Hearts and Flowers and Whips and Chains

Love is in the air.

Hopefully Friday the thirteenth will pass without incident and be all but forgotten as we wake to a weekend filled with chocolate hearts and red roses and pink champagne. And, topping off the romantic frenzy of Valentine's Day, the long anticipated opening of Fifty Shades of Grey.  

My heart swells just thinking about it -- me, alone in the back corner of a dark theatre, munching on the chocolates I purchased for myself, a rose tucked behind my ear, sipping cheap champagne through a straw. Despite the frigid temperatures outside, I will be dressing light for my evening at the movies, prepared for a sweat far more incapacitating than your average hot flash.

I never read any of the Grey books, in part because I was told the writing was really bad, and in part because I have little imagination and the books have no pictures so, really, what's the point. Although, come to think of it, in my experience pictures can be a real buzz kill. Maybe computer dating sites would be much more satisfying without pictures, without, in fact, ever having to move beyond the anonymous banter on a screen.

The other day, when I laid out my basic "rest of my life" plan for a friend -- to see Fifty Shades of Grey and to never again sign on to a computer dating site -- she thought I was being unduly pessimistic. About the dating sites anyway. "Have you tried Farmers Only yet?" She had a point. "And, you know, there's actually a cougar site now." Intriguing, but I think I'm better off with the farmers. I am well past my cougar prime, and I think I'd be better off in the long run with a plain old farmer, even if he smells a bit like manure.

Just for fun, we tried to find the cougar site. We were redirected to a website called milfs-r-us or something like that, which did not seem to contain any pictures of menopausal milfs in their fifties (grand-milfs?), which I found a bit discriminatory. In fact, the first eye-catching promotion featured a picture of an unnaturally buxom thirty-something blond with the tagline "[Bleep] hot older women in POTWIN." Older than what, I'm not sure, but I was intrigued by POTWIN. Spelled out in all caps, I assumed it was an anagram for some unimaginable sexual position. We Googled POTWIN. As it turns out, it's a city in Kansas. A city in Kansas that boasts lots of interesting things to see and do, none of which involve "bleeping" sex starved moms. Although there is a pottery class, and who knows what they do while the clay hardens.

But back to thoughts of romance and a ticket to Fifty Shades. I have been told the book is un-put-downable, despite the dismal prose. I have also been told it's a love story. Okay. I am certainly no expert. I suppose there's a lid for every pot, a wrist for every handcuff. I wonder if the farmers like to rope their women. I wonder what really goes on behind the white picket fences of POTWIN.

Well, something is in the air this weekend, even if it's not really love. Maybe it's just the exhaust fumes from all the snow plows. I'll probably save the chocolate and champagne for bedtime, and just go with popcorn for the movie. Extra butter of course. It's Valentine's Day, and I'm going to make the most of it.

The Class of '76

Different but vaguely familiar. Or similar but vaguely different. It's all semantics really, but I can't decide which is the more apt description of the old friends with whom I reunited last weekend.

Social media has enabled us to stay in touch, at least since somebody made the effort to reconnect a few years ago. No matter how much we told each other how little we had changed over the years, we were all at least a little bit taken aback by the middle aged women who showed up to our brunch. Nevertheless, social media facilitated a seamless sequence of welcoming hugs. Though it had been more than thirty-five years for some of us, we all had at least some realistic expectations and were in little danger of being hauled off my New York's finest for inappropriately embracing some unsuspecting teenager.

There were six of us -- some going all the way back to elementary school together, but all of us intersecting, in varying degrees of closeness, in high school. After graduation, we all went our separate ways to decent schools, we all earned advanced degrees in something, we all got married and had children. Though we cannot believe how old we have become, we are still all a bit young for having graduated from high school in 1976. Back then, the New York City school system enriched its higher scoring students by skipping them right past eighth grade. The acceleration was not so much about enriched education as it was about getting us out of the dangerous junior highs as swiftly and safely as possible. We were not, by any means, all gifted. We were, for the most part, white kids from two-parent households, most of us with moms who would be waiting for us at home at three o'clock with milk and cookies. 

