Sole Searching...

Gone Fishin!

The Eaves of Destruction

Last week, I alerted my soon to be ex that we would have to replace the roof on the castle before we moved into our respective trailers. "Any chance you can take one for the team," he suggested, and "do a roofer?"

Frankly, I'd consider it -- anything to get this whole mess behind me -- if I didn't also need a plumber, a carpenter, a driveway guy, and an electrician. Just to name a few. I have to consider my future, after all, and who the hell is going to want to date a bow legged middle aged woman who walks like a drunken sailor? Not to mention all the diseases. (Can you get shingles from a roofer?)

As luck would have it, I just ran into a guy I used to know (no not that way, you pigs) who is in the business of getting folks' property taxes reduced. He is busying himself as I write this evaluating my situation (minus a few details, to say the least), and I'm thinking maybe this could be my lucky day. Get the fixer upper assessed as low as possible, reduce the taxes, and let some other poor schmucks worry about the repairs. Worst case scenario, I'll only have to fuck the property tax guy.

Shit. He's still talking. Suddenly a handy man gang bang isn't looking as exhausting as this whole property tax evasion scheme. I definitely get the feeling there'll be a better pay off. Though I haven't been listening all that attentively to the details, it sounds like any tax money I save will just be paid to someone else in fees and commission. And, my guess is I'll have to listen to a lot of talking. And, if he's anything like our attorneys, it'll cost us dearly every time he talks, or, for that matter, farts. And, I'll still have a crumbling roof, leaky toilets, fallen closet doors, and a rutted driveway. Come to think of it, if I can't snag a hunky fireman with an axe and a big hose -- let's face it, it's not for lack of trying -- why not set my sights on something more attainable and give a shot to some tool belts and shit kickers? Like mom always said, never pass up an opportunity. 

I could always look for a jack of all trades. Someone who can handle all the tasks by himself, maybe even be a master of some of the more, um, delicate ones. Talk about home improvement.

i Chat, he Hears

For the first time in a long time, I visited my dad's grave for Father's Day. He's been gone fourteen years, and I had myself convinced the sight of his tombstone would no longer turn me into a sniveling idiot. My brother visits more frequently, has developed a thicker skin. He waved his arm toward the horizon behind the rows upon rows of graves and pointed out the beautiful view. It did nothing for me. "I see dead people," I responded.

I was sure fourteen years would make it easier. On the way to our family plot, I moseyed through the narrow lanes of the cemetery as I used to when I was a kid, before I actually knew anyone buried there. Grandparents and great grandparents whom I had never met generally had little effect on me. Their lives had not been real to me, they had all died well before I was born. I was always far more interested in reading the other epitaphs on the way to our plot. Cemeteries are fascinating, filled with couples who seem to die within months of each other, folks who have been dead so long I wonder if there is anyone alive who ever knew them, children who died at inexplicably young ages.

There is the pair of stones for Morris and Gussie something or other, the ones my brother and I noticed soon after my father passed away. We still wonder whether it is the same Morris and Gussie who owned the candy store around the corner from us when we were growing up. (Even in Brooklyn, what are the odds of there being another "Morris and Gussie?") The tiny corner store was crowded and dark, and, though I never considered this at the time, probably filthy. Morris and Gussie were as unhappy looking a pair as I had ever known. Gussie always sat, her ample ass spreading over the sides of a short metal stool, her heavy eastern European accent dripping with disdain, and meticulously counted our pennies as if her life depended on it. Morris just stood by quietly, waiting for kids who had never once shown any inclination to steal to suddenly have the impulse to snatch a morsel. It amazed me that two people, surrounded as they were by sugary treats and smiling children, could be so dour.

I was surprised at how shaky I felt when I arrived at my father's grave. For a long time before he died, his physical presence was not a part of my daily life. We lived almost a thousand miles apart, there was no Skype, no Facebook. We spoke regularly -- as much as we could before my mother would take over -- but I had long become accustomed to not seeing him, to making do with just his voice. His deep soothing voice, a voice I long more than anything to hear sometimes. Visiting his grave, even after all this time, still gives me a jolt. He is only six feet away but invisible and silent. A lone weed sprung up from the neatly pruned bush marking his spot. I had the distinct feeling he had left it there for me, a sign that if I spoke, he would listen.

My mother strolled from relative to relative, weepy in part from their "gone-ness," but in part because the landscaping had not been maintained as it should have been, certainly not to the extent it had been paid for. My brother whispered to me that he was pretty sure Daddy and Nana and the rest of the crew could care less about the landscaping. Frankly, neither did we. God help those maintenance people if they don't do their jobs once my mom takes residence; there'll be daggers shooting up from the soil.

