoing certainty that he is there for me, always has been, in every interpretation of the phrase. We are bound by more than our blood, our cells, our DNA . . . and without him, I would be a sorry shadow of the person I am. And yet, he reminded me of something the other day: our first trip together, just the two of us, in the summer of 1978, when I was almost nine years old. In August of that year, we drove from Chicago down into Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains, before continuing on to Georgia, where we'd meet other family members. We stopped and stayed a couple of nights in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a quaint rustic town proud of its simple country heritage and its majestic natural surroundings. On a mountain pass (I think heading into Gatlinburg), just before a tunnel, we saw two black bears at the side of the road. My father stopped the car some distance away so that I could take a picture of them, and I think now how instead, he could have just kept driving. Having grown up in urban settings, the only bears I ever saw were bears in zoos, and it seemed the luckiest thing in the world to happen upon them in the wild like that. Of our time in the town itself, I remember a few things: Although I don't recall the name of the little hotel we stayed in, I do know that it was at the edge of the Little Pigeon River, and that we had breakfast outside on a small patio where yellow-orange objects conspired to wake us with cheerfulness (the same sunny orange hue was seen in patio umbrellas with white polka dots, in the rubber slats of the deck chairs, and in glasses of chilled orange juice that we drank down as we talked about what to do that day). On August 15, 1978, we took the Gatlinburg Sky Lift five hundred feet up to the top of Crockett Mountain to a viewing platform. The frame of the sky lift was yellow (more good cheer); I remember also that I wore a favorite pair of yellow leather (or fake leather) sandals and that my feet did not reach the foot bar, since my legs were not long enough and stuck straight out in front of me. This was in sharp contrast to my father's long legs, bent at a severe angle to fit. As we neared the top of the mountain, our photo was taken. I loved scaling the mountain in this way, dangling from cables, exposed on all sides (it was like a ski lift)—and I reveled in the fact that this was something I would just share with my father; even if my mother had been with us, she would likely have skipped the ride, acrophobic as she generally is. I was proud of having no fear, and happy to look straight down, thinking nothing of danger. I don't know what else we did during the day(s) we were in Gatlinburg. I am guessing that we went in and out of shops, am guessing that we bought old-time treats like salt water taffy and caramel apples. I know that one evening we went to a vaudeville show, my first, and I was captivated by the crazy word play in a full rendition of the famous "Who's on First?" skit. Another night, we went to the movies. I am not sure which film we saw, but I know it was either Grease or The Cat From Outer Space, both of which had come out that summer. Everyone was buzzing about Grease, but I was also captivated by CFOS, and I remember the leaps of imagination by which I transformed myself into the alien space cat, Jake, with his glowing collar. Neither of these films, I'm certain, was what my father would have decided to watch on his own—bless him and his indulgence, he never let me see that he was anything other than enthusiastic for my choices. In the flow of years, our time in Gatlinburg was short—too short—but back then, time slowed down for us, and I know we had that rare opportunity to lose ourselves in each other's company, to trick ourselves into thinking that it was just us two for the world and that our special journey with its inside jokes and songs and laughter could last forever. And, in many ways, it has. I am thankful for many things about my father—I hope he knows this—but above all, I am thankful that he is the kind of man who could take a genuine interest in the ideas, thoughts, and dreams of a nine-year-old girl. I am blessed to have as a father a man who has, no matter how busy with his own work or life concerns, always made time to nurture our relationship. Thanks, Dad. I love you.

Tangled Skates: a Love Story

2009-06-20T23:50:00.000-04:00

A perfect Indian Summer day, nearly eleven years ago. An afternoon in early September, sunny and warm, blue sky, a day for being outdoors. I had recently gone out on a series of dates—platonic coffees, pleasant lunches—with the man who would in time become my husband. And just a week or so before, he had upped the ante significantly: he told me he'd be going home to France for a vacation in the fall, and did I want to go with him? At that point, although there was clearly a mutual attraction, we hadn't even kissed; I had no possible answer to a "meet the family" proposition. On this end-of-summer day, though, I didn't need to give an answer to that question, only accept an invitation to go skating around Central Park. At his apartment on East 92nd Street, we strapped on our in-line skates, and too little protective gear, and headed out. It had been about three or four years since I'd skated. Maybe not since I lived in Saint Louis, when I'd burn off stress by circling Forest Park. (It was there, in fact, that I first learned to skate in-line style—encouraged, if you can believe it, by a couple of married of senior citizens I'd met haphazardly in the park who were also wearing Rollerblades, and helmets.) I was a bit rusty. It should also be said that although I was confident on level surfaces, and comfortable with a certain amount of speed, I had really never practiced on hills of any major significance. Central Park was fine. It was more than fine, in fact. A perfect date, and I remember being extremely proud of the fact that I didn't fall down and embarrass myself . . . until we started the return to my husband-to-be's apartment. I never realized before, how hilly that part of Manhattan is, the low 90s on the East Side, sloping down to the East River from the park. My husband (I'll go ahead and call him that now), decided it would be best to head across 91st Street, because where it got real steep, between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, this part of the street is blocked to traffic. It's a nice, calm pedestrian way, with benches lining each side. At the top of it, I hesitated. "It's like skiing," my husband said. "You just slalom down. Going side to side allows you to control the speed." Which I'm sure was great advice, except that I don't ski—and there's a reason for that. But there was no way I was going to take off the skates, so I took a deep breath for courage and started down. My husband was quite solicitous and charming, doing his best to accompany me slowly back and forth. And it was working out fine until about halfway down. I'm not sure what happened exactly, but as if in slow motion (which it certainly wasn't), I see the replay: how we got out of sync somehow and when he went right, I was going left; how we were weaving back and forth past each other, crisscrossing, and I was clearly picking up more speed than I could handle; how he was downhill from me, and at some point, it was inevitable that we would crash into each other. We did, or rather, I crashed into him. I remember that I landed smack on top of him, a tangle of limbs and skate boots and spinning wheels. We provided a very entertaining spectacle, no doubt, for the people who were sitting on the benches. We laughed about it and helped each other up, dusted off our grazed elbows and knees and made it back the remaining two and a half blocks to his apartment. The end result? Our roller derby escapade sped us up in more ways than one: my final memory of the day was on his apartment terrace, a champagne cocktail to dull the sting of the cotton pad soaked with rubbing alcohol to wipe the grit from our joints, and finally . . . a first kiss of many.

Jumbleberry Pie

2009-06-19T20:00:00.037-04:00

During the summer of 1991, I was living in Dutchess County, New York, soaking up sun in the Hudson Valley. It would be my last summer there, as I was heading into my senior year in college and already knew that I would be moving on to do other things after graduation. At this time, I was involved with a local man who was nine years my senior (I've posted about him here and here). He was self-employed and didn't work traditional hours so we got to spend a lot of time together. Things were still good between us that summer, easygoing; we took care of each other, which also meant taking care of each other's friends. One friend of his in particular (I'll call him "Adman") worked and lived in the city during the week; each Friday he would take the train from Manhattan to Rhinecliff, New York, and my boyfriend and I would go pick him up. The three of us fell into a routine that suited us all quite well. With summer hours in play, Adman would come up a little earlier, and we'd drive from the train station to the pale blue house—historically a home for boys—where I had my apartment. Out in front was a communal wood picnic table, which usually no one used. With the temperature dropping just enough to be comfortable outside at the end of the afternoon, we'd set up for a meal that I had prepared. I don't remember any of the main dishes I made, and of the desserts, only one. But that one came to represent all of summer to me: Jumbleberry Pie. It was a recipe I'd found in the July 1991 issue of Gourmet magazine. In fact, I just looked it up online, and you can find the same recipe I made, here, on Epicurious. Jumbleberry pie had a name I loved, and the recipe's picture showed deep purple fruit oozing from between the pie's double crust. I remember that this particular summer, I was teaching myself how to bake all kinds of pies. Pies were not something that my mom made at home—together we made cookies and cakes, sometimes other desserts, but not pies. Pies, however, are the perfect vehicle for summer's berry harvest. I remember in that same Dutchess County kitchen, I made whole-wheat-crust blueberry pie, peach custard pie, my paternal grandmother's fresh strawberry pie. In the fall of course, with all the orchards there were around, I made plenty of apple pies as well. Jumbleberry pie, though, was the tops, an unqualified success; a jammy blend of blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries, all at the height of their flavor and so naturally sweet, I could reduce the sugar in the recipe and no one would be the wiser. So on this particular summer Friday, shy of twenty-two years, you could find me dusting the flour from my denim cut-offs, the stain of fresh berries still on my fingers, working to feed two guys past thirty and reveling in their calls for seconds, for the rest of the pie "to go," when we'd eaten our fill in the slanting sunlight, swatting away the yellowjackets and listening to the crickets. Darkness would set in, and with the extra pie wrapped up, we'd pile back in the car, drive across the Hudson to Saugerties, where we'd drop Adman off, confirming plans for the weekend, maybe water skiing. My guy and I would head back to our side of the river, back to my apartment, where we'd do the dishes together, standing closer than necessary, and there was a feeling of happy domesticity that I mistook at the time for an eternal quality of life.

Lemonade Stand

2009-06-18T20:00:00.021-04:00

When the weather got hot, when I was between the ages of six and nine and my family lived in Chicago, my mom would kindle the entrepreneurial spirit and set us to work in the kitchen. We'd cream sugar and butter; add eggs, vanilla, flour, baking powder; we'd overdose the chocolate chips and spread the batter in a pan. I remember the smell of gooey bar cookies fresh from the oven, chocolate still shiny with heat. We'd do a taste test for quality control. We'd get a giant pitcher, fill it with cold water and scoops of Country Time Lemonade mix, stir well. We'd take the lot of it, along with an antique ice-cream table and chair set (wood table top and seats, iron legs and backs), and head across the street from our apartment on Lake View, into Lincoln Park. We'd set up at a sidewalk intersection, where people came frequently in and out of the park, and do a brisk business in lemonade and cookies. I remember the Dixie cups, the repeat customers (especially joggers, hot and sweaty, thirsty and happy to feed a child's kitty. I don't remember how much we sold these treats for—it was the mid-1970s, so it couldn't have been much: a dime a cup? a quarter a cookie?—and I don't remember how much money was made. I do recall that what we earned, I was allowed to keep. And I know that it gave me a feeling of efficacy, of power, that I didn't have before. It was a rite of passage the first time we did this, and it also became an annual tradition during those Chicago years. Now, in an adult world with financial problems deeper than can possibly be fixed with zesty citrus ade and chewy chocolate cookies, I hold even more tightly to these memories and to the simple fact that they were allowed to develop—memories shaped by the hand of a patient parent who looked for ways to stir life skills into the carefree days of childhood. Now, thanks to those summer days with my mother, when life gives me lemons . . . I know what I am supposed to do with them.

