The Mommy Chronicles

Sometimes I think I'd make a good guy

2012-02-11T15:15:00.002-05:00

1. I drink scotch. Neat.

2. I like to go to the bathroom by myself. I don't need an entourage.

3. I could care less about chocolate.

4. I have very good hand-eye coordination.

5. I like to watch sports. Sometimes.

6. I hate Hallmark holidays.

7. I'm not big on drama. Seriously. Ask my husband.

8. I don't do gels, acrylics or Diamonelles.

9. I always liked "Current Events" in school.

10. I detest commercialized romance -- rose petals strewn on a bed, "I Wuv U" teddy bears, silk boxers with lipstick kisses, battery-operated roses, any vacation that is akin to a weekend at "Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge," and any "long-distance dedication" that ends with "I'll always be there for you."

11. I'm the spider killer in the house.

Reasons Why My Husband Is Laughing Out Loud at This List:

1. I like jewelry. Lots of jewelry. Costume, semi-precious, precious. It don't matter none.

2. I like heels. Imelda Marcos was frugal, in my opinion.

3. I cry at nearly everything. But only behind my sunglasses.

4. There are never enough handbags.

5. I check under the bed before I go to sleep at night.

6. I need to take my husband's arm when I'm walking on icy sidewalks.

7. I have lots of creams and lotions in my medicine cabinet and he has no idea what they're for.

8. I worry if my husband misses a meal.

9. I own at least one accessory with feathers.

10. I change my outfit at least seven times before we go out for the evening.

11. I obsess over paint colors.

12. My husband is the dead-animal-remover in our family. Ooooh! Yuck! Oh God oh God oh God is it gone? I can't look! Please oh God don't make me look! Ewww ewww ewww oh God oh God oh God! Is it gone? Is it dead? Did you check? Is it really, really dead? It's not going to jump out of the garbage can, is it? Ewww ewww ewww ewww let's go back in the house. Ewwww!

2012-02-08T12:20:00.006-05:00

Some days you feel like you just don't got it.

Some days you feel like you just can't bring it.

Some days life throws a one-two punch to both kidneys.

Some days you've only got decaf coffee in the pantry.

Some days you're out of milk after you poured dry cereal into the bowl.

Some days you're missing all the sock pairs from the dryer.

Some days you're out of gas with ten more miles to go.

Some days the answer is no. Over and over and over again.

Some days the alarm you checked three times before you went to sleep never went off.

Some days you walk four flights up to find that the exit is four flights down.

Some days the only toothpaste left in the tube is the squidge of sea foam-green goo that just fell off the toothbrush and into the sink.

Some days you only shave one leg in the shower.

Some days you only have mascara on one set of eyelashes.

Some days you just can't see that damn forest anywhere, no matter how hard you look.

Some days you get a stitch on mile one of the 26.2 mile race.

Some days you miss the exit on the parkway.

Some days you substitute cilantro for parsley.

Some days you substitute salt for sugar.

Some days you come home and realize you forgot to buy the very thing you went to the supermarket for.

Some days there's nothing there for you but a cardboard tube on the toilet paper holder.

Some days you've only got 43-cent stamps for a 44-cent letter.

Some days the door slams shut behind you before you realize you left your keys inside.

Some days you just can't get your car close enough to the drive-up ATM, no matter how many times you back up and try again.

Some days you forget your umbrella on the bus, and it starts to rain as soon as you get off.

Some days the pigeon shits right on your shoulder.

Some days the lipstick stays on your teeth all morning during the parent-teacher conference or the regional sales meeting.

Some days the heel breaks off in the middle of a ten-block sprint.

Some days you get on the local when you meant to take the express.

Some days you're heading south when you should be heading north.

Some days there's no clean underwear left in the drawer.

Some days you leave your wallet at home.

Some days the battery dies just as you put the call through.

Some days the fifteen minute delay is a one hour delay.

Some days the restaurant doesn't have your reservation.

Some days the soufflé falls.

Some days the kite just won't fly.

Some days you don't get the email.

Some days the pen runs out of ink halfway through signing the receipt.

Some days you get the wrong order.

Some days you should have worn a jacket.

Some days you need the smaller size.

Some days you've only got a Phillips head screwdriver and flat head screws.

Some days the engine light only goes on after you leave the auto repair shop. And turns off when you pull back in.

Some days you miss the important call because you thought it was a telemarketer.

Some days you're wearing one black shoe and one brown shoe.

Some days it's all flat sheets -- and no fitted -- in the linen closet.

Some days you pray the check doesn't bounce.

Some days you remember the birthday the day after the birthday.

Some days the overnight package takes three days to arrive.

Some days Mercury's in retrograde.

Some days you need a super and all's you've got is a whisper-thin panti-liner.

Some days they're all looking away from the camera when you take the picture.

Some days you've only got two eggs and you need three.

Some days you shrink the sweater.

Some days you buy the wrong color.

Some days you forget to bring the cupcakes.

Some days you leave the tickets at home.

Some days you read the calendar wrong.

Some days you replace one light bulb, and the other one goes out.

Some days you can't get the candle lit.

Some days you can't blow it out.

Some days you think the day will never end.

Some days you wish there were forty-eight hours in a day.

But every day, every blessed motherf-cking I'm a hamster on a wheel and I can't run another step how the hell does she do it all when does he sleep who the hell knows anymore how will we make it through waiting for the answer why me mountains of wash mountains of bills feels like Groundhog Day every day, you're still glad your eyes are open to see every speck of it. Every glorious, gleaming speck.

And you do it again.

Not just some days.

Every day.

2012-02-02T09:11:00.013-05:00

A dear, dear friend lost her mother last week after a courageous, ten-year battle with early-onset dementia. Her mother was only sixty-nine years old. She was first stricken with the disease in her late fifties. She -- and her family -- were robbed of precious, precious years, years that anyone would have hoped to earn after decades of caring for five children and several grandchildren, after earning a bachelor's degree in their forties, after tireless hours spent on community work and volunteering at their church. That's the scary thing about life. Nothing is promised. Nothing is for certain.

Over the past several years, my friend and I spoke often about her mother's decline, about the difficulties her father faced in caring for her while attending to his own health, about the stresses that illness can place on a family as they try their best to find roles and responsibilities, and put aside their aching sorrows for the unjust tragedy that lies before them.

I'm fortunate to still have both of my parents, but I can understand the pain of losing a loved one, and more specifically, to lose them to a dementia-related illness. My grandmother and my aunt, though far older, were also stricken with dementia, and I know the pain of losing them, over and over again, each time you see them and realize that they're slipping further and further away.

My mother-in-law, a strong, smart woman who raised five children of her own, and who returned to school to earn her Master's degree in Social Work after many years of motherhood, was robbed of that same precious time. She became ill in her late fifties, just as my friend's mother did, and lost years with her family, years that all of us assumed she would have. She, too, passed away from Alzheimer's at sixty-nine. My son, six months old at the time, only had one visit with her, since they lived in Florida and we were up north. I hung the photos we took from that day, along with many of our other family photos, in our upstairs hallway, so my son can see those pictures and have some kind of memory of who she was.

This morning, as I drove my children to school, I saw my friend in her driveway, dressed in black mourning clothes. The glass of my car window separated us, and I didn't want to roll down the window and disturb her while she was buckling up her seven year-old in the back seat of her car.

She was on her way to the funeral home with her family to say her final goodbye to her mother, and I didn't want to burden her with having to make conversation. I waved and smiled, and she waved back, but I'm sure she didn't fully register my being there. I dropped my children at school and turned back to my house. I saw my friend's car ahead, pulling away, and I burst into tears. I knew the unimaginable task that she had in front of her this morning. It's one that many of us have had to bear.

The wake took place this week, and the Catholic funeral mass takes place this morning. I'll be heading upstairs in a few minutes to shower and change, and take my place in the pew to support my friend. I'll hear hymns that I've heard so often at the many funerals I've attended in my life, and I will cry as I so often do now -- for the familiarity of loss, for the abject sadness, for the unfairness of it all. But I will find gratitude in knowing that we are not alone in our grief. There will be friends beside me, friends all together, there for another one of us. Some of them have lost parents as well, because we are sadly shifting into that inevitable stage of our lives, and I know how hard this will be for them -- whether the loss took place two or twenty years ago. But they will go anyway. Because it's what you do, what you know as ritual and rite, and what you think will have meaning, even for a second, as our friend sees all of our faces, glistening with sadness, but shining with friendship, as she makes that horribly long walk down the aisle of the church.

SH-T RIDGEWOOD MOMS SAY

2012-01-20T10:33:00.007-05:00

We just moved here from Manhattan.

We used to live in Brooklyn but the schools there are terrible.

We lived in Hoboken and I couldn't carry the baby up six flights every day.

Oh my God the taxes!

How do people pay these taxes?

How much are your taxes?

He got transferred.

He got laid off.

He's doing the reverse commute to Greenwich.

He works for UBS.

He works for JPMorgan.

He works for a hedge fund.

He works for a law firm.

He's in commercial real estate.

I don't know what the hell he does, actually.

He takes the bus.

He leaves so early that he just drives in.

He works from home three days a week and I'm going to
f-cking kill him.

I work from home.

I'm not working anymore.

I need to go back to work.

I go to Tenafly Pediatrics.

I go to North Jersey Pediatrics.

I've got six kids. I just go to the ER.

I'd never let them play video games.

They only have the Wii. I'd never let them get the XBox -- it's too violent.

I'm on the phone! Go play XBox!

What school do they go to?

What school do your kids go to?

What school are they in?

One in Somerville, and one in the RED program.

Two in Hawes, and one in BF.

One in Willard, one in GW and one at the high school.

I just can't send him to preschool every day! I'd miss him too much!

I thought Ridgewood had a full-day kindergarten when I moved here.

I send them to Glen Rock because they have the full-day kindergarten. And the extended day.

I do Pilates.

I spin on Wednesdays.

Oh my God, I love hot yoga.

We need to re-do the kitchen.

We're getting the bathroom re-done.

I will never renovate another house again.

BF or GW?

You're not getting a phone.

BF or GW?

You're not getting a phone.

BF or GW?

You're not getting a phone.

She got really skinny, didn't she?

She looks great! What's going on with her?

She's too thin. Why is she so thin?

Who watched Mob Wives last night?

Who watched Real Housewives of New York last night?

Who watched Real Housewives of New Jersey last night?

I saw Caroline at La Lanterna.

I saw Danielle at Biddy basketball.

I saw Dina at the drug store.

She looks terrible!

She looks weird in real life!

They wear so much make up on TV!

I'd look that good too if I had a stylist!

Her hairline is even lower in person!

She's had work done.

Those boobs aren't real.

She gets Botox.

She got a spray tan -- you can totally tell.

It's January! Who looks like that in January?

Did you check your email?

Sorry -- I'm checking my email.

Did she check her email?

She never checks her email.

If your kids do sports, you have to check your email!

Why doesn't that woman check her email?
Does this coach think I check email every minute of the day?

I read it on the Ridgewood Blog.

I saw it on northjersey.com.

It was in the Ridgewood Patch. I think.

I'll have a glass of red wine.

I'll have a beer.

I brought Skinny Girl but you have to add more tequila to it or it's not really a drink.

I love the city.

We never go into the city anymore.

We should go into the city.

Do you know how much it costs to park in the city and get tickets? Forget it.

I dropped my iPhone.

I had to get a new iPhone.

I can't answer my phone -- my kids have to do it. "Sweetie! Answer Mommy's phone!"

I can't -- he's going to Dads' Night practice.

Can't -- they've got Dads' Night practice.

I thought they had Dads' Night practice.

Wait a minute -- Dads' Night is over! Why is he still going to practice?

I only buy organic milk.

They only eat whole wheat bread.

I sneak Doritos after everyone's asleep.

She joined the Women's Club.

I should join the Women's Club.

Next year I'll join the Women's Club.

I can't -- I have book group.

I'm reading it for book group.

I didn't finish the book for book group.

I can't keep doing book group.

I'm her troop leader.

He's the den leader.

We're so ready to hand it off to somebody else.

This neighborhood used to be a golf course.

I thought our neighborhood used to be a golf course.

No one knows where the golf course was -- all the records got destroyed in Hurricane Floyd.

I hate Route 17 on a Saturday!

Why can't I just buy socks on a Sunday?

I don't go near Garden State Plaza after Thanksgiving.

I shop online.

Good job!

Okay?

Good job!

Okay?

Good job!

Okay?

Are you on Facebook?

Did you see what she wrote on Facebook?

She's always on Facebook, "liking" everything!

Oh my God, why did I "friend" her?

Why are these kids all on Facebook?

I could never do Jamboree.

She's perfect for Jamboree.

With a body like that, she could totally do Jamboree.

Do you have power?
Do they have power?
Why is there power across the street but we don't have power?
The west side always get their power back first.
They're on the Valley grid -- the Graydon Pool neighborhood always gets their power back first.
She said she has power but no cable. So what good is that?

Will they close school?
I hope they don't close school over this -- it's a dusting!
They need to close school -- it's an ice rink out there!
If they close school again tomorrow, I'm going to slit my wrists with a broken red wine bottle.

Did you see Vets Field?

Did you get any water in the basement?

We had to rip up the carpet.
It's alright -- I hated that carpet.

They go to PorchLight.

They go to StageRight.

She's doing New Players.

I'm against the Renewal.

I'm for the Renewal.

What the hell is going on with Valley Hospital?

I'm taking them to Bingo Night.

I'm taking them to the school art show.

I'm taking them to Fitness Night.

I'm taking them to the end-of-year picnic.

I hate going to the school stuff when my husband's out of town.

There are too many fundraisers!

I hate writing checks all the time!

I wish they still did the gift wrap. I love the gift wrap.

You know what they should do? They should have another fundraiser.

I'm on the board.

I'm heading up the socials this year.

I could never be HSA President.

I go to Great Expectations.

I go to Sasha.

I go to Haru -- but I never get Haru.

My roots are terrible.

I need to go every four weeks.

I should go every four weeks but I stretch it to five.

I can't take this baseball cap off until Saturday morning.

You should run for Board of Ed.

You should run for Village Council.

You should run for Mayor.

My family's from Ridgewood.

My husband grew up in Ridgewood.

I grew up in Ridgewood, but my parents live in Mahwah.

I went to Ridgewood High School.

I went to IHA.

I went to Bergen Catholic.
I went to Don Bosco.

I heard he got kicked out of St. Joe's.

She's a phenomenal teacher.

You have to request that teacher. Put it in writing.

He's the worst teacher at the school.

You can't let him get that teacher.

Who's her teacher this year?

There's no pool at Arcola.

There's no golf course at Indian Trails.

I don't know anybody at Ridgewood Country Club. I could never get in.

My friend works at Weichert.

My friend works at Marron Gildea.

My friend works at Tarvin.

I just have to run up to Tice's Corner.

I need to go to Riverside and return it.

I have to go to the mall.

I hate the mall.

I never go to Graydon. My kids got Coxsackie every year so I stopped going.

I love Graydon. Look at the ducks!

What the hell is going on with Graydon?

I know her from Mt. Carmel.

I know her from Montessori.

I know her from playgroup.

I go to New York Sports.

I go to Ethos.

I go to Parisi's.

I froze my gym membership.
Why would I pay that much for one class a week?
I can never get a spin bike.

I run at 5:30 am.
I run at 6:00 am.
I was supposed to run today.
I need a running partner.
Who wants to run with me in the morning?

She hates swimming -- but I take her anyway.

We tried UK Elite but he gave me a hard time every week.

She begged me to do dance but now she wants to quit.

Do you know how much that lacrosse equipment cost?

Do you know how much those recital costumes cost?

Do you know how much those basketball shoes cost?

She's doing the Graydon camp.

He's doing the lacrosse camp.

She's doing too many camps.

He's doing rec.

She's trying out for travel.

They'll just have to choose at some point between the two.

Do you want to carpool?

Can she carpool with us?

Did you ask her to carpool?

I should have asked her to carpool. I forgot and now I feel bad. She just saw me in the parking lot and now I can't get out of the car.

I love lacrosse -- it's only an hour.

I love soccer -- you're in and you're out.

Oh my God. These baseball games last forever! And it's still ninety degrees at 6:30 pm!

I've gotta go to Dick's.

I went to Sports Authority but they were out of them.

They never have it at Modell's.

Once they go to elementary school you can't get into the classroom.

Once they go to middle school there are no parent-teacher conferences.

Once they go to high school you don't know what the hell's going on.

What's she doing this weekend? Is she going to the...

Don't say anything about the birthday party.

She didn't get an invite. Don't worry about it.

I never RSVP'ed to the birthday party.

I forgot to take her to the birthday party.

I have to drop off a gift.

We never had birthday parties like this when I was little. We just had cake and a few friends.

You have to invite the whole class.

I mean, you can't invite the whole class!

I checked Skyward.
I checked Skyward again.
Skyward isn't working.

I used to walk everywhere in the city.

I'm in the car all day long.

My kids ate bananas and dry cereal for dinner in the back seat of the car before practice.

I just have to stop for gas before we go home, ok?

We live on the west side now.

We live on the east side now.

We moved out of Ridgewood once our kids were finished with high school.

Just wait until they start kindergarten.

Just wait until they get to middle school.

Just wait until they go to high school.

Ridgewood isn't the same town anymore.

My kids loved Ridgewood.

I miss Ridgewood.

I made the best friends in Ridgewood.

You should move to Ridgewood.

Say Something Funny

2012-01-19T13:49:00.003-05:00

I used to do stand-up comedy in New York.

I didn't say I did it well. I just said that I did it. You see how different that sounds?

I don't like telling many people that little historical tidbit (I know, I know, I just posted it on my blog and now it's out there for my vast empire of eager readers. Call me crazy, but I'm gonna take a chance and bet that all seven of them won't go tweeting it all over town.).

When you say something like that out loud to other people, they tend to think far grander things about you than you're actually capable of. Usually, they gasp and open their mouths really wide and say, "WOW! THAT'S AMAZING! DID YOU HEAR THAT, PHIL? SHE DID STAND-UP IN NEW YORK CITY!"

It wasn't, really. I never made it past the level of amateur night -- and an overweight, sweaty club manager who made me promise to produce ten cash-money-paying, hard-drinking friends for a three-minute spot on a makeshift stage with the obligatory brick wall behind it. Some clubs actually had real, exposed brick. Others had that molded sheet of faux-brick that threatened to topple on you during your set, which would have been terribly ironic. And probably would have gotten better laughs than anything in my repertoire.

Some people say to me, "Oh, I could never do that!"

