Cracking Up

Good news! I've had to dispose of so much stuff due to previous floods that the giant puddle slowly making its way from the utility room into the livable (theoretically) part of the basement has little in its path to destroy.

Recently, when I realized my roof was falling apart, my soon to be ex suggested I take one for the team and do a roofer. Now I'm torn. Plumber butt is starting to sound pretty enticing. Or, I could just go with Plan A, set fire to the whole place, and snag my fire fighter. (Disclaimer: I am joking. If my house goes up in flames, I did NOT do it.)

I am trying to become a realist, and after more than two years of occasional visits to online dating sites, I think I am pretty savvy when it comes to evaluating relationship potential. As a practical matter, with the house falling apart around me, I think I need to focus on the long term rather than a quick cougar style roll in the hay (which, by the way, may be far more comfortable than a roll in my soggy mattress after the shingles finally implode). Catastrophic as a roof collapse may be, a roofer has limited utility; after all, there is only one roof. A fire fighter? Nice fantasy, but when the house is nothing more than a pile of soot, sex can be a bit of a logistical nightmare, and the possibility of any sort of discretion (hey, I don't worry about shit like that but Chief Smokin' Hot might), melts away with the drywall.

So I'm thinking I'll get the most bang (yes, I said bang) for my buck with a plumber, and for that I can overlook the little bit of butt crack peeking out over his jeans when he bends over to look under my kitchen sink. Maybe it'll even motivate me to leave the room and fold some laundry. Don't ever underestimate the power of revulsion. Anyway, it makes good economic sense. I have four toilets, one of which is already leaking, and another of which makes a noise when it's flushed that literally makes the house shake. Frankly, I think it makes more sense to have a plumber rocking my world than a toilet.  Let's do the math: four toilets, seven sinks, a sump pump, a hot water heater (why shouldn't it break even though it's less than a year old?) -- well, you get the picture. Doing a plumber would be like making maximum monthly deposits into a retirement plan. I might even save enough to buy the guy a pair of pants that fits.

I've already put in a call to a plumbing service. My extensive dating experience has taught me a lot about the importance of first impressions, and I don't really have the time to go through a protracted courtship, so I'm hanging out in an old sexy negligee I dug out of my underwear drawer. Well it used to be sexy. Must have shrunk in the wash.

If he's nice, I'll do him a favor and change into some granny pants and a sweatshirt. If he's nasty, maybe I'll stick with the ill fitting negligee and just bend over to look under the sink -- give him a taste of his own medicine. Hmm, maybe not.

I'll do whatever it takes. Won't even toss the guy out of bed for eating crackers. Just being a good sport -- takin' one for the team.

Taint Right, Taint Wrong, Just Tis

Even level headed gals like me can be irrational. There are perfectly good places I will never visit, perfectly good people I will shun, simply because I equate them with some unpleasantness in my life. Guilt by association. The Wisconsin Dells, for instance -- out. I equate that place with the untimely and rather tragic death of my first dog. James Taylor, live in concert -- also out. I equate him with one of the assorted acts of betrayal that resulted in the demise of my marriage. (Okay, the Dells, let's face it, bad example. There is really nothing good there to taint. As for Sweet Baby James, I cheat; I've kept a few CD's, and I am not above tossing a song or two onto an occasional playlist.)

Oddly, sometimes the irrationality works mysteriously in the other direction. An unpleasant event -- a catastrophe even -- can somehow take on a rosy glow simply because of the places or people it brings into your life. Like a death that brings you back to the place from which you came, or a funeral in a chapel filled with warmth and laughter to moderate the sadness. Like, for example, the death of my dear old friend's mom, which brought me back home, or her funeral, attended by folks I used to know and by folks I had never met, all now occupying big chunks of my heart.

Admittedly, I anticipated my exceedingly long day trip to New York for Etti's funeral with a mix of dread and overwhelming sadness. I slept for about seven minutes the night before I left, and some time during those seven minutes I had a disturbing dream. There was a dead person, and a person about my age who had not seen me in quite some time and looked me up and down as if I had aged beyond recognition, and, to make matters worse, I was about to risk doing something absolutely terrifying in front of a room full of people. Crazy shit. There was, indeed, going to be a dead person (though not Michael Jackson, as my dream had suggested). There was, indeed, going to be at least one person (again, not Hugh Laurie) who had not seen me in quite some time and who might look me up and down as if I had aged beyond recognition. And, I was, indeed, about to do something terrifying. Granted, I was not going to have to belt out tunes in an American Idol sort of contest, but I had agreed to speak on my friend's behalf, to deliver a eulogy.

