Gray

Issuing the skirt... or skirting the issue

2011-04-19T22:12:00.001-04:00

Who would have thought a simple skirt could make such a big difference?

One of my West Point classmates who is currently stationed at West Point has a new photo posted to his Facebook wall. There he is standing outside Washington Hall side by side with a proud, beaming plebe. Apparently, it was Sponsor Appreciation Night and unveiling of the class crest for the Class of 2014. The plebe was wearing a uniform combination that I do not remember: Dress Gray over White. It was a stunning uniform. My classmate informed me that this uniform is sometimes called upon for that time in between Dress Gray and White over Gray and is a bit more formal than Dress Gray in appearance. Thus, perfect for this occasion. What really impressed me, though, was that the female plebe in the photo was wearing a skirt with her Dress Gray over White.

When we were cadets, we had two skirt uniforms: Dress Mess, which included a long black skirt and looked a lot like what Julie on Love Boat might wear to dinner, and our Blazer uniform, which came with a gray skirt and was issued to us yearling year. As plebes, we were also issued gray skirts, which we could [hypothetically] wear to class or church or other events that did not involve formations or drill or parades. I say “hypothetically” because very few women I knew ever wore the skirt option. Why? Because wearing a skirt, especially as a plebe, would just make you stick out even more as a female cadet. And the last thing we wanted to do was stick out… even more.

It was hard to be a woman at West Point in the mid-80s. Don’t get me wrong, it is hard to be at West Point period, and each person’s journey is his or her own, and some are more difficult than others for a whole slew of possible reasons. But the fact of the matter is that in the mid-80s, women at West Point were still a novelty and their integration, although enforced by rules, regulations, and a law passed by Congress, was a far cry from acceptance.

Our time at West Point was nothing like that of the first class with women who braved a storm of abuse, misogyny, and harassment simply because they were women daring to cross the threshold into a previously all-male bastion of… maleness. The women in the Class of ‘80 are true heroes; their trial by fire helped pave the way for those of us who came after. Our class shared our reunion weekend this past October with the Class of ’80, and this was the first time many of us women from ‘85 could walk up to a woman from that first class and shake her hand and say thank you for all she had done.

We were the sixth class at West Point to have women. So, while we did not experience the hell of that first class, we were still somewhat “pioneers” in a wilderness where women were, if not unwelcome, definitely… suspect. We were decidedly unwelcome to some, and most of them let us know just how much so on a daily basis. We were suspect to many. Most male cadets, I think, in all fairness, really didn’t care if women were there, and some were very accepting, or at least tolerant.

“Cooperate and graduate!” was a credo our Beast Cadre yelled at us throughout the six weeks of Cadet Basic Training. Working together to get things done was encouraged, and with good reason. We were organized into squads during Beast. We drilled together, trained together, ate together, ran together, marched together, did Plebe duties together.

As female cadets, we just wanted to fit in like the rest of our classmates.

Still, it was hard to be a woman at West Point. It was one thing to be hazed as a plebe because you didn’t shine your shoes or polish your brass properly or square a corner well or cut a dessert nicely or remember your plebe knowledge verbatim, but it was quite another to be called names and harassed and messed with just because you were a woman. And when the name calling and harassment continued on into upperclass years, it could get discouraging. Many of my women classmates can recall, as firstie commanders leading their units in parades, being called names like “bitch,” “whore,” and “slut” by male alumni lined up to review the Corps as they marched by.

We found ourselves in a strange quandary. We were women. But we were not allowed to be women. We were certainly not men, but we weren’t really women, either. Our hair had to be cut short, no longer than above the bottom of our collars. We were not allowed to wear makeup or jewelry most of the time, although I think we were allowed to wear pierced earring studs with some uniforms. If we were told to wear Dress Mess or our Blazer uniforms (as upperclassmen), then we wore skirts because that was part of the uniform. Very rarely, though, did women choose to wear skirts as an option with their other uniforms, even when allowed.

It is a very strange thing indeed to be, for all intents and purposes, stripped of your gender and your femininity.

Just as male cadets were growing into men, female cadets were becoming women. Only in the past, “cadet” and “upperclassman” and “officer” were all synonyms for “men.” West Point was supposed to mold young men into soldiers, officers, gentlemen, and leaders of men. Now, there were women thrown into the hallowed mix. And often West Point just didn’t know how to handle them.

One day during Beast, I got stopped by a firstie in the sally port as I was heading back inside our barracks. He proceeded to haze me for wearing makeup. He was yelling at me, accusing me of wearing eye shadow! I was shocked. Not only was I not wearing makeup, I had not even brought any with me to West Point. And, frankly, the very last thing a new cadet would have time to do in the heat of Beast would be to apply makeup. And why on earth would we ever want to? We were running around in the sultry heat of summer drilling and training and sweating our asses off. At first the upperclassman did not believe me when I told him I was not wearing any makeup. Then, I was afraid he was going to question my honor and accuse me of lying. It just seemed so ludicrous to me. Luckily for me, I was so frazzled by his nonsensical hazing that I became flustered. Just then a female upperclassman passed by and I accidentally called the male cadet who was hazing me “Ma’am.” Well, that set him off on a whole other litany of abuse. How could I possibly call him “Ma’am”? Was I an idiot? Was I being belligerent? I had somehow assaulted his manhood and all thoughts of my makeup use were soon forgotten.

During 100th Night role reversal, plebes got to pretend to be firsties and firsties pretend to be plebes. Plebes thus got to “haze” firsties for a brief period of time and generally speaking, it was a highly amusing event, a chance to blow off steam and have some fun. There was one firstie in our company who was a real flame, and as plebes we were all looking forward to just retribution. However, he was also infamous for hating women being at West Point. Whenever a female plebe would try to haze him, he would flippantly respond, “When I was a plebe, it was 1979, and there were no women in the Class of ’79. So, you don’t exist!” I remember staring at him, feeling suddenly deflated. He was refusing to play the game with me simply because I was a female cadet. But then I thought to myself, “What an ass!” He wasn’t worth getting upset over. He wasn’t a haze because he had high standards and he was concerned about us learning how to become good cadets. He hazed us because he was an asshole. And he hazed female cadets more because he was a misogynistic asshole.

West Point was a mixed bag, though.

I can remember being stopped on the way back from class one day second semester plebe year by a firstie I did not know. “Miss, halt!”

“Yes, sir?” I turned to face him. What could I possibly have done wrong? All I was doing was pinging back from class, my books tucked neatly under one arm. I knew I had been moving out “fast enough.”

“Miss, what is that cologne you are wearing?”

Huh? I was confused. We were allowed to wear cologne. And mine was not really all that overpowering. I told him the name. And then braced for whatever verbal barrage was sure to follow.

Unbelievably, he grinned. “Ahhhh, thank you. It’s the same cologne my girlfriend wears, and I want to buy her some for her birthday. Carry on!”

Does issuing skirts make an institution more accepting of women?

No, clearly not.

Does the actual wearing of skirts indicate an institution that is more accepting of women?

That depends.

On whether the wearing of skirts is because it is a mandatory component of a uniform, like Dress Mess, or an option that some women choose to take advantage of because they feel comfortable doing so -- and want to.

If male cadets are accepting of women as fellow cadets and male NCOs and officers are accepting of women as soldiers and cadets and officers, then I think women feel more at ease expressing themselves in traditional “womanly” ways – be it wearing a skirt and hose and pumps or earrings – if that is something they want to do.

When women cadets feel comfortable wearing skirts and choose to wear them as an option, I see that as progress.

As a cow (or second classman), I spent a semester at the Air Force Academy and was stunned by how many of the female cadets there wore skirts to class. I told my Zoomie roommate, who often wore a skirt to class, that women rarely chose to wear skirts at West Point. She was surprised. Wearing a skirt if she wanted to, when allowed, seemed perfectly normal to her. She asked me why women cadets did not wear skirts at West Point. I shrugged. I’d never really thought about it before. We were afraid of sticking out as women, of being different, of being harassed. We just wanted to fit in, to belong. At Air Force, it seemed, women could be women and fit in and belong. Women seemed a lot more accepted in the Air Force than in the Army. I am not sure why that is: a different history, a different culture, a different mission, its newness as a branch of service?

I noticed in other photos from the USMA Sponsor Appreciation Night that that some female cadets had chosen to wear white skirts and some had chosen to wear white trousers with their Dress Gray over White. Just as women in business sometimes choose to wear suits with skirts and at other times suits with pants. These female plebes looked professional, military, and squared away, just as their male counterparts did. More importantly, they looked proud and happy.

And at ease with themselves.

Clearly, a woman is not going to wear a skirt into combat, so please don’t even broach such an absurd notion! A man would not wear Army Blues or Dress Gray over White into combat, either. But in a business-like or social setting, being able to wear a skirt is a nice option for a woman, just as it is in a similar civilian setting. And it is still professional and military.

One of my male classmates who is stationed at West Point recently told me that “women are becoming more and more feminine at West Point.” I think what he meant was that women feel increasingly comfortable expressing their femininity in appropriate ways at West Point. He certainly sees this shift as a good thing, healthy and positive. He then added that he had also just attended a Women’s Boxing Team exhibition, which was equally “awesome.” So the “warrior part” was great to see, too.

This idea of being both feminine and a warrior brings to mind Athena, the Greek scholar warrior, who could be beautiful, feminine, smart, and kick ass when need be.

The mission of West Point is "to educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each graduate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army." An officer corps that includes plenty of Athenas sounds like a win-win situation to me.

Three and a butt days....

2010-10-24T18:15:00.002-04:00

I write fiction. And I write non-fiction.

Sometimes it is hard to separate the two.

Like when you are writing something that is based on memory.

Memories can seem so real, so strong, yet they can be… deceptive.

And often just plain wrong.

I have been hung up on the VMI cadet-hazing-me-in-the- sallyport story. And I feel the need to address this feeling.

I mean, the event really happened. I was a plebe. I was walking through a sally port. It was night, and it was dark. And I got stopped and asked what was for dinner by what I thought was an upperclassman, but who subsequently revealed himself as a VMI cadet.

What confuses me is the timing.

I have this nagging feeling that the event in question happened on Friday night, not Saturday. Which makes no sense. As I would have been supposed to know what was for dinner. And it would probably have been something like pizza and Go Army cake. Not hard to remember. And why was it so dark if it was before dinner?

Maybe it was Friday night, after dinner, and the guy was asking me what was for dinner the NEXT night.

And why was I out and about in the dark? Where was I coming from? Where was I going?

And I am actually not sure the cadet was wearing Dress Gray either. I mean, he was definitely wearing a gray cadet uniform, but it may have been his hat or the insignia on his hat that he pointed out to signify that he was not a West Point cadet.

I just don’t remember.

What I remember is being pissed that this guy was having fun hazing me, and he wasn’t even a West Point cadet. Now, personally, I have nothing against VMI or VMI cadets. I am sure I probably know a few VMI grads. And Lord knows there were plenty of West Point cadets who were assholes. Yes, it is true, a certain percentage of that “cream of the crop” they were always telling us about were just plain jerk wads. I don’t care how creamy they were!

Heading back to West Point in less than a week now, I find all sorts of memories rise to the top.

All sorts of feelings.

Mixed emotions.

I am excited to see old friends. At the same time, I am a bit leery of it all.
It is true: I didn’t want to go to my last reunion, five years ago (the first reunion I EVER attended and the first time I had been back to West Point since 1986), but my friends threatened to do a drive by kidnapping and take me to West Point in the trunk of their car. I figured a more comfortable, civilized arrival was in order.

And, even though it poured down buckets and buckets of rain the entire weekend of the reunion, I really enjoyed myself. I enjoyed seeing old friends, old classmates, and I enjoyed seeing West Point again. As hard as that is for me to say. Because, truly, I was one of those people who watched West Point in my rear view mirror as I drove off post after graduation and vowed never to return.

Most West Pointers I know have a real love/hate relationship with West Point. I myself find it very difficult to put the word “enjoy” and “West Point” in the same sentence together, especially if I am talking about my four years spent there between 1981 and 1985.

At the time, I thought I was going be at West Point… FOREVER.

I thought it was never going to end, never be over.

I made some really amazing friends, some of whom I am still very close friends with today, and I did have some fun times, but overall it was an oppressive, demanding, difficult experience. I am very proud that I graduated from West Point, and I have very strong feelings about West Point. But I also am very ambivalent. There were a lot of negatives.

I did well at West Point. In fact, I excelled at West Point, in almost every area except athletics, where I struggled to be average. There were a few athletic things I was good at: swimming, gymnastics, pitching in mass athletic softball, and the indoor obstacle course (because I could do the shelf and climb a rope with relative ease – two things most women found very difficult). I cannot explain to you why I was any good at any of these things; I just was. I was terrible at running. And I had a huge complex about running. Even though I would usually go out running almost every day on my own or with a friend. I was just not a very fast runner. But I also had a mental hang up about running. One that I would never lose until after I graduated.

When I took my first PT test at OBC, I had the best running time of my life. And that gave me confidence. As a first lieutenant I volunteered to run remedial PT for my unit at Fort Hood, Texas and was dedicated to helping soldiers improve their pushups, sit-ups, and two mile run times. My lackluster athletic prowess at West Point and shame at not being a good runner there made me want to excel and help others be physically fit out in the real Army. I guess that is a good thing.

It was hard to be a woman at West Point. We were in the sixth class at West Point to have women, so by no means did we experience what the women of the Class of 1980 -- or any of the other very early years –went through, but women were still somewhat of a novelty. And there was considerable misogyny, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and antagonism towards us simply because we were women.

It was hard to be at West Point period. The West Point experience is designed to be challenging and tough, transformative. The mission of West Point is to develop officers to lead soldiers in the Army, often in combat.

But at times, there are really juvenile, nonsensical things that go on. Meaningless hazing, silly pranks, even, at times, downright cruelty. I guess this is what happens when you let young people pretty much run their own military show. There are bound to be some immature assholes who don’t “get” what it means to be a leader of men and women. Who don’t get what it means to lead by example. Who find pleasure in being cruel and insensitive and who really believe that they are God’s gift to women and the world.

I have said this before, and I am sure I will say it many times again. One of the best pieces of advice that my father, a West Point Class of 1939 grad who did not believe women should go to West Point, ever gave me was right before I left for West Point. He took me out into our backyard and showed me how to stand at the position of attention, how to do a left face, a right face, and an about face. And then he told me, “Two things: Always keep your sense of humor and remember, there are SOBs wherever you go.”

No greater words of advice were ever spoken to me.

Countdown: Less than a week...

2010-10-21T22:56:00.001-04:00

A week from tonight I will be at a Marriott in Park Ridge, New Jersey.

Park Ridge, New Jersey? You may be asking.

It is somewhere off the Garden State Parkway, supposedly “not that far really” from West Point.

The Park Ridge Marriott is the official reunion hotel for my West Point class, the Class of 1985, which will be celebrating our 25th reunion.

We actually changed our reunion date to later in the fall, so that we could get a hotel closer to West Point; at our twentieth reunion (which is the only one I have ever attended) we ended up down by the Tappanzee Bridge. But, apparently, other classes, with more seniority than ours, heard of our brilliant plan, so they changed THEIR reunion weekend, too. So, we still ended up relatively far from our rockbound highland home.

I know, you are thinking: Didn’t you graduate in the spring? Why is your reunion in the fall?

