Going Nowhere Fast

At a hundred strides per minute and about a thirty per cent incline I was definitely going nowhere. As I watched the two television screens overhead -- I love multi-tasking at the gym, thanks to closed captioning -- I realized I am not alone.

Truth be told, nowhere seems like a better option than where we all seem to be heading. Then again, truth be told, the truth is overrated. On screen one, the Sunday talking heads spent a half hour talking about Donald Trump, and whether his aversion to truth telling is any different from, say, everybody else's. Okay, seriously?

The only thing that sets most politicians apart from the rest of us mortals is there's a lot more at stake when they lie. Let's face it though, in politics and in real life, "lie" is such a strong word; there are lots of shades of gray. "I did not have sex with that woman!" Only two people and a soiled dress know for sure, and different dictionaries might give us different definitions and different answers, but really, who cares? Except for Hillary, and only years later when the whole "affair" just became another little grenade for Hillary-haters to toss her way.

Mostly, for politicians, winning (or not losing what you've already won) is everything, and it's why they pay lots of money -- no doubt obtained from questionable sources -- to really smart people who know how to spin a good yarn. Most of us know what it's like to get caught with our hand in a cookie jar, and most of us know how nice it would be to have some help with the back pedaling while we're trying to floss the crumbs out of our teeth. It's human nature. In a presidential election year, it's human nature on steroids.

There are two things that set Donald Trump apart not only from the rest of us mortals but from the rest of the folks vying to be, arguably, the most powerful and important person on earth. First, he already believes he is the most powerful and important person on earth, so that's hard to top. Second -- and this is somewhat related to his penchant for delusion that led to reason number one -- he does not care about facts or crumbs in his teeth or back pedaling. Essentially, he has no shame. Look at the man's hair.

Is anyone really surprised that a whole lot of folks want him to be POTUS even though they know, deep down, he lies? Let she who has never chosen to believe her husband's answer when she asks "do these jeans make my ass look fat?" be the one to cast the first stone. People like to hear that we can easily identify all of our enemies and, as a result, easily obliterate them all. There is nothing like a basic formula to make everyone breathe a sigh of relief and sleep better at night. This isn't the first time somebody has stepped up to a soap box claiming to have a simple solution to "the problem" and gotten otherwise right thinking folks to believe him. And it certainly won't be the last.

Mostly, I shake my head in amusement at Donald Trump, but today I watched a bunch of really smart political commentators analyze why saying "your ass doesn't look fat in those jeans" when everyone knows damn well it does is different from trying to explain why your hand was in the cookie jar. And, I was thinking, if that's something that even merits discussion we really are going nowhere fast. All of us.

They say bad things happen in threes, and this morning, as I strode on a stair climber to nowhere while I watched the decline of civilization on two television screens (the second one was airing a piece about the millions of dollars celebrities spend on gifts for themselves and their loved ones, but that's a post for another time), I figured there was nowhere to go but up. Ha!

As if on cue, a fitness instructor who appeared to have a megaphone sewn into his vocal chords started screaming out instructions to the line of people on treadmills behind me.  In a room filled with signs reminding us not to talk on our cell phones, where the televisions are silent unless you plug yourself in, where the treadmills talk to you and encourage you and take you on virtual tours of the Alps and pretty much do everything for you except your laundry, seasoned runners with sinewy thighs and no body fat needed someone to scream at them at the top of his lungs for forty-five minutes. "Precision running," the class is called. I am not lying, not this time.

I was going nowhere. Politicians and talking heads were going nowhere. Celebrities were going nowhere. Actually, they were jetting off everywhere, looking for perfect and useless gifts. And now I was going deaf. What a morning, what a world.

The New Abnormal

I didn’t think twice about descending into a crowded New York City subway station yesterday. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and, under “normal circumstances,” far less death defying than your average taxi ride through midtown.

By all accounts, this city — like all other cities but maybe just a smidge more — is on high alert. Bomb sniffing dogs, increased police presence, Fort Knox style security in my daughter’s downtown office building, and invisible measures we average folks can’t even imagine, no matter how many episodes of Homeland we watch. New York still goes about its business, though. Surly crowds, accents that make the literate sound uneducated and the nice sound nasty. Old fashioned comforts of home.