Mississippi Houseboat

2009-06-17T19:00:00.026-04:00

I see the picture in my mind's eye: me, my mom, and my mom's sister Cay. Is my father in the snapshot, too, or was he the one pointing the camera at us? The photo is in an album somewhere in my parents' home. In it, we are sitting on the deck of a houseboat, floating on the Mississippi River, each of us wearing a white T-shirt with a large navy blue logo of the Playboy bunny in the center of it. It's the mid-1970s, and my father has taken some time off from work (Playboy Enterprises, therefore the shirts) so that we could have a bit of Mark Twain summer adventure on the great Mississippi. We've rented this houseboat, maybe for a week. I don't remember how long the trip was, or what our starting and ending points were. I suppose it was a round trip, and the starting point couldn't have been far from Chicago, which is where we were living at the time. Many details are fuzzy, but not the overall sensation of excitement. I know now that this trip was likely planned for my benefit, for the chance to give me exactly the kind of memories I have of family, time together, exploring the world and nature—also marveling at human innovation, which we witnessed not only in our motorized boat but in the system of locks that captured my interest and leveled the water as we made our way. When I imagine now, as an adult, the four of us pent up on that little boat, I wonder how no one was ever thrown overboard. I'm not sure I could manage it these days, but children are blissfully ignorant of adults' needs for personal space, and I'm sure I was quite comfortable with the run of the boat. Small as it was, it was expansive in my mind, since we could take it anywhere along the river. Dad piloted our homey vessel, and I will say now that this was something he learned to do during a five-minute lesson at the dock, courtesy of the man who rented us the boat. I don't know what the man showed my father, but it seemed sufficient enough—with one exception. Perhaps the guy thought that this point was so obvious that even the most novice boat captain would know it intuitively, but it bears stating here: when you're putting in to dock, go against the current. Following is my view of what ensued when my father flew in the face of this common wisdom. We were a good bit into our journey, and along the way we needed to dock. Maybe it was for fuel, or else some other provisions. It was a quiet, sunny afternoon. Two heavy guys, beer guts in overalls (that type anyway, if they weren't really dressed thus) were sitting out on a couple of wooden chairs at the edge of their dock. Lazy day, nothing doing. My father starts his approach, going along with the current. He notices the men on shore now and remarks how friendly they are, waving at us with big sweeping gestures. My dad waves back, emphatically. As we get closer, however, we notice that the men are not just waving, they're waving us off. But by then it's too late. Pushed along by the river, the houseboat picks up speed, and the men, incredulous, can only stand at the dock, helpless, arms now dropped to their sides, as the boat comes crashing in. There was some damage, but nothing catastrophic. It should be said that the dock was a bit dilapidated to begin with—still, it was probably all these guys had for commerce. The thing that made the lasting impression, though, was that apparently the dock was home to a hornet's nest, and when the impact occurred, the sky filled with angry buzzing. I remember taking cover inside the boat's small cabin, along with my mom and my aunt. I was terrified of any kind of stinging insect at that age (they still make me nervous today), and I was all too happy to stay out of range of the swarm. Of course, the rest of the family legend is that my father, being the gregarious, sincere man that he is, spends five minutes with the guys on the dock and by the end of it, they are practically thanking my father for having crashed into them. I don't know how he did it, how he has this effect on people, but sure enough, as we were leaving, the waving this time was in genuine friendship. The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. There was a thunderstorm one night, I believe, but it seems pale in comparison with the excitement at the dock. In all, this trip ranks easily on the Top Ten list of our family's vacations; it's one I'd like to duplicate sometime, before my son gets to an age where he wouldn't last a day on a boat with his parents.

Santa Monica Playhouse

2009-06-16T19:00:00.028-04:00

During the summer when I was eleven (maybe twelve) and living in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, I had my first taste of The Industry, which of course out there means acting. For two summers running, my parents enrolled me in the summer camp program at the Santa Monica Playhouse, which is still going strong, still under the ownership of Evelyn Rudie and Chris DeCarlo. Back then, the place felt as homey as it was professionally run; now, their Web site (even the fact that they have one—but of course they would, we all have moved into another century!) seems so far removed from my impressions of the place; they have expanded tremendously. I am glad for them, but I like holding on to my simpler memories. I remember sitting on the ground with other kids in the courtyard on sunny days, learning lines and completing writing exercises where we'd "get into the minds of the characters." I remember seeking refuge from the sun, too, inside the cool, dark theater, where we practiced our singing (the plays we did there in the summer were musicals). I also remember being surprised when told that, in fact, I didn't know how to breathe! I'd inhale and suck in my stomach, and I certainly had never heard of that deep-breathing space in my body called a diaphragm. The theater was a dream come true: intimate but no less "big time" with its lighting system and backstage area; this was not the public school gymnasium rigged up with folding chairs. The plays were great fun, and I especially recall the one called Our Camp, which was (at least in name) a takeoff on Our Town. The story, script, and songs were created by Evelyn and Chris, and everyone got a chance to do at least one solo. We learned the entire play by heart (including other cast members' lines), and during a visit from my aunt and uncle, when my mom and her sister went out somewhere and left my uncle watching over me at home, I bent his ear with the entire production, start to finish. In Our Camp, I had the part of a social-climbing, materialistic, trouble-making camper named Rhonda. (Note here: I was not typecast based on my actual personality!) The crazy thing is, all these years later, I still remember verbatim the solo verse I sang during one of the songs. The lyrics were written as though they were letters home from the campers, and for the record, here's what I sang:

Dear Uncle Joe,

Camp is expensive, you know.

I had to [deep breath here]

pay for the sheets that I tore when I tried to escape through the window, the hole that I shot in the big air-conditioning unit I thought was the rifle range target, and they never said what I owe for the time that I turned my counselor's hair green...

And shucks, you said you'd send me something if I wrote,

so could you send me fifty bucks?!

It was a great experience, with end-of-summer performances to show off everyone's efforts. I saved the show programs for some time but no longer have them; still, I see the layouts: the giant red rose on the cover of Our Camp, the photos within rocket-ship portholes for the play whose title I don't remember (though I remember one song: "Calling All Stars"). There were cast parties as well, which I attended and enjoyed, despite being a bit confused by the older kids' interest in Spin the Bottle. All in all, these were summers well spent, summers that fed my desire for creative expression, for performance, for stepping out of myself and into an imaginary world where I could be anyone at all and earn applause.

Summer Reading: Kon Tiki

2009-06-15T20:30:00.020-04:00

My first memory of reading out of pure obligation and not deriving any form of pleasure from it is linked to the start of middle school. I was in California, where it's typical for middle school to consist of seventh and eighth grades only. I'd graduated from my public elementary school and had gained admittance to a private prep school. Heading into the summer before that seventh-grade year, incoming students were given a reading list. Apparently all the books were mandatory. I only remember a single one—though probably there were books on that list that formed a much more lasting impression, I just don't associate their titles with the marching orders I received in the summer of 1981. Until this time, I read voraciously, and I read everything I wanted (including Judy Blume books banned by my elementary school teacher) and nothing I didn't want. I mean, yes, certainly there were other school assignments, probably other summer reading lists, but if any of them were less than exciting, they didn't raise a complaint that I can recall. This was different. I don't remember ever being so certain that I would dislike a book, nor so accurate in such a prediction. The book was Kon-Tiki, a nonfiction account of a high-seas adventure, written by the Norwegian explorer, Thor Heyerdahl. For those of you who don't know, Heyerdahl led an expedition of six men (including himself) to sail across the Pacific Ocean from South America to Polynesia, in 1947. This was no ordinary sailing, however; the men made the journey aboard a balsa-wood raft, which was constructed using primitive techniques indigenous to Peru—the idea being to prove Heyerdahl's theory that it was possible for South Americans to have settled the islands of Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. What ensued was a perilous journey lasting more than a hundred days and spanning thousands of miles of open water. The book was published three years later and was an undisputed success, spawning additional works in film and television. Almost thirty years later, it's impossible for me to remember much about the book, or why specifically I disliked it so much. Maybe if I reread it, I'd even like it now—who knows? I do know that at the time, the book went down like a horse pill swallowed dry, which is to say not well. I kept setting it aside, arguing with my parents about the necessity of reading it all the way through. I was sick of salt water, cloth sails, sharks . . . whatever various dangers threatened these men who, I thought, were fools to float themselves out there to begin with. I suspect that the book was on the list specifically to appeal to boys, and maybe it was successful in that regard. Not that the girls would dislike it automatically because of their gender—that would be a gross stereotype and I'm sure (I hope!) inaccurate—but it was just not my thing at all. Suddenly, reading was the worst kind of chore. And it would often be so in the years that followed. I'm glad that, eventually, I attained the discipline to read all assigned texts with as much careful attention as I gave the books I loved. But I have to say that it was a bit of a shock to the system to have my favorite pastime—reading—suddenly crammed down my throat. It was a sea change (pardon the pun), and a signal that I'd moved into serious academic territory. Now, it's summer again. This time, it's my son who has the printed reading list, issued from the Junior School librarian. At his age, the list is optional; it's a list of suggested books that parents might encourage their kids to read, according to their own tastes. The list is long, with a diverse collection of titles. Certainly my son and I will work through quite a lot of these, and I will be glad for his sake that, this year at least, the activity will remain one of pure pleasure.

Note: If you want to keep track of what my son and I are reading together this summer, please visit my page on GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/acparker and look for the "mother-son book review" shelf.

Miami Driver's Permit

2009-06-14T23:00:00.023-04:00

It's hot and very, very humid. I am fifteen and standing with my mother outside at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Miami, Florida. Miami, fabulous as it might be in the dead of winter, is not where you want to be in June, July, and August. And if you do find yourself there in the summertime, for heaven's sake, stay inside with the air conditioning where it's possible to breathe. If you do have to go outside—because who am I kidding? you have to go out eventually—then the next best strategy is to stay away from the DMV. But when you're fifteen, all you want is that most cherished badge of dawning independence: a driver's permit. You can't drive alone yet, but the day is coming, and it's imperative to get that permit so that in another year, you'll be ready for the real thing (or not, but you'll be behind the wheel anyway; clear the sidewalks!). For weeks I had been studying for the written test: questions from the obvious (What does a red octagonal road sign signify?) to the less obvious (How many feet before an intersection are you supposed to signal a turn? I hated the "How many feet . . ." questions). I'd been quizzed by my parents and we all figured I was ready. I don't remember where the DMV was exactly; somewhere in the heart of the city. Here is what I do remember: We, my mother and I, show up and are told to get in line. The line at the DMV is long. In fact, it is very long. It spills out of the squat, square, one-story municipal building, out into the suffocating heat. We are standing underneath some projection of the roof, so there's a little shade, but it doesn't really help. The sun pierces everything; the whole city feels like an oven, but with thick, soupy air, not dry heat. So, we're standing there, and at some point it occurs to us that we are the only non-Latinas at the DMV that day; we may even be the only women, period—in any event, we are vastly outnumbered. All around us are short, dark, middle-aged men, wrinkled from the sun, speaking Spanish. In Miami, one presumes they are Cuban, but who knows. Latino men, anyway. And the other thing that becomes clear pretty quickly, as we are standing there with nothing to do and the line does not seem to be moving at all, is that these men operate by different social rules; their culture allows a much more overt dynamic of male/female, ogler and . . . oglee? Ogled. I'll tell you, the DMV line in Miami is a perfect place to get ogled, if you're into that. We weren't. So we're there, wondering if the line is ever going to get shorter. We're drinking Diet Coke. My mother notices the man behind us in line; he is staring at me, and it's freaking her out. She gives him a look. Next thing I know, the man is pointing to his eyes, then pointing at us (at me, at my mom, at us both . . . I don't recall, and it doesn't matter; it was a shared experience that made us both uncomfortable). We have no idea what the gesture truly means, and he repeats it. Did he say something in Spanish? Maybe, but we remember this later as a mute transaction of increasingly emphatic pantomime: the guy pointing to his eyes with the first two fingers on one hand, pointing to us, back and forth, grinning. My mom's solution? She kind of shoves the soda can out in a "back off" gesture. Eyeballs, Coke cans, volleying with heightened frustration until—what? I'm not sure what stops the interaction. It stops by itself, we turn our backs . . . eventually, what stops everything for good is that, disappointing as it is, my mom realizes we could be standing there for hours—apparently people do just that, then have to come back again the next day—and it's way too uncomfortable in every way, so we leave with her muttering that there simply has to be another solution. Which she finds. In the next day or so, my mom locates another DMV office about a half hour away, where there is no line and we are in and out in no time at all. The only notable thing there was the way, when I took my written test, I had to stand at a counter with a couple other people, and the guy on my right kept trying to cheat by looking at my answers. He had a couple solid decades on me, was also a Spanish speaker, and I assume had ESL issues. I don't know whether he passed his test or not, but I did pass mine. Got my eyes checked, photo taken (I still remember I was wearing a greenish-beige and white striped shirt, sporting long dangling earrings made of hammered copper), and left with a driver's permit in less time than it took to shake a soda can. All these years later, my mom and I still laugh about the scene at the inner-city DMV. The humor doesn't translate so well into words (at least, not in this draft, I don't think), but the pantomime still gets us every time.