There is nothing good about seeing a coffin that contains someone you have known and loved and admired forever. It defies reality, gives you an odd and frustrating sensation that the person is actually there, available for conversation. You want to turn to her and tell her one more thing; the urge continues, even after you participate in the heart wrenching Jewish tradition of shoveling dirt into the grave -- tucking her in, as the rabbi suggested.

Similarly, there is nothing good about judging eyes, people staring at you as if you are a ghost, the walking dead. I may not have stood up to Hugh (be still my heart) Laurie in my dream, but there was none of that when I arrived at the funeral, not even from my mother, who most certainly thought my dress was too short, my hair too unkempt. There were friends I had not seen in more than thirty years, all utterly recognizable, even more beautiful with a smattering of laugh lines and traces of wisdom on their faces. There were friends of my old friend, people I had never met, people who have been by her side for longer than I ever was, filling in her life while I have made my own way in other circles. We took to each other like (for lack of a better analogy at the moment) flies to shit. We are all part of a bigger circle now, having spent the better part of an otherwise lousy day together, laughing, crying, getting to know each other, finding common ground.

And, similarly, there is nothing good about preparing to do something terrifying, unless you think shaking like a leaf and being constantly on the verge of throwing up is a good thing. And, truth be told, my singing would have been disastrous, both for my own sense of pride and for the eardrums of everyone forced to listen. But, thankfully, all I had to do was speak. Speak from the heart, reading from pages I had written from the heart. Just as a couple of Etti's friends did before it was my turn. Unlike them, I did not have the perspective of a close friend and confidant, my life had not been affected the way theirs had been, with the abrupt taking away of an essential member of their daily world. I could speak only as a representative of the children, the middle aged children, those of us who grew up -- some together, some not -- at a different time, in a different world. Those of us who were raised and nurtured and influenced by Etti or people just like Etti, remarkable people who seem to be leaving us by the truckload. My shaking stopped as soon as I reached the podium. My fears and insecurities melted, and I felt, almost immediately, as if a hundred voices were speaking at once through me, as if I was holding a hundred hands.

Even after a few years have cushioned the blow of betrayal, I still shy away from James Taylor concerts. The bad taste in my mouth lingers, and there is no good reason to stir up the old indigestion. And, after even more years, I have never set foot again anywhere near the Wisconsin Dells. The grief of that long ago weekend has abated, but an aversion to bad taste in general keeps me away. Nothing against Wisconsin, mind you. I have powerful and fond memories of people and places there that trump any unpleasantness, and the state continues to lure me back. Even though I can easily get a Culver's butter burger in the United States now. I mean Illinois.

I left New York the other day, armed with email addresses of friends old and new, having made more than a few sincere promises to keep in touch via Facebook, that modern era super glue that might just provide the necessary dab of extra adhesive to make our newly discovered connections stick. T'aint perfect, put t'is pretty darn good.

Etti's funeral was overwhelmingly sad. But, oddly enough, I will always cherish the day, and, in that, I am fairly certain I am not alone.

Life's Embrace

Almost exactly a year ago, I sat in a Starbucks in New York catching up with my old friend Miriam. My summer had been challenging, my long awaited eight weeks of temporary empty nesting interrupted by frequent trips out east to help my mother recuperate from injuries sustained in a May car accident. Miriam had faced plenty of her own challenges, but her mother was alive, vital, intact. Pitching in, quite often actually, to drive my mom around when my brother and I could not be there.

As we sat in Starbucks that morning a year ago, I received a hideous email from my daughter's camp, informing me that a boy, the same age as my daughter, had drowned the night before. It stopped me dead in my tracks, that email; I read it over several times, enlarging the print to make sure I had not imagined the horrific news. My daughter, as far as I knew, was fine. Everybody in my life -- and Miriam's -- that morning was fine, her mother, even my mother -- as fine as could be compared to that boy and his parents, whose world had just, no doubt, been shattered.

