Impermanent Stains

I'm still on a high from my uncharacteristic hissy fit, the one that seemed to knock all the lawyers' heads together. Things are going to start happening, The best way to get your attorneys to stop "working the file" is to make them think you're not going to pay them anymore because you're going to be shackled to a bed in the loony bin.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't mean to suggest I've never had a hissy fit before. I've tossed a few glasses of cheap red wine on laps, I've hurled unzipped suitcases down the stairs (long story), launched a few other improbable flying objects. And, yes, I've thrown incisive and incredibly angry words around with abandon, the kind that can do more lasting damage than any sticks and stones. Provoked or unprovoked? Well, that's usually in the eye of the beholder. But as long as the target is unsuspecting and not the usual recipient of my wrath, a hissy fit is worth more than a thousand mature, reasonable conversations.

Last night, when we literally blew in to my cousin's rehearsal dinner in Westport, Connecticut, unshowered and exhausted after a long day of travel, I was feeling a bit on the verge. First, there were the repeated flight delays -- always in twenty minute increments, although the final one was, oddly, only eighteen. Then there was the  interminable conversation at the rental car counter during which I had to reject thousands of upgrade options that I had already rejected in my online reservation and finally explain that I didn't give a flying fuck what kind of car I'd be driving to my cousin's wedding and, no, I was not willing to pay an extra million dollars for a BMW. The ride from New York City to Connecticut at the height of Friday rush hour was, as you can imagine, a treat, particularly since the effects of the tiny fraction of an anxiety pill I had taken so I could sleep on the plane had not quite passed through my system and I kept fighting the urge to doze.

No rest for the wicked, as usual, and after we went through our obligatory (and, seriously, heartfelt) screaming hugs with all the cousins at the hotel, my cousin (the mother of the bride) gave me the once over, told me we needed to be downstairs in ten minutes, and said "you're gonna change, aren't you?" I hope she was just referring to the fact I was wearing jeans and not to the big brown smudge marks on my upper left thigh, which may have led her to believe that, in the months since I last saw her, I had become incontinent. It was chocolate. Really. Remember the anxiety pill? Well, on take-off, I apparently fell asleep while eating a Baby Ruth. My daughter is still laughing at the image -- the candy bar in my left hand, raised on its way to my mouth, my head dropped back, my mouth open. She had thought I was offering her a bite, which she took. Apparently, gravity eventually took my arm down, candy bar and all, and I somehow rubbed what was left of it all over my jeans. Nice.

It's morning, and I'm back in my happy place. Sitting in a Starbucks, wearing baggy workout clothes -- I have twelve hours to lose enough weight so that my dress will zip -- and drug free. At least until my mom arrives in a few hours. I have no plans for any hissy fits today, but if the need arises, I will don my jeans with the suspicious brown stains and make sure that anyone who dares to mess with me knows I mean business. Craziness is like anything else. It's all about the outfit.

Paper Trails

Even I have a breaking point. Yesterday, after the umpteenth request from my attorneys to produce yet another year’s worth of pointless documents because my husband’s genius attorney keeps demanding them, I may have gone a bit ballistic.

I figure each email exchange about this nonsense costs a few hundred bucks, and I can only imagine what it will cost me once I produce stacks of statements so that both sets of attorneys can pretend to flip through them and conclude there’s nothing in there that could possibly have an impact on our divorce settlement.  The only thing having an impact on our settlement, after over two years of masterful fee generating, is the continuing emptying of the marital pot by the people we hired to protect our interests. Ironic, no?

Over time, I have discovered that if you are a person who generally appears to be calm and agreeable and you suddenly have a hissy fit, people react. And so it was, yesterday, when I sent a scathing email to my attorneys laying out what the only relevant issues are, how irrelevant everything else is, and how I refuse to allow them to rack up more fees over sheer and utter bullshit. To top it off, I emailed my husband – who, at least in theory, agrees with me about all this – and told him about the nasty email I sent to the thieving bulldogs of the bar, asking him if maybe he’d like to send a similar one to his. Which would have been fine, except I accidentally sent the email intended for my husband to my attorneys. Oopsy.

