Real Live Writer

On Blogging and Boundaries and Gravy

2012-01-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to lunch with a group of women I like a lot.

One of the women said something complimentary about my blog. Then she said, I couldn’t write a blog the way you do. You say so much personal stuff. (I am paraphrasing, but this is what I took away from her comment.)

It made me think a lot about myself and about the unwritten contract a writer-who-blogs has with her readers. How much personal stuff is appropriate to divulge? What are my obligations?

This is tricky for me. For many years, I was an introvert who talked too much. I was very happy in the company of my own thoughts, and then I would go to a party and regale people I barely knew with information that was 1) inappropriate and/or 2) indiscreet.

Oh, jeez. It still makes me cringe.

Then I learned about boundaries, which is what you learn in therapy (in addition to all the ways in which you were toxically parented). I learned that I didn’t have to reveal personal details of my life to mere acquaintances just to prove to myself that I was open and authentic. I could be private. I could keep my mouth shut for a change.

But here I am, blabbing away again.

I’d like to say that I’m doing it in the hope that something I say about my demented mother or my fledgling efforts to dress well or my difficulty adjusting to life as the mother of adult children who bungee jump in New Zealand and drink Scotch without asking my permission first may help someone else going through something similar.

And that would be nice.

But honestly? The reason I do it is because I’m a writer. And writers write for the glorious, intoxicating, simple pleasure of Writing It Down.

It’s lovely if someone reads it, wonderful beyond description if it provides comfort or solace or a sense of not being alone in this world.

But that’s all gravy. And as my mother used to say mournfully when the waiter brought her the meatloaf, “I didn’t know there was going to be gravy!”

Why I Am Exhausted

2012-01-05T17:08:00.001-08:00

Questions asked by my mother while I was at her apartment this afternoon:

--Can I get you something? Some soup?

--What can I get you to eat?

--Do you still have those crappy curtains in your bedroom?

--Is it Thursday?

--Can I make you some soup?

--Why isn’t that Huntsman winning? I like him.

--Why has that damn clock stopped again?

--Do you like Wolf Blitzer? I love him.

--Can I make you something for lunch?

--How’s Richard?

--Do you like tuna? Can I make you a tuna sandwich?

--Why doesn’t she (CNN’s Candy Crowley) lose some weight?

--Why is Piers Morgan on television? I can’t stand that Piers Morgan.

--What is the matter with that damn clock?

--Are you hungry?

Boundaries and the Mills Brothers and Keeping Your Mouth Shut

2011-12-30T17:08:00.000-08:00

Recently, someone said something to me that she shouldn’t have said. It was a terrible thing to say. I will never be able to get it out of my head.

I am so angry. Now I am stuck knowing something I don’t want to know.

I get my feelings hurt easily. I obsess over things that other people hardly notice. It makes me leery about hanging out with people I don’t know very well. I never know if they’re going to toss off some comment that will have me stewing for days.

Of course, this person isn’t a friend or an acquaintance. She is my mother, and she is almost ninety-two, and she may or may not be suffering from some sort of dementia. So I have to pretend I’m not angry and be all sweet and forgiving and good-daughterly about the whole thing.

It’s hard.

Words are powerful. You can say you’re sorry, but you can’t unsay something.

Part of what has always attracted me to the act of writing things down is a sense of the huge power of words, which is both wonderful and terrible all at once. I love that words matter so much. Writing well is a kind of hyper-carefulness. I may not have the cleanest grout on the block, but I’m persnickety about words I put my name to.

As I’m writing, I’m listening to Pandora, and the Mills Brothers’ song “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” just came on. (Really. I swear to God. Another thing I love about writing: if I pay attention, I can hear the Universe talking to me.) One of the lines: “It’s better not to talk at all, is my advice.”

Yes.

Black Turtlenecks and What's Really Important

2011-12-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about clothes, which has made me think about age, which has made me think about writing.

I love clothes, even though I’ve mostly worn jeans and black turtlenecks and boots for years. I love shopping and looking at street-style blogs and watching “Project Runway” and talking about clothes with my daughter, who has a wonderful sense of style. I don’t purport to know anything about clothes, but I know what I like.

Recently, I’ve come to the realization that fifty-four is a rough age to be when you love clothes. I wear the same size I’ve worn for almost twenty years, but things don’t look the same. Or rather, they do, but I don’t feel the same way in them.

I’ve had to modify the black-turtleneck thing, for one. When I was thirty, black turtlenecks made me feel all writer-y. Now they just look gloomy and unimaginative. So I pair them with blouses and tunics and sweaters and jackets. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I have the horrible feeling that I’m wearing clothes my daughter should be wearing. But I’m not quite a Chico’s or Eileen Fisher kind of gal, either.

Ines de la Fressange is arguably the most beautiful fifty-four-year-old alive. (Google her. You’ll see.) A French model turned fashion icon, she has written a lovely guide to style called PARISIAN CHIC. In it, she gives much light-hearted, soothing advice to middle-aged women about how to dress their age fashionably.

I devoured her book and then spent a few days thinking obsessively about how I could follow her dictates without actually moving to Paris. I went through my closet and tagged some skirts for my daughter. I surfed a few websites. I bought a few things.

And then, two nights ago, as I lay awake at three in the morning thinking about whether I would put on blue or black jeans in the morning, it suddenly hit me that I had to stop thinking about clothes immediately, because 1) there is not enough haute couture on the planet to make me look like Ines de la Fressange, and 2) I am a fifty-four-year-old writer, and what I should be thinking about is what is really important to me, which is writing.

So that is what I did.

I was asleep in seven minutes.

Ho Ho Ho

2011-11-29T14:16:00.000-08:00

This is me:

I am scared out of my mind. I remember what it felt like: wordless, helpless terror. A distillation of terror.

The reasons I am scared are:

1) I am three,

2) I am shy,

3) I am Jewish,

4) I do not like funny hats,

5) I have no idea who Santa Claus is, and

6) I know I’m supposed to be happy about all this, but I can’t imagine what planet I would have to be on that would make sitting on this guy’s lap okay.

This picture made my family laugh a lot for many years. It was not mean laughing, but still. I pretended to laugh, too, but inside I wasn’t laughing. I was screaming, WHY IS THIS FUNNY? HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT TO DO? I’M THREE AND I’M JEWISH, YOU IDIOTS! QUIT LAUGHING AT ME!

Now that I’m fifty-four, I can see that it’s sort of funny.

I keep this picture in my office for two reasons.

One is to remind myself that if this is the worst thing that ever happened to me when I was three, I was a pretty lucky little girl. No one hit me or locked me in a closet or shoved the edge of a dining room table into my chest on purpose. I had nice clothes, enough to eat, a family, a healthy body. No one I loved had died. Lucky.

The other reason I like to look at this picture is to remember that you shouldn’t ever laugh at other people’s fears. Even if they are afraid of something you think is benign or even wonderful: cats or roller coasters or the out-of-doors or feathers. (The fear of feathers is called pteronophobia.) You don’t have to get it.

Just don’t laugh.

And also, don’t make children wear funny hats if they don’t want to. Be honest. You’re doing it because you want to laugh—not meanly—at them, and someday they will tell you how really pissed off they were about it.

Why I Write It Down

2011-11-11T11:12:00.000-08:00

Nineteen seventy-seven was a big year for me. A lot happened. Some of it was wonderful and some of it wasn’t, which can probably be said about most years.

I was 19 and 20 in 1977, a college student living 3,000 miles away from home most of the year.

These are some of the things that happened to me:

--My father died;

--I fell in love;

--I read Madame Bovary in the original French. It was the first time I was able to read a “real” book in another language;

--I took my first road trip without my family (from Pennsylvania to Fort Lauderdale for spring break);

--I worked during the summer in a friend’s gift shop. I remember wearing a beige, knee-length, thin-wale corduroy skirt with an elasticized waist a lot that summer. Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” always reminds me of that skirt;

--I met the man who would eventually become my husband and who is now my ex-husband (but I didn’t fall in love with him until 1978);

--I learned to do the Hustle.

Nineteen seventy-seven bisects my life, even though I’ve lived far more of my life afterwards. I do a tally with every memory as it occurs to me, mentally inserting it in the “pre-1977” or “post-1977” slot. It was the year I grew up, the year I became myself. Everything that came before is sepia-hazy: fuzzy and ancient.

This is a picture of my mom. She’s the one on the right. I think she was in her early twenties when the photo was taken, which would mean that it’s from the early forties, probably snapped on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. The woman on the left is her friend Estine. One of my favorite stories about Estine is that my mother was going to fix her up with a man whose last name was Key. They figured out that if they got married, Estine’s name would sound like Stinky, so Estine said to forget it. She never did get married. The last I heard, she had advanced Alzheimer’s.

My mother still knows who Estine is, but she doesn’t remember her name anymore. More and more of her memories have faded, bleached away by age. If she’s upset by this, she’s doing a good job of pretending she’s not. But really, I don’t think she’s pretending. I think something in old age protects you from this particular horror.

I don’t want to lose 1977. Or anything. I know that the odds are against this, that if I live long enough, I won’t remember the things I do now. How the late spring looked that year from my dorm window: the trees lush and green and heavy in a way that California trees aren’t, the air thick with the smell of cut grass, the sun as warm as it is possible to be without slipping over into hot.

What the Hell Am I Doing in Fresno?

2011-11-05T22:50:00.000-07:00

Actually, that’s rhetorical. What I’m doing is taking Robert out for Armenian food for his birthday. Fresno has a large Armenian presence and several excellent Armenian restaurants

Fresno is the Rodney Dangerfield of California cities. I have lived in California for all but seven years of my life, and this is what I know about Fresno:

--It’s the city you drive through to get to Yosemite;

--William Saroyan was born here;

--If you have to get out of your car to get gas in the summer, it occurs to you that it is physically impossible for any human to survive for more than seven minutes in this heat;

--Just about anything you like to eat that comes out of the ground is grown here;

--I would not live here under any circumstance.

One of the reasons we are here is that I like to visit places I wouldn’t want to live. I am curious about who does live here and why (and if) they like it.

Dinner at Diana’s (inauspiciously located in one of a seemingly endless array of strip malls) was wonderful. Maybe the best hummus I’ve ever eaten. Lovely chicken and lamb kebabs.

Robert and I have celebrated six of his birthdays together. The first year, we spent the weekend at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, where we had massages and drank martinis. Other years, we ate at Plouf in San Francisco, the French Poodle in Carmel, and Picasso, at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I like being able to say that we can now add Diana’s in Fresno to the list.

Tomorrow we’ll poke around a little and see some of the neighborhoods. We will probably go out for breakfast. Tonight I realized that I won’t be able to eat a doughnut, which is a treat I always used to allow myself on car trips. Wheat allergies suck.

To torture myself, I just googled “Fresno doughnuts” and found several establishments. Donut Hole, Donut Queen, Christy’s Donuts, Best Boy Donuts, Dough Boy Donuts, Fresno Donuts.

This is killing me.

On the plus side, tomorrow’s weather forecast calls for showers and a high of 60.

Good News and Bad News

2011-10-20T22:54:00.000-07:00

The good news is that my mother is speaking to me again. I don’t know if she’s forgotten that she said she didn’t want anything more to do with me. She doesn’t call me “dear” or “honey,” and she only says “I love you” if I say it first. I’m glad that she isn’t telling me I make her life miserable anymore, though.

The bad news is that she was in a car accident. She drove to a consignment store to buy fake plastic leaves ($6), and when she got in her car, she put her foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and plowed into a cement wall. She knew that she had a suspended license. She bruised her sternum.

My brother, aka Mr. Crazypants, brought the car back to her house the next day. He thinks we need to believe her when she says she won’t drive.

I have been up to visit my mom four times this week. That’s 800 miles of driving. On one of my visits, I asked her if she would mind if I borrowed her car while she was recuperating from her injury. She reluctantly gave me the key.

I took her to the doctor so he could check her bruise again. I heard him say, You mustn’t drive anymore. She told him she is an excellent driver and has never gotten a ticket.

My heart is bruised.

On the way home, I said, What if you’d killed a kid? Someone’s baby? She said, cheerfully, But I didn’t.

I have a lot of people gathering information, trying to decide what to do: doctors, geriatric social workers, lawyers. And friends, and my kids, and Robert.

But I still feel all alone.

Tomorrow I am going to work on final edits for my new book, due out next year. Then I’m going to fill a plastic water bottle with pomegranate juice and vodka and go down to the beach and look for dolphins. And not think about any of this.

Casting Off

2011-10-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I got my cast off. Also, my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me.

My mother has had some sort of mild dementia for quite some time, but it’s apparently getting worse. Her anger at me stems from my having made a request to the DMV to give her a driving test. An actual driving test, in a car, not a written test. You would think that the state of California would assess the driving skills of 91-year-olds routinely, but it doesn’t. You have to ask.

I got my cast off a few hours before my mother told me she didn’t want anything more to do with me. In the car on the way home from the “fracture clinic,” I thought about other things I had cast off recently:

--glasses;

--anything made with wheat;

--curly hair;

--gray hair;

--suburbia;

--people who blame me for their own unhappiness;

--jobs in which I have to wear suits and have a boss;

--friends who aren’t really friends;

--the conviction that I would always have a dog;

--as many delusions about myself as thirteen years of therapy will allow;

--tax returns from 1997;

--aluminum pans.

I’ve talked to my mother almost every night since she first yelled at me. She has hung up on me twice and been rude and nasty. Every once in a while, she has called me ‘dear’, as she used to. She sounds scared and confused. She is steadfastly unwilling to accept any kind of assistance with grace.

I don’t know if my mother is going to continue to take her fear and frustration out on me.

But I am going to call her every night.

God Is a Big Talker

2011-09-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

I had a horrible day yesterday.

--While jogging, I got a call from my doctor. The x-ray taken of my hand showed a break. Please get a cast at 3 this afternoon, she said. (I broke my hand when I tripped while jogging last Saturday. I kept thinking it was just a really bad bruise.) Then she yelled at me for waiting so long to get an x-ray.

--When I went into the garage, I saw a huge mass of wet sheetrock sitting on the roof of my car. Further inspection of the garage ceiling revealed an enormous hole, directly under the shower in the master bath. I called Robert, who was in the middle of a 40-mile bike ride, to tell him that the house was collapsing and also to please call our insurance agent before 5, because it was a three-day weekend and I would do it except I was late and my hand was hurting, and also, the house was collapsing. Robert didn’t pick up his phone.

--I drove about a hundred miles to get to my bank. (Don’t ask; it’s complicated.) I tried to deposit a check made out to me. This check was from an investment account that I had liquidated. I set up the account years ago with the intention of giving the money to my son. But because I was named in the check as the custodian of the account for my son, the teller wouldn’t let me deposit it. Can my son deposit it? I asked. No, she said. Can we deposit it together? No. Plus, the “bank” is in the baked-goods section of a Lunardi’s. And the teller looked as though she was dressed to go gay-clubbing after work. And it was 99 degrees.

--Got back in my car. Called my son to say I wasn’t exactly sure how we were going to pay for the first semester of graduate school, and could he stall? He didn’t pick up his phone. Called Robert to ask if he’d gotten my message about the house collapsing. He didn’t pick up his phone. Called the “fracture clinic” to tell them I would be late. Woman at the fracture clinic yelled at me for not being a better judge of traffic conditions.

--Got to the fracture clinic a half an hour late. Read a back issue of Modern Maturity. Felt nauseous.

Finally, I was ushered into the casting room. I sat there feeling sorry for myself while the casting guy told me the cast would extend from the top of my fingers midway down my forearm. Four weeks. Don’t get it wet. Don’t stick forks down there. I wanted to cry.

And then I realized someone was crying. A young woman in a beautiful almond-colored sari sat on a nearby bed holding an infant who was shrieking. The baby couldn’t have been more than six months old. Another casting guy was putting his entire tiny leg in a cast.

A doctor walked through the room and saw the woman. Another break? he asked kindly. She nodded yes, exhausted. When’s his surgery? the doctor asked, yelling a little to be heard over the screams. Two weeks, she answered.

You think you already know things, but sometimes, God sends you a message just to be sure you really get it.

This morning, I sat down in front of the TV to begin the herculean task of straightening my hair with only my left hand. I was grumpy.

I turned on TV to a show about an albino woman from Tanzania. She is armless, because in Tanzania, people believe the limbs of albinos contain magic properties, and barbarians traverse the country, cutting off arms and legs of albino people and selling them to witch doctors.

Another message, even when I say I get it, even when I really think I do. And I’ll bet He’s laughing about my hair, which looks ridiculous.

Here’s a link, if you want to help: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/tanzanians-albinism/story?id=11463812

Hair Apparent

2011-08-17T07:15:00.001-07:00

I have very complicated feelings about my hair. I think most women do.

When I was little, I had the kind of hair that old ladies thought was beautiful: almost black, soft, and very curly. My mother loved to brush it. I didn’t like it at all, though, wishing that I could be in all ways like my best friend Laurie Bradshaw, who had silky, smooth brown hair with bangs, as well as a white canopy bed. My hair was too curly for bangs. It seemed grossly unfair to me that some girls got bangs AND a canopy bed, and others got curly hair.

As I grew up I learned that, older women’s comments notwithstanding, curly hair was a mixed blessing at best. It resisted attempts at styling, it frizzed in the rain, and it refused to grow long. It was cantankerous and unmanageable. I—a good girl, the ultimate pleaser—was mortified by my hair’s unwillingness to behave. I longed for conformity and tractability.

I went to high school in what must have been the blondest town in the United States. Moreover, in the early ‘70s, hair was under strict orders to be as straight as possible. This was a long time ago, before African-American models and actresses routinely challenged outdated notions of what beautiful was. Cybill Shepard and Christie Brinkley and Lauren Hutton were the women in the magazines, and I was from a different planet entirely. I set my hair with orange-juice cans; I sat for hours—hours!—under one of those old-fashioned bonnet hair dryers, with a hose and a rubber cap. After each session, my ears and the back of my neck were red and burned, but my hair—even curlier than when I was little—would not be cajoled.

(My best friend is someone I first met in high school. To this day, she has magnificent blonde hair. We still laugh at how my mother, running into her at my house about ten years ago, whispered to me, It’s so sad about Tracy. What’s sad? I asked. That she feels she has to dye her eyebrows, my mother said.)

As an adult, I learned to forgive, if not actually love, my hair. I grew it long and wild and marveled at the compliments I received from women whose hair was the color and consistency of thatch. I wish I had yours! I always said, out of habit, but as time went on, I wasn’t sure it was true anymore. Living in the suburbs, I found I was happy to have difficult hair. It was my way of thumbing my nose at people who wanted to look (and think) like everybody else—a quality I’d come to dislike. Living in the suburbs taught me a lot about myself. I learned that my hair and I were more alike than I had previously thought.

And, as if on cue, straightening wands were invented. My hair finally learned to submit. At long last, we called a truce to our decades-old war.

A few weeks ago, on our cruise to Alaska, I defended my decision not to dye my graying hair to the stylist who was cutting it. But I began to doubt myself. I asked Robert what he thought. He said I should do whatever I wanted, but, in typically wonderful fashion, added that I shouldn’t be afraid to try something new, to play. With that in mind, I had my hair colored about two weeks ago.

I’m still trying to adjust. The color is beautiful, a multi-dimensional intertwining of red and chestnut, with blonde highlights. It’s like Beyonce’s hair in the “Irreplaceable” video, only without Beyonce. I pass the mirror and experience a momentary and disconcerting sense of dislocation. Where am I?

I’m having it tweaked next month. In the meantime, I’m learning to get to know myself all over again. I’m not a pleaser anymore. I still don’t like it when people don't think for themselves. And I’m 54, with straight, reddish-brown hair.

For the time being.

Maybe that’s the real lesson here: everything is mutable, and anything can happen.