There's something about siblings. No matter how much you can be at each other's throats, you know each other. You have been molded, somehow, by the same sculptors, after all. Which is why, I think, my brother had the grace to suggest that he walk my mother back to the office so she could scream about the weeds while I spend a bit more time with my father, alone. A gift for me from my brother, on Father's Day.

We chatted, Seymour and I. I told him I knew he was, as always, looking out for me, and always would. I cried, because I miss him, because I wish he could be here sometimes to tell me what to do, to assure me that everything will be okay. I cried because I knew he must be crying too, a tear welling up in the outer corners of each of his sparkling green eyes. Because he wished I could hear him, know that he will watch over me to make sure that everything will be okay. I gave the weed a little tug, but left it where it was.

The walk back to the office was just long enough for me to regain my composure, to wipe the mascara from my face and resume my cynical bitch persona. I glanced over at Morris and Gussie on my way; for the first time, I noticed they were born in 1889 and 1891, and it occurred to me they were most likely Holocaust survivors. That they had probably lost everything -- worst of all, children. The pall in the corner candy store finally made sense. How awful it must have been to be surrounded by happy American children and sugary morsels. I wonder if there is anyone left to mourn them, to yell at the people in the office about their weeds.

"Fatherless Day," as I have called it for fourteen years, wasn't so bad. I was fortunate enough to have a dad who loved me, unconditionally, who will always, somehow, look out for me. And, though I can no longer see him or hear him, we had a nice chat.

A Chair Grows in Brooklyn

It's landscaping, Brooklyn style.

As I strolled along Ocean Parkway the other morning, I glanced across the street and noticed what I thought to be an odd species of greenery growing by the benches on the other side. Always curious about the flora and fauna of Brooklyn and other distant planets, I crossed over to take a closer look. Greenery, yes. Of the plant variety, no. It was a chair, tethered with a bike chain to a parkway bench.

Odd. Was someone really so presumptuous and highfalutin in one of those old apartment buildings, someone whose ass was way too sensitive for the splintery public benches? Someone who believed him or herself to be entitled to a private throne on a public way? On the mean streets of Brooklyn, no less, where deadbolt locks are a given and thieves set off car alarms at all hours of the day and night? I know it's just a chair, but no flimsy old bicycle chain was going to stop some thug with an overwhelming desire to unseat someone else, just for the heck of it.

This morning, I walked the same route again, my only motivation an irrepressible curiosity about the survival of the chair. Much to my surprise, there it was again, as green and motionless as the surrounding trees, still staking a permanent claim to the landscape. I wondered again who had put it there. This time, I was more forgiving; I thought not about the chutzpah behind planting a private piece of furniture in a public place, and more about the meaning of it all. Yes, sometimes a chair is just a chair, but I had the distinct feeling this was more than just about taking a load off.

I thought about my grandmother. When I was growing up, she lived in our building on Ocean Parkway, and, in later years, became a fixture by the front entrance, sitting in her folding aluminum beach chair, ostensibly working on her tan. My mother (her daughter) would cringe at the sight, hated the feeling that her comings and goings were being watched. I found it amusing and, somehow, convenient. It was a great way for me to say “hi” to my grandmother without having to exert myself with a visit – which, come to think of it, I rarely did.

If memory serves, Nana and her chair appeared each year as soon as the snow melted, and reappeared on every sunny day until the leaves began, again, to crack and turn brown. On cold days she wore her old fur coat; on warmer days you could see the tissue tucked into the short sleeve of her dress. Always, she had her reflector on her lap, although she was generally too busy greeting everybody to use it. Except for my mother (and probably, as I got older, me), nobody ever seemed to object to Nana and her chair. Some passed by silently, oblivious to the elderly woman half blocking their path. Others stopped to chat, no doubt about absolutely nothing, but Nana would smile her beautiful smile and welcome each visitor as if to her own home. A sun worshiper without a back yard, a lonely widow with nobody to talk to most of the day, the sidewalk in front of our building became her front porch, her link to the world. She carried her fold up chair with her, back and forth, but her spot was sacred; there was no need for a bicycle chain.

Sometimes a chair is just a chair, but for Nana, it was so much more. I am guessing the same is true for the owner of the green chair tethered to the bench on the parkway. With a quick snap of my cell phone camera, I committed the sight to memory. Then, with a wink and a nod, I kept walking.  

