Crossroads

It was bad enough that I woke up soaked in sweat and realized I couldn't keep blaming it on the jalapeno pizza.  Another damn hot flash. Like a tap on the shoulder, momentarily startling, sometimes even makes you jump, though it's hardly a surprise. Everything changes.

I had cooled off by the time I found myself at that intersection, the same intersection I had passed through almost every weekday morning for years.  The crossing guards, more often than not bundled up against the cold, clutching the giant stop signs that defied the waiting drivers to turn, much less lean on the horn, until every miniature pedestrian had two feet safely back up on the curb.

Tap, tap. I'm not sure why it took my breath away, why I felt so startled. The same crossing guards, the same miniature pedestrians. Different faces, but the same size. The same long line of cars, heading north, waiting to turn east. I was heading west this time, a different perspective, I suppose. I was no longer a part of this scenery, just a spectator, a fly on the wall. So utterly familiar, so utterly unexpected.

I looked for my old neighbor, the one who always walked her dog around that time, stopping for a while to chat with the guards while they waited out the long red lights. She wasn't there. I hope the dog is okay. It was disconcerting, not seeing her there. It was still more disconcerting, seeing life going on the way it always had, when so much has changed for me. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

Somehow, that evening, I ended up killing some time at bar in a popular local restaurant.  The "old" local, the place of the morning crossing guards with their stop signs and my old neighbor walking her dog and the miniature pedestrians oblivious to the impatient drivers waiting to turn, their horns eerily silent. The place I left two and a half years ago, a move less about distance than about symbolism, about starting fresh, and maybe even about being a little anonymous if I felt like it. My "new" local. I'm hardly as anonymous there as I had planned, but I still enjoy the newness.

Though I was never particularly anonymous in the "old" local -- how can you be, really, in a suburban fishbowl -- I was never particularly social either. Which is why it did not surprise me that I knew a good percentage of the folks wandering in, but it did surprise me that I went out of my way to catch the attention of several. To be out there, to say hello, to even solicit a few hugs. Tap, tap. An alien has inhabited my body, riding the wave of the hot flashes.

Another intersection. I again felt I was no longer a part of this scenery, just a spectator, a fly on the wall. So utterly familiar, so utterly unexpected. I caught myself, reminding myself that just because they are all still there, it does not mean that everything has not changed for them as well. That they, too, don't suffer pangs when they pass through the old intersections, no longer toting their own miniature people around, no longer revolving around the schedule of crossing guards. That they, like me, don't juggle love and loss and extreme joy and devastating sadness on a daily basis, in a life that is always evolving, always changing.

An occasional pause at an intersection is good, especially when everything else can be so shaky.

A Decent Proposal

My daughter said yes.

It had never occurred to me that she would say no, but still, when I finally got the call -- hardly a surprise, since my future son-in-law-to-be had already given me the heads up -- I breathed a sigh of relief. Odd.

She's beautiful, the doctor said when she finally arrived, a solid three nursing shifts after I had waddled in. It had never occurred to me that she wouldn't be, but still, I breathed a sigh of relief. It's a girl? I asked. I had known that for months, had even told the doctor her name. Odd.

I can't sleep. My own Facebook post announcing the engagement has been pushed to the bottom of the news feed, overridden by countless others. I scroll through the well-wishes, all accompanied by photographs of special moments with friends, from childhood through college. I take my own trip down memory lane, a montage of her and me playing out in my brain. She's beautiful. It's a girl? Sigh. My girl. My girl said yes. His girl, now. Odd.

There's so much I want to tell them. About how important this is, about how wonderful it should be, about how I truly believe that it can work, even though I was not particularly good at it. I worry about a lot of things, but, oddly, I don't really worry about them, as in "the them." Though their minds may be elsewhere when they actually speak those vows, they will mean every word. Marriage, like everything in life worth having, is hard, but they will make it look effortless. It's how they are. It's how "the they" is.

Word has it they were both too excited to eat last night. That's how I know not to worry. My own marriage may have given me indigestion at times, but I was never too excited to eat.

As it turns out, like me, she couldn't sleep. She texted me to tell me that. She sent me a close-up of her newly bedazzled finger. I told her how excited I am for them. "The them." I didn't mention how excited I was to hear from her, how reassuring it is to know there will always be "an us" too.

Yes indeed.

The Right to Bare Ass

"Can you explain something to me?"