Really, sister? I'm betting on you as the dark horse. Trust me. In your twenties, not fully formed, with a couple of pints of lager in your belly? You could have probably performed surgery on the subway, for God's sakes. You thought you were invincible at twenty-five, just like I did. We know better now.

The absolute coup de crap is when someone hears about my not-so-storied past as a stand-up hack, and they decide to slap me on the back a little too hard and shriek, right in the middle of a cocktail party, "OH MY GOD! SAY SOMETHING FUNNY!"

And all the air leaves the room right then, and we're vacuum-packed together with the baked Brie, the Chex mix and our drinks in teensy plastic cups. No pressure. Really. I'm good.

And that's when I need to get my coat, ask my husband to get the car, and get the hell out. Because that little red light is flashing somewhere, telling me to get off the stage. You can't see it, because you've had too much shiraz, but I can see it clear as day. So excuse me, won't you? Because no one gets a laugh after that. Not Robin Williams. Not Louis C.K. Not even God. (And he's freakin' hysterical. I know. I saw his set once at the Gotham. He totally killed.)

Realistic New Year's Resolutions for Our Modern Age

2012-01-05T09:35:00.000-05:00

1. Don't eat any more friggin' Christmas-infused Hershey's Kisses, Peeps, M&Ms or candy canes in January because "they'll just go to waste." Throw them in the garbage and rest easy that they will remain edible in a garbage dump for generations to come. Those fuckers have the half-life of uranium.

2. ~~Stop saying fuckers. Fuck.~~ Try not to swear a lot.

3. Stop saying you like, enjoy, or occasionally watch reality TV shows for the sake of polite conversation at cocktail parties. Instead, raise your right fist in the air and yell "Fight da power!" until you're asked to leave. Trust me, people. The revolution will not be televised.

4. Don't hate the mother who saunters into spin class sporting the keys to her Porsche, perfectly coiffed nails and hair, size 0 Prada workout wear, perky breasts, and flawless skin that refuses to even share a hint of her probable Botox addiction (and only "glistens" with a fresh linen scent, while mine oozes red wine, bacon and Snickers during spin jumps). Just trip her when class is over, without getting caught.

5. Remember that "fill it to the rim" is the old advertising slogan for Brim decaffeinated coffee, not a mantra for wineglasses.

6. Get my husband into bed without the use of devices. Get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about the iPad, the iPhone, the BlackBerry and the Droid.

7. Don't buy more "organizers" from the Container Store, Home Depot and Lillian Vernon to feel de-cluttered. Just buy less ~~shit~~ stuff.

8. Strive for "good enough." Mothers who never yell, cry, screw up, make mistakes, forget things, and unabashedly lose it from time to time are mothers who don't exist.

9. Stop with the guilt and start with the laughing, so much that people turn heads in restaurants and at public events because of the crazy, cackling woman making a spectacle of herself.

10. Eat more veggies. And fruits. And whole grains and organic everything you can afford. And drink more water out of filtered taps and glass bottles. Those crazy crunchy hippie people? They were right.

The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see...

2011-12-24T12:22:00.002-05:00

I have always been a believer in the spirit of Christmas and always love to hear the great stories about Christmas miracles. Early this morning [Christmas Eve, to be exact!] a true miracle happened. My friend Jerry got "the call" and is currently undergoing a lung transplant.

Please pray for him, his wife and kids and the donor's family. A true miracle and the greatest gift for him and his loved ones.

Christmas Eve afternoon update: Just heard...surgery went really well and the doctor said he couldn't have asked for a better set of lungs! Thank God!

Merry Christmas to all of you!!!

***

I proposed to my wife on Christmas Eve at Belvedere Castle in Central Park. Why is this a miracle? Because someone agreed to marry me.

***

My friend, who had terminal brain cancer at age forty, willed himself to live until December 26th.

***

My Christmas miracle....Babka that isn't actually Babka. Somehow passed from my great-grandfather to my grandmother who learned to make the potato casserole dish for my grandfather, to my mother who learned to make it for my father and on to my sister, brother and I who make it every year for our families. It stinks the house up in good (before) and bad (after) ways, we don't know what it is supposed to be called, it transported from Lithuania to Pennsylvania to all over the US and it matters to us all.

***

Here's my Christmas miracle - that I don't strangle the cashier at Whole Foods (whose name is Ian, but it's spelled with three "n"s, six "a"s, and a silent "e") as he spends more time explaining to me why he prefers cilantro in Thai "preparations" over Mexican "preparations" -- and less time properly scanning said cilantro.

***

My buddy's daughter was born almost five months early in December. She was given about a ten percent chance of survival. Defying all the odds, and amazingly only one surgery (on her eyes), big Lili just turned one (I say Big Lil because she is really eight months old and wearing 18-month clothes). Not exactly a miracle, just a miracle at Christmastime.

***

The year I threw out my sister's New Kids On the Block Christmas CD and didn't get caught!

***

I'm not sure that she'd think of herself as a miracle, but my niece was born in December and diagnosed a few days after birth with a heart defect. I was in college and dating my husband when she was born, and we were both studying abroad in London for a semester when she arrived. She's my husband's niece (but she's just as much mine) -- and he was beside himself that he couldn't get back to the US for many months to see her, so little and frail and precious. I continue to be amazed and humbled by her strength, her talents, her kindness -- especially with her little cousins -- and by the fact that I so often forget about her medical issues because of the way she lives her life. She just turned twenty-one this December. Happy birthday, sweet, sweet Sarah!

***

I drove through town today and didn't ram anyone with my car. The end.

Now that's a Christmas miracle.

***

24 December, 1971, Sydney, Australia

On R&R from the Land of Bad Things, which by that time was really more like the Land of Mildly Annoying Things, a kid was having dinner in a diner-like place, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, anything but that effin' rice. At a booth in the corner was a family of four, clearly down on their luck. The two kids were clamoring for dessert but it wasn't going to happen. Mom hadn't touched her food except to parcel it out to the kids. Dad sat stone-faced, sipping his coffee (I'm not real sure he ate anything either) and let her explain there was no money for dessert and besides she was sure Santa would leave them each a candy bar under the tree at home. The kid noticed the waitress rooting around in her purse, counting her money. Then she nodded to herself, went back in the kitchen and came out with burgers, fries... and four pieces of pie with ice cream. I heard her say, "We're about to close up and we're not open tomorrow so the cook told me to get rid of this stuff. Merry Christmas!"

The kid asked for his check and the waitress said, "Take a walk, Yank, you know the rules." In Australia GIs couldn't pay for anything. Didn't even matter if you were wearing a uniform, they could spot you. Movies? Couldn't pay. Bars? Please. Buses? No. So the kid didn't argue but he said to her, "At least let me pay for theirs, I saw what just happened." Icy glare, "You don't get to tell me what to do. Merry Christmas." So he slid a $50 tip under his coffee mug and walked out. She came running after him but he returned the glare, "You don't get to tell me what to do. Merry Christmas."

Christmas Eve, 1991, the kid has kids of his own now and was on his way to Grandma's house where there would be entirely too much food, dozens of presents (each), and general Christmas excess, Sydney long forgotten but soon to be remembered. In spades. A brand new Leo Kottke album on the cassette player, a song/poem with Emmylou Harris, written by Kris Kristofferson, inspired by the diner scene from "The Grapes of Wrath."

Here Comes That Rainbow Again

The scene was a small roadside cafe,
The waitress was sweeping the floor.
Two truck drivers drinking their coffee.
And two Okie kids by the door.
"How much are them candies?" they asked her.
"How much have you got?" she replied.
"We've only a penny between us."
"Them's two for a penny," she lied.

One truck driver called to the waitress,
After the kids went outside.
"Them candies ain't two for a penny."
"So what's it to you?" she replied.
In silence they finished their coffee,
And got up and nodded goodbye.
She called: "Hey, you left too much money!"
"So what's it to you?" they replied.

And the daylight grew heavy with thunder,
With the smell of the rain on the wind.
Ain't it just like a human.
Here comes that rainbow again.

Merry Christmas

One afternoon, two coats

2011-12-14T09:08:00.004-05:00

Over the weekend, we took the kids into the city for some Christmas cheer. We started out on Central Park West, after parking the car, and hopped a cab to get to Christmas Central: Rockefeller Center and the glorious, glorious tree. (I know. I know. I mentioned this the other day. Those of you who tired of my Christmas rant midway through my blog post, fear not. I'm not going there again.)

During the ride, the cab driver asked, "You want out on the church side?" He had to know I was a native if he asked me that question. (I make sure to up my accent any time I get in a New York City cab. It helps.) He meant in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral, rather than try to exit the cab in the throng of Christmas crowds, like a crazed salmon swimming to no avail.

He liked to talk, this cabbie, and started telling us about a movie that Anthony Quinn was in, about a thief who poses as a priest to hide out from the law. A spaghetti western, I guessed, one my father would know the name of. I couldn't remember it. But I engaged him. I was feeling festive. So he kept talking.

"He painted, you know. He was quite a painter."

"Yeah, I read that someplace."

(I bit my tongue before muttering, "One afternoon, two coats!" It's like having comic Tourette's, sometimes, God help me.)

The cab driver kept going. "I seen him years ago, right before he died. He lived on East End Avenue -- 60 East End Avenue." It had been at least ten years ago, but he'd committed the address to memory.

"Really? Anthony Quinn?"

"Yeah, yeah. Anthony Quinn. He was picking up his two kids from someplace. What a dresser he was. Somebody really cared about him, you know? Somebody took care with his clothes. He was dressed in a purple suit...and the tie was purple and the shirt was a light purple. Everything, everything from the handkerchief in his breast pocket to the pin on his cravat, it was all put together just so, you know? Yeah, somebody made an effort for him, for sure."

And then he was quiet. And I wondered who cared about him.

Reason #893 Why I Love New York

2011-12-12T12:03:00.005-05:00

I don't care how much of a cynical New Yorker you are, how jaded you've become, or how many times you've seen it while you fight the crowds on your way out of the office after a marathon night of paperwork. The Rockefeller Center tree is still a Christmas miracle. (How the hell do you make a right turn on city streets with that thing on a flatbed, first of all? That's what I'd like to know. But I digress.)

Since I was a little girl, I still, even now, find myself anticipating the first glimpse of the tree as I walk along 50th Street in December, waiting for the cold, grey canyons of Rockefeller Center to reveal its twinkling splendor. A majestic silence emanates from its boughs -- as long as you can drown out all the nut jobs in Santa hats and the irritated middle-aged women from the suburbs who don't get into the city too often and keep yelling, "EXCUSE ME!" to the crowds, overcome at the very lifeblood of New York City swirling around them, daring to graze them in their faux fur-collared coats. (It's Jones New York, sweetheart, not Italian cashmere. Relax.)

New York, swirl around me all you like. Let my eyes wander up to the heavens where the afternoon winter sunlight kisses the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Let me see the little, little faces, pressed up against the scratched acrylic display cubes in LegoLand to see scale models of the very buildings they're standing in. Let me hear the accents, the phrases, the chatter, the bits of Christmas carols wafting from storefront speakers, the glimmer, the glitter, the marriage proposals on the ice rink and the cheers from thousands of people watching, the crowds of out-of-towners emptying out of Radio City several times a day, high from their Christmas Spectacular fix, the angels on the Promenade, trumpeting in unison, the scurrying, the shopping bags, the children dressed in patent leather Mary Janes and peacoats and fur capes and plaid skirts, the flickering votives at the Lady Chapel, the windows at Saks, the momentary fantasy of Harry Winston and Cartier under the Christmas tree, the energy, the rosy-cheeked cop directing traffic, the simple holiday spirit kindnesses enacted on the street or in a store, the hustle, the bustle, the Fifth Avenue snowflake, the pyramid of giant red ornaments on Sixth Avenue, the trees, oh, the trees! in every store window, dotting our path as we make our way to the only one that really counts, to see Prometheus shined up for the season, the city forsaking its grit and grime for a few short weeks to get spiffied up and look nice for the holiday greeting card, to become a shimmering wintertime mecca for all of us who love it so.

I'm a downtown girl, but at Christmas, I'm midtown all the way.

Nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide

2011-12-08T11:48:00.009-05:00

The better half and I had dinner with old friends a few weeks ago in Manhattan. We had some prosecco. We had a lot of prosecco, actually. And then, as you might have guessed, we had some more.

While in that effervescent state, I unwittingly agreed to run a race in the city -- a famously long one -- with said better half and friends. We toasted our pact with more prosecco.

I woke up the next morning feeling quite less bubbly. And petrified.

I'd run this distance before, when I was twenty-nine and plainly naive. I was still in that supple stage then, the one often employed by infants, and my fontanelle still pulsed with youth.

I'm forty-one now, and not so supple. I've been hit hard, or so it seems, by some of life's tsunamis, and I'd been dragged mercilessly along the shore. (In my mind, it's more like Maine's rocky beaches, rather than the Jersey Shore, with the Situation and Snooki standing idly by.) And now, in my forties, I had the body to show for it.

Between twenty-nine and forty-one, I'd run several less grueling races. Once, in my early thirties, I ran a 13-mile race in support of a friend who was training for the New York City marathon. We finished in a respectable time, and as we limped off to breakfast with our spouses in tow, my endorphin-fueled friend remarked that the race was easy! and wonderful! and thrilling! and she felt absolutely! ready! to run! the marathon! and didn't I feel the same?

Oh, yes! I answered. Absolutely! You go, girl! Woo! Woo! (Insert empowering Nike ad tagline here.)

She walked on ahead with her husband, and my spouse, surprised at my chipperishness, asked quietly if I was serious.

"Oh, fuck no," I answered. "I'll be lucky if I don't end up with a permanent limp from this."

This time, the fear wasn't about the time commitment of running such long distances. It wasn't about the pain, or the lactic acid bonfire that would consume my muscles during training. It wasn't even about having that limp resurface and needing to alternately ice and heat my way back to an upright Homo Sapien gait.

At forty something, it's a fear of dying, plain and simple.

These are the years of heart attacks, of sudden collapses and paralyzing strokes while running. Make no mistake. Fortysomethings can't fool themselves.

At twenty-nine, you're still invincible. Oh, sure, you go through the motions of cringing at the thought of thirty. That's what society expects from you. It's part of the package. There's a whole section in Party City devoted to it, for heaven's sakes. Who wants to disappoint Aunt Ruth when she shows up with her "Over the Hill" grim reaper cake candles? Ack! You scream. Sheesh! You hiss. I'm thirty! I'm THIRTY! The bloom has died! The eggs are withering! Isn't it fun to pretend we're accepting the abject truth of our own mortality? Who wants a pomegranate margarita? Let's go sing karaoke!

I know your scheme, thirty. You're a cruel vixen with a fashionable handbag. You let us act out the charade of feigned horror with our black mylar balloons and our $1.99 Hoops and YoYo Hallmark cards, ignorant of what lies before us.

You sit by, smug, as we dance night the away at our "Still Purty at Thirty" birthday fiesta, ordering yet another round of appies and themed drinks, unaware that we will be meeting up with an older, crankier decade all too soon. You speak nothing of what's to come when we leave you -- the mammograms and EKGs and cholesterol levels and the friends who suddenly find things wrong -- I mean really, really wrong -- with their fortysomething selves. You mock us, thirty, even though you happily signed the group birthday card with a flowered "i" and a smiley face.

If I have to choose between the two of you, then make no mistake. I'm choosing forty. Forty shoots from the hip. She doesn't mince words. I like to think of forty as a native New Yorker, originally from the outer boroughs, but now secure enough in her professional career and financial status to have snagged a comfortable two-bedroom apartment on York Avenue in Manhattan -- one with a 24-hour doorman, a gym, and a river view terrace.

Thirty's a transplant from the midwest, still cleaning vomit off her Tory Burch ballet flats in the ladies' room at Down the Hatch. Am I wrong, thirty? Search inside yourself. You know I'm right. Now go get yourself something sparkly from Bendel's and you'll feel better.

I respect forty, I really, really do, because it doesn't candy-coat the truth. It's not a friend who fibs and says your bleached-blonde highlights look completely natural. It comes right out and says you look terrible, you got robbed if you paid more than fifty dollars for that, you look fat in it, and chartreuse is most assuredly not your color.

I'm strangely grateful for forty, for the gentle way it coaxed me out of my emotional tree last year, while being remarkably forthright about what I'd face, once I climbed down. You don't have the gift of immortality, lady jane. You should do the thing you think you cannot do, but sign right here on the dotted line and understand that it might kill you in the process. On the other hand, you might die if you don't do something drastic and improve your physical health immediately. There. Now go live. Fully. Does that help in your decision-making?

I'm choosing to do the thing I think I cannot do, even if I fall off the wagon of my choice every day and hoist myself back on, after the horses have stepped on my back a few times. I'll choose to run today -- maybe two or three miles -- with no expectations of what's to come. It's foolish to do so, because as forty reminds me, it's not mine to have. To be honest, it's never been mine, no matter what age I've been. Forty's a real bitch to shop with, but she gets you to take off those rose-colored glasses and put on a shiny new pair of bifocals, the ones that frame your face beautifully and let you see much more clearly from every angle.

I'll just make like the Winter Warlock of Rankin-Bass stop-motion holiday special fame and put one foot in front of the other. (I can't help it. 'Tis the season, peeps.)

I'll face the fear, step by step, until we can keep pace and run together. I'll thank forty for the lesson learned, and I'll live. Fully.

Don't tell her I posted this.

2011-12-07T13:57:00.004-05:00

Found this scribbled on a piece of paper, mixed in with other papers on the kitchen table today, after my daughter's recent songwriting and choreography session with a friend...

My candle burning

Slooowlly

My heart left out of love

(count to 20 in head)

Across the midnight

praire My heart without

a sound

(count to 60 and

dance)

I think all spoken poetry should end in the same way. Count to 60 and dance.

However the hell you want.

Yes, Virginia, we totally f***ed with you...

2011-12-06T12:50:00.007-05:00

I had an exhausting conversation with my ten year-old daughter a few days ago. I asked if she had written her letter to Santa yet, and she answered with the type of response that all Christmas-celebrating parents dread.

"No. I guess I should just give YOU my list this year, right? That's what all my friends at school do. They give the list to THEIR PARENTS."

She was trying her best to act all cool and nonchalant about the whole thing. I think she even flipped her hair once while she said it.

I figured she was fishing for the truth. She was ten, after all, and in fourth grade. Other kids were starting to talk, and the jig was about to be up. To be fair, it's a rite of passage that parents need to enact for their children, once they start indicating that they know the truth. Otherwise, they go off to college still thinking like that, and they get hog-tied by frat boys and left on the grassy shoulder of a major interstate highway with "A**HOLE" written in permanent marker on their forehead.