Mistaken Identity

2011-08-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

Today I was jogging the path to Hidden Beach when I saw a man young enough to be my son coming toward me. He was walking very slowly with a toddler I presumed to be his daughter. She was adorable, about fourteen or fifteen months old, with a fluffy cloud of hair so pale that God must not have decided what color it should be yet but was leaning toward red. She was wearing camouflage pants and a blue sweater.

As I got close, she pointed at me and said, very seriously, “Mommy!”

Her father looked embarrassed. “That’s not Mommy. Mommy is back at the house with Auntie. We’re going back to the house to see Mommy. Let’s go. Come on,” he babbled. It was funny, that he was the babbler.

I know that the little girl didn’t think I was her mommy. Maybe she just knew, in that inexplicable, baby way, that I was a female in the same way Mommy was. Or maybe Mommy jogs. Who knows.

But I feel happy. It’s as though she saw an invisible badge on my chest. Or a tattoo that will never fade away.

Strength of Character

2011-07-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Very rarely, when I finish reading a novel or watching a movie, I walk away with a hugely pleasurable feeling that is equal parts contentment and excitement. It’s a visceral, robust sense of well-being, hard to describe. After years of thinking about it, I finally realized that it comes from having spent time with a character who is both 1) like me in some fundamental way and 2) relaxed in her own skin, happy to be herself.

The first character I remember eliciting this feeling in me was Annika Settergren, the little girl who lives next door to Pippi Longstocking. You’d think I would have preferred Pippi—a much more fully developed and interesting character—but I didn’t. Pippi had unattractive hair, for one thing. And I found the name ‘Pippi’ alarming. I recognized in Annika a quality I saw in myself: the ability to take pleasure in quirky, exciting people without actually being—or wanting to be—quirky and exciting herself. It was her presence in the books that compelled me to reread them many times over the course of my childhood.

I think I had a seven-year-old lesbian crush on Karen Dotrice, the young British actress who played Jane Banks in Mary Poppins. (She was also the non-feline lead in The Three Lives of Thomasina.) I was utterly taken with her. Another blonde, but this one had a British accent and spectacular clothes. I remember longing in some desperate, wordless way to be her, and feeling gloomy on the drive home from the theater as my own tedious, mid-sixties, suburban life in California slowly came back to me.

Other characters who’ve had this powerful effect on me:

--Mary Clancy (played by Haley Mills) in The Trouble With Angels,

--Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,

--Annie Hall (played by Diane Keaton),

--Sarah Cooper (played by Glenn Close) in The Big Chill,

--Joan Wilder (played by Kathleen Turner) in Romancing the Stone,

--Harriet the Spy,

--Isabelle Grossman (played by Amy Irving) in Crossing Delancey.

I could go on.

I just finished a book (We Were the Mulvaneys, by Joyce Carol Oates) that offered up no character with whom I could identify in this way, which is to say, no character who is at home with herself. Writing a character like this is different from writing a character who is likeable or sympathetic.

Does this make sense? If so, which characters in books or movies have especially appealed to you, and why? I’m really curious.

I Love A Parade

2011-07-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

A small-town parade—like a ripe peach or a child who says “thank you” and means it—makes you believe in the goodness of life. I did not grow up going to parades, but I enjoy them immensely now, especially if they are small and rag-tag. Fourth of July parades are especially wonderful, being inclusive (unlike St. Patrick’s Day parades) and accommodating of nearly everyone: in a town like mine, you could round up a few people behind a banner reading, “People Who Hate Parades” and everyone would clap and cheer for them.

No such group at this year’s Fourth of July festivities, but we had fire trucks and classic cars, dogs and horses, cheerleaders and Little League players.

The Daughters of the American Revolution dressed in long frocks and bonnets.

A couple of kids walked on stilts. The people who till the community garden received lots of applause, as did representatives from the local Democratic Party Club and a guy driving a 1904 Oldsmobile.

My daughter was thrilled to see a pony. Yes, she is in her twenties.

Someone dressed up as Smoky the Bear. Someone dressed up as a camel and spit. The grand marshall drove a motorcycle with an attached passenger seat occupied by a black standard poodle who looked just like my Henry.

Robert liked the community ukulele club.

I love the Klingons, who make an appearance every year.

This guy does, too. We see his car around town all year. Not exactly clear who he is or what he’s about. There’s a blow-up doll in the passenger seat.

We missed the Lyme Disease Survivors Support Group from last year, and the guy dressed as a pigeon squirting shaving cream out of his ass.

This guy brought up the rear. He collects supplies for those in need, especially in New Orleans, and makes deliveries several times a year.

Sometimes the world is a good place. Yes, it is.

Alaska, Part III

2011-07-01T08:04:00.000-07:00

Day 7

Two-mile jog at 5:30 (am!) to watch our entry into Tracy Arm, a waterway that runs past Sawyer Glacier.

A naturalist on the bridge broadcast observations. I saw glacial valleys, crevasses, morains. The water was an eerie, Caribbean blue despite the cloudy skies.

I learned that the glacier’s blue color comes from the fact that glacial ice is so compressed—10 times as dense as the ice in your freezer—that the only light that can escape from it is from the blue end of the spectrum.

I learned that ice floes with areas greater than 15 feet are icebergs, while those with slightly smaller areas are called bergie bits (a scientific term), and those yet again smaller are called growlers.

After breakfast, Robert and I went down to the Promenade deck and camped out for an hour. It was bitterly cold. An attendant strolled by with a cart from which you could purchase Irish coffee. Robert considered it but ultimately said no to the invitation to liquor up at 8:30 am. We watched for Dall sheep, whales, and bear but didn’t see any. I did spot an eagle on an iceberg and several flocks of terns. Another attendant pushed a cart selling Nikons. No one thought to sell blankets, which I would have bought.

Outside of Tracy Arm, we sailed through Frederick Sound. Fog sat heavily on the coast, casting everything in eerie gray light.

It began to clear a little. Water like smoky glass, still and waveless. Right in front of one of the Brother Islands, I saw a whale breech. Far away but beautiful. Five minutes later, another one with his tail in the air. The naturalist pointed out that humpbacks eat 1,000 pounds of fish a day, so it is more efficient for them to travel alone. Pods are rare.

Spent the afternoon in the Wheelhouse Bar, reading WE WERE THE MULVANEYS. Loving it right from the start although, having read Oates before, I keep waiting for something grisly to happen every time I turn the page. I finished THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED yesterday. It is a vast, messy novel, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It is trying to say so many things, and some of it seems not to hang together well. Also, I don’t like Lamb’s tendency to end sentences with ellipses: it is weak and amateurish. Robert is reading (at my suggestion) THIS MUCH I KNOW IS TRUE, and I am surprised at how similar the plots are. Several of the minor characters in THE HOUR first appeared in THIS MUCH, which I think is a nice touch.

Relaxing in our room at about 4:15, marveling at all the colors of gray—gunmetal, charcoal, silver, pewter—in the sky and sea and distant coastline, when we saw a whale blowing water and flashing his tail, and then another, and another. Clearly a group of whales—is every group a pod? I don’t know, but it was thrilling. We were in the Gulf of Alaska, just about to head past Coronation Island. Maybe this is where they congregate.

Evening was fine: delicate sunlight, a fragile blue sky. We had drinks (me: champagne; Robert: Irish coffee) at Crooners, then met Roy and Josie for dinner. Now watching “Oceans 12” in our room. Outside, the ocean is gray and glassy. No sign of whales, but I know they are there, steering clear of us, frolicking in our wake.

Day 8

TV on-board ship is repetitive and pretty mindless, except for CNN International, although it seems that every time I turn it on, I get Piers Morgan interviewing Ryan O’Neal. Still, it’s better than the movies (“The Proposal,” “Eat, Pray, Love,” some ghastly thing about Goya with Natalie Portman being tortured by Javier Bardem) or, worse, the shipboard stations, most of which are meant to sell you something. I like the map that lets you know where we are and the web-cam at the front of the ship. But I could do without the porn-movie sax accompaniment.

Robert has a cold, so now I’m trying to avoid that and the norovirus.

It’s Sunday, but you lose track of the days out here, particularly when you don’t dock. One day melts into the next. Usually, Sunday is my least favorite day of the week (a holdover from childhood, when everything was closed and I felt bored and different from everybody else). I always think that even if I didn’t have a calendar, I would know Sunday by the feel of it, just as I would know Friday—a happy day—and Monday—also happy, the beginning of the beloved routine of school. But out here, it’s hard to keep it all straight.

We’ve kind of lost the will to participate in the myriad activities offered: Trivia, Bingo, line-dance instruction, “art” auctions, talks on wolves, acupuncture, whales, naturopathic cures for stomach ailments, bridge. We spend the days exercising, eating, reading, and sleeping. In addition, I check the Internet every few days for about a half hour. We eat dinner late. By 10 pm, I struggle to keep my eyes open.

I think I have Robert’s cold. Rats.

The people next door smoke pot every day at 4 on their balcony. The smell wafts over to our balcony, so I have to go inside. From the room, I hear them coughing. Once when I was on the balcony, I heard her making a phone call home, bragging in a coy, sly way about packing “some really, really good…refreshments.” Robert and I call it their “high tea.” Today he said, “You know that’s what they used to call pot, right? We used to say we were smoking tea.” I said I didn’t know, that I was bookish and weird in high school. “You were just waiting for me and didn’t know it,” Robert said. Then we both sneezed.

I finally hauled myself out of the room to do Trivia with Roy and Josine. The place was mobbed. We teamed up with an elderly couple, Paula and Ike, and their nephew, Josh. Ike put his hand on my knee and said, “You and I don’t have to know anything. We’re just here to look beautiful,” which I knew was well-intentioned but which got on my nerves nonetheless.

Emotions ran high. Josine knew the capital of Estonia; I knew that the three women who’d kissed on MTV were Madonna, Brittny Spears, and Christina Aguilera, and also that JFK had been born in 1917. We were asked to name the disease indicated by the initials ASD. Josh said it was Arterial Septral Defect. When the correct answer was announced as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Josh stood up and yelled at the MC, “I’ve been a nurse longer than you’ve been ALIVE. Arterial Septral Defect is correct as well!” We also got into a big argument about whether “shalom” means “peace” or “peace be with you.”

In the end, we won. We each got a keychain. I am exhausted.

Roy took us “out” for dinner tonight, i.e, to a screened-off area of the dining hall reserved for people willing to pay $20 for steak. Rolled back to our rooms at 9:15. Still light outside. Sky and sea are glassy and gray, and snow-capped peaks—Canada—rise like jagged dog teeth in the distance.

Day 9

Two-mile run, but it was hard.

We were only in Victoria for a few hours, and Robert and I weren’t feeling well. But we bravely made our way off the ship and explored the downtown area for a couple of hours. We started at the Empress Hotel, with its beautiful gardens and topiary, and wandered a bit.

I saw three used bookstores in less than an hour, and several chocolatiers.

Lots of pubs (The Scottish Pub, The Irish Pub, The Sticky Wicket). That was the good thing about Victoria. The bad thing was that there must be different laws regarding gasoline emissions: everything smelled vilely of diesel. We ducked into a sandwich shop and had wonderful soup (chicken/corn/dill), and then returned to the ship.

We slept all afternoon, then ordered room service for dinner: club salads and chili.

I hate being sick and away from home.

Day 10

No exercise this morning. My head hurt and my nose was running. Everything gray and bleary outside. Robert felt well enough to read but I did not. Spent the day watching movies (“The Town,” “Pillow Talk”) on TV.

I love Doris Day, how she is peppy and chipper and brave about being a single gal. I love the way she wears fur muffs. I love how everything in her apartment is pink and white, and that she knows, just knows, that the right man will come along, and meanwhile, she is going to be happy and fashionable and really in her life. She isn’t pining away. She isn’t devastated by psychological trauma or a dysfunctional family of origin.

Our daughters could have worse role models.

Glad I made the effort to have a final dinner with Josine and Roy, who is also sick with whatever this is. We talked and laughed. Roy told us again about how his bridge group got run out of its appointed venue by a small band of errant Mah Jongg players. Josine recounted another well-fought Trivia battle. Sorry I missed it. Said goodbye to Wilson and Dean, our fabulous waiters. Wilson kept me well-stocked with caramel sauce. He got it right away. Sweet guy.

Day 11

Wrenched my shoulder in the middle of the night, something I do when I’m sick. But it was nice to wake up and see that we’d docked. Nice to know that Cara will be driving in to pick us up in a couple of hours.

Nice to be home.

Alaska, Part II

2011-06-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Day 4

Half-woke at 4 to daylight. Got up early and ran 2 miles as we docked at Ketchikan. Ship inched into the dock; it was nice to run without the wind. Showered, ate, and walked through town, where brightly colored wooden homes are perched on brilliant green hills overlooking the harbor.

Lots of souvenir/jewelry/carvings/rock shops on Creek Street, the old red-light district.

Took a funicular up the hill to see more totem poles, which are all over town.

Also notable: beautiful plantings and flowers on many street corners. Some of the flowers look almost tropical.

We walked out of the downtown, and then it was a little less manicured: lots of rusted-out cars, peeling paint, a Goodwill thrift shop, store fronts with “Everything Must Go!” signs in the windows. This is the kind of stuff I like to see. I like imagining what it’s like to live in places I visit, and I have a feeling that life in Ketchikan is hard when the cruise ships leave in September.

Factoid: Ketchikan boasts the smallest Wal-Mart in the world. When it opened, it sold out in hours and had to close until it could restock.

After lunch, I found a quiet corner of the Promenade deck and read and ate chocolate. My kind of heaven. Met Roy and Josine at 4 for Trivia. Our group included a lovely young man from Sacramento and a husband and wife from Pleasanton. Wife reminded me of my ex-husband’s wife in both appearance and inability to stop talking. (“What car did Lenin outfit with skis? Did Lenin drive? Wasn’t he Russian? Or Soviet? Was he Russian or Soviet? Were there Russian cars? I don’t know anything about Russian cars. Was this before World War I or after? Did he say skis or snowshoes?”) We didn’t do very well. Lenin drove a Rolls Royce, but we missed it.

Sunny afternoon sailing up the Inside Passage. The vistas were spectacular. Sat on our balcony with Robert until someone next door started smoking weed. There really is nowhere on a ship to escape entirely from other people. Ironic, because that’s one thing that is apparently easy to do in Alaska. And even I—bitter and complaining isolationist that I am—would feel so bereft and lonely if I had to be here for any length of time. I would go mad with loneliness. The beauty and serenity and bright, pristine splendor would be nothing without people around (whom I would undoubtedly work to avoid).

After dinner, we went to a revue in the Princess Theater: songs of the 20s and 30s by the Princess Singers and Dancers, who performed at about the level of a mediocre community college theater department.

On exiting the theater, one of the young cruise directors asked me with a smile, “Did you like the show?”

Being polite, I said, “Yes, I did,” whereupon Cruise Director called out, “Chester? These people liked the show!” “Chester” turned out to be the “feelings police” guy from yesterday. He and his wife were sitting on a couch outside the theater. “What ship are they on?” he asked crankily, not missing a beat.

I have decided that Chester and I are kindred spirits, and that I’m going to look for him tomorrow and sit as close as I can.

Day 5

Two-mile jog at six. The water of the Inside Passage was glassy and almost black with the reflection of the steep hills rising on both banks, thick with untouched forest and brush. Everything was green in a way that makes you think all other greens you’ve seen are something else entirely: a murky blue, or some version of brown. Patches of snow lay at the top of the hills. Sometimes you could see snow melt running into the ocean; sometimes it was frozen mid-fall against the crags.

From the ship, Juneau is much less picturesque than Ketchikan: all cinderblock and industrial browns and grays. It has the distinction of being the only state capital without road access: everyone getting in or out does so by plane or ship.

We docked at the base of a steep, green hill. I was standing at the window and saw two eagles circling. One of them landed on a tree directly in front of and slightly above us. Fortunately, we brought binoculars. I have never seen an eagle in the wild before. Magnificent.

Robert and I walked through town.

We had breakfast in a café (scrambled egg on a panini and very good Earl Grey), then browsed in a used bookshop, where I bought WE WERE THE MULVANEYS, by Joyce Carol Oates. It started to rain, so we headed back to the docks, where tour bookers were hawking excursions. We boarded what looked like a 1950s school bus and headed out of town to the Mendenhall Glacier. We drove past Mount Juneau, the base of whose steep face is considered the most dangerous avalanche location in the urban US.

More beautiful countryside, pocked with suburban homes. Tour guide said most of Juneau’s 30,000 people live out toward Mendenhall. (He also said he was a Republican and that even though it “killed” him to say it, Gore was right about global warming, whereupon both Robert and I said, “Duh!” loudly.) I saw lots of churches (Church of the Nazarene, Church of Christ) and lots of rusted-out cars on front lawns. Tour guide informed us that if someone wants to move to the lower 48, there is no inexpensive way to bring his car along, so many are abandoned.

Glacier (in the heart of the 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest) is smaller than when I was here in ’95. But still beautiful, still that breathtaking shade of toothpaste blue I have never seen anywhere else in nature.

Cottonwood trees abound; when the sun came out, they gave up their snowy puffs, making lots of people sneeze.

Arctic terns swooped and buzzed the ponds. A waterfall gushed nearby.

Last night, we talked to a Filipino waiter who waxed rhapsodic about the US. He told us we have no idea how lucky we are to have access to $5 meals at McDonalds. Food is expensive in the Philippines, he said. “You know what I love about America? Wal-Mart. Target. Costco. Yes, I have a card. I love the Philippines, but I love America also,” he said. I thought about that conversation at the glacier. I love my country for a lot of reasons. For me, natural beauty is higher on the list than access to Wal-Mart. But I see now how privileged that makes me. I already knew it, but sometimes it’s a good thing to be reminded.

Dinner tonight marred by news that norovirus has invaded the ship. I am trying hard not to panic but am also gratified that my isolationist ways may yet come in handy.

Day 6

Jog as we docked at Skagway. If it weren’t for the two other cruise ships already in port, I would have missed the town.

Breakfast on the Lido Deck: fruit and coffee for me. After a while, the excess of offerings begins to wear on me. Robert loves it, though: this morning, he especially liked the smoked mackerel.

The staff is taking the threat of norovirus very seriously. When you arrive at the restaurants, you must wash your hands with anti-bacterial soap that is provided at the front door. Staff stand guard and make sure you use it. At the cafeteria-style breakfast, you are not even allowed to use tongs to put food on your plate: another staff member wearing rubber gloves uses the tongs for you.

Skagway is small and has the look of a wild-west town in Wyoming, except that there are no high plains or tumbleweed or cattle. Wood-planked sidewalks without curbs, Victorian architecture.

There is a structure made entirely of driftwood:

Ubiquitous diamond merchants, jewelry and souvenir shops, several saloons. We ate fish and chips in one, then walked through more of the town. There was a lovely museum housed in the first granite building in Alaska, once home to the McCabe College for Women, which was really a college-preparatory high school. Boys and girls were taught Latin, Greek, modern languages, natural sciences, history. It was only in existence for three years, when a public school was finally built. The headmaster was Oxford-educated.

The day was almost hot, but the wind kicked up after 3. I can’t stop thinking about that school, about being a young woman in Alaska in the 19^th century, learning Greek and Latin in a town five blocks wide, where winter days are five hours long.

These are some of the clothes that young women traveling to the Klondike were advised to bring at the end of the 19^th century:

1 pair house slippers

1 pair knitted slippers

1 pair heavy soled walking shoes

1 pair arctics

1 pair felt boots

1 pair German socks

1 pair heavy gum boots

1 pair ice creepers

3 pair heavy all-wool stockings

3 pair summer stockings

Some sort of gloves for summer wear, to protect the hands from mosquitoes.