New York City long ago abandoned the program that protected its smarter kids by releasing them into the larger world before they were fully cooked. These days, metal detectors and armed security guards have eliminated the need for developmentally unsound acceleration. We veterans of the skipped eighth grade struggled a bit because of our youth back then, and though we were never particularly impressed by our quickened pace we all secretly enjoy the reaction other people have to our seeming intellectual prowess. For an occasional self esteem boost, we have all, I am sure, kept the realities of the New York City school system to ourselves. 

Our own children, for the most part, grew up in suburbia, insulated from kids who grow up without a mom in tennis clothes or a thoroughly vetted babysitter waiting for them at three o'clock with a plate of gluten-free cookies and a soy latte. Their schools had lock down procedures, mostly to keep outsiders out, and not to protect them from a large percentage of the student body. Administrators keep a close watch for the occasional troubled kid inside the building. 

No matter how ready they are, chronologically, to go out in the world, our children venture out now into a place far more dangerous than the hallways of the New York City public schools in the seventies. I came out relatively unscathed, physically at least, having only suffered an occasional poke in the butt cheek with a compass needle or the lingering trauma of a menacing glance. But I didn't worry all that much about terror on public transportation or skyscrapers collapsing or threats of total annihilation by angry bands of faceless people in faraway and unhappy places. 

Every generation has its challenges, I suppose, whether they are different but vaguely familiar or similar but vaguely different. The best we can hope for, sometimes, is to come out safely and relatively unscathed on the other side. It was great to see my old friends after so many years, great to see that they have all come out safely on the other side. There are ties that bind us from childhood, and hopefully those ties will keep us together both on social media and for an occasional brunch. 

I felt a little shaky leaving the safety of that table to venture out, once again, into my own world. It was comforting to reconnect with old friends, survivors of a shared past, and survivors, I hope, of a shared albeit uncertain future. 

Mission Impossible

My fingers were numb by the time I wandered into a Starbucks on Bleecker Street. Even though I grew up in New York and, far more recently roamed the streets of the West Village with my son when he was a student here, I always get turned around here. Down here, the neatly numbered and easily navigable (as long as you're not driving) grid of Manhattan becomes a maze of oddly named streets that make walking a straight path virtually impossible.

Venice without the charm or the odor. Or, I suppose more accurately, Venice with a different charm and a different odor. Siri -- God love her -- somehow got me to where I wanted to go, but I could swear I ended up after a half hour walk in the bitter cold right around the corner from where I started. I am too busy thawing out to check -- or care.

I am on a mission, and time is running out. My mother's birthday is two days away, and the best I have come up with is a few rolls of quarters for the coin operated laundry machines in her apartment building. The same machines that have been there for as long as I can remember; the only thing that's different is the number of slots cut into the coin slider. You know, the doohickey that goes cha-ching. Maybe I can get her a really posh designer change purse to hold all the coins.

It is a challenge to shop for my mother. She is, in many ways, very practical and a big fan of anything that is utilitarian. Laundry is necessary, and quarters are necessary for laundry. She actually gets really excited when she is handed one or two as change.  She is also, however, in many ways, a totally impractical devotee of designer labels, although she will claim until her toes fall off that her Chanel sneakers are comfortable and worth every penny. Talk about a conundrum.

Before I set off on my mission to shop for the perfect gift for the woman who has everything -- and if she doesn't have it, it is either not useful or without the proper cache -- I peered into one of her closets. It was only the tip of the iceberg, a small sample of the haute couture that had always been my mother's trademark, even when she shopped for groceries alongside stooped old ladies with folding shopping carts wheeled from home. (Mom wouldn't be caught dead with one of those; she had her groceries delivered.) Each piece had a designer label. They were all size sixes, from back in the days when a size six was actually a size six and not some arbitrary number attached to a garment just to make the buyer feel suddenly slim.