My husband was amused, and assured me – correctly, no doubt – that there are two groups unaffected by personal insults and rudeness: timeshare salespeople and divorce lawyers. I’d add telemarketers, by I certainly get his point. My attorney did, in fact, seem unaffected. “Breathe, and call me later when you’re calm,” she wrote. Since I didn’t expect to feel calm any time soon (although I did fully intend to keep breathing – I am determined to not let this kill me) I made a conscious decision not to call at all that day, even though I had earlier promised I would.

Back to the good news. Lo and behold, the next communications I had from my attorneys had absolutely nothing to do with requests for useless documents (good for my psyche, good for the trees) and everything to do with setting up a meeting to discuss the issues that are actually relevant. Dang. Even my husband jumped on the bandwagon and is slowly trying to explain to his dimwitted attorney that she needs to stop wasting time and money on pointless court pleadings and maybe focus on the stuff that matters. It will no doubt take her a while to process all this, and she’ll feel a bit naked when the shopping bag full of papers she totes into court (I am not making this up) is not as full as she likes it to be, but maybe she’ll get there.

We had hoped (and by we I mean the ones not getting paid royally for our participation in the matrimonial court circus) that this would all be over and done before another wedding anniversary was upon us. Not bloody likely, with only six days left until number twenty-six. At the outset of this whole ordeal, my attorney told me that the longer I stay married, the better it is for me. Theoretically I suppose that’s true, since my entitlements increase with every year I have under my belt. Whoop dee doo. My piece of the pie may be growing, but that doesn’t really help me when somebody else is eating the whole friggin’ pie. It’s like sitting in a bathtub with the drain open. Everything gets sucked out before I even have time to soap up. And (might as well beat the metaphor to death) I come out feeling icky.

All I can do is breathe. And throw an occasional hissy fit. Guess I’d better go shopping for an anniversary gift. Naturally, I’ll send the credit card statement to my attorneys.

The Art of Shopping

Weeks ago, when the unseasonably warm March weather put me in a shopping mood, I visited Sunflower in Highland Park. I needed a bit of retail therapy after endless months spent on the selling end of a cash register.

No matter how personal the touch might be, a cookie cutter national chain store in a large suburban shopping mall cannot possibly envelop you in its loving arms when you walk in the way a small boutique does. Granted, I have been to Sheridan Road in Highland Park more than a few times over the years, and have grown to expect a warm hug when I walk into Sunflower. But even my friends, the ones I drag there against their will for the first time, emerge feeling as if they are part of a new family. A nice family. A family with fantastic taste.

And so it was, a few weeks ago, when my two friends – Sunflower virgins – and I went on a little spring shopping spree. We are, the three of us, completely different from each other in size, shape, and temperament. We are, the three of us, a random sample of real women, women who have raised kids and worked (not to suggest that those two are mutually exclusive) and struggled sometimes to accept ourselves the way we are. We all have the fine, character lines – dare I say wrinkles? – to prove it. Sound familiar?

Three customers, three wildly different body types, a thousand different body hangups. Two fitting rooms. The racks, filled with colorful and, yes, rest assured, black garments beckoned us all. Tentatively, we each did some close examining of the merchandise, maybe even a little grabbing. Holding the enticing items up to the light, we all looked to our hosts, awaiting guidance.

The owner, Susie, and her sales associate, Mimi, did not disappoint. They never do. They sized up my friends in about three nanoseconds, processing enough information about their body types and temperaments to call immediately upon this gift they have – a sixth sense, really – of knowing exactly what to do. The fitting rooms filled up, pushing us out onto the sales floor – which seems more like a favorite friend’s parlor than anything – to finish buttoning and zipping and adjusting our various body parts. When you’re in your fifties, things just seem to stray. I found my left boob hovering near the floor when I bent over to slip on a pair of brightly colored skinny jeans. The folks at Sunflower seemed not to find that strange.

We each took several turns in front of the three way mirrors, and marveled at how good we looked. Transformed, somehow. We were all a bit skeptical. Maybe it was an optical illusion fueled by trick skinny mirrors. Susie assured us the mirrors in her store were accurate, that what we were seeing was absolutely real. I looked back and forth from the mirror to my friend. Hmm. Susie had a point. The “in the flesh” image and the reflection were remarkably the same.