Breakup: A Mixed Tape for Driving

2009-06-13T23:55:00.045-04:00

During the 1989-1990 academic year, I was in college and at the end of another mismatched relationship: this guy being the jealous, possessive type, which did not suit me in the least. At this point, we'd broken up—his fault and my own; neither of us was blameless—and things were still a bit raw and messy. As is the case for so many of us in these moments, music was the cure. Songs were the balm used to soothe, the bubbly champagne-like celebration of freedom, and the arrows we conveniently slung at each other when we'd used up all of our own words. I remember the progression of our relationship in music, starting with "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes and ending with "Train in Vain" by the Clash. These songs were much older than our short-lived romance, but they fit. As for contemporary albums, in 1989, Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever hit the charts. I remember that a girlfriend from high school was staying with me at the time of the album's success. As a humorous side note, there had been some unfounded rumors about us—about the nature of our friendship—back in high school, and as luck would have it, some other alumni had matriculated to my college and had befriended the guy who'd become my ex. Go figure that when my friend showed up on campus (and in my apartment), the rumor mill cranked up again. My ex wanted to know whether what he heard was true. In response to this green-eyed question, my friend and I had a good platonic laugh behind closed doors—especially the doors to my car, where we cranked the stereo, rolled down the windows and pushed back the sunroof, then proceeded to belt out the lyrics to "Free Fallin'," which nicely summed up how I felt, the wind in my hair and a certain freedom back in my life. With a gender reversal, I was the song's narrative persona: a bad girl 'cause I didn't even miss him; a bad girl for breakin' his heart. Along with Tom Petty (the other great anthem of his being "I Won't Back Down"), there was also Sínead O'Connor and I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, in 1990. That album featured relevant songs such as "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance." I remember these ended up on a mixed tape—back when that's all we had: the hours spent taping onto cassettes, not the digital world of playlists, iPods, MP3s—and that the compilation became known as "the breakup tape." When I was sad about the split (which I still sometimes was), or especially if I was deemed in danger of an unhelpful reconciliation, my friend and I would push the tape into the car's player and go for a drive. Anywhere, really, but preferably someplace in view of the Hudson, the Catskills. And before long, we'd be "Runnin' Down a Dream," feeling fine and "like anything was possible" once again. The cure-all in my teens and twenties was simple: a good mixed tape to put me in a singing mood. Come to think of it, often enough this still works (though there's not a cassette to be found in my house). Only the songs themselves are different now.

Spackle and Bus Fare

2009-06-12T23:00:00.000-04:00

We had paint, but needed Spackle paste. Scores of tiny holes riddled the wall over the mattress where for the past few months I'd slept occasional, fitful hours next to a deadbeat boyfriend of sorts, whose every aspect I had to take in hand, and even then he was useless. Unwilling to share responsibility, unable to share intimacy, he did nothing except waste himself—along with my time, money, and emotions. But as bad as things were, sometimes it takes external forces to bring about change, and in this case change came in the form of an eviction notice. Although I never thought I'd be thankful for an eviction, the request to vacate my first apartment was a huge relief. The posts of the past two days explain why in more detail. But the time had come to move on, and the night before I needed to turn over my keys, I had one thing on my mind: try to recover the deposit money. I don't recall whether this was a futile effort—whether the eviction precluded any return of deposit—but I knew at the time that effort was needed. It had been my parents, I'm pretty sure, who had put up the deposit money for me; I, fresh out of high school, had no credit and no substantial savings, so this had to have been the case. And the only hope I had of accomplishing even a partial return was to fill the holes, refresh the paint. The holes reminded me of the kind of destruction you'd expect from termites, if termites ate drywall. They don't, of course. The holes had been made by darts, countless darts that had missed the round board hanging over the bed. I used to think that a dart-thrower's game improved with a couple of beers, but this clearly was not the case in my apartment. Anyway, painting straight over the holes wasn't working, and so we—this being a collective of myself, my so-called boyfriend, and two squatters who called themselves friends—acknowledged the need for spackle. Except that, realizing this past midnight, with only hours to go before move-out time, spackle wasn't an option; no store was open where we could obtain any. As a result, I can tell you: in a pinch, use Crest. Yes, the toothpaste. It works fairly well. I remember standing on the box spring and mattress, pillows squishing under my feet while I went about squeezing minty, white paste onto the wall. I don't remember what I used to push the toothpaste into the holes, or how long we let it dry before applying a coat of paint. The whole process was less than ideal. But as I said, it worked. Crest, paint, garbage bags: the place got relatively clean. We opened the windows to air the place out. After sunrise, my freeloading friends took off. My mom came to pick me up—me and the boyfriend, too; my mom is not the type to just leave someone out on the street. But neither will she assume more than her fair share of responsibility either. This next bit I remember in a secondhand way; I only heard half of the conversation, but I was told the rest later on. My mom called the boy's mother, a long distance call to Illinois from Connecticut. She told her she was putting her son on a bus, that he'd be home on such-and-such a day, at whatever scheduled time. And the part that sticks with me still—the only part in the story that can still strike a note of sympathy where this young man is concerned—was this woman's response: "But what will I do with him?" she said. As though he were a commodity being returned, defective (which he was); one she didn't have room for in her house, her heart. My mother made it clear that this was not really her problem. Whose son was he, anyway? The next scene was the bus depot, complete with an awkward good-bye. Today I am thinking about new beginnings in general, but particularly remembering this one. The liberation of it, the burden lifted. The fresh start symbolized by a coat of paint and a one-way bus ticket out of town. I thought about this person I used to love and whom I used to call my friend. As the bus picked up speed and headed out of town, his journey was just beginning, but the free ride was over. And I felt free for the first time in ages.

Soup Kitchen Bum Surfing

2009-06-11T23:50:00.001-04:00

1987. Privileged Cheeverish town in Connecticut. An odd place to be down and out, but I promise, you can find the homeless, the hungry, or a band of penniless liquored-up losers anywhere. Even in Fairfield County, they don't all drink like bull-market Minotaurs in labyrinth mansions. Read the post just prior to this and you'll know my basic situation: fresh out of high school, college deferral, "friends" of the worst sort, rent to pay, and a dawn-past-dusk job that had me too dog tired to work toward fixing the mess I was in or really even to complain about it. I would just come home, step around the cases of Black Label, and try to get some sleep before having to get up and do it all again. The jerks who lived with me—nay, who mooched off me; who turned my first apartment into a flophouse and got me evicted—were a pathetic bunch. Of course, I was even more pathetic for playing hostess to them. I did it in part because I'd fallen in love with one of these freeloaders when I was just a bit older than fifteen. At that age, I thought you could fix anyone with good intentions. I thought that "potential" was a worthy mate, trumped the flesh-and-blood mess in front of you, because if you just believed in the person with enough ferocity, they could attain that other, higher self. I wanted to save the object of my desire, to make excuses for him (misunderstood artist, dysfunctional family . . . ). I was also stubborn in relationships: despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, I persisted in believing that if I was loyal, the guy in question would come around, see me for what I was, love me back. But what I was, was a naive fool. Come to think of it, I guess he did see that, and he took full advantage. So, we lived together, but then there were the others: the so-called friends who also knew a sucker when they saw one. None of them were employed. One was a runaway drug addict from Ohio (she'd left a husband back there somewhere), another a good-looking guy with a quick sarcastic wit, a top-notch education, and an axe to grind with his parents. He reminded me of Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. We were a bunch of punks, literally, in terms of musical taste and fashion; upper middle-class kids, none of us older than nineteen, raised with advantages and rebelling with out much cause (if any). But at least I held down a job, while they preferred to work a system of outreach programs and quid pro quo with the local bums. Here's what they'd do: since there was never any food in the apartment (I ate in the restaurant where I worked), and since the only money came from me and went to the rent, they surfed the local soup kitchen to accomplish their two-fold aim, which was to feed themselves and to find someone old enough to buy alcohol for the night. I remember I went with them one time, on my day off. The homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Westport, Connecticut, opened around 5:00 or 5:30 in the afternoon, just as everyone was waking up. This was an interfaith operation, staffed by eager women who seemed to be suffering from empty-nest syndrome; we were treated like surrogate children in some respects, yet also held at arm's length. The food was decent, but not much more than that. I remember the runaway wife from Ohio, sitting across from me, wearing a red plaid shirt and army pants, combat boots planted firmly on the floor, hunched over a plate of rice and beans and holding her fork like a shovel. Things then go down according to the established routine. Mr. Breakfast Club finds one of the known bum-addicts and launches his proposition; next thing you know, we're on our way to "trenchtown" or "T-town" (a neighborhood to score in, a few towns over to the northeast), with some scraggly guy missing a tooth or two sitting in the backseat of someone's car. First, the alcohol. Our jonesing friend takes his middle-aged self into some package store and buys the wino wine or the grain alcohol or the case of beer that's on tap for the evening. Next, the score. I remember thinking this was going to be about hash, and the surprise I felt when the needle came out. The fear that we would be caught with a junkie shooting up on the spot, after he'd melted down his ration with a metal spoon and a lighter. I have always felt lucky to get in and out of that car unscathed; people as innocent as I, stupid enough to put themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, have done much worse. I remember sitting next to the window, behind the passenger seat, looking pointedly out into the deserted parking lot, away from the site of the injection, away from addled euphoria coursing the veins of the desperate man we'd taken for a joyride. I remember thinking—knowing—that I didn't belong there, and that what I wanted more than anything in that moment was to go home. Not to the stinking crash pad my apartment had become, but home where my family lived. And yet, I was still too proud to tell them I was in over my head. I was too proud and too tired and too much in the habit of unrequited love to say out loud what I knew in that instant: that the hand I then felt on my knee—the hand of the lost boy I once thought I could rescue—was not one that thrilled me at all anymore. No, not in the least.