I don’t even know what some of these things are, but they make the whole endeavor of relocating to Alaska sound especially difficult for hands and feet. We haven’t seen a lot of mosquitoes, which is surprising. And here in Skagway, not many birds: just a few gulls, an arctic tern or two, one eagle. Maybe we’re too far north.

Alaska, Part I

2011-06-29T16:16:00.001-07:00

Day 1

We couldn’t have picked a more spectacular day to depart from Pier 35 for Alaska. Temperature was a nearly-unheard-of 77 degrees; sky was cloudless; bay was full of sailboats and gulls. After the mandatory (and ridiculous) safety drill, we met our friends Roy and Josine on the Lido deck, where fruity cocktails ($9) were being hawked and a band played upbeat tunes (not one of which was "I Left My Heart In San Francisco"). A few passengers danced with crewmembers who tried gamely to look as though the whole thing was loads of fun.

It was lovely to sail out of the bay and watch San Francisco disappear.

The Golden Gate arched against the sky. I thought about the other passengers who love San Francisco the way tourists do (which is different from the way we natives do), and how leaving a city is not the same thing as leaving home. My eyes got a little teary. I’ll admit it. The Cliff House was tiny on its precarious perch, the last landmark.

Our room has two twin beds pushed together, two small closets, a desk, a TV, a refrigerator, and a shower-sized balcony.
The wall behind the bed and desk is completely mirrored. It would be nice to be able to sit outside if we were going somewhere tropical, but very shortly after chugging out of the bay, it became clear that being outside and not doing anything was ill-advised. They call it The Frozen North for a reason.

We unpacked and Robert was delighted to find that his plan to smuggle in vodka went undetected by the authorities. Amazingly, we were able to empty two suitcases and a garment bag into our dinky closets. We met Roy and Josine again for a snack. Fantastic fresh fruit, cheese, and lemonade.

We had a drink (ginger ale: $4) outside the restaurant before dinner and people-watched. As always, it’s my favorite part of any getaway. If it were a competitive sport, I would win. Lots of families with small children (school is out), lots of multi-generational families, many matriarchs and patriarchs in wheelchairs being pushed cheerfully by adult children who are way nicer and less grudging than I am. Lots of people speaking different languages. Many Asians, many Indians and Pakistanis. Almost no black people. Some people who are quite heavy. I noticed several people with seasick-medication patches behind their ears and begin immediately to feel queasy.

Dinner was okay. The highlight was definitely cream of porcini mushroom soup. For dessert, I ordered vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce and told the waiter to hold the ice cream. He didn’t get it, which made me a little grumpy. This is the weird thing about cruise ships. You start complaining about everything. You think you won’t, but you will. I don’t know why. Suddenly, you feel massively entitled. Or maybe it’s that even with all the activities, there really isn’t very much to do.

The ship was rocking quite a bit; Josine said she heard that tonight was going to be the roughest night. So I took a meclizine and am now quite drowsy. To bed.

Day 2

Exercise on the Promenade Deck. I jogged over a mile and walked a mile and a half. My ears ached from the wind. There was no coastline visible, just endless vistas of gray, white-capped sea. The deck has the feel of an earlier era: beautifully polished wooden slats, varnished benches and life-vest lockers, chaise lounges with navy-blue cushions arranged so that one can read and watch the ocean at the same time. Vintage-looking clocks. You can almost see Edward and Wallis Simpson having a stroll.

After breakfast (eggs, fruit, tea) and a trip to the “sundries store” to buy new batteries for my camera, I coerced Robert to indulge in my other favorite shipboard activity: trying to get away from other people. I find that my curmudgeonly instincts are especially heightened when I am confined at sea with people I know I wouldn’t like on land. I take offense when other people save seats, or sneeze without properly covering their mouths, or walk up the stairs without staying to the right, or neglect to say thank-you to the lovely people who wait on them. I do not like it when children press all the buttons in the elevator so it will stop at every floor. I do not like smokers. (I know it’s really their nasty habit I don’t like, but I’m getting to the point where the distinction is largely moot.) In short, I am not made for the communal aspect of cruising. Fortunately, this is a big ship. Robert and I hid out for a while in one of the nightclubs, empty but for a couple of gentlemen vacuuming the rugs. We located a few venues (one of the theaters, the art gallery, the library). And we ate lunch. (French fries, cheese, more delicious fruit.)

Back in the room, we fell asleep. Up in time for afternoon tea (scones, jam, egg-salad sandwiches, walnut cake). Bloated and leery of our room and its wall of mirrors, we made our way to Trivia. Notable questions: Who invented scissors? What color is the cross on the Swedish flag? What is the biggest opera house in the world? Roy is a chemist and knew about hydrogen. I knew who lived in the 100-Acre Wood. We got 16 out of 20, but were bested by another team. We vowed to do better tomorrow.

We tried to read on deck, but even in my winter coat, I was freezing. We relocated to the Wheelhouse, which is a nice bar/lounge. I’m reading THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED, by Wally Lamb. I almost gave up on it a few times, but now I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s just the right kind of book for a trip like this: one you can read in spurts, then put down to watch the lady at the bar try to sing along with the piano player’s “One Singular Sensation.”

After dinner, we went to one of the theaters to watch a musician/comedian. He told us he has been doing cruises since 1977, which made me feel too sorry for him to like him much. Plus he likes puns and sings ‘70s songs in funny voices. No patience for this on dry land, let alone on the high seas.

Day 3

There are 11 decks on this ship that are open to passengers: Fiesta, Plaza, Emerald, Promenade, Dolphin, Caribe, Baja, Aloha, Riviera, Lido, and Sun. Our cabin is on the Aloha Deck, aka Deck 11, which means that we do a lot of elevator-riding or stair-climbing in order to get places. I avoid the elevators for the most part (because they put me in alarming proximity to other people), so I get a work-out on the stairs. You run into the same people over and over on the stairs, it turns out. I imagine we’re like-minded in other ways as well.

After my jog, I made my way up to the salon (Riviera), where Gordana cut off two inches and regaled me with stories about women who do silly things to their hair. She says women from the UK have the strangest dye jobs, and that the fact that my hair is in such good condition is because I don’t color it, but if I would like to, she would recommend a shade of red. I told her that I’m 54 and this is what I look like, for better or worse, and she laughed nervously, as though I had inadvertently identified myself as peculiar and she was a little embarrassed for me.

Lunch poolside (Lido), where the sun had shown itself for the first time in two days. We had hamburgers and hotdogs, but the wind was blowing my new haircut around and I finished fast. Went off to read in a quiet lounge and was suddenly overtaken with intense sleepiness. Found our cabin and slept hard for almost an hour, missing Trivia (and probably pissing off Roy and Josine). Now I remember why I don’t read in the middle of the day. Also, I think there’s something about being off the Internet that is discombobulating.

Formal night, which means men wear tuxes or suits and women wear sparkly dresses.

Frankly, I was interested to see what some of these people were going to wear. It was great fun to sit in the atrium, drink champagne, and watch the show. Nearby, an elderly man and woman were having a conversation:

Woman: Doesn’t everyone look nice?

Man: This is such a load of crap.

Woman: Always a smartass. What’s wrong with you?

Man: I don’t have to tell you. What are you, the feelings police?

The man was genuinely disgruntled. I love “the feelings police.” I am going to have to think about that and see where I can use it.

Robert and our friends are at a magic show. I hate magic. Basically, it’s just someone tricking you, and then you have to applaud them for it. I’d much rather watch the ocean slip by. It’s 10:40 pm and the sun hasn’t set yet.

Memory, 1982

2011-06-07T10:14:00.001-07:00

In 1982, my then-husband and I moved to Berkeley so I could go to graduate school. My friend Jim got us an apartment in the building next door to his. Growing around the front door was a huge, trailing jasmine in full bloom. My mother stood under the doorframe and said, For the rest of your life, when you smell jasmine, you will remember this place.

It was a very ordinary one-bedroom apartment on the third floor. It had an ancient kitchen with pale yellow tiles edged in black, and shag carpeting that Jim described as “owl-shit green.” The ex and I slept on a platform bed in the dark bedroom, under a blue and white-flowered Laura Ashley quilt. We had a black-and-white TV in there. It was about the size of a toaster. I remember watching Michael Jackson do the moonwalk on that TV.

We didn’t cook a lot, or rather, we didn’t cook well. I made a lot of pasta (which Neil Heidler ate too much of and threw up all over the owl-shit green carpeting). The ex gloried in a dish of his own devising: vegetables sautéed in our big, red wok, then mixed with cream of mushroom soup and served over rice. Needless to say, we ate out a lot. On a limited budget, we often went to La Fiesta, a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant on Telegraph. Strawberry sodas and cockroaches on the walls. Blue tiles inlaid on the tables. Still the best Mexican food I ever ate. I wonder if it’s still there.

I remember sitting cross-legged on the bed and doing accounting problems. Standing by the bookcase in the hallway so I could talk on the phone. Watching my husband perform at a terrible little club on Shattuck whose name escapes me, nicknamed “The Toilet” by the other musicians who were drawn in by free beers.

One of our neighbors was a woman named Andrea, and we got to be good friends. She was working on a doctorate in archaeology and wanted to meet men in the worst way. We used to laugh a lot, but I can’t remember why anymore. We lost touch.

My close friend Sherry lived across town. Every Thursday night, I would go over to her apartment and watch Cheers and Hill Street Blues. (I think Thursday was the night the ex played at the Toilet.) Sherry had a huge crush on Ted Danson. I loved Daniel Travanti. Sherry and I aren’t friends anymore. I miss her so much.

The ex and I went to Tilden Park almost every weekend. We rode the merry-go-round. I always got a brick of pink popcorn at the concession stand.

He liked to jog, in those days. It staggers me to remember that I did absolutely no exercise at all.

I thought about all this this morning as I jogged past a house about a mile away from mine. In the yard, a huge hedge of jasmine bloomed. It almost stopped me in my tracks.

Pomp and Circumstance and Pasta Salad

2011-05-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

My daughter was graduated from college last weekend.

It was at once like all other graduation ceremonies (black gowns, boring speeches, worries about the weather) and unlike all other graduation ceremonies (because my daughter was one of the participants). While I sat there, I thought about my own graduation from college 32 years ago. At the time, I thought I had set my life on a nice, straight track.

I don’t even have words for how that turned out.

I also thought about how hard my daughter was to nurse. She was always stopping and looking around, losing interest in the task at hand. After a few weeks, I thought, To hell with this, and buttoned up. I thought she was going to be distractible and unfocused, a person who never finished anything.

As it happens, she is still impossible to feed. She won’t eat most meat, or beans, or bananas, or mashed potatoes. She still eats cereal dry, with her hands. When she makes a salad for herself at a salad bar, she returns to the table with a mound of black olives and a mound of shredded carrot and maybe, if she’s feeling adventurous, a slice of cucumber.

But this girl who has never eaten a ham sandwich was just graduated from college. Over the course of four years, she endured the usual dramas in the housing, friend, boyfriend, and unsympathetic-professor departments, but she persevered. She wrote a senior thesis in which words like “filmic” and “diegetic” figured prominently. While she was writing it, she called me a lot, panicking. But she stayed focused.

Graduation ceremonies are, in at least one way, remarkable. You—the parents—are all sitting there feeling very private feelings, calling up your own memories. But inexplicably, alchemically, you feel a connection to all these strangers, and their rightful pride in their children somehow ends up enhancing your pride in yours.

After the ceremony, we ate lunch on one of the college’s beautiful lawns. My daughter had pasta salad: pasta, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots. She didn’t eat the lettuce. She doesn’t like it when the pasta and the lettuce are touching.

Old Age

2011-04-17T08:40:00.000-07:00

My 91-year-old mother has some sort of dementia. Not Alzheimer’s, probably. She gropes for words, can’t remember what she did three hours ago, insists that I grew up speaking Hungarian, as she did. She calls my partner “Richard.”

I am sad a lot now.

The weird thing is that my father died when I was 19, and I would give a lot if he could have lived into old age. I miss him every day.

But I miss her, too.

I call her every night. Usually, we talk about three things: the weather, politics (“Do you watch Rachel Maddow? She’s such a doll.”), and whether she went for her walk. Recently, her foot has been bothering her. The half-hour walks have become 15-minute walks. I think it’s an omen.

My mother has become less hard-edged in old age. She oozes love. She hugs receptionists. Once a woman who complained about everything her friends did (“She walks too slowly!”), she now has mostly nice things to say about people, assuming she approves of their politics. It’s a nice change. And lucky. Dementia can make you nasty.

Last night, at dinner, she told the waiter at the Lark Creek Café how old she was. I almost fainted into my steamed asparagus. One of the hallmarks of my mother’s life has been her easy ability to lie about her age. I didn’t know how old she was until I was 20. Even then, she told me that she was 57, and told my brother that she was 56. Lying was something she did even when there was no benefit to be gained.

As soft and mushy as she has become, my mother is still infuriatingly stubborn. She lives alone and insists on driving. (A few months ago, I stole her car keys. My brother had new ones made.) She has control of a lot of money, and she Will Not Let Go. I have begun the process of taking that control away. She wants to argue about it with me all the time.

It breaks my heart.

At dinner last night, I needed a tissue, and she rummaged in her purse to find one. She pulled out a paper napkin wrapped around a brownie. “I forgot about this,” she said. “How long has that brownie been in there?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I got it at the JCC. They serve lunch for six dollars. The meatloaf is fantastic!” Then she leaned in close and whispered, “But everyone who eats there is so old!”

Finishing What I've Started

2011-04-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

I am working on a manuscript. I have written 91 pages. It will eventually be a good middle-grade novel. I’m almost 100% sure it will sell.

I started this novel over two years ago. Since that time, I’ve written and sold another manuscript, and written and submitted yet another to my agent. (She’s still considering it.) Meanwhile, I cannot finish this particular book (tentatively called Three). It’s driving me crazy.

Part of the reason is that it’s a story about three kids—two girls and a boy—and different chapters are told from different points of view. I have a hard time juggling that. I have to remember obscure details about each character, and the longer I take to finish the book, the harder it is to recall them. Recently, I decided I wanted to make a small change in the boy’s home life. It took me weeks to incorporate it, and long after I thought I was finished, I kept finding references to the boy’s parents that no longer made any sense.

It is said that all writers have manuscripts in their desks (or on their computers) that were 1) never finished, 2) finished but never sold, and/or 3) abandoned for various reasons. I have a few of these. In one, I tried to fictionalize my mother’s experience growing up in an orphanage. In another, I wrote about a crazy family loosely based on the one into which I was born. I think I stopped working on these because I realized I would be divulging other people’s secrets.

Family loyalty is a double-edged sword when you’re a writer.

Another reason it’s hard for me to finish Three has to do with the fact that one of the characters is poor. I spent yesterday working on a scene in which she has to figure out how to make a dinner for herself and her father out of rice and a quarter of a brick of cheese. I felt a huge responsibility to do justice to the scene without sentimentalizing it.

After I wrote it, I felt sad and weary and spent. It wasn’t until long after dinner (organic baby greens, roast chicken, root vegetables) that I realized why.

Caring about the characters I’ve created is a good sign. It means they’re real to me, which usually means they’ll be real to other people. But knowing that they’re living in dire circumstances makes it hard for me to want to spend time with them. I find myself stalling: running errands, making phone calls. Anything to avoid thinking about a kid who has to lie about why she never has enough money to get a smoothie after school with her friends.

So I’m writing here about Three in the hope that I will now feel compelled to finish it. I will tell myself to woman up. I will stop whining. I will get over myself and just do it.

Joy (and A Video of My Son Dancing)

2011-03-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

One of my best friends from college died on Friday.

To combat the sadness, I’ve been thinking about joy and what brings it to me. Small things, it turns out.

--The first gulp of lemonade on a really hot day;

--Sitting on the front steps after my morning jog;

--Turning a cake out of a pan and feeling with my whole body that it slid out perfectly;

--A belly-laughing baby;

--Figuring out a plot problem in any novel I’m working on;

--Watching David Letterman with Robert;

--Getting a phone call and looking down and seeing that the last two digits of the incoming number are either “74” or “02”;

--Animals, especially dogs and chimps (and yes, I know chimps are nasty and vicious, but I don’t care);

--Shopping with Cara;

--The moment in a restaurant (especially with Robert) when the waiter brings the salad and I know that the whole meal is still ahead of me, to be anticipated, but I don’t have to be hungry anymore;

--Birds twittering (which I never used to care about at all—how is that possible?);

--Road trips;

-- Tom Waits’s “Heart Attack and Vine,” Johnny A’s “Oh, Yeah,” anything by Benny Goodman;

--Opening a brand new book;

--Watching my son dance. Here is a video. He’s the tall young man in the untucked blue shirt--#424—dancing with the woman wearing a black-and-white top on the right-hand side of the screen. This is a jack-and-jill competition, which means they were randomly assigned to be partners. He had never danced with her before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w--V4LdtjA8&feature=more_related

Whatever joy I feel in watching him—which is considerable—is dwarfed by the joy he feels himself. It is palpable in every move he makes.

A Little Old

2011-03-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I drove down to L.A. to bring cookies to my thesis-writing daughter and a scratch cake to my son, recently bereft of wisdom teeth. Daughter and I decided to bond over some retail therapy at an enormous mall in Glendale. It was crowded and raining and I was tense, having already been in the car for six hours.

We entered a store, and immediately I noticed that the music on the loudspeaker was so loud that I had to shout to be heard. “I hate it when the music is so loud!” I groused. She said, “What?” and I said it again, yelling this time. She laughed. “You are such an old lady,” she said.

Something inside me snapped. “You know what, Cara?” I said. “I am an old lady!” I felt incredible freedom—a sort of zinging inside my brain—as I said it. I thought, Well, okay. The secret’s out.

Except for one thing. I was lying. I am not old.

I know who Mumford and Sons are. I can bench press half my weight. I wear cool suede boots with brass studs. I am, as I constantly remind my kids, adorable and hip.

I am the opposite of old.

As it happens, I am grouchy and curmudgeonly and a big complainer. But it’s not because I’m old. I’ve always been this way.

What I realized in the mall is that now I can chalk up all the weird things about myself—that I hate loud music in public places and camping and movies with car explosions and the way that nobody even cares about split infinitives anymore—to being old.

It’s completely fabulous, finally having an excuse.

While we were in the store with the loud music, I bought myself a filmy, float-y ecru-colored top patterned with figures of women in mid-20th-century hats and dresses.

I bought it because even though I know who Mumford and Sons are, I like to listen to Benny Goodman more.

Okay, maybe I’m a little old.

For Someone Who Makes A Joyful Sound

2011-02-06T21:28:00.000-08:00

One of my best friends from college is very, very ill.

I met Leslie on the first day of my freshman year at Bryn Mawr. She—daughter of a Connecticut minister—sought me out, attracted by my curly hair and the fact that I came from California. We nurtured our growing friendship with endless and largely inaccurate speculations about boys and sex. We got drunk for the first time together. We ordered innumerable cheese steaks from Pizzi’s. We went to New York and sat in a bar with Paul Simon. We worked at the dorm switchboard and laughed harder than I have ever laughed since.

We were both English majors and enamored of the idea of becoming writers. She loved Virginia Woolf and J.D. Salinger. She also loved James Thurber and Joni Mitchell and Alexander Calder and Woody Allen and Cape Cod and the doughnuts they used to give out in Thomas Great Hall every morning. Mostly she loved Bob Dylan. When I told her I didn’t, she threatened, seriously, not to be friends with me anymore, so I backed down and said I didn’t like him as much as Jackson Browne. We spent many hours listening to our favorite records, trying to convince each other. In the end, we decided we both loved Bruce Springsteen and called a truce.

She was a bridesmaid in my wedding, although even by then we weren’t as close as we’d been. Later, she married Mike, her college sweetheart, and had two kids. They lived outside of Chicago for many years, and then in Milwaukee, where they are both on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. Leslie did become a writer of nonfiction and wrote several best-selling books.

