Boarding Games

Seriously? American Airlines' solution to the mayhem also known as the boarding process is to reward people without carry-ons with early boarding. Let me get this straight. They have to pay twenty-five dollars to check each bag, then get more time to sit in cramped seats in coach while everyone else fights for bin space, then wait at the luggage carousel for an hour after landing while everybody else whisks out of the airport with their oversized carry-ons in tow? Including the folks who got to valet their bags for free on the jetway while the flight attendants attend to the passengers still brawling on board to claim the last cubic inches of overhead bin space?

Am I an idiot, or is it unlikely most folks are going to fall for this crap? Personally, I'll need a bit more incentive to fork over twenty-five bucks to check a bag than prolonged discomfort in a tiny and smelly seat while everyone else is busy throwing punches in the aisle. And unless I am heading somewhere I really don't want to be, there's no way I'm paying to know that everyone else has arrived at their final destination while I'm stuck at the lost baggage desk trying to figure out where my clothes traveled to on my dime. Okay, so I may still be an idiot, but I am NOT checking my carry-on just so American Airlines can save face and money by boasting more timely departures.

If only everybody could just be more like my mother. (Never thought I'd say that!) A woman ahead of her time, she has travelled back and forth from New York to Chicago for years with nothing more than a Louis Vuitton purse I mean pocketbook and the crossword page from the New York Times. Granted, her pocketbook is larger, or at least heavier, than your average oversized bag, but rules are rules, and if it's billed as a pocketbook it's a personal item and it gets a free pass. Frankly, the thing is so dense and downright lethal it should probably be banned as a weapon, but since knives are fair game now, nobody is going to raise an eyebrow about Louis. Even if it's packed to the gills with small blades.

Hopefully, when my mom flies out here tomorrow, enough folks will have been seduced by American's scheme to benefit itself without benefiting anybody else to make my mother's journey through security uneventful. This time around, in addition to the pocketbook from Land of the Giants, she will be carrying a freezer case filled with osteoporosis fighting meds that cannot go through the scanners. She's been nervous about this, so I checked on line a few weeks ago to see what she needed to do to get through security without getting her meds confiscated. A doctor's note would suffice, the TSA site told me, but she should call security seventy-two hours before departure to confirm. A lifelong rule follower, she called airport security exactly -- and I mean exactly; down to the minute -- seventy-two hours prior to her flight to confirm the procedure.

Seems simple enough. I'm pretty certain most people will ignore the early boarding incentive and bring their gigantic carry-ons with them on to the plane. I just hope there aren't too many fist fights; I don't want my mom's ice packs to melt.

Curses! Foiled Again!

After a bit of a rocky start, yesterday turned out to be a fairly decent day. Causing someone I care about pain really puts me in a bad mood. These days, even causing pain to someone I don't particularly care about fails to give me the kind of temporary satisfying rush I used to enjoy. That sucks.

But, as I said, things started to look up, and at work I even earned myself a little bonus for an extra big sale which, to tell you the truth, happened mostly because I left the customer alone (in blatant and horrifying disregard of company policy). Nevertheless, the random minor success gave me an extra spring in my step, and I smiled all the way home until I opened the door to the kitchen and saw what looked to be the beginning of a crime scene on the floor.

Manny, the blind puggle, just gets really pissed off when I'm gone for more than a few hours. Apparently the company of Cal the handyman and Margaret the biweekly cleaning lady who doesn't really clean is no substitute for mom, the lady with the food. Margaret seems to know this, and has become Manny's accomplice, always leaving the pantry door slightly ajar when she departs. (Sometimes, I think all she does is come in, open the pantry door, whisper a hint in Manny's ear, and leave. Just based on the physical evidence anyway.) Manny can't locate a cookie when you place it directly under his nose -- I often have to tap his nostrils with it -- but he can sniff out an open pantry door from the other end of the house. Or maybe it's just dumb luck; maybe he's always banging face first into stationary walls hoping to find that one in the kitchen that moves, welcoming him into a world of culinary (and often toxic) delights. Pay dirt!

Yesterday, the first thing I saw was the broken pieces of some sort of package, the words "non-stick" screaming up at me from one of the chunks. I panicked, thinking he must have eaten the contents of a package of construction goop, filled with toxic chemicals, something Cal had brought in to touch up the family room walls. Upon closer examination, I realized it was the box from a roll of tin foil, serrated metal edge and all, sliced in half as if by a "Ginsu" knife (a "Shih tzu" knife?). It's amazing what Manny can do with a severe underbite. Personally, I would have gone for the chocolate, but Manny is not very bright, and clearly not very discerning.