Well, this is West Point we are talking about, and reunions tend to revolve around football games and football weekends.

At my last reunion, five years ago, it poured down rain the entire reunion weekend. It rained so hard they canceled the parade, and the football game, although held, may as well have been a water polo match. I am pretty sure Army lost. I can’t remember who they were playing, but I think it was a team from Michigan.

This year Army is playing VMI. I remember playing VMI my plebe year, and I think we, embarrassingly, lost. That was during the “Walker up the middle, Walker up the middle, Walker up the middle, punt” period of Army football. Before we discovered the wishbone secret that Air Force had mastered and had a stunning football season my firstie year, beating the hell out of both Air Force and Navy and going to a real, live bowl game. In Michigan.

The VMI game, though, was back in plebe year, when the Army team was not doing so well. And there were all these girls running around Michie Stadium in pink and green, groupies from Sweet Briar College, an all-girls school near VMI, there to support their “men.”

I remember getting hazed in a dark sallyport on Saturday night, after the game, by a cadet who emerged from the shadows to ask me what was for dinner. I was startled because Saturday dinner was optional and upperclassmen didn’t usually attend it and hardly ever asked us what was on the menu for that meal. I struggled to remember the menu but somehow managed to get it – or a close proximity thereof – out. I was waiting to get hazed by this upperclassman, as I was not at all sure I had been entirely accurate. Plus, what kind of asshole must he be to haze a poor lowly plebe on a Saturday night, AFTER we had just lost to effing VMI?

To my surprise, the upperclassman did not haze me, nor even question me further. In fact, a smile of intense smugness crept across his face.

Okayyyy… now, this was getting weird!

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I replied.

Uh-oh. This could not possibly be good.

He laughed. “I’m not a West Point cadet,” he said, emerging fully from the shadows to reveal his fake Dress Gray uniform.

OK, now this was getting really bizarre. Was this supposed to be funny?

“I am a VMI cadet,” he said proudly.

I was pissed. It was a Saturday night, I was pinging back to my room, just minding my own business, and I get accosted by a VMI cadet who wants to haze me?????

You are not even a real cadet, I thought to myself. You are from VMI. Where you pay to get hazed. And you have nothing better to do with your time than pretend to be a West Point cadet and accost lone female plebes in a dark sally port after your goddamned football team just beat our sorry ass football team?????

And I just called you “SIR”?????????????????

The cadet laughed again. “I tricked you,” he said. “You thought I was really a West Point upperclassman.”

I looked at him for a brief moment and blinked and said, “Good evening, SIR!” and pinged on my merry way.

Twenty-five years ago today....

2010-05-22T16:52:00.002-04:00

My blog has no pictures.

No illustrations.

No graphics.

It is called… Gray.

Not because I think life is colorless, or images are bad.

True, I am not a photographer, and I truly appreciate others who can take great photos and videos.

But I wanted my blog to be… pure.

Words only.

That may be weird. But…

I called it “Gray” for a variety of reasons.

My female West Point classmates, at our 20th class reunion, thought I should write about our experiences as women at West Point.

Fine.

I wanted to write about West Point.

And my personal experiences at West Point.

‘Cuz those are the only ones I truly know.

West Point is … gray.

The buildings are gray. The uniforms are gray. In winter, when there is no snow, virtually everything is gray.

But I also wanted to write about middle age. When we are all turning… gray.

AND… I wanted to write about life.

Which is frequently gray.

Or which, more accurately, has many gray areas.

I wanted to look at that part of life which is not black or white.

So… that left a lot for me to talk about.

Today…….

Or twenty-five years ago today, my class graduated from West Point.

Twenty-five years.

Wow.

What has happened in those twenty-five years since graduation….???

We all have different stories.

We all have different experiences.

We all have different takes on the past 25 years.

Some people say: “Gosh! Where did the time go?”

Some people say: “Wow! 25 years!!!! Let’s be proud!”

Still others say: “Great! Look at what we have done, but look forward at what we still have to do!”

I say: “Look at it all. I mean, yes, good lord, where DID the time go? But, my Lord, look at what all we have done!!! Marriages, children, careers, accomplishments, it is mind boggling. And, most importantly, where are we going next?”

What will we be doing in the NEXT twenty-five years???

In many ways, it does seem like graduation was just yesterday.
But we have all been through a lot, done a lot, lived a lot. No matter what paths we have chosen.

And we, who are still here, can look out into the… gray!... unforeseen future and say:

“What is next? Bring it on! Here I am. Let me do my thing!”

Waste Land

2010-04-24T12:04:00.002-04:00

“April is the cruellest month….”
-- T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

My older son just wrote a term paper on T. S. Eliot for his AP English class. He asked me to proofread it before he submitted it.

Reading over my son’s words – and the embedded snippets of Eliot’s poetry – made me start to think.

Always a dangerous proposition….

I realized that I was not sure if I had ever read any poetry by T. S. Eliot before.

This was profoundly disturbing to me.

Yes, I knew that T. S. Eliot was a 20th Century poet, most famous for having written “The Waste Land.” And that “The Waste Land” was widely regarded as a work of art reflecting the views of the post-WWI “lost generation.”

There was a nagging part of my brain telling me that I was “supposed” to have read “The Waste Land” for some English class or another, but I have no recollection of ever having done so.

I am stunned that my cultural literacy is so devoid of knowledge and familiarity with such an important poet.

Embarrassed, actually.

Truthfully, I feel as though my mind is in some ways a cultural Waste Land.

I am missing a lot of important “stuff.”

One of the things I most regret about my West Point education was the dearth of literature, philosophy, and critical thinking – hell, thinking of any kind!

Yes, sure, we had a very diverse core curriculum, which included a course in English, a course in philosophy. Very few of my courses required me to do much thinking, though. There was a lot of what cadets called “spec and dump.” Memorization and regurgitation. Of facts, information, dates, formulas. If you were good at memorizing and regurgitating – and you were willing to put forth the effort to do so – then you probably did well academically at West Point.

Which is not to say that I think people who did well there were not intelligent. I think that one could be very intelligent and thoughtful and someone good at memorizing and regurgitating. I also think that one could be very intelligent, but not so good at memorizing and regurgitating. Or unwilling -- or too lazy -- to memorize and regurgitate ad nauseam.

I personally liked the fact that we had such a diverse curriculum. That no matter what we majored in, even if it was English or history, we still got a Bachelor of Science degree, because we had to take so many math, science, and engineering courses.

What I didn’t like was that the atmosphere there was so intense, so fast-paced, so geared on “accomplishing the mission,” which meant getting the work done. Not so much learning anything. Or thinking too much or too hard.

I am sure there are many who would argue that because West Point is a training ground for future Army officers, the educational mission there is much different than at other institutions of higher learning. The Army doesn’t “pay you to think.” The Army pays you to lead your soldiers, accomplish your mission.

All well and good.

I would just say that training unthoughtful leaders is unwise.

Or, rather, that not training leaders to be thoughtful is unwise.

When I think back on my West Point education, besides all of the memorizing and regurgitating, I remember the emphasis being on problem solving (which I think is good), but problem solving that always leads you to one right answer. And that would be the answer you would have to underline twice and annotate with “Ans.” for “answer.” And there was always a right answer. As in a correct answer.

An approved solution.

I understand in math and chemistry and physics and engineering the need to show your work, step by step, and to come to some definitive answer, which, hopefully, is “correct.”

In philosophy or English or literature, not so much.

I can remember my philosophy professor – and we did have one required course in philosophy – half jokingly telling us that our answers, our essays, did not have to be underlined twice and have “Ans.” at the end. He was an Army officer, a West Point grad, so he knew what the system was like. He was a combat arms officer, I am sure, as West Point liked to make sure the Ps in their “warm and fuzzy” departments were “real men.” Even warriors can do philosophy.

As I remember it, the focus of our core philosophy course was on just and unjust wars, which I think was a wise topic for cadets to study. However, we never had a basic philosophy course, one where we examined basic philosophical questions, read the great philosophers, discussed what they wrote and thought. Discussed what we thought.

I had two English courses at West Point. That’s it. They were core plebe English classes, first semester focusing on writing and second semester a brief survey of American literature. This was an advanced level plebe English track, as I had taken enough English in high school and tested out of the basic English track. The problem with this was that it also meant I had tested out of the mandatory cow year English course. Which meant that I never read classics like “The Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer.

And maybe “The Waste Land,” too.

I find it amazing, in retrospect, that I only had to take two very basic, simple English courses my entire college career.

Even more fascinating to me is that I never realized that I could have taken more English courses. That I could have taken electives in English. I could have even majored in English. I cannot tell you why I did not realize this. I just know that it is true. Clearly, no one ever pointed out to me or emphasized the possibility. I only realized it years later, when I ran into someone who had graduated from West Point just after me and had majored in… English.

Wow.

If I had been more cognizant and aware as a cadet, would I have majored in English? I don’t know. But I think I would have at least taken a few electives in English.

A few years ago, I read Elizabeth Samet’s book Soldier’s Heart on the importance of literature and reading for cadets, for helping make them become more thoughtful leaders. I loved the book, enjoyed reading it immensely and was glad to see this point of view. Of course, what struck me right off the bat was the fact that Samet was a civilian professor.

We did not have any civilian professors when I was at West Point. Well, OK, there might have been one or two, but I never had one. The only time I ever had a civilian professor in college was during an exchange semester at the Air Force Academy for an international relations course. That was probably the best course I ever took as an undergrad period. Which is not to say that I think civilian professors are necessarily better than military ones. I am sure that is not a truism. But there is a huge difference.

When I was at West Point, most of the Ps were senior captains or young majors, who had served in tactical units and had a company command and then been sent back to grad school by the Army to a get a master’s degree and return to teach at West Point for three years. They were, for the most part, upwardly mobile, gung ho young officers; they were not necessarily subject matter experts in their fields. There were also permanent professors, more senior military officers who had been selected to get their doctorates and return to West Point to teach for the rest of their military careers. These professors tended to be more academic in nature and knowledge and experience. They had chosen, or been chosen, to fulfill their military careers as professors and not as brigade or division or corps commanders or senior level staff officers. They were all lieutenant colonels or full colonels.

I had several permanent professors while at West Point, and most were outstanding and engaging. Most of my regular Ps were fine, too, for that matter. But I am not sure that any of them ever really made me think.

At least not too much or too hard.

One of the reasons I wanted to go to West Point was because I wanted to be in an environment where I would be really, really challenged. And, overall, West Point was that sort of environment, but the challenge came more from the combination of military, physical, leadership, and academic requirements and demands. I was always wistful that I was never truly challenged academically, or mentally. Sure, we had to take a lot of courses and they were most often very demanding, but the demand was more in time management, attention to detail, and completing the mission. We were good at solving problems, especially when there was an approved solution to find.

But were we encouraged to be thoughtful or questioning?

Were we asked to think outside the box?

Were we asked to tackle any serious questions with serious thought and debate?

I will not speak for others, as everyone’s experience at West Point is his or her own, but I can say that, unequivocally, I was never required to wrestle mentally with anything in any challenging way. I had to take self defense, yes, in PE, and the male cadets had to take boxing. We all learned how to fight with bayonets. How to low crawl, high crawl, maneuver over terrain, and drive tanks. All of these skills were obviously highly important to people training to become officers in the Army where they might be called on to do these skills and train others and lead soldiers into combat or at least support soldiers in combat. I am not denying that all of these skills are vital ones. I am just saying that I think real leaders need to be able to think in a deep and meaningful way.

Another thing that surprised me about Samet’s book was how much more aware and engaged the cadets she portrayed seemed than any of us had ever been. It seemed like they actually read the books assigned to them in English classes and were capable of thinking about them and discussing them in a meaningful way. Maybe my memory is just bad. Maybe we were more aware and engaged than I remember us being. I just remember everything being so intense and fast-paced that there never was any time for thinking. We were lucky if we got the reading accomplished. Plus, I think a lot of cadets took pride in “getting by.” Doing the minimum to succeed. Many took pride in the whole “spec and dump” approach, in how little they had to study or work. Many cadets would brag that they had pulled an “all nighter” to cram in a semester’s worth of work in one night; they would embrace the guiding mantra “RD = FC” (rough draft = final copy) as if that were a good thing.

Maybe these phenomena are seen everywhere, to one extent or another, at every single college campus in America.

I just think that critical thinking skills are important for all young people to have, and especially so for young military officers. I also think that genuine exposure to literature and art and philosophy are important in helping develop those critical thinking skills.

I hope that the West Point of today is actually like what Samet describes. And that the cadets are more engaged and challenged intellectually. I know that there are more civilian professors there, who can lend a different perspective and knowledge base, to the educational experience. I think a mix of military and civilian professors is probably a good thing. I hope that critical thinking is a more integrated part of the West Point experience. And I hope that cadets are encouraged to read books and literature. And to ask the difficult questions that have no approved solution.

That may have no solution.

I feel that in times of crisis and battle, the leader who has read and thought in addition to his other training and education, will lead his or her men and women more effectively.

That said, I think I have a lot of reading to catch up on.

It is true....

2010-04-18T15:52:00.003-04:00

I have not posted to this blog in months.

Yet, I write constantly.

On paper. In little notebooks I keep in my purse. On Post-It Notes. On my computer. In my head.

It is true. Most of my writing does go on in my head. I don't think I ever stop writing.

I hear something on the radio.

See something out my window.

Bump into someone.

Overhear a conversation.

Walk down the street.

All spur stories to start writing in my head. Some I write down. Others, not. My head is overflowing with characters, plots, scenes, themes, dialogue. There is incessant chatter.

I like to be the Observer. And not the observed.

I like to watch. And listen. And eavesdrop. I like to imagine all the stories that are out there.

The other day I took a break at work and walked down to the edge of campus, near the Grotto. Behind me was a statue of the Virgin Mary, in a fake cave, protected by a black, wrought iron fence. In front of me was the river, the Liberty Bridge, cars and trucks careening across the bridge, the South Side, the incline, and Mount Washington. A Droid billboard.

I saw the letters: "P&LERR" atop the building over at Station Square. I know this stands for Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad. I know that Station Square used to be a huge train station. I know that my grandmother used to work at the lunch counter inside the station and that my grandfather, a traveling salesman from Georgia passing through, met her there. I know that Station Square now houses an array of shops and restaurants. And that at the stroke of midnight as we moved from New Year's Eve into the New Year, my future husband asked me to marry him in hullabaloo of Houlihan's. And I said yes.

I have no idea where all of the people in their cars and trucks and SUVs are going as they criss cross the bridge.

I turn around and walk back to my office. On the way, I see the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh. I see the oddly incongruous "UPMC" letters atop what I know as the US Steel Building. I know that my father, who worked for US Steel, met my mother, who also worked for US Steel, in -- not this building, but rather -- the former US Steel Building. Which I do not really remember as an entity. I know that my father was recently widowed, and my mother was a secretary who had recently moved to the headquarters building from Clairton Works. And he saw her one day. And was like Wow! I know that he used to comb his (almost non-existent) hair before calling her on the telephone to ask her out. I know that on their first date, he told her that he had "come a'courting."

There are a lot of things I know. And a lot of things I don't know.

And a lot of things that I imagine.

Conversations.

Encounters, brief and otherwise.

Scenes and plots and stories and scenarios of all variation.

No one is safe really. Anyone, everyone can be a character in my stories. Anyone, everyone is a character in my stories.

Myself included.

