Mama Bear in the Woods

I am a Jew from Brooklyn. Christmas is not my holiday. It shouldn't seem all that odd, then, that I celebrated it this year with a family other than my own. What is odd is that I celebrate it at all.

Christmas, though not a holiday in my own family's tradition, has long been a part of my end of year routine -- ever since I "married out." Though I was well into my twenties at the time, "Lisa's first Christmas" was a magical day. My soon to be mother-in-law had added a stocking for me over the mantle, my name glued on to the thick white cuff in silver glitter, the fat red sock below it bursting with unexpected treasures. In the mountain of gifts neatly wrapped under the tree, an overwhelming number of them bore my name. Santa, apparently, loves a newbie; naughty or nice, you get the royal treatment.

Though it certainly never acquired the significance for me as say, my birthday (which is, in my mind, a national holiday), Christmas has occupied a square on my calendar for over a quarter of a century. It has marked time, was something to be anticipated. I even went to Midnight Mass a couple of times; whether I was searching for meaning or just avoiding my inevitable duties as "wrapper in chief" I couldn't say, but, as I recall, the music was pretty. Over the years, my mother-in-law began to worry that she was incapable of choosing something I would like, and my piles of sparkling packages gave way to hastily written checks tossed into an otherwise thin stocking. She never really understood how much I just liked the ritual of tearing off wrapping paper, that I would take a lump of coal with a shiny bow on top over a gift card any time. Though the exorbitant feting of my first Christmas was forever unmatched, Christmas has remained important to me. For most of my adult life, it has been one of those few days each year I could count on for time spent with family. A tradition, for better or for worse, a day comforting in its humdrum sameness.

With the break up of a marriage comes many casualties, and my version of Christmas was one of them. I have spent the last two rekindling long forgotten traditions, reconnecting with my Jewish roots. While my children have continued to spend the day with their Catholic relatives, as they always have, I have remained behind, comforted at least by the long abandoned but still strangely familiar ritual of Chinese food and a movie. I have missed the last minute shopping, the frantic wrapping, the living room carpet littered with stray tinsel and an occasional ornament hook, the smell of bacon frying in the morning. But again, it's not really my holiday, and on the grand scale of collateral divorce damage, it's pretty minor.

This year, Christmas was different for all of us. Unexpected crises intervened, and nobody went to Grandma's. Nobody ate Chinese food. My son, still in Japan, feasted (oddly, I think) on KFC and cake. Like I said, it's not my holiday, so none of my business, but I still felt his absence more acutely than I do most days. I ended up in Seattle, of all places, with somebody else's family. Well, near Seattle anyway. Exchanging gifts with somebody else's daughter, sprawling on a couch with somebody else's dog, reveling in the antics and unbearable cuteness of somebody else's grandchild. Wondering how my own children could possibly survive (or thoroughly enjoy) Christmas without me.

This was my fourth trip to Seattle. There were two conferences for work years ago, and, one summer, a wedding. My own children were young back then, watched over at home by one grandparent or other while I tried to enjoy my time away. I never felt entirely confident that they could survive without me for a few days. Especially under the care of elderly folks. Funny, they did survive. And they did this year as well, seemingly no worse for the wear.

On the day after Christmas this year, I accompanied my friend and his grandson to a children's museum while his mom tried to enjoy a couple of hours of pampering. (Tough to do, as she had entrusted her baby to the elderly, and no doubt wondered how he would survive.) As I followed little Billy around, trying to capture for posterity (and for his mom) the look of wonder on his face as he explored this brightly colored utopia, I recognized somebody I used to know, somebody I haven't seen in a while. It was a young mom who wanted to slug the kids who grabbed toys, who pushed the littler ones down, who refused to share. It was a young mom who became so irate at a museum worker who would not let little Billy play with the Lego's while she put them all back in a bin that she stuck her foot in the filled bin when nobody was looking and kicked a healthy instep full of Lego back onto the carpet. "Who are you?" my daughter asked me when I told her about my behavior. But she was smiling. Though I may sometimes wonder, she knows exactly who I am, wasn't really surprised at all. She has mentioned before the superhuman strength she knows I would possess if I ever caught somebody doing her harm. I like to think she's right, and I also like to think we'll never need to find out.


In all my visits to Seattle, I had never seen Mt. Rainier, was convinced it was merely an artist's rendition. On the last full day of my trip this year, the sun broke through the clouds early in the day, and, finally, after years of searching, years of doubt, I saw it. The lone peak rose up before me as I drove down a long stretch of road in the hills near Olympia, its outlines fuzzy but distinct enough to set it apart from the clouds that seem to float in a protective ring around it's pointed snow covered apex. As I turned into the winding roads to climb higher, the elusive mountain again disappeared, swallowed up in the upside down carpet of impossibly tall trees. When I emerged later in the day, Mt. Rainier again appeared. It seemed to be everywhere now, its massive form taunting me at the edge of the horizon, no matter which way I turned. As I meandered along the outskirts of the woods, it came to life on a canvas of blue sky, watching over me with its snowy gaze.

It has been there the whole time. I just didn't see it.

Oh Maya God!!!!

And to think I was embarrassed when, upon finding out marshmallows contain gelatin, which apparently comes from pigs, I thought maybe folks could tap dance around the whole kosher problem. It never occurred to me that rocky road ice cream could be sinful in such a literal sense.

"Well it's not as if they have to kill the pig for that," I suggested, grasping at straws. All those years at a predominantly Jewish summer camp, evenings spent spearing fluffy white marshmallows with long twigs and blackening them to a crisp in the fire, could those camp fires have been no less barbaric than your average pig roast?

"Well they don't give it up voluntarily," my friend pointed out, hoping against hope that I had been joking and that I couldn't possibly be that stupid. After all, as they say, you are who you hang out with. Or if they don't say that, they should. Anyway, I tried to save face, suggesting that maybe the gelatin came out of something like pig udders, but needless to say, this particular friend no longer hangs on my every word.

But I digress, to the extent that you can digress before you even set out on a particular path. This is a post about people who seem to know stuff saying stuff that just makes no sense. Like the weather reporters yesterday -- or, as they like to call themselves, meteorologists, giving themselves an imprimatur of expertise -- who went on and on and on about the approaching storm that was about to create blizzard conditions in the Chicago area. Plans were cancelled. People rushed to the store to stock up on comfort food so they could hurry home and ride out the storm in front of a cozy fireplace. We all spent hours gazing outside our windows, certain every once in a while that a lukewarm raindrop had finally morphed into an icy and menacing snowflake. Armies of "snow fighters" spent the day waiting for the call, their massive plows gassed up and stocked with rock salt.

As it turns out, we got little if any snow, and "blizzard conditions" may have been a bit of an exaggeration. Unless they were trying to tell us it was a great night to go out to the local Dairy Queen, which, as far as I am concerned, is hardly newsworthy, since I can't really think of a night that wouldn't be a perfect night to go out to the Dairy Queen. Although I will have to rethink my order and avoid anything with marshmallows.

I understand that even the smartest experts can sometimes get things wrong, and I am pretty forgiving about it, particularly if they own up to their errors. So when I watched one local television meteorologist yesterday evening (who must have felt pretty stupid when he looked out the window and saw nothing white) taking the time to explain why it looked like there would not be a blizzard after all, I softened and I just felt thankful that I would be able to get my car out of the garage in the morning even though I had forgotten to send a deposit to the guys who plow my driveway. Thank goodness for weather people who can't get it right.

Later, though, as I listened to the rather spooky sounding howling of the wind all night, I thought maybe the whole blizzard thing was a ruse, a clever way to make us all forget the real disaster that was about to unfold, which was the end of the world. I had officially stopped worrying about that yesterday morning when a friend pointed out that it was already December 21st in New Zealand, and nothing had happened. Talk about a theory with holes in it, although I should have known better than to be taken in by my friend's reasoning; he doesn't call himself an ologist of any kind. Worse still, he's Canadian! The Mayans never even knew New Zealand existed, so why would they base their calculations on New Zealand time? Frankly, why would anyone base calculations on New Zealand time?