Ships (Westport, CT)

2009-06-10T23:11:00.000-04:00

I graduated from high school in 1987, and although I had applied to college (one only, I knew what I wanted) and gotten my acceptance, I deferred matriculation for a year. It was for the best. Teen angst and anger were peaking, I was sick of school, and really it would've been a waste for me to go straight through when all I could think of was living on my own in the "real" world. Well, I got a dose of that. A good dose of what I could expect to do with a high school diploma and—let it be said—a bunch of shifty slackers for roommates, whose only ambition was to get wasted and stay that way all day. Except that I was not a slacker; that's something I never have been. And even if I had wanted to party—illegally, mind you, I was still underage for beer let alone the rest of what was out there to be had—well, there wasn't the time or energy for it. After a somewhat lost summer following graduation, I set about getting a job, a checking account, and an apartment, trying to making a responsible go of it. My credentials got me a peon's job in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant in Westport, Connecticut. Well, I suppose it could've been worse; I could've been busing tables or washing dishes, except that I had legal citizenship and did not speak Spanish. The restaurant was called Ships (or maybe The Ships), and like all the other restaurants where I have worked since that time, it exists no more. I was hired to work the cold station: salad prep, raw bar, dessert prep. I was not responsible for creating any recipes, so don't get any fancy ideas about my being a pastry chef or anything of the sort. And when I say "raw bar," I'd best disabuse you of any highfalutin' ideas: this was not the Grand Central Oyster Bar or Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar or any "Bar à huîtres" in Paris. In fact, oddly enough, most of the "raw" orders had to be run under the broiler for dishes like Clams Casino and Oysters Rockefeller. My job was tough, and the hours were long. I started early, and because my freeloading roommates remained stubbornly unemployed, I soon began working late as well: double shifts almost every day; leaving to go to work on the town bus before anyone was awake and coming back in the wee hours, dead on my feet, to an efficiency apartment that stank of booze and reeked of smoke and was just heating up for an all-night party when I walked through the door. If you're wondering how I let this go on, I'll tell you first that I was simply too exhausted to deal with a confrontation, and second that this stupid frame of mind should be excused with a plea of youthful lack of savoir faire. It took about three months and an eviction notice for things to sort themselves out, by which time the restaurant was already set to close.) But back to the restaurant; I will tell you what I remember. First, cue the cheap black-box stereo with cassette player: Boston's Greatest Hits, played in an endlessly repeating loop. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd ever listened to Boston before working at Ships—almost certainly not, wasn't my taste—but I can still hear that falsetto today, and in a lovely synesthetic mash-up, I immediately smell briny, iodine oysters. First thing I did in the morning was make up a batch of whipped cream to stash in the fridge for desserts. Leaving the cream in the automatic mixer for too long, it was here that I accidentally discovered how to make butter. I plated tray upon tray of skimpy side salads. I sliced meats for chef salads, boiled eggs, washed spinach, and crumbled to bits the bacon fried by the line cooks. I did who knows how many other tasks before the lunch crowd came. I remember that the kitchen was very low-tech by today's standards, but the crazy ticker tape machine over my station spat out orders quick enough to put me in a tailspin on a regular basis. I'd get slammed twice most times a table turned: apps then desserts. As though it were yesterday, I can feel the floor under me roil and suck like quicksand as the tape dictated multiple raw bar orders. The thing about those clams and oysters was that there was no way to prep them in advance; they had to be opened to order. Six at a time, I'd open the clams. For the oysters, I'd shuck and cuss, gouge my hand and suck the sore spots on my palm where a stubborn shell had refused to open, the tip of the oyster knife stabbing my skin instead. This was the job hazard no one really explained; nor the potential for a vibrio infection (which thankfully I never got). I had no gloves, nor did the thought occur to me that maybe I should wear them. I just kept shucking. I'd get a breather, then I'd plate desserts, and at least that task was easy. My other memories are about people, two in particular: the line cook who worked the grill, and the fry guy next to him. We were three in a row throughout the service. The grillmaster acted like he had seniority, whether he did or not. He was a crotchety, foul-mouthed, middle-aged black man who did all he could to widen the traditional rift between kitchen staff and front of house. If an order came through incomplete or fouled up in any way, this guy had a tendency to smack the servers on the back of their hands with his hot metal spatula. The fry guy smelled like smoking fat. He was a very tall, skinny, redheaded guy who spoke English as a second language, but I have no idea where he was from. Someplace in South America, I think, although his looks certainly didn't fit the typical Latin image. One day, I remember, he was late to work. Then more than late. He pulled a no-show and it caused a scandal; rumor was he'd been arrested for stabbing someone in an alley or behind a building in town somewhere. I had a hard time believing it, but saw something in the paper a day or so later. The details I lost sight of, but not the haunting feeling that just maybe he was innocent and getting a bum deal—or else I'd been working in close proximity with a person who'd gone homicidal. Neither thought was comforting. But, heading home at the end of every crazy day—no matter how crazy—I had other fish to fry. As I said, I got evicted from the apartment I was living in. Not a very good start to my new, "adult" life of responsibility. I moved back in with my parents while my roommates (and assorted squatters) scattered to the winds; I have to say I was as relieved as I was ashamed. When Ships closed down later that year, I looked for my next paycheck and started saving money for travel, biding my time until the following September . . . when I'd be more than ready to continue my education—in books, not in barnacles or any other fishy thing.

Granddaddy's Orchids

2009-06-09T20:00:00.027-04:00

Today I was honored with a gift: a gorgeous orchid plant in luscious, fertile bloom. The colors are instantly uplifting, especially on as drab a day as today is in New York City, the sky going from black to gray to white and back to gray. In front of me, however, a complex cluster of waxy yellow petals that look as though they've been flecked first with an intense shade of purplish-pink (really, the color you first think of if I say "orchid"), and next with a touch of orange-red, right in the center of each flower. The picture to the left does not do justice to the color saturation; the blossoms are much brighter than they appear here. The orchid is an interesting plant. Its flowers seem fragile; you'd expect them to be like tissue paper. And yet not only are the leaves hearty and thick, the petals (at least on this variety) are sturdy as well. Another seeming contradiction: the blooms are, on the one hand, the epitome of refinement, of elegance . . . and yet, if you look closely at their centers, there is something fierce and almost dangerous looking about them. They remind me of hungry, open, animal mouths—the potentially lethal jaws of a mythological creature that seduces you first with beauty. Not that I am menaced by these flowers, but they do have a complexity about them that makes you question what you know about beauty and strength, poise and passion, superficiality versus something at the source. And this kind of enigma, I suppose, is what makes the orchid a perfect match in memory for my paternal grandfather. I cannot see orchids without thinking of him. I don't remember very many things about him, but I remember that orchids were his favorite flower. I have a picture of my grandfather—one of only a few that I possess—where he is in a greenhouse, wearing high-waisted polyester pants and a short-sleeved button-down cotton shirt; an old man among orchids: two seemingly fragile things, side by side. He did indeed seem fragile to me with his wrinkled skin and thin, gray hair. His back was bent, he used a cane, and his manner in general was effacing. He did not talk much, and when he did it was softly. But I see him standing there among the orchids—a simple man from the American South, surrounded by exotic flowers that hint at distant lands—and I know that he was a person who made things grow, and that a farmer's life is not for the faint of heart. He tended to things, to people. He lived through hard times when there was little more than Saltines and ketchup to eat; butter beans and cornbread. He raised two sons, took a switch to them for discipline but gave them lots of love. The switch part I always had a hard time imagining; I only ever knew him as a very gentle man. He was sweet, moved slowly, talked little. I didn't get to know him as well as I would have liked, but I loved him a great deal. The satisfying thing is how he's stayed with me through the years, on and off with various triggers to memory—but always, immediately, whenever I see these most beautiful of flowering plants, the orchid.

Serving up Friendship

2009-06-08T21:30:00.000-04:00

Thinking about high school friends. Friends from my second high school, that is. A place I entered under cover of deep Michigan snow, in the middle of my sophomore year. Spring semester, summer vacation, then back for one more term before having to take a medical leave. These events are all detailed in other posts. But what I remember today is this: an unexpected gesture from a friend I didn't even know I had. A handcrafted gift I have kept and cherished since the age of sixteen. With all the moves I've made, it's perhaps a miracle that this gift has not been broken—it is fragile, fired clay—and yet it makes sense: I have taken more than the usual care with it. The object in question is a plate, glazed in dove gray with an abstract crosshatch of lavender, peat, and twilight sky. It was made expertly by a boy in my school, in the ceramics studio, and given to my mother to pass along to me once she'd made the trip up north, alone, to clean out my room toward the end of the school year when it became clear I wouldn't be back for a while. I was at my most miserable, a teenager in physical pain and emotional torment—feeling sorry for myself and thinking that the only people I wanted to comfort me were friends who were hundreds of miles away. I had found myself unexpectedly in a NYC hospital. When discharged, it was to go to my parents' house—a place in Connecticut, where they moved after I was already away in school, so I knew no one there. I was full of spite, much of it directed at my mother, unfairly; I was especially unhappy that she was back on my campus, where I couldn't be. So when she came back with an object fattened with bubble wrap, when she said it was a gift for me from a friend, I took it in my hands carefully, lovingly, and it was like someone had thrown me a lifeline. The plate is heavy, thick-rimmed. It is not a plate you want to eat from, though I do use it often as a serving dish. I might display it as the piece of fine art that it is, perhaps mounted on a wall—except that I've never liked the looks of plates on walls, and also I prefer to enjoy it as more than something to gaze at. As soon as I saw the plate, I knew who it was from. I had admired it already, though I'm not sure I said anything about it to this boy, the artist. In fact, we had never said much of anything to each other at all, ever. We knew each other, hung out with some of the same people, and saw each other around the art department. Had he also been in the metalsmithing class I took? I know that he made beautiful metal pieces as well; I remember some of them from the senior art show that took place later. Would I have called him a friend before this moment of giving? I'm not sure. I suppose I would have; there was no reason not to. I liked him, though not in any way that suggested I really knew or understood who he was. He was a bit of a mystery to me; still is. I remember him as quiet. He was an observer. And what was so startling was that, apparently, he had observed me rather well. His gesture of sympathy for my ordeal was intimate and perfect, despite (or because of) its being so unexpected. I am sure I thanked him for the plate, but I'm also sure that he has no idea how, all these years later, his gift still grounds me. It still reminds me that friends can be hidden in plain view, and that, like earth-bound angels, they can appear at exactly the right moment, then step away as quickly. We never did strike up an overt relationship of any sort, and once high school was over, life took us in different directions completely. We didn't know each other well enough to keep in touch. Still, I wonder what he's doing now and how he is; if he is still making beautiful art; and if he ever remembers a girl to whom he once served friendship, simply plated on a dish glazed in the colors of moonlit night.

