Lie-la-Lie

It is impromptu only in the sense that I find myself surprised to be there.

The text goes out some time on Thursday afternoon. 3:00 tomorrow. My house. I am notoriously remiss about entering contact information, but I just ask for the address and show up. It doesn't really matter whose house it is. As long as it's not mine.

It's an unlikely and motley (in a good way, kind of like a mosaic) assortment of people, the loosely organized but alarmingly cohesive group that populates my neighborhood Starbucks at dawn. The women are outnumbered, but I like to think we add a certain je ne satis quoi to the group. Really, I have no idea what it is that anyone adds, although this week I supplied the cucumbers.

It is hardly surprising that the drinks at three in the afternoon are always the same (and, yes, they involve cucumbers). Every day, while most people are still asleep, we are trickling in to our morning watering hole, where the baristas all know us by name and, if they see us coming, have our "usual" waiting for us on the counter. It is an impromptu daily gathering that requires no invitation, but we all do our best to show up, and we respect a more or less unspoken code of assigned seating. (Unspoken, that is, until somebody messes with it.)

We range in age from mid-forties to mid-seventies, but if you toss out the lowest and the highest, I find myself at the young end, which is strangely reassuring. A founder and key member recently moved out of state. Everybody pretends not to notice, but it's weird not having him here. We think he misses us, even though he is happily surrounded by children and grandchildren. We think we are that entertaining.

Had someone been a fly on the patio railing yesterday afternoon, the idea of us being entertaining would have, in and of itself, been entertaining. We sat, barely noticing the occasional horizontal drizzle blowing through, drinking our exotic gin and tonic and juniper berry and bay leaf and cucumber drinks -- it's all about the brands and the proportions, and if I reveal that, they'll have to kill me -- listening to Simon and Garfunkel and other great music from the great old days that we all remember in our own special ways, depending on where we fall on the baby boom spectrum.

Lie-la-lie. We all lost ourselves for a few moments in The Boxer. Is there anybody over forty who doesn't know all the lyrics? Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie. Paul Simon claims it was just a space filler, only temporary until he could figure out what words to say. Forty-five years later, the "real" words still haven't come, but the space filler, well, to borrow a phrase, "still remains." Lie-la-lie. Longevity, on borrowed time. The song just wouldn't be the same without the dog-eared refrain.

As I gathered up my cucumbers for the trek over to what was only my second impromptu Friday afternoon gathering, a friend texted to tell me she was in my neighborhood and wanted me to meet my new boyfriend. I was excited. "You got a new puppy?" was my reply. When you spend so much time just filling up space and reveling in the rose colored glory days of your youth, your mind forgets that, though happiness is indeed a warm puppy, there is always space for more. Happiness, that is. There was no new puppy. I assured the male human I would have looked more presentable but I had expected him to be a dog.

I could claim that my own puppy and my motley band of Starbucks friends and my pair of cucumbers for the secret drink whose name I can't remember are just space fillers, that I am waiting for something else to come along. That I am really not as settled into the booth side of the first table near the couch for the long haul. I'd be lying, though. Lie-la-lie.

Promises, Promises

When she was eight, she assured me she would always stay with me, and that she would always talk to me at dinner time. I'm no fool; I got it in writing.

At the time, I had good reason to be skeptical, even though I could not yet imagine so much as an eye roll from my youngest child. Her siblings were fourteen and fifteen, then, and had already figured out I wasn't the person they had once thought I was. The fall from grace was jarring, even though I knew, deep down, I had not really changed. All good things must end, and the elevated status that comes with being mom to young children is no exception.

I've been lucky in a lot of ways. By the time my youngest breached her promise and had perfected her silent sulk at the dinner table, the older two had resumed diplomatic relations with me. Again, I'm no fool. I knew I was still, in their eyes, pretty dumb, often annoying, and certainly not the person with whom they would choose to hang out for any length of time, but moms learn to take scraps. The truth is I even had my own friends, most of whom are as imperfect as I am. Most of them have also experienced the fall from grace, though to me they have all become more wise and more beautiful with age.

