The FixMaster

I am not just an ordinary bird. Not that eagles are at all ordinary, but warrior eagles who have been known to battle harsh accusations of narcissism while battling a few narcissists of their own are certainly a rare breed. Add to that some latent white knight traits, and you've got yourself one rara avis.

My versatility (if you'll indulge me and let me rustle my own feathers for a moment) never ceases to amaze me. I've spoken often of my "Fionas," my beautiful warrior goddess sidekicks who remain poised for battle on my behalf whenever I need reinforcements. Lately, I've had some difficulty being my own white knight, and have recruited the troops more frequently than I care to admit. Well, maybe I haven't so much recruited them; they just seem to appear when I need them. Uncanny.

You can only imagine the performance anxiety that overtook me yesterday when one of my most dependable Fionas needed a Fiona of her own, and I mean a full blown, pistol packing, tough talking, take no prisoners Fiona capable of scaring the living shit out of the demons. Certainly not an impostor such as myself, but when someone you love is struggling you just gotta dig deep, no matter how unqualified you feel.

So I grabbed a bottle of red in my talons, fluffed up my feathers and hopped in the eaglemobile, trying to remember as I soared down the street what exactly it is that my trusted Fionas do when they work their magic. When I arrived, my friend was curled up in a fetal position, but she had as yet held back the tears. What I learned, quickly, is that white knights figure things out by trial and error (at least the good ones do), and as long as you care enough, it's really not that hard. My first task was to steady her with every ounce of my eagle weight (don't let the feathers fool you -- there's some heavy muscle underneath) while her body shook uncontrollably with the repressed sobs. Then I just had to listen. And, of course, I offered up every platitude I've ever stated in these blogs and then some, vomiting them up until she threatened to break every bone in my wings unless I shut the hell up. What are friends for?

For a faux Fiona I think I did a pretty good job, because in short order my friend was up and running, being her own white knight and doing what any self-respecting warrior goddess would do in a crisis: bake cookies. I felt like I was in a James Bond movie. All of a sudden, she had opened a door and pushed a button and one of those gargantuan fancy shmancy mixers rose like a phoenix from the depths of the cabinet up to the level of her kitchen counter. I half expected the thing to morph into a twenty-second century super sonic automobile and start shooting gobs of enemy seeking missiles up through the skylight and into the frigid night. Even better: it started magically blending various and sundry ingredients into mouth watering chocolate chip cookie dough, and no matter how high tech the machine, there's always enough batter left stuck to the bowl for two warrior goddesses wielding spatulas to annihilate. We left no morsel unturned; white knights don't mess around.

For years, I have pressed my nose against the windows of upscale cookware stores, coveting the giant mixers in every color of the rainbow, hoping I would get one for Christmas. That was real hope (even though it was always dashed); to do so this year would be a prime example of false hope, since I will not be celebrating Christmas.

Yep, you guessed it. I'm flapping my wings, flexing my talons, and soaring over to Williams Sonoma to grab my own damn mixer. And if any of my dear, dear Fionas finds herself in trouble, my spatulas will be polished, and I will be armed and ready.

Fools "Ruch" In

Never marry a man who has an extreme aversion to ruching. Actually, stay away from any man who has strong opinions about your attire, particularly when he feels compelled to voice the negative ones. That's the message I want to deliver to my daughters.

After a bit of a hiatus, I watched an episode of Say Yes to the Dress yesterday, and I was horrified. A petite young woman, stylish with a mannequin-esque figure, appeared with her mom to pick out her wedding dress. She was hoping her fiance would make it to the shop to help with (actually -- and frighteningly -- dictate) the decision, but she had not yet heard from him.