Salad Days Drawing

2009-06-07T22:30:00.000-04:00

Today I spent part of the morning drawing a collaborative picture with my son. It brought back great memories of similar quiet time I used to spend as a child, drawing or filling in coloring books—either with my mom or on my own. I have tried to spend this kind of time with my son on a regular basis. Years ago, he used to ask me to draw all sorts of animals, and he especially loved it when I drew "owl eyes" (a cartoonish owl with huge eyes). Today, though, it was all about chivalry and battle; mostly battle. My son was very clear about wanting to draw a scene with a castle and knights . . . and a king . . . and, of course, a dragon. Which became two dragons, each with two heads and a lot of fire-breath. And, with an impish grin, my son decided to draw a separate room outside the castle (see upper right corner of image) where all the weapons would be kept. He knows I'm not into weapons, but you can't very well have knights without swords, can you? All this got me thinking back to the drawings I used to make. When I was young, I drew a lot of animals. Cats, dogs, horses, pigs, V-shapes in the sky meant to be birds in flight. And then I drew houses, flowers, pictures of girls in pretty dresses . . . And I remember very distinctly a phase when I drew picnics. I think I was around ten years old. I can still see the way the drawings looked; they didn't vary much. There were always two people (both women or both girls, or one woman and one girl) sitting on a red and white checked blanket that was spread out on a grassy field. I remember being very careful about drawing two brown plates on the blanket, and in each person's hand, a brown fork. Between them was a salad bowl. I don't know why it was always salad that they ate. I didn't draw cakes, didn't draw sandwiches or bowls of fruit. I drew green lettuce scribbles and red circles meant to be cherry tomatoes. At this age, I was not really a salad eater myself, though I loved raw vegetables. And I don't recall my mom eating salad in any excessive way that would beg notice. So, why salad, I don't know. Salad in my salad days. Of course my teenage years were different. I took to drawing skulls and crossbones and other macabre images. And now, here I am, teaching my son to draw dragons, watching him draw swords and other unidentified weapons alongside. At least, interspersed with these drawings, there are still his requests for rabbits and birds, goldfish and flowers. Yes, he draws those, too. For now.

Bug in the Eye

2009-06-06T20:00:00.041-04:00

It happened two times. Once in St. Louis, once in Chicago. I don't know if you've ever had a bug fly into your eye, but I can tell you: it hurts. Especially if any part of the bug sticks. The first time was in June of 1993, it must have been. I was with a friend from law school (the friend who, in a star-crossed misadventure, would become more than a friend that summer; I've posted about it before), and we were doing a monumental favor for another, mutual friend. Turns out that when I took that self defense class, this other friend took it with me. And while the stand-in attacker scared the hell out of me, my friend had it much worse: the attacker, who was a pretty large and heavy man, basically landed on her knee and did something to it that ultimately required surgery (and a lawsuit to cover medical bills). So while my friend flew home to Florida with her bum knee, I agreed to move her belongings out of the apartment she needed to vacate and into a storage facility. It was at the end of an afternoon of packing and hauling boxes, as I stepped off the loading dock for the self-storage, that the bug did its crazy kamikaze move. It happened so fast—faster than the blink of an eye, literally—and it stung like crazy. My friend drove us back to my apartment in his yellow-gold, oversized Caddy (or some similar car, old and not particularly reliable). At home, I rinsed my eye with water; he looked at it and wasn't sure if he saw anything there. After what seemed like at least an hour but was probably less (funny how time extends like a telescope when you're in pain), my eye was still watering, still hurt, and had turned pretty red. My friend and I debated, then we went to the E.R., maybe because it was a weekend and the doctor's office was closed. I felt weird about it, because this was hardly something that seemed like an emergency—not a shooting, stabbing, severed finger, burn, heart attack—yet I didn't know what else to do. A brief exam revealed that when the bug (a tiny gnat-like thing, apparently) hit my eye, its body broke apart. A wing was still stuck on the surface of my eyeball. Once removed, I felt fine. I remember, though, the follow-up appointment I had with an ophthalmologist. The doctor asked if I had trouble reading exit signs on the highway before coming right up on them. It wasn't a question I liked. I had always had 20/20 vision. But I was told I was slightly near-sighted and had astigmatism in one eye, and I was given a prescription for glasses I could use for nighttime driving if I wanted to. After this, the other buggy incident was about three years later, in Chicago. I was walking down Michigan Avenue, returning to my job at the Chicago Sun-Times after my lunch break, when—Bam!—same thing, bug in the eye. This one either hadn't stuck, or else got rinsed out with water, but my eye hurt just the same. I seem to recall another round of medical treatment, but honestly couldn't tell you whether I was in a doctor's office or the E.R. this time. Things during that period were a bit of a blur, with mostly just work on my mind, chasing down crazy deadlines. Could've been the E.R., or else I'm just superimposing the first incident on the second somehow. Anyway, it was the last time to date that this happened, for which I'm thankful. My biggest problem with winged creatures now is the same one we all have every year: how to keep the skeeters from biting.

Mothballs and Twix

2009-06-05T23:10:00.007-04:00

Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Ready or not, here I come! My friend's voice traveled down the hallway of her family's large, Los Angeles house. We were playing Hide and Seek: my friend, her older sister, and I. The girls went to my elementary school (we were in our last years), and they lived just down the canyon road from where I did. I remember being at their house fairly often, and also some kind of occasional car pool our moms had worked out. I remember that breakfast for them was often of the powdered sugar donut variety. Did I wish for the same, instead of my hard boiled egg and toast? Maybe, but not with conviction. Overall, I accepted (and now am very thankful for) my mother's firm belief in breakfast being the most important meal of the day and therefore her insistence that it be nutritious. I am now debating how to relate the next bit of info in a way that will not sound uncharitable. My intention is just to describe a fact, not a judgment, but, well, there aren't many delicate ways to say that my friends' mother had a significant weight problem. The girls were on the heavy side as well (as you might deduce from the donuts), but not yet what anyone could call fat. Not really. The father sticks in my mind as being the opposite: kind of wiry and full of nervous energy. On the afternoon in question, the afternoon of Hide and Seek, I'd gone into the master bedroom, then into a small walk-in closet to hide. I remember the space was boxy, square: I opened the door and faced a U-shaped configuration of clothes rods jammed with hangers, from which flowed colorful, voluminous fabrics. The racks were crowned with a single U-shaped shelf, and it was up on that shelf that I decided to hide. I don't know how I got up there, but I did it fairly quickly. Up on the shelf, it smelled faintly of mothballs. Not an overpowering smell, but it's an odor you simply can't miss, even if only in trace amounts. The other thing I discovered up there, besides the mothballs: a jumbo, "economy" package of Twix. The pack had been opened, and maybe two sets of Twix bars already consumed. At the time, I thought it was the weirdest thing in the world. Why would anyone—especially someone as generally "take me or leave me" in attitude as my friends' mother was—hide candy in the upper reaches of her closet? Of course now, although still disordered, I recognize the behavior as a natural part of the psychic landscape of the chronically overweight and unhappy. I imagined then that if she hid the candy there, maybe she also ate it there, too, chewing quickly and swallowing in silence, standing among the pleated, patterned garments or else crouching down among the shoes. (She certainly wouldn't be perched on the shelf as I was!) The thought made me feel strange, embarrassed that I'd discovered this secret; I felt almost ashamed, as if I were the one bingeing on chocolate-caramel-coated wafer cookies in the tiny room. And actually, I have to confess: I was. Ready or not, here I come . . . my friend's voice warned, I had only a moment to act. I told myself I was doing the woman a favor, saving her from herself. I scraped the thick layer of chocolate and caramel off the long shortbread cookie with my teeth. It was a hit of sugar, drug-like, and when the cookie was also eaten, I crumpled the empty, metallic-gold wrapper and jammed it into my pocket. I was ready to be found.

Photo Mugging

2009-06-04T23:30:00.028-04:00

As this first week of June winds down, so does the graduation season. Many commencement ceremonies have taken place already in the city, releasing hoards of job seekers and setting adrift the "what next?" crowd. It's an exciting time, a milestone—one you want to record for posterity. And it's pretty safe to say that when you record it, you want to do so without background interference. What follows is a significant confession. Consider it also an apology to countless high school graduates from the year of, I think, 1985. We don't know what came over us; we just couldn't help ourselves. I remember that it started as an accident. My mother and I were in New York City, at Lincoln Center. I don't think we'd seen any performances—perhaps we'd come from the library branch there that focuses on the performing arts—but anyway we were there around lunchtime. The weather was lovely, perfect for sitting in the seasonal cafe that in those days was always set up in the plaza. This dining area was sectioned off from the rest of the outdoor space by a rectangular configuration of large planters giving root to boxy, shrub-like plants. At the time we were seated, just next to the greenery, the plaza was empty. Soon, however, scores of youth in blue caps and gowns (and white tassels, if memory serves me well) flooded the open space around us with their families. They had just received their diplomas, probably walking across the stage at Avery Fisher Hall. We heard the noise of celebration, and of course we were curious to find out what was going on. In order to see, we either had to stand up, which we weren't going to do, or else peek through the plants, which was easier and of course much more discreet. How were we to know that a family photographer would be releasing the shutter of his camera (I remember it was a man), right at that exact moment? We were a bit to the side of the assembled group, but not by much. Clearly we'd gotten in the picture. We pulled back from the plants, horrified for a millisecond before the hilarity set in—and not before seeing a look of puzzlement on the photographer's face. He'd seen something . . . but didn't seem to be sure what it was. Often I think people just don't see the unexpected for what it is. Why should he suspect, as he was readying the camera, that a couple of white faces would peek out from the bushes? I say "white faces." Not that I would usually make an issue of race, but in the interest of cultural irony, this might be the time to mention that the graduating class could easily have been from Harlem or some other neighborhood that, at that particular time in the city's history, was almost exclusively black. The reversal of some horrible, racist kind of stereotype came to mind: while perhaps at some time, some white people imagined blacks as savages living in the jungles of Africa (god knows, there are probably some ridiculous drawings of black faces peering out of the bushes somewhere), here we were, two pale-faced fools in the background of an otherwise civilized tableau of educated black people. And did it end there? Of course not. As I said before, I don't know what came over us, but we saw extreme humor in the situation, and so we went on a spree of what we later came to refer to as "photo mugging." The space in front of the planters, on the other side from our table, seemed to attract a lot of groups looking for a scenic shot, so we had plenty of victims. We'd wait until someone counted "One . . . Two . . ." and on three we'd part the leaves and peek out, then vanish again. It's incredible that no one noticed, or if they did they didn't say a word. From the cafe side, we realized at some point that our bad behavior was very much on display, and eventually we called off the photo mugging for the afternoon. We'd start laughing uncontrollably, however, each time we thought of the days or years to come—the surprise of seeing our faces in the photos (remember, this is before digital cameras, so the contents of the photos were unknown until the process of film development and printing was complete), and then the class reunions. We imagined friends talking later: would they compare notes and shake their heads, amazed to see us in several sets of photos? It's a story we have told each other many times over the years, wondering at our own nerve. Are we ashamed of ourselves? Maybe a little. Feeling remorse? I admit, not a lot. It remains one of our greatest, craziest collaborations. Of course we'd never do anything like that now. In a digital world of instant editing and PhotoShop capabilities, we'd never stand a chance. Class of 2009, consider yourselves lucky.