I asked her if she had something she wanted to talk to me about. (I know. I'm really, really good at parenting, aren't I? Thanks. I think so, too.)

She told me that everyone's talking at her (sorry, Harry Nilsson) about how Santa isn't real and that some kids at school say that your parents are really Santa and that they buy the presents for you.

I asked her what she thought. (Gosh, I'm really, really good at this, don't you think? I should have had ten more. Maybe twenty, like the Duggars.)

She said she wasn't sure. She thought she'd found something in my closet once that made her think he wasn't real. But she just wasn't sure.

"Can I tell you something, Mom?"

"Of course!" (Still parenting excellently at this point. Some might call that stalling. Not me. Oh, no. This is all part of my Grand Parenting Plan, soon to be available in MP3 format on iTunes and CD Baby.)

"I saw Dad putting money under my pillow when I lost my last tooth. You guys are the Tooth Fairy, right?"

I couldn't deny it. She'd seen the act in progress.

"And you save the plastic eggs every year for the Easter Bunny, so...don't you guys fill them and hide them?"

Ooof. Left jab with a right cross. Nicely done, kid. Fibbing was no longer an option.

I fessed up as kindly as I could. Tears ensued, but we worked through it until the Tooth Fairy and Mr. E.B. were officially outed. I assumed this was the dry run for the bigger question, the whopper of all whoppers -- was there really no Santa Claus?

I tried to broach the subject gingerly. I believed in Santa, and always would, but...

"MOM! ARE YOU SAYING THERE'S NO SANTA CLAUS?"

Quick, hand me a knife. Then hold my child down so I can thrust it into her tiny, sweet, little sugarplum heart repeatedly.

Backpedal. Backpedal. Backpedal. Sweet Jesilu, how fast can I backpedal? (Again, thank you for your praise of my parenting skills. I thought that one up all by myself, and off the cuff, no less. The book tour for Grand Parenting Plan starts next week. Come on down to Barnes & Noble in Secaucus and say hello between 4 and 7 pm!)

No, no, no, sweet child! Why would I say that? That's not what I meant at all! What? Huh? Hey! Look at that shiny thing over there! What? I don't know. It worked when you were three. Sweet merciful Mildred, child, you're worse than Mommy is when she has PMS. God help us all when puberty hits.

So I lied without lying, because she clearly didn't want the truth. And she knew without knowing, just enough so the red velvet facade with lush white faux-fur trim didn't have to be dismantled. At least, not yet.

On Christmas morning this year, I'll do my best to make it merry. I'll take lots and lots of pictures. I'll ooh and aaah as my children gleefully rip open wrappings and proudly show me what Santa brought. And I'll know that another precious piece of my daughter's childhood will be lost to the annals of time. Maybe she'll catch my eye, knowingly. Or she might give it her all and go with full Santa gusto on December 25th, knowing it might be her last.

But before then, on Christmas Eve, I'll collapse on the couch with Baileys and nurse my metallic gift wrap paper cuts and tape dispenser injuries. I'll be bleary and delusional, not even cognizant of the fact that Channel 4's annual showing of "It's a Wonderful Life" has ended and that Channel 4's 11 o' clock news program has already started.

It'll hit me, though, when I hear the intro for Gabe Pressman's annual holiday greeting -- his very unemotional re-reading of the famed New York Sun column "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." That outdated pastel illustration of the famed Virginia will appear on the screen, along with the sketch of the editor of the New York Sun -- and they'll cut back and forth awkwardly between both illustrations for the whole friggin' reading, because Gabe's producer won't shell out money from the production budget to update the g.d. taped presentation.

And you know what I'll mutter under my breath?

BITE MY CANDY CANE, GABE PRESSMAN. BITE IT HARD.

I might tinkle the ice in my glass of Baileys for dramatic effect. Not sure yet.

Audible gasp, you say! Bite your tongue! Gabe Pressman is a New York treasure! He's won the Edward R. Murrow award! He's been an intrepid reporter on the city beat for lo these sixty years!

Screw Gabe Pressman. (He doesn't even celebrate Christmas, does he? I think he's a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx.) Why must he torture us -- all of us parents caught between the wonder of the childhood years and the abject fear of the tween unknown?

Why do we torture ourselves? Why do we enact this ridiculous Santa ruse? Why? Why?

Because we're all kids. Kids in our hearts and our minds and our souls who never quite got over the cold, icy Christmas truth. And we can't bear to have our children miss out on these moments, no matter how finite they may be. It's part of what makes childhood exactly what it is -- magical. Especially when we're adults and it's not ours any longer.

Mike Stivic refused to tell little Joey on "All in the Family" that there was a Santa Claus, because he didn't want to lie to his son. But in truth, I'm on Archie Bunker's side here. What's the harm? Twelve years of twice-weekly therapy, probably. (Joey's definitely in twice-weekly therapy. His mother was Sally Struthers, for God's sakes.) That's where I'm placing the blame when my children tell me they're getting professional help. It was all Santa's fault. (The Grand Parenting Plan video will be available in 2012. Be sure to look for it on amazon.com so you can pre-order!)

Maybe it's also that the first little let-downs in life should come from us, their parents. It's a damn shame, but life will inevitably hand them to you. It's up to us to pull back the red velvet curtain at some point. We have to, or we wouldn't be decent parents if we didn't. But at least we'll be there to catch them when they collapse in a puddle. And cry a little bit for ourselves, and for the kids we once were.

I really don't know if I can take another year of that stupid Virginia illustration, though. So I'm planning to pre-empt Gabe this year. At 11:20, I'll turn on the damn Yule log instead. It's gonna look great in HD. Even better if I've had another swig of Baileys. Or two.

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.

Makes you think all the world's a sunny day

2011-11-30T21:44:00.115-05:00

If you've met me or if you've read my blog, I've made it pretty clear that my roots are in New York City. (Whaddaya stunad? How many times I gotta tell ya?) I was born in Manhattan, but when I was eighteen months old, we moved back to Queens, where my mother was from, and where her father was from before that. My father grew up in Brooklyn, as did his mother and father before him. They were from lots of neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn, Queens, and of course, Manhattan -- the first place in America they'd set foot once they'd gotten off those steerage ships and passed through Castle Garden or Ellis Island (You know that movie "Gangs of New York?" If you see Scorsese anytime soon, tell him he owes me royalties on that. Those were my people.).

When they were first married, my parents tried to make a go of it and garner a Manhattan address. They got as far as the Irish ghetto at the tip of Manhattan Island and had to hightail it back to the outer boroughs once I came along, about a year later. Babies are expensive when you're in law school, 23 and fresh from the altar. So they went back to the kind of neighborhood that our families knew, the good, solid places formed around the Catholic parishes that dotted the city's landscape, and that defined where you were from. Ask any New York old-timer where they grew up, and they'll identify it by the name of their parish at some point in the conversation. Guaranteed. They'll also refer to the house number, as in "That was when we lived at 33-17 Farragut," or "We weren't living at 322 yet." It was expected that family members would know those houses, and those eras, even if they'd never set foot in them. Such phrases are slowly disappearing from our New York vernacular.

I lived in Queens until I was about twelve or thirteen, when my parents moved us to Connecticut. It was a blessing and a curse, and as I've written before, I will always have my feet in two vastly different worlds. I write about my childhood often as an exorcism or a love letter, can't really say which.

I was planning to write about my grandfather this week, the quiet, devout Catholic who loved to frequent the local OTB at the Flatbush Avenue junction during the week. I tried to Google a photograph of a Brooklyn OTB storefront today, and I ended up finding these on flickr, a photo sharing site. I actually gasped once or twice while looking through them.

I don't know the person who took these pictures. I didn't grow up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, either. But the scenes were so familiar, almost as if they were my own memories, somehow projected outward onto the screen in front of me. Good photographers can do that to you.

They were all taken by a guy named Anthony Catalano, who clearly has a gift for photography. Please don't reprint them, because that wouldn't be fair to Anthony. From the looks of his collection, he grew up in Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies, and lived in what was once a gorgeous Dutch home dating back to 1855. (They have those in the outer boroughs, dotted here and there. You just have to know where to look.)

Just thought I'd share these today and let you have a look. If you're older than forty, and especially if you're from one of the five New York boroughs, this probably feels like yesterday. True test of a seventies New York childhood -- see if you can spot the cans of C&C Cola in one of the pictures.

All photographs courtesy of Anthony Catalano.

In his flickr photo stream, Anthony also has a collection of photos featuring the home he grew up in. His grandparents, Sicilian immigrants, bought the house at some point in the 1930s and raised their children, and eventually, their grandchildren, in their home. Built in 1855, the home was razed in the mid-eighties after the family had sold it, and an unsightly brick apartment building was built on the lot.

We have a house like that in our family. Several, actually, but one quickly comes to mind. My great-grandmother's house in Corona, Queens, was once a grand Victorian with a lemonade porch. My great-grandmother's bachelor brother, Tom, bought the house for his newlywed sister so she could raise a family outside of the grimy city streets of downtown Manhattan. I think the deal was that he got use of an attic room upstairs whenever he wanted to come to the "country," and she got the rest of the house. Not bad for 1900.

My great-grandmother "Mamie" and my great-grandfather John were married at St. Francis Xavier Church on West 16th Street in Manhattan. Their first-born child, William, was baptized there as well. In my twenties, I used to pass the steps of Xavier now and then, and I'd stop to touch the worn, cold stone steps, childish in my attempt to connect to my past. There are too many of those touchstones in New York for me to name, and I am blessed to know so many of them. I often wonder how many people pass through city streets, unaware of their own personal history that might be resonating, begging to be found, just a few steps from where they stand.

But back to the house. Mamie raised her five children -- Willie, Basil, Rita, Thomas and Jim -- in that house, and various brothers of hers came and went as needed. Early pictures of the house show it standing alone, with other houses off far in the distance. It's jarring to look at a photo of Queens and see the wide, open space pictured in the photograph. Those photos aren't possible anymore.

Eventually, the lemonade porch was enclosed, and other buildings were built up alongside it. In 1950, my great-grandmother died of a sudden heart attack in the front parlor of the house, and the house was sold not long after that. My mother, who was two when the house was sold, remembers a wide center staircase and a music room, and still has a "piano baby," which must have once sat on a grand piano somewhere, but which later sat on my great-grandmother's banister post to adorn the house.

In the late seventies, my mother and I drove over to take a look. It was chopped up, stripped of its earlier beauty, and turned into a multi-family dwelling like so many other grand homes of New York City. It was someone else's now. It didn't belong to us anymore.

Anthony's photos reminded me of that today, and made me think of how much history we New Yorkers share. Our stories are ours alone, but they are so much the same, block after block.

Here are some photographs of his family home near New Utrecht Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Somebody, please, get this guy a book deal. Just one of millions of New York stories sitting quietly on the stoop, just waiting to be asked to be told.

The photographer's mother in her prom dress on the side porch of the house, 1948

Anthony as Superman in the front parlor, 1966

Self-portrait, 1977

Hanging out on the stoop, 1978

The photographer's mother in 1978, divorced and raising her two sons in the same house

The photographer and his brother in the house for the last time, 1986

No, no...thank YOU

2011-11-22T11:06:00.008-05:00

I never felt a kinship to the Pilgrims. Sure, I was grateful for their boat trip and all, and for the historic Thanksgiving feast they shared with Squanto -- the one now modernly interpreted across this great land with Stove Top stuffing, ice cream pumpkin cakes, and mashed potato volcanoes with molten gravy lava. I'm sure they were all swell people, those Pilgrims, but I just couldn’t relate to them. Their history was one enjoyed by a certain class of Americans, and not by a freckly Irish kid like myself, who had much more of a connection to Ellis Island and Long Island than that elusive rock up north in Massachusetts.

There was no question: my people were Johnnie-come-latelys, “No Irish need apply” immigrants who showed up uninvited to America’s swank dinner party. The story of Thanksgiving wasn't really ours to tell. We were glad to be here, don’t get me wrong. But we learned quickly enough upon our arrival that the streets weren’t really paved with gold, and and that we were still second-class, same as we’d always been. My lineage wasn’t found in dusty Civil War daguerrotypes in the attic, or at oceanfront summer cottages in Maine. I came from open fire hydrants, stoopball and broken beer bottle glass twinkling in the summer light at the Myrtle Avenue playground. I couldn't trace my lineage back to the Mayflower. The Lower East Side of Manhattan, maybe, but that's as far back as we went in America.

If the Irish had hosted Thanksgiving, the historic event might have taken a different turn. The Native Americans probably would have left long before it even started, since they'd be waiting hours, if not days, before Good Sister McSwigan deemed that turkey well-done enough for human consumption. (First Rule of Irish Cooking: If it's moist or colorful, don't eat it. Wait until it's gray and dry, or it could kill you.) That, or they’d be very, very drunk. I'm not sure that they'd sill own Manhattan, though, because we Irish are pretty fast talkers. The Indians would show us how to build shelters and farm the land, and we'd teach the time-honored practice of rolling our eyes at relatives and referring to particular family offenders as "that one" at buffalo hunts and drum circles for years afterwards.

My father believed that he raised me right, from an Irish immigrant perspective, and denounced Irish Protestants as “proddys” -- a derogatory term for Protestants. I wasn’t supposed to know them, to date them, or God forbid, drink or eat with them. In his eyes, any Irish Protestant wasn’t really Irish, but British -- and that was even worse. Even though some “proddys” seemed like really nice people who wore the same sneakers and played the same board games as we did, somewhere in their lineage was an ancestor who had stolen my ancestor’s land and starved his children back in Ireland, so we weren't going to be asking his descendants over for a backyard barbecue anytime soon.

When we first moved from Queens to Fairfield County, a perfectly coiffed, Bermuda-bagged representative of the “Welcome Wagon” arrived at our home. It was an obvious contradiction in terms, since the "Welcome Wagon" Lady usually arrived when it was least welcomed, when you're still getting settled, you haven't showered in three days and can't find the hamster in any of the moving boxes.

My mother pulled me aside in the kitchen while she hastily arranged stale cookies on a platter for our unexpected guest, and told me to say that we were from Long Island. “But we’re not,” I said, confused and slightly annoyed. “Yes, we are,” she hissed, “Queens is part of Long Island, so it’s fine,” Then she turned me on my heel and reminded me to offer a paper napkin with the Dutch butter cookies.

I learned new names -- Rye, Greenwich, Larchmont, Scarsdale, Bronxville, Darien -- and the qualities and trappings that came along with them. Woodside, Astoria, Flatbush, Corona, Bay Ridge, Parkchester -- those slowly faded from my mental map.

In Connecticut, I was being schooled with the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of John Smith. Or at least his poorer relations, who’d lost the family money in the ’29 market crash and had no funds for the likes of The Gunnery and Miss Porter’s. They’d lost the starchy bonnets and buckle shoes, of course, but they now wore a modern uniform -- popped Lacoste collars under their Ralph Lauren button-downs, penny loafers, and chinos embroidered with bizarre lobsters, tennis racquets and seashells. In the winter, they sported an LL Bean cotton turtleneck under all of that. And they were still, shockingly, skinny under so many layers of clothing. I gawked openly at their outfits for weeks.

Suddenly, I heard acronyms I'd never heard before. She’s “DAR,” my mother would whisper to me, wishing that her twelve year-old daughter inherently knew what it meant, and hoping I wouldn’t ask for clarification in a loud, heavily-accented voice.

“Friggin’ WASP,” my father would say on his way home from the Metro-North commute, after being subject to an hour and a half retelling of Biff's Christmas ski vacation in Stowe or his kids' sailing lessons in Westport, for everyone within earshot in the bar car. “I’d like to punch the perfect teeth out of that fu--er’s Locust Valley lockjaw.”

Some days, I longed for the comfort of my New York clan. I missed the familiarity of my old neighborhood and my outerborough upbringing. I relished visits to my relatives still living in Brooklyn and Queens, and sat out on the cool brick stoops in my Sunday best, knowing I couldn’t come back. I had already changed too much.

Don't even get me started on my husband's side of the family. He's Jewish. His parents grew up in New Jersey. They made matzo stuffing and fought over the parts of the turkey that my family threw in the garbage. It's a wonder how my kids will ever make sense of Thanksgiving at all, given their not-so-Pilgrimish connections.

But no matter. On Thursday, I'll be thankful for lots of things -- for the Pilgrims, the Native Americans, for my family and my husband's, for the opportunities available to all of us, and for the great strides we've made, completely in spite of ourselves.

Both Sides Now

2011-11-17T13:26:00.010-05:00

My feet will forever be in two worlds.

My left -- my dominant side, my sinister side (you have to have studied Latin to get that reference -- I'm Irish Catholic and trust me, I took Latin) -- is deeply rooted in my New York City upbringing. My core values, my vestigial remnants of Roman Catholic faith and morality, my accent, which appears in bursts of anger or in the back rooms of funeral parlors amongst my cousins, my phrases -- "poor unfortunate," "am I right ammeye wrong?" my sense of humor, my earliest sorrows, my silence, my moments of clarity and strength...they're all rooted here as well.

I was never told I was Italian on my father's side -- not until I was old enough to learn the cold, hard truth about being 1/16th Napolitan. (I joke. Don't take it personal. That's how it was between the Irish and Italians.) It didn't make much difference, because I was a dirty mick to the old ladies in the German neighborhood I lived in. I could have been the Pope's little sister, but I was still shanty Irish to them.

I couldn't help but include an excerpt of Martin Scorsese's 1974 documentary "italianamerican," not because of this Napolitan thing of mine, but because Martin's parents remind me so much of so many people I once knew -- relatives, neighbors, people sitting down the pew from me at church -- who lived a certain way and talked a certain way and dressed a certain way and defined so much of what I understood to be New York. If you look closely, you can see that Catherine Scorsese and my grandmother (see the photo above) had the exact same hairstyle. And probably the same housecoat.

Scroll down to the playlist below to pause music if you'd like to watch this video

I miss these voices, these attitudes, this way of being. I wish it hadn't left me so soon.

My right -- my weaker side, to be sure, because it hadn't been exercised as often -- is in Fairfield County, Connecticut. We left Queens when I was twelve, maybe thirteen. My daily life up until then -- a life of corner stores and plaid kilt uniforms and weekly drives to Flatbush and Queens Village for dinner -- would be no more. My visceral ability to stand in the aisle of an MTA bus at the age of eight and tighten my quadricep muscles, to remain standing without lurching in the throng of city commuters and old ladies -- that skill would no longer be needed. My touchstones of stoops and boxball and cut chain-link fences were gone to the ages.