Characters emerge in my dreams. I see movies unfold in my head as I sleep. I often don't remember them, but often they scare me or move me in some unsettling way.

I wonder who is driving that brown SUV that is crossing the bridge and where they are going. And why. And what will they do when they get there.

I write and re-write scenes in my head. Describe. Report. Analyze. Tell. Show.

Hills Like White Elephants.

People who were young once.

People who are now dead.

One true sentence.

Is there such a thing....?

I have no idea. But it doesn't stop me from writing.

Writing.

Writing.

Forever and ever. Amen.

Books that will always stick with you

2010-01-02T18:51:00.002-05:00

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day." -- Edith Lovejoy Pierce

On Facebook a few months ago, there was a meme on Favorite Books. I changed it to "Books you've read that will always stick with you" and came up with my Top 15. I wrote, “There is a story behind each and every one of these books. They are not necessarily my ‘favorites,’ but they will always stick with me.”

Now, for my first blog posting of 2010, I have decided to elaborate and give the “stories” behind the books:

1. One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
Classic Dr. Seuss. One of my first books. What I remember most about this book is “reading” it to my brand new sister-in-law when I was three years old. She really believed (or so it seemed) that I was reading the book to her as I had memorized all the words on each page, and this made me very proud. It made me want to learn to read for real!

2. Blueberries for Sal
I loved this book. Sal and her mom out looking for blueberries up in Maine and a mama bear and baby bear looking for them, too. The goal of the humans is to save them, not eat them (so they can can them for winter), while the goal of the bears is to eat them all right now (so they can have fuel for winter hibernation). The same goal, but with two different means. Imagine the surprise of the two different mamas when they realize their progeny have gotten mixed up! A simple book with simple yet exquisite illustrations by Robert McCloskey, the author of Make Way for Ducklings, another of my all-time favorite picture books.

3. Nancy Drew - The Secret of Shadow Ranch
In second grade, our teacher Mrs. Hardy used to read aloud to us from Hardy Boys books, that I imagine boys in our class brought in. I broke the mold when I brought in a Nancy Drew book for her to read aloud. This was the first Nancy Drew book I ever read, and it was the first Nancy Drew book that our teacher read aloud to our class. Breaking glass ceilings in the second grade gave infinite pleasure!

4. All About: Archaeology
This was a book from the infamous Landmark book series, which, alas!, I believe exists no more. I think I read every Landmark book that was in our elementary school library. This one, though, I selected from our local bookstore for my birthday; I was allowed to pick out any book I wanted, and this was the one I wanted. I was mesmerized by Heinrich Schliemann and his search for the lost city of Troy, by Howard Carter and his exploration of King Tut’s tomb. For years afterwards, I wanted to grown up and be an archaeologist!

5. Rifles for Watie
I. Loved. This. Book. Am not sure how I discovered it, but I think maybe I acquired a hardbound copy at the used book sale that was a part of the annual Clothesline Sale to raise money for our school. I loved stories about young boys going out into the world to become men (maybe because there were no books about young women going out into the world to become women!). I also loved the Civil War. My father used to take us to visit Civil War battlefields whenever we were traveling around parts of the US that had Civil War battlefields, and I was intrigued.

I also liked this book because it was set in the West and covered a part to the Civil War that we rarely hear about. My father was also a big aficionado of the American West. It was like this book melded my father’s love of the Civil War and American Indians with my love for adventure and a good story. And a young person becoming an adult.

6. A Separate Peace
We had to read this book for Ninth Grade English. That in itself should be a harbinger of doom, but I LOVED this book. My kids (some twenty-five or thirty years later) had to read it as well, and they hated it. When I read it at the time, I did not notice the homoerotic parts. Hell, it seems every book we read as kids was homoerotic, but I never noticed it! What I liked about it was the teenaged narrator racked with angst, how he became friends with the easy-going athlete, and the tragedy that ensued. Well, no, I did not like the tragedy; I was very upset by Phineas’ sudden -- and unexpected – death. But I liked the fact that a book could be written from the perspective of a teenager who was as clueless as the rest of us.

7. David Copperfield
Another ninth grade English read. I loved this book because it was LONG and confusing and full of vocabulary words I had to learn. And because it had a host of really neat characters who were weird and mysterious, some evil, some noble, some ordinary (albeit extraordinary in their ordinariness). I think I really came to appreciate Charles Dickens after this book, although there are others of his books I enjoyed far more.

8. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
OK. This was puberty and girls going through puberty and – hello! – NOBODY wrote books about puberty. Except for Judy Blume. What girl can ever forget: “We must! We must! We must increase our busts! The bigger, the better, the tighter the sweater! We must increase our busts!” I liked this book because it was real. It was honest. It talked about stuff pre-teen and teen girls go through when they go through puberty. And I don’t know another author who handled this as well as Judy Blume. I also enjoyed her boy going through puberty book, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, as well as her iconic forbidden young love but, yes, we really have sex book, Forever. I cannot imagine going through puberty without Judy Blume!

9. Gone With the Wind
OK, OK. Yes, this is my all time favorite movie of all time!!! Probably because I love Vivien Leigh. And Clark Gable. And all of the other memorable character actors. And the sweeping saga of the movie itself. But I loved the book, too. Which is quite different in many ways from the movie. I mean, Scarlett has about ten times as many kids in the book. But the point is: I love Katie Scarlett O’Hara, even though she was a spoiled rich girl brat. More importantly, she was a survivor. And she helped her family and friends make it through the Civil War as the plantation era world they knew was destroyed all around them. And she came through the other side. And made frickin’ dresses out of curtains and captured Rhett Butler. I never understood her obsession with Ashley, whom I thought was a weak-kneed wimp. But I admired Scarlett’s fire and strength and loyalty to Tara. This was a heroine full of flaws that you could still root for! Scarlett O’Hara was a woman to be reckoned with.

10. Origins - Richard Leakey
Back to the interest in archaeology and anthropology, but crank it up a notch! I was totally fascinated by the story of how the Leakeys went to Africa and the Olduvai Gorge and sought out, quite simply, the origins of our species. I found this story absolutely fascinating. It reinforced my desire to become an archaeologist/anthropologist.

11. The Snow Leopard
A book that was loaned to me by a father of kids I used to babysit for. A book that completely captured my attention. A real life story of loss and journey and truth set in the mountains of Tibet, by a modern author, Peter Matthiessen. I read this book in high school, and it changed my life. I was enchanted by mythology and the hero and journey myths, and this book seemed to be a modern day rendition of the hero/journey myth. The author had just lost his wife to cancer, and he was on an internal quest, or journey, even as he made a real journey through the Himalayan Mountains in search of the legendary black snow leopard. This book totally captured my spirit and has remained one of my favorite books of all time.

12. The Sun Also Rises
People make fun of me for liking Ernest Hemingway. But I will not apologize. I think the man was a brilliant writer in his early years. Some of his short stories, like “Hills Like White Elephants,” still take my breath away. And I LOVED his first novel. No, I did not truly understand all of it when I first read it as a teenager, but something about his writing sang to me. And I particularly liked how I could compare The Sun Also Rises with his life and his friends and acquaintances and his later memoir of this time in Paris, A Moveable Feast. The Sun Also Rises is still one of my favorite books.

13. The Magnificent Spinster
This was my first introduction to May Sarton. I had an aunt, my father’s sister who was next in age to him, who used to send me books and write me long letters. We would write back and forth and talk about books and literature and writing and life. I am not sure exactly when she sent me a copy of this book. I think it may well have been right after I got out of the Army, when I was a bit at loose ends. I remember stumbling across a May Sarton book in the local public library at about the same time my aunt sent me a bunch of her novels. And I was totally blown away by The Magnificent Spinster. May Sarton was a poet, but she was also a novelist. And it was her novels – about real life families and couples and individuals that caught my attention. The novel that moved me most deeply was The Magnificent Spinster. I went on to read all the other novels by Sarton, but I was also captivated by her numerous published journals. In the end, though, the one Sarton work that moved me most deeply was The Magnificent Spinster, the story of a girl of New England privilege who went on to become a teacher devoting her life to service and education – as told by one of her former pupils, who was by then in her seventies.

14. What to Expect When You're Expecting
I loved this book because it was like a Bible. Or an encyclopedia. I used it religiously. And it was endlessly helpful to me. First as a comfort and source of knowledge as I embarked upon my first pregnancy and then as a handy, reliable reference source and one I was wont to pass on to otWhher newly pregnant women. I also was a devotee of What to Expect in the First Year. Part of the allure of this book was that it took me FOREVER to get pregnant. We were married for many years and went through long periods of separation brought on by the Army and field time and deployments. More than anything else, I wanted to get pregnant and have children. This was something I had intensely desired since childhood, and at one point I thought it might never happen. But, then, after my husband returned from Desert Storm, we conceived our Desert Storm baby. And less than two years after him, our second child. As well educated and trained as I might have been, I knew absolutely nothing about being a mother. I just knew that I wanted to be one. This book was a comforting beacon in the night to me as I embarked on my new career of mother.

15. The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell
My sister sent me this book as a Christmas gift one year. She knew well, I am sure, of my predilection for mythology and stories and symbols. I loved the conversations in this book and one of my lifelong desires would be to have dinner with Joseph Campbell. I continue to be intrigued by story and narrative and myth and heroes and journeys and truth.

Book 'em, Danno!

2009-12-31T20:43:00.002-05:00

I simply must post something on this, the very last day of 2009.

I know that I have not really been very good at posting this year.

And that Epsilon has stepped in to liven things up with her… uh… interesting and unique take on things.

And her obsession with that tunnel that (supposedly) goes under the river.

So, thank you, Epsilon!

* * * * *

Blue moons, me thinks, must cause people to want to clean!

Even more so than typical end of the year-ness.

I have been going through tons of paperwork, organizing, shredding, filling up huge black Hefty bags with… detritus.

And it feels so damned good!

But.

I have too many books for my room (and my home) – alas!

Which is causing me great angst… and gastrointestinal distress.

I love my books.

I love books.

I cannot live without books!

But I think I need to live without… quite so many books.

Me thinks… sigh… my collection needs a good…gasp!... weeding.

Or a small weeding.

Or a wee weeding.

Or a WEEding.

Yes, I could box up books and stash them in the already burgeoning attic.

But I don’t want to do that.

We don’t have a basement. In an old house built on a slab of stone on the side of a hill.(Thank God, really! Or else I am sure we would be dealing with leakage and flooding and mold and mildew and alligators and crocodiles and whatnot.)

Sigh.

I think it is probably true: I have accumulated some books (maybe one or two or a few) I don’t really, truly care to keep… forever.

When we used to move every year or so, I was much better at going through belongings and books.

And when we set up shop in our new locales – wherever that might be, certain books went in certain places.

It was always reassuring and made the new place feel more like home. All I had to do was put my old friends back on the shelves where they belonged and reigned, and voila!

When I moved here, I had less room.

And thoughtfully, purposefully arranged my most precious books in a certain way.

That had some deep-seated meaning at the time.

Right now, there are four large bookcases in my bedroom.

All four are overflowing.

I have moved some books to other rooms, but most of the other rooms of the house are already full of books.

(The curse of being in a family that loves books!)

Although I use libraries religiously, I also acquire books through purchase, gift, at used book sales, from friends, etc.

I love reading, yes!

But I love books.

The objects.

As objets d’art.

The tangible book. Yes. But also the idea of the book. Or behind the book.

Each book tells a story about its owner.

Thus a whole shelf of books tells even more. A whole room, even more. And a whole houseful, well…….

So, imagine my shock and dismay when I enter a home that has… no books!

Sacre bleu!

Say it isn’t so!?!

I cannot even imagine it, really.

Yet, I have seen it.

As God is my witness, I have been in homes that have… no books.

But I digress. My problem is too many books. Although I do not think there is really any such thing as “too many” books.

When you get down to it, the problem is not too many books, but too little room.

And the room is not getting any bigger any time soon. So, the number of books needs to get whittled down a bit.

Something that I will think about tomorrow.

For, afterall, as we all know…tomorrow is another day!

Right now, however, I hear a bubble bath calling my name. A bubble bath wherein I will hide and read … a book.

And welcome in the new year.

Happy New Year! Happy 2010.

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

2009-12-11T17:08:00.007-05:00

I can’t stop singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

Two members of the high school chorus did a cute duet the other night as part of the high school holiday band/chorus concert, and ever since then I keep hearing the song wherever I go.

In my head, out loud, on the radio, in Starbucks. Just about everywhere.

Of course, it really is cold outside right now, so maybe that has prompted the sudden popularity. There was even a post about the song and different versions of it on Monkey See, NPR’s pop-culture blog.

Whenever I hear the song, though, I always think of the 1949 movie Neptune’s Daughter, where – I kid you not! – Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams sing the duet in the traditional version, where the woman feels she should leave and the man wants her to stay. [I am not sure why, but I can no longer find a video version of this online to share with you, but it is priceless!] Later in the same film, Red Skelton and Betty Garrett sing a reprise, but this time with the roles reversed. You can see this version online, but it’s just not the same as when Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams sing it.

The song, by Frank Loesser, went on to win an Academy Award for Most Original Song. The irony of it all is that Neptune’s Daughter had nothing to do with Christmas – or it being cold outside. It was set in Florida, where Esther Williams is a swim suit designer and there are synchronized swimming musical numbers mixed in with the movie’s other song and dance routines. Ricardo Montalban is a playboy captain of a South American polo team! Williams falls (reluctantly) in love with Montalban, and I guess he sings the song to her so she won’t leave but will stay and... look at his etchings. Or something.

You can see a trailer for the film online, and it does include a clip from Montalban and Williams’s version of the song.

[More info and a complete synopsis of the film are available on Turner Classic Movie’s website.]

I think most recently the song has regained a bit of popularity because of the version in the movie Elf where Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell sing it . In fact, at the high school concert, I commented that the song always reminded me of the Ricardo Montalban movie, and the mom sitting next to me said, “Really? It always reminds me of Elf.”

Sure, Elf is cute, but how can you beat synchronized swimming bathing beauties, Latin music bands and dancers, polo, comedy, and Ricardo Montalban?

I mean, really now?

Downtime

2009-11-27T16:29:00.002-05:00

Goodness. I am not sure how to respond to that last post.

I guess I should just say: Thanks, Epsilon!

I'm not certain how that tale proves there is a tunnel running underneath the Ohio River, but I am assuming you have a few more tricks up your sleeve. So, will just be patient.

I hope you and your family enjoyed a nice Thanksgiving. I, too, did not have to cook this year and was quite relieved. My task was to bring a nice bottle of Riesling and some appetizers. Spent a quiet evening with my mom and some good family friends.

A cold front has indeed descended upon us; I even saw snowflakes flittering spastically through the air this afternoon!

Took a long walk in the cold to clear my mind. Now I feel like I was traipsing across the moors with Heathcliff and am trying to warm up with a mug of coffee. Although I see something a bit stronger in my future....

Am listening to Russian Nights, working on the computer, and generally just kind of hanging out. Not something I get to do very often!

Heard a segment on NPR the other night about the complete(newly translated)letters of Vincent Van Gogh(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120846061). Incredibly fascinating stuff! I love the way he thought -- and wrote -- about poetry and music and art and spirituality and how they were all interconnected. Was considering getting his collected letters for my artist sister for Christmas until they said they were available in a six volume set containing 902 translated letters -- for only $600! But you can also access them online at vangoghletters.org, and I think that would make a fun way to spend some quiet time this long, blustery holiday weekend.