What a difference a year makes. My daughter called the other day from camp, anticipating with a good degree of dread the anniversary of the boy's drowning. She was scheduled, that day, to lead her somewhat reluctant campers into the lake, the ones who were always afraid. My daughter, by no means an avid swimmer but certainly not afraid of the water, felt paralyzed. She did not know how she'd go in the water, that same water that had taken a boy she knew on that awful day. She did not know how she'd escape the memories of that night, still vivid in her mind. The agonizing hours that passed between the time she and her friends had been herded back to their cabin and the time when they were finally given the news. The feelings of shock and loss and total disbelief that something like this could happen to one of their own.

When we talked the other night, we spoke of how horrendous this anniversary would be for the boy's parents. How lucky she is to be enjoying another summer at camp, while this boy, and so many others, will never have that chance. We agreed that she would hold her head up and march those girls into the water, for the boy's sake, for his parents' sake, to remind herself that life goes on, and sometimes you have to keep going, no matter how daunting it seems.

Yes, what a difference a year makes. My friend Miriam spent most of the time during our Starbucks rendezvous listening to my tales of woe, about my mother and then, suddenly, about the tragedy at camp. Her mother was alive and unbroken and, as far as we were both concerned, on the path to living forever. Certainly not anywhere near the point of illness or death. Not in our wildest nightmares.

Etti, my friend's mother, died last night, after a valiant battle with lung cancer and chemo induced infections. As unlikely as it seemed a year ago, Etti is gone; my mother, for whom everything seemed so bleak last July, is short but relatively healed, and camp, so shaken in the summer of 2011, is once again in session. Not as if nothing had ever happened, but in spite of everything that has happened. For those who have loved Etti and for whom her loss is staggering, life will stop dead in its tracks for a while. It will seem, for a while, that things cannot go on, at least not in a way they always have. But, as gloomy as today seems, Etti's loved ones will heal and move forward, as she would have wanted and expected them to do.

This morning, I am reeling, from the news -- albeit expected -- of Etti's passing. From much smaller losses, like the fact that I missed a phone call from my daughter at camp last night. It would have been a good night for me to hear her voice, to remind me that life goes on, that people move on, and that we should never take for granted the people we love. I will head to New York on Friday to bid farewell to Etti and to give my old friend and her brother as much of a hug as I can offer, though I know neither my presence nor my embrace will do much to ease their pain.

On Saturday I will head to Michigan to retrieve my daughter and give her a big hug, although I am fairly certain she will not be as excited or as comforted to see me as I will be to see her. But I will be both thankful and optimistic. Thankful that my mother has regained her strength, thankful that my children are okay (to say happy would be a stretch, so we'll just go with okay), and optimistic that next summer will bring more good things to those I hold dear.

Goodbye dear Etti -- strong, funny, seemingly invincible, loving to the core. A true believer in YOLO. May we all continue on, learning from her example.

Say YOLO to the Jacket

Apparently I am sufficiently philosophical (or, more likely, self serving) to have abided by some degree of "YOLO" for years, but I am way too un-hip to have ever heard the term before last week. YOLO. You only live once. It's not the first painfully obvious phrase to be memorialized in an acronym, but, along with its new status, the admonition to "go for it" because you only live once has become a battle cry for death defying recklessness.

Case in point. An elementary school teacher fills out the following detention note: 

Now I know there's a teacher shortage, and as far as I can tell if you show up most of the time and don't molest your students tenure is virtually guaranteed, but why recklessly expose your tendency to misspell and to misplace modifiers just to show off your firm disciplinary hand? I'm all for YOLO, but sometimes the rewards just cannot be worth it. Not to mention unfair. This was probably the first of many rude awakenings for Collin, a little boy who not only took the rap for an entire class screaming YOLO but who also will never know how to spell "sandwich."

Sometimes, YOLO is the way to go. It's the way we scratch our itches and scratch items off our bucket lists. It's the way some folks justify sky diving, although I fail to see how expediting death satisfies ones need to live that one life we're given to the fullest. Sure, I like to live dangerously, but my idea of a YOLO adventure is to go out west and ski on really big mountains. As long as there's a bunny hill. With no trees. And not a lot of people. And lots of hot chocolate waiting for me in the lodge.

To be painfully honest, YOLO usually comes up for me when I am shopping. Not grocery shopping -- that comes under the purview of a different acronym: CDIJ. (Cold day in July.) Clothing shopping, when I am faced with an earth shattering decision about whether I should buy something useless and overpriced. One of those WWJD moments, assuming Jesus had been brought up by someone like my mother who only shops retail.