What's up with that -- having the guy take part in the dress selection process? The feminist in me -- which is a "one from column A, one from column B" kind -- finds the whole white flowing dress concept a bit antiquated, since the likelihood of a virgin walking down the aisle these days is about as great as the likelihood of my divorce being finalized before I die. Of old age. But the part of me that is able to dismiss the feminist principles when something more important comes up -- like the prospect of looking like a fairy tale princess for one day of your life -- wholeheartedly believes that a groom's first glimpse of his bride in her dress should occur when he sees her walking toward him down the aisle; not a moment before. And, if he doesn't at least pretend to think she is nothing less than a vision, that bride would be well-advised to turn tail and proceed to the nearest fire house to find a worthy hunk with whom to spend what would have been her wedding night.

But back to Kleinfeld's bridal shop. The fiance blows in and as cute and svelte and chic as the bride-to-be is, her betrothed is actually prettier than she. Red flag number one; who needs that? She seems less excited to see him than nervous about what he will think about the three dresses she has fallen in love with in his absence. Frankly, I despised the one that was her favorite, was neutral about another, and thought the third was absolutely divine, but my vote was with whichever one made this bride look in the mirror and beam like nobody's business.

So anyway, the fiance -- we'll just call him, for lack of a better name, shithead -- sits down, looking peeved that his very important day has been interrupted by this nonsense, and awaits the fashion show. His bride appears in dress number one -- her favorite -- and in a half of a nanosecond, shithead pretty much dismisses it as ridiculous. Both the bride and her mom maintain their smiles as they accept his verdict without comment, and off she goes to put on option number two for the one man firing squad.

It was the one with the ruching, the one I thought made her look divine. I think it actually would have been her favorite had she not already been acutely aware of her fiance's extreme aversion to ruching. WTF??? When would that topic have come up? The young woman is literally trembling as she readies herself in the dressing room for what she knows will be a swift kick in the stomach. I am looking at her in that dress, thinking she looks stunning, but, more importantly, I can see the look in her eyes. The look that tells me (and anyone else with minimal powers of observation) that this is her dream dress.

Ready, aim, fire! Shithead clearly sees the look in her eyes as well -- I could tell because he kind of shakes his head in an obligatory apology before taking a full two nanoseconds to deflate his beloved's already shaky spirit. "I'm sorry," he said. "You know I just hate ruching." Is this an issue that goes back to his mother somehow? Maybe there was ruching in her nursing bras and his lips got caught in the elastic.

At this point, I could tell the salesperson wants to take her pointy toed shoe and ram it right up shithead's ass, and I'm screaming at the television screen, trying to scratch his pretty little eyes out. But mom and daughter have the most uncanny ability to keep smiling while the tears are welling up so swiftly behind their eyes their heads are starting to swell and they're looking a bit like encephalitis victims, and the daughter tries her best to conceal the quiver in her voice as she quickly announces it's time to take the dress off. Done.

Now I would hate to overreact to a simple shopping trip and predict that this young woman is doomed to a marriage marked by emotional abuse, but I'm going to anyway. This young woman is doomed to a marriage marked by emotional abuse. Run for your life is what I want to tell her. And I feel like slapping mom around a little, just for good measure.

It's going to be a Jewish wedding, and I'm hoping one of the salespeople will do the proper thing, which would be to show up and before shithead gets a chance to stomp on the glass for the final "mazel tov!" and take the damn glass (or lightbulb, which will work even better) and break it right over his sanctimonious, evil little head. And of course the beautiful dress with the ruching will be in the salesperson's car, and the bride can slip into it and run off to the fire station where there are real men who have never heard of ruching and who will be so stirred by the arrival of this young maiden that they will have to turn their hoses on themselves.

Say yes to the dress, honey. Say no to the shithead.

Morning Sickness

I went to an old fashioned bakery this morning before I hit Starbucks. I had forgotten how intoxicating real baked goods could smell, how air could virtually whisper "good morning." Different from the bold "wake up" message that wafts into your nostrils when the fresh aroma of Starbucks beans greets you. Not better. Just different.