Against my better judgment, I agreed to try things on. Each outfit was more beautiful than the next. The zippers all went up eventually (after a bit of a struggle, made all the more dramatic by my mother's emphatic grunts). "That would look just perfect if you lost maybe a pound or two." A compliment in the guise of an insult, or an insult in the guise of a compliment? It's tough to say, but I am a woman after all, and no matter how you slice it, I do not quite see a compliment in there. By the time the fashion show was over, the gentle suggestion had evolved into three or four pounds, and I was fighting some vaguely familiar feelings of self-loathing.  Another quarter, another pound -- what's the difference, as long as everything else stays pretty much the same.

By the time she pointed out that the clothes (though a little tight, lest I forget) at least made me look my age (thank you very much) I was, well, feeling downright cozy and at home in the apartment in Brooklyn where I grew neurotic. I mean grew up.

Time to move on. At least from the warmth of Starbucks. Fortified with coffee and a chocolate croissant, clad comfortably (and imperfectly) in zipper-less leggings, my purse weighed down with a few rolls of quarters (just in case), I am off on my annual albeit futile mission to find the perfect gift.

Faceless in the Crowd

Somebody asked to see a picture of my father the other day. The only one I could find was a dog-eared and almost totally faded black and white. He was with his brother, his three cousins, and his uncle. The photo was a blur of bright white smiles and thick dark hair and odd skinny ties. Particular features were hard to decipher; only the bald uncle stood out from the crowd.

To the untrained eye, that is. To me, my father’s face jumped off the ancient page in sharp focus, even though I had not known him when he was that young. I had never struggled to pick my father’s face out in a crowd, no matter how dense. His presence always announced itself to me in sharp clarity, called out to me in a stage whisper meant only for me. Everything else evaporated from view, and I felt safe.

As I get older, I sense that I am becoming invisible, at least to the untrained eye. Nobody looks up when I walk into a room, at least not intentionally. If I hear a construction worker whistle, I am offended, not because the whistle itself causes me to feel demeaned and marginalized, but because the whistle is not meant for me. I think about possible self-improvements, ways to change things up a bit. As I have been told on the tennis court many times, if something isn’t working, do something different. Wise words, at least when it comes to tennis.

Wise, too, when it comes to living, but maybe my appearance is not what needs changing. To be sure, with gravity putting the finishing touches on the ongoing metamorphosis set in motion by widening crow’s feet and plummeting estrogen levels, I am up to my ears in sartorial change. Attempts at reversal can backfire. Attempts at a complete change of direction can be absurd. Just look at Bruce Jenner.

At least my kids can still recognize me. Come to think of it, no matter what kind of toll age takes between visits, I can almost detect that spark of recognition in their eyes, and maybe even a tiny sense of relief that I am still there.  For at least a moment, maybe, everything else evaporates. Their appearances, like mine, continue to change, and our relationships with each other continue to evolve. Some things change, and some things stay exactly the same. Predictability can be comforting.

When I arrive in New York City today, I will peer anxiously into the waiting crowd until I spot my mother. As I always could with my father, I can spot her a mile away. Within minutes, no doubt, I will be snapping at her, muttering petty frustrations under my breath. Still, I will feel that sense of relief when I see that she is still here, and I will be grateful that I can celebrate her eighty-fourth birthday with her.

The dog-eared old picture of my father before I knew him conjures up vivid images of the man I always knew. The sight of my tiny, aging mother waving me in at LaGuardia will conjure up vivid images of the gorgeous and larger than life woman she always will be. Everything else evaporates.

Are You What You Eat?

I am into day seventeen of my twenty-four day cleanse. Well, that's not entirely true. It's been seventeen days since the cleanse package arrived, but I'm not exactly "into" day seventeen. For seventeen days, I have woken up to a stack of boxes containing mysteriously named supplements that, when taken in some scientifically determined amount, sequence, and combination, promise to greatly enhance my sense of well-being. I admit I have been a bit haphazard about sticking to the protocol.