YOLO or NO NO? Sure, you only live once, but it's hard to live very long when there's no money left in your bank account, so the decision to go hog wild on a beautiful blue suede jacket the other day was not one to be taken lightly. But the nice small town saleslady (small town bumpkin my ass; the savvy little bitch had me at "hello") threw in the great pair of sandals I had come in for and knocked more than a few shekels off the price of the jacket which, I am told, will never show water spots, even if I wear it in the rain. How could I say no? YES! I said yes to the jacket. YOLO, and I'm gonna look sharp (and dry) while I'm at it. It's called perspective.


Like Elvis said, (and I'm paraphrasing a little here), you can burn my house, steal my car, drink my liquor from an old fruit jar. Or spell sandwich wrong. But YOLO honey, lay off my blue suede, er, jacket. 

Candid Cameras?

I've often questioned my devotion as a mother. I do not scan Facebook for pictures of my children, and I have spent little time poring over the thousands of pictures posted each day by my youngest daughter's camp just so I might catch a glimpse of her face in one or two.

The Facebook issue is easier for me to justify. Ironically, it's much less about a lack of interest (though, truth be told, I am really not that interested in seeing pictures of my kids as they party with friends) than privacy. Difficult as it is to respect -- or even define -- privacy in a world in which everything has become so decidedly un-private, I cannot help but feel I am violating my kids' lives when I peer at their online photos uninvited. Even though, theoretically, I am invited, having been honored with friend requests by all three of them long ago. I think they knew all along I would not peek. I never looked through their things, even though I could. I never listened in on phone extensions, back in the dark ages when that was an option, even though I could. I never looked at their emails or read their texts, even though I could, and even though the temptation was sometimes overwhelming. I avoid their Facebook pictures like the plague, even though I can look all I want, without them being any the wiser.

More troubling to me, as a mom, is my failure over the years to sift through pages of thumbnail photos to spot my child. That, I admit, is pure laziness. Having attempted it a few times, back when camps first decided to post pages upon pages of pictures of enormously happy faces (propaganda, if you ask me), I tired quickly of the frustration of not spotting my own kid for days at a time. In recent years, I had a friend who would do the leg work -- letting me know when she had noticed a picture of my kid as she had carefully gone through the day's shoot looking for pictures of her own. And naturally, I always rushed to see it. Jeez, I'm lazy, not negligent!

This year, my youngest (my baby, but don't you dare tell her I called her that) is a CIT (counselor in training, which means you get to pay just a tad bit less for her to be away for a few weeks). She has access to her cell phone, and she is, officially, "staff." Her tee shirt says so. Which means I did not feel guilty about failing to send a few letters before she left so she'd get mail her first few days. I have sent only one brief card in a week, and, at least at first, I did not worry about the annual changing dynamic among a group of bitchy and clique-y and often cruel teenagers. She was to be in charge of a group of younger girls, not a member of the flock but a chick in an authoritative "Staff" tee shirt. Why worry? And I did not, even when I received her text, a few days into it, telling me her campers were simply "horrible people," call the camp in a fit of despair. I called her, momentarily concerned, but felt better when we both burst out laughing.  Hmm. Horrible people? A bunch of spoiled kids from suburbia crammed together in a wooden bunk and expected to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of others much like themselves? Twelve princesses suddenly demoted to ladies in waiting? Horrible? Shocking.

Hearing her voice the other day may have been reassuring but it somehow made me miss her more. So in the wee hours this morning, unable to sleep and left with nothing better to do (other than search for a pair of shoes I wanted on Zappos -- a task far less daunting than searching for your daughter in online camp photos), I logged on and went to the photo gallery. And, though I had to make my way through more than fifty pages of photos before spotting her, when I finally found her I smiled. I could barely see her face -- the picture was tiny and the group was large. But I am quite familiar with the cock of her head, the waves in her hair, the shape of her face, the tilt of her shoulders. I zoomed in as much as I could, and, though the image was still fuzzy, it was definitely my child. So much a part of me, so recognizable. The text complaints will continue to roll in, but I know she is fine, and I know she is coming home soon.

I will continue to risk the gates of "Bad Mommy Hell" and avoid looking at my children's Facebook pictures, no matter how intentionally public they are. But I think I will visit the camp photo gallery again tonight, just to see the familiar outline of my daughter's face. Just to know she is okay.

Democracy at Work

Around these parts, when folks are upset about something, they pester unsuspecting people in Starbucks to sign vaguely defined petitions and submit mildly illiterate and highly belligerent letters to the local rag. Vocal minorities come and go, never quietly, but eventually nobody really remembers what they were ranting about.