It's disarming when a stranger asks you this, especially when you're naked. I stopped drying off, pulled my towel up and wrapped it tightly under my armpits. There was nobody else in the locker room, so she was clearly talking to me.

"If there's a guy who swims in the pool in his underwear, should I approach him myself or should I report him to the front desk?" God's honest truth, I had been deep in thought, pondering the great mysteries of life and death, like how I could have been so fond of Justice Scalia, and why a President is a lame duck when he still has almost eleven months left in his term, or why, within the span of a month, a teenager, my friend's twenty-seven year old son, and a brilliant seventy-nine year old jurist all died, inexplicably, somewhere in the state of Texas. (Yes, I watch too many crime shows, and the news of the teenager arose out of a hunch and a Google search.)

I had even been reminiscing about law school, although I'm not sure how much reminiscing one can do about an experience she mostly slept through in the first place. First year. Constitutional Law. Professor Henry Monaghan always seemed angry (and a little hungover). His rants were soothing and predictable background noise to my daydreams: diatribes about his arch rival, Lawrence Tribe, a liberal constitutional scholar at Harvard who probably didn't know they were rivals -- probably didn't even know Henry; dismissive stage whispers about how pathetic and third rate we were, students at Boston University, across the river from people who mattered (no he wasn't bitter at all); tantrums about  something called "substantive due process" which seemed just a silly oxymoron to me but apparently drove Henry to drink.

It came back to me today as I read excerpts from some of Justice Scalia's opinions, smiling at his mastery of language and his capacity for eloquent ridicule. I rarely come across such quality entertainment in my social security disability appeals, except for occasional snippets of scathing sarcasm from a favorite Seventh Circuit judge. Scalia's writing was so good, his principles so consistent, his respect for the Constitution so unwavering, it was difficult to hate him, even though I generally disagreed with his result. I get why Ruth Bader Ginsburg chose him as a playmate. Smart with a sense of humor -- goes a lot farther than movie star good looks, even if he's not Jewish.

As much as the thought of his pivotal seat on the bench being handed off to some pinko liberal would make him spin in his grave, I think Justice Scalia would be appalled at the politics of his death. I don't think he'd necessarily be surprised that Republicans are so worked up that they've forgotten to even pretend to cry. I don't think he'd even be surprised about calls for Senate filibusters or whatever else they need to do to keep open the possibility that one of the buffoons seeking the Republican nomination will actually become President and place an avowed gun-slinging homophobe on the Supreme Court. But these calls for the President to ignore Constitutional language that he (or she?) "shall" nominate and, with the consent of the Senate, "shall" appoint a new Justice, ignore it because he is a "lame duck?" Has he been a lame duck for this entire second term? Just the second half of the second term? The last quarter? I wish I had paid more attention in Con Law.

I'm not smart or principled or consistent, so, in these uncertain times, at least I am certain I won't get nominated, no matter which duck does the nominating. And though I get the point of strict construction, I'm a little loose about it, since I know the Constitution was drafted by folks who believed the definition of "person" changed with skin color and who grew up in a time when nobody envisioned crazy people shooting up classrooms and movie theaters and learning how to make bombs on the Internet. The times, they are always a changin', and I am a firm believer in wiggle room.

I told the lady in the locker room she should let the front desk handle the guy swimming in his underwear, if it meant that much to her.  It was a no-brainer. I have a strict policy against approaching strange men in their underwear.

The Biggest Chill -- Remembering Adam London, 1989-2016

Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans, God laughs. Or is it God plans, man cries? All I know is somebody fucked up and there doesn't seem to be a Plan B and the tears won't stop. 

As we search for reasons (there are none) or meaning (there is none) or solace (there does not appear to be any), we slog through the muck of our own irrepressible thoughts as we tiptoe around the palpable heartbreak on the faces of his parents, his brother, his soon-to-be-fiancee. We bring offerings -- cookies baked in grief, candies spun in empathy, vegetables marinated in fear. It feels better to eat than to speak. When we speak, we say the darnedest things. As if there is a right thing.

At the risk of gross understatement, somebody with great promise has died. This was a special twenty-seven year old, just as a twenty-seven year old should be. Smart, ambitious, generous, energetic, successful, fearless. Keenly aware of life's evanescence, eerily so, but completely unafraid. He leaves the rest of us determined to honor his legacy, to forge ahead, to open our hearts, to be unafraid. Yet he leaves us all, in our own way, terrified. 