Not surprisingly, the improvements have been slow to reveal themselves. Okay, well that's not entirely true either. Unless you consider only gaining three pounds and feeling like crap only some of the time to be an improvement, there has been little in the way of noticeable enhancement. For the first few days, I was religious about the not as vile as I thought it would be fruity energy drink and the much more hideous than I could have imagined fiber concoction and the pills that are so big they must contain lots of good stuff although for the life of me I couldn't tell you what. By day five, though, I was slipping off the wagon. (The energy drink also claims to help with mental focus, but by day seven, when I completely forgot I was even attempting the cleanse, I was dubious.)

Today, as I have for most of the past seventeen, I woke up with every intention of doing it right. Again, not entirely true. I had every intention of starting my day off with a heavy dose of coffee and nonprescription pain killers. The cleanse will wait; there's no way I can even consider all that good living and quasi-deprivation until my head stops pounding and my joints loosen up.

I actually thought a twenty-four day challenge would be fun. I had forgotten that January in Chicago is challenging enough, and I suppose I had forgotten that there's a good reason I avoid diets and all sorts of self-improvement regimens like the plague. I am capable of obeying basic rules but woefully incompetent when it comes to following long lists of instructions. It's why I don't cook. Well, that's not entirely true. I just prefer food as a finished product.

There are indeed positives buried within this somewhat misguided cleanse episode, other than capping the weight gain at three pounds. I have learned a lot about myself, and I thrive on self discovery. For starters, the only thing I find more tedious than hearing about somebody else's cleanse is trying to do one myself. When I am hungry I want to sink my teeth into something delicious, not choke down a tasteless capsule that somehow manages to have an aftertaste. Or a drink that bears an uncanny resemblance to things you don't really want to think about when you're eating. At least I have given up diet soda. Having blown my wad on the cleanse, I am quenching my thirst with tap water and attempting to offset the cost of the cleanse by eliminating my daily trip through the McDonald's drive-thru for the perfect diet coke. I am not totally incapable of sacrifice.

And, at the end of the day, I still think a good day is one of accomplishment or good effort or pleasant conversation or a random good deed, and tends to involve little or no thought of dietary supplements. The Advil and coffee are taking effect, and day seventeen is off to a good start.

Je Suis Charlie. Je Suis juif. Je Suis Libre.

Les laisser continuer à manger du gâteau.

Whether it was Marie Antoinette or some other fabled princess who actually said it, she was on to something. Let them eat cake. And drink wine.  And fill their croissants with chocolate. And enjoy satire, or not. And be Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim, or not. Let the French, and the rest of us, continue to be free.

I have been reading about the end of the American Civil War, of the jubilant and irrepressible crowds pouring into the streets and cheering Lincoln outside the White House. My mom used to tell us about people dancing in the streets when World War II ended. I always thought the part about her father throwing open the windows and letting the freedom in to be a bit of embellishment, if only because I have never seen a Brooklyn window capable of being thrown open. Inched upward with great difficulty, maybe, but never thrown open. I will never know, but it’s a good story.

What I do know is that, back in the day, as with any good story, war had a beginning, a middle, and an end, not to mention pretty detailed character development. The battle lines were drawn. Literally. North and south. Blue and Gray. Allies and Axis. Good and Evil. To the victor went whatever spoils were left and to the loser eventually went some reparations and reconstruction and to everyone went some real hope for peace.  Sure, John Wilkes Booth was practicing his marksmanship only miles from the victory celebration and there will always be people who hate, but white flags and handshakes and treaties at least signified the beginning of a different chapter.

Not so much these days. Three murderers are dead, but I am anything but irrepressibly jubilant. My heart breaks for the moments of terror suffered by so many over the years, and in Paris this week. I grieve for the families of those who were slaughtered because of their drawings or their religion or simply because they were in the way. I grieve for the French and for all of us who value not only freedom but life itself. And I know full well that there are countless other murderers out there taking target practice with renewed fervor, and there is no imminent end to the madness. They will not give up, but neither will we.