My friends are hooked, and have already returned several times, bringing friends of their own. As for me, well let’s just say it’s become a bit of a habit for me, my visits to Sunflower. Beats drinking. No alcoholic haze, no alcohol induced brazenness, no hangover. Just lots of pretty new things, a brazenness to wear and to flaunt, inspired both by the realistic mirrors and the brutally Though I did blurt out an occasional “I love you guys,” I was not bullshitting. Stone cold sober, my professions of love and everlasting devotion were completely heartfelt.

My career as a retailer in a cookie cutter national chain store in a large suburban mall has come to an end, and the cookie cutter clothing I had amassed with my hefty discount has been pushed to the back of the closet. After all, I had to make room for all the new stuff.

Real women are unique. Their clothing – and the shopping experience that brings them together -- should be, as well.

Check out my favorite store, Sunflower, in Highland Park, IL.

http://www.facebook.com/sunflowerboutique

http://sunflowerboutique.wordpress.com

Become a follower of "An Eagle's Tale" (or, if you already are one, keep following!) and get a 15% discount if you mention it at Sunflower!

Fired Up

Does this outfit make me look fat?

When opportunity knocks, I seem to always be in the bathroom. 

Or, as will be the case this coming Saturday, a thousand miles away for a family wedding when the entire local fire department -- truck and all -- will be visiting my Starbucks. If the fees for changing flights weren't so steep, I'd skip the rehearsal dinner Friday (heck I'll see them all in six months for Thanksgiving; I can just watch the video) and stick around here a bit Saturday just for the chance to be lifted (hoisted?) onto the truck by one of deep dark suburbia's finest. The mere thought is making me swoon. Me, in my slightly too short fire engine red dress and slightly too high spiked heels (after all, I'm going to have to head right from the airport to the ceremony), a buff young stud steadying me with his large rough hands around my hips as I get ready to view the machinery. Watch the updo, I'll squeal, tossing my head back as he places his helmet on me.  Fuck it; I really wanted to wear my hair down anyway.

After I saw the flyer, I asked my morning fireman Starbucks buddy whether there was any way they could push things back a week. Shockingly, he laughed, apparently thinking I was joking (or nuts). In his wildest imagination, I suppose, he could not conjure up the images I was conjuring up. Of course not; to him, I'm just the tired looking old broad in sweats who taps away on her laptop every morning, squinting because her eyes have long outlived their shelf life. Ha! He hasn't seen me in the red dress. (And if he does, with any luck, his vision isn't so good either.)

Ah, well, back to reality. My baby cousin (who just turned thirty this week -- yipes!), the wobbly little toddler I propped up on my bed one day long ago so I could deck her out in all sorts of fake costume jewelry, is going to be heading down the aisle this weekend with, I'm guessing, not a fake bauble within striking distance of her bouquet. We all bring truckloads of our own baggage to weddings, depending on how lucky -- or, as is often the case -- unlucky we have been with the whole lifelong commitment thing. As cynical as I am, though, I remain optimistic for my cousin and her fiance, who seem so natural together. Deep down, I am a hopeless romantic, fully able to push aside thoughts of reality -- kids, money issues, middle age, boredom -- and believe wholeheartedly in the soul mate thing. Even if it begins when you're in your twenties and neither one of you really has any sense of who you are or who you might become.

It's no wonder, more than two years into a costly divorce, that I might find the idea of a quick hook up in a hook and ladder a bit more appealing than the prospect of something permanent. As expensive as weddings can be, the financial and emotional costs don't hold a candle to what you need to lay out to tear it all asunder. Maybe if they did, folks wouldn't rush to the altar so quickly. But where would that  leave us? There's something nice about the whole young nuclear family thing, the glue that keeps everything working relatively smoothly as kids and parents alike struggle through the challenges of growing up. Even if it all starts going to shit at some point, it still seems like a pretty good system.

The other night, I enjoyed a pizza dinner with my own nuclear family, us and our three kids, still somehow glued together even though the nucleus has unraveled a bit. I reminisced about how my husband and I used to share a pizza (I'd peel off the top, leaving him the bottom). "I always hated that," he said.

"So that's what it's all about!" my son piped up. Maybe he's right. Maybe it was all those little indignities, the splitting of a pizza vertically instead of on a horizontal plane. Why didn't he just say so back then? Hmm, come to think of it, he did. I'm sure he committed his fair share of petty crimes, but I can't even remember. Ha, that's bullshit! Of course, I remember each one, but there's no point in dwelling on it now. After all, Illinois is a no fault state. (I tremble to think what divorce would cost in a "fault" state.)