Dénouement

2009-11-26T14:39:00.003-05:00

Sorry! I know it has been EONS since I have written, and you have all probably given up hope for poor Penny.

Or, heck, simply forgotten who she is.

I have some time right now to sit down and catch you up.

Our family rotates hosting Thanksgiving Dinner every year, and this year the dinner is at my mother in law’s. All I have to do is bring the wine, my famous Emeril’s Cranberry Orange Sassy Sauce (well, I don’t think that’s what it is really called, but whatever), and my Aunt Julia’s pumpkin bread that my daughter graciously volunteered to bake, as I loathe baking. We don’t have to be there until 4:00, so I have some free time between the Macy’s Day Parade and Turkey Gronk Fest.

In case you have forgotten where our fearless spelunkers were when I left off, I will take you back to the final scene of my last installment….

* * * *
All of a sudden my flashlight started to waver and then dim. I shook it and banged it on my free hand. It got brighter for a moment, and then it started wavering again.

And then, boom, just like that, it went out.

And Penny let out one of the most blood curling screams I have ever heard.

It scared the crap out of me and made me jump about a foot in the air. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

“Penny! Stop it!” I glared at her in the darkness.

“It’s dark! I can’t see anything!” Penny wailed. “We’re all gonna dieeeeeeeeee….”

“We are NOT going to die,” I said. “Ben, where are you?”

“Right here,” he said.

“Are you near Penny?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well, can’t you find her and slap some sense into her?”

“You are SOOOOO mean!” Penny wailed.

“Well, you are SOOOO loud!” I retorted. “Jesus, your screaming is not going to solve anything. In fact, it will probably cause a cave in or something and then we will really be trapped.”

“Oh, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

“Penny. Here. Stop yelling,” Ben said. “Just hold my hand. It will be all right.”

“Yeah, hold Ben’s hand. So, we don’t lose you in the dark and leave you here by mistake.”

“Oh, my God! Please don’t LEAVE me heeeeeerrrre!!!”

“Shhhh… she’s not serious. We would never leave you here. But you need to stop screaming.” Ben was annoyingly reassuring.

“Yeah, you might wake up the bats or something.”

“BATS?!?”

“Stop making her upset!” Ben sounded angry.

“Yeah, yeah. All right. All right. I’m just trying to get my bearings so we can feel our way out of here.”

“What do you mean ‘feel our way out of here’?”

“Well, if we just find the wall of the cave, we can follow it to the entrance. The only problem is….”

“What?”

“Well, when the flashlight died and Penny started screaming, I was startled and turned around a few times and now I’m not really sure which way is in and which way is out.”

“Ohhhh, nooooooo….” Penny started whimpering.

“Well, I haven’t turned around at all,” Ben said. “I was right behind Penny and she’s still in front of me. So, we just need to keep going in that direction.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Ben sounded sure. I wasn’t really sure if he was sure or if he was just sounding sure so Penny wouldn’t freak out again.

“I don’t think we are very far from the entrance. So, we should start to see light coming from there pretty soon.”

I didn’t add that if we went a while and we didn’t see daylight, then that would mean we were going the wrong way and would have to turn around and head the other way.

(The only thing I was really worried about was that it would be night time pretty soon and we wouldn’t see light no matter which way we went in the tunnel. But I didn’t want to get the others worried about that possibility.)

I found Ben and Penny in the darkness and then reached out my right arm to find the side of the tunnel. My hand brushed up against the cold, damp stone wall, and I took a deep breath.

“OK, guys. This is it. Let’s go!”

“See, Penny,” Ben said. “Stay with me and follow her, and we’ll be outta here in no time.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

I really had no idea which direction we were going, to tell you the truth. But it seemed like a good idea to do something.

To keep moving.

We were moving very slowly, because it was inky darkness, and I was afraid of tripping over something or bumping into… something. I wasn’t sure what. And tried not to let my imagination go wild.

“Hey!” Penny said. “What’s that?”

“What?”

“Shhhh! That sound. In the distance. Don’t you hear it?”

All I could hear was my own breathing and the faint dripping of water from the ceiling.

“That!” said Penny. “Didn’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?” Ben asked.

“It sounds like… like… yelling from really far, far away.”

And then I heard it, too. Muffled yells. I couldn’t tell what the words were, but it sounded human at least.

“We’re in here!” Penny shouted at the top of her lungs.

“WE’RE IN HERE!!!” All three of us shouted at the tops of our lungs.

And then we saw a dim light bobbing in the distance.

We moved as quickly as we could towards the faint light.

And then I saw a huge, dark shadow looming behind the dim light.

Oh, God, it was a bear! I just knew it.

Never mind that there weren’t supposed to be bears in this area. Or that bears don’t generally use artificial lights.

“Nick!” Penny shouted with glee.

“Penny!” the dark form shouted back. “Where are you guys? It’s so dark in here.”

And then I could make out his frame and saw the white stripes on his shirt. He was carrying a penlight, the kind people keep on their key chains to help them find the door lock when it is dark outside.

I felt a tremendous surge of relief.

We were not going to die afterall!

“What are you guys doing in here in the dark?” Nick said.

“What are you doing here, period?” Ben asked. “I thought your parents said you weren’t allowed to go into any caves.”

“I’m not. But I got bored and came out here to look for you guys. And then I found your stuff out by the entrance to the cave. I just sat down on a log and was going to wait for you guys to come back out. But then I waited and I waited. And you weren’t coming.”

“Our flashlights all died!” Penny said.

“Yeah, we were in total darkness, man,” Ben said.

“But what made you come in?” I asked. “Even though you weren’t supposed to?”

“I heard a really high-pitched noise from inside the cave. And I realized it was somebody screaming. I shouted and shouted but nobody answered back. But I knew it was… was….”

“A call of distress?” I asked.

“Yes! I knew you guys still had to be inside, and it had to be one of you. I was afraid somebody got hurt or something.”

“So, you just came looking for us?”

“Yes.”

‘Well, thank God you did!” Penny hugged Nick. “You saved us!”

“Well….”

“You’re a hero, dude.” Ben agreed.

“Yes, I have to say that it was really lucky that you had that pocket flashlight on you,” I admitted.

“Yeah, well, I had our spare house keys, and it just happened to be on there. And actually still work. But it is pretty tiny.”

“Big enough to find us!” Penny said.

“You know, it's lucky I came all the way out here,” Nick said. “I mean, you know….”

“We would have found our way out. Eventually,” I said. “But thanks.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it was such a good idea that you guys went in there without better flashlights or extra batteries or a ball of string or something.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “But next time –“

“NEXT TIME?!? Are you NUTS???” Penny glared at me. “I’m not ever, ever, ever going in that stupid cave ever again!”

“Well, you won’t have to,” I said.

But I knew I would be.

And I knew, with even more conviction, that this tunnel was the one that would take us all the way under the river.

Don’t ask me why or how I knew, but I just did. I felt it in my bones.

The three of us were all muddy and wet from being in the cave. We looked kind of like drowned rats. Or contestants in a Tide commercial.

We gathered all our stuff together and started to head back home. I was already planning how we would sneak into our basement so I could wash all our muddy clothes without my mom knowing.

Penny walked up to Nick and yanked on his arm. “Here,” she said.

“What?” Nick turned around.

Penny slipped something into Nick’s hand.

“What is it?” Ben asked.

Nick opened up his hand to reveal a shiny, copper-colored coin.

“What’s this for?” he asked.

“Silly,” Penny blushed. “It’s your reward.”

“You don’t have to give me a reward.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“A penny’s not very much of a reward,” Ben said.

“Yeah, well, it’s my lucky penny. I carry it with me everywhere. And now it’s Nick’s.”

And so we come to the moral of our story:

A Penny saved is a penny earned.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Confessions of a Middle Aged Mom

2009-11-21T15:36:00.002-05:00

My ears are burning.

Not because someone is talking about me.

Well, someone may well be talking about me, but that is not why my ears are burning.

My ears are burning because my 83-year old mother told me to put Swim Ear in them. She was digging through the hall medicine closet (it doubles as a linen closet, but medicinal products from as far back as the 1950s fill up much of the space), and she could not find the ear oil. Or the oil for one’s ears. That, apparently, one is supposed to warm up and drizzle into the innards of one’s ears whilst experiencing pain and discomfort.

Me. I am happy with several Advil and a shot of whiskey.

But, no, that is not medicinal enough for my mother. You need to use the special ear oil and THEN take the pain killers and the whiskey.

Myself, I am just hoping said pain will go away. Disappear. Bother me no more.

If I just ignore it for long enough.

I am not a baby or a toddler. I do not have time in my life for ear infections. Where the HELL did I ever get an ear infection anyway????

And I am most certainly NOT going to go sit in some over-crowded, germ-infested emergency room waiting room for 8 hours waiting to be seen by a doctor because my ill health did not present itself until the weekend.

So, I am hoping it just goes away.

But… I do have to say that I have IMMENSE sympathy for babies and toddlers who experience ear infections, because ear infections are extremely painful and really suck.

And if you are not old enough to express your level of discomfort in complete sentences – or even words! – then I totally get why you get so whiny and irritable and cry non stop.

My ear troubles remind me – too painfully! – of the time my younger son, who was about 13 months old, got an ear infection while we were on a family vacation at Club Med in the Bahamas. He was crying and fussy, and I took him to the Club Med Medical Clinic. They then sent him to see a doctor – THE doctor – the ONLY doctor on the island, I guess, and we had to take a taxi off the Club Med premises to this doctor’s office which was at the end of a long and winding dirt road. The doctor was very nice and prescribed antibiotics for my son. That night, back at Club Med, the evening’s entertainment was a Magic Show, and the magician was… the island doctor!!! I kid you not. I am looking at this guy up on the stage and wondering why he looked so familiar, when it dawned on me: “Oh. My. God. That is the DOCTOR!!!”

Anyway, we flew home several days later. The first leg of the trip, from the island to Florida, went fine. Perhaps because the plane did not ascend all that far up? However, when we got on the big, huge jet that was to take us from Florida back to DC, my poor young son could NOT be consoled! It was painfully obvious (to ALL on that flight) that he was in a lot of pain and I was an evil mom from hell. The worst part of all was that my baby was in so much pain and there really was NOTHING I could do to console him. It was agony.

Once we landed, he was OK again. And quickly fell asleep. But I was forever traumatized.

And I am sure this is why I am getting an ear infection some 15 years later.

As pay back or something.

Lest I forget.

Cell Phone Dickering

Coincidentally – or not! – that same son is now in dire need of a “better” cell phone plan. When he and his older brother were about 11 and 13 (or 12 and 14) – I can’t remember – I got them cell phones for Christmas. While my kids were thrilled to be cool and hip, my main concern was that they be able to reach me and me them whenever it was necessary. They got simple phones and a Pay As You Go prepaid plan. My reasoning: if they lost their phones, not such a tragedy. Plus, they would not be able to ring up astronomical phone bills. If they ran through their allotments, they would be done, until I decided to put more money on their phones.

This worked like a charm for many years. Neither son was particularly chatty, and they often forgot to take their phones with them. My older son only turns on his phone when he wants to call YOU, and then immediately turns it off again. My younger son would use his phone, but not all that much.

Until….

High school.

And GIRLS.

And text messaging.

It is a bizarre fact of truth that if you own a cell phone you are charged for each time that someone calls or texts YOU! I fail to understand this phenomenon. It does not work that way for regular phones. You make the call, you pay. OK, fine and good, but not the other way around!

If I had to pay for each and every time some moron solicitor called my home phone, I would have been sent to debtor’s prison long ago!

Anyway… teens these days apparently only communicate via text message.

I myself have an older style flip phone and while I have the ability (on my phone) to text message, it takes me about four hours to send a simple text from my old school dialing apparatus. I do not have a QWERTY keyboard on my phone. So, it takes me a long, long, long while to figure out how to type the simplest of responses to all of my friends who seem to have QWERTY and valet texting on their phones.

My son, the one who had the horrible ear infection on our Club Med trip 15 years ago, told me that he NEEDS a new phone. When I asked him how he was planning on paying for this new phone, he gave me the look from hell that said: “YOU were the evil mother who allowed me to suffer, irrevocably, on that airline flight back from the islands!”

I told my son that he could research cell phone family plans and get back with me. That if he was really serious about getting a new phone and phone plan, he could take the time to look up what would be the best option.

I am still waiting.

He told me, plaintively, “It is not MY fault that people text message me so much.”

OK, fine. Whatever.

Do the research. Put together your presentation. And convince me.

Otherwise, I will not be overly sympathetic.

His plan?

Borrow his older brother’s phone (you know the one who only turns on his phone when he is calling YOU!) without asking him and just use that.

Uh-uh.

Not acceptable.

Try again.

Over.

Social Life

Did I forget to mention that my younger son NEEDS a new phone and plan where he can text message and receive text messages ad nauseam BECAUSE he has a social life?

“Is it MY fault I have a social life?” he asks me with derision.

“Do you WANT me to be unpopular?”

Sigh.

No, I just want you to pay for your extravagant lifestyle.

Dating

Social life is not the equivalent of dating.

But… my younger son who wants the new cell phone and cell phone plan with unlimited texting is also into the whole dating scene.

I do not approve of his dating techniques. Me, I would get to know someone first and decide I like them and THEN ask them out.

Him? He sees someone he likes or thinks he likes and asks them out and THEN gets to know them and decides, gee, maybe he doesn’t really like them afterall because they have nothing in common.

Huh.

There is no sense my telling him why this approach is not sound. Afterall, I am the evil bitch mom from hell who will not buy him an iPhone with unlimited text messaging to China.

So, I guess he will figure out after one or two or three or four times that his method is really just not working for him.

My other son, you know, the one who never turns on his phone unless he is going to call you and then turns it back off again, has plenty of friends who are girls but he does not date. He says he would love to date, but there really are no girls he would want to date at the moment. He likes them as friends, but they are already dating someone else or just not his type.

I am tempted to buy HIM an iPhone with unlimited text messaging to China, but that might be a tad irrational.

Driving Privileges

Just because you CAN drive a car and because you have your junior license does not mean you MUST drive a car.

My older son, who does not have the cell phone woes, does have his driver’s license. He also has an aversion to any kind of physical activity whatsoever. So, he is always wanting to drive somewhere. Even if it is just down the road to the local grocery store to buy chips!

That is just so anathematical (not a word, I know, but I like it) it makes me break out in hives!!!

Number one: he does NOT have a car of his own.

Number two: he is NOT paying for his car insurance.

Number three: his need to use a car does not fall into the realm of realistically reasonable.

What WOULD be reasonable?

“Son, I need you to go pick up your younger brother from driver’s ed.”

“Could you please drive down and pick up the pizzas I ordered for dinner?”

“If you want to use my car to go to work and back, that is fine.”

College Application Season

The applications are already in, so I feel I can comment on this now without jinxing anything.

But this was like pulling teeth!!!

Not, mind you, that I have ever in my life pulled anyone else’s – or my own! – teeth.

The process is so labyrinthine and mind-boggling, even though the online Common Application is supposed to simplify things ten-fold.

There is nothing common about the Common Application, other than the fact, I guess, that you can (sometimes) send applications to multiple schools through this one online venue.

Not all schools use or allow the Common Application and even of those that do, some require extra, additional hoops to jump through.