It occurred to me, as I waited in my daughter’s lobby watching all the smartly dressed twenty-somethings slip into the heavily fortified bank of elevators. that 9/11, to them, is the defining event of their pubescence. When I was the age they were then, the south tower of the World Trade Center had just been completed; and it would be a year before the twin towers were officially open for business. The scandal-gate era had just begun with the Watergate break-in. We were fighting a pointless and horrific war, but it was really far away — particularly for a middle class Jewish kid in New York. As bad as things were, fear had not yet become a way of life.

What went up has since come down. The image of Richard Nixon insisting “I am not a crook” seems sweetly nostalgic. We pay more attention than we used to Asia in general these days, but it still seems very far away and vary unfamiliar. It’s not uncommon for people to ask me whether my son, who has lived in Japan for almost four years, is fluent in Chinese.

No matter what was going on in the world, back in the day, I don’t recall feeling vulnerable or threatened. Except when my mother caught me sneaking some Twinkies. I never thought movies or concerts or subway stations were dangerous on a mass scale. Sure, there was always street crime, but all I needed to do was pay attention, or, as my father always told me, “keep my wits about me.”

My daughter, the one who lives with the daily reality of twenty-first century New York, doesn’t think twice about taking the subway, or going about her business the way she has since moving here. When her younger sister said she would take the subway to her office, though, she put her foot down and insisted she take one of those garden variety death defying taxis. The kind of threat that seems manageable. We accept that we have no control over what happens to ourselves, but when it comes to the ones we love, the known, old-fashioned evil is definitely the lesser one.

My subway ride yesterday was indeed cheap, fast, and, to the naked eye, at least, not particularly death defying. It was mildly unpleasant, being crushed by way too many bodies crammed into way too small a space, but everybody seemed far more interested in getting to where they needed to be than, say, destroying human life. Despite the harsh accents, I could just tell.

Wedged in with my packages, unable to even hold on, I was startled when someone tapped me on the back. Braced for a New York style confrontation, I whipped around, ready to apologize. It was a woman seated near where I had achieved my precarious balance for the ride. She just wanted to let me know she was getting off soon.

Maybe the villains still are far, far away, in a place very unfamiliar. We know it’s not true, but it’s the way we keep going.

Toujours Paris

A friend last night remarked how eerie it was that I had written only days ago about Paris.

I had thought it wasn't really about Paris, at least not by design. I was musing, as I often do, about life and love and other profound mysteries. The elasticity of the human heart. The beauty of a crisp autumn day. The sweet buttery taste of a perfect croissant.

The caption at the bottom of the television screen remained unchanged for hours last night: At least 153 killed in Paris terror attacks. This could not be happening again. Less than a year after coordinated attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish grocery store and a few other gratuitous kills, satire lives on and Parisian Jews still buy food and people walk around, feeling safe. Months from now, Parisians will again enjoy concerts and soccer games on a Friday night, and an entire country will no longer be on lock down. C'est la vie. La vie continue. 

I am glad I remember Paris the way I do, exactly six years ago, when I finally fell hopelessly under its spell. The news coverage of last night's carnage was, somewhat mercifully, blurred by darkness. Mostly, I listened. To the not-so-distant wail of sirens. To tongue tied reporters trying to articulate what is still, to most of us humans, unthinkable. I wondered if Paris would look familiar to me when the sun came up. I wondered if the croissants would ever taste as good.

When I returned home from my first visit to Paris, I couldn't eat bread. Especially French bread; even the still warm, extra long loaves cleverly packaged in white bags adorned with tiny French flags. I learned, soon after, that it's all about the water. You just cannot replicate French bread with Chicago water. You can come close, but you can't make a New York bagel here either. French bread.* New York bagels.* That's the best we can do.

As humans, we adjust to these things, the minor adversities and inconveniences that go hand in hand with our instinctive will to survive and our realistic expectation that life is not perfect. Life goes on, la vie continue, without French bread or New York bagels in Chicago; there are certainly enough simple pleasures out there to keep us content, to help us appreciate the ones that are harder to come by.