We've grown older, my husband and I, and I like to think we've both grown up a bit. No doubt, we'd do things differently now than we did back then, if only we had the chance. We don't, but my cousin and her fiance and every other young couple does. My advice to them? When opportunity knocks, don't get caught in the bathroom. And, to him in particular, never leave the seat up!

Do I believe in the possibility of love and commitment everlasting? You bet. For now, though, bring on the firemen.

Seasons of Tough Love

Usually I welcome the end of April. Theoretically, it means showers give way to flowers, but I've long ago relinquished hopes of that being the case. At least the onset of May signifies a closing of the gap between the inaptly named spring in Chicago and the longer, warmer, lazier days of summer. Theoretically.

This year, though, I can't help but remember the string of unfortunate events that defined the month of May just a year ago, a month I still refer to as "Mayhem." My beloved lab died, his happy and carefree sidekick went blind, and then there was that car accident on the way to my daughter's college graduation that broke more than a few of my mother's bones. And set off a chain reaction of spinal compressions that now has her injecting herself every morning  (as she says shooting up -- my mother, the junkie) with some revolutionary concoction that will stop the mortar that holds her spine together from deteriorating further, curtail the shrinking, maybe even alleviate some of the pain. Maybe.

She's a feisty old broad, my mother, and a few broken bones and a collapsing spine have not deterred her. Slowed her down? Yes. Made things a lot more difficult? Definitely. But she, unlike her skeleton, is far from broken. It will take a lot more than osteoporosis and a little T-boning in a taxi to stop her from living life as fully as she can, while she has the chance. Don't get me wrong; she's a well documented (in this space, even) pain in the ass, but there's a lot of good in there, a lot I can only hope to emulate as the years wear me down.

May is already a bit of a tainted month for me. My father died in May, and my wedding anniversary is in May. There's no ambivalence about the former, but as to the latter, well that's a mixed bag. There are good memories, there are not so good memories, some relief that I've gotten out, and a lot of honey coated nostalgia and wishful thinking, about what we both could have done differently long ago to prevent the catastrophe. In the plus column for May, though, is Mother's Day, the day set aside by Hallmark to celebrate those of us who, no matter what we have accomplished or failed to accomplish in our lives, value our role as mom above everything else. Even though our kids sometimes don't quite see the point.

As any good shrink (or I) will tell you, my mother has caused me a fair share of pain and insecurity over the years, and I've tried my best to do things differently.  As any good shrink (or my own kids) will tell you, I have caused my children a fair share of pain and insecurity over the years, and they, in turn, will try their best to do things differently. Good luck with that. It will take a long time for them to realize what I have realized, which is that the more opportunities life gives you to screw up, the more likely you  are to screw up. Which kind of puts the ever present mom in a precarious situation.

As we waited in the stands for the medal ceremony at my daughter's final badminton tournament the other day, I watched with amusement as the girls from the nine teams gathered on the gymnasium floor. The tough, focused competitors had once again become giggling high school girls. Some sat braiding each others hair, some jumped up in odd shows of team unity and broke into spontaneous, for lack of a better word, dances, others just gossiped and snacked as they lay sprawled on the polished wood floor. They had all traded their court shoes for flip flops or Uggs, and looked less like athletes than teenagers at a slumber party. And why shouldn't they?

Off to my left, a country clubbish looking mom yelled down to her daughter, who was eating an enticing looking bakery cookie loaded with thick frosting in the image of a smiley face. "Is that your second cookie?" The mom literally looked as if she was going to cry. The girl seemed momentarily stunned, not to mention embarrassed. Busted, caught with the shadow of yellow icing on her lips, there was no point in denying it. But the girl persevered, stared right at her mom, and took another bite. A small victory for girls everywhere, for girls like me who, years later, still reel from the memory of the criticism and the disdain, from the scornful look on the face of a mom who thinks her daughter's happiness (like much of her own) rests with thinness.