After checking to be sure the serrated edge was all there and not somewhere deep within Manny's digestive tract cutting open his insides, I looked for the foil. No need to look far; I glanced to my left, toward the "butler's pantry," and saw the beginning of a path that had been carefully laid out by the unravelled tin. Sort of like a shiny, silvery yellow brick road, it made a straight shot through the front room, a clean wide turn toward the front hallway, then a hairpin turn toward the stairs, where the long sheet of glinting path ended abruptly midway up, the cardboard roller off to the side. I had to laugh. I imagined Manny as if on a treadmill, his little feet pushing against the rolled up end until the entire thing was completely unfurled. How he made the jump up the stairs I couldn't begin to fathom. What a pup.

Like any normal adult, I called my friend to see if she'd like to head to the local watering hole for a drink. She was game, and off we went, to celebrate, I suppose, making it through a day that had been a bit of a roller coaster ride. Over a glass of wine, we shared a bucket of tater tots. Fried stuff sure feels good on the way down. Hours later, not so much.

Usually, at night, I lie awake listening to the odd rumblings of Manny's insides as his canine enzymes break down lord knows what and his stomach churns to digest the indigestible. Last night, much to Manny's annoyance (I could tell by the way he kept batting away at his ears), my insides were the ones belting out a gurgling serenade. As the dissonant crescendo continued to keep us both awake, Manny finally hopped off the bed and peed, quite emphatically, on the floor.

He may be the stud I sleep with, but, as usual, payback's a bitch!

Fifty Shades of Neutral

There are still bits and small strips of masking tape clinging to the edges where the floor meets the ceiling in the front room, remnants of the painting spree my husband had embarked upon years ago. He was meticulous about the tape; he didn't want to make a mess.

The front room: once a dining room where nobody ever dined, then an office where nobody really ever did any work, then a TV room where I would lay on the orange love seat until I fell asleep (usually two minutes) and then the cable box just stopped working anyway. Mostly, it was just where the dogs hung out,  curled up together on the big orange chair by the window so they could keep watch. Now, with one dog gone and the surviving one blind and the cable out, there is nothing to watch and no real reason to curl up with anybody. I usually come home to find Manny on the couch, awakened by the hopeful sound of the garage door opening, his tail wagging tentatively until he is certain it's the lady with the food. Neither one of us notices or cares about the yellow walls or the ancient tape in the corners.

As my new handyman, Cal, becomes more deeply entrenched each day in preparing our nineteen year old house (was it really hardly finished yet when we moved in?) for sale, no stone goes unturned, no chip of colored paint goes unnoticed. Everything must now fade to shades of neutral. The laundry room can remain tangerine (it's just a laundry room), and the living room turned dining room can remain the still trendy rich forest green that provides such a strong backdrop to the Edward Hopper print on the wall and the mint green chairs I just had to have, but the rest, unless it is the deep taupe that runs sporadically through the house, must go. The citrusy peach that is my very own handiwork in the master bathroom (a decorator friend, trying to be polite, once suggested it was a bit too Caribbean); the sickly pale yellow in the front room that has had so many incarnations and still doesn't know what to call itself but, gosh darn it, not a speck of yellow paint got on the ceiling; and the bright blue in the kitchen, so stark against the nineties style white cabinets and floor tile, the lone neighborhood survivors of almost two decades of epidemic upgrades to dark wood and stone tiles with rivulets of pink running through them.

My teenage daughter is vaguely aware of the home cleanup effort going on around her, and tries not to let it get in her way. But when she saw the six paint swatches taped to the blue walls by the pantry, she was offended. She likes our blue kitchen. I don't know if I like the blue so much as expect it. It's like an old shoe, really, a little bit nasty but comforting, something other people might sneer at even though it reminds me I am home. I explained to my daughter that we had to neutralize. I have promised Cal I would pick my favorite swatch; together my daughter and I agreed on the least offensive of the six. I have promised Cal I would dig up the leftover cans of taupe so he could touch things up. I think they are in the garage, along with the bright kitchen blue. I say it's the cold that's keeping me from dragging them inside, but I think I'm fibbing a little.

Maybe I won't object though, if Cal replaces the old masking tape in the front room with a better adhesive. Maybe there's a silver lining to draining the color from our walls; maybe, with the right paint, and better tape, things will be a little less messy.

Spring Hopes Eternal

It's the first day of spring, and folks in Chicago are, as always, shocked that the weather doesn't seem very springlike just yet. Shocked and offended, as if somebody is playing a cruel joke on a population accustomed to balmy sunshine and snowless sidewalks the moment the clock strikes vernal equinox. Silly.