In real time, December 21, 2012 has arrived. No blizzard, but the jury is still out on the apocalypse. Will I ever believe a weather reporter again? Maybe when pigs fly. Or maybe when they give up some gelatin voluntarily. But if there's even a slight chance that the Mayans didn't just run out of paper and were trying to tell us something, I'm heading to the Dairy Queen for a gelatinous blizzard. The conditions are perfect.

We the People?

If everything happens for a reason, the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday is certainly a stumper. It was a spree of unspeakable violence that took the lives of twenty small children and six adults and made mince meat out of the lives of so many others.

Everybody is at a loss. And, instinctively, when humans feel lost and unable to control what happens around them, they answer some call to action, frantically searching for solutions. There is no solution to this one. Young children are dead, surviving children are terrified, and families have been forever shattered.  Threadbare silver linings give us hope -- tales of heroism, remarkable stories of children being secreted away in small bathrooms, the knowledge that people everywhere will donate money or time to help the victims recover. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, from ramshackle storefront headquarters to the Oval Office, have begun to address the politically loaded (and potentially suicidal) issue of gun control. It would be unseemly -- downright cowardly, I should think -- to ignore it in the aftermath of so  much bloodshed.

Who knows where the debate will take us? (In circles, possibly, since I just heard Vice President Joe Biden has been put in charge.) We have a Constitutional right to bear arms. Of course we Jews have a biblical mandate to rest on the Sabbath, which doesn't mean it makes any sense in the global community of the twenty first century to not drive or answer ones cell phone on Saturday. Our forefathers are no doubt shuddering in their graves at all the violence, just as God no doubt wrings her manicured hands and grows another gray hair each time she sees a shabbos goy turning an ignition key or dialing a number.

One need only Google "obsolete laws" to get a generous sampling of once well intentioned local ordinances that would defy logic in today's world. In New York City, for example, women who wear clingy or body-hugging clothing are subject to a fine. Imagine the logistics of enforcing that one. In Memphis, Tennessee, a woman cannot drive a car unless there is a man in front waving a red flag to alert others to the danger. I have nothing against legislative attempts to promote public safety or protect the fairer sex from the presumably animal instincts of males (or maybe it's more about maintaining urban aesthetics), but let's face it, sometimes ignorance must give way to enlightenment, and ideas -- and rules -- must actually evolve.

"Let them eat steak!"

So where does one draw the line when chipping away at the right of a society chock full of mental illness, social maladjustment, and general discontent to maintain deadly arsenals?  Hunting enthusiasts might say assault weapons. I don't know, I'm kind of with Bambi on this one. For anyone who really believes there is an inalienable right to blast holes in beautiful animals minding their own business, I say let them eat steak. And play some really cool video games. (If I were a cow, I'd say let them eat tofu, but that's a whole other story.) I am more in the camp of modern day Goliaths; I say ban everything down to a sling shot. What good is such a thing to anybody anyway, buried so deep in some basement junk drawer that nobody would find it in time on the off chance a feisty little prince comes to call.


In the meantime, we will all take whatever small measures we can to make ourselves and our children feel safe. My ex retrieved a call yesterday from the high school letting him know our daughter is safe. He wasn't all that worried, but he understood the gesture. (I did not get a call, but nobody ever thinks I need to know anything around here.) A Utah company that markets bullet proof children’s clothing and backpacks saw its web site crash yesterday from too much traffic. A store in Florida reported that thousands of dollars worth of Spanx were stolen. Having tried those on, I know that they are made with reinforced steel, and would stand up to a bullet as well as any bullet proof vest. Of course I nearly suffocated the one time I wore them, but, again, another story for another time.

"Tofu. They can eat tofu."

Let’s just say that after I see some progress on the gun issue, I will begin my crusade against Spanx. First things first.

Words with "Friends"

Everybody told me things would be better on the other side. It's been almost a week since the matrimonial judge pronounced us man and ex-wife, almost a week since I officially became a free (and presumably wild) divorcee. Yet, as I have almost every day for at least three years, I woke wearing flannel pj's and staring at point blank range into the loaded butt of an obese puggle whose front end was, inexplicably as usual, buried under the covers.

I can handle subtlety, and I certainly don't expect my whole life to do a one-eighty overnight, but at this rate I'll be in a nursing home before anything resembling a peace-of-mind-induced frolic begins in earnest. With my cougar clock ticking, I decided to help things along a bit, and what better way to start than by changing my Facebook status. I went to my "about me" section, and scrolled down to relationship status, all the while feeling a bit squeamish about checking the box next to "divorced." Not because I am afraid of all it's suggestive connotations and the knowing winks and nods, but because my children are my Facebook "friends," for heaven's sake. The last thing they need is to be inundated with a barrage of ill advised -- albeit well meaning -- congratulatory whoops from my other "friends." I thought maybe I could attach a footnote to caution folks away from thumbs upping my good fortune with wild abandon, something like "my divorce is cause for neither celebration nor condolence so please do not comment," but there was no space for elaboration next to any of the status choices. No space for elaboration and, much to my chagrin, no option that read "none of the above" or "none of your fucking business."

I looked to see if any of the other choices might fit my situation. There was the old standby, "it's complicated." That might suggest reconciliation, and lord knows after all we have spent on this divorce it had better take. There were only two that seemed to apply. I could leave things at "separated;" after all, I have long felt detached and removed and a bit insecure, and I don't expect that to change any time soon. Or I could change my status to "in a relationship." More like an eternal entanglement; how can you not be hopelessly and forever entangled when you have raised three kids together? I don't know, maybe in time "divorced" will make sense. Maybe when I stop waking up to a puggle's ass in my face.

Facebook didn't invent the concept of boiling down humans and their relationships into oversimplified words and phrases, but it has certainly helped us to dispense with anything resembling nuance. "Friend." "Like." It's just that our labels used to be more specific. My newly unbetrothed has, for example, worn many etymological hats. Boyfriend, fiance, husband, ex. (Actually, if I were a stickler for precision, there would be even more hats: boyfriend, fiance, ex-fiance, fiance, Christ (that uttered by my mother after she had plunged her head into the oven), husband, estranged husband, husband, soon to be ex-husband, one day maybe (god willing) to be ex-husband, ex. Some labels are tougher to chew on than others. It took me a long time to say "husband" without giggling. After twenty-six years, "ex" does not exactly roll off the tongue. (Of course, neither does "my husband's girlfriend," or, worse still, as choked out by my husband's girlfriend as she was about to undergo a medical procedure and was assured that her "husband" would be waiting, he's "somebody else's husband.") There's a brain twister for everyone. Maybe "it's complicated" was the way to go after all.

These are strange times. Times when "friends" can be enemies, "like" can mean hate, when somebody else's husband waits for you to come out of surgery and when your boyfriend's wife calls to inquire about your condition. A time when everyone is entitled to know your status, even when you yourself cannot figure it out.

Flirty Harry

"You're doing the right thing," my friend assured me as I choked down an early lunch before heading downtown to get divorced. Funny. I hadn't asked. At least not out loud.

I don't remember much about my wedding day. The event -- if you can call it that -- was thrown together hastily. Yes, it was a shotgun wedding; I was not pregnant, but my soon to be mother-in-law had promised to pay for our honeymoon if we would stop living in sin. It seemed reason enough. We were in a strange city, and we had spent much of our courtship living almost a thousand miles away from each other. There was no Facebook, no email, no "sexting" to help deepen our relationship. Only the occasional drunken phone call in the middle of the night. "I lourvvve you," he would croon, as I drooled on my Princess phone.