We lost contact for a while but re-connected via e-mail and Facebook. It has been nice to be in touch again, although our friendship is grounded much more in memory than in events of the present day. Which is fine—sometimes you need friendships like that—but I have always wished that we could rekindle what we had. Even though I know that sometimes, “what we had” is such a product of time and place that it has to remain in the past, and the best you can do is call it up from time to time and remember it lovingly.

I ought to be able to insert a pertinent quote from Bob Dylan. But I never really liked him.

So here’s a little Jackson Browne for Leslie, with love:

“Keep a fire for the human race

Let your prayers go drifting into space

You never know what will be coming down

Perhaps a better world is drawing near

And just as easily it could all disappear

Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around

(the world keeps turning around and around)

Go on and make a joyful sound”

On Anthony Trollope, the Real Housewives, and What I Do All Day

2011-01-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

I am always fascinated by what writers do during the day. When I was younger, I had the idea that writers sat at roll-top desks, sipped tea, and took long walks on the beach for inspiration. I did not think about land-locked writers at all. And I did not think about how they had to get their engine lights checked or go to the drugstore or get a cavity filled or vacuum or sit freezing on the bleachers during soccer practice.

I’ve read about writers who say that they eat breakfast and then work from 8 am to 4 pm. This is amazing to me. First of all, what kind of breakfast? Who cooked it? And cleaned up after? And then there’s the work itself. Does working “from 8 am to 4 pm” mean actually working? Actually writing something down? Because that is just unbelievable to me.

Here’s what my work day looks like: I get up at 7:30 am, check my e-mail, and play a few games of Mahjong Titans on the computer. I may be thinking about work or I may not. Usually I am thinking about how I know I have to exercise and don’t want to.

At 9 I go for a jog/walk through my neighborhood. The good part about this is that I do get to do part of it on a beach. The bad part is that it is exercise.

I get home at 10 and do weight training while I watch terrible morning television shows. I know the Real Housewives and various hoarders intimately. Then I shower and eat breakfast. This morning, it was two bite-size Almond Joys and an orange.

By now it is 11:30. If I have to go to the grocery store, I go now, when it is less crowded than in the afternoon. When I get home, I put away groceries and do some medically necessary things to manage a chronic health condition.

At 2 pm, I am ready to work. I take my laptop into the kitchen, because even though I have a lovely office and a perfectly nice desk, I get more work done in the kitchen. I don’t know why, exactly. I think it’s because in my office, I know I’m supposed to be WORKING, which freaks me out. In the kitchen, I drink tea, look out the window, check my kids’ Facebook pages, and once in a while, type out a sentence. I do this until 5 and if I’m lucky, I’ve written two pages.

Anthony Trollope was a postal surveyor who wrote 5,000 words every day before he went to work.

Camille Grammer is one of the Real Housewives. She has four nannies for two children. And homes in Malibu, Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, and Colorado. And no job.

On the laziness spectrum, I fall somewhere in between Anthony Trollope and Camille Grammer.

Tomorrow I am writing three pages.

What Matters

2011-01-17T10:20:00.000-08:00

On my walk through the neighborhood this morning, I passed two little kids unfolding a card table on their front lawn. The boy looked to be about six; the girl about three. Both were bed-haired and dressed the way locals at the beach dress on cool winter mornings, which is to say, barefoot and without coats.

As I passed, the girl whined and the boy said, “It doesn’t really matter, Lil.” His tone was parental and kind, and the girl was immediately quiet.

I kept walking. I wondered what the boy’s name was. I decided it was Carson, because I’ve known two little girls named Lily who had brothers named Carson. And also because I’m watching “Downton Abbey.”

At the end of the block, tacked onto a telephone pole at a level only a Pomeranian could see: a torn piece of lined notebook paper , “yard sale” and an arrow scrawled in childish blue crayon.

These kids reminded me of my own, seen this weekend in Monterey. The 21-year-old dragged her non-dancing boyfriend to watch her brother compete in a west-coast swing competition. The 25-year-old (he came in fourth in Intermediate Jack ‘n Jills) bragged when she was out of earshot about her many accomplishments as if they were his own.

I want to tell Carson and Lily, You have no idea how much it matters.

A Good Reminder

2010-12-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

For Christmas, my adult children converted all the videos taken during their childhoods into DVDs. I can’t stop watching them. Four-year-old Evan “explaining” pistons, two-year-old Cara singing “Jingle Bells” the real way and also with the dirty words her dad taught her. Me in high-waisted, stonewashed jeans with front pleats that do unspeakable things to my ass. Evan playing drums and practicing for karate belt promotions. Cara walking when she was just shy of nine months. Both kids skiing like maniacs. Me and my dog Henry at obedience school. (What a waste of time that was.) Family vacations with our great friends the Bruces.

An orgy of memory and nostalgia.

My son, who turns twenty-five today, dances in blues clubs five nights out of seven and regularly competes in west-coast swing competitions. Last week, I said to him, “Isn’t it amazing to see how much time you spent playing drums and doing karate? And now you don’t do those things anymore.” (He still skis like a maniac.) And he said, “Well, but dancing came out of playing drums and doing karate.”

Of course he’s right. Playing drums exposed him to the intricacy of music, the joy of beat and rhythm. And karate is all about controlling one’s body in space.

It’s nice to know that the things that gave him pleasure as a boy have morphed into something that has enhanced his life as a man.

It’s a good reminder that we are truly the sum total of all the things we have loved and hated, all that we have accomplished, the places we have been, the books we’ve read, the people we’ve known. Everything.

Although it kills me to think that I am in any way a product of those jeans.

Mail. The Real Kind.

2010-11-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

Remember when getting mail—like, in the metal box out at the curb—was the highpoint of your day?

For me, this was when I was about twelve. I had a friend named Claudine, who was terribly exotic to me because she had long, dark hair that she wore in a thick braid down her back. Also, her mother was Belgian and spoke with an accent. (My mother was from Cleveland.) Claudine was a brilliant artist who dabbled in calligraphy. Add to all of this the fact that she had an older sister who introduced her to some of the accoutrements of late-‘60s Berkeley hippiedom: curtains of beads (instead of bedroom doors), incense, peace signs, Simon and Garfunkel records. We saw each other every day in school, but I always had the feeling that at three o’clock, Claudine walked through an invisible portal and entered a different world where she sat in a garret lit with patchouli-scented candles and nibbled at afternoon snacks of pain au chocolat, brushing her hair until it glistened.

At about this time, my father made me watch a British television series called The Forsyte Saga, an adaptation of the novels of John Galsworthy. At first, I was furious: The Forsyte Saga was in black and white, and it was on at the same time as Hee Haw. Shortly, though, I began to be glad for my father’s persistence. The Forsyte Saga was the very best sort of soap opera, featuring wonderfully drawn characters, magnificent costumes, grand explorations of family and loyalty, love and sex, money and class. Plus, everyone had a British accent. For the first—but not the last—time in my life, I was in BBC heaven.

I got Claudine hooked, and pretty soon, we began to write letters to each other, pretending to be various characters from the show. In our letters, we became Soames and Irene and Jolyon and Bossiney. And Claudine’s letters were written in elaborate calligraphic script and featured the added bonus of relevant drawings, often on perfumed tissue paper. Each envelope was sealed with a dollop of colored, stamped wax. I couldn’t wait to get home from school and check the mailbox. On a good day, I might have as many as three letters.

I kept all of Claudine’s letters. They’re in an old steamer trunk in my garage, along with many others: from Amy, the girl I met at horseback-riding camp, from my father the year I went away to school, from old boyfriends, college roommates, from a girl I met in Washington, D.C. who died of anorexia in her twenties. I almost never open that trunk, but I can’t imagine throwing away those letters. They are among my most prized possessions. They are a window onto my whole life.

I think it is unutterably sad that we don’t write letters anymore.

On Waiting For My Mother To Come Out Of Surgery

2010-10-18T18:47:00.000-07:00

My ninety-year-old mother had major surgery this morning.

These are some of the things I thought:

--People talk too quickly and too softly to ninety-year-olds. Really, they miss half of what you’re saying.

----A ninety-year-old waiting for the anesthesiologist to come talk to her looks vulnerable and small.

--People in hospital waiting rooms just want to sit and not talk. The woman who kept asking everyone if they wanted coffee should have just shut up and sat down.

--Hospital lighting is not flattering to anyone.

--I really hate sitting close to people I don’t know, especially when they smell of cigarette smoke.

--While I am in the waiting room, I do not want to watch “Family Feud.”

--Or Dr. Oz talk about the lies women tell their gynecologists.

--An hour and a half is a really long time.

--The relief that comes with knowing that a ninety-year-old has survived surgery is short-lived and tempered with a sense that the future is highly uncertain.

--Sometimes it doesn’t help to remind yourself that ninety years is a long, long time to live, and that you are so lucky. Sometimes, you just have to feel sad.

Road Trip, Days 13-15

2010-10-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

Day 13

Mount Rushmore is amazing in the same way that an elephant is. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen the pictures—the first time you see it up close and in person, you are awed. There is shock in realizing that something whose image is so familiar, so pedestrian, still reeks of majesty. You stand there and think of presidents and history and why this flawed country and its strident, self-serving, uneducated, small, stupid people are still the world’s best hope, and it’s only later that you realize you didn’t think once about whether the couple whose picture you took were Democrats or Republicans. And that is what you—I—came away with: that for once, it didn’t matter.

The Black Hills are thick with evergreens and what I think are birch trees: trunks as thin and white as bones beneath gold, syrupy leaves. The hills dump you into the Buffalo Gap National Grassland and then, in Wyoming, Thunder Basin National Grassland.

It really is an awful lot of grass.

The high point of the afternoon was lunch in Lusk, Wyoming. The café where we stopped was fully decorated for Christmas: plastic garlands were tacked over beams and doorways, and a lit Christmas tree, topped with a white cowboy hat, winked in the corner. A sign near our table warned, No Firearms. A really scary looking guy—gaunt, unsmiling, chinless—sat at the next table watching a TV show about some NASCAR driver’s 12,000 sq. foot house. He didn’t smile or speak until an older woman came in and said, “Well, Ed, how you doin’?” Then he beamed. She sat down and they talked about hunting. I distinctly heard the word “varmints.” The cashier told us that next weekend, the town would be mobbed. “Huntin’ season.” “What do you hunt?” I asked. “Lots o’ antelope,” she said. “They gits in my yard, they bug my horses. You wanna take ‘em out? Go right ahead. Fine with me.”

(Right over the South Dakota border, but no hint of Scandinavian lilt. This is cowboy country.)

Now we are in Casper, which is where Robert went to live after high school. We found the post office where he worked as a mailman, and his first apartment. (The post office is next door to the Dick Cheney Federal Building.)

He has had a life experience that is so different from my own. He moved a thousand miles away from home when he was 17 and has supported himself ever since. No help from anyone. I am so proud of him. And so happy to share Wyoming with him, even though Wyoming is practically my least favorite state in the country. Cowboys and hunting and Dick Cheney and grass are just not my things.

Day 14

I’m tired. I want to go home. I don’t want to work out in a hot little hotel gym. I don’t want to haul my suitcase and my laptop into the elevator. I don’t want to eat roadhouse food anymore.

Today was more Wyoming. Wyoming is too big. There are no trees, unless you are in Yellowstone, which we are not. There is no place to have lunch, except Cappy’s, in the town of Rawlins, which wins the award for Saddest, Most Beat-Up Town on this trip. I will say that I ordered a Philly cheese steak at Cappy’s, which is highly out of character for me, because I have a thing about thinking that nobody outside of Philadelphia knows how to make one. And it was pretty good. The people at the table next to us prayed quietly before eating their enchiladas. It was nice. I decided in my own head that I was going to pray when my food arrived, but I forgot to. It is a bad idea to attempt to become devout when you’re hungry.

I would like Wyoming more if I could ride a horse through it.

Now we’re in Salt Lake City, visiting Robert’s sister and her three adult children. Her two daughters are friendly and giggly and beautiful, like “The Odd Couple”’s Pigeon sisters, only not British. Dinner at a brewery downtown. The Temple is hardly visible amid all the new construction. I miss it. The city without its severe, pinched silhouette is just any old city on an interstate, lit up with chain-restaurant signs.

Day 15

Salt lies on either side of I-80 in Utah, mounded and white. Beyond it, the desert extends in all directions, drably beige.

Lunch in Wendover (or, as Robert calls it, Bendover, which is apt). It’s just over the Nevada border, where all the Utahns go to gamble. The marquee outside The Nugget advertised a Deer Widow Weekend special outside the Subway where we got sandwiches. Chippendale dancers were involved.

More desert, although some industrious Nevadan planted lush, yellow-flowered plants along the highway and in the median. We drove past Pumpernickel Valley and, two hours later, the Rye Patch Dam. CDs of Itzhak Perlman, the Everly Brothers, and Billie Holiday alleviated silence but not weariness. Pink mountains ringed the desert, looking like the carved end of a roast. (I think I wanted to describe the mountains as meat because the valley and the dam made me think of sandwiches.)

Fifty-minute traffic jam outside of Fernley. Weather : 94 degrees. Boy, are we tired.

Home tomorrow, after dinner with my mother.

Road trip, Days 10-12

2010-10-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

Day 10

I love Wisconsin, which I have seen for the first time today.

These are some of the things Wisconsin has:

--Red barns. Not dilapidated, sagging, Green-Acres barns. Perfect, meticulously maintained red barns. With silos. They’re like the ones in children’s picture books that I used to buy to teach my kids about seasons and the weather. We’ve seen a lot of barns on this trip, but Wisconsin definitely wins the Charming Red Barn Award.

--Rolling hills, i.e., landforms wherein elevation at the top is higher than elevation at the bottom. Flint Hills of Kansas: take note.

--La Crosse, a college town of beautiful old homes, only some of which have been converted into student housing. Driving to the hotel from the restaurant, we saw five shirtless young men through an upstairs window of a grand but slightly seedy house, playing ping pong. (One hopes they were students.) Bricks and wrap-around porches figure heavily.

--Beer-batter-fried bratwurst. Yes, we had some.

--Culver’s frozen custard. On the menu tomorrow.

--Bogs.

--Gas stations featuring live bait.

--Perfect 65-degree weather.

--People with charming accents.

--Kay Cashman Cahill, who it is killing me not to see.

--Proximity to other delectable AListers I am missing.

--Turning trees, leafed in orange and red, flaming against dark evergreens and a pale blue sky.

--Cheese.

--Fried cheese curds.

--The Mississippi River.

--A lot of geologic formations I am too tired to look up.

--Cows. Everywhere, cows.

A note on exercise: I have not missed a day of exercise on this trip. We stay in Holiday Inn Express hotels, which have decent fitness rooms. I hate exercise, but I hate not exercising even more. Hence, the bratwurst.

So, anyway, Wisconsin. I adore it. I could even live here if 1) it didn’t have snow and 2) it was in California.

Day 11

The fly in the ointment that is the perfection of Wisconsin and Minnesota in the fall is, quite literally, flies. We stopped just over the border in Minnesota to take pictures along the Mississippi, and a swarm of flies (or maybe gnats, or midges, or something similarly unpleasant) rose from the grass. You had the feeling they were looking for orifices. Back in the car immediately to admire the trees—autumnally bedazzling—on the bluffs. Windows up.

Lunch in Austin, Minnesota, home to Hormel, the Spam capital of the world. We opted for A & W. Ice cream is not my thing, generally, but I did splurge on a root beer float, which I don’t think I’ve had since Lamaze lessons, 1985. (Nurse Nancy made them after class.) After lunch, we drove through town, which charmed with leafy streets, porched homes, lawn-scented air.

The weather was spectacular: 65 degrees, a broad, spacious, sunny warmth and, just under its surface, an undercoat of cold that was a promise of something, a hint of what is coming.

Now we’re in Sioux Falls, which is apparently the fastest growing city in the Midwest. Lots of strip malls and road construction. Seen on the marquee out in front of a State Farm office: I Just Took An IQ Test And Got A Negative Number. And on the marquee in front of a computer repair shop: We Fi x Typ ewriters. The old section of town is dark brick (as is so much of the region). Lots of Irish bars. A huge Catholic church overlooks the town, reminding me of the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere in Lyon. Well, sort of.

Quite by accident, we found Falls Park, which is where the falls on the Big Sioux River actually are. The falls are not high, but the currents are strong.

I had such a lovely thought as I watched them: that I was only here because I’d met a man who likes to do the same kinds of things I like to do on trips: eat new things, drive on unfamiliar roads, laugh at signs directing travelers to eat at restaurants called Schmooters and Senor Wiener.

Lousy dinner at a fast-food place that’s all over the place here: Culver’s. We ate there because they advertise frozen custard desserts. I had chocolate with caramel sauce and fresh pecan halves. I can’t remember the last time I ate two ice-cream-like products in one day.

Day 12

The middle of South Dakota is all sky and emptiness. Corn fields morphed imperceptibly into grassland dotted with hay bales rolled up like carpets. Are they still bales if they’re not well-packed cubes? Fields of dying sunflowers faced east, bowed like mourners.

No hills or mountains on the horizon. It’s like in mid-South Dakota, mountains haven’t been invented yet.

Lots of billboards: for the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, the need to manage wildlife populations (“WEAR FUR!”),the Reptile Gardens, Bear Country USA, something called Wall Drug. For de Smet (home of Laura Ingalls Wilder—sorry, Little House On the Prairie fans—no time to stop), for the rights of fetuses, for caves and caverns, the power of prayer, various camp grounds and trailer parks, for the world’s only corn palace.

It is indeed a palace made of corn. It’s been in the town of Mitchell, in one shape or another, since the nineteenth century, built by a guy who took umbrage at Lewis and Clark’s assertion that no one could ever make a living in South Dakota.

Right now, it houses a small arena featuring a basketball court and a stage. Murals (also made entirely of corn) on the outside of the building are remade every year.

Yes, corn. The cobs and the husks. This is one of the murals.

Just outside of Rapid City, I noticed the ‘Maintenance Required” light flashing on my dashboard, which really ticked me off, since I had the car serviced at a Jiffy Lube somewhere in the Ozarks. We pulled off the road and found a garage. The young man at the desk was friendly as could be. He examined the car, figured out the problem, fixed it, and didn’t charge us a thing. Thanks, Taylor, at Advanced Automotive Repair.

My stomach is upset. I’m tired. I will crawl into bed and read Lorrie Moore’s THE GATE AT THE STAIRS (excellent) and try not to feel homesick.

Road Trip, Days 7-9

2010-10-04T16:27:00.000-07:00

Day 7

We stopped at a grocery store to buy yogurt this morning. I waited in the parking lot while Robert went into the store. While waiting, I realized 1) I have never seen a Same-Day Dentures in a strip mall, or anywhere, 2) in Missouri, 70-year-old women drive pick-up trucks as often as young men, and 3) California does not have grocery stores called Smitty’s.

I don’t really know much about St. Louis. No one talks about it anymore. So when we rolled in this afternoon, I didn’t even know what I wanted to see.

From the car, we saw a tall building that turned out to be Barnes-Jewish Hospital, located on King’s Highway and affiliated with Washington University. The residential neighborhood there (Fullerton’s Westminster Place, on the National Register of Historic Places), is one of the grandest urban neighborhoods I have ever seen.

Most of the streets are gated on at least one end, discouraging casual drive-throughs. The houses are immense, close together with very small setbacks from the street, mostly in the Georgian, Romanesque, and Renaissance Revival styles. (I’ve been checking out Wikipedia.) The trees! The trees! So lush on every block, rustling in the hot breeze.

Then we crossed King’s Highway and drove through Forest Park, where the St. Louis World’s Fair was held in 1904. More grand homes on the edge of the park, looking like the house in Meet Me in St. Louis (which, Wikipedia tells me, has been torn down). The park ends at Washington University, which is surprisingly beautiful. To anyone with pre-college-age kids: keep Washington U. in mind. I wish I could go there.