Back in the day, there were no Starbucks, and we had to make do with simple pleasures. Like waiting for commercial breaks to get a snack because you couldn't just press a button and back up to see what you missed. And being blissfully unaware that someone was trying to reach you unless you happened to be home when the phone rang. And not having to report to your ninth grade social studies class that your greatest recent accomplishment had been to send over ten thousand text messages in the previous month. (It would take me ten years to achieve that. My kids make fun of me when I text because I'm so slow. It's like learning to ski; you have to do it when you're young and fearless.)

And old-fashioned bakeries. I used to love going with my mom to the one in our neighborhood, with the cases of brightly iced, perfect looking cookies, racks of freshly baked breads, and mouth watering displays of thickly iced cupcakes and fat layer cakes. I loved the smell, but most of all, I loved watching the bakery workers do their thing. The speed with which they would fold the thin white cardboard boxes would rival the texting agility of any twenty-first century teen. My favorite part was the string. The candy-striped blue and white string that hung from the ceiling, that they would grab and wind three times around the box one way, then three times the other, and tie up with a dexterity and efficiency I only wish the Starbucks barristas could replicate when the line is out the door. And then they would snap the string with their own bare hands, soundless except for the light tapping of their knuckles against the box.

Morning trips to the bakery would somehow bestow a magic upon the rest of the day. The whispered "good morning" would repeat itself in our ears as the aroma of the sinful sweets permeated the air in our kitchen. There was a kind of contentment to it all, never marred, back then, by panicked thoughts about how we might somehow jump start our metabolism and work off the newly forming fat. All we knew was when the sugar buzz wore off, we'd just go grab another bite. Or maybe think about lunch.

My trip to the bakery this morning got me so caught up in reminiscing about tranquil and carefree days I half expected my day in deep dark upper middle class suburbia to pan out like a lazy Saturday in the seventies. Silly bird. After shoveling in some chocolate coffee cake, I did what any self-respecting modern type-A person would do: I went to a spin class. When I arrived, everyone was in crisis mode. The cleaning crew had done a terrible, terrible thing when they scoured the spin studio the night before: they moved the bikes. Not just an inch here and there, but all over the room. I can only imagine the glee they experienced knowing how many lives would be destroyed in the morning.

The scene was surreal. Grown men and women in wildly colored spandex (I think there's something in the dye that makes people extra kooky) scurrying around frantically, peering at the little identification numbers under the handlebars, sticking their faces right in there even if someone was already on the bike (nobody brings their reading glasses to spin). One woman spent ten minutes searching, and when she finally located "her bike" (by then occupied), she practically wept. The person on the bike was uncharacteristically nice (or terrified), and politely dismounted. Everybody was happy. Not.

Apparently, it's not just about the bike. Location, location, location (relative to window ledges and fans and speakers). So the woman proceeded to wheel the three ton bike through the very crowded room of spinners, each one of us compulsive in our own right, but each one of us humbled (and even appalled) by the extent of this woman's lunacy. Even the other folks who had searched the room for their very special bikes now looked a little introspective -- thinking perhaps they should have lived dangerously and risked the demoralizing trauma of a lower RPM read-out.

There are two things people like the bike fanatics don't understand: (1) the calming effect of a trip to an old-fashioned bakery before spin class; and (2) the calming effect of being able to tell yourself, when your power and RPM read-outs are low, that it's not you, it's the bike, stupid.

Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe the eagle in me just doesn't understand the seriousness of the term "stationary bike."

WTF???

I'm seeing the writing on the wall, and it's not pretty. Yes, my friend just gave me a wall calendar full of Sarah Palin's pearls of wisdom, and my daughter and I are flipping through the pages, absolutely awestruck.

The scary thing about Sarah -- gosh, I don't think she'd mind if I call her that -- is that she actually says stuff. Lots of stuff. Usually, when you think about seeing the writing on the wall, it's because of stuff that isn't said; it's that "eureka" feeling you get even though nobody's actually spoken the words or written them down for you. Like "aha, I'm nowhere near the center of his universe" (can't help it; at fifty-one, I still entertain the fantasy) or "aha, I had better get my act together because I'm about to get screwed." Just random examples.