Yesterday, crammed into a fitting room with my two daughters as we all tried on dresses for our cousin's upcoming wedding, I made the mistake of telling my youngest that a certain neckline was better for her sister than for her. Her sister actually agreed, but all my fifteen year old heard was what I said, which was apparently something like "you are ugly, fat, and inferior in every way." Minutes later, I told my older daughter a certain color wasn't so great on her. She agreed. Shortly after that, they both told me a dress I loved was not good on me because I didn't have enough boobs to hold it up. I was disappointed (the bottom half was just so cool) but I moved on. Still, my youngest only heard me pounding her into the ground. She brought it up no less than seventeen times at dinner.

Just like the mom and daughter at badminton, my youngest and I will have to carefully navigate the next few years without permanently straining our relationship over complete bullshit. I am under no illusions about my older daughter, by the way; we are certainly nowhere near being out of the woods. The delicate mother daughter dance continues, and I often seem to come up short, with two left feet.

It's complicated, the mother daughter thing. These days, my mom occasionally even looks to me for guidance. Maybe she always looked up to me in some ways, and I just failed to see it. I know I often look to my daughters for guidance, but my guess is they are probably so busy hearing criticism they don't notice. Nevertheless, I am fairly confident that they will celebrate Mother's Day with me and make me feel like a queen, at least for a few hours. Because deep down, the little princesses know that one day they too will be queen, and that can be a royal pain in the ass.

A Cake Walk

According to my son, lover of gritty urban surroundings, there is an up side to living in deep dark suburbia.  "It's tough to be a writer in New York," he told me. "Why would anyone sit and write when you can always take a walk?"

Well, every hour of every day, there are plenty of folks walking the streets of deep dark suburbia, proof, I think, that you don't have to live in an interesting place to take a walk. And nobody, even the most committed power walker, can hoof it all day -- unless you're Forrest Gump, and I've been working really hard lately on distinguishing between reality and fantasy, and I'm pretty sure Forrest is fictional. So if everybody can always take a walk, and everybody has to sit some time, what's wrong with trying to write in a place where you might actually see something on one of your walks, something to capture your own (not to mention your readers') attention. Though I suppose there are some good stories buried deep within the confines of endless white picket fences and aluminum siding, and maybe, things aren't always as dull as they seem. So I've heard.

The truth is, no matter where you are these days, there is a lot of sameness. Main Street, USA, winds its way through major metropolitan areas and small towns both in this country and around the world. The McDonald's in Winnetka, Illinois is a McDonald's like any other, despite suburban planners' attempts to camouflage the truth with a facade suggestive of WASPish old money. The McDonald's on the Champs Elysee in Paris is a McDonald's like any other as well (not to mention a travesty), no matter how much wine they sell with their "extra repas de valeur." It may sound better, but face it, it's still just greasy cow parts on a bun. And French fries are still as about American as it gets.

This morning, for some reason, I got to thinking about chocolate cake. Not just any chocolate cake. 
Ebinger's chocolate buttercream layer cake from my Brooklyn youth. Chocolate blackout cake was their claim to fame, but I lived for the buttercream, the thick sickeningly sweet layer on the top that I would save for last. The yellow cake was moist and tasty, but really, it was simply there to hold the layers of frosting together. The glue for the ambrosia, a bit of color to break up the monotony on the fork. The only decoration on an Ebinger's buttercream layer cake was the three green pistachio nuts in the center on the top. I never ate them, but I knew they were there. Like the pale green box wrapped in string, it was part of the reassurance I needed, proof that the cake I was about to eat, one layer at a time, was the real deal.

Ebinger's bakery closed in the 1970's, after an almost one hundred year run. I don't think I've ever found a cake I've liked as much; a piece of my sweet tooth simply died when Ebinger's disappeared. Okay, a small piece. You can take your molten lava cakes and your bittersweet ganache and all sorts of death by chocolate concoctions, not to mention the pretty little cupcakes that people line up in droves to buy, the treats that never taste half as good as they look, much less cost. My mom -- yes, the same woman who hid food from me in later years -- always made sure there was an Ebinger's cake waiting for me when I came home from school; as soon as I finished off one, she was off to the bakery for a replacement.