For dinner, we went to Hodak’s. Obscenely loaded plates of fried chicken. Excellent cole slaw. So-so fries. Robert had two beers; I had an iced tea. Total bill: $26.

Out of curiosity, I just looked at MLS listings for homes in the Fullerton’s Westminster Place neighborhood. Several houses are listed for one-third (ONE THIRD) what we paid for our house in 2007. These are homes with a full three stories. Some have carriage houses.

But none, I see, is a block from the ocean.

Day 8

Overheard on morning radio just outside of St. Louis:

Disk jockey #1: My doctor says there are only two things you should do in your bedroom.

Disk jockey #2: Fighting and crying?

Disk jockey #3: I thought it was begging and sulking.

Illinois is the land of corn. And rhyming billboards: “Where danger lurks/Remember, sonny/That rabbit foot/ Won’t kill the bunny.” Sponsored by Gunssaveslife.com.

Now we are in Joliet, about 40 miles outside of Chicago. Robert grew up here. Family lore has it that he ran away from home when he was two and was found several streets away, happily heading out of town. He had to wait until he was seventeen to make another run for it. Now, he returns for family visits and 40^th high school reunions.

Tonight was the pre-reunion reunion, held at an Irish bar across from a football field where Joliet Catholic was playing to packed crowds. Terrible parking. Reunion planners are apparently morons. I am so grateful that I (and my children) did not grow up in a community in which football wields such a dominant influence. There are so many other, more interesting ways to be in the world.

It is so much more fun to go to someone else’s reunion than to my own. First of all, I’m five years younger than everyone. Second, a lot of people stared at me, trying to place me, which was entertaining. Third, there was booze. Fourth, everyone called Robert Bob. Five, all the men sounded exactly like Mike Ditka. Lots of talk about disliked teachers, asshole coaches, who dated whom, who pulled Brenda Jackson’s wrap skirt off in the hallway, who got benched, who hung out at Jim’s Blast Furnace during lunch to smoke.

Robert looked handsome in his black Tony-Soprano shirt. I was, once again, overdressed. Why do I always overdress at these things? Tomorrow night I’m wearing jeans.

Day 9

A leisurely tour through Joliet. First stop: Dan’s Candies, where I bought a caramel apple, and where I would have bought more if I hadn’t seen a framed, signed picture of Ann Coulter on the wall behind the cash drawer. Then we drove past Robert’s high school, which is imposing and castle-like, his childhood home, the streets of a historic district where one of his old friends lived until recently. Paid a visit to Elmhurst Cemetery, where his parents are interred (near actress Lynne Thigpen, who was four years ahead of him in high school). Meandered through Pilcher Park, where elm trees shimmered in the wind. It was cold, and the sky looked threatening.

We had a late lunch at Little Joe’s Pizzeria with Robert’s older brother, his girlfriend, and his daughter, son-in-law, and two high-school-age grandsons, whose genial politeness to me on the two occasions I’ve been introduced to them is worth noting.

Robert went to a working-class, racially integrated high school from 1966 to 1970. Tonight, people mingled, talked, and laughed uproariously in a downtown bar. There were no signs of old wounds or divisions, at least none visible to an outsider. The din (enhanced by a pitiful live band playing sixties classics) was remarkable. Robert (aka Bob) was popular across all groups. His “posse” hung out at the bar. I heard about how he was thrown out of Band for refusing the director’s order to cut his hair, how he and friend Buff got high in Pilcher Park, how he and friend Grant did some painting for an 80-year-old neighbor and managed to see up her dress (where it was determined that she was not wearing underwear).

It occurred to me as I was listening to the conversations around me that when one meets one’s significant other in midlife, it is especially nice to go to his high school reunion. Tonight I got to know Bob the smartass, the rebel, the popular guy, the stoner, the hippie with long, thick, abundant hair. It is nice to have the picture rounded out.

Road Trip, Days 4-6

2010-10-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

Day 4

Seen from the interstate highway system in west Texas:

--Incredible frontage roads that allow one access to nothing and go nowhere. They just run along the edge of the sparsely traveled interstate and then stop.

--Abundant, beautiful black-eyed Susans. (At least, I think they’re black-eyed Susans. I never know about plants.)

--Just outside of Odessa, the second largest meteor crater in the country (and the sixth largest in the world). Weird. Glad we stopped.

--Also outside of Odessa, a billboard reading, Nancy Pelosi—Two Heartbeats Away From the Presidency: This is a Joke, Right?

--Vast oilfields under dark, low clouds. The air smelled faintly of gasoline. Surreal, ugly. You can’t help but wonder what’s in the water.

-- Signs in Midland to The Presidential Library. (This is a joke, right?) We drove on.

--Several large wind farms in and around Abilene. T. Boone Pickens? There is certainly a lot of wind.

In Abilene, we got off the interstate and wound our way through west Texas back country. Spectacularly beautiful. Well-paved two-lane highway through charming Albany and Throckmorton. Texas drivers are much better behaved than their California counterparts. Green hills, cottonwood trees—which I only know because of a sign for Cottonwood Road—happy cows, hay bales. Huge horseflies, but otherwise, really idyllic.

And then, quite accidentally, we drove into the next little town and decided to stop at the Dairy Queen for a Blizzard. It was hot, so we parked behind the sandstone (maybe? No better with rocks than plants) courthouse and got out of the car to sit on a bench. I wandered over to a War Veterans Memorial and was taking a picture when I noticed a book store, Booked Up #4. Puzzled, I crossed the street.

I have never seen a bookstore like this in my life (across the street from the public library!). Enormous. Rows and rows of 12-foot-high shelves packed with used books—some leather-bound, some just old—extending the full length of the very long space. I was the only person in the store; there were no other patrons, nobody at the front table, behind which a sign directed you to “Bring your purchases to Booked Up #1, on the other side of the courthouse.” I browsed a little, but truthfully, I was afraid that if I started, I’d never stop. I felt like a soap bubble on the edge of an open drain, about to be sucked away. I do remember a few random books: a compilation of ancient Turkish texts, an examination of 1950s Broadway musicals, and the autobiography of Mary Pickford.

I left the store and went back to Robert, who was still sitting under the tree, not feeling well. “Where the hell are we?” I asked, and in the next breath said, “I could live here.”

It turns out that we were in Archer City, Texas, home to one of the premier rare and antiquarian book collections in the world, owned by the town’s most famous native, Larry McMurtry. Here’s one of the articles I found online: http://donswaim.com/latimes.mcmurtry.html

Now, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t buy something. But I’m so glad I stumbled on the town. I don’t think I will ever forget that store.

This is why it pays to take the back roads. And stop for Blizzards.

The only other thing I have to report is that on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, I noticed a turnoff for Anadarko. And it occurred to me that in Saving Grace (the recently wrapped TV series starring Holly Hunter), the lead character’s name is Grace Anadarko. Maybe a geographical joke?

Still reeling from Booked Up. Now watching the Forty-niners/Saints game. One minute 20 seconds left. Robert may have a stroke.

Day 5

Oklahoma City’s National Memorial is located downtown, near other Federal office buildings. It’s a moving, quiet, heartbreaking place. Two tall, black, stone (marble? Jeez. Not sure) arches on either end of a shallow, rectangular reflecting pool. Inscribed on one arch: 9:01; on the other: 9:03. The attack was at 9:02; the inscriptions refer to our last moment of innocence and our first moment of grief and, ultimately, healing. Tiered stone benches on a grassy rise overlook one side of the pool. On the other: 168 chairs, each bearing the name of a victim. Nineteen chairs bear the names of children.

It is shocking to remember the day of the attack, how naïve we were, how ignorant of what was coming. Sickening to realize that fifteen years later, we are still a nation where zealots and freaks among us can procure weapons easily and with impunity, under the guise of exercising constitutional rights. As Chad Ochocinco says, Child, please.

Onward, north. Kansas interstate is bordered by yellow flowers (that are not black-eyed Susans) and lush prairies. The Flint Hills are hills in the same way that I am a blonde. If it were snowy and you tried to ski on them, you would come to a complete stop halfway down. The gentlest of slopes. Grasses that shimmer in the wind. Vast and nearly treeless beauty ornamented with the occasional billboard: ACCEPT JESUS CHRIST AS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR AND REPENT Or You Will Regret It.

You know you’re not in California when you are listening to a radio station broadcasting Walter Brennan singing about a mule.

Now in Kansas City’s Westport district, a Midwestern version of Noe Valley. A tense moment at the front desk of the hotel while I waited in line behind a group of five middle-age men to check in. One of them graciously allowed me to go ahead of them, and when I said thank-you, there was quite a bit of talk about me buying them dinner and them drinking vast amounts of beer and Joe needing to be careful because “uh oh, she’s got a camera!” Very relieved when Robert came in with the suitcases.

Later, we walked down the street to the Jerusalem Cafe. I meant to have fried chicken or a steak in Kansas City, but frankly, I’m sick of meat. Yummy gyros on a balmy, breezy night.

And now it’s almost midnight. Robert is sleeping. Outside our window, the night is yellow with parking-lot light and occasional flashes of lightning. The thunder cracks and roars, and the rain on the window is sizzling like something roasting on a spit. I have never known a man who sleeps like this.

Day 6

Drove through the Kansas City neighborhood where Mr. and Mrs. Bridge lived (in the Evan Connell novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, two of the most significant books I read growing up). Fun to see Ward Parkway and signs to the Plaza. Then found Swope Parkway and drove to a more modest section of town, where Robert spent summers at his grandmother’s. The house is still standing, although he says it looks smaller. His grandmother was the light of his young life: the kind of grandmother who made hot breakfasts for fifteen people, had a freezer full of popsicles that could be eaten whenever you wanted one, and baked the best lemon meringue pie he has ever eaten. (His older brother used to beg Grandma to make “one of those women meringue pies” when he was little.)

Left leafy Kansas City and drove south. Narrowly missed running over a tortoise crossing the highway just outside of Harrisonville. Stopped at an Amish store with “FUDGE” painted on the wall facing the highway in Rich Hill. (Honestly, all any roadside business needs to do is advertise “fudge” and I will pull over.) As we parked, two ladies in drab-but-patterned street clothes and black snoods were leaving. Inside, we found locally made jewelry, jars of locally made chow-chow, eggs in pickled beets, mustard eggs, eggs in pickled jalapenos, butter “made from first cream,” bottles of traditional Amish wedding ciders, and various kinds of candy and nuts. We bought honey-roasted pecans, a taffy-like candy called Mary Janes (Robert loved them as a kid), and homemade peanut-butter fudge. Passed on the pickled eggs, but with regret.

In Joplin, we picked up Interstate 44 heading east. I’ve just finished a manuscript that takes place in a mythical town between Joplin and Springfield, and I wanted to check out the town of Mount Vernon, whose chamber of commerce website and real estate listings were useful to me as I researched the Ozark area.

Mount Vernon is home to Turner’s Calico Corner, a general store selling candy, fabric, notions, country kitsch, religious paraphernalia (passages from the Bible ran on the electronic neon crawl in the front window), homemade fudge (which I nobly resisted, still so full of Amish fudge that I could barely walk), and country/cutesy signs (“Chocolate, men, and wine are all better when they’re rich”). I bought something called “MeeMaw’s Recipes” just so I could talk to the woman at the counter to hear her accent. Then we went to the Red Barn and Grill. Robert had a huge slice of lemon meringue pie (not as good as his grandma’s, but pretty close); I had a ham and cheese sandwich. More talking to the waitress, so I could get the accent right. Not quite southern, but not California-newscaster, either.

Now we are holed up in Springfield. Too fat to eat a real dinner, but I had a salad downstairs. Our waitress was a cranky woman in her seventies who lived in Santee, California for many years. “Do you like it in Springfield?” I asked. “I hate the winters,” she said, which made me think we were smart to plan this trip for September.

Road Trip, Days 1-3

2010-10-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

Day 1

Beautiful day of fog and eerily warm weather on the central coast. Tightly wedged into my ordinary car (which is not as zingy as Robert’s, but does have the advantage of being cheaper to fuel), we made the now-familiar drive down 101: past Salinas and Gonzales and Greenfield, past exits to Fort Hunter Liggett and Paso Robles, down the precariously steep Cuesta Grade into San Luis Obispo, through Pismo Beach and Nipomo (“Gary Bang Harley Davidson”) and the seaside splendor of Santa Barbara (which is starting to look like a strip mall for rich people). On to Ventura (which always makes me think of Tori Amos) and the gloriously named western suburbs of LA: Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Calabasas.

Eagle Rock is a funny little corner of Los Angeles: still full of neighborhood shops and small, well-kept bungalows that haven’t been McMansionized. It’s a neighborhood that isn’t particularly pretty or quaint, but it’s a neighborhood—it has that kind of feel. You can eat at the Oinkster or Auntie Em’s Kitchen, where the red velvet cupcakes are divine. There’s a Baptist church, a Christian Assembly, a church for Seventh Day Adventists, and St. Dominic’s. I overheard someone at Swork Coffee say that most of the parishioners at St. Dominic’s are Filipino.

We had dinner with both of my kids at our favorite area restaurant, Café Beaujolais, whose authentic French food is served by authentic French waiters. One always wonders if they are out-of-work actors. I ordered a chicken leg stuffed with cheese. “I have a big one for you,” our waiter crooned Frenchly. I said the only possible thing there was to say—“I like big ones”—which thoroughly mortified my daughter. We split a bottle of wine. This marks the first time I have ever had wine in public with both of my kids.

Lots of fun conversation, which involved discussions of relationships, school, work, west-coast swing, whether my daughter should text her boyfriend (who was partying with fraternity brothers in Vegas), why my son should date Jennifer Connelly, should she ever become available, how I have a huge personality and interrupt people when I am comfortable with them. And how I am quirky.

Now it is 1 AM and I am suffering from the insomnia that arises from a combination of an unfamiliar bed, the roar of an overzealous air conditioning unit, and the peculiar-but-ultimately-gratifying realization that my children think of me as an actual person rather than just their mother

Day 2

We drove down to Del Mar because Robert is training to ride his bike cross-country in a year or so, and we wanted to scope out the beginning of the trip from the safety of a car. We wound our way through endless housing developments, none of which existed when I lived in San Diego in 1979 with my then-soon-to-be-husband. Eventually, we ended up in Poway (“the city in the country” said the sign, which was lying, because “the country” is actually “the Godforsaken desert that no one in his right mind would live in”). More driving up hills studded with brush and some sort of burnished grass. Julian, at 4200 feet, is home to Mom’s Pies and a crowded biker bar, but we couldn’t linger.

Onward through hot, desolate, mournful desert. Twenty cars all afternoon. Temperature hit 112 at 1:30 and remained there for hours.

We passed a camel farm (selling milk, cheese, and rides for children). It was like Afghanistan, except for the music we listened to: CDs of Buddy Guy and Andrea Bocceli, a couple of decent rock stations. Weirdly, just east of Yuma, we heard part of a documentary on Count Basie narrated by Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Treme).

After descending the mountains east of Julian, we turned onto a road with a sign noting that it was the southern stagecoach route of 1849. Apparently, no one has been on it since then. Forty-seven miles from the turn-off to the town of Ocotillo. The only people we saw were some Border Patrol officers about a mile outside of town.

I’m always fascinated by the kind of terrain that people find appealing. I know lots of people who like the desert. I do not. I like farmland: old houses with porches, rolling, green hills which speak to abundance and self-sufficiency. The desert is terrifying and angry and sullen: a surly teenager in a nasty snit. Halfway through the afternoon, I started to wonder what I would do if one of us had a heart attack or (almost worse) if the car blew a tire. What I realized is that there’s no margin for error out there. One mistake and that’s pretty much it. You’re done. (In my head, I’m hearing my friend Jim saying, “A roast is done. You are finished.” But in 112-degree weather, I’m sticking with “done.”)

Robert is discouraged. We have to find another way for him to get over the mountains. More research necessary.

Billboards outside of Yuma: “Do You Miss Me Yet?” (over a picture of a smug-looking George Bush; “Remember When We Really Had Hope and Change?” (over a picture of Ronald Reagan).

Outside of Tucson, a jagged mountain looks like an open-mouthed fish emerging from the sea. Who the hell lives here? At 9 PM it was 100 degrees. At Texas Road House, where we went for steaks, enormous TVs broadcast the Arizona-Iowa game. Men and women all over the restaurant were riveted, silent. I am so glad I don’t live here.

(Lest anyone think I am incredibly self-deluded, I would last about three days on a farm. I am not built for chores that involve sweating, tractors, or smells. I would like the pie, though.)

Day 3

Temperature as we loaded the car at 9 AM: 97 degrees.

Drove past Tucson developments in which all the houses look like clay adobes. Lots of Saguaro cacti. Sky a brilliant blue, except at the horizon, where it was tinted sepia, as though it had been singed.

Near the New Mexico border, we noticed a billboard advertising a winery in Fort Bowie, Arizona. We couldn’t pass it up. We drove into a sad, dusty town, past metal trailer homes, a wooden house painted pink, in the shape of a teepee (with windows), boarded up, a For Sale sign out front. The only thing that seemed to be thriving was a beautiful orchard of tall, thick pecan trees.

We found a little store by way of a sandwich board out front: “Wine, fudge, pecans.”

Nothing else about the building looked remotely like a retail establishment. But we went in. There were shelves of wine made from the grapes of a local winery, “chocolate merlot” and “caramel chardonnay” sauces for ice cream, and a variety of fudge home-made on the premises.

I skipped the mint julep fudge and settled on peanut butter chocolate. Quite wonderful. We bought a syrah and can’t wait to drink it at home.

New Mexico was all sky and puckered clouds. Crossed the Continental Divide, where successive billboards advertised a trading post selling moccasins, saddle blankets, turquoise jewelry, Mexican pottery, cowboy boots, porcelain dolls (“from $18.99”), and leather whips. Far-off, smooth-sided mountains with severe peaks looked like pyramids. Temperatures in the high 90s all afternoon. Happily, we had good CDs: Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Smith, the best of Sly and the Family Stone. And just outside of Las Cruces, El Paso’s KOFX 92.3, playing 60s R & B. Sang along to “Wooly Bully” and “Papa Was A Rolling Stone.”

Seen on the back of a semi: JESUS CHRIST IS MY LORD AND SAVIOR, NOT A SWEAR WORD.

Reached El Paso mid-afternoon. Situated directly across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico, where crumbling shacks and huts crowd the riverbank. From the freeway, we saw an enormous Mexican flag flying proudly in the near-distance.

Once out of El Paso, we drove through more high desert, then mountains, then more desert. “Drive Friendly—The Texas Way,” warned the signs. The clouds were different from those over New Mexico: scattered, but thick and dark. Serious Border Patrol guys held us up for a few minutes while their dogs sniffed our car. We had to open our cooler. The agent, wearing a bullet-proof vest, seemed disappointed at our cache of Crystal Geyser Sparkling Waters and waved us on.

We saw a rainbow and what looked like dry lightning. At sunset, the light against the clouds was very Sistine Chapel-y, which went well with the Marfa NPR show featuring West Texas swing from the 1930s. We drove in the dark for a time, coming to rest in Pecos, Texas. I can hear the semis out on the interstate, heading back to El Paso, or north to Odessa, where just today, a Vietnam Vet and rabid Republic of Texas supporter was finally captured by Rangers after a shootout.

What I Don't Blog About

2010-09-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

Someone I know casually through my blog said recently, “Your life is so great.” There was something about the tone that implied that 1) having a great life is unseemly and 2) I should shut up already.

I have a wonderful life. I am happy. But that is not to say that I don’t have problems, challenges, sadness, fear, generalized ennui, crankiness, angst, and moments of supreme irritation. I just choose not to blog about those things, usually. I’m not sure why. I guess I exorcise those demons in my fiction, and with my friends-in-real-life. Nobody who really knows me can accuse me of unfailing optimism.