As superior as we are, we Americans could learn a lesson or two from abroad. Take, for example, Spain. A developed country (though way down toward the bottom of the list by most measures) its people know how to live. Great food, lots of wine, and long naps in the middle of the day. And we call ourselves the leaders of the free world! More importantly, they know how to get things done, quietly and effectively, without resorting to the somewhat infamous tactics of that silly Inquisition they hosted way back when. Everybody makes mistakes.

A not-so-annoying petition

Take, for example, a band of Basque firemen protesting budget cuts. Not to be confused with the often violent Basque Separatists, this unified group of men in uniform (ahh, be still my heart, it's why my friend so generously sent me the picture) offered up a rather compelling twenty-one plus bun salute to give voice to their gripes, and let me tell you, I bet the powers that be paid attention. I know I did, and as soon as I remember the international dialing code, I'm phoning in my support.  And, I'd bet my bottom dollar (or just my bottom, for what that's worth) that plenty of passersby stopped to, um, further investigate the details behind their petition.

Naturally, the strategy isn't foolproof. For someone like me, for whom the fireman appeal stems largely from the uniform itself, I'm far less of a pushover when the clothes are gone and the helmets have been removed from what are revealed to be ordinary, balding heads and hung, a bit absurdly, over their little hoses. I do admit that I spent time zooming in, trying to catch a glimpse of a "member," but only as a matter of cultural enrichment. I've seen many statues, but I've never seen one in the flesh -- er -- uncut. (No luck, by the way, so don't waste your time ladies.) And, though I admit the Basque buns were, for the most part, gravity defying and quite inviting (I certainly wouldn't toss them out of bed for eating tapas), I tremble -- and not, mind you, with any sort of pleasure -- to think what the sight of some middle aged suburban behinds would do to my psyche, not to mention my appetite.

So bring on the petitions. I might take a peek, just so I don't miss any important details. But
please, keep your pants on, and I promise to do the same.

Maps of the World

The other night, time stood still. At least in my dream.

My childhood girlfriends had all gathered together. I have not seen many of them since the day we graduated from high school, yet each one was utterly recognizable. Nobody had aged. It was a room filled with unwrinkled skin, flat tummies, body parts as yet unaffected by gravity. Virtual prom queens from a gritty place where there actually were no proms or homecoming dances. Products of much rougher streets than the ones on which we all now live, we had all somehow managed to avoid the ravages of thirty-six years.

We are, for the most part, second generation Americans. Except for Mimi, one of my oldest and dearest friends. Her parents are immigrants -- her dad a Holocaust survivor, though he never spoke of it, her mom, Etti, from Turkey. Etti is the only person I have ever known from Turkey; had it not been for her, my only tangible image of that country would be of the terrifying prison in Midnight Express. Thanks to Etti, though, Turkey is a place, in my mind, filled with boundless energy, people who possess immeasurable love for family and friends, and the irresistible aroma of little delicacies made with phyllo dough and meat. I never knew what they were called, never cared. All I knew was that when Etti cooked up a batch, there were always some reserved for me.

Recently, a friend told me that though she loved her father, she often wishes he had done something more with his life. Charitable work, possibly, tireless involvement, perhaps, with people or organizations outside the small box of his family and job. I get it; we all wish that about ourselves. It's a constant struggle for me, that fear that I will die before I get around to accomplishing something that will put me on the map.

We forget sometimes about parenthood, about motherhood in particular. My mom often told me a story of the day her mom, my "nana" of beach chair fame, dragged her downstairs and over to the building next door to confront a girl who had harmed her, with fists and with words. As we all would have been, my mom was mortified as she watched her own mother hold this girl by the arms and instruct her to slug her. An eye for an eye, an embarrassment of biblical proportions. My mother never laid a hand on the girl, and I suspect nana never expected her to. It was a story of raw mother instinct, something that has always stayed with me. Back then, nobody would have thought to call the cops, to file charges. Nana was innocent by reason of motherhood.

Etti is dying. Frankly, I couldn't tell you what charities she favored, or how much time or money she devoted to any of them. But Etti has been on the map of my world since I was in grade school, her modest but warm apartment a place in which I was always welcome. No GPS bitch required. For her own children, she is and always has been the map itself, their guide, the definer of boundaries, the "x" marking the spot. The spot they called home, the place where they would always be safe. How much more can one be expected to do with her life when she is, to a select few, the center of the universe?