She turns nineteen today, that youngest child who assured me, so many years ago, that she would always stay with me, always talk to me at dinner time. Only one teen year left, and we have, together, weathered much of the storm. When she was fourteen, the sting of my fall was particularly sharp. I no longer had the luxury of a fall back child, one who still could not imagine not loving me and needing me with all her soul. That year, when I drove her to school in the morning, she would sit silently in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, oozing anger and disdain. As we pulled up to the drop off point, she somehow managed to extract herself from the seat belt and grab all her stuff and slam the car door without so much as a glance in my direction. Then, I would watch, mesmerized, as the nasty little shrew morphed into a friendly, human-like creature with a broad smile and a spring in her step. Busted.

Finally, I confronted her. Not in the morning, mind you, because I think I've mentioned I'm no fool, and even under the best of circumstances she was not pleasant before breakfast. She denied everything at first, but then realized maybe I had a point. For a few blissful days, she grudgingly spoke in the car on the way to school. Well, at least she grunted briefly when i asked her a question. She would sort of turn in my general direction, not totally scowl at me, and she seemed to make a concerted effort to not slam the door. I was in heaven. And relieved, I think, that I might not have to embarrass my kids with a pregnancy in my late forties just so I could have a child who would love me. For a few blissful years, anyway.

The torn and tattered promise still hangs on my bulletin board, surrounded by pictures of all three of my children at various stages of life. She is home from her first year at college, and we are navigating yet another set of new waters as we readjust to living together for a short while. The years of sullen silence are already a blur. I love how she has turned out, how all of them have turned out, but sometimes I am desperate to make time stand still. I feel like the mom in the Subaru commercial, wondering how her toddler can possibly be driving.

We will spend much of her birthday together, and she will even pretend not to mind all that much. We will reminisce, we will justify eating way too many sweets, we will laugh about that old note. I will wonder why the time seems to pass so quickly. She will wonder why everything takes so long.

Like her siblings, she won't always stay with me, and I certainly don't expect her to. But she talks to me at dinner time, and I'll take it.

On the Street Where I Lived

My first night in suburbia -- more than twenty years ago -- was eerily quiet. No ambulances speeding by, not even the buzz of some steady late night traffic. No brakes screeching, no private conversations carried in some bizarre updraft through my fifth floor window. My run the next morning was equally disconcerting. The calm, quiet darkness of the suburban streets was terrifying.

I grew up on one of the most beautiful of the mean streets of Brooklyn, I learned the rules of Ocean Parkway early. Ocean Parkway, the grand boulevard that emerges with great fanfare (or at least a large green sign) from the Prospect Expressway and rolls, unimpeded as soon as you catch the first in a series of carefully choreographed lights, right up to the Boardwalk at Coney Island and the murky Atlantic Ocean just beyond. I learned that, as tempting as it might be to take a short cut and cross over at Avenue H, which dead ended right at the entrance to my apartment building, the odds of surviving the seven lanes of Brooklyn drivers were slim. When I rode my bike, my mother always reminded me to look over my shoulder when I got to Bay Parkway, where cars seemed to take the angled turn with little regard for human life. Years later, when I would visit and go for a run, she would issue the same warning. 

On the nights my brother and I walked home from Hebrew School -- at, you guessed it, the Ocean Parkway Jewish Center -- mom would peer out from the screen door on our fifth floor terrace, waiting for us to appear on the safe side of Foster Avenue. Safe in that there were no more streets to cross. Back then, I thought it was silly. Now, I can almost feel her sigh of relief. 

This weekend, my daughter and her boyfriend ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon. They saw with their own eyes what I had only ever seen through a car windshield, the great fanfare of the green sign heralding the emergence of Ocean Parkway from the Prospect Expressway. The choreography of the lights was irrelevant as they trotted the length of the grand boulevard, unimpeded except, no doubt, by some leg cramps. They did not have to worry about the treacherous crossing at Bay Parkway, did not have to brace their ears against the wailing of ambulance sirens or the screeching of brakes. 

And, when they crossed over to the safe side of Foster Avenue, to the block where I grew up, my mother was watching. She was not, as she had been long ago, peering surreptitiously our of the screen door of our fifth floor terrace. She was downstairs, outside, in the rain, Burberry umbrella in one hand, her handmade sign in the other. I would never have believed it had I not seen the picture taken from my daughter's cell phone. My mother, her grandmother, risking her hair in the rain, holding a DIY sign. Other than the Burberry umbrella, none of it made any sense. 