Here are a few of the things I don’t blog about:

--anything that violates the desired privacy of people I love;

--anything I would be embarrassed for my kids to read;

--anything associated with chronic, treatable-but- nonetheless-extremely-unpleasant illness;

--politics (unless I can’t help myself);

--anything that would necessitate a lot of swear words (unless I can’t help myself);

--anything that lays bare the truly ugly, mind-numbingly-hideous-but-with-any-luck-fleeting thoughts I wake up with at 3 am and gnaw on until the sun comes up.

A note on swearing: I love to swear. I believe in swearing. But I write for children, and this blog is linked to my website. So I try to keep a civil tongue.

Which is not to say that I didn’t swear in front of my own children.

When my daughter was three, she stormed in the back door, slammed it, then opened it again and yelled outside to her brother, “I’m never playing with you again, you idiot asshole dick!”

Okay, I couldn’t help myself.

Thoughts on Fall, School, and Being A Good Girl Who Occasionally Broke the Rules

2010-08-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

I love the fall. Coming as I do from California, I can’t say it has anything to do with the leaves. I think it’s a holdover from my childhood, when I loved school.

I loved everything about school: order; the comfort of being told exactly what to do (even if I was told by Mrs. Parker, who had nine fingers, or Miss Pennykamp, who looked just like someone named Miss Pennykamp ought to look); the smell of chalk, the slow tick of the old wall clock toward 2:50; SRA readers, their color-coded bindings gleaming in the box at the back of the classroom (I still remember the one about Roger Bannister); the creak when I pulled up the desktop to retrieve my workbooks; the joy of producing a perfect row of lower-case, cursive ‘r’s; the collective ecstasy as we all waited for the film strip to start.

I liked summer well enough. I especially loved its approach and its first days, which coincided with my much-longed-for birthday. I had no use for Independence Day, a holiday that went unheralded by my parents, who were averse to crowds, traffic, hotdogs, the out-of-doors, and almost all manner of celebration. But I did enjoy July. We belonged to a swim club at the old Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, which, in those days, boasted a Jacuzzi, a sauna, and a high-dive. My pre-adolescent self hadn’t yet learned to fear heights (or much of anything). I spent my days jumping off the towering board and lying on the cement pool deck, leaving behind at the end of each lazy afternoon a watery, steaming silhouette of myself.

Most of the kids in my Berkeley neighborhood belonged to the Claremont swim club. In addition to hanging out at the pool, we also liked to sneak up to the hotel’s top floor and slide down the old, covered fire-escape slide. We only got caught once. Hotel management was displeased. But we kept doing it. I still remember the delirious thrill of slipping into the darkness, defying authority.

At heart, though, I was a conformist. The life of the rebel was not for me, which was why I so looked forward to the beginning of school, with its newly sharpened pencils, blank notebooks, and uncluttered expectations. August crawled along. I couldn’t wait for September, and I still can’t. The leaves have nothing to do with it.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I had my moments of school-related bad behavior. In third grade, I passed a note—intercepted by the dour Miss Roach—to Laurie Bradshaw in which I made an indecorous reference to Batman’s wiener. And in tenth grade, Bea Treinen and I were made to leave the classroom when another student blew her nose and we couldn’t stop laughing. So yes, even I experienced the occasional bliss of breaking school rules. Which, as a law-abiding, rule-bound fifty-three-year-old, I now know was not such a very bad thing.)

Thoughts On the Music In My Ipod

2010-08-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

This morning on my jog through the neighborhood, I listened to the following songs on my ipod: “Highway to Hell” (ACDC); “Get Low” (Flo Rida); “Garden Party” (Rick Nelson); “If You Think You’re Lonely Now” (Bobby Womack); “Tired Of Being Alone” (Al Green); “Take Me To the River” (Al Green); “Jungleland” (Bruce Springsteen); “Night Moves” (Bob Seeger); and “Oh, Boy” (Buddy Holly).

These are some of the things I thought about:

--My daughter and I used to drive through Briones Regional Park when she was in high school. We would listen to a tape she made, and “Highway to Hell” was on it. We would turn it up loud.

--Robert and I love “Get Low.” “Them baggy sweat pants/And the Reeboks with the straps/She turned around and gave that big booty a smack.” It just makes us laugh. We like the guys in the background.

--No one except for me likes “If You Think You’re Lonely Now.” No one. It gives me chills. It’s religion. Except I don’t like the lyrics. They don’t go with the music, which sounds like religion and sex together.

-- My ex-husband and I had a thing for Jennifer Holliday and went to see her whenever she was in the Bay Area. Al Green opened for her at the Circle Star once. “Take Me to the River” is just, well, amazing.

--“Jungleland:” Bryn Mawr College. Freshman year. Leslie Whitaker’s room on the third floor of Rhoads North.

--In 1977, I was a sophomore in college. My father was dying. During spring break, I drove from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale with three male friends who were seniors. (I am glad I got to experience spring break once, but really, once was enough.) On the trip home, “Night Moves” came on the car radio, and two of my friends high-fived each other. The air smelled like orange groves. I have never forgotten. It’s funny, what manages to worm its way into your brain for all eternity.

--I imgine that no one else in the world has the same songs on her ipod that I do. (“Get Low” and “Garden Party”?) It is probably a reflection of the fact that no two people in the world have quite the same personalities.

--I am always a little bit embarrassed when other people hear my music. I used to think it was because I had lousy taste in music. But now I think it’s because the music you like is so personal—so expressive of who you are—that it feels revelatory, confessional. Whenever I drive with my window open, I turn the volume on the CD player down. I just don’t think random truck drivers have to know that I harbor a secret penchant for “Runaround Sue.”

On Debutantes, Bruce Springsteen, and Why We All Need Lockers

2010-07-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

Busy working on my next novel, so haven’t written here much in a while.

My thirty-fifth high school reunion is coming up, and one of the characters in my book is (very loosely) based on someone I knew in high school. So I’ve been thinking a lot about high school, which is something I don’t usually think about all that often.

My high school was located in a very affluent, very small town in northern California. I moved there at the beginning of eighth grade, which is a terrible time to move anywhere. I always felt like an outsider: I hadn’t grown up with these people, many of whom had known each other since kindergarten.

There was a lot of culture shock. I’d gone to seventh grade in Berkeley, which, in 1970, was awash in hippies. My new school didn’t have hippies. It had social-dance class and school-approved sororities and debutantes.

I cannot say that I liked high school very much, but I wasn’t someone who was abjectedly miserable there. I had wonderful teachers and friends, some of whom I’m still in touch with today. My closest friend is someone I went to high school with. She introduced me to the joy of eating raw cookie dough. I wrote her from college in Pennsylvania about a singer I liked who was unknown in California. That was how she found out about Bruce Springsteen.

I think the thing about high school is that most teenagers—not all, but most—are inexperienced in the business of having their hearts trampled. They haven’t yet learned how to weather anguish. High school will teach them, if they are lucky. If they are not lucky, they will have to learn out in the big, bad world, which is a shame, because by then their best friends will have jobs and husbands and children and be too busy to leave sympathetic notes in their lockers when something bad happens.

In high school, people really care when bad things happen to their friends. They are really paying attention. Otherwise, there is just geometry and John Steinbeck to think about. (Note to teenagers: once you turn 18, you will never think about geometry or John Steinbeck ever again.)

Actually, as we all know, there are no lockers in the big, bad world. This is too bad. Lockers were one of the things I liked about high school: a place that was just yours, to be decorated as you chose, where you could unburden yourself of books and binders that would otherwise need to be hauled around all day.

That is what we all need now: someplace where we can put the heavy things down.

Ano Nuevo State Park

2010-06-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

We are lucky enough to live 30 miles south of Ano Nuevo State Park, a preserve comprised of pinniped rookeries, native dunes and coastal terrace prairie habitats, and various inland plant communities, including old growth forest, freshwater marsh, red alder riparian forest and knobcone pine forest. (So says the website. My knowledge of the outdoors is limited to impressions related to weather [hot, windy] and smells [grassland: fresh, loamy; elephant seals: really, really bad].) Today we drove up, passing participants—some in masks, one sporting a pink feather boa—in the AIDS/LifeCycle bike ride—on our way.

We got a map at the Visitors’ Center, a converted dairy barn, and headed out, through fields edged in cattails and bordered at their far edges by thick pines. To our left: the ocean, littered with whitecaps, an impossible blue.

We passed a pond, the nesting ground for red-winged blackbirds and marsh wrens.

Lots of mock heather, lupine, lizardtail and coyote bush. (Again, thanks to the website. When it comes to plants, I [to quote my mother] know from nothing. I think these yellow flowers are mock heather, but I’m not sure.)

Halfway, we stopped and spoke with a genial ranger, who advised us to stay 25 feet away from the elephant seals.

The path gave way to sand dunes. We trudged on, hearing the bellow of the seals, which convinces you before you ever lay eyes on them that you would have to be some kind of prize idiot to ignore the 25-foot rule.

The seals themselves were sunning on the beach. They are quite enormous (an impression not well conveyed in the picture). Occasionally, one of them raised a flipper in the manner of a royal wave. I wanted to wave back. The presence of thirty Japanese tourists was inhibiting.

We stood at the viewing stand for a while, reveling in the sun and the sea, the proximity to magnificent animals, the sense that the natural world is glorious beyond description.

On the drive home, we were quiet, and I knew without asking that we were thinking the same things.

That we are lucky to live where we can breathe in such beauty.

And that people—who can turn away unmoved from pictures of pelicans suffocating in oil, who expect their need for fossil fuel to be gratified no matter the costs—can break your heart.

For Robert, With Love and Thanks

2010-05-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

This weekend marks Robert’s and my five-year anniversary. We met via the Internet, Robert after fifteen years of what he likes to call “power-dating,” I after a dismal four months, during which time I met a variety of men clearly put on this earth to dissuade any woman from even so much as thinking about dating ever again. Occasionally I wonder about them: what they’re doing now, if any of them found any takers.

This is what I would say to them, if I could.

--If you are 70, do not say you want to date women 47 and younger;

--If you are 70, do not say you are 53;

--Do not tell your date that the reason you don’t have any male friends is that men are jealous of how good-looking you are;

--Do not tell your date that you are giving away most of your possessions because “as long as I have my computer and my antique sword, I’ll be fine”;

--Do not meet your date through a Jewish dating service and then, over coffee, respond to her story about a skinflint by saying, “He’s Jewish, right?”;

--Do not call your date forty-five minutes after she tells you what an asshole you are for making anti-semitic remarks and start to tell her about a dream you had;

--Do not neglect to mention that you owe the IRS $100,000 in back taxes and also have a girlfriend;

--Do not initiate first-date banter by reminiscing about your ex-wife, who is bi-polar and likes to say she lives to make her ex’s life a living hell;

--Do not spend ten minutes explaining why the woman you are looking for must have clean fingernails;

--Do not, during the course of an introductory phone conversation, announce that you are wearing a Versace suit and a thong;

--Do not then say, “You like that, don’t you?”

To the other women these men have dated, I would say, Do not give up. Because the world is wide and wonderful, the heart is resilient, and the extraordinary and the impossible can present themselves at any moment.

The Pleasures of a Garden, As Told by One Who Is Gardening-Impaired

2010-05-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

I love having a garden, but I hate gardening. Over the years, I tried to love gardening, but I have finally had to admit that it is not for me. The dirt, the sweating, the inability to do it while lying down compel me to leave the gardening to George, local barfly and raconteur extraordinaire. He does a lovely job.

I am a little bit ashamed that I don’t like to garden. I feel as though I should. It’s an admirable, wholesome, healthful activity, plus you get to wear a floppy hat. I console myself with the fact that George can’t write children’s books.

Our garden is at the front and on the south side of our house, protected from the street by a high hedge. The woman who designed it made sure that something would always be blooming, no matter what the season. Right now, we have roses.

Soon, it will be hydrangeas.

We have more lemons year-round than we know what to do with. I make a lot of lemon bars and lemonade. The scent of a lemon just pulled off the tree is further proof of divinity all around us.

I love these. They grow at the back of the house. I don’t know what they are. They look like Dr. Seuss characters to me.

We have ferns in front of the enormous living room windows. I grew up in a house in Berkeley that had a fern garden. They lend shade and peace. They are the garden’s gentle librarians, staking out a quiet corner (apart from the unruly roses), demanding whispers.

We have two Monterey pines. Last year, two tiny birds flew in and out of a hole in the bark of one of them no larger than a mail slot. We watched as they doggedly brought twigs and grass and straw into the tree. Later, we could hear the chirping of baby birds. We never saw them fly away.

Out by the kitchen door, Robert channels his inner Midwesterner and does a little farming. Right now, we are all about the butter lettuce.

The bench is between the Monterey pines and is shaded by a wisteria-covered arbor. When we first moved here three years ago, my daughter liked to sit on the bench. “How do you like the trees?” I asked. “Oh, we’re going to be friends,” she said.

Voice

2010-04-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

My favorite aspect of writing is creating voice. I like for each of my characters to have a distinctive way of thinking and speaking.

Creating children’s and teenagers’ voices is especially challenging because their vocabularies are necessarily limited. Little kids don’t know a lot of words; teenagers often speak inartfully (“Like, um, yeah.”) and profanely. (There are only so many times you can use “bitch” and “asshole” in a young-adult novel.) Somehow, you have to give the impression of child-speak or teen-speak without relying too heavily on the words children and teens actually use when they are sitting at your dining room table telling you why peas are disgusting and why, by the way, you should buy better snacks and you don’t know anything.

Another part of this is conveying character through voice. The way a character speaks is the best way for a writer to tell readers something about her. Is anybody watching this season’s “The Amazing Race”? You know those two brothers, Jet and Cord? Their preferred exclamation is, “Good gravy!” What does this tell us? That they are polite (at least on camera), that they are unafraid—proud, even—of being different, that they keep their cool under intense pressure. All this from just two words. (I should say that while Jet and Cord seem like lovely young men, they would be terrible characters in a book. I have no idea which one is which. Real people can be similar to each other, but characters have to be distinct and well differentiated.)

My favorite writers use voice to good effect. Mona Simpson (ANYWHERE BUT HERE) comes to mind. Also Philip Roth and Jennifer Egan. Nicholson Baker’s THE EVERLASTING STORY OF NORY is an adult book about a nine-year-old girl, written in the third person. Baker gets nine-year-old girls so well that he actually disappears. You forget the book is written by a middle-age man.

It’s not just that Baker gets nine-year-old girls. He gets this particular nine-year-old girl. Nory is kind to a classmate who is bullied, she worries about aphids that are eaten by ladybugs, she is suspicious of kids who “tell stories a certain way.” She is at once like all other nine-year-olds and different from all other nine-year-olds: her very own particular self. It is an achievement. (I recommend the book if you love language and character, not so much if you are a fan of plots. Not much happens.)

I am working on a book right now that takes place in Missouri. People in Missouri speak differently from people in California. I want to get it just right without beating readers over the head with it. Not easy, but that’s the fun part of being a writer. (The not-fun part is sitting in front of the computer for two days trying to figure out whether Danny should like Cap’n Crunch or Fruit Loops.)

It doesn’t sound like much, but if you like reading about believable, authentic characters who, somewhere along the line, turn into believable, authentic people, it’s a big deal.

Like, um, yeah.

Thoughts While Sitting in the Doctor’s Office

2010-04-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

--I am okay with the old-fashioned formality that used to attach to the doctor-patient relationship. I want my doctor to be authoritative and wise, and to the extent that calling him “Doctor” furthers this notion, I am not put off. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t want to call him “Todd.”

--Doctors are explorers, mapping uncharted land. They are 49ers, prospecting in faraway territory for something priceless and elusive. Doctors are spelunkers. (“Let’s go down there! And bring a camera!”)

--At a certain point in your life, you are going to end up entrusting your physical health to someone who was riding a Big Wheel during the Reagan Administration. At first it seems fabulously risky, but you get used to it. It is a strange rite of passage, one of the first times you are able to acknowledge that someone younger knows more than you do.

--It is impossible not to look at other people in the waiting room and wonder what is wrong with them.

--I wish the nurse who takes my blood pressure would stop talking about her son who is doing Jazz Studies at Chico.

--On the exam room wall: graphic illustrations of normal sinus cavities, written exhortations to get your colonoscopy, a sign reminding all health-care practitioners to wash their hands. There is nothing to read except a back issue of “Modern Maturity.” I don’t read it because it might be germ-y: a sick person might have touched it last. In doctors’ offices, I push open doors with my shoulder and slather anti-bacterial cleanser on my hands when I get back to the car.

-- It is inordinately important to me that my doctor believe I am smart. I am sure this has something to do with the fact that my father was a doctor. (I couldn’t care less what my accountant thinks of me.) When he says, That’s a good question, I beam. It is just nuts.

--I never take the elevator at the doctor’s, if I can help it. Germ-y air.

--I love my doctor, but I am always so relieved to be finished talking to him. Is there another person in my life I feel this way about? Can’t think of one.

--A lot of people are sick. A lot. It is easy to forget this if you and your family are healthy. When you go to the doctor’s, you are immediately reminded. It is touching and sobering. I hate being sick more than anything. (The only thing worse is when my kids are sick.) Going to the doctor’s makes me want to be compassionate and kind. I want to hug all those people in the waiting room and tell them it will be all right, except that, of course, I don’t know that it will be all right. (And also, the germs.) For some of us, it will be, and for some of us, it won’t. And that is just brutally awful, something I never get used to.

--A lot of things I go to the doctor for are things people died of seventy years ago. Now there are new drugs and therapies and technologies. It makes you think of all the things we are still dying of that someone will someday cure. Who is she, and what is she doing now? Probably sitting at the kitchen table, coloring.

Genius

2010-04-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

I am reading Nicholson Baker’s new book, The Anthologist, and finding it wonderfully entertaining. Every night I look forward to getting into bed and diving in. It is like having a conversation with a funny, damaged, massively literate friend.

Nicholson Baker is a remarkable writer. I am certainly not the first person to say so, but I may be one of the first people to have recognized it. He was in a creative writing class I took in college. (I attended a women’s college, Bryn Mawr, which has a cooperative relationship with Haverford College, where Baker went.) I noticed him on the first day of the semester. He was very tall and very handsome, and I had never seen him before (which was noteworthy in and of itself: the two colleges were quite small and “tall and handsome” [at the same time] was a rare and highly visible attribute among Haverford men).

The class was taught by Christopher Davis, who told us that each of us would be required to submit eight pages (I think) of fiction, which would then be critiqued in class. I set confidently to work and produced a short story called “Summer on Goose Island.” Just writing the name fills me with horror. It was the story of a Tragic marriage, with lots of fog-swept sand dunes and execrable dialogue. I was rightly eviscerated in class for its many flaws, none of which I remember, as I threw the story away immediately on returning to my dorm room.

What I do remember, though, was being handed Nicholson Baker’s writing sample. It was twenty-six pages long and I thought, Oh, good Lord. I imagined that it was going to be an obvious attempt at suck-up-ery, that this Nicholson Baker, whoever he was, thought that twenty-six pages was his sure-fire route to an ‘A’.

I don’t remember what he wrote. I just remember that on page six, I looked up and said to my boyfriend, Oh, my God.

I don’t recall how the story was critiqued. I think Christopher Davis knew that he was in the presence of greatness. Nobody said much, except another Haverford student who made an ass out of himself by saying that the story “took too long to get going.” (There is one of these in every writers’ critique group I have ever been in.) Nicholson Baker didn’t say a word. He nodded and made a few notes.

After class, I went over to him and babbled something about how he was a genius. He smiled politely and said, “Thanks very much.” In that instant, I knew that Nicholson Baker was destined to travel in circles different from those I would inhabit. He was already a grownup, albeit with talents and sensibilities very few grownups possess. I knew that I wanted to be a writer; I knew that I was probably good enough to become one. But I also knew that I would never approach the deft, sure-handed brilliance that Nicholson Baker effortlessly commanded at the age of twenty.