But Sarah's not subtle. There's a whole country full of people out there who see and hear what she has been saying, and I don't know about the rest of the folks out there, but I see some pretty clear (albeit inarticulate) writing on the wall, and it tells me that this self-aggrandizing crackpot whose only foreign policy achievement was keeping an eye on Putin from her perch in Juneau (gives new meaning to the concept of superpower) has a pretty good chance of making it to the Oval Office. I sure hope mama grizzlies don't shed.

Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the rise of Sarah, since most of the people with whom I come into contact are relatively intelligent and would never vote for someone like her anyway. But I do know people who intend to watch her reality show just for kicks; I tremble to think about the other viewers out there, the starstruck morons who will have no trouble casting a vote for a larger than life buffoon who has actually invited them into her living room, just down the road apiece from Russia, for a hot chocolate. Again, I can't help that; it's not my problem.

So I'm going back to focusing on myself. I suppose Sarah and I are more similar than I'd like to admit. Just as she was so focused on her homefront she hadn't been able to focus on the war in Iraq (or Iran, or Ireland, or wherever she thought the "Department of Law" folks in the White House were sending troops), I'm kind of too focused on myself to worry about an idiot becoming president. It's not like we haven't lived to tell that tale before.

I'm focusing on that writing on my wall, that no man in my life has ever made me the center of his universe, and that if I don't take care of myself, I'm about to get screwed. Big time. My newly polished talons had better stop grabbing on to false hope and start dropping all the big dead fish that are weighing me down. I've got better things to carry with me on my journey. Maybe I'll fly to Alaska once things thaw out a bit, get some tips from Sarah on how to believe so wholeheartedly in my own superiority that nothing anybody else says matters. Mama Grizzly, meet Baby Eagle.

If she can spin her illiteracy into literary genius, likening herself to Shakespeare for her uncanny ability to create new words, I can certainly convince myself that I am worth far more than some people would let me believe. I can read the writing on the wall, and, with Sarah's help, I just might be able to "refudiate" it.

You Can't Take Most of it With You

Sometimes strange thoughts pop into my head. Like yesterday, when I got showered in Starbucks with latte foam and it reminded me of bird poop and I realized what I was writing was shitty and things happen for a reason. Anyway, I assume my readers know about the

strange thought issue, since most of those strange thoughts seem to pop right from my head into my blog. I should really get myself a filter.

I suddenly began to worry today that an eagle is too self-contradictory for me to use as a metaphor. For four days now, I've focused on the soaring, the concept of an eagle taking flight rather than digging in her heels and clinging to the past with her strong talons. (By the way, I've always felt lucky to be an American, but if I were an eagle, not so much; what woman wants to be bald?) As it turns out I have nothing to worry about as far as the conflicting messages sent by the eagle's various extremities. Those talons are strong, all right, but the only things they cling to are the tasty treats the eagle has chosen to take along for the ride. Necessary provisions.

No opposing forces -- to cling or not to cling? to soar or not to soar? -- causing inner conflict for this eagle. Yeah right. The urge to cling on to the past is so strong sometimes, I'm lucky my feet aren't so much strong as just plain ugly. Lucky because clinging to the past is pointless, and as appealing as it seems, the past can never be recreated; no matter how much you try to set everything up so nothing will change, things will never be exactly the same. Which can be a good thing if the past sucked, but if your head is filled with good memories, watch out!

I think a lot of folks going through the break up of a marriage tend to get confused by happy memories. You want out, and then all of a sudden you're out and your marriage seems, in the blurred vision of hindsight and loneliness, to be the best darn thing that ever happened to you. Memories of children growing up, family gatherings (which always seem much rosier in retrospect); sometimes it's just memories of being in your thirties rather than your fifties. How can that help but look great? And somehow, we get tricked into thinking if we stay in a dead marriage, our kids will stay young, older generations won't die off, and we will be able to turn our own aging clocks back. Irrational, sure. Tempting, you bet.