On the days leading up to the funeral, it was hard to resist comparisons to The Big Chill. University of Michigan alumni gathering together to mourn the untimely death of a friend. Friends bound together by a shared campus during a tumultuous era. Years later, they wonder why their friend is gone. They wonder, too, why their ideals and dreams are gone too, buried long before they lowered their friend into the ground. 

This was different, though. Very different. Five years out of college, these kids are still living their dreams. They are too busy to be disillusioned, too enthusiastic for regrets, too young to lose one of their own. These kids are bound together, too, by college campuses and the tumultuousness of their own generation, but they still straddle other worlds. They are still our children. They are still remembered by teachers who knew them when, who knew they would one day do great things. They are still, by virtue of youth and with a little help from social media, very much tied into their childhood friends, their high school buddies, their prom dates. They have parents, and grandparents. They belong to all of us, still. They have launched, but not completely. I defy anybody to recall Alex's mother in The Big Chill, or a brother, or to know what he was like as a child, or even what he looked like in college. (Okay, we know it was Kevin Costner, but that was not essential to the story.) This was different. Very different. 

Adam never got the chance to become jaded. He was human, and no doubt suffered disappointments, but he was a long way from being disappointed. He was way too young and way too busy. This week, I met people who knew Adam before he grew up, people who grew up with him, people who watched him grow up, and people who were ready and, as his soon-to-be-fiancee put it, excited to continue the journey with him. He touched so many lives, so many generations, and nobody can figure out, yet, how to pick up the pieces. 

Today, with everybody dispersed back to their own lives, his parents -- and I borrow his mother's words here -- must face the first day of the rest of their lives. Adam would tell them -- and the rest of us -- to be optimistic and energetic and unafraid, the way he was. To love, and to travel, and to express our true selves. He would want us to laugh again. We look to Adam, I suppose, for Plan B. 

Standing on the Tip of an Iceberg

There is no good way to tell you this. 

I was trying to vacation the old fashioned way, burying my phone deep within my beach bag, even leaving it in the room for long stretches. Service was spotty anyway, and since I still cannot grasp the difference between roaming data and cellular data and wifi data (is there such a thing?) I had pretty much disabled everything to avoid being charged for all the junk that continues to pile up, no matter how hard I try to unsubscribe.

There is no good way to tell you this.

Really, I had only retrieved my phone to check the time. 3:03 p.m. The sun seemed too high in the sky for it to be that late, but Mexico is funny that way, keeping itself in one arbitrary time zone. And placing a gleaming new Starbucks outlet only inches before the airport security checkpoint, neglecting to mention there is an identical one just past the metal detectors, where nobody will confiscate your expensive brew.

There is no good way to tell you this. I pressed pause, needed a final moment before I could let her tell me. The last text I had received from her, one of my dearest friends, less than twenty-four hours earlier, was a series of pictures from her trip to South America. Standing on the tip of an iceberg, was the first caption. I didn't look down, she assured me. 

We don't look down. If we did, we would never have the nerve to make the climb. And no, there was no good way for her to tell me what she was about to tell me, that her son, Adam, had died that morning. Her twenty-seven year old son, a child I have known since he was two, when his tongue would catch on something every time he took a stab at a hard "c." Milk and "tookies." A child whose only shortcoming, as far as I can recall, was an inability to pronounce "cookies." At twenty-seven, he still referred to me, sometimes, as mom.

Back in those early days, we were kind of a blended family, passing the long afternoons together in each others' basements, dining on pizza or macaroni and cheese with our children while our husbands worked late. The kids attended day camp together in the summer. Adam had a friend, a boy, with long hair. One afternoon, when I picked them up, my daughter couldn't wait to tell me about the girl with a penis. Those were the days, when they were young enough to change together for swimming, when they were young enough to volunteer information about their day. They were often inaccurate, but they didn't lie.

We migrated to the same suburb within six months of each other. Different elementary schools, different middle schools, but we were still family. We picked up others along the way. We were snowballs rolling uphill, growing families gathering strength as we gathered each other, looking out for each other always, but never looking down.

We teeter together, now, on the tip of that iceberg, all of us who have rolled up that hill together, raising kids and raising each other and, sometimes, raising hell. Pushing each other up and picking each other up on the way. We have lost one, one of our children. That is not the way it's supposed to play out.

Looking down won't help.  It never does. All we can do is hold on to each other.

More than a Woman (from Brooklyn)

It's unmistakeable, the sound of Brooklyn.