Shades of Gray

My old gray mère, she ain't what she used to be, but then again, who is?

I have learned a lot from mom over the years (some good, some not so much), but one thing she has shown me in recent years is that not everything -- even in her mind -- is black and white. Ironic, I suppose, since she is a woman who has often been unable to see the gray, to smudge the strict demarcations in her view of the world and get a glimpse of some middle ground. For her, it's been a lifelong refrain, a simple, bifurcated definition of good and evil, right and wrong: us and them (translation: Jews and everybody else, or, to be more specific, goyim); fat and thin (take a wild guess which one's right); expensive and cheap; New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers (almost as bad as the goyim, with a narrow exception carved out for New Jerseyites).

She's pretty strict on certain things. Like purses. With her delicately healed broken bones from last year's accident and her rapidly compressing spine, she tirelessly shops for a purse that will be light yet functional enough to carry all her, um, stuff -- including the threadbare piece of toilet paper on which she has written all the phone numbers of her loved ones and physicians, just in case. She is stymied, unable to find such an item. Well, at least not one made by an appropriate designer and ostentatiously emblazoned with that particular designer's initials. Pain and discomfort would have pushed a lesser woman into the bargain basement years ago, but not ma mère. She'd rather throw everything into a little shopping bag -- as long as it's from Saks -- than be caught dead carrying a purse that costs less than your average car. Don't even get me started on the shoes. 

Though still rather predictable, her behavior has become increasingly anomalous. Take her taste in restaurants, for example. In general, she only frequents overpriced joints that boast a regular clientele of either celebrities or just regular beautiful and thin people. There is but a handful of acceptable  establishments remaining in New York, none, as far as I know, anywhere else. (Okay, once, about eight years ago, she ate a pasta dish in Florence that she deemed the best ever, but that restaurant has since closed, so it doesn't count). But her absolute favorite dining spot is the greasy Chinese stand in the LaGuardia airport food court. Anticipating her greasy though bland lo mein calms her on the days she's flying home from a visit to Chicago. And she could not wait to pick me up at the airport last night, but I am fairly certain it was the egg roll, not my charm. Odd.

As we sat enjoying (or, in my case, choking down) our meal, I studied my mother. She is as vain as they come, about her hair, her make-up, her clothing. her physique. Though she has never exercised a day in her life, she has always monitored every morsel entering her mouth (our airport meal notwithstanding, although she had probably starved herself all day). She generally wears fitted suits to show off her painful thinness. But this time, she had left the St. John at home, and was wearing something loose fitting and not immediately recognizable as "designer." Her compressing spine, which has squeezed her midsection into kind of a box, has caused her to relent, just a bit. She will now be seen in public in old designer clothes. Her make-up was the same as it has been for the fifty-two years I have known her, but I am absolutely certain not a millimeter of botox or, god forbid, a scalpel, has touched that skin.

What strikes me most about her, though, is the gray hair. More of a white now. Her hair has never seen any kind of dye or highlight; it has aged as naturally as her still impeccable skin. With a small touch of color, she'd look far younger than her eighty-one years, but she has chosen not to go that route. I admire that about her, and have long hoped I would make the same choice, although I have already succumbed to highlights, and as the grays sprouting at the top of my own head continue to multiply, I might not make it. But I know I will pause if I ever get to the colorist's chair, and I will think about my mother's helmet of gray. It's sprayed, it's teased, it doesn't even look like hair, but it's touchingly humanizing. It stops me in my tracks every time.

My old gray mère is a study in contradictions, and her behavior continues to take me by surprise. She bought me a present, she told me, as we entered her apartment. I expected something designer, or at least overpriced. She handed me a white paper bag in the kitchen, with grease stains spreading across the bottom. I was puzzled. Food?

I guessed what it was before I even opened the bag. A black and white cookie. A New York concoction, one of my favorites, something that cannot be replicated anywhere no matter how hard those "non-New Yorkers" try. My mother, the woman who hid food from me for years, had bought me an oversized black and white cookie. Now that's what I call shades of gray.

Our Outer Beast

Animal prints are the new black. That's what the fashionistas are saying anyway.

Just as I have tried, in the past few years, to move beyond basic black from head to toe, I am trying to resist outfitting myself in trendy garments that make me look like some middle aged wild thing who has lost her way. Not that the look would be a misrepresentation; I'm just not ready to out myself like that to the world at large.

