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.