The one thing that will remain constant is the relationship between you and the person you've already had second, third, hell tenth thoughts about. The person who no longer makes you happy. The future is full of memories yet to be made, some of them happy, some not, but the prospect of sharing them with someone you don't want to be with should be enough to get those eagle wings flapping and those talons releasing their grip and hanging on only to the essentials. Should be.

I have no problem grabbing on to the good memories and taking them with me as I swoop into my next chapter. As memories only, snapshots of a time gone by -- people and a life that no longer exist in the same form. My big ugly talons may not be as strong as an eagle's but they are freakishly flexible. I'll be able to grab whatever I need to nourish myself as I move forward.

Best of Luck

As I sat in Starbucks this afternoon struggling to write an eagle-worthy post, the guy across from me set his cup down a bit too hard and launched a spray of foam my way. He was mortified, but I assured him it was not a problem, even though a big white creamy blob landed right on my leg, and another on the edge of my laptop. Bird poop, was all I could think. Eagle excrement. My story was downright shitty, and I needed to move on. Things happen for a reason.

Which is exactly what I had told an acquaintance from my yoga class the other day. We were in my car; I was driving her home because she still had not received the go-ahead from her doctor to drive after having suffered a stroke several months earlier. I hadn't seen her in, well, several months, but I had assumed that was due more to my erratic attendance than her having a near death experience.

A few years younger than I -- which means her age starts with a "4," which in my mind now means someone is barely out of diapers, although I guess I shouldn't joke about that when I'm telling you the story of a young woman who suffered a stroke -- she is active, fit, bright, and incredibly nice. Though she hasn't practiced her trade in a while, she is a gynecologist, which is particularly interesting because the stroke she suffered resulted from a device that gynecologists routinely offer up to pre-menopausal women to curtail bleeding. The device carries with it a three per cent risk of stroke. Just as I was surprised, as a kid, to learn that my dentist's kids had lots of cavities, just as I was surprised, in my thirties, when an obstetrician friend miscarried twins in her third trimester, I was a bit taken aback to hear this woman's story.

The more she told me, the more I became convinced that this had happened to her for a reason. And I told her so; even suggested she enter the world of blogging. As it turns out, her brain is still a little too addled for blogging (not that that would ever stop me), but she has been journaling her progress, and has actually come to refer to her affliction as her "stroke of luck." Well put that in your pipe and smoke it, all you pity party throwers out there. Oops, there I go, talking to myself again.

There's no denying that a forty-something mother of three having a stroke sucks; but here's where the glass looks much more than half full. Her husband is a neurologist. He does this stroke stuff for a living. So when symptoms that none of the rest of us mere mortals would have thought twice about started occurring, he insisted on taking her to the emergency room. Within a half hour of their arrival, she started to seize, but by then, her husband the Jewish doctor (maybe I should have listened to my mom) had gathered together all sorts of emergency personnel and she was intubated and ready for surgery. Half full my ass; that glass was overflowing.

At the time this happened, she was also involved in researching non-traditional forms of treatment for stroke and age-related illnesses. Weird. And she had just gotten out from behind the wheel of her car; she and her husband had been driving their daughter to college. Again, weird. And, because she won't be able to drive until December, she has been forced to walk almost everywhere, which has enabled her to notice the magnificence of the world around her in a way she never has before. And, it's been the warmest autumn in recent memory. So weird. So lucky.

She is expected to make a full recovery, and I hope, when she does, she'll share the story of her "stroke of luck." Things do happen for a reason, and when an articulate gynecologist married to a neurologist suffers a stroke related to a gynecological device while she is involved in researching alternative treatments for stroke victims and, happily, not driving, I don't think she's crazy at all for referring to what happened to her as a "stroke of luck." Good luck, that is.