I can still hear Etti's voice, strong, distinctive, marked by a thickly accented and meticulously enunciated English. Her accent made me laugh sometimes. I particularly liked the way she pronounced comfortable (come-for-table); it seemed to make so much sense. Come to my table. Eat my concoctions made with meat and phyllo dough. Please, make yourself at home.


In my dream the other night (remember? this all started with a dream!), as all the Brooklyn prom queens of my generation gathered and marveled at how well time had treated us, none of our parents were visible. We assumed, though, as children of all ages do, that they were there, even though many of them have been gone for a while. Yes, they were all there, somewhere in the background, fiercely protective, watching over us, keeping us in tow, keeping us safe.

Etti, a woman I have always thought to be one of the strongest people I know, has been fighting lung cancer for several months, and is now faced with an unexpected infection that seems to be winning the battle. Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she is, in the words of her daughter, being pragmatic and strong. Of course she is; she does not know how to be anything else. She has directed the doctors not to resuscitate, and her condition is deteriorating fast. She is not losing the battle, though, or giving up; she is simply fighting it on her own terms. As only Etti can.

My dream notwithstanding, I am fully aware that time marches on. Yet, I refuse to believe Etti will ever leave us. The truth is, no matter what happens, she never will.

The Fruits of My Neighbor

These days, it's not so easy to figure out what season it is just by wandering through the fruit section at the grocery store. Supersonic transport has given us plums in January, all varieties of juicy summer fruit in the dead of winter. It's nice, I suppose, but sometimes it's better to wait, to have something to look forward to.

Back in the dark ages, when I was in college a good five and a half hour drive north of New York City,  we had to wait until about eleven o'clock in the morning for the Sunday New York Times to arrive in the one store in town that was open on Sunday. Same with the bagels, once a week, imported from what might has well have been a foreign land. Winter lasted a bit longer up there than it does in normal climes, and for the life of me I cannot remember ever seeing a peach or a plum before it was time to pack up and head south for the summer.

I read an article last Sunday morning -- these days the Times arrives  in the wee hours of Sunday morning, even in the Midwest -- about the benefits of delayed gratification and redirected gratification and something called "underindulgence." Underindulgence, a word that, as yet, is so emphatically unrecognized that an online dictionary service corrects your query, suggesting maybe you meant counter intelligence. Did they mean counter to intelligence? Maybe the concept is just counterintuitive. Why underindulge when the world is our oyster, when there is summer fruit in winter and when you can get New York bagels anywhere and any time you like and when you don't even have to leave home to shop. Three cheers for free shipping and hassle free returns! Indulge, consume, accumulate. It's what we do. It's how everybody else knows we're doing okay, it's how we occupy all the extra time we have that doesn't have to be spent waiting for the New York Times to be delivered late Sunday morning.

My neighbor grows his own peaches. (He also makes wine in his basement, and has been spotted, in the past, mowing his lawn in a Speedo, but neither his grapes nor his, um, other fruits hold much interest for me.) The peaches, though, they are a rite of summer, and no matter how many bushels of peaches I have enjoyed all year long, I look forward each August to the offering from my neighbor. Bags full of fruit that he loves to share, and not only because he and his wife would otherwise be up to their eyeballs in peach pies, peach preserves, and whatever the hell else people do with tree loads of fruit before it goes bad.

Next month, when my neighbor beckons me from across the fence to collect my stash, I will be reminded of the beauty of delayed gratification (who the heck waits until August for a good peach?), redirected gratification (i.e. sharing -- my neighbor's enthusiasm when he hands over the bags pretty much sums that one up), and underindulgence. The spelling Nazi buried somewhere within my laptop insists on underscoring the word, a silent warning against screwing up. (And, by the way, it suggests that what I meant to say was counter intelligence.) Not quite as annoying as that GPS bitch who whines incessantly when you decide to delay a right turn, but close. I know where I'm going, bitch, and I know what underindulgence means, Herr Spellcheck. At least in theory.