6.3.66

2009-06-03T23:30:00.000-04:00

Forty-three years ago, in the Greek Orthodox Church of Sts. Constantine and Helen, in Detroit, Michigan, my parents were married in a traditional wedding ceremony. Of course I don't remember this event; I was born three years, three months, and three weeks later. But a fascination set in long ago, and I remember looking at albums, at the square-format photos with thick cardboard backing, photos now bleached out with light exposure and age . . . Without the photo in front of me (I swear it), I can remember the exact orange-pink shade of the roses my mother carried, the cream color and elegant tailored cut of her sleeveless dress. I see her in profile: slim body, head angled down, youthful skin with full, flawless cheeks, the merest hint of a smile like a pale Mona Lisa. I see my father, brown suit (or was this just the discoloration of the print?) draped on a "tall, dark, and handsome" man. Not a trace of silver in his hair yet. He, too, looks fairly serious, but completely content. In the non-memory of their wedding ceremony, my mind replays their walk around the altar: the Greek's Dance of Isaiah, three times around, crowns of stephanotis exchanged on their heads. In the Greek tradition, the couple is both formally engaged and also married in the same ceremony. I remember that when the time came for my own wedding, a pearly branch of the stephanotis was placed in my hair. Since my parents' union, there have been forty-three anniversaries now. I don't recall many of them at all. I do remember the ruby anniversary, though: the fortieth. Three generations went together to Block Island to celebrate: my parents, my husband and I, plus our son. I remember thinking that maybe this was an oddity: wouldn't most couples prefer to be alone on such a special day? But then again, I thought it could be fitting. What better testament to a lasting romance? Lives born from their partnership, a proliferation of vows. With my husband and I pulling out of the fabled seven-year slump (or itch, or whatever you wish to call it), it is hard to imagine the power of forty years, which is the entire length of my life. Maybe we, too, will reach this milestone. Whether we do or not, I thank my parents for the love and commitment they gave to each other, as I have directly benefited; they have shown me what is possible in a relationship, in a marriage between two individuals. I wish I had the impossible (for me) memories of their wedding day—a day of beauty and beginnings, of poignancy and power and fragrant rose petals—but I will happily content myself with faded photographs and a greeting to them: Happy anniversary. May there be many more.

First Tuesdays/PRSA

2009-06-02T21:00:00.018-04:00

I remember a single afternoon, sixteen years ago in St. Louis, when I met two dynamic women who changed my professional life for the best. One I never had another contact with and can't remember her name, but still she influences me; the other became my first mentor in public relations and is still a friend today. I was attending a one-day conference with a job fair component, sponsored by the St. Louis chapter of PRSA, the Public Relations Society of America. I had left law school and was not exactly sure what to do next, only knew that I had to do something. My mom is the one who steered me toward public relations work, giving me some of the best career advice I ever received. She worked in PR before I arrived in her life, and she could say from experience that the skills I'd learn in a PR position would be among the most valuable and most transferable—though perhaps I'd want to stay in the industry. She was absolutely right. Although I did eventually leave the world of professional PR, still I use the lessons and tools in almost everything I do. She also advised me to focus on the agency side, and not the in-house, client side; that, too, was right on the money for my personality. The pace was faster, the daily work more diverse when you had multiple clients in different industries. So I remember going to this conference and to my first job fair. I remember the laborious effort to whip up a resume, worrying about how thin it was (those days are happily a thing of the past). I remember the conference meeting room, in some hotel, with its metal-framed chairs upholstered with a benign gold-on-red patterned material. And a panel of speakers, one of whom was this woman whose name I can't recall. She was a freelancer—a writer, I believe—who must have worked on PR projects, maybe wrote press releases, otherwise I'm not sure she'd have been at a PRSA event. What I remember about her was that she was quite young, very determined, had a great energy and independence, and she'd made it all work to her advantage. She talked about the freelance life, the constant search for the next gig, and it seemed daunting to me then (still does now, sometimes), being as I was, a person with little experience and no contacts to speak of. It was not the right time for me to work on my own, but her ability to do it planted a seed. The thing I've carried with me over nearly twenty years, though: her "First Tuesdays" program. She described how on the first Tuesday of each month, she would dedicate her time and attention to one thing and one thing only: phone calls to contacts. She explained how on Mondays, after a weekend, there was too much scrambling to get back into the groove of the workweek, too many things to assess and organize for the week, and she didn't want to bother anyone on Mondays. Later in the week was just that, later. So she picked Tuesdays, and stuck to it. It was a simple thing, but the idea of setting aside a specific day each month for this activity, and not just doing it here and there (though I'm sure she made continuing calls at other times), was an eye-opener to me. The ways you could approach people and that there was a work rhythm to everyone's week that could be taken into consideration . . . First Tuesdays felt like a great prop, and I have often remembered and used it, whether job-hunting or just doing a bit of relationship maintenance, staying in touch. Today, being the first Tuesday of June, I'm back at it. Although email and social media networks like Facebook have pretty much replaced the telephone for me, I have made some great connections today. I wish I could reach out to that nameless memory of a woman from St. Louis to thank her for sharing her energy and strategies at a time when I needed every bit of advice I could get. Instead, I sent a message to my former boss and friend, the other woman I met on that conference day, to thank her for giving me that first break I needed to create a new path for myself. First Tuesdays, as much as they may serve to prowl for job leads, can also be about reconnecting. And gratitude.

Flying Elvi

2009-06-01T20:00:00.000-04:00

Although St. Louis was not a particularly good fit for me—I needed to be where the streets downtown weren't deserted after 5:00 PM, where there were throngs of people who moved quickly and jaywalked against the light, where nobody asked where I'd gone to high school as if it made a difference once you were out of college—still, as I've said in earlier posts, I had the good fortune to meet and work with some fabulous people while I was there. People with great energy and creativity, supervisors who mentored me with kindness and generosity. And, craving the weird, it's not as if some oddball things didn't happen there, too. Let me ask: when was the last time you saw a group of skydiving Elvis impersonators, complete with Vegas-style jumpsuits (jeweled, wide-collared, bell-bottomed) and black pompadour wigs, parachute into a canyon of glass-walled, high-rise commercial buildings? Sixteen years ago this week, the marketing agency where I worked was a hive of activity, preparing for the June 9 grand opening of the Regal Riverfront Hotel. As part of the opening fanfare, our events-marketing guy (who also looked a bit "King"-like and had, or wanted us to think he had, a whole lotta shakin' goin' on) booked the Flying Elvi to jump from about 8,500 feet and land on a small semicircular patch of grass in front of the hotel's main entrance. Later in the evening, we'd all listen to "Golden" Joe Baker, a non-flying Elvis impersonator, who at the time was regularly performing at the Sands Hotel in Vegas. But the highlight was definitely the jump. I don't know what was involved in getting permits from city hall, or what had to be done to cut through any of the rest of the extensive red tape to make this event happen. Our event "King" (initial S.) handled all of that; I was there to provide PR support. But I do remember that even up to the last several minutes, we were unsure about whether the jump would actually take place. There was a wind kicking up during the afternoon, and S. was in constant communication with whoever it was who, measuring wind speed and safety conditions, would make the final call. The Elvi got the green light. If you want to get an idea of what the Elvi are like, watch the 1992 comedy Honeymoon in Vegas (this is not an endorsement of the film; you can also just watch the movie trailer here), and look for the "Flying Elvises" at the end. Anyway, their jump into downtown St. Louis was pretty amazing. Two moments stick out: the first was when one of the Elvi was blown dangerously close to the building across the street from the hotel—not a few of us worried about his getting slammed into the plate glass windows, though he did manage to avoid this fate—and the other, more humorous moment involved an Elvi or two (there were ten in the group, though I'm pretty sure not all ten were at the Regal opening) landing in the small basin of the hotel's fountain rather than on the grass. As our official obligations wound down, some of our group hung out with the Elvi. I remember them as a band of paunchy men with, collectively, a great sense of humor and an obvious talent for kitsch and self-promotion. Guys with average to boring day jobs and a love of risky skydiving. Somewhere, unless lost permanently, I have photos of them, taken before they sped off in a white stretch limo, wigs finally abandoned until their next gig. So I have to say that while I always thought of St. Louis as a bit boring, it's certainly true that, at least among a certain segment of the population, there's a healthy appreciation there of the "theater of the absurd" that life can be . . . that is, with FAA clearance.

Road Trip: Saint Louis–New Mexico

2009-05-31T21:00:00.056-04:00

In the summer of 1993, my ties to St. Louis were growing thin, though they were also at their strongest then, too. I had left law school during the spring semester, had trained as a volunteer with the Sexual Assault Response Team, and had also landed a public relations internship in a boutique-style marketing firm. I was fortunate to work for and with incredibly generous people, and together we did amazing things in the city. During the day, I learned how to write press releases and good industry newsletters; I helped plan special events to boost awareness for local businesses, and to raise money for charity. (The year I was there, I got my first taste of NASCAR culture, when the racing association teamed up with Northwest Plaza for a flood relief fundraiser.) At night, I stayed on call at home in the event I was needed in one of the area emergency rooms to comfort survivors of assault. It was a busy, intense time. My former law school colleagues were, many of them, away for the summer. But some stayed in town. Among them, my friend-who-mistakenly-became-more-than-a-friend. He was working for a professor, helping with a research project in international law. At some point, despite being basically happy with our work situations, we both started burning out—also we were circling each other uneasily within the deteriorating psychic space of our relationship. Was this the time to take a road trip together? I'm not sure, but we did. I don't remember the details exactly, but for some reason I ended up with an unexpected three-day weekend, and in that moment I was gripped by an overwhelming desire to get out of town. My friend decided he needed to do the same, made whatever arrangements he needed to make, and we planned our spontaneous getaway. I believe it is a bit more than 1,000 miles between St. Louis and Albuquerque. A good sixteen hours or so, assuming a legal highway speed, which we may or may not have respected. We started driving on Friday afternoon after work; rather, I drove. We decided we'd barrel straight through, and we did. We drove all night. Drove across Missouri, down to Oklahoma and across that long, lonely, flat state, across the top handle of Texas, and finally, mid-morning of the next day, we rolled into the center of New Mexico. It would be inaccurate to say that the trip didn't break us further; it did. But we were also buzzed on adventure, mainlining the open road beneath the tires, and we stopped often for fuel, coffee, and so I could splash water on my face. We listened to music: the radio sometimes, but also mixed tapes. We were still making mixed tapes then—it seems so archaic now. We ended, exhausted, in Albuquerque. From there, for the next two days, we'd drive south through the desert, traversing reservation land near the Rio Grande; we'd head north on the Turquoise Trail to Santa Fe, drink frozen margaritas in perfect leisure on a restaurant terrace, and return to our no-frills motel under a sunset sky of electric O'Keefe colors. We talked a lot, navigated a tense physicality, and gave ourselves (and each other) the most we could muster in thirty-six hours. The drive back to St. Louis was longer, boring, the elastic of our daily lives snapping us back to routines that were starting to wear on us. We didn't talk much about what we'd seen, preferred to remember the beauty in silence. It had been that, anyway: a landscape of beauty we'd wandered for a short while; the last beautiful thing we'd share as a fading, almost-couple.

St. Louis

2009-05-30T23:00:00.006-04:00

I remember quite a few things about St. Louis, but the quirk that after a while came to represent the city to me, like shorthand, is this: in St. Louis, no matter how old you are, no matter your professional standing or the other details of your life, your resume, or your CV, when you meet a new person there is a single question you are almost certain to be asked (really, without fail if I recall), and that is, "Where did you go to high school?" Your answer matters. Pretty much says it all.