And so it was that some rare good sense and a lingering bit of worry over what everyone else thinks were the only things standing between me and some overpriced "premium denim" in a subdued but unmistakable leopard print. Even though they fit like a second animal skin. Even though they were, oddly, slimming -- possibly because the jungle spots detract attention from the occasional fat pocket. I even passed on the crinkly solid gray skirt paired with a muted pink tank. Too much like a bunny riding an elephant. (I did, for some reason, become so enamored of a leopard print ruffly top that it somehow made it home with me; it makes me look a bit like a big cat in a tutu, but I'll stick it the section of my closet earmarked for clothing that should only be worn on vacation or when everyone -- including me -- will be hopelessly shitfaced.)

Young women come into the store looking to be transformed. They are -- many of them -- relatively new mothers, women who cannot remember what it felt like, only a few years earlier, to have males other than a suckling baby eye their breasts with desire, males other than a frightened toddler grab their ass. Still barely out of their twenties, they wear sensible flip flops and granny pants and baggy clothes speckled with cheerio stains and stretched shapeless by impatient toddlers. They come into the store seeking to recapture a lost youth I would kill for these days, not realizing how much it is still within their grasp.

It's a mere animal print away for some; for others, it's a pair of short shorts. Denim shorts that cost more than a month's worth of babysitting, but totally worth it for the way it makes them feel. These women are still too young to have become accustomed to the gravity and puckering and varicose veins that come with bearing children, and have not yet learned to embrace their physical imperfections. I would tell them that they will, one day, but I suppose I would be lying. Accept, maybe. Embrace? I'm all for fantasies, but that's a bit far-fetched.

To say that the clothes make the woman would be shallow, not to mention expensive. But if a young mother who has lost sight of herself can put something on that makes her smile while she's pushing a cart through the diaper aisle at Babies R Us, why knock it. People will react to her in kind; smiles beget smiles, and there's nothing like a healthy -- albeit brief -- dose of humanity to brighten an otherwise tedious and isolated day.

We are, we humans, inherently social. It's the nature of the beast. And if it takes an animal print to bring it out, I say go for it.

Soaking Dry

I am unaccustomed to having absolutely nobody at home. Every summer, for as long as I can remember, at least one child has been in and out, even if it has just been to use the house for free and random room and board. Sure, a blind dog can be a handful, but he doesn't speak, is not at all picky about what he eats (it doesn't even have to be food), and he is much too wise to criticize the hand that feeds him.

As I approach the mid point of week one of the three I will have entirely to myself, I am learning to enjoy the freedom, starting to live life with abandon. Sort of. Yesterday, I went for a drink after work with a friend. This morning, I lazed in bed until almost seven o'clock. This afternoon, tired from four solid hours of pacing around a retail space, I am actually lying in bed, under my covers, without fear that one of my children might catch me, prove their long held theory that I am, indeed, a useless, lazy slug. Tomorrow I might go hog wild and lie down buck naked. Maybe even on the family room couch. With a glass of wine in one hand and the remote in the other. Maybe I should buy some curtains first.

To tell you the truth, though, all this personal space, all this "me" time, free from judging eyes and sporadic requests for immediate action, makes me feel like a fish out of water. I am disoriented, still tip toeing around the house when insomnia hits in the wee hours, trying not to disturb the slumber of some phantom being. I wake in the morning trying to figure out how to fit my schedule around someone else's, until I realize there is nothing to work around. I am suddenly confronted with all this air, and I cannot breathe. I need to learn to be amphibious, to move seamlessly between a chaotic sea filled with  little fishes and a strange universe in which I find myself standing alone. Not so easy after all these years.

Thankfully, my three children are in three different time zones, which means I am on call for texts and emails at all times, day or night. And as needy as the three of them tend not to be, they each manage to pitch in every now and then, just to make me feel comfortable, I suppose, in my new and unfamiliar habitat. A request, a complaint, an impromptu critique; I live to see that flashing light on my phone, even if it's to tell me everything is not okay. How sick is that?

My guess is I will become adept at adapting just in time for my three weeks of freedom to be up. Just as suddenly as I was launched out of the deep, I will be tossed back in, arms flailing, stuffed to the gills (sorry) with feelings of obligation (however overblown they might be) and an overwhelming fear of giving my child yet more reasons to spend years on a shrink's couch.

But I will keep swimming. I am about as ready to leave the ocean filled with little fishes as a guppy is to fly. Sure, I don't mind coming up for air for a few weeks at a time, but my time in the water is winding down, and I am not quite ready to dry off.