Or maybe it makes perfect sense. When it comes down to it, my mother will not only risk her hair or a daunting bit of arts and crafts but would go to the ends of the universe to share a milestone with one of her children or grandchildren. And a 13.1 mile milestone through the streets of her beloved Brooklyn is certainly no exception. As she waited, peering not through a screen door but through her Chanel sunglasses (yes, in the rain), it was less a sigh of relief, I would imagine, than a feeling of pure joy that went through her as her granddaughter and crew ran by.  

Ocean Parkway has changed a lot over the years. The horse path on the east side of the street is long gone. So, too, are some of the older buildings. There are still old people sitting on the parkway benches on the west side of the street, just different old people. Still, to this day, I feel a sense of coming home when I pass under the big green sign near Fort Hamilton Parkway welcoming me to the street where I lived. Sometimes, I just miss the noise.

But it's good to know that whenever any of us head over that way, my mother is waiting, making sure we are safe. 

The Mother's Load

I first became a mother in the latter part of April, which meant I discovered fairly quickly that Mothers' Day would be my favorite Hallmark holiday.

Three years earlier, I had gotten married on Mothers' Day weekend. My own mother had thought my scheduling to be rather rude and selfish. Not as rude and selfish as my decision to marry a Catholic, but still, up there. I was forcing people to be out of town on that most sacred of days. As it turns out, as is always the case, my mother had a point. One of her friends returned home to New York that Sunday just in time to see her own ailing mother before she passed away. I am grateful, to this day, that the weather was perfect and there were no flight delays.

In the twenty-nine years since my Mothers' day wedding, in the twenty-six years since I have been on both the receiving and giving end of Mothers' day Hallmark sentiments, I have always cherished this weekend of pink ribbons and well-intentioned but unimaginative bouquets and always welcome chocolate (of the decadent milk variety, please). But the celebration has been tempered, on occasion, by loss and a fair share of mixed emotions.

This is only the third year on which I will be unmarried -- and, as it happens, without even so much as a prospect on the horizon for a Saturday night date -- on my wedding anniversary. Pretending the occasion no longer exists simply because the promises have officially been broken and repudiated never really works. This year, I marked the occasion with a brief phone call to my ex. I even got him to admit that, as ex-wives go, I could be far worse. Well, not so much admit it but acquiesce by his silence. In my book, that's a win.

I remember Mothers Day 1998 better than most. By then, I had three children, had earned more than an average share of Mothers' Day homage. I had busied myself the day before with my children's activities. Plays, soccer, an outpouring of requests by each one -- except for the almost two year old -- for me to be in several different places at once, or, in essence, for me to have to choose my favorite. I was distracted that weekend. A thousand miles away, my father was in the end stages of cancer. My mother was terrified. I found little Waterford vases filled with fake flowers at a department store at the mall. I purchased one for my mom and put it in my carry-on. I was abandoning my husband on our wedding anniversary, abandoning my children on Mothers' Day, just to go see my dying father and the broken pieces of my mother. I felt selfish. My husband booted me out the door. He occasionally had some good instincts

The Waterford vase still sits on my mother's dresser. My father slipped away the next day, when I was already back home. He knew to wait until I arrived back in Chicago safely; he waited for my call, and only then felt ready to begin the process of dying. The real process, I mean. Not the slow march that had become a little quicker in the last few months, but the end game. My guess is he might have been able to talk, say a few words, but he chose not to. What, after all, could he say? My mother held the phone to his ear while I told him I loved him. He heard me, I know, and then he went away.

For a long time, I regretted not staying in New York just one more day. I was thirty-eight, then, and I still had a lot to learn. My father had been a parent a lot longer than I had, and he wasn't going anywhere until he knew I was back with my own children, reassuring them I was still there. I may have felt as if I had been cut off at the knees, but he knew I would be all right.

My baby was napping, and my older two arrived home from school about a half hour after the phone call. They burst into the house with the relief that comes from knowing that Mom was back home, that everything was back to where it should be. We settled into a group hug. "Grandpa died," I told them as they loosened their grasp. They burst into tears, for about thirty seconds anyway. "But can we still go to the park?" At first, I was taken aback. Then I laughed. They didn't seem all that disappointed about going to the airport. After all, we would be together, and, back in those days, that was usually the point.