My dress, which I had bought without benefit of an entourage, was frilly and cheap. My hair was cut short, with tight curls from a recent perm poking up through the lacy veil. I looked like Little Lesbian Bo Peep. My parents wore their best fake smiles; his parents' smiles were genuine. It's amazing what alcohol will do, if you only just give it a chance. The photographer sucked, I don't recall even choosing the band, and about an hour before everything got going I realized I had never updated the guest count and we were about thirty dinners (and place settings) short. The wedding coordinator -- I think she was about eighteen -- was still in jeans and a tee shirt, the tip of her nose pink from an afternoon spent drinking beer at the Cubs game.

The evening passed in a blur, and somehow we found ourselves riding in a taxi to Ohare the next morning. The three of us -- me, my new husband, and Harry from Miami. Nice guy; he used to let me sit on his lap and take the steering wheel when my family would head south for spring break. Hmm. Maybe he was joining us on our honeymoon -- I wasn't really sure. But I wasn't worried; I always liked Harry.

Maybe the memories of my divorce will fade as well. Neither the beginning nor the end of the marriage was memorialized in a video, although the latter was recorded in a court transcript. The divorce certainly took longer to plan, cost a lot more, and probably involved a lot more alcohol along the way. It took me longer to choose my outfit for court than it had to choose my wedding dress, and I liked it a lot better. My hair is long, his is mostly gone. All the folks who were supposed to show up were there. There were no surprise add-ons to accommodate, no last minute meals to prepare. All we needed were pens, and there were plenty of those to go around. Each time I said "yes" or "I do," I was pretty sure I meant it.

The husband I had barely known on that day more than twenty-six years ago is now somebody I know better than anybody. When we hugged hello, I felt more genuine fondness for him than I remember feeling back then. When we hugged goodbye, I wondered to myself, as I had on my wedding day, whether I was doing the right thing. We were so different from the other couple in the judge's chambers, the tired looking thirty-somethings who could not stop snapping at each other. "Why can't everyone just get along?" my brand new ex wondered out loud. His attorney reminded him of a venomous affidavit he had drafted only months earlier. Short term memory loss can be a beautiful thing.

The elevator news feed in my attorneys' office building had informed me that 12/12/12 was an auspicious day for weddings, and couples everywhere were rushing to the altar. Several hours later, I emerged from the court house into the December sunshine, certified copy of our divorce decree in hand. Already more auspicious than the wedding (we had forgotten to have our license signed, so -- much to what would have been my mother-in-law's dismay -- we honeymooned in sin, on her dime). I thought about Harry, now long gone. I could have used some company on the ride home.

It's Not the End of the World

People sometimes get things backwards. Like when you first tell them you're getting divorced, and they get that "thank god it's you and not me" look of pity in their eyes and tell you how sorry they are, even though you are so relieved to finally have the cad (or the bitch) out of your house. Or when, after what seems like a hundred years later, you tell them the divorce is final, and they light up with that "hallelujah" look on their faces and congratulate you and ask when you're throwing a party even though all you want to do is crawl into bed with a pint of ice cream and contemplate what you will do next to mess up your life.

In a few days, on 12/12/12, if all goes according to plan (as if!), I will be divorced. The deal has not unraveled so far, but I have yet to feel anything resembling joy. The only satisfaction I have felt since reaching an agreement with my soon to be ex was from watching the looks of exasperation on the faces of our attorneys as we effectively told them to butt out and keep their malpractice worries to themselves. Oh, and there was the little incident with my pen clicking. Had I known how much such a simple thing would annoy the botox queen (who, by the way, is now barely able to move her mouth out of the fake smile position) I would have been armed with a clickable pen in each hand during all our prior meetings. In the hallway of the courthouse the other day, much to my delight, she seemed to be just as agitated (the frozen corners of her mouth turned down ever so slightly into a grimace) when I merely tapped silently against the clicker with my thumb. So fun.

At least the Cook County matrimonial division has been consistent in its dedication to fucking up already fucked up situations (talk about getting things backwards) and draining the emotions and bank accounts of folks who are pretty well depleted on both fronts. Now inches away from ending the nightmare, we have been told that we must take a court mandated parenting class before we can make our split official. "Isn't it too late for that?" I asked my husband. Our youngest is sixteen, with one running-shoe-clad foot already out the door, and our oldest, twenty-three, was quick to point out that we have already screwed them up irreparably. My twenty-two year old son would laugh if he would ever make himself available long enough to hear the details, but the most I could get out of him yesterday when I asked him if he was okay after the Japan earthquake that was all over the news here was "what earthquake?"

But counties need to generate fees however they can, and at some point in the next few days I must block out four hours and take an online course and test about how not to use the divorce to turn your kids against your spouse. Again, backwards and too little too late. Their opinions of us are already about as low as they can go. It's like being required to make up a missed Lamaze class after you've had the baby. (We worried back then whether our giggling through movies about enemas and loving massages offered up during labor to wives screaming profanities at the man who put them in this position would mean we would not be allowed to have the baby; we wonder now whether flunking the online parenting class would mean we have to stay married.) Not willing to risk it, my husband has already passed and forwarded his certificate to the botox queen. He assured me you only have to eke by with a grade of 70 to pass; that's a relief.

My husband and I (much to our attorneys' dismay) have opted to agree on certain details based only on a verbal promise and a handshake; if it comes down to trusting each other (even with our track records) or trusting the attorneys who have bled us dry, there's no contest. And when the botox queen warned him against something for fear that it would invite future litigation, he had a hard time finding a reason not to believe me when I assured him I would never want to look at (much less pay a cent to) a matrimonial attorney again. My word, til death do us part, was good enough. A toast to the god of second chances.

When I told a friend the divorce would be final on 12/12/12, she noted that was also the day the world would end. "That's 12/21/12," I corrected her, managing not to call her a nitwit because, as I said before, sometimes people just get things backwards. So if the twelfth is not the end of the world, it must be the opposite, like maybe the beginning of something. Again, a toast (and a prayer) to the god of second chances. And she'd better work quickly, because if the Mayans got it right, we only have nine days.

Labors of Love

A high school girl asked me the other day for some advice. (Not to be confused with my high school daughter, whom I thanked the other day for always being there to remind me what a moron I am; she appreciated my gratitude, and was even polite enough to say "you're welcome.")

But the girl who barely knows me, who has no idea what a moron I am, wondered whether she should pursue what she is passionate about (her choice) or something that pays well (her mother's preference). Two completely independent circles in a Venn diagram, I suppose. My son, who wrote the other day to tell me how excited he was about his recent contract renewal and its attendant signing bonus and salary increase mostly because he relished the idea of turning it down, would think the choice to be a no brainer. Why work your butt off for some bitter, nasty middle manager when so many of life's passions, the things that make you tick, beckon tantalizingly from outside the constraining walls of your job? "WAIT! Don't be hasty!" I wanted to scream across the Pacific, across that damn International Dateline, knowing he generally shuts down his Internet connection right after he sends me a provocative email and would not receive my response for at least another twenty-four hours. I typed in some carefully chosen words: "Pursuing your passion is great, especially if you have food, shelter, clothing (and, if you ask me, an occasional new bit of uplifting bling) while you are doing it."

Days have passed, and my perfectly reasonable commentary has been met only with silence. Well, except for the brief Skype episode during which he told me he has a fever of one hundred two and the Japanese vitamins he'd been popping all day weren't bringing it down. Go figure. Anyway, intermingled with my garden variety nightmares are images of a fat and lucrative contract being shredded and released like confetti from the belly of a plane piloted by my son. His belly is as empty as the plane's, his whole being as precarious as the thin skinned metal machine being knocked around by icy gusts as it plunges blindly ahead. I have enough to worry about; I would love him to pursue his passions, but I'd sleep better if I knew he had two feet firmly planted in solid ground. And a bed to sleep in.