My feeling is that if they made the college application process more like an RPG (role-playing game) video game, kids like my older son would just never get enough of it.

“What do you mean I have already successfully applied to all of the schools I want to apply to and I need to get off the computer and go play video games????”

Now, wouldn’t THAT be the kind of thing parents wanna be hearing…?

Drill Sergeant of the Year Award

I’m not sure what weekday mornings at your house are like, but at my house, it sounds like a boot camp scene from Full Metal Jacket or An Officer and A Gentleman.

“What do you want on your sandwich? MAYOnnaise? Or mustard?”

“It’s 7:10. If you want breakfast, you better shake a leg! The train to the bus stop leaves the station in six minutes. Six minutes! Six minutes!”

“It’s 7:20. Move it! Move it! Move it! That’s an out the door kinda move it!”

You see… sigh.

I have to hustle my two sluggish teenagers into the car so I can drive them the quarter mile to the bus stop.

I know, I know, you are thinking, “Why the HELL can’t they walk to the bus stop?!?”

I used to think that, too.

But when your kids miss the bus a few times and you have to drive them the three miles to the high school and back during rush hour school traffic, it takes a huge chunk out of your own precious morning time when you are supposed to be doing things like working out at the gym, swimming laps, taking a shower, doing laundry, getting dinner ready, folding clothes, making dentist and doctor and car service appointments, and getting ready for work, all at the same time.

And if you just let them walk, by the time they got to the high school, they would be really late and have already missed a class or two. And you would be receiving a phone call from Child and Youth Services telling you that your insensitive actions are, in fact, child abuse.

Trust me, it is so not worth it.

Consequently, I just channel my inner Louis Gossett, Jr. and do what a mom's gotta do.

Sarcasm

I was lying in bed on a recent night, unwinding after a long hard day of work, minding my own business, reading Olive Kitteridge (this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction) before bed, when in walked my younger son to say goodnight.

He tilted his head and squinted at the cover of the book I was reading.

“Olive Kitteridge,” he said. “Is she any relation to Kit Kittridge, An American Girl?”

He said it so drily. So seriously. So nonchalantly.

Now, how can you NOT burst out laughing at that? I mean, it was funny.

True, it did take me a moment to realize who Kit Kittridge was as I only have boy children and I missed that whole American Girl scene.

Of course, this was from the same kid who, when he was about seven and we were dragging him and his brother around the golf course, trying to have a “family fun” day on the links and teach physical fitness and a lifelong love of aggravating sports, addressed the ball on the ninth tee with a long, drawn out sigh and the words, “I feel like Tired Woods.”

My older son is just as bad.

I had recently attended a College Information night at the high school where they had talked about how stressful senior year could be and how much pressure students could be feeling as they tried to decide which colleges to apply to and how to complete their applications and write their college essays. Yada, yada, yada….

My high school senior was sitting at the computer, ostensibly doing homework or writing his college essay, but more likely updating his Facebook status or checking something on GameFaqs, or maybe some permutation of all of the above. I stood there looking at him for a moment, wondering how on earth the little blonde-haired boy who used to create spacecraft out of Legos was now a six foot tall giant with facial hair about ready to graduate from high school.

He looked up at me.

“What?” he said.

I sighed.

“Wha-a-a-at?” he repeated.

“Do you feel like you are… under a lot of pressure?” I finally asked.

Without missing a beat, he started playing percussion on the desktop with his hands and humming, “Duh – duh- duh-duh-duh-duh-duh” (the opening of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”).

Need I say more?

Need I say more?

Mea Culpa

2009-11-11T15:50:00.003-05:00

I would like to apologize for my prolonged absence.

Two of my kids had the H1N1 virus, and then I got it.

Ugh.

I have been totally out of the net for days.

I promise to get with the program in the very near future!

-- Epsilon

A friendly nudge

2009-11-07T11:55:00.002-05:00

OK.

Epsilon.

I have been waiting for you to continue your cliff hanger story before posting my own musings.

I had this really great post on Autumn all planned, but did not want to steal your thunder.

Now I am getting emails from people who want to know what happens to Penny!?!

sigh.

I have no idea what is going to happen to poor Penny, so, like, could you please take a few moments to let us know?

Thank you,

The Management

Second Thoughts

2009-10-31T19:47:00.000-04:00

Penny was the one who first noticed the water dripping from the ceiling and running down the walls surrounding us.

The cave had been dry when we first went in. Now all of a sudden it was wet. Or this part of it was wet, anyway.

“Hey, do you think this means we are under the river?” Penny asked.

I frowned. We hadn’t really been inside the tunnel all that long. I knew, from all my years of Girl Scout hiking, that it always seemed like you had gone miles and miles and miles and then the trail markers would tell you that you had only gone like a quarter mile or something.

I didn’t think we had really gone all that far yet.

In fact, I hadn’t really thought about how long it might take us to work our way just from the cave entrance to the river, let alone all the way under the river. And I realized that we only had one flashlight and no extra batteries. Ben’s flashlight was an old Halloween one with an orange plastic pumpkin covering the bulb, and it had died about five minutes after we had entered the cave.

“Ewwwww!” Penny shrieked and jumped back.

“What?”

“Spiders!” She pointed. Sure enough the wall in front of us was teeming with all sorts of ugly black and brown spiders.

“They’re just spiders,” Ben said, but his voice sounded kind of strange and hesitant.

“Don’t even tell me you weenies are afraid of silly old spiders,” I said. I wasn’t afraid of them, but I didn’t particularly like them. I mean, I had no desire to wade through a wall of them or anything.

“Oh, gross!” Penny wailed.

“Now what?” I whirled around.

“It’s all muddy in here from the water. Look at my hands! Look at my jeans! Look at my shoes!”

“Oh, for crissakes!” Ben grunted. “We are cave explorers. What did you expect?”

“Ohhhhh,” Penny started to sob. “Mom is gonna kill us!”

“Oh, she won’t even have to know,” I said. “We can wash all our clothes as soon as we get back, and she won’t have to know.”

“But I don’t know how to wash clothes,” Penny whined.

“Well, I do, so don’t worry about it. I’ll even wash yours, Ben,” I said.

“Uh-oh.” Ben stopped in front of me.

“What?”

“Look!” He moved to the side and pointed ahead of him.

Shining my light into the darkness I suddenly saw what he saw: the tunnel in front of us suddenly split into a very distinct V shape.

“Ohhhhh,” Penny whimpered. “How are we supposed to know which way to go?”

How, indeed?

I considered this dilemma and the fact that we were down to only one flashlight and Penny was getting tired and whiny (and muddy) and we really had not come prepared for serious spelunking.

I was starting to think that maybe we needed to regroup.

Maybe this could be our initial reconnoiter. And we could then plan a real, serious expedition for another day. We definitely needed more flashlights. And heavy duty ones! And extra batteries. And some rope. Or a ball of string or something. And a watch that glowed in the dark. And some water and snacks. And maybe a first aid kit. And a compass. (Did compasses even work underground?)

“You know what, guys?” I tried to sound official, like I really knew what I was doing.

“What?”

“I think we have made an amazing first go in the tunnel. But this whole V thing means we need to do some more serious preparation. I mean, we don’t want to get lost or anything.”

“Get l-l-lost!” Penny stammered. “I thought we were just going to go under the river. Do you mean, we could really get lost in here?!?”

“Wellll, no,” I lied. “Of course not. All we have to do is backtrack and find our way out. But I don’t think we should go any further today with – uhhh -- just one flashlight.”

“Yeah,” Ben said. “I think we each should have a flashlight. Er, I mean, a flashlight that works.”

“I wanna go hooooooome!” Penny wailed.

“All right, bratty! That’s what we are going to do. I just said that. So take a chill pill, will ya?”

We turned around and started working our way back out of the tunnel. It was far more twisty and turny than I remembered it. And a lot colder. But maybe that was because my clothes were now so wet and muddy. Penny kept sobbing under her breath, and Ben finally grabbed her hand.

“It’s OK, Penny. Just hold on to me.”

Right. Like Ben was going to be able to do anything. But it did seem to calm Penny down a bit. Maybe next time we wouldn’t bring Penny. She was too little to go on a real adventure.

I wished Nick had been allowed to come.

All of a sudden my flashlight started to waver and then dim. I shook it and banged it on my free hand. It got brighter for a moment, and then it started wavering again.

And then, boom, just like that, it went out.

And Penny let out one of the most blood curling screams I have ever heard.

Mem'ries

2009-10-27T21:02:00.003-04:00

“Mem’ries! All alone in the mooooonlight....”

Penny’s singing, which might more accurately be described as shrieking, reverberated off the rock walls of the cave.

“Stop!” I shouted.

“Yeah, you might cause a cave in or something,” said Ben.

The three of us were working – more like, squeezing -- our way through a womb-like underground tunnel, in search of... the other side of the river.

“I can hear my ECHO, echo, echo, echo, echoooooooooo...” Penny persisted, switching from singing to simply making noise.

“Nuh-uh,” Ben nudged her. “You’re doing that on purpose. There is no echo in here.”

“Is, too. Is, too. Is, toooooo....”

Ben punched her in the arm.

“Ow! That hurt.”

“Serves you right. Serves you right. Serves you right...” I made fun of her.

Penny stuck her tongue out at me. I could barely make it out in the yellowish glow of my official Girl Scout flashlight.

“God, it’s a good thing Nick couldn’t come afterall,” Ben changed the subject.

“Whaddya mean?” Penny looked at him like he knew some top secret secret.

“I mean, numbnuts, he mighta got stuck in here!”

Ben was right. While Ben was taller than me, he was also pretty skinny. Nick, on the other hand, was a giant, built like a linebacker. He actually just might have gotten stuck in some of the parts of the tunnel we’d just been moving through.

But Nick hadn’t been allowed to come with us. He had told us his parents wouldn’t let him come.

Why he had told his parents what we were planning on doing this afternoon was beyond any of us, but his dad had gotten real mad at him and outright forbidden him to go inside any “stupid ass caves” (his dad’s words).

The rest of us, of course, were not stupid, and we hadn’t told our parents anything. We were just outside playing, riding bikes, hiking in the woods behind our house, as far as the parents were concerned. They wouldn’t expect us home until dinner.

And that’s the way we liked it.

I mean, c’mon. We were not dumb. Although we couldn’t articulate it at the time, we were all fans of the premise: “It is better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.”

And we really wanted to go exploring and find a cave. The cave. THE tunnel.

We had heard for years, growing up in S-town, all about the tunnel that ran underneath the river. Indians had used it to go back and forth from one side to the other in the days long before there was any bridge.

Nobody seemed to know where the entrance to this tunnel was anymore, but it was a well-known fact that there were a whole series of caves and tunnels around the limestone cliffs between the town cemetery and the reservoir. Teenagers had been going there for years to drink beer and smoke dope and have sex and stuff. There was graffiti on the cliff walls, and remnants of bonfires scattered all around the base of the cliffs. There was also an old refrigerator, minus its door, of course, but we had no idea how it had gotten there.

All we knew was that we were men on a mission. To find THE cave. To find THE tunnel.

“I think Nick was just a fraidy cat,” Penny said, after a time, for no seeming reason.

I laughed at her. Nick was anything but a fraidy cat. He just had really strict parents.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Penny said. “It’s YOUR boyfriend who’s the fraidy cat!”

I glared at my little sister, would have socked her one, but she was too far away from me. Clear on the other side of Ben.

Nick was NOT my boyfriend. I did not need any freaking boyfriends! I only hung out with Nick because he liked the same things I did, which were pretty much the things that every other girl I knew didn’t like. And pee wee Miss Prissy Pants Penny was only along with me now because my parents were out and I had to watch her. ‘Cuz I was older. And like way more responsible.

As for Ben, he was just this neighborhood kid who never had anywhere to go or anyone else to hang out with. So, we put up with him. You know, just kinda cuz.

Cuz that’s the way it was.

But I knew, knew in my guts, in my core, that we were on the right track. This tunnel was gonna pan out. We were gonna emerge, in the not too distant future, into the sunlight again. And we would be… on the other side of the river.

Speaking of tunnels....

2009-10-24T13:27:00.002-04:00

The other day my younger son asked me why we can’t remember being born.

I didn’t have a particularly good answer to that one, but we did spend some time talking about what our earliest memories were and reminiscing about his early childhood.

Ever since then, though, I keep having this Groundhog Day-esque dream where I am driving through the Armstrong Tunnel at night and I am just about to emerge from it and I have this incredibly strong feeling of impending… something.

Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Kind of like right before that final volley of fireworks goes off.

Or right before that head finally pops out after hours and hours and hours of hard labor and the rest of that slippery little body slides out and you hear a baby crying its lungs out and you feel such incredible joy and happiness and relief that you start crying, too.

Or right before other things that shall remain nameless that you were thinking of right off the bat.

The feeling in my dream is not the boom! My dream never goes that far.

But rather that feeling right before the boom.

That impending, built up, suspenseful feeling.

With no boom, no release, no fireworks, no relief, no crying baby.

It gets kind of disturbing after a while.

And I do not think that I am – or can! -- remember my birth.

I am not sure why we remember what we remember.

Or how we remember.

Or why we forget certain things.

Or how.

Or why an old photo or a smell or a song can suddenly bring a long forgotten memory to the startling forefront.

I just know that they do.

I have this theory, though.

(Which is completely unscientific and not based on anything in particular but my own thoughts.)

I have this theory that we actually have the memories of everything that ever happened to us stored inside our brains. Somewhere. We can’t always remember them, but they are there. And sometimes, since they are there all along, something will happen to trigger us to find them again, even if only briefly or fleetingly.

I think that we have inside of us far more than we are actually capable of remembering.

That every thing we have ever seen, heard, said, thought, or read is in there, somewhere, but that our computer software is incapable of dealing with or processing or using it all because we would just be totally and completely overwhelmed.

But, theoretically, we could be hypnotized (or something) and a scene could be related in extreme detail, in far more detail than we could ever really consciously remember or recount.

And I think all this… stuff… or a lot of it… ends up in our dreams.

I am always astounded at the degree of detail in my dreams. Sometimes it is like watching a really suspenseful movie. Other times it is very detailed and seems quite real while I am dreaming it, but then later, looking back, it makes no sense at all. I mean, logically or realistically or plot-wise.

I guess it is my poor, tired, stressed-out mind trying to solve some problem or another, or deal with some issue, or just blow off steam or something. But clearly the brain has to draw from somewhere to create these dreams… these movies.

Of course, when I was a little kid, I also thought that all of our memories were put in folders and then into filing cabinets in our brains. And there were tons of filing cabinets with folders spilling out and stacks of folders in corners, etc., in room after room inside our brains. And the reason we couldn’t remember everything was because 1) we didn’t have a proper system for filing them, 2) we didn’t remember the system we used to file them, or 3) we couldn’t figure out the system we had originally used.

Do you ever have someone’s name or a certain word “on the tip of your tongue”?

You can feel it, sense it, you almost, almost have it.

It’s coming, it’s coming.

It is almost there.

And then, all of a sudden, sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days or weeks later, it finally comes.

How does that work exactly?

What processes are going on in your brain?

What does it mean if you are “trying to remember something”?

What is actually going on inside your head, in that organ with all those little wrinkles and folds?

Where exactly are these memories stored? And what are memories?

How are you trying to find them?

And what does it mean if you “feel” like you are almost remembering something?