On Mothers' Day this weekend, I will be walking with at least one of my children, as I have for many years, to raise money for all the "pink" cancers, the ones that take mothers and wives and daughters away long before anybody is ready. Not that anybody is ever ready. I will remember, as I always do, the bright pink "housedress" I bought with my own money on a long ago Mothers' Day, a whimsical little garment my mom wore for years after that, until the pocket with the flower appliqués was hanging by a thread and the once robust fabric had been laundered to a paper thin translucency. My fashionable mother always looked most beautiful to me when she wore that housedress. I will remember the Waterford crystal vase with the fake flowers that I brought her the day before I lost my father and she lost her lifelong partner.

I will remember my very first Mothers' Day as a mother, when my husband and I walked to the zoo with our brand new baby tucked into her brand new pastel yellow stroller, completely ignorant of what this all meant. I will remember, too, my wedding day. Not with fondness or bitterness or anything other than pure nostalgia, and a bit of amusement when I think about how I never would have guessed how life would turn out. I will remember how the idea of being a mother was just about the furthest thing from my mind that day. I will remember how I worried that my mother's friend Judy would not make it home to New York in time to see her mother again. If I had known, then, what it means to be a mother, I would have known Judy's mother would do everything in her power to wait. I will remember how I have always felt a bit indebted to Judy's mother for at least taking my own mother's mind off the fact I was marrying a Catholic.

Happy Mothers' Day to all the wonderful mothers I have known, the women in my life who have taught me so much. Most importantly, happy Mothers' Day to my own mother, the woman who knows best how to drive me insane but who always, unconditionally, has my back. The strong and smart and resilient woman whom, as different as we are, I can only hope to emulate when it comes to things that really count.

And happy Mothers' Day to me. My favorite and most well-earned Hallmark holiday. Hold the ditties, hold the flowers. My three children, the fine people they have become, that is my gift. Okay, a phone call would be nice. And I'm not gonna lie -- milk chocolate is always welcome.                                                                                                                                  

Scrambled Egos: The App Smear

Nobody likes to lose. All that inspirational stuff about the failures you need to endure before achieving success may be true, but let's face it, winning is the ultimate feel-good.

My mother has always kept herself at a safe distance from anything that might put a chink in her armor, if she can help it. More often than not, failure, for my mother, is an un-coiffed head. She avoids heavy wind and she has enough umbrellas to supply a cast of extras in Mary Poppins. She has always kept herself at a safe distance from swimming pools or other large bodies of water -- with the exception of a "swimming with the dolphins" episode when she joined us in Mexico one year. She probably wouldn't risk it again -- the hair wetting, not the dolphin swimming -- but she would be the first to admit that that rare failure was a small price to pay for the bragging rights.

Preternaturally un-athletic, my mother has no trouble avoiding sports of any kind. Still, as a great lover of words, with an encyclopedic vocabulary, she is fiercely competitive and hates to lose. For as long as I have known her, she has always kept herself at a safe distance from a Scrabble board. She would just rather not play.

I, on the other hand, am competitive but very accustomed to losing, and will play anything -- as long as it's not a contact sport. (With the exception of a short ice hockey stint in my early forties, but I got to wear a lot of padding and that's a story for another time.) Like my mother, I am a lover of words, with an adequate if not encyclopedic vocabulary. I remember well the day my father came home with an ingeniously futuristic edition of Scrabble, mounted on a lazy Susan, its plastic surface landscaped with rectangular depressions so the tiles would stay in place with each spin. We kept each other honest with a dictionary close at hand. We leveled the playing field with an egg timer. I loved the rutted, revolving Scrabble board, except for when I got the urge to dump all the tiles off in a rage and fold the thing up in an emphatic act of defiance.

Scrabble was a family thing, played at the kitchen table. Other than sneaking a peak at the tile rack of the relative to your left, there were few opportunities for cheating. There are just so many trips you can make to the "bathroom" before everyone gets suspicious. It's why, I suppose, I always reserved the right to dump and fold. Not cheating so much as loss avoidance. You can't lose if nobody finishes. This, recall, was long ago, before conventional wisdom assured all us kids with fragile psyches that everybody is a winner, and nobody is keeping score. Yeah right.

These days, a good game of Scrabble is accessible to everybody at all times, day or night. Need to go out to dinner or attend a class or go grocery shopping? No problem, no egg timer required, no need for thumb twiddling. Words with Friends can travel with you anywhere. Your turn lasts as long as you need it to. Your opponent can play with someone else while you're gone. And -- as I just found out -- you can cheat. Not everybody can be a winner, but, if it's that important, you can be a Words with Friends "one to beat." You can become a legend, not just in your own mind, but in the collective, envious mind of your circle of friends who play.