And even though the guy in Starbucks who accidentally spritzed me with faux eagle poop looked at me kind of funny when I told him the mishap clearly happened for a reason because I had been writing a shitty story about birds, I think if I had taken the time to explain to him how it made me think about the "stroke of luck," he might understand. Or maybe not. After all, his cup had runneth over, and he thought it was a bad thing.

Spinning Wheels

The balmy November weather has kept the colorful leaves hanging on the trees a bit longer, and I'm still slipping into flip flops rather than furry clogs for my morning Starbucks run. And the biker guys have not yet retreated indoors; they still swarm in wildly colored spandex and oddly shaped helmets outside my pre-dawn haven, clicking in like an army of alien tap dancers and marching up to the counter like they own the place. Welcome to our planet, fellas, but go find your own Starbucks.

Yipes, how inhospitable of me; they're just men of a certain age (I'm guessing right around mine) searching for the meaning of life. So what if they wear silly outfits? I'm committed to being kinder, particularly after I received so many lovely birthday wishes from people much more thoughtful than I tend to be. There were, of course, the wonderful meals with close friends -- the usual suspects, but there were also countless Facebook well wishers, people from my past and present whom I rarely or never see, taking the time to acknowledge the day. Contrary to popular belief, the social network is not just a forum for underage drinkers and under dressed college girls to flaunt their stuff. It's all about connection, however fleeting, and it might just help keep a reclusive crankosaurus like me from falling off the face of the earth.

There were two pleasantly surprising phone calls from old friends. First, there was the call from my childhood pal, the one with whom I enjoyed breakfast on a recent visit to New York (back when I was still a fledgling blogger trying to figure out whether I really was a narcissist). The other was from from my law school buddy, the one person I still keep in touch with from those days (unless you count my husband). That is if you can call a once a year quick lunch on the day before Thanksgiving, when I blow briefly into New York, keeping in touch. They are both lifelong New Yorkers, and share an accent that makes me nostalgic for my formative years out east. Hearing from them was as comforting as sitting down to a bowl of my grandmother's chicken soup with rock hard matzoh balls, followed by a plate of her spectacular stuffed cabbage.

Both phone calls were relatively brief; we didn't spend too much time catching up on the minutiae of our lives, or our kids' lives. Nevertheless, it was obvious that they, as I am, are still searching for answers that eluded us when we were young. They, as I am, are sensing the new adventure that lies ahead as the kids leave the nest (the eagle's nest, of course), and are beginning to flex their aging wings. Getting ready for take-off. Okay, maybe there will be more limping than soaring at first, but the eagle image is my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Even limping is okay, as long as you move forward. I actually went for a bike ride the other day, determined to enjoy the unseasonable weather and, who knows, maybe search for the meaning of life. Call me vain, but you will never see me in wildly colored spandex of the sort worn by the Starbucks extraterrestrials, and I shun helmets because they always seem to slip off my head and start to strangle me. Asphyxiation strikes me as more of a threat than a spinal injury. And the clip-on bike shoes? After several near death experiences, I reserve those for indoor spinning, and would rather risk having the laces of my running shoes get caught in the gears than ever again experience the panic of going over with my feet still stuck to the bike.

Something appears to have happened to my bike since I last rode it over the summer. I can't possibly be as out of shape as I felt; I could barely pedal the damn thing. I must have been too distracted by my search for the meaning of life to feel the strong winds in my face, or notice the flattened tires, or smell the molasses somebody obviously spooned into the gears. But I limped on, arriving home alive, if just a bit breathless. (Aim low; you don't get disappointed.) And, throughout the ordeal, I always moved forward, never backwards (although I must admit I did make a complete circle).

Today, another balmy one, I thought maybe I'd wash the molasses out of the gears and fill up the tires (they don't seem flat but I'm probably not squeezing hard enough), and go for another spin. But baby birds need their rest, and learning to take flight takes time. I decided to put the bike away until next spring, and went to have a talon-icure instead.