It is “coming to you”?

It is “almost there”?

And then – poof! – it is there.

Last summer while on vacation with friends I have known since elementary and middle school, I was trying to remember the title and author of a book we had read in a high school English course. I could tell them what the book was about – a brother and sister who had an incredibly unhealthy relationship -- and that it was by a French author. I could envision the cover of the book in my head. I could picture the entire book in my mind and the simple line drawing illustrations. I could remember our English teacher telling us that we probably shouldn’t leave the book lying around the house because our parents might find it and think it was… inappropriate. But for the life of me, I could not remember either the title of the book or the author’s name.

My friends had not been in the same class and had not read the same book, but they kept trying to help me figure out what the title and author were. We were on an island in the middle of a bay in Canada, without Internet, so we could not simply Google and figure out the book’s title that way.

Which would have been very simple indeed.

And which made me realize how much I rely on Google to figure things out and remember words and how to spell them, etc.

Anyway, I forgot all about this book until one day just recently I was walking through the stacks of the library on my way to yet another meeting, and the title of one of the books on the shelf happened to catch my eye. I cannot tell you why this one book leapt out at me from the midst of all the others.

All I know is that all of a sudden I saw the title: “The Holy Terrors.”

And it clicked.

That was it!

That was the book we had read in high school English.

The Holy Terrors.

Les Enfant Terribles.

By Jean Cocteau.

It was as clear as a bell.

A quick check on Google confirmed this.

In fact, the cover illustration on Amazon.com was the same exact black and white line drawing cover that I had so well remembered in my mind’s eye.

So, why was I unable to remember the title and author of the book, but pretty much everything else about it?

And why, months later, after I had completely forgotten about this book, did I suddenly spy the title in the middle of the library stacks, out of hundreds of thousands of other books, and instantaneously know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was, in fact, the title of that elusive book?

I do not know.

All I can say is that it happened.

Frankly, I think there was a tiny part of my brain that had continued to work on – had still been working on -- that book title and author. Even though, consciously, I had long ago forgotten that I wanted to know this and moved on.

There was a part of my brain that had kept figuring out the title of this long ago read book on a back burner, or a “to do” list of sorts. Part of my brain was still on the lookout for clues or signals. And that part of my brain noticed "The Holy Terrors" on the bookshelf, not coincidentally, but with cognition.

Or recognition.

And had then alerted the conscious me to take notice and… see.

And voilà!

I had not had to tunnel down into the depths of my brain to figure this book title out; the title had risen to the surface. Or popped out. Or, more accurately, appeared right there before my very eyes. The memory of the title was somewhere in my brain. And seeing the title spelled out in front of me, even randomly, was all that I needed to make the conscious connection.

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie....

2009-10-22T22:29:00.002-04:00

I do not do desserts, either.

But I used to entertain a lot.

Which required producing homemade, yummy desserts. En masse.

This was one of my favorites.

One of my favorites because 1) it was INCREDIBLY simple to make, 2) it was INCREDIBLY delicious to eat, and 3) it was INCREDIBLY homemade.

Fudge Walnut Brownie Pie

Ingredients
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla
2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup Hershey's cocoa
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup walnuts

Beat eggs. Stir in sugar, butter, and vanilla. Stir together cocoa, flour,and salt. Add to butter mixture. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts. Pour into greased 9 " pie plate. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until set. Cool.

Fabulous with ice cream on top!

Humble pie

2009-10-20T23:08:00.003-04:00

It's true, it's true.

I motivated Ms. Golf Sierra to post something worthwhile after a dry spell the length of the Sahara Desert.

But don't thank me.

It's OK.

I didn't do it for me.

I did it because I missed reading stuff on Gray that moved me and made me smile or laugh or cry.

Or, God forbid, think!

And I STILL want to tell you all about the tunnel.

Trust me, this is a story you all will want to hear!

And if I had a recipe for some pie you could make from scratch, I would post it.

But I don't bake pies.

Or much of anything from scratch.

But I am sure that soup Golf Sierra posted was really pretty darn good.

So if you do stuff like make soup out of giant gourd-like things, I would venture to guess that the Butternut Squash Soup is worth your while.

As for me, I will stick to more processed foods.

The easiser the better.

Oh. And the tunnel...........

P.S.

2009-10-19T09:15:00.002-04:00

Soup was to die for!

I added a bit of balsamic vinegar and some heavy cream, so it was almost more like a bisque.

But it was heavenly!

And scarfed up by two teenaged boys, just as much as by the grownups.

Fall[en]

2009-10-17T14:11:00.002-04:00

In yoga this morning, the instructor left us with a quote: “Everyone is the hero of his own life.”

It sounded profound at the time.

Of course, after an hour and a half of stretching, twisting, grunting, and breathing, just about anything sounds profound, in its own way.

At least for a few minutes.

And then we all roll up our mats, put on our shoes, don our jackets and dash out the door, grabbing for cell phones and car keys and planning what comes next in our busy weekend agendas.

Kind of defeats the purpose, I guess.

We are too busy being the heroes of our own lives to really stop and think about what that quote actually means.

Most of the time, I think we are all so incredibly self-absorbed with our own lives, why the hell would we need to think even more about ourselves?

But there is a difference between being self-absorbed and being reflective, or introspective.

While I think most Americans are self-absorbed, I think very few are reflective or introspective in any meaningful way.

I personally hate to rush around from here to there, constantly following a time table, a schedule, trying to meet the needs of my job, my kids, my home life, my community, and never having any time to… think.

Or breathe.

I joke that the main reason I do yoga on Saturday mornings is because it is the one time of the week I remember to breathe.

It is definitely the one time of the week where I think about breathing.

Something we do all day long, all night long, day in, day out until the day we die.

I do not like to operate in crisis mode, under pressure, whether it is a real crisis or the fake crisis modes that we, self-absorbed humans dream up for ourselves on a daily basis.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that if a real crisis arises, I can carry on and function and do what needs to be done. Or at least give it my best shot. But I loathe the fact that people around me seem determined to turn my place of work, my home life, my kids’ lives, into perpetual crises.

I think everyone needs to just take a great, big giant chill pill.

Just because everyone is the hero of his own life does not mean we have to be the protagonists in “Bladerunner,” “The Bourne Identity,” or “D.O.A” (that movie where Dennis Quaid plays a washed up, middle aged college English professor who suddenly has to solve a bunch of murders and get it on with Meg Ryan but, oh, wait, he only has 24 hours to live because someone slipped him some poison).

Fall, a time of year of change: of late harvests, of coloring and dying leaves, of dropping temperatures, provides us with a prime opportunity for pausing and looking within.

I think we all need to do a reality check: take stock of what is truly important in our lives and live each day purposefully and passionately.

How much of our lives do we waste worrying?

On the cell phone whilst driving?

Fruitlessly trying to accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously?

And for what?

We get so caught up in our day to day lives and with weird, distorted concepts of what we should be doing, of what we are supposed to be doing, of success.

Are we doing the right thing?

Are we making enough money?

Are we doing enough?

Are we making a difference in this world?

Are we…?

Are we…?

Are we…?

Am I…?

Am I…?

Am I…?

I, I, I, I, I, I.

I get sucked into worrying and fretting about the meaning of life, about the meaning of my life. And while I am so busy worrying about life and myself, it is life that is going on all around me. Life is what I am living.

Right now.

With this breath.

And the next and the next.

Whether I realize I am breathing or not.

Perhaps we would all do well to take the words of Ghandi to heart: “Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.”

I am taking a pause today, even though I should be grading the forty million student assignments I have to grade, doing the fifty tons of laundry I need to do, and paying the pile of bills I need to pay, to breathe and think and be grateful for what I am so blessed to have in my life.

And I will leave you with the recipe I am going to make for this evening’s meal. Because it is fall and I have a giant butternut squash and it is cold and damp outside and I want something warm and good to feed my family. And because I feel like this soup is quintessentially autumnal. Or fall[en]. As are we.

Classic Butternut Squash Soup

Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
2/3 cup diced carrot (about 1 (8-inch) large carrot)
1/2 cup diced celery (about 1 (11-inch) large stalk)
2/3 cup diced onion (about 1 medium onion)
4 cups cubed butternut squash (about 1 medium squash)
1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme
4 to 6 cups chicken or vegetable broth
Sea salt and ground black pepper, to taste

Method
Heat olive oil in a large soup pot. Add carrot, celery and onion. Cook until vegetables have begun to soften and onion turns translucent, 3 to 4 minutes. Add butternut squash and thyme. Stir to combine with vegetables. Stir in broth and season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until squash is fork-tender, about 30 minutes. Use an immersion blender to puree soup. Alternatively, let the soup cool slightly and carefully puree in batches in a traditional blender.

Reply to [Aside]

2009-10-14T18:16:00.001-04:00

ummmm.....

Yeah.

I am glad that my "ploy" is not working.

- E

[Aside]

2009-10-14T17:22:00.003-04:00

Now I get it!

Now I understand why you are doing this on my blog. It is your goal to get me to post more often! You think that by posting totally preposterous stuff you will infuriate me enough to respond.

Well, that is so totally ridiculous!!!

It is not even funny.

Like I care if you are posting stories that have no historical continuity.

Or are told from the point of view of a four year old.

We won't even talk about political correctness!

Sheesh.

No! We will not.

I just hope I don't get sued by Native Americans, small white children, the National Spelunkers Association, the Mark Twain Fan Club, Wal-Mart, Costco, or Blogger.com.

That's all!

Reading your blog posting is like watching A Knight's Tale with my kids when they were five and six and they didn't GET that rock music did not exist back in the Middle Ages.

Your ploy is NOT going to work.

You are NOT going to get me to respond to your... your... frippery!

Now, where was I...?

2009-10-13T22:21:00.002-04:00

They say there is a tunnel that runs under the Ohio River from S-town to, well, the other side of the river.

I have heard this urban legend, old wives' tale for years.

Most people, I am sure, would simply pooh-pooh it, or dismiss it out of hand. (Or is that the same thing?)

But, I ask you: what if it were true?

What if there really were, was, be’d a tunnel under that there river???

I certainly believed it whole-heartedly as a child growing up in S-town.

The story we were told was that a tunnel ran underneath the river and the local Indians used it to travel back and forth from one side to the other.

This made complete sense to me at the time. I was a savvy kid, too; smart enough to know there was no S-town Bridge back when the Indians lived in the area. And no ferry, either.

The Indians would have had to paddle their birch bark canoes back and forth, and that probably would have taken a long time as the river looked pretty darned wide to me as a little kid peering out across a stretch of the Mighty Ohio.

And even though the Indian braves were probably in really good shape from all of that hunting and canoeing and war-fighting stuff, it would have been kind of hard to paddle when the weather was bad and it was windy and the water choppy. Or if it was raining really hard, or winter and chunks of ice were barreling downstream like fat women in the middle of the aisle at K-Mart during a Blue Light Special.

And what about the squaws with papooses on their backs? And all their small Indian children? And all those elders who had to make deer skin soft by chewing on it with toothless gums? How would they ever have been able to paddle back and forth across the river in a canoe?

I was sure, as a kid, there must have been plenty of reasons for the Indians to want to cross back and forth across the river, even if there was no town over there then.

Or a mall.

Or a Wal-Mart or Costco.

(Although there was no Wal-Mart or Costco over there either when I was growing up, but you know what I mean.)

All the same, I am sure there were good berry patches or bigger deer. Or something enticing.

Other tribes wandering up from West Virginia or Ohio wanting to trade stuff like pemmican and baskets and raccoon pelts and whatnot. You know, there could have been any number of reasons for people to want to cross back and forth over/under the river.

My reasoning followed: If the Indians could have simply walked through a tunnel to cross the river, wouldn’t their lives have been much easier?

It made perfect sense to me.

Plus, it was a well-known fact that there were lots of caves up in the limestone cliffs between the S-town Cemetery and the town reservoir. It would make sense if one of those caves was really just a super long cave (or tunnel!) and that it ran all the way under the river.

Afterall, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher had gotten lost in a really long dark cave in Missourah with that mean Injun Joe guy after them. So, clearly Indians liked caves and knew their way around them much better than silly little white children who wandered off aimlessly from Sunday School picnics when they weren’t supposed to.

All my friends and I needed to do, when we were young ‘uns, was to find the entrance to this really long cave that no one knew the location of any longer, as the Indians were long gone, and then we could criss-cross the river simply by going under it.

Now, wouldn’t that be cool?

I mean, not only were we not allowed to cross the S-town Bridge by ourselves, we weren’t even allowed to cross the Boulevard that ran between S-town and the river because we might get run over by cars, buses, dump trucks, or eighteen wheelers.

Our parents would never need to know we were crossing the river. And we would be totally safe because we would be using a tunnel that Indians had used. Even the squaws and little children and old people had used the tunnel, so it had to be safe.

Right?

It sounded like a perfect plan to me....

En garde!

2009-10-12T21:34:00.002-04:00

Delta,

You have thrown down your gauntlet and set out your ground rules.

I pick up your glove and accept!

Henceforth, I shall post...

in blue.

If it is in blue, it is me.

I will assume that if it is in... err, pardon!... GRAY... it is you.

Also, since you are Delta, you may call me... Epsilon.

May the games begin!

Sincerely yours,

E

Ground Rules

2009-10-11T15:21:00.002-04:00

OK... I have heard from a few friends who are concerned about someone hacking into my blog.

I can assure all of you that I am fine with this! I know it is a bit odd and different, but I have no reason to believe that the hacker is a serial killer, or in any other way... dangerous.

And, quite frankly, I find it fairly interesting that someone would want to come on board in such an unusual way. And why. I mean, this person could have just started his or her own blog, right?

Answers to a few questions from my end:

No, I do not know exactly who the hacker is. But I have a few very good ideas.

Yes, I could change my blogger account password easily enough, something I do fairly often. But I am sure my hacker friend has ways of determining my log in no matter what.

Ground rules for the visiting author:

1) Please be respectful and do not use foul language, at least not very often.

2) Please figure out a way for readers to be able to (easily) tell the two of us apart.

3) Please come up with a pseudonym that I can use to address you.

4) Keep things interesting!

-- Delta

Tunneling to the truth

2009-10-10T19:18:00.002-04:00

"And... if you know the tunnel under the river story, that kind of implies that you live in -- what did you call it? -- 'S-town' yourself."

Not necessarily, Delta. It means I know a lot about S-town. And its lore. To be honest and upfront, I was born in S-town and grew up there. That is all I will say for now.

And I do not have to believe in the tunnel under the river story to tell it. So, hold your horses!

But I still might believe in the tunnel.

And so might you.

After you hear what I have to say....

Time Out!

2009-10-10T17:21:00.002-04:00

You can't tell me you really BELIEVE that tunnel under the river story?!?

I was sort of being patient, waiting to see what you were going to post on my blog, before I really made any comments. But this is kind of ludicrous!

And... if you know the tunnel under the river story, that kind of implies that you live in -- what did you call it? -- "S-town" yourself.

They say...

2009-10-08T18:02:00.001-04:00

that there is a tunnel that runs under the river from S-town to, well, the other side of the river.

I have heard this urban legend, old wives' tale for years.

But what if...

it were true?

WTH????

2009-08-27T20:53:00.002-04:00

Hello!!!!????!!!!

Somebody is messing with my blog.

Somebody is posting blog posts on MY blog!!!!