A bit of a dreamer and a firm believer in the pursuit of passion myself, I would be a hypocrite if I were to discourage either the inquisitive girl or my son. But should I remind them that passions can be illusory, that time dilutes passion, waters it down the way the microwave did last night when I over-nuked a frozen solid pint of Ben & Jerry's S'mores ice cream? Maybe the secret to maintaining the buzz is patience and immersion in a whole lot of drudgery before rewarding yourself. I should have worked through the humdrum task of doing the dishes first, with the slowly softening pint on the counter taunting me in the corner of my eye. Dipping my spoon into the melted slop was about as exciting as coming home to find the guy you once waited hours, even days, to see sitting in front of your family room flat screen with a beer in one hand and scratching himself through threadbare boxers with the other.

Not that there's anything that horrible about the guy in the boxers. Not necessarily, anyway. Passion is time consuming, all consuming really. It doesn't pay the bills, and odds are the guy on the couch might be of some help with that. He might even change a light bulb, make you laugh, sit and listen while you complain about your day. So who cares if his hand is in his pants? You have electricity. You have dependability. And, if you don't let things slide too far, there can still be a wild night here and there.

Really, though, why would I tell this girl or my son any of this. They both have plenty of time to figure it out for themselves. Should the girl go off to college and opt out of writing classes, enroll herself exclusively in accounting and statistics or, and I tremble at the mere thought, organic chemistry? Of course not! Should my son stay where he is, take the bonus and the raise, toe the line and spend another year feeling crushed by his job? Of course not! Not yet anyway. As long as he doesn't mind living in squalor and eating on the cheap, as long as nobody is counting on him to be sitting on the couch in his boxers waiting to be called upon for mundane chores, the fat pay check can wait. They are young. They don't need to relinquish their passions; they just need to figure out for themselves how and when to fit them in.

Stranger things have happened. "I got a B- on my physics test!" read the text last week from my high school junior, who would much rather be out running or chatting on line with friends or, frankly, having root canal than thinking about physics. But a B-, that was big for her in a class she despises and finds incomprehensible. (My high school physics teacher used to wake me up by using me in hypotheticals: a squirrel shoots a bee bee gun at Lisa, who is sitting on a greased roof....) "Engineering School here we come!" I responded. "Yay!" was her reply. As passionate a communication as I have received from her in a while. My daughter the engineer. The passionate engineer.

Zen Diagram

Maybe one day, for all of these kids, passion will merge with the lucrative, and the things they most enjoy will not have to wait for some elusive chunk of free time that might never arrive.

All of it, I told the high school girl. There's no reason why you cannot pursue it all.

Pandora's Box Cutter

A few weeks ago I misplaced a box cutter at work. Several days later, the person whose box cutter I had misplaced was fired. I felt the same way I did in my high school French class one day, when I had been talking to my friend and only she got in trouble. Sometimes life just isn't fair.

Though my feelings of survivor's guilt have abated (the keeper of the box cutter, who looked as if she would slit my throat with it when she realized I had lost it, simply sucked at her job), my coworkers have done their best to remind me every chance they get that I am a thief. It didn't help when I accidentally left the shop the other day sporting several necklaces and bracelets that did not belong to me. I have been branded -- and not in a positive, retail strategy kind of way. I am a repeat offender, an incorrigible miscreant, a taker of things that are not rightfully mine.

It's no different from marriage. You lie once and you're a pathological liar, unworthy of ever being trusted again. The branding runs so deep that you actually start to believe your divorce attorneys, who have billed you for almost three years' worth of nonsense to bring you back to the same deal you would have made on day one, just with less money in the pot, are people you can trust, who have your best interests at heart. Under cover of carefully crafted billing statements, they have stolen from you repeatedly, and will happily continue to do so until the well is dry, yet we embrace them as our guardian angels in an endless battle against somebody once so cherished and trusted we allowed him or her to watch us pee.

And so it went, when, yet again, the angels from hell, who have already pocketed the equivalent of several college tuitions, trashed what two reasonably intelligent people had agreed to on their own and embarked on the latest frenzy of bizarre documents and filings. Cha-ching, cha-ching. Good thing I still can't find the box cutter. (No, of course I am not suggesting I would harm anybody; I just want to shred all the paper. Yes, that's it.) Making do with a nibble of a miraculous little anxiety pill, I set out instead to reason with my estranged husband. After all, we do not steal from each other on a daily basis; we only lied to each other once or twice.

He told me why his botox addled attorney butchered our latest agreement. I assured him her fears were unfounded, and that I would never do what she told him I might do, which, by the way, was continue to drag him back into court in the years to come. "Would your attorney allow you to take my word for something?" he asked, knowing the answer was surely NO, particularly since allowing me to do so would crash the fee gravy train.

"Of course not," I admitted. "But it's not up to him." There is nothing like a little self-assured sounding declaration of independence to make my husband stop and think, maybe for a second even, that I am not a complete loser. He was taking a long time to respond, so I added what I thought was a very good point. "If you think I will ever give another cent to a matrimonial attorney to deal with our personal problems, you are nuts." I try to avoid name calling, but I thought I really needed to drive the point home to get things moving. Our tendency to brand people as liars and thieves just because of one or two little missteps along the way notwithstanding, we both agreed we could still, after all these years, take each other's word. And if we were willing to take that big step, it would be like winning our own miniature power ball. Very miniature, but I'm all about aiming low and appreciating the little things.

The Matrimonial Bar

Who knows? Maybe the matrimonial bar monkeys will be off our backs soon, and we will be able to put this whole nightmare behind us. I am a person who rescues lost dogs when nobody else will take the trouble to stop and possibly get their hands smelly (another story for another time). I am polite to people who do not have my best interests at heart, because I don't want to hurt their feelings. My husband washed floors and cleaned toilets in a nursing home as a teenager, and sends leftover home cooked delicacies home to me from time to time, and so far nothing has appeared to be laced with hemlock. We both screwed up a few times, but I like to think we're basically decent people. After all, our kids all turned out to be pretty damn good citizens. At the risk of setting the bar pretty low, we are not, and never would be, matrimonial attorneys. At least not in the system as we know it.

And we still both have a pretty good sense of humor after all we've put each other through (mine's better and more sophisticated of course), which I think counts for a lot and will help us come out on the other side a little beaten up but still standing and much wiser. Which is more than I can say for the keeper of the box cutter at work. Sure, she was lousy at her job, but I really think the axe fell because of her complete lack of a sense of humor. To say the least, she was not amused by my cavalier attitude toward the whole affair. My "let her use scissors" suggestion was not well received.

Sometimes life isn't fair. But sometimes, in the long run, I like to think it is.

The Years in Pictures

Every year at Thanksgiving, we take a group picture. It's always the same crowd, with an occasional noteworthy absence, an occasional noteworthy (or at least snicker worthy) add-on.  Thank goodness we weren't digital until recently; the albums filled with indelible images of unwelcome strays who have tempted various relatives over the years to stick their heads in the oven alongside the turkey still provide us with hours of entertainment and fodder for conversations when the stuffing knocks the small talk out of us.

Though he joined us with a well-timed phone call from Japan (we were all subdued and bloated as we shoveled in our last forkfuls of dessert), my son, for the first time in group picture history, was not present. My cousin will photo shop him in, but it won't be the same. (One year he photo shopped his sister in, looking incongruously slim and elegant in a cocktail dress while the rest of us offered up fake smiles and our aching bellies rested heavily on our laps.) I had already missed the first attempted call from across the International Date Line, so I set the ringer on my cell phone to "rude and obnoxious" and tucked it inside my boot to ensure I could continue my gluttony freely and not miss him again. I summoned my daughters and my brother for a turn. The cousins were happily occupied with our newest one year old, and my mom wouldn't hear him anyway. I would just let her scream into a dead phone later, and tell her her grandson enjoyed hearing her voice.