I would need to learn the code of Lisa Birnbach's Official Preppy Handbook, since we had moved to Ridgefield in the early eighties. I'm not even kidding. A friend of my parents gave me the book in jest just before we moved, and I pored over it as if it were the New Testament and I was still seated in Sr. Beatrice's class, about to be quizzed. I learned words like "Benetton," "The Gunnery," "mudroom," "embroidered wide-wale," and "Sperry Top-Sider."

I took the move hard, although I pretended not to. I was the butt of jokes in those first days of middle school, ill-fitting in the clothes my parents weren't prepared to purchase for me, unused to preppy fashion in the wake of daily Catholic school uniforms. I said "quawh-tuh" to the delight of my friends whenever they held up twenty-five cents. I took French. I went antiquing with my parents and sat, sullen, in the back seat of their Saab. I refused to acknowledge the gift I'd been given, the golden chance to do better than my parents had, or so they imagined, since a ticket up and out of seventies outerborough New York seemed like a swift express ride to success.

I did better. I made friends. I took tennis lessons, for a week. I snuck booze out of friends' parents' liquor cabinets and stayed surprisingly sober after many rounds of whiskey. Or not, since I believe Jameson was used as a topical anesthetic for my teething gums as an infant.

I read. A lot. I watched "Friday Night Videos" since my father refused to pay for cable. (For several years, we watched all of our television shows on a grainy, snowy screen and fruitlessly adjusted the sad rabbit-eared antenna purchased from Caldor, delusional in hopes of picking up New York City stations in the woods of Ridgefield. After several years of this, my parents were shocked to discover that I needed glasses, and finally acquiesced to CableVision.) I was awkward, needy, hormonal, confused, angry -- words that define any teenager in America. I went back to my visit my grandparents in the outerboroughs and noticed how much smaller the rooms seemed. I saw litter and graffiti, suddenly, and realized how much had been accepted as a part of my young Queens vernacular.

I missed my old neighborhood. I got letters from friends telling me about Regents exams, about two-bus commutes to Catholic high schools on the other side of Queens, about which girls had gotten slutty and strange and far older than they should have been.

I asked to apply to small Catholic high schools in Fairfield County, because I needed a touchstone again. By the time freshman year had rolled around, I felt differently, and declined enrollment.

I was an alien in my friend's New England homes, as their parents and older siblings talked about visiting colleges, student essays, dorms and Champion sweatshirts with Greek letters. There was none of that in my home, because no one in my family had ever gone away to school. They either hadn't gone, or in my parents' case, they commuted, just as they had to get Catholic secondary educations at elite high schools in other parts of the city. When I was sixteen, my parents handed me a ridiculously thick book and told me to pick out the college I wanted to attend. No one looked at my college application or helped with my essay. That was the New York side -- figure it out for yourself. You're on your own. The hard way's the better way.

I applied to colleges, but only in the Northeast. I didn't hear from my Queens friends so much anymore. I went on class trips that involved wilderness training.

I was accepted at several colleges, in spite of my less than stellar grade point average. I turned down admission at Boston College because I felt a dear family friend was pulling proverbial strings for me, and I wanted to believe that I would get in on my own academic merit. Which I wouldn't have. So I declined. It was a world still foreign to me, this world of "old boy" networks and WASPy connections. My father was horribly disappointed, because he wanted his only child to have a Jesuit education, as he did, and because he felt I would have gained easier entry to a life he felt was barely in his grasp.

I was left with two choices: NYU or Syracuse. Other families cringed at the thought of sending children to a university in the middle of New York's Greenwich Village. My parents thought that was too easy for me, too familiar. My grandmother would be taking the Command Bus in from Brooklyn every week to take me out to lunch. That was no true "college" experience. That was going home again.

So I chose Syracuse, because it was far enough, but also so I could claim New York residency once again. (Well, not really, but it was nice to think of it that way.) I became the first person in my family to go away to school, rather than take a subway or a bus to get to a class. On a sweltering August afternoon in upstate New York, my parents drove away, trying to hide their silent weeping behind tinted glass, and I felt lost and alone, again, with no real guide to help me plan for this experience. I was without my tribe.

Me and my godmother at my graduation from Syracuse, 1992

I moved right back to New York after graduation -- two weeks, to be exact -- and I realized that I was no longer a native. I needed to earn my place again. I had lost my accent. I didn't recognize certain streets or buildings. I helped my grandmother move from her apartment in Flatbush. Irritated at the city bus schedule, I hopped impulsively on the 2/3 express train to Flatbush Avenue. In the middle of the day, as the only white girl on the subway car, I knew I no longer belonged there.

I was cut in half, King Solomon's experiment, the product of working-class and college degree.

Other people now live in the homes and apartments where my family lived and fought and celebrated and died. I recently took my daughter to the street where my mother grew up as a child. Some of my cousins still live on the same street, but in time, no one there will know me anymore. I'll be regarded with a suspicious eye for slowing down to take a look at the house, for pointing out the windows of my grandparents' front bedroom or for showing my children where their grandparents had their first kiss on 216th Street. I naively thought my past would always stay in place, waiting for me to reclaim it.

And now the same is true of my Connecticut half. My parents have recently divorced, and the house I lived in during my high school years is someone else's home now. I never wanted to identify as closely with those years, and now, there's little left for me to even try.

When I look back at my family tree, I can see that not many of us were sure-footed.

I guess it's the way of American life as we strive to shake off our emigrant ways and do better, earn more, have more, be more. My mother's mother grew up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and ended her life in Queens -- which was a continent of difference to her generation. My father's sisters moved to New Jersey, and us to Connecticut, and to hear some of my relatives speak of it at the time -- it sounded as if we'd gone off to Europe, as if we'd gotten on steamships and gone as far away as the tiny Irish island we once left, so long ago.

We're all from New York, my family, but no one's still there to prove it. Just as we're all Irish-American, but we don't know a soul back in Tyrone, Roscommon or Tipperary, the places we claim to be from.

My great-grandfather, Eddie Morris, left northern Ireland in 1901, steerage class, and arrived in New York City, alone, twenty years old. He was proud of his Irish heritage but proudly embraced his American citizenship. He adopted a thick New York accent to fit in, I suppose. My mother often told the story that when Eddie, or "BaBa," as we called him, had a stroke at eighty-some-odd years of age, his Irish brogue suddenly re-appeared. Long gone to years of attempted assimilation into established New York neighborhoods, he reverted to it for many months as his speech returned.

I'm grateful for both sides now. They never leave you. They can't be quantified or contained, but they're within you. Always.

Sitting still in domestic bacteria

2011-11-14T07:52:00.005-05:00

"come. i say come, you sitting still in domestic bacteria

come. i say come, you standing still in double-breasted mornings

come. i say come, and return to the fight."
-- from "For Sweet Honey in the Rock", Sonia Sanchez

The great ones -- the writers, the poets, the filmmakers, and the stand-up comedians -- have long had a girl like me pegged. I'm easy money for these cats.

You can smell me from a mile away. I'm a bored suburban housewife, grateful for her position in life and aching to shake it the hell off.

Don't get me wrong. I'm happily married to a gem of a man, pleased as punch to discover my children in their being and becoming, and even mostly happy that I have pets.

I don't have to walk six miles to get water or bags of rice. I don't have to sport a burqa in 110-degree heat -- although I probably should, after all the brie and Christmas cookies I eat during the holidays. I've got a warm bed at night and a fireplace that I can turn on at the touch of a switch. (I live in Jersey. We have that here.)

But there's gotta be more. There's just gotta be more.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Go vacuum a rug. Wash a dish. Fold a shirt. Get the hell over it. You got a roof over your head and a 100% down pillow under it. Lucky, lucky bitch.

Very funny.

Trust me, I'm Irish. There's no thinking I'm that special. We don't do that.

But there's a treadmill under my feet, and I can't seem to get off it. There's a droning loop of white noise, of paperwork, of lunch boxes, of registrations for basketball and library storytimes, of cupcakes and parent signatures, of toilet paper rolls and checkbooks and recipe substitutions and online payments and soccer jerseys and doctors' appointments and eco-friendly household cleaners and prep cooking and towels in the dryer and Razor scooters and recycling and peanut butter sandwich smears.

I run and run and run and never get any closer to the classes that I read about at the New School, and which go on, semester after semester, without me sitting in them. I speed past the exhibits at the Met, the weekend edition of the New York Times left unread by my bedside, the books -- oh mercy! the books! -- which sit in dusty stacks near my nightstand, the photographs left untaken, the streets of New York left lonely without me wandering aimlessly along them (I know, I know, six million other people are there to wander them -- just go with my pseudo-dramatic moment), the life left unmarked, unnoticed, unknown, unheard in the chaos of normalcy.

Once in a while, I jump off the treadmill (in this really cool Jillian from "The Biggest Loser" kind of way where my knees are up around my head and I land on my feet like Balanchine) and sprint towards the meaningful moments -- the times when I kneel down on the floor and look -- I mean really, really look -- into my child's eyes, and tell her and him how terribly glad I am that they're my kids, how grateful I am that they're here, that they were born, even if one of them took twenty-one hours and lots of drugs to do so, and that they're growing up great (in spite of every colossal fuck-up I've already managed to achieve in ten short years of parenthood). I greet my husband, home from a day in the steel canyon trenches, and hold him to me, thankful, grateful to be in this, smelling the scent of his threaded suit jacket, scratching the nape of his neck with my fingers for a moment, embracing who he is and what we've made, knowing that it's real and that there is no question that I am absolutely meant to be in this very place with this very person, and that maybe that's whole lot more than a whole mess of people ever get.

And then, just as soon as I put my arms around him, around them, around it, it's gone, lost to the running and the droning. You remember that scene in "It's a Wonderful Life" where Bert and Ernie try to subdue Clarence the guardian angel and he suddenly disappears? Yeah, well, it's not even like that at all, but I needed a good image. And the holidays are coming up, so it adds a nice seasonal element.

Is that what makes it so elusive? Is that what I'm chasing?

Maybe the thrill is in the chase. Maybe that's what I've been missing all along.

Inspiration Point Friday -- Autumnally Awesome

2011-11-08T12:18:00.008-05:00

Must. Not. Ahhhh! Get. In. Christmas. Mmmmppph! Spirit. Before. Arrrrrgh! Thanksgiving!

Pant! Pant! Pant!

I'm trying. Oh, Lord, how I'm trying. There's still too much of November to love. It just got here, for heaven's sakes -- how can you be so rude as to invite it in and then send it right out the back door the minute it arrives?

No, I say. No! There are still pumpkin muffins to be baked, apples to be crunched, fig-related things to be eaten, bittersweet branches to be wrapped around tarnished candlesticks, leaves to be scattered, and raking to be (un) done.

I don't care if the Christmas commercials started on NOVEMBER FIRST this year. (Sheesh.) I'm not having it. December, you're all snowy and tinsely and sparkly and jolly -- but you'll have to just stay outside and wait for my invitation. I'm gonna sit a spell with November and visit for a while.

When I was a kid, a simple swag of Indian corn on the front door signaled fall. My mother bought one every year, and hung it on a nail with a wired orange ribbon. I forgot to pick up corn this year, but I just might think about making this with the kids during the week of Thanksgiving. Great idea from Better Homes & Gardens -- visit www.bhg.com for the directions.

I just love a banner. It's a minor compulsion. I can deal with it if I want to. But I don't. I just love the garlandy-garlandness of it. Hopefully this won't burst into flame above the fireplace. From etsy.

What says fall better than a pumpkin pie martini? Well, lots of things, actually. But that's not important right now. I'm picturing myself basting the turkey and frothing up the roux for creamed onions while I sip this contentedly on Thanksgiving Day. Any cocktail with a cinnamon sugar rim is just dandy in my book. I'm a girl. I know. But I look cute in an apron.

1 oz. pumpkin liqueur or pumpkin-flavored syrup

2 oz. vanilla vodka

1 oz. Sylk cream liqueur

2 tsp. sugar

1 tsp. cinnamon

**If you can't find pumpkin liqueur or flavored syrup, try using 1/2 oz. of spiced rum, such as Captain Morgan, 2 Tbsp. canned pumpkin puree and 1/4 tsp. pumpkin pie spice

Mix together the sugar and cinnamon. Dip the the rim of the martini glass in a bit of pumpkin liqueur, then place the glass rim into the cinnamon and sugar mixture until the rim is coated.

In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, combine the vanilla vodka, cream liqueur, and pumpkin liqueur or syrup. Shake vigorously for 15 to 20 seconds. Strain into the rimmed glass, sprinkle with cinnamon or nutmeg and garnish with a cinnamon stick. Enjoy!

This might be the year that I finally make my husband's heart swell and fix him an apple pie from scratch. They're so easy, these boys. Fill those bellies up good and they're yours for life. I'm liking this recipe for caramel apple pie with mile-high apple slices. From Better Homes & Gardens. Check out www.bhg.com for the how-to.

Hopefully, if the pie comes out well, the old man will write on one of these paper leaves from Paper Source that he's grateful for me. Or at least my cooking skills. Or at least that I didn't have too many pumpkin pie martinis and end up with my head in the turkey carcass like Joey from "Friends." I think it's a sweet tradition to pause on Thanksgiving and make note of what we're thankful for, right before we all unbutton our pants and pass out in front of the TV. Ah, another Harris Family tradition.

I hope all of you enjoy the

cinnamony, crispy, crackly, appley, snuggly, smoky, sweatery
moments of fall.

It's All About the Kids

2011-10-31T10:31:00.002-04:00

(A Halloween re-run. I've just been without power for a day and a half. Cut me some slack, peeps.)

Let's not fool ourselves, shall we? Halloween is for adults. Not for kids. Oh, we think we're doing it for them -- but have you ever seen the look on a little kid's face while he scoops out pumpkin guts with his bare hands? How much fun is it to design a jack o'lantern face with a Sharpie and watch Mom or Dad ruin your creative vision with awkward, poorly-placed knife cuts?

True, kids do love the gigundo mound of candy that they score from trick or treating. But let's fess up here. Their hard-earned stash is secretly depleted throughout the first week of November by their own parents. We make them work their butts off for hours in ridiculous, uncomfortable outfits, and by 11 pm we're scarfing down Milky Ways and Kit-Kats while they sleep fitfully in their beds, sweating out red dye #5 and milk chocolate. It's like we're whoring our kids for caramel-covered nougat. (I'm dramatic, I know.)

Halloween is just another excuse for us to gorge ourselves on the bags of candy that seem to appear in supermarkets and pharmacies about one week after school starts. It goes something like this: the spiral notebooks, retractable pens and Hello Kitty pencil cases of back to school mania disappear from sight, only to be replaced by candy corn and mellowcreme pumpkins. ON SEPTEMBER TENTH. And then all hell breaks loose. The bagged fun-size candy that sits untouched in the General Candy aisle all year long is now fair game for "organized" moms who want to stock up on Halloween candy before the first friggin' day of fall. Oh, please. It's a shameless excuse to plow through about three bags of chocolate-covered blow before Columbus Day even hits. Geez, by November 2, "fun size" means guessing which pair of jeans in your post-baby collection actually fits since you've existed for several weeks on a diet of candy-coated peanut butter and Diet Pepsi.

During the month of October, I have had lengthy discussions with other mothers (while the kids are out of earshot) about which Halloween candy they prefer. I have seen grown womens' eyes glaze over and their manicured hands fidget nervously as they discuss the pros and cons of Snickers, Kit-Kats and Reese's peanut butter cups. Do you buy the candy you hate or the candy you love? Have you ever done candy bar meal replacement? How many pieces of candy corn can you eat before that nauseous feeling hits? My God, it's worse than meth.

Add into the mix the de-briefing of preschoolers for weeks beforehand on masked costumes, tacky light-up skeleton displays at Party City, and the very popular "there's no such thing as ghosts" discussion. We scare the bejesus out of them, hep them up on piles of candy, and drag them around to Halloween parties, fall crafts and storytimes, boos at zoos, yada yada yada. It's no wonder they're all on ritalin.

Next up: Thanksgiving and Christmas crap in the seasonal aisles! Word to those of the Jewish faith: don't start buying Hanukkah dish towels, paper goods and candy dishes. Or you're done for.

October is the cruelest month.

2011-10-27T14:21:00.005-04:00

Foolish mommy that I am, I thought I had forever.

Even though I knew that there was a set number of years, and a limited amount of time, the end of these days still seemed far off.

But this is the year of the Halloween pillowcase. The year that all parents dread.

My ten year-old daughter announced this week that she wants to collect her Halloween candy in a pillowcase. She already abandoned her plastic pumpkin a few years ago, when the black plastic handle broke under the weight of too much loot. She doesn't want to carry the cute pumpkin tote bag she sported last year, either. She really wants the pillowcase.

What's the big deal, you say? To you, it's just a pillowcase, just a sensible option to cart around more candy. What's all the fuss?

But to me, it signals the end of an era. It's the beginning of the end of Halloween at our house. And I dread that damn pillowcase.

I still have years of trick-or-treating left with my son, thank goodness, but I'm hearing the clock tick with my daughter.

I've only got a few more years -- maybe just one or two -- to watch my daughter shuffle excitedly down the street in an ill-fitting costume, to catch the glimpses of face paint and sequins and masks as she and her friends run and shriek, to hear her little voice yell out "trick or treat!" over and over again, from house to house.

"Mommy! Look what I got!" won't even be uttered this year. She'll be too far ahead with her friends down the street, because, as she's said, she's "old enough" to trick-or-treat without me this year.

Of course she is. I know that.

So I'll let her run ahead with her friends, as they whisper and giggle, fueled by sugar and candy corn cupcakes from their classroom parties.

And I'll be grateful for the sight of my little boy, still so excited to show me what he got for Halloween, still so caught up in the magic of the moment.

And I'll feel the tiny pull of knowing that there will be only so many years that I'll stand at the sidewalk, on unseasonably warm days and blustery, windy ones, to watch my children ring neighborhood doorbells and burrow into candy bowls for Blow Pops and Skittles.

I'll catch a knowing look from my friends and neighbors, as they roll their eyes and mouth the words "adorable" over my sweet children's heads. My friends' husbands, just home from work, will soften at the sight of my kids, just for a minute, as they hold open the door or act frightened when they pass us on the street, making a big show of pretending not to know who my children are.

My son will believe them. But my daughter won't.

I know it's not forever, these days of trick-or-treating, these days of childhood. And oh, how heartbreaking it is to leave them behind.

But not just yet. So I'll be more present this year on Halloween, without the harried years of getting infants into costumes and worrying about toddlers with coughs who just want to go to one more house before I get them back inside. I'll enjoy the Halloween parade at my children's school, knowing that next year will be my daughter's last stroll around the field. Maybe I'll take a few more pictures this year. And videos. And know that I'll be grateful for more parades with my boy.