I have never played Words with Friends. Maybe it's because I get a headache staring at my cell phone screen, maybe it's just because I have precious few friends. Maybe I'm becoming my mother, and I would rather not play than lose. It never occurred to me that I could simply cheat. Sheds a whole new light on things.

Maybe. There is something to be said for earning arrogance. I think there is anyway; I'm still waiting for confirmation. To me, surreptitiously relying on some computer app to rearrange an impossible set of letters into an obscure word is a bit short sighted. It seems like liposuction -- a quick fix without any long term satisfaction.

Then again, maybe long term satisfaction is overrated. I'm always up for an experiment, but I'll start slowly. Maybe there's an app for cheating at spider solitaire.

Drone Warfare

I am hard wired for imperfection, programmed for fallibility. There are worse things in life, I suppose.

There are worse things in life than losing in tennis to a tall skinny blond. Like having to take a picture standing next to her after it's over. Other than that, nothing springs to mind.

At least she was sweating, although when she removed her pony tail and headband her gorgeous mane cascaded down her shoulders in soft, gentle waves. Had I even dared to remove my pony tail and headband, my hair would have remained plastered to my head anyway. The photo session seemed to take an eternity, and my fake smile was waning. A woman sitting nearby assured me that from far away, I wouldn't look that hideous. Was there no end to the indignities?

Naturally, a friend had chosen to stop in and watch this match -- the playoff match, the match against the tall skinny blond. "You need to change your philosophy," he told me.

"I don't have a philosophy," I told him. Other than resenting the crap out of tall skinny blonds, but I kept that to myself. I think he was referring to my game.

"You should have beaten her, you know," he said. By then, I was drowning my sorrows in an Oreo Blizzard. The tall skinny blond was probably nibbling on a cucumber sandwich and some fruit. I thought about dumping the Blizzard on my friend's lap, but why relinquish the one thing that was standing between me and complete and utter despair. What I lack in tennis philosophy I more than make up for in survival instincts.

The tennis match was days ago, and I have more or less gotten over it. More or less, that is, until I stopped by to see a friend fly his drone over a local soccer field. I was not sure what to expect. When I think drone, I think of a robotic person who just puts in the time and gets the job done. No imagination, no second guessing, no deeply rooted neuroses getting in the way. Hard wired to not fail, programmed for infallibility. Like the tall skinny blond, with her golden locks temporarily tied up so she could stick to her simple yet effective game plan for an hour and a half while I sprayed balls everywhere and turned the entire miserable experience into a referendum on my life and all my shortcomings.

Okay, I know a remotely controlled aerial device has nothing in common with a tall skinny blond, except for maybe the robotic part and the complete absence of neurosis. But really, how interesting ---or attractive -- can anything be when it's robotic and completely non-neurotic. My tennis friend who had narrowly escaped a lap full of Oreo Blizzard had assured me that the tall skinny blond was not all that attractive. He is a bad liar but a good friend.

The drone, I have to admit, robotic and non-neurotic and almost trite in its UFO-ish design, was both interesting and attractive. To the untrained eye, it appears to have a limited repertoire. It lifts off, it cuts through the air swiftly and silently, gracefully circling around trees, breaking the monotony with an occasional figure eight or a gratuitous dip of a propeller -- kind of a nod to the mere mortals below.  And it is foolproof. If the battery runs low, or if the decidedly undrone-like human at the controls somehow loses control, it will get itself home. It will get the job done, and will do it again, and again, and again.

Mid flight, the drone grazed a telephone pole, but it returned unscathed, no worse for the wear. It stayed the course without missing a beat. Blond waves cascading down, as if it had not even broken a sweat. Sometimes there is great beauty in simplicity and non-neurosis. And infallibility. Maybe it was the clear blue sky. Maybe it was the long awaited warm temperatures, arriving, to the delight of many, on a Saturday. Maybe it was just the miracle of flight, one of the few things we humans just cannot do, unassisted. The drone is equipped with a camera, and, on the ground, we can use the "App" to see what the drone sees. Our view is imperfect, though, imperfect as we are. Even the tall skinny blond cannot see things from the tree line.

Hard wired for imperfection, programmed for fallibility. There are worse things in life. It helps me to appreciate the simple pleasures, like an Oreo Blizzard or a drone in flight on a beautiful spring day.