Buying Bulk

2009-05-29T22:00:00.001-04:00

One thing you do not do when you live in New York City is buy bulk; well, some people might, but generally not those of us who are renting cramped apartments. I have lived in big cities almost all my life, and mostly in small spaces. This suits me fine. Yes, occasionally I would really like to have more room to eat, sleep, breathe in. There are problems with clothes not fitting in the closets and where to store things like in-line skates. Only recently have my husband and I managed to upgrade to a place that has, while not really a dining room, at least something resembling an alcove that's reserved for meals; it's more than just a table in the corner of the living room. Living and eating are, in terms of spatial relation, finally separate in our home (psychically they still often seem the same, though). This is luxury. Anyway, the point is that there's just no room to store extras, and even the one box of . . . let's say cereal . . . had better be the small and not the "economy" size, because otherwise it doesn't fit in the cupboard, and there's not enough counter space to leave it sitting out. You get the picture. While I was growing up, it was often the same situation, and even when it wasn't—that is, when we had enough space to store extras, backups, spares—still my parents never bought bulk. I guess it's also typical of families with only one child. So I was clueless about such places as Costco or Sam's Club, until I moved to St. Louis. I remember that a friend—male; someone who should have stayed just a friend, but who ended up a botched boyfriend for a while (one of those mistakes you know you're making but that you are powerless to stop)—this friend found out that there was a Sam's Club not far away, and he convinced me to become a member with him. There were rules about who could join. I don't know if it was that we were supposed to be a household, or we were allowed to join because of his student status (I had left law school by then, but he was still enrolled), or what the deal was. We had to be judicious in how we filled out the forms, though, that I recall. However we joined, we joined. I remember signing at the membership or customer service desk, remember getting our Sam's Club cards. We were proud of ourselves. We thought we'd scored big, because we could save a lot of money when we shopped, which is of course a prime concern for anyone on a grad-school or a paid-in-experience intern's budget. But there was one problem: there were a lot of items we couldn't buy. Nothing perishable, that was for sure, though I marveled at the huge containers and packages of everything from chicken to Cool Whip. We simply couldn't go through any of this fast enough, not even when we split the take (don't remember why freezing wouldn't work, but it wouldn't). So we stuck to things like paper towels, toilet paper, and the other item I remember: giant boxes of Corn Flakes. Never before, never since have I eaten so many Corn Flakes, bowl after bowl after bowl. The box contents never seemed to be depleted, and I think that was the last straw for me. I saw myself projected into the future, living with the same person (we may as well have been living together, we were always at his place or mine), having the same conversations and the same arguments, eating from the same box of cereal and eventually—because at some point the box was going to be empty, right?—heading back to Sam's Club to shop for more. I saw a nice, Midwestern, domestic routine of bulk groceries, space to store them, plus the children most likely necessary to make the jumbo packaging worth it, and I just knew . . . I'd never be happy like that. No, guess I'm just a small-batch kind of gal.

New York Taxi Moment

2009-05-28T20:30:00.034-04:00

This week, friends are coming in from out of town. They, too, live in urban environments, so instances of city rudeness are not unknown to them, especially on the road, I imagine. (How many times a day does someone in Southern California get exposed to a dose of road rage?). But when it comes to rude, New Yorkers—especially the cab drivers—have earned a reputation over the years, not wholly undeserved. Actually, I think that people in the city (including the cabbies) have trended much more toward nice in the past decade, though maybe "nice" is just a relative term. Certainly there was a post-9/11 shift. Of course I hope that my friends have only the best experiences in public transportation during the next few days, but in case of any rudeness, I thought I'd share a story to convey that it happens to all of us sooner or later, even the locals—so it's not necessary to ask whether you, when you visit New York City as a tourist, are a target; odds are, it's nothing to do with you whatsoever. As for me, I have only ever written down a cab's medallion number once, and, unfortunately, it wasn't the time I lost a wallet on my way home one evening. No, I wrote down the number of the most obnoxious cab driver I've ever had the displeasure of having—plus the locations and time of day of pickup and drop-off. I was on the West Side, on or near 57th Street and Ninth Avenue, close to my apartment at the time. This was a couple of years ago at most. I don't remember exactly where I was heading, but it was way across town; I think my journey had something to do with appointments for kindergarten admissions for my son. (If you don't know about the hellish circus that is the NYC kindergarten admissions season, I'm sure it'll turn up in some other post, but trust me: this time of your life is really not the time you want to cope with surly, insulting, incompetent cab drivers!) Things started out all right. We zipped across Central Park to the East Side, then we started hitting the red lights and traffic congestion. I had started my trip slightly on the wrong side of running late, and I remember being concerned about the time. If you're not familiar with the New York grid, the blocks that take you East-West are double or triple the length of the ones running North-South. Crosstown blocks are not really where you want to get stuck. So we're moving at what is now a snail's pace, and then there's a break in the traffic; we can advance. The driver speeds up for several car-lengths, then skids to a halt. He rolls down the front passenger side window and starts talking to a young woman and a man who are standing on the sidewalk in front of a brownstone building, two huge rolling suitcases between them. It takes me a second to realize that he is prowling for his next fare. Is it me, or does it seem completely inappropriate to you, too, that we've stopped in the middle of the street, the meter still running on my ride, so that the driver can negotiate a trip to JFK or LaGuardia or Newark? At this point, we weren't all that far from where I needed to be, but, given the time, it was too far—too many long blocks—for me to get out and walk the rest of the way. So the driver keeps up his wheeling and dealing. Had there been anyone driving behind us, the situation would have taken care of itself: horns would start blaring, and we'd be moving along. But isn't that the way? When you don't want gridlock, you've got it bad. When you could actually profit from some impatient horn-blowing behind you, there's no one to be found. I had to goad the driver on myself. All right . . . I mention to him that the meter's running, and could he continue on, because I'm about to be late for an appointment. I'm sure there was more than a hint of irritation in my voice. If it had just ended there, I wouldn't have thought more about it. Unfortunately, the driver then proceeded to trump me in rudeness beyond belief. Because I dared speak up, he gives me this hostile look in the rearview mirror, then keeps talking to the people on the sidewalk. I tell him he's got to move on, at which point he starts swearing at me. F---ing b----, what the f---, and so on. But he does accelerate. Does he ever. He's now mad at me for queering his next (more lucrative) deal, and I start to wonder if his solution is to do everything possible to put me in harm's way, hoping I'll break something in an accident. I wouldn't put that kind of twisted logic past him; he was also continuing his stream of cursing. But we do arrive at my destination, at which point he indicates the full fare to pay. I had my wallet out already—I had used my pen and the back of a business card to write down the cab's identifying numbers—and I pulled out the fare minus a dollar. I knew he'd really start shouting at me then, but I didn't care. I told him that was all I had, that the last dollar could be paid by the people on the sidewalk if they were still there when he circled back around, and that was that. I jumped out of the cab, for the first time refusing to give even a penny's tip. He gave me more of his tongue lashing, but screeched off, leaving me in his dirty exhaust. I looked at my watch: right on time, and actually I was feeling not bad at all. In the end, I threw away the information I'd written down. After all, what was I going to do, call up and complain that some city cab driver had been rude? I'll leave that to others (some tourists maybe), although, as I've said already, I certainly hope that my visiting friends have no reason to complain this week. "Welcome to New York, and may all your cab rides be safe and pleasant! Have a nice day."

Self Defense

2009-05-27T20:00:00.045-04:00

The lights in the studio were cut. I stood in one darkened corner, then walked diagonally across the padded floor toward a man who approached me from the other end of the room. No one else was there. Every nerve in my body tingled with the anticipation of attack. He started a patter of trash talk that began with "Hey, baby, where you goin'?" and ended in four-letter obscenities. His wiry body advanced quickly, and I called up the tactics of self defense I'd been practicing for weeks. Let's call this a final exam. Let's say I flunked it miserably, right from the words "called up." It is an illusion, the idea that in a moment like this there is time to remind yourself of anything; your moves must be without thought, swift and accurate. The man approaching was the teacher of a scrappy "street style" self defense class offered in St. Louis in the spring of 1993. Since I'd been working for S.A.R.T., the Sexual Assault Response Team run out of the YWCA (see yesterday's post), I got to thinking naturally enough about my own ability for self defense. I don't know where I got the info for the class I signed up for, but for weeks I'd been practicing defense tactics. Some of them I still remember to this day, like the side-to-side rolling to destabilize someone who's knocked you to the ground and is sitting on top of you. Even better, you perform the three-pronged move (still standing, with someone behind you) of elbow-to-gut, fist-to-crotch, and then, when the attacker is doubling over in pain, elbow brought back up to crack the assailant under the chin. Then you run like hell. After a certain number of classes, we students felt we'd made good progress, felt ready to be tested, and therein lies the lesson: you're never ready. Never. The evening of the test, we waited in the outer reception area, where we could not see into the studio. One by one we were called in. I remember hearing the women who went before me; I could hear them struggling, fighting, screaming. It was definitely unsettling—it sounded pretty real—but it also felt informative somehow, though I'm not really sure what that means in this circumstance. I guess I told myself that having heard them, I had some idea of what to expect. I expected the approach, the trash-talk confrontation. I did not expect to be facing my teacher, certain he was the only other person in the room, and then be grabbed roughly from behind. Where had this second attacker come from? None of us had any idea of a door near the corner where we'd all been asked to start our walk across the studio. It was a dirty trick, but effective; it was as close to a real attack as could be managed in a controlled setting. And, as I said, my weeks of training were basically useless. I was disoriented and overtaken immediately. I can replay the scene like it was yesterday, except that, oddly, I also can't; it's devoid of detail—and that is not a function of passing years. Many whodunits exploit the unreliability of a witness's report; even, or especially, when the witness is the victim. It's just a different matter altogether to realize that you are the unreliable one, that if you had to describe the man in the shadows, you were likely to make mistakes. We all tried, and largely failed, to name the physical traits of this rigged perpetrator, before he came out to introduce himself to us. Even that evening, sitting in the vestibule with the incident fresh in my mind, the only things I remembered with clarity were the walk across the studio floor, the shock of a person behind me, and then my instructor's hand over my mouth when it was over, telling me not to say a word to anyone else.

S.A.R.T.