It’s okay. I’ve accepted it.

Some people are just that good. And what I learned by being in class with Nicholson Baker is that most of us are not. Most of us have to work really, really hard and be very, very lucky.

And isn’t that just the greatest name for a writer? How did his parents know?

The Office

2010-03-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

I love seeing pictures of the places where writers work. Perhaps this is because I’m basically nosy and like seeing the insides of people’s houses.

My office is at the back of the house, shoddily added on by the previous owners, who neglected to provide access to heat. In the winter, I usually work upstairs or in front of the living room fireplace, where it is warmer.

In its favor, my office does have high ceilings and a bay window.

Here it is:

Bookshelves make a room. I need more:

Bookshelf detail: Galsworthy, a tiny picture of Big Ben, a bust of Dickens, a Pabst Beer opener from Robert commemorating one of our first dates:

Here’s my desk:

Desk details: my Bryn Mawr mug full of pens and pencils:

A spider made for me by a fan of Spider Storch, made at a reading at Cal State Fullerton:

Some of my inspirers: John Updike, my kids when they were babies:

The couch, where I work when the desk chair gets uncomfortable:

Sometimes I write at a local coffee shop, just to get out of the house. Great people watching, great hot chocolate, and there’s heat. But even if I’ve worked there, I like to spend a little time in my office every day anyway. It’s where I can be in the presence of pictures of my kids, vacation souvenirs, my favorite books.

Room of one’s own and all that.

Coq Au Vin, Creativity, and What Aline Hallenbeck Said To Me In Eighth-Grade Home Ec

2010-03-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

Our friends Roy and Josine came down for drinks, dinner, and Rummy-O today. I made coq au vin, which always makes me feel as though I should be wearing an apron with frills and pockets, like the one I made in Mrs. Nebeker’s eighth-grade home ec. class in 1970. (Note: I almost failed this class. I massacred that apron. Aline Hallenbeck said she didn’t like my hair color [brown] with my eye color [brown]. Barbara Lamon gave an oral report about skin care and could not utter the word “pimple” without dissolving. All in all, a massively stressful experience.)

When I tell people I’m not creative, they often say, But you write books! You must be creative. It’s a reasonable thing to think. I would say it to writers if I weren’t one. But because I am, I know that writing is a supremely laborious task bearing little resemblance to what I think of as creativity. There are no sparks of inspiration, no bursts of epiphanic realizations. (Well, very few, anyway.) There is just sitting and typing out a sentence and then deleting a word or a comma and sitting again. The process is “creative” only in the sense that something eventually gets made. But I, myself, am no more creative than the person who “makes” a spreadsheet or a diagnosis or a driveway.

Now, entertaining: that’s creative. I get to cut and arrange flowers,

design a menu (coq au vin over egg noodles, buttered green beans, blueberry crisp with vanilla ice cream) and cook it, pick the music (Benny Goodman, Marvin Gaye, Ray LaMontagne), and choose which china and napkins and wineglasses to use:

On thinking it through, I guess entertaining feels creative because it’s fun. Writing feels like a job. An important job—a job I adore, a job I think is vitally important, a job I am lucky to have—but a job. It’s slow-moving, often financially unrewarding. Not as stressful as having my appearance critiqued in eighth-grade home ec., but stressful nonetheless.

(Aline and I eventually became friends. She spent three hours on the phone with me one night in eleventh grade trying to get me to join Young Life and never held it against me when I chose not to. I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. The horrors of eighth grade don’t last forever? First impressions aren’t always accurate? Hair- and eye-color preferences change over time?)

At any rate, Roy and Josie and Robert and I had a blast playing Rummy-O.

A night with good friends can do much to revive one’s midweek spirits.

I’ll bet Aline Hallenbeck is a killer Rummy-O player.

Of Good Conversation and Grace Under Pressure

2010-03-13T08:57:00.000-08:00

This week, I watched two new TV shows, “The Marriage Ref” and “The Ricky Gervais Show.” In the first, three celebrities (who have thus far included Jerry Seinfeld [the show’s creator], Alec Baldwin, Larry David, Madonna, Tina Fey, and others) discuss ordinary couples’ marriage problems; in the second, animated versions of Gervais and two of his collaborators sit around a table and discuss whatever pops into their oversized cartoon heads. Both shows feature discussion among bright, engaging, funny people (Madonna being the exception, but I digress).

I think we’re hungry for good conversation. For too many years, we’ve been watching the Kardashian sisters spew drivel and “real” housewives gossip and whine like nine-year-olds. Late-night talk shows used to provide a forum for intelligent, witty banter, but now, often, the guests are there simply to hawk a movie they’ve made. Their ulterior motives show; they aren’t up for an interaction that is both revealing and entertaining. If they are under twenty-five, they aren’t capable of it.

People don’t know how to talk well these days. I don’t mean “speak well,” i.e., use proper grammar and words appropriate to context. I mean they don’t know how to engage in discourse. There is an art to conversation, to sustaining a rhythm that includes equal measures of self-revelation, interest in the topic at hand, and genuine concern for what other participants have to say. I worry that it is dying, that the only people left talking on television will be bickering reality-show contestants and tongue-tied celebrity nitwits.

I may have to watch sports (with the sound off).

**

On the book front: During the holidays, I received from Bryn Mawr classmate and friend Maureen ’78 A VERY PRIVATE EYE, a memoir (told in journal entries and letters) by British author Barbara Pym. Wonderful! Descriptions of 1930s Oxford, trips to pre-War Germany, conversations with literate friends (see above). I enjoyed the memoir so much that I went out and bought one of Pym’s novels, A GLASS OF BLESSINGS. (All of Pym’s books have marvelous titles.) Also wonderful. Pym is often described as a sort of mid-20th-century Jane Austen, a term not to be bandied about. It’s accurate, I think.

One of the signal events of Pym’s life as a writer was her publisher’s decision in the early ‘60s to stop publishing her. Despite having a loyal and small-but-significant fan base, she was deemed too old-fashioned and not enough of a money-maker. She took the blow in her usual stride, saying all sorts of stoic and very British things, but I know she must have been heartbroken. Her rejection at the hands of money-hungry publishers is emblematic of the contempt in which artists are held and with which many writers I know are sadly familiar.

Rejection notwithstanding, she kept writing and enjoyed a measure of success and redemption before her death in 1980. Now she is my hero. She reminds me not to give up and to take setbacks with grace. (I may not be very good at this last one.)

Sometimes I wish I had Kim Kardashian’s ass (which really is spectacular). But I’d settle happily for Barbara Pym’s stiff upper lip.

Remembering Eight-Year-Olds

2010-02-22T16:31:00.000-08:00

Today, while taking a walk around my neighborhood, I passed a driveway on which two eight-year-old girls were clutching the passenger-door handle of a Honda Accord and shrieking. They appeared to be playing a game.

It has been twelve years since I’ve had an eight-year-old.

The experience made me remember so many things I’ve forgotten.

To wit:

--Eight-year-olds like to yell for no reason;

--They are loud even when they are not yelling;

--They are always hungry for what one doesn’t have in the house;

--They are unafraid to tell one how deficient one’s selection of snacks is;

--Their games do not look interesting to adults;

--There is nothing more exquisite than being at a friend’s house after school;

--It is very, very nice to have a friend over after school, but slightly less nice than being the guest because of family-member-related anxiety (little brothers who insist on being included; mothers who buy bad snacks);

--Eight-year-olds never want to go home (unless they are on their first-ever sleepover and it is 2 AM and their parents will not answer their phone);

--Eight-year-olds have no fashion sense;

--Eight-year-olds may or may not be interested in talking to the parents of their friends, but if they are not interested, it is usually because they are shy and not because they think parents are too hideous to live.

I miss eight-year-olds.

Well, I miss my own.

Citius, Altius, Fortius

2010-02-16T16:48:00.000-08:00

We have been watching the Olympics.

For many years, I hated the Olympics, mainly because they require the participation of people who are good at sports. People who are good at sports tend to be people with whom I have nothing in common. They are, in my experience, optimistic, driven, headstrong, persistent, and indefatigable. I (gloomy and lazy, with notable expertise in sleeping and giving up easily) prefer the company of my own kind.

I am the sort of person who is not fun to watch the Olympics with if one enjoys watching the Olympics. I am always making comments about how figure skaters are anorexic whether they know it or not, how snowboarders were probably in the slow-readers group in elementary school, how Americans’ adoration of athletes as heroes is disgusting and tiresome. Why don’t we clap and cheer for teachers and nurses? I am always wondering aloud. Robert nods in weary agreement, straining to hear the sportscaster. (Really, it is a wonder he hasn’t put a blanket over my head and locked me in the linen closet. If there were an Olympic medal for patience, he would win it.)

This year, while I continue to whine ceaselessly (about the Chinese figure-skating pairs’ oddly antiquated music, about elite athletes’ lack of a healthy childhood, about Bob Costas), I am finding myself moved and exhilarated in a way I’ve never been before. What I’m seeing, as if for the first time, are the grace and beauty of human beings pushing themselves to do things they shouldn’t be able to do. In a year in which I’ve endured quite a bit of illness, I am newly appreciative of healthy, vibrant, intact bodies urged to extraordinary heights.

It’s not as though I’m suddenly a different person. I’m not going to stop thinking that we’d be better off as families/communities/societies if we spent more time applauding intelligence and decency and less time measuring just how fast Junior can ski down a bumpy hill.

But maybe I’ll marvel just a little at the things we humans can do when we set our sights on distant goals. Maybe I will try to bring a little of that persistence and stick-to-it-ive-ness to my own life, my own battles. Maybe I will secretly cheer when the apple-cheeked American crosses the finish line first.

Just don't expect me to stop complaining. For one thing, those uniforms. I mean, come on.

Mother Love

2010-01-24T15:29:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow my mother is going to be ninety.

When she was born, Woodrow Wilson was president.

My mother was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of three children born to Hungarian immigrants who never learned English. When she was five, both of her parents died within six weeks of each other, of unrelated causes.

My mother has very few memories of her early childhood. She remembers calling her parents “Mama dear” and “Papa dear.” She remembers a doctor coming to the apartment to try to alleviate her mother’s asthma. She remembers holding a kitten and thinking, This is more happiness than I can bear.

When her parents died, her older sister Elsie was sent to live with Aunt Ella and Uncle Ernie. (I met Ella and Ernie once, when I was six. They were very old. Uncle Ernie pinched my cheeks until I cried. I thought, What kind of old man does this? My mother said he’d been doing it for years.) Her beloved brother Milton was sent to Bellefaire, a Jewish orphanage in Cleveland. My mother was sent to Michigan to live with an uncle and his five sons. All she remembers is hating it there and wanting to be wherever Milton was.

Eventually, someone took pity on her and she, too, was admitted to Bellefaire, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She still says it was the best time of her life. I have seen pictures of Bellefaire (which is now Bellefaire Jewish Children's Bureau , a non-profit agency providing an array of child welfare, behavioral health, and allied health services without regard to race, religion, sex, or national origin). If you had to be an orphan, Bellefaire was the place to be one.

Automobiles were still exotic when my mother was a little girl. She remembers that Bellefaire participated in something called Automobile Day. The richest men of Cleveland volunteered to drive the orphans to Euclid Beach, a local amusement park on the shores of Lake Erie. For many of the kids, the car ride to the park was more exciting than the park itself.

That, more than almost anything, underscores for me how long my mother has been alive.

Next weekend, we will celebrate her birthday with a family dinner in Monterey. I will drive nearly one hundred miles to pick her up, then another hundred to bring her to my house. She won’t think anything of it.

Ninety years isn’t long, in the grand scheme of things. But it is a staggering amount of time for one person to live.

My mother started life facing almost unimaginable challenges. The fact that she is still here—still healthy, still raging against George Bush, still nagging me to turn the heat down—is a triumph of heart and will and a spirit I can only hope to have inherited. I am so proud of her and so glad she is still with me.

Thinking About Beauty

2010-01-15T17:24:00.000-08:00

I am working on a new YA novel. Whenever I write a book, I am reminded of how difficult it is to be a kid. I mean, it’s hard to be alive, period, but as an adult, you have resources, you have the benefit of your own experiences, you have credit cards. As a kid, you are so vulnerable to almost everything.

I try to remember back to a time when I had no experience. What did I have, back then? A good brain, unceasing and mostly unwanted parental advice, a certain fearlessness. Those seem like meager weapons in the face of all the bad things out there.

My book is about a girl who is beautiful. I’m so lucky, she thinks again and again.

When I was a girl, I wanted desperately to be beautiful. Not beautiful of spirit, not beautiful in an it’s-what’s-inside-that-counts kind of way. I wanted to be Christie Brinkley beautiful. Cybill Shepherd beautiful. (It was the early seventies.) I don’t think there’s a girl alive who doesn’t want that. And what it must be like to be one of the few who is truly, demonstrably physically beautiful! Even now, the idea of such a gift takes my breath away a little. What a different life such a child must have from the rest of us.

I was astounded when, as a volunteer in my children’s kindergarten classrooms many years ago, I realized that all five-year-olds are beautiful. It is absolutely true. But something happens to most of us by the time we’re nine. It’s subtle; it’s not as if we should be walking around with bags over our heads. But it is undeniable: we become part of the masses who are blessed with ordinary looks. Or, if we are more fortunate than most, we become someone described as “pretty” or “cute.” But most of us, sad to say, are not beautiful. It is maybe our first experience of having something important taken away. It takes many of us a long time to get over the unfairness of it all.

Being the curmudgeonly realist that I am, I don’t really believe that beauty confers happiness on anyone. To the extent that I am right, I think it must be difficult to be a beautiful young person, because people aren’t very patient with you if you’re beautiful and unhappy. They assume you are whining or fishing for compliments. They are also a little jealous, and probably a little bit glad to hear of your misery. Whether they know it or not, they are thinking, It serves you right. They are relieved to see evidence of cosmic retribution.

So I am writing about a beautiful girl who is unhappy. I have a lot of sympathy for her (as I must if I’m going to write anything interesting about her). Every once in a while, I allow myself to remember the way it felt to be myself at age twelve: not beautiful, wishing with all my heart that I was.

I know now what I never knew back then: there is no easy way to be young.

Sometimes being fifty-two sucks. But sometimes, I can’t help thinking, I’m so lucky.

Duck, Duck, Goose

2010-01-08T19:19:00.000-08:00

Forty-four percent of the waterfowl using the Pacific flyway winter in the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. So Robert and I decided to visit with our friends Roy and Josine.

(I have not thought a lot about birds in my life. My main thoughts about birds have been: 1) it is creepy when people keep them indoors in cages; 2) parrots are amazing; and 3) I am not crazy about pigeons.)

It was a beautiful day in Willows: cold (temperature: 48 degrees), cloudy, and foggy, rainless, windless. We inched along the public viewing road of the Refuge in the back of Roy and Josine’s truck, which is high off the ground and allows better views of the marshes, rimmed by tangles of cattails and reeds. We were the only people on the road, except for the occasional ranger.

In an hour and a half, we saw snow geese, mallards, red-shouldered hawks, buffleheads, red-tails, one kestrel, one enormous owl, several rabbits, a lone deer, and at dusk, a slouching coyote clearly looking for dinner.

We brought binoculars and stopped often, gazing out over what seemed an endless vista of waterways (the Refuge contains tens of thousands of acres) and watching countless flocks of ducks and coots and geese. I have seen these birds often enough in parks, but there was something magical about watching them here, where they are unbothered by kids running at them to make them scatter, where no one is throwing bread crumbs at them.

I am a particular fan of owls (as is my son), so it was especially exciting to spot one high in a tree. He was tall and fat and the tree was leafless, but he was still hard to see, until I trained the binoculars on him. Out here, you become aware of the power and beauty of camouflage. I know it’s science, but seeing it in action, I think it has the feel of the divine about it. God is protecting His creatures.

I do not understand how anyone can possibly enjoy hunting an animal with the intention of killing it.

After driving through the Refuge, we ate dinner at a local casino. (Roy and Josine have a senior discount.) At the table next to ours sat a group of young men who might have been truckers. (I am basing this on some pretty tired generalizations having to do with the sporting of flannel jackets and greasy pony tails. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps they were nuclear physicists.) Midway through dinner, we became aware that one of the young men was choking. Before any of us could move, one of his buddies ran around the table and began Heimlich-ing him. The young man coughed up whatever had been lodged in his windpipe. Then he sat, looking relieved and chastened. (Earlier, I had noticed him shoveling big forkfuls of macaroni and cheese into his mouth.)

It struck me later, how jarring it all was. One moment we were breathing in the gray, frigid serenity of the Refuge and, only an hour later, we were in a smoky, low-ceilinged cafeteria, surrounded by fluorescent lighting, women in hairnets, and all-you-can-eat trays of mashed potatoes and chocolate pudding, watching a young man struggle to inhale. Sufficiency vs. excess; animal nature vs. human. Peace vs. self-gratification.

We made a final tour of the Refuge today before heading home. The thing I will remember the longest is the sound of thousands of birds, set against a backdrop of silence. No engines; no people. Just the birds and the silence behind them.

Wrapping My Brain around Christmas

2009-12-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I took a quiz on Belief.net. Twenty multiple-choice questions to answer, and the site tells you what religion aligns most closely with your beliefs. My result: 100% Reform Judaism, which is exactly what I am.

So why do I have a nine-foot Christmas tree in my living room? Why have I spent the last few days looking for non-existent parking spaces in shopping malls? Why is Frank Sinatra’s “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” blasting away on the CD player?

Partly because my father, a self-identified “cultural Jew,” didn’t believe in organized religion for himself or his children. No Hebrew lessons or religious education for me.

Partly because twenty-nine years ago I married a Presbyterian-born atheist, with whom I cobbled together a unique holiday experience for our two children: a Christmas tree and a menorah, a reading of the Chanukah story on the first night, no outside lights, no Santa. (The proscription of Santa was particularly effective, causing my then-six-year-old daughter to ask me tearfully one March, “Am I allowed to believe in leprechauns?”)

The atheist and I are no longer married, and our children are adults. Sometimes I feel bad that I didn’t insist on educating them in some sort of religious tradition. My son is glad I didn’t; my daughter, who is still pissed off about the leprechauns, is fashioning her own system of beliefs.

Sometimes I feel very conflicted about the way in which I have made room in my life for Christmas. I love the tree and the presents, the shopping and baking, and especially the music. But inside, I always feel a little like an outsider, a pretender. (And I always feel guilty in temples because I don’t understand the language or know the rituals. There’s this gnawing sense of anxiety and shame. It’s like those dreams where you’re in high school and you realize you haven’t studied for finals. You keep thinking, Why don't I KNOW this?)

Several years ago, Robert and I went to a Christmas Eve service at the Berkeley Unitarian Church. The minister gave a sermon about the birth of Jesus: how it was really a story about being frightened and alone, and how miracles can happen when everything seems hopeless. It was a wonderful, inclusive take on Christmas. It spoke to something deep inside me: the need to believe that we are not alone in our suffering.

The menorah still sits on my mantel, surrounded by garlands and stars. I rarely light it anymore, but it is my way of reminding myself of who I am.

Little Miss Perfect

2009-12-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, while working out, I found myself watching a TV show called “Little Miss Perfect.” It is a reality show, each episode of which features a look at the lives of two contestants in a little-girl beauty pageant. It was riveting in an I-can’t-believe-I-live-on-the-same-planet-with-these-people kind of way.