What captured my attention, initially, was the large pineapple, festooned with flowers and grotesque facial features that appeared to be smiling at me as she sipped from the half inch of straw poking out at the top.

"I'll have what she's having," I told the waiter who materialized almost immediately as we planted our winter white behinds on some nearby chairs. The lady with the pineapple looked happy and relaxed. Kind of the look I was going for, other than bronze beach goddess, which seemed less attainable.

"Please, have the rest. I can't finish it." She was offering up the half-filled and apparently as yet untouched glass of spillover from her pineapple. Pink, not pale yellow as I would have expected. I changed my order to a garden variety pina colada but I was still mesmerized, not so much by the smiling pineapple but by her voice. I walked over.

She told me she was from Connecticut. She must have misunderstood my question. Where are you from? You can move a gal into Connecticut, but you can never remove the loud clatter of the elevated tracks on 86th Street, the ethnic mosaic of people on the move, the blaring horns, the ever-changing landscape of a single Brooklyn intersection. It wasn't just the accent that gave her away. It was the offer. People who are from Connecticut do not offer strangers the rest of their drinks, and if they do they don't really mean it.

Bensonhurst. The rest of the world only knows Bensonhurst and its surrounding neighborhoods as the gritty home of small pizza joints and mom and pop hardware stores and gangs of listless teenagers who hang out on street corners by day and dance in tight white disco suits by night. The anti-Connecticut, a place where you would think folks are more likely to steal drinks from you than offer them up.

Brooklyn is about as diverse as a place can be, and if I said that my upbringing on a largely Jewish segment of Ocean Parkway in the sixties and seventies was no different from that of an Italian girl in Bensonhurst I would be lying. But that accent, as intoxicating to me as it is offensive -- or at least comical -- to almost everyone else, brings me home.

We reminisced, my new friend and I, with heavy accents and light hearts, about the Famous, the sprawling cafeteria on 86th Street where my nana worked as a bookkeeper. I don't remember the food, but I remember sitting at the cash register with my nana, marveling at the speed with which she added numbers on that faded green spread sheet, not even needing a pencil to carry digits over a column. I loved the way all the customers knew her name, and she knew theirs. I love that I was able to remember my nana this way, before she declined and became somebody I barely knew and who barely knew me. She was smart and strong and independent, ahead of her time, really. And she could add a string of sevens like nobody's business.

My new friend didn't remember my nana but she sure remembered the Famous. The food, yes, but mostly the feeling of being there, probably a lot like the feeling I had when I would sit by the register with nana. The feeling of belonging to something important, and wanting to go back.

She joined us for dinner last night -- her friends were all detained by a bit of a blizzard -- and the sounds of her voice and the distant steady splash of waves brought me home, to the clatter of elevated train tracks and the blaring of horns and the comfort of an ever-changing but welcoming landscape.

Life's a Beach

The TSA pre-check line seemed as long as the line for the regular old folks this morning. Damn. I think that's what they call a white girl's problem. I reminded myself to suck it up. 

An official sounding TSA agent came by, told those of us containing our anger and outrage as we waited at the tail end of the line that was supposed to be for the chosen ones that there were two much shorter pre-check lines down at the other end of the terminal. En masse, we took off, the less bright ones (like me) sprinting through the mob scene on the outer flank, the more savvy ones cutting through the otherwise wasted wide open space that would lead them directly to the poorly marked pre-check sign down at security checkpoint B. Naturally, I overshot it. 

Another white girl's problem. I am, after all, on my way to the beach. Wiping away the perspiration from my brow and wondering whether I'd have time for coffee and a bagel, I meandered my way back to the end of the alternative pre-check line, which was now just as long as the other one. I berated myself silently. Looking up, I noticed two gentlemen waving at me, the two gentlemen I had been standing between earlier. I assumed they were mocking me. Boy did I feel dumb. 

"We lost you," one of them shouted. "Where did you go?" My faith in humanity has always remained intact, sometimes against all odds, but now my love for my fellow man has reached a fever pitch. I hesitated, but they waved me on. "She's with us, they assured everyone as I squeezed past, ducking in between them as they lifted the blue strap and actually seemed relieved to see me. 

Life really is a journey, and I suppose we're all in this together. I'll admit, my travel companion looked a bit peeved when he found me, already a good twenty-five minutes into my coffee. I didn't think it was a good time to tell him to suck it up and stop acting like a white girl. 

Loving the journey, although I have to admit I'm all about the destination right now.