We look forward to holidays. Even when we dread them, there is a piece of most of us that needs them -- the connection, the catching up, the unique feeling of belonging in a room full of people where everyone has some variation of the same familial blood flowing through (or close enough to) their veins.  As painful as the long day of idle conversation and gluttony can be, we create our memories this way. (Our most cherished memory, by the way, is the group picture memorializing the visit one year of a cousin's trashy girlfriend; she somehow ended up smack in the center of the group picture, larger than life, and to this day, though we don't remember her name, we miss her terribly.) We approach each year with optimism, lying to each other about how great we look, promising not to fall prey to the annual gastronomic disturbances, pretending we give each other more than a passing thought during most of the intervening months, professing our supreme devotion to family as we deny our preoccupations with the realities of our everyday lives. The haze of alcohol and too much food clouds our brains, and we actually start to feel a fondness for the Pilgrims, folks who probably would have viewed our mad bunch of Jews and Jew lovers as another tribe load of savages standing in their way. The polished Tory Birch buckles on our ballet slippers notwithstanding, the fundamentalist Pilgrims would not have been fooled, would have run us out of town faster than you can send a smoke signal. Just sayin'.

My son is as cynical as they come, and I at least pretend to be. On the phone, I was as nonchalant as I could be, told him about some of the day's craziness, acted as if I did not resent at all having to hand over the phone so my daughters and my brother could have a turn. I did my best to conceal my impatience as I waited for them all to finish their inane conversations, so I could continue mine. I demanded that they pass the phone to me once more, so I could tell him...tell him what? Absolutely nothing. He filled in the silence, telling me about his work, his travels, the Thanksgiving dinner he would be attending over the weekend and how difficult it is to find chocolate turkeys in Japan. Blah blah blah, I heard, as I could feel my meltdown beginning to form behind my eyeballs. Why aren't you here with us? I wanted to scream. It fills me with pride to tell people my son -- the adventurer, the writer, the worldly savant -- is living and working in Japan. It will fill me with pride and great joy to tell people my son -- the adventurer, the writer, the worldly savant -- once lived and worked in Japan, and has returned somewhere closer to home. But don't tell him I said that.

I had to pry the phone out of my fingers after he hung up. As bored as he sounded, I know him well enough to know he felt some inexplicable sense of longing for our hectic, drawn out, often incredibly infuriating annual family get together, not quite as overwhelming as the sense of loneliness I felt without him there, but close. No amount of photo shopping will fool me. His absence is, to say the least, noteworthy, and, hopefully, temporary.

Time marches on though. Our newest family member (you may recall his ill-timed birth last year caused us all to miss Thanksgiving as we know and expect it to be, and we are still recovering from that blow) is older than my son was in his first annual group picture. I can remember when his dad, now well into his thirties, was born. Weird. My mother is the last of our parents  remaining, which means my generation of the family tree will, before we know it, be the fragile branch at the top. Thirty-somethings and forty-somethings, kids I could swear were just in diapers, will soon be in charge. Moving up the family hierarchy, when you get to be my age, is anything but a promotion.

Thank goodness we'll always have the group pictures, to remind us of how things were supposed to be. With an occasional temporary glitch for comic relief.

The Stuffing of Life

It never ceases to amaze me, the sight of New York City from the air after dark.

Last night, as we leveled off before the final descent into LaGuardia, I pressed my face against the window and watched the light show unfold. The Statue of Liberty heralded our arrival, looking like a small jewel in the converging waters of the two rivers, dwarfed now by the new tower piercing the black sky at Ground Zero.  The lights of cars on the busy highways lining the East River on both banks gave the impression that the city itself was on the move, made it seem as if the sparkling bridges criss-crossing the water might somehow dislodge themselves and float into the harbor. I felt comforted by the twinkling multi-colored spire of the Empire State Building, still, despite all the changes to the skyline over the years, dominating the midtown skyline. Dependable, a venerable survivor.

Reluctantly, I pulled my face back from the glass; time to kick my bag under the seat in front of me, check my seat belt, ready myself for landing and avoid the sharp admonishment of a tired flight attendant. The man in the seat next to me was staring at me, a kind but puzzled stare. I felt embarrassed for having obstructed his view, but nowhere near as embarrassed as I had felt earlier in the flight when I uttered some gibberish in my half-sleep, drawing his attention away from his IPad. (He had seemed willing to chat; I pretended to not know where the noise had come from.) Certainly nowhere near as embarrassed as I would have felt had he woken from his own restless sleep to find me struggling in vain to see the print on the crossword puzzle I had retrieved from the floor, gazing up overhead to be sure my light was on. (It was; instead of grabbing my reading glasses from my purse, I had grabbed my sunglasses, and, I would imagine, was looking like a bit of a lunatic).

Yes, after so many years of approaching New York by air, though I have become a dotty middle aged woman who talks to herself, wears sunglasses in the dark, and practically licks the window to see the sights, I still feel childlike and small. Mesmerized, rude, goofy, disoriented. Playing dress-up with oversized sunglasses. And still, after so many years, looking forward – in an ambivalent sort of way – to catching a glimpse of my mom as she awaits my arrival in the terminal.

My daughter spotted her first. There she was, in the same spot she has been in for years, first with my father by her side, then alone. Despite the crowd, she always stands out, with her helmet of hair blown and sprayed completely out of proportion in preparation for the holidays, her Burberry plaid coat and Fendi pocketbook looking exceptionally large around her shrinking frame. I can tell from the smiles on the faces of the folks surrounding her that they all know everything about us – our names, where we live, how excited she is that we are coming in. I always half expect to see some of these people sitting at our Thanksgiving table later in the week.

It is hard to believe my mom is on the verge of turning eighty-two. It is just as hard to believe I am no longer carrying a baby or schlepping bags of picked through snacks or sporting some child’s puke on the front of my shirt. It’s just me and my youngest this time, and we did not even sit together. Her brother is in Japan, her sister is on a different plane, her father will just have to wait until Christmas for the big family visit on his side of things. I wonder where the years have gone, wonder how many more years there can possibly be of coming home to the inherently annoying but oddly comforting sight of mom waiting for me at the airport. I know she is thinking the same thing. Frankly, she’s been thinking it for five hours. (She’s been at the airport since before we took off from Chicago; you never know how much traffic you’ll hit).

When our plane finally bounced onto the runway, the kind man next to me asked me how I did on my crossword puzzle. Since my eyes had only been open briefly, and then only with sunglasses impeding their view, I had not done very well at all. I wondered if he had caught the whole sunglasses episode and had been too polite to say anything. He admitted he had not gotten very far with his reading either. I wondered if he, too, was feeling preoccupied and a bit childlike, coming home, maybe, to a life lived in another time.

We have been through a lot over the years – my mom, me, New York. My children too, but – happily -- they have not yet crossed the threshold into an adulthood where a shrinking future becomes dwarfed by a looming past. Hopefully, they have lots of time ahead of them to explore, to change, time before they need to seek comfort in the humdrum routine of being welcomed by an elderly mother who defies old age and a grand city that continues to beat back adversity like nobody’s business.

Birds of a feather, those two, two tough old birds. They go well together, my mom and New York, and, every once in awhile, it’s nice – amazing even -- to come home.

(And speaking of birds…Happy Thanksgiving to all!!!!!)

Heaven Can Wait (A Few Weeks)

Contrary to what I have been led to believe all these years, Jews do believe in heaven and hell. Good news in and of itself, as it is reassuring to know there are goals far more lofty (and, no doubt, far more attainable) than making Jewish mothers proud.

The news of a belief in the afterlife was alarming at first. Though my Talmudic knowledge is admittedly fuzzy, I do recall learning that we Jews justify our greedy partaking of the pleasures of life because we do not believe in heaven and hell, and, put simply, there's just no time like the present. We live without fear of Satanic punishment or the promise of heavenly reward, which pretty much gives us license to party. WWJD, meet WTF! We enjoy life with wild abandon, as long as we go to medical school or law school and try not to incur the wrath -- or, worse still, the disappointment -- of mom. Daunting, yes, but nowhere near as terrifying as the prospect of being condemned to eternal supernatural pain. Damn close, sometimes, but still, no contest.