I don't know who you are, or why you are doing this! I mean, come on, why not just start your own blog???

I am sorry.

sigh.

I am sorry that I have not been able to post lately... err, like, for a long while.

I can say that I will try to do better, but, frankly, I am doing the best that I can right now.

sigh.....

OK.

Look.

If you (whoever you are) want to post on here, I guess it is fine. Just please try not to be, you know, offensive or use really off-color language.

And, yes, I hear all of my close friends laughing at this caveat.

Your posts were actually kind of -- OK -- not "kind of", but more like "really"-- interesting.

So, if you have more interesting things to discuss, go for it.

You have my blessing!

Lord knows I have more than enough stuff to keep me busy right now.

And I think you might have some really interesting, entertaining things to talk about.

You go, girl/boy! Whoever you are!!!!

I'm baaaaaaaaack!

2009-08-21T20:41:00.003-04:00

I see that Ms. Gray Stockings has not even noticed my surreptitious, yet in-broad-daylight arrival.

Don't worry.

I would venture a guess that she won't notice for some time to come.

So.... sigh...

Let's see....

Where to begin?

I could talk about the current book I am reading. The last book I read. The most recent movie I saw. The movie I most wanna see. Songs that I am listening to. Meals that I have eaten, cooked, or wanna cook. My thoughts on fashion. Politics. World events. The economy. Religion. The weather. Sports. Poetry. The blotter report in our weekly local rag. TV. Michael Jackson. Health care. Travel plans. Vacation hot spots. Good deals on used cars. The price of tea in China.

There are so many things to choose from.....

Makes me wonder why Ms. Golf Sierra has been so derelict in posting to her blog. There is simply so much to write about!

I have thoughts about... oh, so many things!

I think I will just start from the first thing that comes to my mind.

Which would be cooking.

Someone recently told me this most amazing story about how when they were at a summer family reunion in the wilds of Vermont or New Hampshire (sorry, I always get those two states mixed up), her husband got annoyed with a porcupine that was gnawing on their cabin wall at two in the morning and blasted it to high heaven with a sawed-off shotgun. He then proceeded to skin it and dress it or prepare it or whatever one does with a dead animal and... I kid you not!... cook it up in the crock pot.

This thing cooked all day long in the crock pot. Filling the cabin with that lovely aroma of stewing porcupine, I would imagine. An odor I doubt any Glad air freshner could ever negate! (It makes me want to smear Vick's Vapo-Rub under my nose as I write this.)

Anyway, while my friend did not sample the cooked porcupine, she said all her relatives and distant relatives were lining up, out the cabin door, just to get a taste.

I asked her how her husband even knew (let alone thought of) how to cook a porcupine. According to her, there is a recipe in The Joy of Cooking cookbook for porcupine.

Well, I have a Joy of Cooking, and you know what?

She's right. On page 515 of the 1984 edition of Joy of Cooking, there is, indeed, a recipe for porcupine:

Skin by hanging back legs from hooks. Remove kernels in small of back and under forelegs. Hang in a cool dry place 48 hours. Soak overnight refrigerated in salted water:
1 porcupine
In the morning, bring the water to a boil. Drain and immerse porcupine again in cold water. Bring to a boil and drain again. Place the meat in a Dutch oven. Add:
3 cups water or light stock
1 rib celery, chopped
1 sliced medium-sized onion
1/4 tsp pepper
1 tsp salt
Simmer until tender, about 2 1/2 hours

OK. Now, why am I thinking it should be more like 2 1/2 DAYS?????

And I still wouldn't be touching it.

I can see why he opted for a crockpot, though. You could just throw the porcupine in on low and go about your business all day, doing meaningful activities, like repairing that giant hole you made in the cabin door when you shot the porcupine with a sawed-off shotgun, for instance.

And in case you were wondering -- or could not find adequate recipes on the Food Network website -- the Joy of Cooking also has recipes for squirrel, oppossum, raccoon, muskrat, woodchuck, beaver, beaver tail ("To Indians and settlers alike, this portion of the animal was considered the greatest"), and armadillo.

Boy, howdie!

Why, this could be a roadkill chef's dream come true.

So, the next time you pass a carcass on the Farmer to Market road -- or in your cul de sac, remember that the Joy of Cooking (aka "The All-Purpose Cookbook") could be the answer to that never-ending question...

"What's for dinner?"

Gaaahhhhh................

2009-08-18T22:22:00.003-04:00

I am totally annoyed.

The person who runs this blog has not posted anything in EONS.

Hello!!!!

That would be like in a rrrrrrrrealllyyyyyyy long time.

I am fed up.

From here on, I am going to start posting things. All by myself. Hacked in and got the password. I am in, baby, in. In like Flynn. (Ya know, I used to think that was "In like flint." Neither one makes any sense to me, but whatever.)

I have a contest going. I wanna see how long it takes Ms. Gray Stockings to even friggin' notice that anyone else is posting on her blog.

We can take wagers. Whaddya all think....?????

See. No one is reading, or even glancing at this blog. Because it is stagnant. Dead. Not happenin'. Dull meat.

But me, I am going to change things around here. For as long as I can.

So, stay tuned, any wayward sons, or people who use RSS feeds.

I is here.

I is here to stay.

And I is full of ideas and thoughts and feelings and such.

I ain't gray.

I is every color of the rainbow!!!!!

Let the games begin..............

Canada 2009

2009-08-01T13:29:00.002-04:00

I realize that different people find different things relaxing and reinvigorating, but my ten days in Canada were wonderful, amazing, peaceful, quiet, enriching.

A stop in Niagara-on-the-Lake for a Shaw Festival play and winery visits and a nice dinner and stay at our favorite B&B is always a great way to begin our vacation. Three friends who have known each other since grade school and middle school and now live in three separate cities but who are embarking on a vacation together for the third year in a row.

Stocking up on our favorite wines for the week, and taking advantage of the chance to walk around the small town of NOTL and stretch our legs after a long day in the car.

A fabulous, relaxing dinner on the outdoor patio of the Epicurean, followed by a great play (in this case, Sunday in the Park with George) at the Royal George Theatre.

A night's rest and then four more hours north by car to Pointe au Baril and an additional twenty minutes by launch to the island where we will spend the next eight days.

With no TV, no radio, no computers, no Internet, no phone (although our host has Canadian coverage for his cell phone, so we can be reached in case of emergency), no work woes, no kids, no nothing.

Eight days of relaxing, reading (I managed to fit in four and a half books and numerous magazines), sunning, talking, listening to music, kayaking, swimming, eating, and drinking all those great NOTL wines. Cocktail hours on the screened-in porch or out on the dock, home cooked and grilled meals with fresh produce we had picked up at a farmer’s market on the way, sitting in lounge chairs watching the water and the surrounding islands and the birds and the occasional boats that come and go.

It really was about as close to heaven on earth as I can imagine.

The stark scenery of the windswept pines and granite rocks against all that water is breathtaking and never boring. And the weather changes constantly and unpredictably from one day to the next and even within a single day.

Ducks, Canadian geese, loons, gulls, woodpeckers, snakes, minks, squirrels, fish, bats, and mosquitoes; the wildlife is ubiquitous, and thankfully we did not see a bear this year!

You can just sit and look out at the water and the islands and never be bored: sunrise; puffy, streaming clouds; overcast skies; rainstorms and thunder; clearing skies and rich blue; late afternoon and early evening skies; a slow, prolonged sunset; painted waters; darkness. And then it begins all over again.

For eight days.

That is life on Yoctangee, a small island in a sequestered part of Georgian Bay, in Ontario....

Channeling my inner Patton

2009-06-21T19:33:00.007-04:00

(Please listen to this music in the background as you read the post.)
Theme from the movie Patton

I have learned this week a very important lesson:

You can take the girl out of the Army, but you cannot take the Army out of the girl.

Although I graduated from West Point twenty-four years ago and have not worn a military uniform since 1990, the Long Gray Line lives on within me clear as a bell, night and day, no matter what. All I have to do is look inside myself and draw from my core. Or my Corps.

I am by nature shy, quiet, and nonassuming, but when I believe in something I can do what needs to be done. Or give it my best shot.

I remember well the statue of General George S. Patton, Jr. that stood on the edge of the Plain, across from the Library at West Point. I loved the way he stood, holding binoculars in his hands, looking solid and resolute and determined. Like he knew exactly what he was doing.

I think they have since moved Patton, or temporarily relocated him during construction of a new library. And I think he may well be moving somewhere else around the Plain in the near future. A man of maneuver! But one who will be standing tall at West Point for some time to come. Inspiring untold generations of future cadets to service and leadership.

I work in a university library, and I had to call upon the spirit of Patton this past week to guide me in a particularly difficult chore. You might think a library would be a very quiet and peaceful and stressfree place to work, but you would be wrong. A library is like any other organization, full of people who must somehow work with one another to accomplish a variety of missions that ultimately serve its users.

I do not relish standing up in front of a group of people and leading them in a move that many question or doubt or fear. I like to stand up in front of people and teach them or entertain them, but when it comes to convincing them to adopt a course of action they may not totally believe in, that is another story indeed.

But this past week, I was called on to do just that. I was called on to convince my colleagues to adopt a new, expedited process that would help guide them as they establish a more professional organization. Two years ago, the group voted, after considerable contention and hours and hours and hours and months and months and years of meetings and debate, to adopt a promotion process more in line with the promotion and tenure process of the university's faculty. Librarians as a rule don't much like change (even though their field is rife with change!), and this was a huge change. A scary change.

By virtue of my position as the elected representative to Faculty Senate and hence, Chair of the Library Faculty Committee, I felt it fell to me to be proactive and take the initiative, to help develop a process that would move us all further in the right direction. I felt strongly that if we all worked together, we could employ positive peer review and assist one another in preparing for promotion. We were colleagues; we should be helping each other to be the best librarians we could be.

I am not a politician. I tend to be obtuse when it comes to seeing the inner politics and workings of an organization -- and even a library has inner politics, believe me! I always expect people to do the right thing. That is just the way I am wired. Perhaps this is a weakness on my part, or perhaps it is a blessing. If I cannot see the obstacles that others see, then I continue to drive forward.

I went into my meeting this past week pretty much scared shitless. I was expecting the worst: contentious debate, overwrought emotions, the whole nine yards. But I was hoping for the best. I went in prepared, I went in having given everyone documents ahead of time, explaining what I was proposing. I was ready to explain. I was ready to answer questions. I was ready to ask for input. I set a clear agenda, with a set timeframe, and announced that our meeting would end on time (or earlier) and that we would leave the meeting having voted on the resolution I had proposed in my documentation.

To my surprise, everyone was civil, everyone was calm, everyone had good questions, and everyone contributed positively to the discussion. It was a very productive session.

At the end of the meeting we voted. Ten people voted for the resolution, none voted against it, and one person abstained. We created a task force to accomplish some tasks that need to be done before we can fully implement our plan, and we gave them a deadline to report back. We adjourned the meeting on time, and everyone headed off for lunch or wherever they needed to be next.

I was stunned. Pleased. But stunned. I was not sure that I had it in me still. To be assertive and firm in guiding a group to make a decision.

The only thing that could have made it better would have been if there had been a huge American flag behind me and I had been wearing a Patton outfit and ivory-handled pistols and I had talked about crap flowing through a goose.

It is not only on battlefields that we must lead. It can be in classrooms, in meetings, in boardrooms, in our homes, on the street, just about anywhere really.

Anytime, anywhere.

Bibliopassion

2009-06-17T19:49:00.001-04:00

I love books.

The physical artifacts. The feel of them, the weight of them in my hand (not so much in heavy book boxes whilst moving, but individually, yes), their appearance, how they line up on my bookshelves and atop my nightstand, verily, in every room of my house.

Love them.

Am addicted to them. Can’t resist them. Work around them every day. Gravitate towards bookstores and libraries and bookshelves wherever I go. Find them comforting and sexy and revealing. One of my favorite things to do when first meeting someone or going to their office or home is to check out the books on their shelves. Reveals a lot, I think, about the person and how they think and read and what they are interested in.

So, you can imagine my dismay when I enter a house completely bereft of books!

Unfathomable to me.

I love books.

What is inside them. The type and the font and the layout, yes. But more precisely, the words. The words upon the page. The thoughts and ideas and images from the writer that have made their way onto paper or a computer screen and then ultimately upon the printed page.

The narrative. The story. The images. The evocation.

The writer Robert Coover wrote: “The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn’t imagine ourselves through a day without it.”

Isn’t it this which makes us humans? The ability to tell stories.

And record them permanently for others to read. Later. At another time. In another place. On another planet. Decades, centuries, even millennia later.

I feel joy, euphoria, contentment, security surrounded by my books, my friends, my compatriots. Each one, like a separate treasured memory, holds a special place in my mind and in my heart. Each one elicits certain thoughts and memories and ideas and moods and feelings. Each one marks a different point in my life. I feel that if someone were to come into my bedroom and look over the books in my bookcases that line all the walls of my room, he or she would see into my very soul. And, so, I do not often let people into my bedroom. Other than my children, who already know me and pay no nevermind to the books on my shelves.

Reading.

I love to read.

In the bathtub, on a plane, in the doctor’s office, in bed, in the Adirondack chair on my front porch, at my desk, on a blanket at the beach, in line at the DMV. In my car as I drive to and from work or on long trips (audio books, of course!). Anywhere, everywhere, but not at the table whilst eating with others. That is a time for conversation and community, although if we talk about books, that is fine with me, too!

My hunger for reading knows no bounds. I read fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose. Drama and grammar guides. Magazines. Mysteries and biographies. Histories and politics. Science and philosophy. Religion and art. Realistic fiction, creative non-fiction, fantasy, memoir, mythology. Classics and popular fiction. Bestsellers and obscure tomes.

What am I looking for?

The word upon the page that moves me. I am looking for the story, the description, the narrative, the dialogue, the turn of phrase that reaches deep inside me and jiggles things around and makes me think and feel and say: “Goddamned, I am glad that I am alive and that I can read!”

Baby, you can drive my car!

2009-06-13T23:11:00.002-04:00

I keep remembering a family vacation we took when my kids were three and one. It was a Club Med vacation that we had saved up for forever, to Punta Cana, where the beaches are truly pink.

The allure of the Club Med vacation was that we could spend part of the time all together as a family and part of the time alone as grownups while the kids went to Kids’ Club or whatever it was called. When your kids are babies and toddlers, you don’t ever really get any adult alone time. And we really wanted some of that.

I remember walking up to the playground, and seeing the kids all lined up and playing on the slide. I heard a little girl call out, “M, M, save me! Save me!” My three year old son moved forward and came to her rescue. It struck me that these young children in their play were modeling the story of the ages: the hero coming to rescue the damsel in distress. My son seemed to take it all in stride. While the little girl sounded panicked and desperate, almost shrill, he moved slowly, confidently, and with purpose to “save” her.

It was as if he were doing his own thing and all of a sudden, out of the blue, someone was calling on him, asking for help, and he felt it was part of his job, his duty to step forward and assist. Because he could. Kind of like, “Oh, all right. I am really over here doing something else that is important to me, but if you need my help, here I am!”

Today my older son took his driver’s test.

Which he passed with flying colors.

And I had no doubt that he would.

But….