My neighbor can probably afford to fly periodically to South America to get fruit out of season, and he can probably afford to have somebody else -- fully clothed, or at least in boxers -- mow his lawn. He does not need to watch my house when he knows I am gone, and he does not need to watch extra carefully even when I am home, just because he knows that I am a woman, alone. He is in his eighties, happy to sit for hours on a sunny day on his front porch, or take off every once in a while in one of his vintage cars. And he appears to be genuinely happy when he delivers my peaches, or, sometimes, tomatoes, or whatever else he happens to be growing. He appears to live a life of underindulgence, which, as far as I can tell, is neither counter intelligent nor counterintuitive. In his small house surrounded by newer and more spacious models, on a street crowded every Thursday from April through October with landscaping trucks, he seems content, gratified, living life well.

I may sneak a few peaches in before my neighbor delivers my annual home grown stash next month, but those peaches, shared from the yard next door, will be the sweetest.

The Lights of My Life

Twenty-four years ago next month, I attended the first night game at Wrigley Field. I also traded bulimia for parenthood.

Destined to be a blogger who flaunts her heart and all her dirty laundry on her sleeve, I was never one to withhold personal information. I will always remember that first night game. I had been pregnant for about a minute. My brother, a long time baseball fanatic, had flown in to join us for the historical game, and I told him our news immediately. Between the first two innings, I disappeared within the bowels of the stadium to find a pay phone (yes, kids, a pay phone) and tell my parents of their imminent change in status. And, the whole time, I worried myself sick over my bulimic episode from the day before, the one just before I found out the rabbit had died. Had I somehow harmed the tiny cluster of cells that was to become my first born? Worse still, had that cluster witnessed something that would haunt it later? Had I fallen short, already?

Looking back, I realize it had much less to do with physical damage to my embryo, and everything to do with my new code of behavior. For years, from the time my oldest children were babies and through the better part of three childhoods, my gold standard was whatever example I wished to set for them. If I would preach something to them, I would practice it myself. A simple formula, much less complicated than determining what to do and how to be based upon my own personal judgment.

And it was a good system, for the most part. I was a pretty decent citizen, and, since that day before the first night game at Wrigley Field, I have never voluntarily or purposefully vomited up a binge, no matter how tempted I may have been. Woohoo!

Time marches on, though, children get older, and they need you less. And, no matter what you do, they gaze at you with pure disdain, and they punish you with incessant critique or, even more infuriating, silence. You start to remember, after years of being utterly beholden to others, that you are a person in your own right. Or wrong, as the case may be. You begin to care less about the approval of your children (odds are, you could act like Mother Teresa and still not get it anyway) and become more tuned in to your own discontent. If, of course, you're one of those people who has any.

So you make some mistakes. But, thank goodness, you've trained your children well by setting a good example for years, and they disapprove. Beats the crap out of having them emulate your bad behavior -- although there are days I wish they'd just do something illegal or immoral or just plain stupid, if only to get a break from their punishing stares. Alas, I have set high standards for them, and they continue to be above reproach, while I continue to spiral downward. Hey, I still don't puke.

With any luck, my children will grow up and become far less perfect than they thought they were. They might even begin to see their parents as human.

Yeah, right.

A Word Paints a Thousand Pictures

I can no sooner abandon my beloved blog than put my teenager up for sale. (Honestly, who the heck would purchase a teenager, so what's the point?) It will come as no surprise -- at least to those who know me well -- that, though I truly mourned the death of Nora Ephron, the fledgling opportunist in me secretly viewed her departure as a job opening. I have spent days fantasizing about vying for a chance to fill her enormous shoes, maybe even just a small section in the toe box. I have even drafted a cover letter; to whom, I could not say.

As a mom and, on occasion, a trusted teacher and mentor, I have advised many youngsters to never shy away from stiff competition, to never let a fear of failure stop them from pursuing their dreams. I have spent years doing all that I advise against, and where has it landed me? Trailer bound, my love of anything resembling a mass readership for my writing as yet unrequited, the perennial odd woman out at a couple's dinner, where I can at least count on my sorry state to ensure that somebody will take pity on me and give me the excess change after money has been collected to pay the bill.

Yes, it is time to face the competition and the fear head on, acknowledge it, put it out there, and continue to shoot for the stars. Which is why I am going to share with you the work of a young writer whose work has just been called to my attention, a thirteen year old girl who is destined for great things.  I can only hope to one day be capable of painting the kind of vivid picture she was able to paint in a hastily written letter from camp. If the mark of a great writer is the effect she has on her audience, one look at this writer's parents' therapy bills could be quite telling.  A copy of the most brilliant "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" letter appears below:




Game on, Sarah. Game on.