As it turns out, there is no cause for alarm and, in fact, there is every reason to rejoice, even though there's a good chance I, for one, will be doing some time in hell. Apparently, we Jews take advantage of the pleasures of life not because there are no consequences but because God commands us to, because asceticism in any form is a sin. Woohoo! Thou shalt be hedonistic. Though we have few specific details about heaven, and I can only hope it's not the brightly lit (oy, how unflattering) community in the clouds (oy, the humidity) filled with cherubic angels buzzing overhead (oy, what do they feed those kids?) and presided over by some old and frail saint (give me a good deadbolt and a suburban police force trained to keep outsiders out any time). All I know is it is likely a wonderful place where good folks are rewarded for their good works on Earth, or at least their good intentions. I'm guessing there's a Bloomingdale's on every block (where every day is "friends and family" day), a beach where I look great in a bikini, and no matrimonial attorneys anywhere in sight.

But wait, the news gets even better. Hell, for us, is not a fire filled place with no windows. There is no Satan, and nobody -- not even the Jews -- has horns. There is no Dante-esque sign on the door saying "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." A God who commands hedonism would never be so hypocritical. Hell, for Jews, while certainly not paradise, is no worse than a no-frills spa. It's a place where our imperfect souls can go to get purified, a place where, at worst, we may have to forego fancy facials and mud wraps and settle for a bit of tasteless food and an amateur massage on a shaky table in an unairconditioned room (oy, so hot, but it's not like we'll get burned). And Jews, notoriously liberal, have a like minded God, who has handed down quite lenient sentencing guidelines. No matter how impure we have been, the maximum sentence is a year, and most of us get sprung much earlier. Some of us can even be tweaked in twenty-four hours -- kind of a no-frills day spa. There's probably an occasional Groupon deal for the borderline cases, the ones who just miss the non-stop flight to heaven.

I've always been skeptical about the non-existence of an afterlife, and I have tried to comfort myself with the notion that Hell is where all the other fun people are. True enough, but we'd probably not be allowed to play with each other, and there's nothing fun about that. I suddenly feel as if I've been given a new lease on life -- and death. A few years in my double wide will prepare me well for a year or less in a place without eucalyptus scented towels and fancy French wine with dinner.

As the Bible says, "thank God I was born a Jew." Well, it doesn't exactly say that, but I'm starting to believe it's a pretty good deal.

High School Jew-bilee

Gawking is bad form, particularly when you are the designated "gawkee."

How does one explain to a group of high school students in a Catholic school what it means to be a Jew? As the kids filed in, the boys in their button down shirts and ties, the girls in their pleated plaid skirts and knee socks, I was relieved to be sitting behind the desk, my fashionable thigh high boots discreetly hidden from view. I realized I had way more questions for this curious and somewhat alien looking band of young creatures than I had answers about myself. The caged lioness on display had become the spectator, peering wide-eyed at the strange cluster of humans gathering to question me about my mysterious tribe. 

While I gawked rather shamelessly, these teenagers behaved with a startling degree of decorum. Though some cast occasional surreptitious glances my way, for the most part they betrayed little interest in me as they went about their alien rituals.  My social graces, learned as they were in a chaotic Jewish home and reinforced in a public high school where, some days, survival trumped any objectives scribbled on the chalk board, leave little room for subtlety. There was nothing surreptitious about my open mouthed utter fascination with the uniformity of their uniforms, their sartorial anonymity, their exotic customs. In unison, they rose, staring at something I, for the life of me, could not see (for a moment I thought it was me until I realized they were praying; even my delusions of grandeur have their limits), spoke some words, and made some brisk sweeping motions with their hands. "Our father," garble garble garble, hands moving up and down, side to side in front of their hearts. Talk about tribal. I  grew up thinking the moments before class started were reserved for the throwing of spit balls.

As it turned out, the creatures spoke English, in fact seemed to be members of a highly intelligent life form. I resisted the urge to roam the hallways and peer into other classrooms, just to see the other exhibits. What I had begun to refer to as "Jew and Tell" began in earnest. As it turns out, their initial show of indifference was just politeness; they were as curious about me as I was about them. With some gentle (or should I say gentile) prodding, I encouraged them to ask questions. Even armed as I was with a lifetime's worth of meshuganah Jewish anecdotes, I felt certain nothing could be as fascinating as what they could tell me about why all those girls had chosen to wear the same plaid skirt this morning. In a rare show of good taste, I did not ask.

After a brief but uncomfortable silence, one brave soul asked me to name my favorite Jewish celebrity. "Jon Stewart," I told them. They seemed to approve. "Although Jesus was a bit of a rock star," I added, thinking we would all relax a bit if we remembered we share a favorite son. They laughed. I thought about the Catholic school around the corner from where I grew up, the girls and boys in uniforms who walked the same sidewalks as we did at the end of the school day. We never spoke, rarely even acknowledged each other's existence. I wonder now whether they viewed us with as much suspicion and curiosity as we viewed them. All I know is my mom assured me that despite the modest skirts and all the virgin Mary crap, those Catholic school girls were promiscuous little sluts. I so wanted to be Catholic.

Jew and Tell sped by, as the students and I traded ideas about religion in general, and all sorts of stories about religious and cultural customs, from food to prayers to games to mourning rituals, and to the beauty of Christmas time in New York. Toward the end, one girl asked me what I thought was most different about my childhood from theirs. That one was easy. "We Jews address our parents' friends by their first names," I told them. They all nodded in immediate agreement, some pointing to the vivacious Italian girl in the front row as a notable exception. An interesting example about how incorrect  overgeneralizations and assumptions can be; about how each of them, as individuals, and I might have lots more in common than we think we do. 

I emerged, a bit sheepishly, from behind the desk to wave goodbye to my new young friends. Come to think of it, boots and plaid go quite well together. 

52 Pick-Up

I ushered out my year of being fifty-two crumpled up on the unseasonably warm November pavement, retching like a high school kid after her first illicit drinking party. I was just coherent enough to wonder where the fun was in all of that. With some help, I picked myself up, and went home to put me, and a year filled with its share of silly games and bad jokes (and, to be fair, some good stuff), to bed.

I ushered in my fifty-third birthday with a pounding headache and a firm resolve to stay "up." And never to drink on an empty stomach. The barrage of well-wishing texts and phone calls began early, topped off by a steady stream throughout the day of "happy birthday" comments on my Facebook timeline (whatever that is), all making me feel optimistic and a tad bit more special than I actually am. I felt ready to pick up the pieces of a hectic fifty-two, and with the help of several doses of Advil, I felt more than ready to crack open a new deck and deal myself a new hand for fifty-three.

When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping, which is exactly how my daughters and I kicked off my celebratory weekend in downtown Chicago. Retail therapy is a potent narcotic, not to be overused or abused, naturally, but highly effective whether you are shopping for yourself or for others. Three hours passed in what seemed to be a minute, and as we carried our packages back to our hotel, exhausted and starving, we had a bit of an extra spring in our collective step. The only thing that could have made the afternoon nicer was having my son join us, and he may have even viewed it as an appealing alternative to what he was actually doing -- playing Santa in some shopping mall in Japan. WTF?

Dinner, at a favorite old haunt in the neighborhood where my husband and I started building our little family so many years ago, was festive and delicious, made even better as we sported some of our new purchases. We exited to a ridiculously balmy November night, and decided to walk the almost four miles back to our hotel. It was a walk through my early years in Chicago, a tour of long forgotten neighborhoods that, despite some updates and changes in dining and shopping establishments, seemed strangely familiar. The sidewalks were busy enough to feel lively but not too busy to impede our progress. The residential blended seamlessly into the commercial; even the dogs out for their evening walks appeared to relish the diverse sounds and smells of their surroundings. There were couples and individuals and groups, there were people of different ages and nationalities. People from all walks of life, Chicago natives no matter where they came from, enjoying the rare beautiful night in a city that rarely sleeps but certainly hibernates for a few challenging months of winter.