I'll be young again this Halloween, as I always am on the 31st.

It's become a mega-super-duper holiday in recent years. I think we've all embraced it because it's free of the obligation and guilt and dysfunction that other holidays carry with them. There's no fighting with your sister-in-law over who's going to whose house to trick or treat. No "Secret Pumpkin" with your four brothers and sisters, along with a $50 gift limit. No drunken pumpkin picking and family fights on the hayride afterwards. (At least I hope not, for your sake.)

There's just reveling in the seasonal fun and spooky spiritedness. Eating candy we never eat all year and licking just a smidge of orange frosting off our fingers. Lighting the jack o'lantern we carved and stepping back to get a good look. Being young and carefree in our hearts and our minds, if it's only for a few short hours, and having fun just for the good-old-fashioned fun of it. And if you're lucky, a pumpkin martini (or two) may be involved.

So on Monday, as the witches and Luke Skywalkers and skeletons all parade around the playground, I'm going to take in every delicious minute of it.

I'll take my time getting my kids into their costumes, and take lots of pictures, even though it's starting to annoy my daughter. I'll bundle myself up in cozy fall clothes for trick-or-treating, and take mental snapshots of how my babies looked in the fading fall light, scurrying like little goblins, free from the finite, lost in the sweet flow of the moment.

And I'll get lost in the sweet flow of the moment myself, and forget that these days are fading, like the garnet and rust fall leaves that swirl in dervishes, teasing me with the passage of time.

It's Now or Never

2011-10-25T13:30:00.004-04:00

After celebrating my 41st birthday this summer, I realized that I may not have more years ahead of me than behind me.

That fact crept up on me quite suddenly. As a child, I sometimes lay in bed at night and grew anxious at the thought of dying (I'm Irish Catholic. We do that.). To calm my mind, and explain away the justifiable anxiety, I obsessively listed in my head all the things I had yet to experience -- high school, college, my first apartment, love, travelling to faraway places, a house, a career, a baby, grandchildren. It seemed plausible that the end was not worth obsessing about. I'd be too busy for death. There was still so much to do. Never mind the fact that all of these milestones weren't guaranteed. I was eight. I thought I was entitled to them.

So I got my driver's license. Graduated from college. Ran a marathon. Got my name on the masthead of a magazine. (Down at the bottom. Waaaay down at the bottom.) I gave birth. Twice. I walked across a Roman aqueduct in Spain. I did stand-up comedy in poorly-lit amateur comedy clubs in Manhattan. I've given stray animals homes. Lived in London, in New York City and in San Francisco. And in Syracuse, New York, in Ridgefield, Connecticut and in Glendale, Queens, too. I biked across the Golden Gate Bridge. I've been drunk in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day. I volunteered in a food bank for AIDS patients. I learned to play the guitar. And pretty much forgot everything I learned. I sang with a band once -- badly -- for about five minutes. I snuck a bottle of whiskey down my pants and got away with it. (That's not a goal, so much as a skill. See Irish Catholic above.) I've loved and been loved greatly. I've had my heart broken a few times. I married younger than I thought I would, and am forever thankful, so damn thankful, that I didn't let him go.

There's a lot I haven't done, because fear has paralyzed me. I've never gone on a long trip by myself. I've never mountain biked on a wooded trail. (I'm from Queens. That's a given.) I've never done a headstand. I've never lived all alone -- without parents or roommates or live-in lovers. I've never fully pursued my dream of writing. At least not until now.

But what does it all add up to? It doesn't make me better than you. It doesn't make me worse, either. It makes me...me, I guess.

So are the best years of my life already behind me? That doesn't seem likely, because -- please God -- I've got another thirty years in me. Maybe forty.

But maybe I don't even have one more year, or one more month. Because life just happens, in what feels like forever and then all of a sudden and in an instant, in one swift, deft punch to the gut. (I know, I know. Spit-spit, puh-puh, bite your tongue. I'm just making conversation.)

But what if I've got this time ahead of me? And what if I don't?

What if I live out the remaining years ahead of me as if they were the best years of my life?

What if I've only just begun?

What is about to be possible, plausible, tangible, real, actual?

What if I continue to let fear keep me from them?

What if I don't? What if I finally realize that fear is not an option?

(Insert oft-used, cliched Yoda quote here.)

What will I do today that will keep me on that path?

What will you do?

Go WoHeLo yourself.

2011-10-18T11:16:00.007-04:00

When I was in second grade, the applications for girls' leadership organizations were sent home from school in our trusty Trapper Keepers. Don't forget, girls! Tell your parents! We'd finally reached the age when we could become Girl Scouts or Camp Fire Girls! Both forms promised fun! friendship! and travel! (Well, maybe not the travel. But I could have sworn something was mentioned on the damn form.)

I wasn't too interested in either one. But my mother and my best friend's mother both were. My mom worked, and my best friend's mom, Mrs. W., watched me every day after school. Clearly, they'd talked, and decided that an extra ninety minutes of peer interaction (and a chance for Mrs. W. to catch her breath before we busted in the front door after school) would be a positive experience for all of us.

Next thing I knew, I was a Bluebird. My best friend Ann had chosen the group, and I went along with her because I didn't feel like watching "Gilligan's Island" re-runs by myself in Mrs. W's faux-brick-faced living room. And because Mrs. W. didn't need to run two of us to two separate meetings each week, quite honestly.

So I got the uniform, the pin and the blue beanie. Deep down, I knew that my mother's heart was broken. She'd been a Brownie and a Girl Scout until she was in high school, for heaven's sakes, and she had hoped that I'd become a Girl Scout as well. But she swallowed hard and hemmed my blue skirt anyway.

The first years of Camp Fire Girls -- strangely named "Bluebirds" -- seemed very much like Girl Scouts at first glance. We wore the same poly/acrylic uniforms, except ours were two-toned, red vest on top and blue skirt on the bottom. We had pins, and we had secret handshakes and ceremonies, just like those other girls. We were regarded as an obvious knock-off of Girl Scouts, when in truth, Camp Fire Girls had been founded two years before Juliette Low ever got any bright ideas. But it's ok. I'm not bitter. The poor woman was deaf in one ear, for crying out loud.

But right out of the starting gate, I felt that Bluebirds had the better deal. Exhibit A: the uniform. It was bright, tailored and crisp, and I thought I looked like hot shit in it. Especially when I wore it with navy cable-knit knee socks and Earth shoes. The Brownies in my neighborhood just looked dirty and depressed in their monochromatic, mud-toned threads. Their noses ran a lot. And they didn't wipe them.

On days when our troop meetings took place, we were allowed to wear our Bluebird uniforms to school instead of our everyday red plaid Catholic school jumpers. The Brownies wore theirs, too. It may have required dispensation from the Pope, but it was sanctioned and welcomed.

Strangely enough, when we graduated to Camp Fire Girls, we weren't allowed to wear the corresponding uniforms, which consisted of navy bell bottoms and devastatingly hip navy felt vests. The Girl Scouts still got to prance around in their Kermit-the-Frog-hued get-ups and sashay in their sashes, but not us. No, sir. I think the nuns thought we had become subversive. Or at the very least, dirty hippies in training.

It's safe to say that the paths of Scouting and Camp Fire Girls diverged as we progressed. True, we had badges and neckerchiefs. But we wore felt vests. We had Indian names. We were about as "native" as the Indian from the Village People, but what the hell did we know? We lived in Queens. Any "camp fire" taking place in the outerboroughs involved a rusted metal trash barrel and a bunch of potheads and dusties in a city playground after dark. You don't wanna roast marshmallows with those people. Trust me.

Some Camp Fire troops allowed boys to join, something those prissy Girl Scouts would never do. We earned wooden beads when projects were accomplished, and our mothers sewed them on our felt vests in cool patterns -- like flowers, and rainbows, and peace signs. We may have possibly earned an "E-Z Wider Rolling Paper" craft badge along the way. That's how cool we were.

Camp Fire troop leaders were moms who wore flared jeans and sported wedge boots in delicious shades of caramel leather. Their hair was feathered, and they had tons of cowlneck sweaters in mushroom, mauve and navy, accented perfectly with gold chains or pendants in the shapes of butterflies or owls. They let us hot-glue pinecones to stuff. They had macrame plant hangers and knew how to make hook rugs. They listened to Carly Simon on the radio when they pulled up in their Gran Torinos and Toyotas for meetings. They were something for a kid from the seventies to aspire to.

Not so much for The Girl Scout troop leaders in our 'nabe. I recall them as frigid nerds, for the most part. They yelled a lot and wore scratchy, pleated wool and unsightly plaid pantsuits. They didn't like my mother, because she worked full-time. Their husbands looked whipped. Their kids were not your friends, and your mother didn't even make you invite them to your birthday parties. That's how annoying they were.

You know that scene in a movie where they film a line of tough people in slow motion, walking abreast, wearing all kinds of leather, with a wall of flames and swirls of acrid smoke licking at their backs? They strut like runway models, indifferent to the chaos and carnage surrounding them. They're just moving forward, without a bead of sweat on their brow or a single hair out of place.

Yeah.

That was us, the Camp Fire Girls, sauntering down 78th Avenue to a troop meeting. And we kicked the shit out of those sickly-green-sash-sporting cookie pusses.

At least that's how I remember it.

Today, I'm the leader for my daughter's Girl Scout troop. We don't have Camp Fire Girls 'round here no more. If I may, I'd like to give a shout-out to all of the Girl Scout troop leaders at my daughter's elementary school. I'd go on a night hike with you ladies any time.

But deep down, in the fibers of my childhood memories, I'm still that swinging, long-haired, seventies girl, in an even swingier Camp Fire Girl vest. And I've got that E-Z Wider badge someplace. Just give me a sec.

Inspiration Point Friday --

2011-10-14T11:58:00.004-04:00

Can it please be autumn already? Please? Can we get a move on here, seasons? What's the hold-up?

I need firepits and fleece blankets. Pronto. I need hot chocolate, hot cider, hot toddies, hot mulled wine -- hot booze, essentially. Just hot booze. Maybe not hot beer, but let's fire up that pumpkin ale and see what happens. I'm feeling adventurous.

I need to get my Aran sweaters out of mothballs and onto my person. I'm showing my age. I used to say that about men, but now I say it about merino wool. Not that I kept men in mothballs, of course. I never said anything like, "It puts the mothballs on its skin so it stays fresh all season, or it gets the hose." (Honest I didn't. Just don't go near that tarp covering up the hole in my backyard, or it gets the hose.)

I need my kids to stay little so they'll never stop wanting to go on long car rides to pick seasonal produce with us. I rue the day that we're driving in the car and I catch a glimpse of them rolling their eyes in the back seat, while I get giddy about Macouns and Cortlands and all the things I'll bake them in while we head out for a day of apple picking. I've got about three more years until I reach official un-cool-mom status.

I need to look like Ali McGraw in "Love Story." Not that it would ever be humanly possible, but I'd like to pretend that I do, in a fitted wool coat and adorable knit hat. Fall means never having to wear unflattering cap sleeves that accentuate my poorly defined tricep muscles. (Rent the damn movie if you don't get the reference. Ryan O'Neal was cute, then, before he got arrested on weapons charges.)

I need a better picture of my son with fall-themed face paint this year, because last year he looked like he was viciously attacked by a gang of gourd hooligans.

I need a reason to wear a cape, other than an invitation to a Halloween costsume party.

I need filtered, fading light through a kaleidoscope of oak leaves. And crunching, lots of crunching under my smartly-heeled boots while I take a walk with my kids.

And I need this yummy sweater from Anthropologie. Is that so wrong?

But here's what else I need, fall. Here's the crux of it. Listen up, autumn, and listen good.

I need the change of seasons, but not the passage of time.

I need my kids to stay this little forever. I need the days to last longer, I need time to stand still, I need this to last indefinitely.

Can you do that, fall? Can you?

If you can't, then don't bother coming at all. Because I know what you're really here for.

But you will, just like the seasons before and those that follow. And you will make the brevity of life so delicious, so tormenting, so breathtaking, that I'll need more than one stiff hot toddy to face it.

But I'll love you just the same, you sweet, sweet season. Even though you haunt me.

Now where's my mulled wine, damnit? I've got a hayride to catch.

Reason #697 Why It's Easier to Be a Boy

2011-10-13T14:51:00.001-04:00

How to plan a Girl Scout pumpkin picking field trip:

1) Attempt to complete the "re-registration" of your Girl Scout troop via "convenient online format" in August.

2) Play phone and e-tag with "data specialist" at local Girl Scout Council office until the end of September.

3) Fill out reams of paperwork to "re-register" your troop manually in October, since the "convenient online format" wasn't so convenient.

4) Send out an email reminder to parents one month before the trip.

5) Send out an email regarding carpooling to and from the trip.

6) Answer emails about snacks and drinks on the trip.

7) Complete a "trip approval form" two weeks before the trip.

8) Have each parent complete a permission slip before the trip.

9) Contact two separate farms to reserve space for a hay ride.

10) Plan raindate in the event of inclement weather on the day of the trip.

11) Send out another email reminder to parents two weeks before the trip.

12) Buy snacks and drinks, hand sanitizer, first aid kit for splinters from hay on hay ride, extra bags to carry pumpkins, sunscreen, fall-themed napkins and plates, extra water, and tissues.

13) Send out a second email regarding carpooling to and from the trip.

14) Update all emergency contact information in iPhone and have copies available for Service Unit Manager, co-leader, and one other parent "on call" in case of emergency.

15) Pick up ten girls after school and walk them back to my house.

16) Open the door at 3:30 pm and see a monsoon outside the front door.

How to plan a Boy Scout pumpkin picking field trip:

1) Send out an email to Boy Scout troop two days before the weekend and ask, "Who's around at 2 pm to go pumpkin picking on Saturday?"

2011-10-12T12:08:00.006-04:00

I want to have an affair with Alan Rickman.

But all I want to do is go to a restaurant with him and listen to him order from the menu. Then I'll just get up and leave. Trust me. I'm a cheap date.

That's not weird, is it? It's not like I'm a friggin' Muggle, or something. (And there goes my chance of ever getting more than twelve hits on my blog.)

I love the sound of a man's voice. Scratch that. I love the sound of certain men's voices. Richard Simmons' cackle on audio loop could cause me to end up in a tall bell tower with an Uzi. My God, we could have won the war on terror and smoked out Bin Laden out years ago if we'd blasted the sound of Richard screaming, "I wanna DAAAAAAAAAAHNCE with somebody!" from a tinny ice cream truck P.A. system, while driving around in circles in Afghanistan. It's not a big country. And I'm guessing gas would be cheap. But now I'm off-topic.

I also can't stand to hear men's voices singing in a choir. Men's choirs just make me feel sad. Or that I've been unknowingly cast in a remake of "The Exorcist." They're usually singing about heavenly ascensions, about the abject horrors of hell in short, staccato notes, or they're performing a requiem written by some famous composer whose life was cut horribly short by consumption and syphillis. That's just not a fun night out for me.

Forget about James Earl Jones. That's like getting all hot and bothered about God. I may have issues, but not those issues.

I need a voice like Lee Marvin's. Ah, that might be too much. Maybe more like George Clooney's or Jon Hamm's, telling me -- with unbridled patience -- how to turn a wrench or what just happened in the Yankees game while I go into the kitchen for a minute to get more wine. Or that he's so consumed with me that he just can't stand to be away from me for a single minute, not a second, and that he'll clean the whole house while I just lie down and rest and work on my gorgeous. I definitely want to hear Jon Hamm's voice saying that. What? Oh, hi, honey. Nothing. Just my blog. The ol' bloggy-blog. Silly ol' bloggedy-blog-blog. You look good. Were you working out just now? You can totally tell. Totally.

I guess it all harkens back to the sound of my father's voice, coming up the stairs late at night after work. One of my earliest memories in life is the slatted view from my crib, looking out on our hallway in our first apartment in Queens. Some nights my father would be out late, taking night classes or working (or stopping at the pub afterwards), and my mother was often left with the task of putting a wild-eyed toddler to bed by herself. She tried to get me to bed at a decent hour. Oh, how she tried. But I wasn't having it, and I just couldn't fall sleep until I knew he was home. We lived in a two-family house then, and we rented out the top floor apartment. My tiny room looked out onto the hallway that led to the flight of stairs below. I waited for him, for what seemed like hours, kneeling in my crib and popping my head below the sight line whenever my mother checked on me. And then he was finally home. I'm sure I smelled the cigarette smoke first. But the sound of him, the thunk of his footfall on the stairs, then his voice, his distinct, unmistakable voice in my room, lifting me up and ignoring my mother's pleas to keep me in bed and get a good night's sleep, the "Hi, Bonzo!" near my cheek as he hugged me -- Daddy was home. And it was all ok. Except for all the sleep I missed, which means I should really be about five foot six. Ah, well.

Often, on weekends, my parents would have friends over. I was allowed to stay up until all hours, but at some point, bedtime beckoned, and I'd lie in the dark and listen to their conversations while I tried to fall asleep. The high-pitched laughs of girlfriends and wives always startled me, but the hum of the men, the constant baritone notes, rolling and dropping, the comforting clamor of a male laugh, one joining the other in unison, was better than any lullaby could have been.

Gloria Steinem must want to gouge my eyes out right about now. Yeah, 'cause she's TOTALLY reading this.

Sometimes I think I get men better than women. Some of my closest friends in high school and college were guys, guys whom I loved and trusted and admired and still do, to this day. As a little girl, I always liked being around my father and my uncle and my older Irish boy-cousins and all of their crazy friends, with all of their crazy-boy energy. If I started bugging them from hanging around too long, they told me to skedaddle. Or get them a beer. Simple as that.

I never understood all the drama around girls, all the high-pitched shrieking and talking on the telephone about who said what and who did what and what she wore and how you had to call eight different girlfriends for eight different perspectives on what it all really meant. Too much noise.

I'm no damsel in distress, but the sound of a man's voice calms me. Not when it's whiny and sinus-y -- sorry, Woody, but you only increase my sense of danger -- but when it's strong, logical, even-keeled, and tempered with just the right amount of kindness -- then I'm hooked.

My husband has that kind of voice. Some nights, snuggled up in bed with him, I can drift off to sleep at the sound of his voice, that reverbating, calming hum I hear with my head on his chest while he answers one of 87,000 questions I ask him about the movie he's trying to watch. Or about "Boardwalk Empire," which is probably why he doesn't watch it anymore. Or why he didn't even try to start watching "Game of Thrones." Why are we paying for HBO, anyway?