Life also goes on after the unthinkable happens. We don't forget but we keep going. A sparkling new tower lights up the sky by Ground Zero now, lit up in red, white, and blue stripes, in solidarity with our friends across the pond. Tragedy is a part of life; we mourn, and then we keep living. I like to think it's not only because of a lack of better alternative. There really is a lot of good stuff here.

My Paris post the other day, my 'love and loss and mysteries of the universe' post, was a little bit about game theory. About how love isn't -- or at least shouldn't be -- a zero-sum game. Love for one thing doesn't -- or at least shouldn't -- cancel out love for another. And, I suppose, we can only hope that the kind of hate that cast darkness over Paris and humans everywhere last night cannot take away all the good stuff. I marveled, only days ago, about the capacity of the human heart to stretch and always make more room. I despair, today, about the capacity of a frightening number of seemingly heartless humans to hate and destroy and fail to see what seems so obvious to the rest of us.

It's counterproductive to wonder when the next monster will come out from under the bed, hell bent on destruction. But on mornings after, when the sun comes up and the unthinkable mess is in full view, it's tough to focus on the croissants. No matter how many terrorists have blown themselves up or let someone in law enforcement do the honors, we know it's not a zero-sum game, and there are plenty more where they came from.

Social media enabled folks in Paris to mark themselves safe. It was reassuring, for those of us who immediately ran through our mind's Rolodex to account for friends and loved ones who might be in harm's way. It would be nice if we could think of "safe" as a permanent status, but we all know better.

We'll always have croissants and French bread and New York bagels, and we'll always have Paris. And, la vie continue, because that's how we roll, Well, la vie continue.*

Game Theories

I have been plagued, lately, by an irrepressible urge to visit Paris. By my calculations, a seven year itch.

My love affair with Paris was slow to bloom. It finally hit me on my third visit, my forty-ninth birthday gift from my husband. We were trying desperately to salvage whatever we could, and he was astute enough to know it was pointless to wait for my fiftieth. At least we'll always have Paris.

It wasn't the first time it occurred to me that love, or at least my capacity for it, could be finite. A zero-sum game. I remember worrying about it before my second child was born, a bit uncomfortably close on the heels of my first. I think it was my mother-in-law who reassured me, but I was skeptical. She was right, though. My heart stretched, and it did it again for my third. And, as time went on, for a few dogs.

With Paris and my marriage, though, game theory seemed to apply. Maybe it's because everything about the city was so perfect that third time. A mad cow disease scare had marred my first visit, dashing my hopes of gorging on steak frittes and forcing me, every evening, to stare into the dead eyes of some unfortunate sea creature. The second time, it was just too damn cold, and it's difficult to fall prey to any kind of romantic spell with three kids and your mom in tow. The third time, though, with my marriage falling apart, Paris came together. Crisp, sunny, November weather. A quaint hotel on Ile St. Louis where we had to ring a bell to wake the night manager if we returned after nine. It didn't matter that we could touch all four walls of the room from the bed. All was forgotten in the morning when we descended the narrow winding staircase into the dungeon to devour our designated basket full of croissants and French bread. Love was unraveling but, hey, we were in Paris. We got along.

Seven years, and I barely remember why we were coming unglued, but I can still taste the croissants. I can still hear the sounds of my shoes on the pavement, still see the crowds of annoyingly compact French women, so purposeful, so efficient, so stylish no matter what the time of day. It was our third time, and we had already done the museums and the cathedrals and the Eiffel Tower and, when my mother was with us, about seventeen Louis Vuitton stores. This time, we just walked. Sometimes together, sometimes alone, but each of us, I think, always alone in our thoughts.

Our last morning there, while he slept, I walked, by myself, to visit the new Holocaust museum. A wife without a husband, a mother thousands of miles from her children, a Jew on the streets of Paris (even in le Marais) -- I felt conspicuously alone. Not particularly unhappy, just alone. And a little bit in the dark, in the City of Lights.

I've thought about returning to Paris several times, but somehow the itch has become stronger now, at the seven year mark. Maybe it's just coincidence, maybe it has nothing to do with seven years or Paris and it has everything to do with turning fifty-six or being almost three years into a divorce.

Maybe there's no theory to the game at all, but there's one thing I know -- it's not a zero-sum. There's always room for more.