It's not just about the uniqueness of Brooklyn, a place really like no other. It's about the uniqueness of what's local, no matter where you are. The flavor of my youth, a taste that stays with me now, was sweet buttercream and small mom and pop stores and fresh hot chewy bagels that you could literally taste through your nostrils and ambulances screeching by at all hours and bike rides to Coney Island and a mosaic of people you just don't find in deep dark suburbia. Not to mention abrasive accents, which seemed normal to me at the time. Main street USA didn't really exist back then; small towns everywhere, just like Brooklyn, had flavors all their own, special seasonings that shaped the people who grew up there.

These days, even New York City has sold out. The streets of Soho, once a mishmash of bohemian stores and restaurants and apartments, overflows with glitzy chain stores and people who could just as well be shopping at Neiman's. If I can find it in Soho, odds are I can find the same thing here in deep dark suburbia. But there's still a difference, at least from a walker's -- and a writer's -- perspective. In deep dark suburbia, you can walk for miles and see nothing different, except maybe different paint colors on the houses, different models of black Lexus sedans, different styles of Lululemon ensembles. Zoning ordinances exist to keep everything sanitized and very much the same. The local police exist primarily to run people who don't look like the rest of us out of town.

In New York, though, odds are that if you walk long enough, you'll see every color and sort of person you'd ever want to meet (or not meet), and you'll pass through neighborhoods that, while moving toward some degree of sameness, all still retain some sort of unique flavor. So far, superstores and factory style cupcake joints haven't managed to destroy all that.

No matter how much walking you do in the big city, there's always going to be something to write home about. Ebinger's might be gone, but the flavor still lingers.

Superiority Complex Carbohydrates

I don't think it's possible to ever get too much of a good thing.

Like avocados. I have been told they are a "super food." I pretty much swallow them whole, figuring the high calorie count will be negated by my super-ness. Superiority? Whatever. Luckily I love avocados; I don't think I'd be able to stick with my self improvement plan if the super food du jour happened to be pork bellies. (Do folks really eat those, or just trade them?)

The point is, I am trying to take good care of myself, to be the best me I can be. According to an email I received yesterday from a friend, Lucille Ball (one of my all time heroes) used to say "love yourself first, then everything else falls into line." Easy for her to say. She was hilarious, successful, and married to a hot Cuban. And, she knew how to dance. She probably didn't even know what an avocado was.

With my two left feet and complete lack of rhythm, dancing is out of the question. And I haven't met any hot Cubans lately. (JDate, you got some  'splainin to do !) But I do take an occasional break from super foods and try to do other things that make me love myself. Yesterday, I played tennis against a large and scary bleached blond bitch named Buffy. No I am not making this up. Even vampire slaying Buffy's are supposed to be cute and sexy. This one was like a Mack truck in fluorescent yellow tennis shoes who made it a point several times to take a full back swing on a short ball and try to peg me at the net. Really? If I had wanted to play tennis with high school boys, I would have strapped one on, gotten myself a jock strap, and colored in my wrinkles so they'd look like facial hair.

Mean old Buffy seemed smug as she dashed off the court, beating me not as badly as she would have liked but leaving me in a cold sweat and on the verge of puking. She seemed to actually love herself, even though I could not, for the life of me, figure out why. Which, as it turned out, made me love myself even more. I spent the entire unpleasant (and death defying) hour and a half being sickeningly pleasant, apologizing profusely whenever I won a point on a particularly wimpy shot. Salt on the wound, a few little punctures in her big old tires. Love myself? I was feeling downright smitten.

When you make a conscious decision to love yourself the little snowball of mere fondness starts to pick up steam and rolls into a boulder of hopeless infatuation. An old friend just stopped by my writing chair, and he reminisced about the time we had chaperoned a fifth grade field trip together and he had the dubious pleasure of watching from underneath as I went up the climbing wall. "It was nice that you weren't wearing underwear," he said. I assured him that I was, that it was probably just creeping up my ass for a change. Feeling lots of self love, I told him how much better the view would be now all these years later, with my granny pants bunched up under my shorts. Loving oneself is good; sharing the love, even better.

Last night I grabbed a  Lean Cuisine out of the freezer for dinner. A nice snack, but when I finished (in about two seconds flat) I didn't feel particularly lean. Thank goodness for my theory (remember the theory? that you can never get enough of a good thing?). I popped two more in the microwave, hoping to feel super lean. These things take time, I suppose. At least I was starting to feel satisfied.