Maybe it's also because the TV remote is his bitch, he owns it 24/7, he picks the stuff I absolutely never want to watch, and my inability to follow plot lines just puts me into some kind of defensive sleep mode.

I'll just say it's his voice and go with that instead. Because there are also a million things he's said to me over the years with that kind, calm voice of his, things like "I love you" and "Will you marry me" and "We have a baby girl" and "The doctor said my blood pressure is fine" and "Your father just got out of surgery and he's awake" and lots, oh lots, of other kind, calm things that shouldn't be shared on blogs, but keep me perfectly content to serve him as the master of his remote control domain. (Bowing on one knee with head lowered.) My infrared wireless liege!

But if I see Alan Rickman at the table next to us the next time we go out to dinner, I'm totally going over to sit at his table. Just to hear him order dessert. And my husband will just have to understand.

The Long and Winding Road

2011-10-11T13:26:00.013-04:00

I had a bit of Beatlemania this week.

Martin Scorsese recently released his documentary about George Harrison -- "Living in the Material World" -- and my husband and I watched it at home on Saturday. The next day, Sunday, October 9th, was John Lennon's birthday, and Paul McCartney and his fiance Nancy Shevell were married that same day, in the same place where Paul and his first wife Linda married forty-two years earlier.

It was a bit strange to have a convergence of such events in the media, to see juxtapositions of past and present Beatles footage, of now and then, of John never reaching old age and Paul looking noticeably older as he waved from the steps of the Marylebone Central Office in London. To quote "The Brady Bunch" in their famous two-part Hawaiian episode -- "Doodle-oodle-doooooo."

I never knew life without the Beatles. Sounds silly, I guess, to say it, but I was born just a few months after the Beatles had broken up, as Paul McCartney sprouted "wings" into a solo career, and the radio was consumed with their music. They were in the car. In the living room on my parents' hi-fi, the Harman Kardon with the brushed steel knobs and green-glowing bandwidth. On the FM radio in my uncle's VW Beetle. In Muzak form, on line at the bank and in the elevator. They were there, always, like light and air, wherever I was, at any given time.

My great-aunt Charlotte didn't like them. Not one bit. When I plastered the walls of my childhood bedroom with Beatles posters, she harumphed at the sight of it and told me that "they brought the drugs to the Sixties." Great-Aunt Charlotte could have benefitted from a toke or two herself, to be sure. But you couldn't pin all the wrongs of a generation on four boys from Liverpool.

By the late seventies, there were certain Beatles songs that broke the generational barrier, ones like "Eleanor Rigby" and "Michelle." Those became part of the musical vernacular, and your grandmother didn't complain if she overheard those songs in the doctor's waiting room. If Perry Como was singing the cover, so much the better. To her, and lots of little old ladies like her, that was good music.

But just try to belt out the line "Everybody had a wet dream" from "I've Got a Feeling" when you're an innocent, unknowing kid playing records in the basement -- and there's gonna be trouble.

During my teen years, I watched the Beatles shift from long-haired rebels to esteemed artists. By the eighties, they were suddenly safe, almost quaint, as music got harder and scarier. I imagine that future generations will regard them as modern-day Beethovens and Mozarts.

I was somewhat taken aback at those who consumed every fact and date surrounding the Four Lads, as if memorization could somehow facilitate a kind of quasi-intimacy with them. I've never been that kind of fan about anything. I can't tell you when the Beatles were in the studio or what the exact date of their last public concert was. I just know that I'm brought someplace special whenever I hear a certain song, and that my response is immediately emotional, almost spiritual, at tiimes. I can't say why. It just is.

For my mother, a teenager in plaid skirt and knee socks, screaming in front of her television in 1964, they were the mop-topped, collarless-suited boys who'd brought something unexpected from across the Pond. They'd brought fun and hope and life after the assassination of John F. Kennedy just a few months before, and she was completely transfixed by the sight of them in that small, glowing screen in her parents' living room. Somewhere, in a box of my mother's old photographs, are square, scalloped pictures of a grainy television screen with lined images of John and Paul standing stiff at the microphone. She knew, at sixteen, that this was something worth remembering, and she squeezed off a few shots of the boys, thinking that they'd never make their way back to Amer-ee-kay again.

My Beatles were the late-Sixties Beatles, the about-to-be-broken-up Beatles, the "Let It Be" session Beatles, the Billy Preston Beatles, the animated lads who had Blue Meanies after them on Sunday afternoons on Channel 5, the scruffy, shaggy boys with long hair and funny cigarettes. It would be wrong to say that my husband didn't channel a bit of Paul when he grew out his bushy beard and Jew-fro (his word, not mine) in college, and to say that I didn't fall for it in some small part because of my elementary school-aged fascination with Paul. My husband was way cuter, of course (ahem), but he elicited some of that same twentysomething soulful swagger, that coming into his own-ness, just as Paul displayed behind the piano at Twickenham Studios.

The Beatles never seemed to "jump the shark," like so many other American icons did. Maybe it was because they left us wanting more. Or because John Lennon was shot at such a young age, and the possibility of a Beatles reunion -- and any Beatles comeback mistakes -- were never to take place.

So we made fools of ourselves instead, because the Fab Four never got the chance to.

In college, I studied abroad in London and made the mecca to Abbey Road Studios with a friend. I took a self-guided "Beatles tour" and stood at the old Apple offices, my neck craning to see the roof of the building where they'd played their last impromptu concert. On any given day in London, I'd guess there are still foreign students trying to re-enact the Abbey Road cover and pissing off motorists who live nearby. I don't know when that will stop.

Somehow, the Beatles never went out of vogue. As I reached parenthood myself, I sang Beatles songs to my children at night to help them drift off to sleep, and my husband and I seemed to be playing Beatles music more often that not in the house. It was as necessary to us as Rodgers and Hammerstein, as Miles Davis, as Bach or Billie Holiday. It was schooling, plain and simple.

Last year, the kids even watched us download all the Beatles songs we hadn't owned in digital form when iTunes finally partnered with the Beatles and made their music catalog available. It was an event, I'm almost embarrassed to say.

Today, the Beatles seem more of a brand than a band. Which I guess is understandable, since they haven't played together in forty-one years. But I bought it, hook line and sinker, and I marketed it to my kids as well. Both my daughter and son had various incarnations of Beatles onesies and toddler tees, and it was much more about me, than them, when they sported them. Who didn't run out to buy Beatles Rock Band a few years ago and fight their kids for a turn on the drum pads?

So many of us have passed on that music, that time, that shared sense of the past, to our kids. My daughter asks me lots of questions about the Beatles -- which one has died, who's the oldest, who's the youngest, who played the bass and who played the drums. My son sometimes says, "Mom listen I can say them all real fast -- JohnPaulGeorgeRingo."

The Beatles have become something comforting to us, which is ironic, considering the tumultous decade from whence they came. But we Gen X'ers knew nothing different. We didn't have the fifties. We were born into the 1968 Chicago riots, into Vietnam, into gas lines and Iranian hostages. That's our normal.

Although it might not have always been popular to say it, the Beatles are, for most of us, our soundtracks, our lullabies, our earliest moments and the first albums we ever bought. We owned music from The Knack and Billy Idol and Iron Maiden and David Bowie and The Replacements and The Pretenders and Metallica and The Talking Heads and U2, but the Beatles albums were leaning right up against them, right there in the old milk crates we kept in our bedrooms, stacked tight with records that we thwapped back and forth until we found the one we wanted, the song that defined us that week in the confines of our teenage bedrooms.

And I guess that what's I want to pass along to my kids when I blast "Hello Goodbye" while I'm cooking dinner or let them watch "A Hard Day's Night" on a rainy weekend afternoon. Maybe I selfishly want them to know something that, perhaps, they can't. I want them to come back with me to my grandmother's stoop in Queens Village, to the back seat of a 1977 Toyota Corolla, to the light of summer sun that plays off the leaves of a tree when you have nothing better to do in childhood than to stare at it for minutes on end. I want them to know that I was a kid once, too. I want the music to stir them, to change them, as it did for me, but in their own experience and in their own way, if they're drawn to it.

I shouldn't DJ the soundtrack for their innocence, for their memories, for these days that will be so far from them in such a short time. It is theirs to make, theirs to shape, theirs to sift through and sort, but I hope that some of these songs are there, somewhere, when they look back. And I hope they make them feel as comforted and content as I do, even now, when I hear them.

My daughter recently made a playlist on her iTouch called "Me and Mom." On it are songs of her young life, entwined with mine. She plays it almost every night before she goes to bed. There's Carole King, Rosemary Clooney, U2, Dean Martin, even that song "Magic" by Pilot (whoa, ho, ho, it's maaaah-gic, you knoooooow), but the artist who pops up most often is -- you guessed it -- the Beatles. She told our babysitter recently, when asked why she had these kinds of songs on her iTouch, "I live with my mother. Doesn't that explain it?"

Maybe music can sometimes say what our own words can't. Even for mushy wanna-be writers like myself.

Let it be, let it be.

Whisper words of wisdom.

Let it be.

Inspiration Point Friday -- Think Different

2011-10-07T10:10:00.006-04:00

I'm no Steve Jobs. Hell, I'm no Bill Gates. I'm not even the tech guy who used to come up and fix my computer every week when I worked at Conde Nast. I usually just had to turn the damn thing on and off again. (I think the kids call that re-booting.) But he was nice. Sometimes he'd stay for a minute and eat handfuls of whatever I had in the candy dish on my desk.

But back to the topic at hand. Jobs' death this week reminded me how short and fragile life is, how no one, not one of us, not nobody, not no how, is getting out of this world alive. If $8.3 billion couldn't buy Steve Jobs immortality -- or sweet merciful Lord, just a g.d. cure -- then what chance do the rest of us have?

He was a tyrant to his employees, he was a tireless marketer, and he was defiant, but he was never anything less than passionate about his calling in life. He pursued the very core of the thing he truly loved to do.

(Hit the pause button on the Playlist player below if you'd like to view this video.)

After reading several of his most memorable quotes, and watching (via YouTube) his commencement address to a graduating class at Stanford a few years ago, I got to thinking about how I've always wanted to write -- always. Since the age of four, I scribbled on legal pads and clacked away at typewriters. I have ideas. Oh, how I have ideas. (Thanks to those of you who've suffered through them on my blog, week after week.)

There have been times when I've stopped writing. Scroll through my blog history and you'll see giant chunks of time when nothing was posted.

But I come back to it.

Because I can't let it go.

And I shouldn't.

So I won't.

Even though I don't always know where it will lead me.

I'll still go -- fumbling, in the dark, up against walls and corners, all alone -- because I can't stop.

I'm not going to change the world if I do.

But I'll hear what my soul longs to say.

And I think that's what Steve Jobs' spirit was trying to say, too.

It wasn't about stock prices or palatial homes. Read one of many articles about Jobs and you'll learn about his relatively modest home in Silicon Valley, about the home he once owned that had nothing but an old Harley in the living room, about being so poor, once he dropped out of college, that he only had one decent meal a week from the local Buddhist temple, and that he was happy.

It's something to think about.

But hey! Let's be schizophrenic for a minute and gush about the materialistic tokens that bring me momentary glimpses of joy and glee. (If you missed my post about the Louboutins, shame on you. And me.)

A writer writes. A writer doesn't need props to write. Especially a broken, old, banged-up Underwood typewriter. But I've always wanted one, since I was a brooding English major in college. I finally snagged one on eBay this week -- at the right price. I'm waiting for that box from UPS like a kid counting down the days to Christmas. I'm guessing that it's an old office typewriter that was used again and again by a Girl Friday to type up a letter beginning with "Kind Sir:", but oh what magic it might have made! Oh, how kismet-ish (go with me here) it would be to know that sheaths of paper bearing the words of Raymond Chandler, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, or Dorothy Parker may have curled under the keys? I'm a romantic, I know. And somewhat delusional. No, I'm not on medication. Why do you ask?

I'm currently grappling with the idea of writing a story about growing up in the outerboroughs. It's here in me somewhere. I just need to get it out. I see it as a screenplay, and I hear the dialogue in my head all the time. (I told you, I'm not on medication! Honestly!) I can hear myself pitching it in a meeting as "the Queens-Irish version of 'Moonstruck'." And then see myself getting shown to the exit a few minutes later.

But I've gotta get it out. My life's gonna go down the toilet if I don't.

(Hit the pause button on the Playlist player below if you'd like to view this video.)

And can't I sit in this chair while I write it? Please? Just for a little while?

The One About the Louboutins

2011-10-05T11:06:00.020-04:00

"Christian Louboutin pumps are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

-- Benjamin Franklin's wife

A few weeks ago, I ordered a pair of shoes through a fancy department store website.

They were on sale. They were flats. They were sensible. They were nothing to write home about.

Fast forward two weeks and a package from said fancy department store arrives in the mail. Inside were two shoeboxes. One was the pair of sensible, sale-priced flats that I'd ordered. The second was...

A CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN SHOEBOX.

My breath went shallow. My hands were shaky. What in God's sweet merciful name had happened here?

And then I panicked. SWEET JESUS! MY CREDIT CARD'S BEEN ERRONEOUSLY CHARGED FOR A PAIR OF LOUBOUTINS! American Express Security Services is calling my husband right now at the office and telling him that his wife paid $895.00 for a pair of shoes. He's doubled over in pain, weeping, flinging himself on the floor, screaming "LOUBOUTINS!" to the horror of his co-workers. A crowd is forming outside his office door, and they're stunned, whispering, "She bought Louboutins..." as they step back to clear a path so the EMT workers can bring in the gurney to his office. In years to come, my children -- and my children's children -- will only speak of it as "the shoe which must not be named."

I ripped through the packaging in a frenzy, searching for the invoice. I started to hyperventilate. What divorce court would find in favor for a woman who had her credit card ERRONEOUSLY CHARGED FOR A PAIR OF LOUBOUTINS? I'd be penniless, cast out, dressed in tatters, save for a divinely fabulous pair of heels, preferably with peacock feathers. I'd become the stuff of suburban legend. They'd call me "Little Kathleen" and I'd wrap my head tastefully in scarves, secured with a brooch made from the paper remnants of the shoebox. (It's a "Grey Gardens" reference. Rent the documentary if you haven't seen it.)

The Catholic in me wouldn't allow myself to even touch the black box until I'd laid eyes on the invoice. I scanned the paper. Louboutin, Louboutin, Louboutin, nine hundred dollars, nine hundred dollars, nine hundred dollars...nothing. There was absolutely nothing on the invoice, save for the one line about my sensible, sale-priced flats and the $69.00 total.

I was confused for a moment, stunned. And then slowly, like a rising fever, it came upon me, making my body tingle and my pulse race.

The fancy department store made a mistake. But not just any mistake. A big ol', glaring, bright-red-soled mistake.

They'd sent me a free pair of Louboutins.

Let that sink in for a minute.

A. Free. Pair. Of. Louboutins.

I clawed at the cover and opened the box. A glorious white light emanated from the box. A choir of cherubs sang in Latin. (At least I think it was Latin. I don't know. I should have taken Latin III.)

The air smelled of Thierry Mugler "Angel" perfume (why, I don't know. But it did. It just did. Go with me, here.) Animated rabbits and bluebirds gathered at my living room window and nodded in happy agreement at my good fortune. And not one of them shit on my front porch railing, for once.

And then the cynicism set in.

What if they looked like this?

Or like this?

Not that there's anything wrong with those shoes, of course. Perish the thought. (Spitting on the ground in an Eastern European shtetl fashion between two fingers like my husband's Great-Aunt Faye for protection.) But I'm not going to a party with P. Diddy-Sean John-P. Did-whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is and getting Cristal bottle service for four hours. They'd be wasted on me, in all honesty. (The shoes. Not the Cristal. But I digress.)

And then I opened them.

And they were beautiful.

And classic.

And wearable with every piece of clothing that I own.

They were even nicer in the box than they looked on Princess Kate in last week's People magazine.

And they were a size 6.

I shoved my 8 1/2 farmer foot into them with psychotic fury, not caring if I broke a toe or split a nail. These were LOUBOUTINS, for Chrissakes! The plastic surgery it would take to get me in them wouldn't cost as much as the shoes themselves! Fit, damn you, fit for the love of God! Why do you torment me so? Why do you appear at my doorstep and not let me partake? I sounded like William Shatner in that Star Trek movie screaming, "FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!" (My husband knows which one. Ask him. I have no fucking idea.)

Then I stopped. Because I cared more about the leather than about my own appendage. Because I had that much respect for the shoe. And because I knew at that exact moment that God had smited me. Or smoted me. Whatever. You get the idea.

The Louboutins were not meant to be. It was God's will. I've gone through Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief. It's a "was." Thanks for your concern.

So what would I do? Would I sell them on eBay? And get hit by a bus wearing the shoes I'd bought with the money I'd made from the sale? Yes, yes, that seemed about right, given my religious upbringing and my well-formed superego. Should I return them for store credit at said fancy department store? With what, since there was no receipt, no paper trail, no proof that they'd ever come from said fancy department store at all? I'd have to get dressed up and break out my good handbag for that trip. I wasn't sure I was up to it. And what would I say? That I'd received them as a gift? Who would buy me shoes and not know my size? I couldn't pull it off. I'd seen a lot of CSI and Law and Order, but I just couldn't commit the fraudulent crime.

Who would I give them to? Yes, yes, I see your hand going up. But hold up a sec. The bad luck would just carry over to whoever inherited them. They're tainted, they're cursed -- they're devil shoes. The inverse of Dorothy's ruby slippers. Beezelbub stilettos. Hades heels. Lucifer Louboutins. (Spitting again on the ground in Eastern European shtetl fashion.) Be gone, patent taupe demons! I command you!

And so they sit, my sad, sad, Louboutins, in a dark, black box, wrongfully shamed by an act they did not commit. My poor, innocent, red-soled pawns, damned for all eternity. Or, at least for this week, until I figure out what the hell to do with them.

I give this about ten seconds before my size 6 friends all post "helpful" comments on the blog. Have at ye, girls, have at ye. But be warned. The Louboutins will steal your soul.

And sweet, sweet Jehosaphat, you'll look fabulous going through the Nine Circles of Hell.

(Peh-peh. Spitting again in Eastern European shtetl fashion. Not that such a thing should happen to you. God forbid. Here. Have a cookie. Take two. They're small.)

Inspiration Point Friday -- Livin' (Room) Large

2011-09-30T10:56:00.006-04:00

Here at Inspiration Point, we're planning on re-vamping our living room. It's been ten years, and we still don't like sitting in it so much...even though we've really, really tried. We rushed to decorate the room when we first bought our house, and boy, did we screw it up. Armless loveseats? What the hell were we thinking?