Silly and irrational, and I'm right there with my neighbors, thinking maybe the astronomers were off by a few days this year. When the readout on my car dashboard told me this morning it was twenty degrees, I considered the possibility that my car could be wrong. After all, every other light on the dash tells me the thing is falling apart at the seams; brain death cannot be far behind. So I flipped the worn and unraveling thumb flap off my mitten and brushed the tip of my thumb across the ever optimistic picture of a bright sun on the screen of my iPhone. My phone is young and healthy, not a tired old coot like my car. It doesn't sound like a flock of angry birds struggling to take flight when I put it to work, and the voices in my head are nowhere near as clear and levelheaded as the voices in my phone. It is clearly nowhere near being brain dead.

Fifty-two degrees, it told me. Aha! I looked more closely, realized even my trusty iPhone, the brilliant little carrier of voices that tell me how to find my way and, occasionally, to watch my language, had thrown in the towel and taken off for Apple headquarters in California. Cheeky little gadget. I brushed across the screen to find the local weather, still hopeful that my car was wrong, that it was not twenty degrees on the first day of spring. Aha! My car was wrong. It was eighteen degrees, not twenty. Ugh. My thumb was freezing from all this research.

Reality hit like a ton of bricks. Cold hard bricks. I began to remember how things work around here. Come to think of it spring-like weather never arrives on the exact date when daytime is as long as night. It tends to arrive in Chicago the moment my airplane touches down somewhere south of the border, someplace that offers up year round warmth for a not so small price plus a whole lot of schlepping. The astronomers have not yet caught up to the findings of deep dark upper middle class suburbia, where the start of celestial spring means nothing and the only accurate harbinger of spring is spring break. Spring break and Murphy's law, two great forces of nature working together to ensure that spring will arrive the moment most of us are somewhere else looking for it.

Which, frankly, does not bode well for me this year, since I won't be going anywhere, at least nowhere appreciably south. I can only assume that the balmy taste of spring hovering over the area for a week will somehow elude me; I will be huddled up in a down jacket, skidding on black ice and trudging through gray slush while birds chirp within earshot and the sun sheds its warm rays tantalizingly out of reach.

But if all goes according to Hoyle (or this guy Murphy), I can comfort myself with the knowledge that winter will return with a vengeance when the flights start returning to Ohare and break time is over. And, as is the case every year, April showers won't arrive until May, and May flowers won't bloom until June. As is the case every year, the astronomers will get it wrong, and, as is the case every year, we will all be shocked and offended.

I Do, I Do. But I Can't!

Folks, I'm in a bit of a bind.

Just when I had thought the Craigslist fellas looking for wedding dates had blown me off, I received an email last night. Okay, I was clearly not the only recipient (not by a long shot), which made me feel a little bit cheap and not very special, but beggars can't be choosers and I really, really want the rights to this screenplay. Here's the email: 

Gals, We know it's coming down to the wire but Dave and I have finally got our shit together. We've got the Empire bar rented out tomorrow for a happy hour thanks to ABC (why? We don't know. But we're Rollin with it). Can you two make it for a drink around 6? Let us know if you're down - because hey, why not? At the very least it'll be a good story.. At most.. True love?

NOTE: ABC Nightline is profiling our journey to find the perfect wedding dates and they will be filming our "meet and greet" tomorrow evening at the Empire. Please come camera ready if you wish to participate as we narrow it down. It should be fun and if all goes well, we hope to pick our dates by the end of the night! We look forward to meeting you! 

Naturally, since I was brought up to be polite, I responded immediately with a lengthy explanation about why we wouldn't be able to make it on such short notice. Camera ready? At my age? I need at least a week, and a very fuzzy lens. I offered up my eighty-two year old mother as a family representative, since she lives nearby. I am aware that's kind of a reach since she doesn't date but it was worth a try. My daughter, whom I've already offered up without permission, encouraged me to go. "It'll get your blog on the news," she said, clearly as wrapped up in the fame and fortune as I am, not caring a whit about the fellas' feelings. Cads, both of us. A friend offered me a ride to the airport, assuming, obviously, that I am a shameless opportunist and wouldn't care about the camera readiness thing. Another friend suggested I set up a Skype meet and greet during the happy hour. Okay, that may save me some travel and botox money, but camera readiness for a talking head on Skype requires extra care and, for that, I'd need even more than a week.

Sigh. I don't expect a big break like this to come my way again any time soon. I suppose I can at least be content to know I was in the running, that I made what has to be the final cut since the wedding is this Saturday. (By the way, I refuse to watch the Nightline coverage; I choose to remain blissfully ignorant of how many thousands of others received the invitation to happy hour.) Frankly, I'm a little hurt that they went with ABC to tell their story. I could have been a poster child for the American Dream, twenty-first century style. Proof that even a sorry old cougar can rise from the ashes and make it big.