Memories of my young adulthood flooded back. Runs along the lake front. Leisurely walks home from work. Strolls to the zoo with two young children in a cumbersome double stroller. Old guys (meaning guys in their thirties, maybe forties) playing sixteen inch softball. Hot summer afternoons at crowded beaches with the city skyline as a backdrop. Funny how selective memory can be. As we walked, I recalled no frustration with work, no ennui, no tiring days taking care of kids and trying to escape for an occasional night out. Certainly no marital strife, just all the good stuff, in a place that did nothing but twinkle, as it did last night. Not even the occasional breeze whipping hardened fall leaves and errant beach sand in our faces could dampen my recollections of a place and a time I longed to recapture. If only for the chance to appreciate it more -- get a bit of a do-over.

Back at the hotel, our feet a little achy but our spirits high, we feasted on my favorite kind of birthday cake and watched a movie. Okay, well I may have missed most of the middle, but since it was still technically my birthday when it ended my daughters were kind enough to fill in some of the gaps for me. Even thirty-three floors up, we could feel the energy of Michigan Avenue, sense the life that would continue on well into the night, long after most of suburbia has fallen into a restless middle aged sleep.

My game of 52 pick up is over, and the first hand of my year of being fifty-three has been dealt. So far, so good. My house of cards has been battered but is still standing. In these days of apocalyptic storms and changing climates beyond my control, I am thankful for that.

In a State

It's Election Day, and, as I have for at least several weeks, I woke in a blue state.

Blue because I am weary, weary from the incessant barrage of political ads on television, the enormous stacks of tree killing postcards in my mailbox, the infuriating ring of the doorbell when I'm trying to hide in my house and avoid everyone I know, not to mention folks I don't know. Apparently some local campaign wonks have determined I am more likely to vote for their candidate if some "neighbor" rings my doorbell to personally hand me a flyer that I will immediately toss into the recycling bin. Let's just say pulling me away from a tense game of spider solitaire is not the way to get on my good side.

I was born and raised a New York Jew, and I am a woman living in deep dark upper middle class suburbia, which means I am likely to vote with my left leaning conscience and remain blissfully ignorant of the negative impact that could have on my already beaten up Chanel purse.   I suppose I could put a bit more thought into things, but trying to figure out from all the ads and flyers which deadbeat dad or tax evader or other criminal or miscreant or basically heinous human being should get my stamp of approval would turn my already blue state into a state of utter confusion and, really, who needs that shit? Call me simple, but all I know is I will do my part to make sure no woman will ever associate a coat hanger with anything other than, well, her coat closet.

In my defense, though I have admittedly given up trying to determine from all the negative ads which politician is most worthy of jail time, I have tried to consider other factors in making my decisions. Like name recognition. I figure lawn signs can give me a good idea of which candidates are popular, and if they are popular, they must be nice people. So I took a drive around the neighborhood the other day, taking my own little straw poll based on signage. No luck:



My mind remained open this morning as I drove up to the polling place. I ignored the clusters of signs as I walked to the entrance, hoping for some sort of epiphany before I received my ballot. I joined a small group of voters approaching the glass doors, and we were greeted by a candidate. I recognized her name from the signage, but I couldn't tell you what she's running for or against whom. She stood next to two signs; one said "Vote here;" the other "Vote aqui." She waved, identified herself, and said "Thanks for your guysizz support!" WTF? Maybe my bar is pretty low, but that didn't sound like English, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't Spanish either.

An epiphany! My blue state is starting to fade.

Slices of Life

My childhood friend, who has already had a year filled with too much tragedy and loss, is now dealing with the aftermath of "superstorm" Sandy. With her suburban home temporarily uninhabitable, she is seeking refuge in the Brooklyn apartment where she grew up. An apartment where her vibrant mom always was, and now is not, having succumbed to cancer this summer.

She is as strong willed and seemingly invincible as her mom was, yet my friend suddenly feels as powerless as the fuses in her house. She berates herself for being cranky, knowing others suffered far more damage from Sandy than she did. "What's my excuse?" I asked her as I sat sipping my coffee in a warm and cozy Starbucks eight hundred miles away from the devastation, my east coast family members safe and fully wired. I am as cranky as they come. Cranky because my chronically aching hip kept me from running a race with my daughters, and I have been relegated to the role of chauffeur and, after I finish my coffee, shivering spectator.  Honestly, though, there are lots of folks out there who have it a lot worse than I do. Ya think?

Trying to conserve the precious ounces of gas she has left in her car, my friend has taken a few strolls down our gritty Brooklyn memory lane. As if the ongoing news of Sandy's aftermath isn't shocking enough, she informed me yesterday that our old candy store, Morty & Eddie's, is now called Halal Chinese and Afghan cuisine. It makes me wonder what the kids in P.S. 217 do after lunch. Are they imaginative enough to hide aromatic Asian food in their desks? Worse still, have they never known the pleasure of sucking quietly on a jawbreaker for an hour to wash away the taste of a peanut butter sandwich? Must they suck on an eggroll instead, try to concentrate during those sleepy afternoon hours while picking stringy vegetables from their teeth?

Time passes, and things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but either way we cannot help but yearn for what used to be. Yesterday, as I wandered down the northern stretch of State Street in Chicago's Loop for the first time in years, I was shocked to see how different it looked from a day, more than twenty-seven years ago, when I had found myself there for the first time. It was dirty and crowded and seedy and tacky. It is still tacky, but in a sterile sort of way. Old run down discount shops have been replaced by gargantuan bargain chain stores with polished windows and colorful signs advertising enticing sales. There are fewer panhandlers, no homeless folks huddled in doorways wearing countless layers of clothing. Like the dusty shelves and narrow passageways of Morty & Eddies, now supplanted by something called "cuisine," the grit of State Street has been overrun by the illusion of glitz.

I know it's not so much the grime that I miss; it's simply the old days. Jawbreakers were a lot of work. Morty & Eddies was claustrophobic. State Street was downright icky. But, then again, back in those days, all our parents seemed invincible, my hip didn't feel like it was about to break in two, and my friend didn't have to fret about what her house was going to look like when she finally returned  from her surreal visit to the apartment in which she grew up.

The good news, or the sad truth, I suppose, is that years from now my friend and I and lots of others like us will look back upon the fall of 2012 and think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And we all know full well there's nothing so special about sliced bread.

Call Me Crazy

"Call me Anna."

"What???"

"Cong."

"Mom, stop voice texting!"

Nobody understands me. Not even Siri, or her cousin who's in charge of the voice activated texting end of things. I try to be a good citizen and follow the rules and I take advantage of all the high tech hands free options on my iPhone while I'm driving and I get nothing but grief. Siri's evil cousin twists everything I say, and my daughter's disdain continues to grow.

On the fourth or fifth try, the little person inside my phone finally got my message right. "I'm coming!" By that time, of course, I was already there, and my daughter was actually waiting outside the school entrance to meet me. She approached the car with some trepidation. I burst out laughing.

"What's so funny?" She didn't seem amused. "I was getting a little creeped out that somebody named Anna was texting me from my mom's phone." Aw. I was touched. She cared.

"Well you can call me Anna," I told her. I figure it's a lot nicer than whatever else she calls me in her head.

"Weirdo!"

Like weirdo, for example.

Anna. I like it. It was my grandmother's name (depending on which translation of some indecipherable Russian letters you use). It's old fashioned and modern at the same time, one of those names that doesn't get stuck with just one generation. Unlike Seymour, for example (my father's name), a name that appeared like some cruel joke in about 1917 and slipped quickly out of favor, I would guess, as soon as those poor tykes reached school age and faced the mockery of their peers. Peers with names like Stanley and Irving, no less. Names that boast longevity only because somewhere along the way folks stopped naming their dogs Fido.