Sure. Freedom is an ideal, and our methods and goals are always in need of tweaks. The road to freedom is littered with blood and immeasurable destruction. Sometimes we don't go far enough and sometimes the cost is too great, but the road remains open. In theory I would die for freedom, though I certainly prefer not to.

Mohammad or any prophet worth his or her salt would, I imagine, feel cheapened by the idea that executing folks wielding nothing more than a pencil could avenge some great wrongs, real or imagined. I am glad that three terrorists in France are dead and can no longer kill. And I wish with all my heart I could see the looks on their faces when they realize that if there are indeed 72 virgins waiting they are most assuredly waiting for somebody else, certainly in a different location. And you can't take it – i.e. your AK47 – with you, so blasting through the pearly gates is as unlikely as the falsely promised gang bang.

My greatest hope is that each of us continues to uphold our freedom and do the best we can with our lives, even though we will all inevitably fall short. It's what makes us human. We must continue to eat cake and croissants and drink wine and think our own thoughts without fear of those who just don’t get it.

Nous sommes Charlie. Nous continuerons d'être libre.

Close Your Eyes and Blow!

December 31st is hardly an appropriate day for starting something new, although my mental to-do list for tomorrow continues to grow. Today is a day for looking back and reflecting, certainly not for making headway on that book I keep meaning to write or for settling into that new healthy lifestyle.

It has been a slow year for my blog, which may or may not mean that the past year has been uneventful but most definitely means I did not have to scroll down very far to see what I was up to last year at this time. As it turns out, I was pretty much up to the same things at the end of last December that I am up to now: missing the kids who have already come and gone, enjoying the one who is still in town, worrying over a lethargic dog, experimenting with various odor and stain removers for carpet and upholstery. And, of course, looking ahead optimistically to a clean slate for the year to come. Plus ca change. 

An overabundance of senior moments makes it difficult for me to identify any particularly memorable moments from the last twelve months, but I am certain there had to be at least a few. I hate to think I spent 365 days doing nothing but wait for some annual comings and goings and mysterious canine ailments and stain removal and air freshening, but for the life of me I am struggling to come up with anything more interesting. I decided to flip on a morning news show, which I rarely do anymore because there never seems to be any news going on. As luck would have it, the year in pictures montage was about to begin.

Wow, what a year. "Polar vortex" actually sounds exciting when you don't have to hear about it and you cannot even recall where you left your shovel. ISIS, ebola, the Ukraine, the thaw with Cuba, football players abusing women, Bill Cosby abusing women, medal controversies at the Olympics, police shooting citizens, citizens shooting police, racial tensions, politicians barking across the aisle, airplanes dropping into the ocean -- it's difficult to believe the morning news shows had time for so many segments about hair and makeup. It's the "In Memoriam" piece that really knocks the wind out of me, though. So many people who seemed to live enviable lives are, suddenly, gone. If you had told me last year that there would be no more Robin Williams, no more Philip Seymour Hoffman, no more Joan Rivers, no more Lauren Bacall, no more Shirley Temple, no more Maya Angelou (who will balance out Beyonce at the next presidential inauguration?) I would not have believed you. If you had told me that countless other people I haven't really thought about for a long time but just assumed would live forever would be gone I would have been skeptical. If you had told me that Mickey Rooney had died this year I would have sworn that he had already died a long time ago. Maybe that was Mickey Mantle.

It gives one pause. I look forward each year to the final New York Times Magazine, filled with remembrances of not-so-famous people who did or said or endured extraordinary things. It is, in large part, a celebration of unsung heroes, and a reminder of how much of a mark mere mortals can leave in such a short period of time.

Today, as I look ahead, I reflect upon the unsung heroes and the unsung moments of my daily existence. Lots of things have happened between December of last year and now, even though I am still spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about my kids and cleaning up after my dog and planning to finish that book and start that healthy lifestyle.

I may not be able to articulate why, but my life this year has been pretty darn exciting. And if you don't believe me, just close your eyes and blow.