We just had a gas insert installed in our suddenly not-working woodburning fireplace, which made us want all the more to create a room that called for cozying up with books and cocktails and swanky hors d'oeuvres and Christmas presents to open and heaven knows what else we can think up.

We were a little bit traumatized after the whole armless loveseat incident, so we enlisted the help of a wonderful designer -- Holly Mathis -- who does virtual consultations from her home in Texas.

We're still in process, but man, do we love her and her ideas. I think I've mentioned her before, but I'll mention her again. Check out her lovely, lovely website and even lovelier ideas at www.hollymathisinteriors.com.

With Holly's help we (which would be me) started putting together a virtual pinboard of things we love and she added to them as well.

One of her suggestions is this chocolate velvet Chesterfield sofa from Restoration Hardware. I'm dreaming about it at night and wondering how I can make it my own...and keep the dog from sleeping on it if we put it in front of the fireplace...

I found this sweet, sweet Parisian club chair in a store in New Jersey. It's on casters! And the leath-uh? Like butt-ah!

(We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog to bring you this new fall favorite of Kathleen's...suddenly, I can muster the courage to sit through an early-morning soccer game with my trusty coffee in hand, thanks to this swingy, sweet blanket cardigan from Sundance.)

Ok...back to the living room...

One idea which I'm loving and getting all verklempt about but still trying to figure out how to implement it in the living room...

If you're a native New Yorker like myself, and can claim city ancestry for the past 60 years or so...then think about visiting www.nyc.gov and clicking on a link at the bottom right of the home page labeled "You Can Get Historic Photos Online." The City photographed every house and building in the five boroughs between 1939 and 1941, and again in the mid-1980s.

I focused on the earlier era and ordered photos, lots of photos -- ones of my great-grandfather's row house in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, of my grandparents' house in Queens Village (see below), of the house where my father grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn (further below), and nearly wept at the sight of the massive, double glass-front oak doors that my grandparents had to remove when crime skyrocketed in the 1970s. I ordered a print of the first place I ever called home -- a six-story prewar apartment building in Inwood, Manhattan, but the view was long before my pram ever got parked there. I've collected about eight or nine photos from my family history -- as well as a copy of the first apartment my hubby and I lived in together in the West Village when we were married. It's remarkable to see these places, so familiar and yet so unknown, when viewed in a different era.

Some of the photos have blurry shots of men in fedoras in the background, captured unknowingly. There's a jalopy parked in front of the two-family house we lived in on 74th Street in Glendale. The one of my old apartment building in Inwood features a couple of hoodlums standing in front of the double doors on Cooper Street, looking like they're up to no good, and sneaking a quick look back at the photographer over the turned-up lapels of topcoats. The picture below is my cousin's house in Queens, with the previous owner sitting on the stoop. My cousins exclaimed her name like that of a long-lost, suddenly found friend when I showed them the picture.

It's proof of the ghosts I always feel around me when I walk the streets of New York, of the thousands of souls who went about their daily existence on stoops and fire escapes, who are left only as shadowy figures in simple photographs and other people's memories. So say we all.

It's $15 for each print, but to me, it's well worth the investment.

I'll be framing them and hanging them somewhere in the house. Just don't know where yet, but eventually, they'll tell me where they should go.

Here's to the radio men inside

2011-09-28T11:55:00.003-04:00

This morning while I puttered in my kitchen, I typed "www.wcbsfm.com" into my computer's browser and clicked the "Listen Live" button.

Ah, how times have changed.

I haven't clicked a radio dial in my house in years. (I also no longer have my vinyl record collection because my husband sold it at a garage sale a few years ago, and I still haven't gotten over the loss. But that's a whole other post for when I'm PMS-ish and feeling extra-super-special-sensitive. Be sure to mark your calendars!)

With the advent of technology, of CDs and iTunes and iPods and Spotify and God knows what else, my listening experience has forever changed. It actually wasn't known as a "listening experience" back when I was a kid. It was just called "turning on the radio." I laugh to myself as my children ask to hit "repeat" over and over and over and over again when we listen to songs from our iTunes collection. They have no idea how good they've got it.

Even though I've got smart playlists and Spotify Premium, I still like listening to 101.1 WCBS-FM. If you're a New Yorker or live in the tristate area, you know that those call letters define New York City's time-honored oldies station. It's one of the last remnants of 60/70s AM and FM radio. It's comforting. It's corny. I used to listen to it so often in the car that my kids could sing the station identification jingle when they were toddlers.

I think there are a lot of us closet oldies fans out there. In 2005, WCBS-FM tried out a contemporary adult hit format -- JACK FM! -- and failed miserably. Even Mayor Bloomberg said he would "never listen to that f---ing CBS radio again." It was actually noted as one of the greatest failures in New York radio history, and in 2007 it went back to its oldies format by playing "Don't Stop Believin'" and ending in exactly the same spot where it abruply ended in The Sopranos series finale.

Don't get me wrong. I was raised on Scott Muni and WNEW-FM. (Ah, Professor, I miss your gravely Lucky Strike announcer's voice still.) And in my high school and college years, I delighted in finding the most fabulously tragic alternative band that no one had ever freakin' heard of. I prided myself on owning every album (sorry, I'm showing my age) featured on the Billboard Alternative chart at the back of the latest Rolling Stone magazine. I was a mix tape fiend. I played air drums. I lip-synced in my bedroom mirror with my aviator shades on and my comb-microphone in hand. I had issues.

Music got me. It shaped me. It saved me. It held me up in my darkest adolescent moments and made my glory days all the more, well, glorious. (Thanks, Bruce.)

But in my earliest years, before I had ennui and angst and swore I could understand every word that Michael Stipe mumbled incoherently on the Chronic Town EP, I had 70s Top 40 radio.

When I was little, my days were filled with music from the radio -- from car radios blasting on the summer streets, from the old transistor radio my parents and grandparents kept in their kitchens to catch the morning news and traffic on 1010 WINS, from the flip alarm clock I kept in my bedroom so I could hear the sweet sound coming from FM radio, from my friends' parents' fab Danish stereo consoles in the living room, from the glow of the light-up dial that comforted me late at night in my uncle's old bedroom at my grandparents' house at sleepovers, from the wafts of power chords and girl group choruses that sent me to sleep on Wings (I mean, Walls) of Sound. (There were also a few nights that I listened to Dr. Ruth and GOOOOOT SEX! with the volume down low, but maybe I shouldn't discuss that here. That's for the PMS post, too. Mark your calendars!)

I switched from AM to FM late at night and noted the differences in the way the music sounded -- the tinny mono sound of WABC 77 AM contrasted with the deep bass stereo sound of WNEW-FM. My mother was probably never happier than when the "sleep" option became available on clock radios so she didn't have to go into my bedroom, night after night, and shut the damn thing off after I'd fallen asleep.

As I got older, I had my preferences, but I still listened to the radio constantly because I never knew when my favorite song might be playing. (Ah, the brilliance of marketing to an impressionable, captive audience.) I had a stack of blank audiotapes at the ready in my bedroom -- for what I guess you'd call a primitive version of "downloading" -- and raced up to the radio with my clunky tape recorder to the speaker at the song's first recognizable notes, ready to tape Bruce Springsteen, Blondie, the Steve Miller Band, Bob Seger, Rod Stewart, Journey, Bad Company, ELO, the Doobie Brothers, Pink Floyd, the Stones, the Eagles, Chicago, Cheap Trick, the Police, Meat Loaf, The Knack, Elvis Costello, The Who, Elton John, The Cars...my God, the list could go on forever. Those tapes were tinny, they missed the first thirty seconds of every song, they featured my mother's voice interrupting with "TURN THAT RADIO DOWN!" more often than not, and I treasured every single tape. My friends and I sat on our stoops in Queens, trying desperately to be more than we were, to be more than we even understood, and kept playing them until the batteries died and the whirring stopped.

We didn't have disposable income back then. I don't even think the term disposable income had been invented yet. We had radios, and if you were really lucky on your tenth birthday, then you also had a tape recorder from Radio Shack that gave your thumb throbbing red marks from depressing the "record" and "play" buttons at the same time. You had to hit it exactly right, or your recorder jammed and you heard an awful, grinding sound that meant you had to wait until your next birthday for a replacement tape recorder.

Maybe, just maybe, if you were really good at Christmas or your grandparents took pity on you, then you had a turntable that folded up like a suitcase and plugged into the wall. You put it on the floor and played your 45s and 33s, and when they inevitably skipped, you fixed them by maneuvering the diamondhead needle and scratching out the flaws.

After a time, when chores and babysitting jobs beckoned and I had some cash to burn at the record store, the radio wasn't on as much. Suddenly, I had B-sides and album sides to explore. From there, it was a slippery slope -- to my first stereo with front-loading dual cassette recorder, and my first car with FM radio and the junkiest tape player ever made. Seriously.

Concert tees filled my teenage dresser drawers. My Walkman became part of my daily outfit. And I left the radio behind.

Today, as I cook in my kitchen on a rainy Wednesday morning, I yearn for the sounds of my radio days. The voices of Ron Lundy, Harry Harrison, and Dan Ingram may be long gone -- but they're touchstones to my childhood, to summer days out in the backyard and ELO blasting from my cousin's revved-up Mustang.

Music, you're a dear, old friend. Thanks for always being there.

Who......are you?

2011-09-27T12:33:00.009-04:00

Over the summer, my daughter said to me, "Mom, I wanna be an author...uh, a journalist."

[Thinking to myself] Ohhhhhh, boy. [Saying out loud to daughter in chirpy, cheery voice.] "That's wonderful! You can be anything you set your mind to."

That's exactly what I said from ages ten to twelve, when people asked me my aspirations in polite conversation. A journalist. It was the only way I could personify this internal urge I had to tell stories, to write down a flow of words that seemed to be streaming through my brain like the ticker around the New York Times Building -- disjointed and stilted, but never-ending. No fourth grader could possibly say out loud that he or she wanted to be a writer, especially in a working-class neighborhood. Shut your mouth, kid. What kind of talk is that? Get this one -- she wants to be a regular Shakespeare over here! So I saved someone the trouble of saying it by almost never daring to voice it.

Instead, I'd be a journalist! (Note the strained exclamation point!) Sure, that made sense. It was respectable, something to strive for. I'd work my way up in a newsroom someplace in Manhattan. I'd look like Margot Kidder did as Lois Lane in "Superman" and wear a cute fitted vest and be scrappy and sexy all at the same time. (It was the seventies. I didn't have much to go on.) I'd smoke, like all journalists did, and I'd learn how to bang out a story on a manual typewriter, cigarette burning at the side of my mouth, all without ashing my desk. I'd get a beat. I'd go to press conferences. I'd have a byline in the New York Times. I'd have great stories to tell, late at night, when I was the toast of some fabulous party on the Upper East Side. (I'm a kid from the outerboroughs. The Upper East Side was an urban mecca, a highly polished brass ring that took much more than a subway token to get there.)

And that was the problem. I had stories I wanted to tell. Not stories about politicians or natural disasters, but stories of my own. I didn't want to re-tell someone else's.

Don't get me wrong. Journalism is quite the noble profession. And it sure as hell ain't easy. But for kids like me, we didn't fit the mold. Truth be told, I didn't have the discipline. These days, there are many more essayists and "observers" working in news media, but I don't recall as many when I was younger.

Fast forward thirty years later and my daughter is somehow charting the same path. She's a lot like me -- can't figure out math to save her life but can spin quite a yarn (aka never stops talking) whenever it's called for. We hadn't talked about her desire to be a writer just yet, because it didn't seem to be something she could yet quantify. It bothered me to hear her correct herself and say "author...a journalist" a few weeks ago, because it seemed that someone -- a friend's parent? a teacher? me, unknowingly? -- had tried to be well-meaning and had somehow re-directed her. I worried that she'd been shot down, even if the bullets of mediocrity and sensibility had just grazed her.

She's trying to figure out how to make something of herself, and maybe, just maybe, she's as afraid of trying for the thing she really, really, really wants to be, the thing that calms her spirit and stokes that belly-fire. I don't want to see her reach for the other thing if it isn't what she yearns to be. Yet I don't want to push her too forcefully towards chasing my as-of-yet-unfulfilled passion, if it isn't hers, either. I can't tell you how much I want to get this right, and how much I struggle with the magic words to help, which is terribly ironic for a wanna-be writer to say.

My parents were more encouraging than most, when it came to pursuing my dreams. Other parents pushed for business degrees when college came calling. Mine hoped that I'd complete a liberal arts degree, and my father wondered aloud why I hadn't minored in philosophy. They knew that I'd hinted at writing. And I'm sure they worried about it. My father gave me Linda Ellerbee's autobiography in high school and told me to read it. I got to the part about her alcoholism and put it aside. I wondered what she'd drank away, in spite of her successes.

I headed towards a publishing house after college, thinking I should work towards becoming a trade editor, thinking it was logical, thinking it made sense. And it didn't. I liked writing jacket copy more than anything else. And I was completely out of my league -- hell, I didn't even know the rules of the game. I moved over to in-house advertising with Conde Nast, still ensconced in the background, still in the safety of others' shadows, brushing shoulders with talented editors and writers at GQ, Vogue and Mademoiselle, only because the elevators were crowded at lunchtime.

Marriage and moves and motherhood beckoned. Because I let them. I could have found ways to seek out the balance, but I let the desire fade. For a time.

Until I find myself here at forty-one, banging out silly little stories, only with a cup of flavored coffee -- and thank God, not cigarettes -- at my side. Still wondering who I'm going to be and what all of this actually means. Still afraid to voice my dreams, because it seems so elusive at this stage of the game. Not even knowing how to get started again on something that never got started at all.

And today, with my daughter's words ringing in my ears, I want to write to her, even though she doesn't quite know what a blog is or how much Mommy writes about the simple, staggering beauties of being that she possesses. I want to tell her -- don't silence your desires, baby girl. Don't drape your soul with sensible choices. Don't be afraid to say it out loud, a thousand times a day. Don't be afraid, baby. Don't ever be afraid to be exactly who you are.

9/11 2011

2011-09-11T09:11:00.006-04:00

It has been ten years. Ten years since I heard my husband crying on the phone in our kitchen in San Francisco and whispering to my father, who was minutes away from entering his office in Tower Two, "Billy, Billy, thank God you're alright." Ten years since I clutched my pregnant stomach and fell to my knees, watching the Twin Towers fall. Ten years since our lives were forever marked, lessened, changed.

My husband worked in JPMorgan's West Coast office and was already at work at 4:00 am Pacific Time on the morning of September 11, anticipating the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. He had seen the first tower hit on live television while he was on the trading floor, and he knew my father worked on the 102nd floor of one of the buildings. There was confusion on the TV news, not yet panic. Was it a commuter plane? Was it an air traffic controller error? What happened?

When the second plane hit the other tower, he knew it was something more -- and he was sure my father was dead. He bolted from his desk, his co-workers later told me, without explanation. He ran from the building, and drove home at a frightening speed to make sure I hadn't woken up and learned of the news by myself. He was sure I would go into early labor at the sight of the tv news, and at the horror of learning that my father probably died in the attack.

He remembers seeing a woman running down Lombard Street alone, naked and screaming. He couldn't stop because he needed to get to me, he said, so he kept driving. But he was sure that the woman knew someone in those towers or on those planes. Nothing else could explain her desperate behavior, timed so closely to what had just taken place.

I was eight months pregnant with our first child, still sleeping and not knowing what had just happened in New York City. While I lay asleep in bed, unaware of his return home, of anything -- he bore the initial shock of 9/11 all alone in our dark living room that morning, whispering in a cracking voice on the phone, calling every person, every number in our phone book, everyone -- to see if my father was in Tower Two that morning or if he had somehow miraculously escaped. He said that every minute I slept, every minute that he didn't have to wake me with unimaginable news, was another minute that my father was still alive to me.

The phone rang and my husband ran to the kitchen to pick it up. My father was calling from a train station in Westchester. He'd simply been late to work that day. When the attack occurred, all trains to Manhattan stopped, and everyone was ushered off the commuter trains at the nearest stops, to search for pay phones or share cell phones to call family members. I awoke to hear my husband's voice, to hear "the World Trade Center blew up," to panic, and to the TV to see it all for myself, because it didn't seem possible at all.

New York City was my city, my birthplace, my home. For a generation of New York City outerborough kids who visited the Twin Towers as schoolchildren, who held them as a symbol of hope in a dingy, crime-ridden city in the 1970s -- it was inconceivable that they would ever be anything but there. For my parents, '50s-era children from Brooklyn and Queens, the Empire State Building was their Eighth Wonder of the World. For us, it was the Twin Towers. They were the first buildings I saw when we flew back from California, the first mark of familiarity for me, the first assurance that I was truly home.

I watched the towers fall on the television that September morning and remember hearing myself yell, "My city! My city!" I could only think of the structure, the steel, the permanence so callously challenged. In the hours to come, I began to absorb the horrors of what those who were inside had to witness and endure. The enormity of loss, the magnitude of so many lives, incinerated in the attack and the collapse and with nothing to remain, was simply too much for me to comprehend all at once. My mind actually went into a kind of preservation mode that morning, an abject denial, and refused to acknowledge the scope of it until hours and days later. I remember speaking to a friend later that afternoon, who was overcome at the thought of the passengers' terror on the hijacked planes. I didn't understand her at first. In my shock, I had somehow supposed that the planes were empty, stolen from jetways without any additional suffering, and that the only victims were the hijackers themselves. I gasped and choked and sobbed all at once, at the sudden realization of what had happened to those people as well.

We were grazed that day, when so many others were horribly wounded. I lost no one, although there were too many "what if"s and "just a few minutes away" situations to permeate the bubble of safety in which I'd unwittingly traveled. Relatives and friends of mine were all within steps of those towers. One of my cousins was an FDNY fire marshal who was a first responder on 9/11, and had one of the towers rain down on him. He walked away from the rubble unharmed -- forever marked and changed, of course, but amazingly alive. If I hadn't been pregnant, my husband and I might have been on Flight 93 -- headed from Newark to San Francisco -- because our friends had gotten married on September 8th in Connecticut and we would have been returning from the East Coast. My child -- my precious, precious gleam of a daughter -- might never have been born.

Our story is the same as thousands of other New Yorkers and Americans. It touched us, but it didn't destroy us. With that fortunate place comes a sense of remorse, of survivors' guilt, and the need to offer remembrance and respect. After ten years, the wound has closed over. As a nation, as a people, as a collective psyche, we had to want to heal. But with it comes that sense of guilt in doing so.