The pageant is held in different cities throughout the south and seems to attract participants whose families live in little southern towns. It is overseen (and hosted) by a man named Michael Galanes who judges the competition and sings a dreadful song to the five finalists while gazing deeply into their eyes. (“Little Miss Perfect Pageant, where all your dreams come true/ the Little Miss Perfect Pageant, where the special one is you! / The secret of tomorrow is to live your dream today,/ your memories and your friendships will always feel this way!/ There are perfect colored rainbows on the other side,/ hop on your magic carpet and take a wild ride!/ If you think it, want it, dream it, today’s the start,/ just feel it in your heart.”) Michael and his fellow judges are shown discussing each contestant’s relative merits in three categories (“Beauty,”
“Interview,” and something called “Wow Wear,” which, as far as I can tell, is when the little girl gets dressed up in a costume and exhibits talent, usually dancing, but sometimes, if the kid is under six, waving and winking.) Michael’s critiques can be ruthless, but he has evidently found his milieu. (His bio begins, “Once upon a time, there was a little boy born and raised in the mountains of Vermont, but he knew his calling was the sparkly stage, somewhere, somehow….”)

The girls themselves look normal enough in their everyday lives. Most of them talk about how much they like getting dressed up, wearing makeup, winning big trophies, and being the center of attention. They complain about practicing and cry when they are being readied for competition. Their incarnations as beauty contestants are startling: big, teased hair, heavy makeup, sprayed-on tans, body-hugging costumes. You just can’t look away.

The real stars of the series, though, are the mothers. They are almost always fat. Some of them are ex-child-beauty-queens themselves. They oversee their daughters’ careers with military precision, arranging for coaches, driving to dance lessons, assessing smiles and twirls and coquettish over-the-shoulder glances with dispassionate calm (“Amber just isn’t graceful at all!”) They are supremely unembarrassed about what they are doing. They talk about the (not inconsiderable) amounts of money they spend on this lifestyle as though it is proof of what good mothers they are.

It is easy to be snide here, to laugh at people who look as though they live in houses with broken-down cars on the lawn, to take perverse pleasure in seeing seven-year-olds coiffed like country-music stars break down in tears when someone else wins the trophy. But I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that these families aren’t really so different from families I have known. In my neck of the woods, people don’t enter their daughters in beauty pageants. They drive them to theater auditions and soccer meets and chess club championships. They are still defining themselves by their children’s accomplishments. It really isn’t all that different.

Another thought: Ultimately, this show is about what lots of people in this country still value in women. It’s massively discouraging to think that when all is said and done, the “perfect” girl is the one with the best makeup, the most complicated hairstyle, the cutest hip swivel. Really? Is that really what we’re still about?

More about friendship

2009-12-03T10:03:00.000-08:00

Had lunch with my friend Jim last week.

He was my high school English teacher. He is thirty years older than I. His birthday is either today or tomorrow. (I always forget.)

He was my teacher for three years in high school. We did not start off well. He likes to remind me that he thought I was pretty horrible until our class read “The Importance of Being Earnest” and I took the part of Lady Bracknell. (“Prism!”)

Somehow, we became fast friends. He took me to Wilkes Bashford, where I drank Campari while he tried on suits. (Yes, I was still in high school. It was the seventies. Things were different.) I cut P.E. so that I could hang out in the English office with him during his free period. Sometimes he would write the gym teacher (another of his close friends) a note: “Dear Miss Bertolosso, Please excuse Gina from P.E. today. She has a paper to finish.” (After giving me a withering stare, Miss Bertolosso would silently turn away. I think she was secretly glad I would not be in her class, in which, to put it mildly, I did not excel.) We would sit at his desk and gossip.

Lest there be any wondering: This was a platonic friendship pure and simple. Always. Neither of us had the slightest interest in the other sexually.

I went across the country to college, but Jim and I remained close. During the summers when I was home, I worked in a store he owned and “housesat” at his apartment when he went out of town. (He recently reminded me that I watered a plastic houseplant for three weeks without realizing what I was doing.) We wrote letters, talked on the phone. He came to my father’s funeral, after which we went outside and smoked cigarettes with my much-older and –adored cousin, also Jim. Inside, I was dying, but the Jims made me feel as though I would survive, that the world would still be there when I could manage to enjoy it again.

He traveled across the country to attend my wedding. He arranged for my husband and me to rent an apartment next door to his when I returned to Berkeley for graduate school. As his neighbor, I went to countless dinner parties at his house, where we snuck away to the kitchen and gossiped about the other guests. We forged a new tradition: I hung out with him on Thanksgiving morning while he cooked. We would drink Negronis and laugh ourselves sick.

He loved my children. He loves most children, but he especially loved mine. When my daughter was born, he made me seven gourmet meals, to be unfrozen on successive days. I cried when we ate the last one.

Now he lives in Connecticut, but he visits California once or twice a year. We always manage to get together for lunch or dinner at least once. We don’t drink the way we used to (and God knows we no longer smoke), but we still gossip. There is always a sense of the utter magic of it: how the two of us came together when it seemed as though we shouldn’t.

“This friendship—we’ve been good friends a long time,” he said in the car as I dropped him off last week. It was uncharacteristically sentimental of him to say so.

It is a wonderful mystery, as maybe all friendships are.

BFFs

2009-11-21T14:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I received the advance reading copies of my new book, THE HARD KIND OF PROMISE. I am so happy with the book’s cover and, as always, am looking forward to the reviews.

The book is about best friends and what can happen to them in middle school. But as we adults know, lots of things can happen to best friends no matter what their ages.

I lost a lot of friends within the five years following my divorce. I’m thinking of four women in particular, all people I thought I’d have as friends for the rest of my life. I still miss all of them a lot.

When this kind of thing happens, you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong. (Well, you do if you’re me.) One woman was, I think, mentally ill. Two of the women were Professional Moms who let mom-ing get in the way of friendship. The fourth, a dear friend since high school, well, I just don’t know. She’s the one I miss the most.

Was it my fault? If it had only happened once, I’d have said probably not, but four times? I’ve got to think I had something to do with it. Do I not know how to be a friend? (That’s what the nut job would say.) Was I in a weird place post-divorce, shedding people in a misguided effort to be rid of memories, my old self? Maybe. Did I just get lazy? Well, that sounds like me.

Whatever it was, it continues to eat at me. I wish I could just say, “I’m sorry,” and fix things. But I know that isn’t how friendships work, not always, anyway. Even the strong ones can be brittle, fragile, jagged-edged. Sometimes things are unfixable.

I am grateful beyond words for Tracy and Jim and Ursula and Kathi and Sue and Josine and Karra and Paula (who is proof that sometimes you can just call out of the blue and say, What happened? and everything is miraculously okay again) and The Women Of The List (who deserve and will get a post all to themselves in the near future). I hope we will be friends for the rest of my life. I hope I will be a good friend to all of them and to anyone else who comes along, should I be so lucky.

And I am once again amazed by the ways in which writing for children isn’t really writing for children at all.

Playgrounds

2009-11-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

I saw Las Vegas for the first time last week, when Robert and I braved the nine-hour drive to celebrate his birthday.

I am not a Las Vegas person. I’ve always known this, but it was reassuring to have it confirmed.

We stayed at the Bellagio, which bills itself as refined, elegant, sophisticated, and lushly European. Well, I guess, except for the hordes of middle-Americans in baggy jeans and sports-team t-shirts, college boys in sideways baseball caps holding fruity mixed drinks at nine in the morning, college girls teetering on slave-girl-sandals-with-five-inch-stiletto-heels, fat people on electric scooters, old ladies alone at the slots machines, hookers, and large groups of people speaking unrecognized foreign languages. I would have loved to study all of them in more detail--like most writers, I relish any chance to look at people--but the casino was cloudy with cigarette smoke and I simply could not endure it.

We had a remarkable birthday dinner at Picasso. I am not a foodie; I consider gourmet food to be anything that I didn’t cook. But our dinner was breathtaking. A cream of butternut squash soup with floating islands of marshmallows and a puree of morel mushrooms. Kobe beef “spheres” (which is apparently what the refined call meatballs) on a bed of lentils. Delectable snapper, the preparation of which I don’t remember, thanks to the efforts of our sommelier, who brought a different wine to accompany each course. Dessert was something with chocolate and butter pecan ice cream. I think I ate a quail egg somewhere along the way.

The next day, we walked down the Strip, dodging smokers and drunken college kids and the guys silently flicking ads for escort services at us. We walked through the Paris casino (poking our heads into the oh-so-elegant soap shop just to see the big sign for the new toilet-bowl cleaner, Poo-pourri) and Bally’s (which looked seedy, but not as seedy as Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall and Saloon, which seems to be the lone holdout from a bygone era). Sushi for dinner. I was ready to leave.

It’s a big playground, just like Branson (which we visited last year), except that Las Vegas is for the grownups who want debauchery and sin and the opportunity to browse in a Hermes store as if they were really going to buy something. (I don’t know any adults personally who would like Branson, but there seem to be loads of them, all aching to get a ringside seat for Andy Williams, most of them from Kansas.)

I guess it’s nice that there are two different kinds of playgrounds. It made me think that there should be different kinds of playgrounds for children. One kind with swings and slides and parallel bars, for the kids who want to be where the action is, the girls who make everything a competition, the boys with a constitutional need to run and yell. And another kind, with sandboxes and water tables and pails and shovels, for the kids like my son, who always wanted to think seriously about what he was digging, who watched the other children with happy interest but was content to play alone, who sighed in resignation when his castles were trampled and announced quietly that he was ready to go home.

We're all entitled to the right kind of playground. I'm still looking for mine, which should include a window seat, a stack of books, and plenty of scones.

Seen This Week

2009-11-01T18:11:00.000-08:00

Seen this week:

--At the Santa Cruz Department of Public Health, where I waited to get my H1N1 shot: a little boy, maybe four, wearing a cowboy hat, one cowboy boot and one blue Croc, a dirty t-shirt and too-short sweat pants, one elasticized leg hole at his calf, the other almost at his knee. His face was smeared with peanut butter and jelly. Our eyes locked and we completely got each other. Without saying a word, we shared our misery;

--At my front door on Halloween: a teenage boy dressed as a giant rabbit. He and his friends (dressed non-memorably) said “Thank you” and “Have a nice night”;

--On the drive over the Santa Cruz mountains, on the back roads: a tiny tree with yellow leaves, glowing in a shaft of sunlight despite the surrounding redwoods;

--On TV: John Abbott in 1948’s “The Woman in White” as a hypochondriacal English gentleman who says things like, "Dear boy, please! My nerves!" Also, Sydney Greenstreet and Gig Young, who, according to Robert, was definitely wearing a wig;

--On my nightstand: Elizabeth Berg’s “We Are All Welcome Here,” “The Short Stories of Mary Gordon,” Mameve Medwed’s “Of Men and Their Mothers,” three back issues of The New Yorker, an albuterol inhaler, a candle, my cell phone charger, and a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrapper;

--From my front steps, where I sit after my morning jog: a thriving rosemary plant (given to us as a housewarming present by Dix and Kathi), several hydrangea bushes—pink-leaved and nearly flowerless—the giant statue of an anchor (courtesy of the previous owner), our Brown Jordan wrought iron table and chairs, ca 1957 (courtesy of my mother), the white wooden bench beneath the yellowing wisteria vine, and a squirrel who had just descended from one of the Monterey pines and was eyeing me with what I chose to believe was derision but was probably just squirrel-ish-ness; and

--From the kitchen island, where I currently sit: a variety of maple cupboards, black granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, a glass bowl of Fuji apples, a tall, beveled vase sprouting twigs and sprays of dried silver-dollar stalks, and a half-empty can of diet Canada Dry ginger ale.

Of Neti pots and disappearing husbands

2009-10-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

Having cheerfully informed me that I am “a human Petri dish,” my pulmonologist recently recommended that I use a Neti pot at least five times a day. Rinsing out my sinuses has now become a second career. I write a paragraph or two, then heat water in the microwave and retire to the bathroom. Write and rinse; repeat.

This is the kind of thing that makes me cranky.

The onset of middle age has coincided with a distinct increase in the number of hours I spend attempting to maintain or improve my health. When I add up the hours spent jogging, weight training, bicycling, visiting doctors, rinsing out my sinuses, and performing Buteyko breathing exercises (designed to decrease the frequency of asthma attacks), I arrive at an alarming figure. (And no, I can’t fudge the numbers by claiming that the bicycling is really just for fun. It is fun, sort of, in the sense that it’s better than running lukewarm water into my nose, but in my world fun involves either lying down or chocolate and as such, cycling doesn’t qualify.)

It takes me aback, all this attention to self. In the old days (like, when I was thirty), I took my effortless good health for granted. I did nothing to nurture or replenish it; I simply assumed it would always be there. I pretended it was a patient, virtuous, long-suffering husband who wanted only to please me, who seemed to ask for nothing in return (in this way distinguishing itself from my actual husband at the time). I callously took what I wanted; I gave nothing back.

Now, in my fifties, I see that this pretend husband was actually a calculating, passive-aggressive jerkwad. While feigning agreeableness, he was really storing up grievances and plotting revenge. Now he’s left me (probably for someone half my age), and I am stuck with my Neti pot and my inhalers and my regret.

It has taken me a long time to learn that you can’t take anything for granted.

Off to the microwave. I hate this. But when I’m finished, I’m going to have an Almond Joy and maybe a nap. As my mother says, So it shouldn’t be a total loss.

The Perils and Perks of Aging

2009-10-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

Middle age is fraught with unpleasantness. Your body begins to turn on you in vicious and previously unimagined ways. Your adult children make known their grievances. If you are a woman, you become invisible to males under the age of forty. Despite being the high point of Sunday nights, “Mad Men” makes you wonder for the first time in years what your parents’ sex lives were really like.

This is not to say that being middle-aged is without benefits. There are a lot of things I like about being fifty-two. There’s the fact that I no longer bleed on a monthly basis. That’s something. And I like not having to pretend to enjoy rock concerts anymore. Plus, there is the fact that I know all kinds of things of which younger people are ignorant: which actors played the brothers on “Here Come the Brides,” for instance, and what it was like to ride a bike without a helmet, and how it felt to be able to wander your neighborhood entirely beyond the reach of the parental units, who were unabashedly thrilled to be rid of you.

But it is safe to say that, in general, being “of a certain age” sucks ass. I’ve asked my friends, and most of them say that they hate the changes in their physical appearance, the increasing number of doctors’ appointments penciled in on their calendars, the realization that they can no longer run as far or as fast as they used to, the sense of being “peripheralized” by the media (and teenage girls), the notion that the world is really intended for younger people, the fading of memories, the way newsprint seems to get smaller and blurrier, the ever-increasing number of pills on the nightstand. There’s no denying it. No one would choose to age if the other available option was Stay Young Forever.

So I’ve decided to remind myself, on a regular and public basis, of some of the nice things that have happened to me since I’ve turned fifty. To wit:

--My daughter was graduated from high school;
--My son was graduated from college and had relatively little trouble finding a job with a salary that allows him to pay his own bills;
--I saw Paris for the first time with someone I love;
--I sold my house for more than it was objectively worth, in time to avoid the recent economic collapse;
--I moved in with my boyfriend (which brings to mind yet another indignity associated with aging: the absence of a reasonable word with which to refer to one’s significant other when one is over the age of thirty and unmarried);
--I now live in a beautiful part of the world that features fog, crashing surf, pelicans, sea lions, a non-working lighthouse, and KPIG reception;
--My colonoscopy was clean;
--My kids usually pick up their phones when I call;
--I have a new book coming out early next year;
--I read Amy Bloom’s AWAY;
--I am currently planning my mother’s ninetieth birthday celebration;
--I am still able to wear the same size jeans that I’ve worn for ten years.

That’s twelve things to be happy about, my ever-threatening physical decline notwithstanding. That’s not bad.

I will try to remember all this tomorrow as I stand in line at the pharmacy, waiting to refill three prescriptions and buy new reading glasses to replace the ones I’ve unaccountably misplaced.

Leaping Into Nothingness

2009-10-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my twenty-year-old daughter texted me from New Zealand to tell me that she had just bungee-jumped off a platform over the city of Queensland. My reactions ran the gamut from pride to anger (what if something had gone horribly wrong?), from fear (what in God’s name is she going to do next?) to disbelief (how did I give birth to someone who could possibly want to do this?). It took me a long time to settle down.

The disbelief is what has stayed with me in the days that have followed. I have known since shortly after she was born that my daughter and I are not terribly alike. She is shorter than I, brown-haired, blue-eyed, a person who loves to be surrounded by friends. (I have dark hair, brown eyes, and prefer the company of a chosen few.) She loves activity, noise, loud music, raucous laughter, bright lights. (I am quiet and sedentary and just generally more bat-like.) She can sing. (I can’t.) In short, I can’t really say that I’m shocked that she would be drawn to bungee-jumping, an activity pretty low on my list of What I Must Do Before I’m Eighty. (The only thing lower is intentionally setting myself on fire.) I have had a long time to grow accustomed to our differences.

Today, as I was jogging through my still-new-to-me neighborhood, I thought again, How did I give birth to someone who would want to bungee-jump? How do I—a person given to catastrophizing and imagining the worst, a careful person made happy by certainty—have a daughter who would willingly take a gleeful, running leap into nothingness?

It was a beautiful fall morning in my neighborhood, which sits on a cliff above Monterey Bay. Yesterday’s clouds had all but dissipated, leaving behind a pale sky and the smell of wet eucalyptus leaves. I could hear jays cawing from the Monterey pines and the rush and crash of waves in the distance. When I finally reached the shore, I sat for a minute and watched a trio of brown pelicans skim the water’s surface, then rise in formation, looking like a phalanx of unmanned drones.

Climbing the steep, rocky path up from the beach, I thought how happy living here has made me, how much I prefer my life here to my old life in the suburbs, where I never paid attention to the color of leaves, where I had a yard instead of a garden, where a sudden rainstorm would remind me only of the traffic jams sure to ensue on the flooded streets.

I live about a hundred miles away from my old house, but my move entailed so much more than packing and sorting and throwing away and then driving south for an hour and a half. It has meant leaving the house where I raised my children: the house where they built pillow forts in the family room and learned to read and hid my birthday presents and called for me in the middle of the night. My son worked on his Lego models at the kitchen table. My bungee-jumping daughter ate seven red Jello Easter eggs one year and threw up what I thought was blood all over the kitchen floor. Moving has meant giving up access to the rooms where these things happened. It has meant having to rely on my own memories, without the prompts of place.

Moving is one of life’s monumental stressors. Those of us who move have to find new places to shop, to exercise, to eat, to play. We have to make new friends. We have to get used to the way the new streetlights are timed. We have to find new favorite bookstores. (Mine is Capitola Books, located conveniently across the parking lot from a See’s Candy store.)

Moving has also meant giving up my life as a single parent to set up housekeeping with Robert. It has meant forging new traditions, like buying flowers and vegetables at the local farmers’ market on Saturday mornings, and heading out to an orchard for apples afterwards. It has meant finding a place for his late father’s armoire (the guest bedroom). It has been a joyous process of accommodation and coming together and learning to make meatloaf just the way he likes it. But back when we had just begun the moving-in-together conversation, I had concerns. What about my freedom, my independence? What about all those things I liked doing alone? (Tellingly, I can no longer remember what those things were, but at the time, they loomed large.)

Remembering all this as I jogged home this morning, I was struck with the realization that moving is its own kind of gleeful leap into nothingness, a bungee jump without a cord. Perhaps my daughter and I have more in common than I’d thought. Perhaps, I decided as I turned into my driveway, I am braver than I had previously believed. It was a nice thought to have as I stood, panting, watching two gray doves peck the damp dirt beneath the now-flowerless hydrangea, each careful not to lose sight of the other, seemingly aware that the world can be a dangerous place.

I caught my breath; I imagined telling my daughter that we are more similar than not; I could hear in my head her uproarious laugh. Okay, maybe it’s a stretch. But I’m vowing that I will stop thinking of myself as timid and fearful, that I will give myself credit for occasional courage, however tentative, however mundane.