2009-05-26T21:00:00.050-04:00

It's late at night, and you're alone in your apartment, tired but on high alert, unable to sleep. In the dark, you pray. Despite the fact that at this time in your life you would never describe yourself as a "religious" person, it is definitely a true prayer, not the bargaining offer of an exchange (I'll reform, if only . . . ); you are not the one in need. You are the one whose job it is to help those in crisis, and although you signed up for this gig, you wish desperately that your job didn't exist, wasn't needed—not tonight, not anytime. Not while you are the volunteer on call, committed to driving at whatever hour of the night to whatever hospital emergency room phones in a case of sexual assault. Given that a possible career in criminal law was what brought me to St. Louis, it's easy to see how I found my way to S.A.R.T., the city's Sexual Assault Response Team. The program was (still is) based out of the Metro St. Louis Y.W.C.A. For volunteers, the program involves intensive training, education, role playing, and support meetings. For survivors of sexual assault, it offers a non-judgmental presence in a moment of need, plus access to individual and group counseling, case management, and coordination of services to help with coping and recovery. In 1993, I served as a volunteer crisis counselor for several months before I left St. Louis, and I have to say it was a harrowing experience—one I admit I was as relieved to end as I was committed to beginning. I remember, on those nights when I had the "graveyard" shift (we never called it that, of course), how lonely and terrifying the world outside my windows seemed. Under night's opaque cover, someone was screaming or not screaming; someone was scratching, clawing, spitting, struggling, or choosing the path of least resistance in order to survive. Daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, young or old, all races; nor was it unheard of to receive a call about a male (man or boy) in the E.R., though it was not common. For S.A.R.T. to receive a call, the case had to be reported, and the fact was that for every call we received, there were untold numbers who suffered without help or treatment, who endured a private hell and refused a chance to put the wheels of justice in motion. The assumption of stigma in cases of rape is well known, the fear that the "victim" would be blamed—often a real problem, still, despite some solid public education efforts made by those in law, medicine, social services, the arts—fear that the legal system would fail those it's meant to protect . . . We never called them "victims," that was another thing I remember. They were always "survivors," which was a more empowering designation, one that put emphasis on the fact that whatever the person did or didn't do to get through that moment of deepest violation, it was the "right" thing to do, since they were still with us, alive. Broken perhaps, but not lost. Three in the morning. Staring at the telephone and willing it to stay silent. Sometimes it did, and all I endured was a night without much sleep, if any. Other times, the three o'clock call would rip through the apartment—who knew that the sound of a telephone could be so loud, so jarring, like an assault in its own right? On those nights, I'd splash water on my face, clip on a hospital I.D., drive wherever I was needed. Sometimes it was the well-off hospital with superior resources and a luxe interior, other times it was the under-funded, stressed and strapped regional hospital servicing the city's underprivileged population. I drove into good neighborhoods and blighted ones, car doors locked and my nighttime street-smarts at their peak. I checked in with the E.R.'s triage nurse, who briefed me on what was going on. After cardiac arrests and shootings or other lethal emergencies, a rape survivor has priority in the E.R., but nevertheless that can sometimes mean a long wait (mercifully in a small, private room, the "rape room"), during which you are often the only chance at comfort that a survivor has. In all the times I was sent out, I never saw a family member or friend present, although I know this must have happened, too. I remember faces and bodies, equally shattered, equally small in the shapeless, thin hospital gowns. I remember phone calls made, receivers slammed down on the other end of the line. I remember women wanting a shoulder to cry on; others wanting nothing, not any form of comfort or conversation at all. I remember doctors, police, and evidence collecting. I remember women who had no way to get home, once they were dressed in the spare clothes that S.A.R.T. kept in a closet on site. I was not allowed to give rides, and I never did. I don't remember any rule about taxis. If there was one, I confess I ignored it: more than once I paid out of my pocket for someone to get back home. And I would go back home myself, following the same deserted streets, trying to resist the urge to follow in my imagination the survivor I'd just seen; trying to disengage, because sooner or later you had to. You had to go back to your own unbroken life, your own safe haven, and try to feel good not guilty. You had to try to get some sleep. And you had to pray, again, that the next time you were on call, the phone would stay silent and you could tell yourself that it meant a quiet night in a world of violent crimes.

NOTE: If you are, or know someone who is, a survivor of sexual assault, there are people who can and will help. Nationally, you can contact RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network), which Worth magazine calls one of "America's 100 Best Charities". They sponsor the NATIONAL SEXUAL ASSAULT HOTLINE, which is a 24/7, free, confidential service, both online at www.rainn.org and at 1-800-656-HOPE. Their site offers resources and education for survivors, their families and friends. In St. Louis, S.A.R.T. also offers a 24/7 support hotline and basic information on their Web site, here.

Drawn to Law

2009-05-25T23:00:00.005-04:00

What was it, apart from a secondary satisfaction to ride out the 1992 recession in the shelter of graduate school (not that incurring additional expense made sense), that had me moving through the Gateway to the West, settling in St. Louis, Missouri, for a doomed attempt at law school? Was it because I'd been told numerous times in my life that I'd make a good lawyer? (And why was that? For a logical mind or an eye for detail? Because I was good at arguing?) I remember that during orientation at Washington University (a.k.a. Wash U), I quickly came to dislike the getting-to-know-you chitchat at social events, because I'd be asked first where I went to college and then what my major had been. Coming from a small liberal arts college with no official pre-law program (we got taught how to think across subjects), I got used to the incredulous looks I received when I said I'd majored in French Language. It was obvious, too, from my urban, "updated Annie Hall" style of dress and my eschewing of foundation makeup and neatly coiffed hair, that I wasn't exactly a cultural match for my new setting. But despite the skepticism of those around me (including friends who knew me as more of a hell-raiser than anyone prone to law enforcement) I felt I was there for a reason, and at the time, that reason was to pursue a J.D. degree with an eye toward a lock-'em-up position in a district attorney's office. I remember two main influences that put me on this path, though I probably had other reasons, now lost to me. First, I was friends with more than one teenage girl who had been the victim of a violent crime for which there never seemed to be a remedy (legal or psychological). Second, I'd had a fabulous criminal law instructor during the summer before my senior year in college, who provided the encouragement (and recommendations) I needed to launch my applications. What I remember about my girlfriends is how fragile and guarded they were as a result of what had happened to them. What I remember about my criminal law class is that I wrote my final paper on the logical inconsistencies and ironies of the statutory rape and martial-rape-exception laws. My instructor thought the paper was as good as some published law review articles (an indication of my actual future career as a writer, I suppose), and he always reassured me if I had doubts about my aptitude for legal work. I remember him saying that if a "thick-headed cop like me can get through law school, then you certainly can with flying colors." He'd been a police officer in New York City before going to law school and eventually joining the EPA. I applied to a lot of law schools, almost all ivy league, and got into one (wait listed at another). As congratulations, my mother gave me a ring she'd had for decades. In fact, I'd been with my father when it was purchased in a small jewelry store in Chicago in the 1970s, and I'd always loved it. The ring is gold with an openwork design, its single emblem a set of hanging scales. The ring was bought for my mother because of her birth date, which makes her a Libra. She gave it to me for my pursuit of justice. (I also happen to be a Libra, so I can still claim the symbol, even though its legal significance is no longer relevant to my life.) In the end, it wasn't meant to be. I knew it fairly early on, in part because my body sent me signs of discord: I ended up taking a medical leave during my second semester. Sometimes the body loosens by its own force the grip your mind has on a self-appointed task or role. I remember feeling guilty for "quitting," but now of course I see the domino effect of my life stemming from the decision to leave law school for something that was as yet undefined—and it's all for the best.

Commencement 1992

2009-05-24T22:40:00.016-04:00

Seventeen years ago, the mortarboard cap and gown put away and the parties over, I closed the door on my undergraduate years, boxed up my affairs in the Hudson Valley (things and relationships), and prepared to move on. On this day in 1992 (a Sunday then, as now), the New York Times reported on weekend commencement ceremonies that had taken place the day before. My college was cited among them. "Bard College held its 132d commencement yesterday on the main campus lawn in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. William Julius Wilson delivered the commencement address to the school's largest graduating class [. . . ]. Dr. Wilson, a sociologist and a professor of race relations and public policy at the University of Chicago, received an honorary doctorate of humane letters." It was not an uplifting ceremony; I was wilting throughout. First, it was hot—or anyway I was hot, sitting under the white tent, shoulder to shoulder with the two hundred plus seniors, doing my best to stay hydrated with Snapple Raspberry Iced Tea. Granted, my impressions were filtered through a wicked hangover from all-night partying the night before, but still. In 1992, the country was in a recession crisis. (Plus ça change . . .) Nothing compared to the economic ills that have battered our country over this past year, but it seemed threatening enough. People feared for their jobs, if they had them. The presidential race of that year reflected the public angst, generating catch phrases such as "It's the economy, stupid!" and, later in the year, independent candidate Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" of jobs falling away—his comment in reference to the perceived threat of NAFTA, but appropriate for general sentiment about the economy, too: it sucked all right. In that commencement moment, though, with family and friends in attendance, all I really wanted to do was to feel a sense of accomplishment, not fear or worry. I didn't really want to hear how we were being released into a job market that was a disabled mess. Dr. Wilson's speech didn't spare us a thing; it was was a serious harsh on the mellow of the graduating class, at least to my mind. I have to say, though, that I had a great psychic cushion: my immediate future did not involve resumes and job interviews. I was heading to graduate school, riding out the economic turbulence in continued academia; at least, that was the plan. I remember being glad that my familiar lifeline—student status—was not yet severed. Today, I think about all the seniors who have graduated this weekend across the country. I want to say to them that I understand what they may be feeling: that mix of self-congratulation and anxiety; the feeling that this moment in history trumps whatever honors may have been bestowed, and that the prize they are reaching for (if it is a plum job anyway) may elude them for some time more. I hope things turn around soon. I hope this year's graduates keep an optimistic eye on their future, see the opportunity for something better to come out of the recent period of collapse and disillusionment. While life may not be all Pomp and Circumstance . . . I hope that for most, it's still celebration and forward motion.

Grape Milkshake

2009-05-23T22:30:00.029-04:00

It seemed like a good idea when I first thought of it. Of course, when you're six or seven (or even much older), lots of things seem like good ideas that aren't, including conning a babysitter into letting you wobble around the neighborhood wearing your mother's high-heeled boots, many sizes too big and in any case off limits; or else sticking a tiny seashell up your nose, far enough so that a couple weeks later—because you'd done this on the sly and were afraid to say anything when it got stuck—the shell had to get vacuumed out at the pediatrician's office. You know, stuff like that. (What? You mean to tell me you never put a shell up your nose when you were little?) Anyway, this was no big thing, didn't have any serious consequences. No getting in trouble, no trip to the doctor. Still, it marked me for its foulness, and I've never forgotten. To give some background: I don't know whose idea it was, mine or my mom's, but together we started a mini tradition of kitchen experimentation when we were living at 345 Fullerton, in Chicago, so I was probably in first grade at this time. I'm guessing on timing, but that's close if not accurate. We picked a day of the week—I think maybe it was Wednesday?—and after school on that day, we'd make up special drinks. I believe I had free rein, could choose any ingredients and my mom would help me mix them up. I was really into it. You'd think with a mad-science style of interest in culinary chemistry, I'd end up a bartender or something—excuse me, a "mixologist." Lucky for barflies everywhere, this would not turn out to be the case. I thought it made perfect sense: I loved milkshakes. I loved grapes, grape juice, grape-flavored anything. They had to be a winning combination. Bless my mom, she never judged my choices. Who knows, there may well be a way to make a good grape milkshake. (And of course, having just written that sentence, I had to do a search online to quench my curiosity. There are quite a lot of grape milkshake recipes out there, actually.) But our effort was not good enough, the gap between expectation and reality so huge, there was no way to scale the divide. The "milkshake" was one of the worst things I ever tasted—and I have to say I was disappointed with myself, since it had been my idea. I put the word "milkshake" in quotation marks because, now that I think of it, I'm not sure we made it according to a normal milkshake formula. I'm not even sure there was any ice cream in it, so it may just have been grape-milk. For sure there was purple grape juice mixed with milk, and that alone was enough to turn our stomachs. It was at once a first and a last, for both of us. I don't remember any of the other concoctions we made on "drink day." Our weekly project may only have lasted a very short while (and if so, I suppose it was with good reason). But I have always kept the adventure, repulsion, and humor of the grape milkshake filed away in memory. Now, I have a weekly cooking date with my six-year-old son. We're a lot more ambitious than drinks, but I hope to create similar memories for him. I hope that when he's older, he'll remember us together in the kitchen and remember that I let him make choices. We're only two weeks in. He hasn't gotten crazy yet, but he might. I've explained the grape milkshake to him, so I'm sure he won't try that, but I assume there'll be something else along the way; it's only a matter of time. There'll be something I know will be disgusting and a waste of ingredients, and yet . . . I hope that when that happens, I will have the same spirit of indulging creativity that my mom had. I hope that I will let him learn from his mistakes and reinforce the message that without trying, you just don't know. And really, who does know? He could come up with the next great invention. He could end up a mix master of ingredients one day. I just hope that between now and whenever, I don't have to swallow too many milkshake-like mistakes!