Frankly, I'm pretty sure Anna is out of the question, and for now, I'm stuck with an occasional exasperated "Mom!" Not soft and feminine and flowing and timeless like Anna, but at least it's an acknowledgment of my existence. It beats the crap out of the silent, stink-eye stare.

The next time I voice text her to tell her I'm coming, I'm going to just instruct Siri's cousin to transmit the "call me Anna" message. On an especially good day, it might elicit a chuckle. On an ordinary day, she'll just know what it means. That I'm on my way. Call me crazy, but I'll always be there, no matter what.

The I of the Storm

The East Coast is bracing for the storm to end all storms ("see," said my daughter, "the end of the world is beginning..."), and the local news shows have been, as usual, looking for that all important "Chicago connection." It is, after all, or should be, all about us.

As far as I can tell, as I gaze out the window at the low, late afternoon sun of a beautiful October day, we folks here in the Midwest fit into the day's news of natural disasters only in a geographical sense, in that we are situated somewhere to the left of the hurricane churning up the Atlantic and somewhere to the right of the earthquake prompting tsunami warnings somewhere in the Pacific. Once again, we just sit here taking up space in the middle. The place where nothing happens. For me, we are like the hour or so between the opening scenes of a movie and the climax, the time when I generally doze off and don't really miss anything important.

Overlooked so often, we crave attention. "Look at us, look at us," we cry out, mostly to ourselves, since everybody else is paying attention to the more important things going on in the world's foreground. But being self-important is better than being not important at all, so our newscasters do not disappoint. Today, while folks on the Jersey shore were doing the opposite of partying and a crane was dangling precariously off a high rise in midtown Manhattan and Big Apple grocery stores were down to their last beer and my brother the Jewish doctor was preparing to stay indefinitely at the hospital and my eighty-one year old mother sat nervously looking out the window on Ocean Parkway hoping she would not actually see the ocean come rushing down the street, our local newscasters were wringing their hands over the winds that might end up swirling over Lake Michigan later this evening. A tempest in a teapot, I suppose, but it's our tempest, and it's the best we can do. Okay, the bikers and the joggers on the lake shore might have to head indoors to the health club for a day or two, but I'm guessing not too many people are actually going to be out on Lake Michigan on an evening in late October, no matter how pretty the day has been. If winds blow and waves churn and nobody is there to feel it, is it really happening?

Sometimes it's not such a bad thing to fly under the radar. If this is, as my daughter suggested this morning, the beginning of the end of the world, I'm thinking I'd like to distance myself from any connection Chicago might have to what's happening in the corners of the world that get attention whether they like it or not. I still refuse to believe the end of the Mayan calendar has anything to do with the end of the world; I believe with all my heart that they simply ran out of ink. Or got bored.

But if, by chance, I am wrong (hey, it's happened once or twice), I will take comfort in the notion that they probably forgot about the Midwest anyway. I'm already making arrangements for my loved ones who live where everything happens to come here for December, just in case. To the place in the middle of the movie, the place that could easily have been forgotten on the cutting room floor when the Mayans were figuring out the ending.

Charlotte's Web Site

I am now the proud proprietor of my very own web site. Woohoo! Twenty-first century here I come!

So anyway, the other day, as I lay helplessly on an inaptly named massage table (inaptly named because "massage" connotes some sort of pleasantness) I was telling the guy wielding the loudly vibrating instrument of torture against my aching muscles about it. Well, trying to tell him, between moans. Moans which must have sounded like moans of pleasure to the geezer lying serenely on the table next to me, who suddenly went from looking like a dusty old corpse to a frisky and very dirty old man.

"A web site?" he purred. "Really?"

I tried my best to purr back, although I probably sounded like a cougar in the throes of a deadly cat fight. "Yes. My very own web site." I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I figured out pretty quickly he was not assuming my website had anything to do with the drudgery of helping kids craft college application essays. My feline grin was no doubt a bit scary, but for him I think that was a good thing, adding a little something to the sexual tension that had gripped his once lifeless form. "AARP porn," I elaborated, winking as I grimaced my way through a particularly painful attempt at unknotting my hip.

Frisky doesn't even begin to describe what he looked like then. His entire body literally started to shake with a renewed youthful energy. Granted, my body was shaking too, but that was because somebody appeared to be driving a car across my back. I don't know what had excited the guy more -- the prospect of some new pay per view porn site filled with glistening women whose body parts were still under factory warranty, or the prospect of his AARP discount. I needed to clarify.

"AARP porn," I repeated over the din of the vehicle taking a joy ride over my piriformis. "The stars have the AARP cards," I explained, thinking it would be a cute party game to try to locate those damn cards (which I toss in the trash when they arrive in bulk around every birthday) within the wrinkles and folds. And there's no discount, butthead I thought to myself, although if there was an incentive I could provide to some younger male viewers to sign on and act as occasional arm candy and sex toy I would be sure to offer it up.

The old guy's body suddenly looked tired again. I was losing his attention, and, well, it's not as if I can afford to turn my other vibrating cheek at anyone these days. Even an octogenarian, especially if he has a big bank account and non-arthritic fingers, can look hot in the correct lighting (correct lighting being anything other than the bright ceiling fluorescents hanging directly overhead). Hoping his eyes were even worse than mine, I tried to look sexy as I winced. My guy was now pressing the vibrating instrument of torture against my hamstring. Somebody was getting jollies, and it sure wasn't me. And my geezer neighbor was back in corpse pose.

Food for thought, though, I suppose. If I don't get any nibbles for my writing services, I might just consider some more scintillating options. Writing, writhing? Really, what's the difference? Whatever I need to do to put food on the Formica table in the double wide.

Good Fortune 500

For Manny, it was the equivalent of a delicious roll in rabbit shit without having to be tossed outside as if he were, say, a dog. It was 4:30 in the morning, and we were doing laundry. The sweet aroma of worn underwear and socks, itself enticing (to him, not me), was suddenly no match for the pungent vapors seeping through the porous brick exterior of our house into the mud room. A skunk had clearly taken aim, and all that stood between us and a good soak in tomato juice, dishwashing liquid, and baking soda was the door to the side yard. Funny, it hasn't been much use as a door for several years, stuck as it is in the shut position.  And though I have learned over the years to never let a closed door interfere with my dreams, I was quite content to allow this one to thwart the nightmare that is a direct skunk hit.

Often, in the middle of the night, I lie awake contemplating the many ways in which I have wronged my children. Sometimes, for a change of pace, I lie awake contemplating how I have wronged other people. No doubt, my children -- and those other people -- lie awake on occasion as well, contemplating the ways in which I have wronged them. At least we're all on the same page. Even the neighborhood skunks try to get in on the action every now and then, punish me somehow for what I have done.

But that door, welded shut to keep me and Manny inside and relatively unscathed while Pepe le Pew flipped its tail at us, has become a symbol to me. A symbol of hope, of auspicious beginnings, of a rosy future that most assuredly will not be cut short by the dire consequences predicted as a result of the Mayans having run out of ink to complete their calendar. Life may be filled with narrow escapes, but it will go on, and it will be free of foul odors and baths in tomato juice. Even days that begin inauspiciously with pre-dawn trips to the laundry room will show signs of optimism and good tidings. When I run into a closed door, I will know, from now forward, that it is closed for good reason

I plan to take full advantage of the hope offered up by that door yesterday morning, take advantage of the shift in perspective one always enjoys after a narrow escape from disaster. Yesterday, with a renewed sense of purpose, I got off to a good start. I finally ordered my new business cards, I finally created my web site, and I went to see a man about a horse. Well, actually, a woman about a job, but that sounds so ordinary and mundane. And I even started looking into vacation options for me and my youngest child this winter. After all, if we are both lying awake at night contemplating the ways in which I have wronged her, we might as well do it together for a few days at a beach front hotel in Mexico.

This post is number 500 in An Eagle's Tale. My good fortune 500. Things are looking up, and sometimes a closed door is just a closed door. Not a deterrent, not a roadblock. Just something to help keep the skunks at bay.