As much as this day is about our shared experience as a nation, it isn't about me. I am here. My father is here. I am not one of the many, many mourners standing at the memorial, clutching a framed photo of a loved one. I was merely a witness to a crime so inhumane, so impossible, that the memory is left with me - with all of us, still.

Which is why I watch the reading of the names every year. It's all I know how to do on these September mornings, when the air is cool and the sky is a calming, wide blue -- just as it was on the morning of 9/11, 2001. And I cry. Terribly. Openly. Because after ten years it is still unimaginable that it truly happened. After all the "missing" posters and the ribbons and the memorials and the fundraisers and the commemorative plates and bumper stickers, they are still gone. The people -- all of those people -- are gone, gone, gone. I want to acknowledge them, to somehow let them know that all of us see their pictures, their families, their names, their lives left behind. We know they were here. They loved, they cried, they won, they yelled, they laughed, they fought, they failed, they touched. They were. And somehow, inexplicably yet necessarily, that they still are.

The wound is ripped open every year as the names are read, but we can never forget them -- the secretaries, the Cantor traders, the firefighters, the Windows on the World busboys, the insurance adjusters at Aon, the tourists, the elevator operators, the IT guys, the airplane passengers, the Port Authority police officers, the office managers, the people. The people. The people.

September 11

2011-09-08T12:46:00.006-04:00

The tenth anniversary. I hate that it's coming. I hate that there are a whole lot of shoulds surrounding that day.

I hate that there are lots of "never before seen" pieces of raw video footage from the September 11 attacks, and that there will be hour upon hour of retrospectives. I hate how we mark it in years and in television specials, in t-shirts and bumper stickers, in coffee table books and in window decals.

I hate that it ever happened, and that so many people are forever changed, damaged, and cheated. Wives without husbands. Sons without mothers. Aging parents without adult children. Friends left alone with their memories. Marriages that never took place. Holes in family pictures where people should be.

I hate that it's still the first thing I think of when a plane flies too close overhead. Or that I think of it sometimes when the power goes out. I hate that I will never be comfortable traveling by plane again, and that I worry more about flying without my family than having us all perish together. I hate that I've actually thought of that. I hate that my children will fly without me on a plane someday, or live in a large city far away, and that my fear will always be there, right there, no matter how I rationalize it.

I hate that the news media tries to make 9/11 victims into two-dimensional heroes. They weren't sound bites. They were people. People who held hands and jumped together from unimaginable smoke and flames, who ran up flights of stairs with forty pounds of gear on their backs, towards -- and not from -- the horror, who ushered everyone out of the building, who made a split-second decision to help someone else without thinking of themselves first. It feels ugly sometimes to hear those snippets and see those photos, because it has come to define them as all they were. To their families, to their friends, to their mothers, to their commuter bus buddies, to their softball teams, to their neighbors, they were a whole hell of a lot more -- not to be minimized in thirty seconds or in one still shot. It's painful and breath-taking to absorb that incomprehensible loss, over and over again, so many times, to so many families. They deserve at least that.

I hate that I'm going to have to finally explain the reality of 9/11 to my almost ten year-old daughter, who will have more questions than I'll ever be ready to answer. How do you explain the deaths of so many people, all at once, in a hushed, horrible black cloud of smoke, who were simply gone, taken, stolen? How can you tell a child that such a thing won't ever happen again? You can't. Then I hate how weak I feel when I think of the first-time mothers who had to parent alone -- my God, who had to give birth alone surrounded by so much sadness, and see the unmistakable face of the person they'd lost in their newborn child -- because their husbands died in those towers and on those planes, and never once saw their babies.

I hate that there are naive, childish, delusional parts of my psyche that want someone -- anyone, anyone who holds the magical turnkey -- to say it never happened, it was all a mistake, and that every single person who was lost that day can somehow return. Everyone in those towers and planes, in the Pentagon building, and in the FDNY fire trucks, can all be returned to their families and their lives. I'd give back these last ten years to make that happen. As long as all the good could remain, as long as all the gifts I was given in marriage and motherhood could stay, as long as I could still be who I've grown into in spite of and because of it, then I'd hand them right back so all the girlfriends and cubicle workers and brothers and mothers and toddlers and uncles could have them back, right where they were on September 10, before that God-less, still unimaginable day ever happened.

I hate that there are certain songs, like Train's "Drops of Jupiter," that bring me right back to where I was a few hours and days after the towers fell, numb from crying and watching the explosion over and over and over and over and over again on the TV until I had to turn it off. I drove on Marina Boulevard in San Francisco, where my husband and I were living, and remember how white the sidewalks looked, how bright and empty they were, because no one was outside. I had just come from the supermarket, because we suddenly realized we had no food in the house. The supermarket was silent, and the cashiers stood huddled together, whispering to each other. I got back in the car, robotic, driving, not remembering how I got there, and then the song came on the radio. It seems foolish and strange to say it, but there were lines like "tell me did you sail across the sun did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded and that heaven is overrated" and I thought of those thousands of souls, all together, somehow peaceful in spite of how they'd been taken so violently from this world, seeing all of us down here, lost and terrified and mourning, and that whatever they'd gone to was infinite love and eternal peace, somehow enough for them not to feel the need to return to us. That they were ok, I guess. That's what I needed to know. Tears still come when I hear it.

I hate that there will be an expectation of closure when we come to September 12, 2011, as if we can somehow quantify or encapsulate our grief, neatly and plainly. It doesn't work that way. It shouldn't.

I hate that I don't know what else to do but write about it, and that whatever I write will never be enough.

I hate that I haven't gotten over it. Still. Ever.

I hate that none of us ever can.

Inspiration Point -- Fall-ish Friday

2011-09-02T12:56:00.001-04:00

Yes, yes, I know. It's Labor Day weekend. Make no talk of autumn! Egads, woman -- eek out that last drop of summer fun while you still can!

Let's face it, folks. The party's over. Half the weekend's getting washed out, and I'm too tired from last weekend's Irene escapades to get flip-floppin' crazy. I've got to clean out the kids' closets and get ready for the first week of school. So let's just face the facts -- fall is on its way. No gettin' around it. Turn off the SpongeBob sprinkler and go get your cable-knit sweaters out of the mothballs. It's been fun, summ-ah, but I'm movin' on.

And if I'm moving in these Cole-Haan Air Tali wedges in chocolate brown suede...well, then, fall, I think I'm ready for you to come in right now.

If I:

a) were a size 4

b) had reason to pack this for a romantic vacation

in the Scottish Highlands

c) had expendable income for purchasing anything

from the Tory Burch fall lookbook...

then I'd be running out to buy this luscious tweed skirt right now.

Fall makes me jazzy. The leaves are twirling and dancing in a slow, slow waltz to the ground, the sunlight's more precious, the passage of time seems all the more present -- which always makes me slow down and savor. Seasons like that need musical accompaniment. My cousin Frank, in a recent Facebook posting, just reminded me of Dexter Gordon -- a musical genius -- and gave me the soundtrack I need for the next few months while I bake up pumpkin-y things and snuggle with a book under chenille throws. The pumpkin-y things will be burned, of course, and the throws will be covered in cat hair, but it will still be fall. And I'll still feel jazzy.

Speaking of baking and puttering...I hope to do a lot more baking and cooking this fall, now that I have more time on my hands with the kids back in school, and now that I finally have a child with awakened tastebuds (She eats calamari! And pumpkin gnocchi! Thank you Jesus!)

I'll be perusing the internet for yummy recipes...and I'll be referring to this great website a lot, too.

Click on "recipes" and you'll find a beautifully categorized treasure trove of recipe ideas. Oven -- get ready to feel the heat, baby.

Homemade apple cider doughnuts, anyone?

Dear Hubby: If you're reading this, then consider this my first official Christmas gift hint. (Go on Etsy and look up merriweathercouncil's shop.) So cute I could just...just...make a pinching motion with my thumb and index finger and say "gleek!" in a squeaky voice.

There, now. Aren't you feeling positively autumnal? Now go get a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks and turn the heat up.

Funny As a Two Dollar Bill

2011-09-01T14:42:00.002-04:00

In my back-to-school cleaning and purging madness, I happened upon an old pill container in my dresser drawer. The orange-tinted plastic was worn and scratched, and the directions on the top of the child safety had been rubbed off from years of use. I immediately remembered what it was, and I knew what I'd find once I'd opened it.

I popped open the rubbery top of the container, and wafts of Chanel No. 5 and the sachets from my grandmother's closet rose up from the small cylinder. I tipped it over and a tightly rolled wad of two dollar bills fell out, along with several "Susan B. Anthonys," the one-dollar coin that was minted several decades and is no longer in circulation.

There must have been about sixty or seventy dollars tucked away in that container, but it wasn't the monetary value that struck me. It was the care and effort enacted all those years ago -- the evidence of trips my grandmother made to Flatbush Savings Bank, to the Bank of New York and to Dime Savings, banks that I'm not even sure still exist -- to secure those special bills and offer them as gifts for me and my cousin, each time we saw her. Two dollar bills were always tucked into birthday cards, Halloween cards, St. Patrick's Day cards, and they were pressed into my hand when I'd visit her at her home in Brooklyn.

My grandmother Rose was a tough Irish broad. She was pious, a fervent rosary bead user, and she never took a drag off a smoke or a drop of "the drink," as she often called it. But beneath her God-fearing demeanor was a steel construction. She worked at the "telephone cump-nee" -- New York Telephone, for those of you not from the outerboroughs -- both as an operator and later, as a billing supervisor. For years, when I'd call her, she'd answer the phone with the odd but immediately recognizable "Heh-doh?" which my mother swears was a leftover greeting from her operator days.

If you weren't on her good side, God help you. But for some reason, I could do no wrong in her eyes, and she spoiled me terribly. Not with diamonds or fancy cruises, of course, but with the Depression-era equivalent of unique coins and bills, meant to be tucked away in shoeboxes and under mattresses. There were silver dollars and half-dollars, which I'd shamefully spent on candy and Wet 'n Wild lipstick, and there were two dollar bills, which I'd held onto.

I had tried to spend them a few times as a kid at the corner store, and I quickly tired of getting the stink-eye from the store manager who thought a nine year-old kid was trying to pull a fast one and pass some counterfeit bills. It was the city. It was the seventies. Anything was possible.

After a time, I realized that two dollar bills were once again getting harder to find, so I started to collect them at the bottom of sock drawers and in small, forgotten purses in my closet. Gran continued to make trips to the banks, and as I matured, I came to realize the effort it took to find those precious bills. But it happened less and less frequently, both as she aged and as I begged off cash gifts with a newfound awareness of a widow's income.

After my grandfather died, suddenly and shockingly, and she found herself alone at 61, she continued to live in Flatbush, Brooklyn until her children nearly forcibly removed her from the increasingly dangerous neighborhood. She was nervous about traveling the streets alone, but she was determined not to leave her home. She took public transportation regularly, and made regular trips into Manhattan by herself to shop at B. Altman or volunteer at a Catholic hospice on the east side of the city. But she lived as if under martial law, as if government curfew had been enacted, and didn't dare go out after sundown. In her eighties, it was clear that she should no longer be living in a crime-ridden neighborhood by herself, especially since so many of her friends were no longer living there.

She consented to move to Bay Ridge, another Brooklyn neighborhood, since they had a "nice shopping street" and a few good "rest-runts" that she could easily walk to. But it didn't last long. She told my father that she heard opera in her head and it was upsetting to her. She could swear she'd hear my grandfather talking to her from the next room, even though he'd been dead for almost twenty years. She'd start to forget words and names, and it was clear that she could no longer live independently.

Her world became increasingly smaller and sadder, as the one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge soon shrunk to the front bedroom of my aunt's home in Brick Township. She declined rapidly into full-blown dementia, and she'd pace the house in circles for hours until she'd drop into a chair, exhausted. Often, she'd look out her bedroom window and remark to my aunt, widowed herself and living in a 55+ community, "Where are the children, Patty? I miss the children playing outside, Patty."

When my aunt could no longer care for her, she had to be moved to a nursing home nearby. She died when I was in my early thirties, long since lost to us, but still present, somehow, even in her obvious illness.

After she died, my aunt found the pill container somewhere in the house, and she insisted that I take it. "They were for you. She'd want you to have them." And I did, and I tucked them away someplace, almost ten years ago, knowing I'd never spend them.

I still miss her, and I'm grateful for so many lessons she taught through her own unwitting example. (She also taught me how not to cook, but her ketchup-basted pot roast is a blog post in and of itself.)

It was a welcome surprise to reconnect with her, just for a moment, in the midst of my seasonal chaos, and to have a long-left-behind scent become visceral and acutely recognizable.

It's strange to get choked up over legal tender, but that's the thing about two dollar bills. They're funny.

Inspiration Point Friday -- The Lovely Linda

2011-08-19T18:12:00.003-04:00

I bought myself a little birf-day present a few weeks ago. And I promptly forgot about it until it arrived in the mail yesterday.

How my shutterbuggish heart leapt at the sight of the cover:

Yes, Linda McCartney was a child of privilege -- raised in Scarsdale, New York, she was the daughter of a prominent New York show business attorney and the heiress to the Lindner department store fortune. (She's no relation to the Kodak Eastman company, as is usually assumed.)

I'm sure her wealthy connections landed her the job as a receptionist at Town & Country after college, but there must have been something inside of her -- some kind of gumption, brass balls, something -- that got her the spot as the only unofficial photographer at a promotion party in New York for The Rolling Stones. This was before she was Mrs. McCartney, or even before she was Mr. McCartney's girlfriend. She hadn't even met Paul yet. This was won on her own merit -- and her blonde hair, of course -- but she wasn't perched on Jagger's lap. She was behind the lens, in a powerful position, and she was still quite kind and tender with her subjects.

She had a way about her, one that musicians trusted and understood, and she was asked to be the house photographer at the Fillmore East (Bill Graham's 1968-1971 East Village companion to his San Francisco rock venue, for you young'uns).

She photographed Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, The Doors and Neil Young among others -- and even became the first woman photographer to have her work featured on the front cover of Rolling Stone.

She met Paul McCartney while on assignment in London to capture the "Swinging Sixties", and married him in 1969.

You're the first woman photographer to have your picture on the cover of Rolling Stone -- and then you marry a Beatle.

Not bad for 28.

What I admire most about Linda is that she never put the camera away, even after becoming the wife of a rock star, and even after having four children. I would guess that it felt like an appendage to her -- like a vital part of her being, like her eyes or her heart -- much as it does to me. I ain't no Nikonista, but so often, I like what I see, and I want to freeze that perspective, that moment, that flash of simple, stark beauty, and share it.

Since I've been a teenager, I've been consistently struck by Linda's photographs. I'm usually drawn to photobooks of the Sixties and rock musicians, and more often than not, the photograph I'd be most struck by in a collection was snapped by Linda McCartney.

She never had an entourage, like Richard Avedon, or an attitude, like Annie Leibovitz (who co-authored this book), or even an assistant, for that matter. Just herself and her camera. If she was without it, and she was with one of her children who remarked that "this was a great shot if only we had the camera," she'd tell him or her -- "take it with your soul camera." That's a nurturing momma spirit and an artist all rolled into one.

It's myopic of me to relate to her as a mother, but like any of us, when we put photographs from our youth aside -- and then re-discover them later on in life -- we find more treasures when we view them with a tempered, matured eye. Some of these photographs are nearly fifty years old, but they resonate, they speak volumes, and to me, that's the mark of a talented photographer.

Yes, she had the bad haircuts (which she often did herself), and she had a horrible voice. (Young'uns, just look up "Linda McCartney singing Hey Jude" on youtube and you'll see what I'm talking about.) And I'm sure she was a whole host of other far-less-than-perfect things back home at the ranch. Not to mention the fact that she had a lot of free time on her hands with a cook, a gardener, a driver, housekeepers, and God knows what else when you're the wife of a Beatle. (I sound bitter on that point. So be it.)

But from the looks of her outfits, she didn't spend her days as a kept woman mindlessly shopping on Saville Row. She never lost her photographer's eye and snapped away wherever she was, often in mid-conversation with her husband and family. And she seems to have taught her children to find and pursue their passions -- Stella McCartney, anyone? -- which had to have come from example. Don't even get me started on the vegetarian cookbooks.

Enough of my Lovely Linda Lovefest. There's no way Ms. Leibovitz will be doing a retrospective of my Hipstamatic shots anytime soon, but I'm hoping those pictures -- and all of the other shots I've squeezed in my family's lifetime -- will be treasured in years to come.

And that's enough inspiration for any momma to start pointin' and shootin'.

All photos copyright Paul McCartney.

Clean Up in the Aisles of My Life

2011-08-15T16:00:00.001-04:00

I'm not a fan of the supermarket.

In my younger days, grocery shopping meant something different. Sure, I was tired after a hard day at work, but in my twenties, an evening at the supermarket involved the fun prep work of cooking a sumptuous meal for the man I was trying to seduce at my apartment -- usually with a variety of chutneys and spreadable cheeses.

It meant leisurely Sundays, devoted to all the ingredients I would be simmering into a fall bisque or winter casserole. Back then, I sniffed produce. I read labels. Sometimes, I even sampled whatever they were selling at the front of the store. And I actually smiled at the poor unfortunate who was stuck with the tedious job of handing out tidbits to shoppers in tiny, tiny paper cups.

These days, grocery shopping is a mini-marathon to be enacted in the twenty-three minutes I have between drop-offs and pick-ups. Bringing children along is not an option. It's just not a good idea for anyone involved. I've learned this the hard way.

The worst part of my aisleophobia? The way supermarkets "store" the next grouping of seasonal items up high above the display shelves. Stacks of plastic jack 'o lanterns, boxes of cheap, breakable Christmas tree ornaments, and rows of giant plush bunnies all sit there on high, smugly mocking me as I scurry anxiously past with my shopping cart. Sometimes, I swear I hear them taunting me like those gangs from "The Warriors." Can you imagine gangs with holiday themes? Now that's a movie I'd enjoy. BECAUSE I'VE LIVED IT.

Lately, it seems like supermarket managers just shove the next season into your face like Jimmy Cagney wielding an orange at Anita Bryant. It's August, for heaven's sakes. Let me have my everlovin' summer before I have to start shopping for bags of friggin' Halloween candy. I went to Stop 'n Shop today and lo, even back-to-school items were being forced off prime at-eye-level shelf space by bags of mellowcreme pumpkins and poorly-printed plastic jack 'o lanterns (made by Chinese people who must think Americans are out of their freakin' minds).

No matter how well you're managing right now, the near future is hovering, demanding to be acknowledged, threatening to topple and spill over into the current situation you've finally gotten under control, and make a seasonal mess of your life.

Don't even get me started on coupons.