This is not to say I have completely given up, though. I am, if not completely shameless, a relatively shameless opportunist. If anyone has an idea, let's hear it.

Happy St. Patrickstein's Day

I'm guessing that historically St. Patrick's Day has as little to do with overindulging in beer as a Jewish ritual circumcision has to do with eating little hot dogs wrapped in dough, but both are most certainly designated feast days, and one man's feast is, well, not necessarily the same as another man's.

Ironically, while a poor unsuspecting Jewish male baby is being prepped to have a piece of his penis lopped off in front of a crowd of revelers, he is given his first taste of wine, which might help explain the low incidence of alcoholism among Jews. And though we pride ourselves on being a civilized people, we refer to this barbaric ritual a mitzvah (a good thing; we are good rationalizers) and we come dressed to party and shout Mazel tov! and stuff in all sorts of fleshy treats. But no beer, definitely no beer. Even on St. Patrick's Day.

Today I will be navigating the green-clad and the hung-over on the streets of Chicago to attend the bris of my old friend's grandson. My friend, gone too long now, would have cringed with the rest of us at the thought of her grandchild feeling even a slight twinge of pain, and at the same time kvelled (does it need translation?) more than anyone at the sight of the brand new addition to her family. Like the rest of her surviving mosaic of goofy family and friends, she was offbeat, sometimes mystified by life, terrified of death, and filled with love for the people who loved her. Unlike many of us, she possessed an amazing capacity for gratitude. Even when she knew her time was winding down, she thought herself to be lucky, just for having all that she had for as long (or short) as she had it. She would have worn something green to the St. Patrick's Day bris, might even have snuck in a beer. For those of us who knew and loved her, the hole created by her passing will be obvious, but her unique presence will be felt. She will, no doubt, arrive late, as was her habit. The energy in the room will suddenly pick up, and the party will start in earnest.

It is my hope for this baby, once the wound heals and the memory fades, that he will get to know his maternal grandmother and learn the many lessons she could teach, even though he will never lay eyes on her. It is my hope that he will be reminded, one day, that his Jewish ritual circumcision and his first taste of alcohol coincided with St. Patrick's day, and that the irony of that coincidence will not be lost on him. Because whether you're on a morning pub crawl with good friends or having, um, a delicate procedure performed by a shaky looking old Jew in the company of people who are celebrating your arrival into the world (both customs weird in their own special way), life is -- and should be -- about sharing good times with people you love. Or at least like. Or don't hate.

It is my hope for this baby that, like his grandmother, who did not have so much as an ounce of Irish blood in her veins, he will always believe that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and believe that it is well within his grasp.

Habemus Papem! Mazel Tov!

The largest gathering of ineligible bachelors since the last JDate speed dating party has come to a close. We can all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that there is, once again, a Pope. He's a bit older than I had hoped, but that means Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York will be returning stateside, which is certainly good news. (Am I the only one who has noticed how absolutely adorable he is?)

Most of us will never know what really goes on inside the Sistine Chapel when the men in red convene, or how many bong hits it takes to send that plume of white smoke up the chimney. (Whaddaya think the seagulls were doing up there?) But you have to give these guys credit for their efficiency; it's amazing what a day without administrative distractions and revelations about misbehaving priests can do to speed things along. When in Rome, though, you gotta eat well, and I'm pretty sure the big red thing they read the name of the new Pope from was actually the dinner menu. Frankly, I couldn't understand a word the guy was saying; thought maybe he was just a waiter reading off the secondi piatti.  

Everyone seems pretty excited about the new Catholic in Chief; well everyone on this side of the pond at least. Buenos Aires is probably the most European of cities in South America, so the transition of power to one of the zillions of Catholics in that corner of the New World should be fairly smooth. Those folks dress well (Evita Peron wasn't just hanging out at the Louvre when she visited Paris), eat well, can produce a good glass of wine, and really know how to play soccer. And, like folks throughout the ages who have been subject to Vatican rule, they are not exactly strangers to dirty politics. Argentina and the papacy will adjust well to each other.

As a non-Catholic, I still have trouble understanding why it matters who the Pope is. I get that he has to be celibate because it's probably a good idea to practice what you preach, and frankly there are probably a lot of heads of state out there who wish they had, um, kept it in their pants, but how on earth does one guy get to decide what Catholicism dictates for a limited period of time. Is the prospect of eternal damnation really that compelling when the rules keep changing? Maybe the fact that Francis is a Jesuit will keep him from turning his new job into a major power trip; maybe even the most blindly faithful will finally have some wiggle room.

The guy seems really humble, which is kind of refreshing. I just hope he can find a good Malbec and a good steak in Rome.