I, the mom, could not sleep very well last night, worried about it. Dreaming about it. I actually dreamed that he passed the test just fine. That wasn’t what I was worried about. I was worried that I would oversleep and we would be late and he would miss his time slot. His driving instructor had told us, “You need to be there 15 minutes early, and then 5 minutes ahead of time, you need to drive up in front of the building and have all your paperwork ready to go. They have different appointments every 15 minutes, so if you are late, you might miss yours.”

OK.

Aye, aye!

My son’s appointment was for 11. I figured it would take us about half an hour to get there, all things going smoothly. I was sure that all things would not go smoothly, so we should allow some cushion time. I figured if we left at 10:15, we would have plenty of time. Which we did. I think, actually, we left before 10:15 and got there around 10:30. The DMV site is about 15 miles away, up the local highway. Not an interstate, but one of those local highways that has stoplight after stoplight, strip malls, the whole nine yards. The speed limit changes from 40 to 45 to 55 and back and forth all the way there and back. I had my son drive us there (not something I was wild about, but the driver instructor had let him do that on the very first day he took him out driving, so I figured it would be bad form if I didn’t).

So, my son drove us there. Did a great job! All was fine and dandy. Most of what makes me nervous when we are driving, aside from the fact that he insists on driving with one hand, is THE OTHER GUY. Other drivers. You never know what other people are going to do. I see it every day on my commute downtown to work and back, and it is something I cannot control.

Of course, there is very little in this life I can control, so….

Anyway, we got there early, which was fine, and parked. Unfortunately, the driver tester dude was about half an hour behind schedule, so we had to wait extra, extra long. I personally found this very painful and stressful. I was already nervous and stressed out, but trying not to show it, because I didn’t want to make my son nervous and stressed out, too. He started telling me, in minute detail, about some science fiction book he had been reading. He seemed totally non-plussed.

I kept turning around, craning my neck, to see if a space had opened up in front of the driver testing building for us to go ahead and pull up, as we had been instructed to do. I had all of our paperwork in my hand: my son’s learner’s permit, my driver’s license, my registration, my proof of insurance, and this form I had to sign saying my son had driven 50 hours of supervised time. My hand was sweating, so the learner’s permit on top was starting to wilt. The cars were not moving. In fact, the same two cars that were there when we arrived, were still sitting there.

At least it wasn’t raining, I thought to myself.

“Aren’t you nervous?” I turned to my son, finally.

He looked at me, his eyes squinting up, you know, that look that teenagers always give their parents.

Like you are deranged.

“It’s not really in my nature to be nervous,” he said. And he was serious.

And it is really true. It truly is not within his nature to be nervous.

Of course, I am sitting there, a nervous wreck. I had woken up early, after a fitful sleep, and had been experiencing severe gastrointestinal distress ever since. I could hardly wait for the driver tester dude to take my son on his test so I could flee to the bathroom.

I had a hard time understanding how my son could not be nervous. But really, I do not think he was. I am not sure why I was nervous. Verily, I thought my son would do just fine on his test. If anything went wrong, it would be a fluke, a silly mistake, a trick.

Maybe it was because I was having flashbacks to when I took the driver’s test. It was at this same DMV site, and the test course was the same. I had failed my first time, because after going through the entire test just fine, the tester had said, “OK. You’re done. Just pull up in front of the building.” And so I did. Only I drove right through the final stop sign. The tester guy said, “You just drove through that stop sign. You fail.” Of course, silly me had thought (since the whole test course was fake anyway and not on a real street): he said I was done, I don’t have to play this silly game any more. He thinks I know how to drive, he just wants me to return to the test building. Fine.

But, no!

So sad, too bad, dear dad. You fail!

Plus, there was that whole parallel parking factor. I guess I had to parallel park to pass my test, whenever I did eventually pass it on the second go round, but I have to tell you, I avoid parallel parking like the plague!

I am terrible at it, it makes me nervous, I would never do it in traffic. My idea of parallel parking is when there are all these open spaces and you can just drive into one of them. I would NEVER choose to park between two parked vehicles. Ever. Just wouldn’t do it.

Which made me think that if I were taking the driver’s test this morning, I might very well fail it.

Even though I have been driving legally for thirty years!

Finally, the cars in front of us started moving up. The tester came up to us with his clipboard and asked if my son was my son. He checked off my son’s name. Then he told us to make sure we had all of our paperwork in order and informed us that he was running thirty minutes behind schedule. We watched him as he tested the drivers in the two cars in front of us.

I watched as he brought the first car back around to the end of the test; clearly the driver had failed. I looked closely at the driver tester guy as he methodically checked things off on his clipboard. He was white-haired, around sixty, kind of looked like a former football coach or high school gym teacher.

I turned to my son.

“Oh, my God!” I said. “I think that is the same guy who gave me my driver’s test.”

My son looked at me, skeptical, but not dismissing it out of hand.

I was suddenly bombarded by flashbacks.

PTSD.

I broke out in a sweat.

The paperwork in my even sweatier hands was starting to disintegrate.

My son’s eyebrow raised. “You really think so?” he asked.

No, no, of course it was impossible.

I had taken my driver’s test thirty years ago, and the driver tester dude had been old then.

He would have to be like a hundred years old now.

My son chuckled. “Wouldn’t it be funny if this guy was the son of the driver tester you had?”

I looked at my son. This was no time to be funny! This was serious.

To make a long story short, my son passed the test with no problems whatsoever.

He said the only thing the driver tester guy corrected him on was driving with one hand.

Aha! Hadn’t I told him that???

My son explained: “I prefer to drive with one hand because it relaxes me and I drive better.”

(Never mind that I often drive with one hand!)

The fact of the matter is that as the parent sitting in the passenger seat, I have to consciously prevent myself from stomping my right foot down on an imaginary brake. And sometimes I think my son is too far over to the right of the road, and it makes me nervous.

And on the way home, he ran a red light. Well, in all fairness, it was one of those cases where you are not sure if you should speed up and go through a yellow light or slow down and stop early. I think he made the wrong choice: speed up and go through. But I think he did it because he has only been driving for like three minutes and doesn’t have the experience to know when you should do which.

Of course, if he had been driving with both hands, I am sure he would have… still run the red light!

All I know is that when I got home, I had to go take a nap! I was totally exhausted and drained from the whole experience.

I was so glad my son passed, which I really thought he would do, because the thought of having to drive all the way back out there to the DMV and do this all over again was, frankly, just more than I could bear.

I cannot think about how I have a second son who will be going through all of this next year.

I will think about that tomorrow.

For, afterall, tomorrow is another day....

Beep beep'm beep beep yeah!

Fly Away from Here

2009-06-09T15:45:00.003-04:00

“We’ll just fly away from here
Our hopes and dreams are out there somewhere”
-- Aerosmith

My younger son flew down to visit his father today. It was the first time he flew on an airplane all by himself.

As he is now 15, he is old enough to fly all by himself, and not as an “unaccompanied minor.” His older brother was not accompanying him on this trip, as he has a summer job here, so my younger son was “on his own,” on his own. I was a bit leery of letting him go through those security gates all by himself and head off to the train and then to those distant gates. (Never mind that the Pittsburgh International Airport is really not all that big!)

The airline probably would have let me get a gate pass and accompany him (albeit for a fee! – I couldn’t get over that I actually had to pay money for my son to check even ONE suitcase!!!), but he said he felt fine doing it by himself. I did make him call me on his cell phone when he reached the gate, and then again as they were actually boarding the plane so I would know they were taking off on time. So, I could then call his father on the other end and let him know that he was on his way, as scheduled. Even though the Departures board kept telling me that his flight was “On Time.”

I think my son realized that these phone check-ins were more for my benefit than for his own, so he didn’t argue. But I think he didn’t really mind, either. Next time, he probably won’t want to do this. This morning, both of us might have been thinking about the time we were all at the departure gate together and I let him go to the bathroom all by himself and he got lost and almost missed our flight!

Of course, I also had my son call me when he reached his destination and got picked up by his dad. Am I a paranoid, worrywart parent? Probably. I mean, his flight was only about an hour or so, and he didn’t even have to switch planes or anything. Still, I think doing anything like this for the first time, alone, as a “grown up,” is a bit nerve-wracking, a rite of passage, and once you complete it, you gain more confidence. I think that works both ways, too, for the parent who needs to let go as well as the kid who yearns to be more independent.

In the past, my younger son had always flown either with me or his dad, or with his older brother. For a while, they were both “unaccompanied minors,” and then for a while my older son was old enough to accompany my younger son as his “guardian.” Interesting that when my older son was my current son’s age, I had no qualms about him being in charge of not only himself but his younger brother as well. Although I have to say, my older son has never had the occasion to fly by himself yet, even though he is older. So, in this case, the younger son is doing something that the older son has not yet done.

This is a strange phenomenon with siblings of different ages. In some respects, I think my older son is much older than my younger son at that same age, and my older son gets put in charge and held responsible for not only himself but his younger brother, too. In other respects, I tend to let my younger son do some things earlier than I did my older son, maybe because my older son is already doing them and my younger son wants to, too, and I can’t think of a good reason to say no. Or sometimes just because it ends up that way.

So, the older son gets put in charge more often at a younger age and responsible for the well-being of others, while the younger son gets to do certain activities (that aren’t age-dictated by law) at an earlier age than the older son. I am sure this must have some effect on how one develops as an individual.

What really stunned me this morning was how genuinely sad I felt after my son disappeared through those security gates. Seriously, there were a few times this morning I almost had to fight back tears! As I sat alone in the airport terminal waiting for his call, as I kept checking the Departures board to make sure his flight was still “On Time,” as I was driving out of the short term parking lot and leaving the airport. I was sad to see him go, yes. Although I certainly want him to spend time with his dad and have fun. I mean, in an intellectual, adult sense, anyway. Maybe I am also a bit sad that he is growing up and away from me. And maybe I am just lonely without him. He is a funny, lively, active, at times kind and generous, at times crabby and annoying as hell kind of guy. You know when he is there, and you really know when he is not.

It is true; when my kids are not with me I feel out of sorts, like all is not right with the world. Maybe this is natural. It didn’t bother me when each of them went on their 8th grade class trips to Washington, DC. Or to band camps or football camps. I didn’t even care that I had no way to contact them or talk with them on these occasions. I knew they were having fun and doing things they wanted to do. But when they go away for longer periods of time, holiday breaks or summer vacations, I have to turn a part of myself off. Because I start to feel sad, and then I feel guilty that I feel sad.

My sons have never really been apart from each other for any real length of time before, either. Only a few days or a week at most when one or the other was on a trip or at camp. This summer my younger son will be gone for well over a month. It will be interesting to see how his older brother copes, if he will miss his younger brother. And vice versa. My younger son confided to me in the car on the way to the airport that he was surprised by the big bear hug his older brother gave him, saying good bye. He said, “Maybe he’s going to miss me!”

Life flies by quickly, and within a few years both of my sons will be leaving home for good – off to college, careers, their own adult lives. That seems so strange to me. Good, of course, because isn’t that what we as parents are trying to prepare them for? But at the same time, sad. I am going to miss them. It was only yesterday that they were babies and toddlers and little boys who played with action figures and Legos. Now they are young men, taller and bigger than me, with facial hair and deep voices, and a desire to explore the world and discover who they are. These are all good things. Afterall, our hopes and dreams are out there somewhere.

To the Point: Reflections on Reading

2009-06-06T21:38:00.004-04:00

The first book about West Point that I ever read was probably the Landmark series book that I got from my elementary school library: The West Point Story by COL “Red” Reeder (USMA ‘26). (To show you what a nerd I was, I probably read EVERY book in the Landmark series that our school library had, along with every single Young Biography book.) The next book I read about West Point was an old, dog-eared paperback copy of West Point Plebe – also by the prolific COL “Red” Reeder. It is a G-rated kids book written in the 1950s. I actually found this book in my younger son’s room recently; I think he may have been reading it. The only thing I remember learning from West Point Plebe (aside from the fact that the protagonist, Clint Lane, was a gorgeous hunk) is that it is not a good idea to put grapefruit juice in a metal canteen!

THE classic novel on West Point is, of course, Dress Gray by Lucian Truscott, IV (USMA ’69). It was published in the late 70s right before I went to West Point myself but dealt with a West Point of the late 1960s, when Truscott himself had been a cadet. I read that book, of course, as well as the just-published Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy. While the latter was about the Citadel (a place where people pay to get hazed!), I figured it probably wouldn’t be too far off from West Point. I remember going to R Day thinking that I would have to “Drop those bags!” and “Pick up those bags!” just like in Dress Gray, and I was rather disappointed when no one ever asked me to do that. I won’t say I actually practiced doing it for real, but I certainly imagined myself doing it until I was, I thought, pretty fast on the draw.

Over the past several years, there has been a small slew of non-fiction books about West Point and what life at West Point is “really” like. Both Absolutely American (2003) by David Lipsky and Duty First (2001) by Ed Ruggero are worth reading and have their pluses and minuses. Lipsky, a reporter for the magazine Rolling Stone got approval from the Academy’s administration to follow a group of cadets through all four years at West Point. On the other end of the spectrum, Ed Ruggero (USMA ’80), former infantry officer, West Point P, and leadership speaker/writer, portrayed a year in the lives of several cadets at West Point in an attempt to give a glimpse inside the mysterious “leadership lab.” It is really hard to write about West Point if you have never gone there and experienced it yourself, but Lipsky did an admirable job. Of course, it is really hard to write about West Point if you HAVE gone there and experienced it for yourself, as Ruggero did. West Point is a different world, a different universe, with a different language and different rules; everyone going through it with you understands exactly what you are saying when you talk about West Point, but no one else really ever does. Or so you think.

If you have an interest in reading about West Point, there are three books I would recommend:

The first is a novel. Honor and Duty (1994), by Gus Lee, an Asian-American writer, is phenomenal. You may have read or heard of his first novel, China Boy, about growing up as a first generation Chinese American in San Francisco. Lee went to West Point in the ‘60s but didn’t graduate, failing out because of “Juice” (electrical engineering) his cow (junior) year, and this book is in many ways, I think, a roman a clef. It is very hard to capture West Point and what it is really like to go there, but Lee is a wonderful writer and does an amazing job. There are two things I remember most from this book, which was set during the Vietnam War: one was how as an Asian cadet, he was hazed for being Vietnamese (even though he was actually Chinese) and the other was a mentor character, a junior officer, who was a thinly disguised young Norman Schwartzkopf. I highly recommend this novel, especially if you prefer fiction.

The second book is a non-fiction book that will break your heart. I wrote about it a few months ago on this same blog. In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point’s Class of 2002 (2008) by Bill Murphy, Jr. The Class of 2002 was the “Bicentennial Class” as West Point was founded in 1802. They were already cadets when 9/11 occurred, Firsties, in fact, and they did not know what they would be getting into after graduation. Almost immediately, as brand new second lieutenants, many of them found themselves in Iraq or Afghanistan, and then Iraq or Afghanistan again. If they didn’t get killed first, that is. This is a very hard book to read. I cried through most of it. I don’t want to ruin the story, but if you have loved ones deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan right now, you might not want to read this book at this time. This is a very powerful, very moving book that talks about duty and honor and service and the realities of serving during wartime.

The final book, also non-fiction, is Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature through Peace and War at West Point (2007) by Elizabeth Samet, a civilian English P at West Point. I found this book to be extremely moving, thoughtful, and well-written. When I first read it, I wanted to write the author, who is still an English professor at West Point, but I was too shy and embarrassed. I wanted to tell her what an amazing book I thought she had written. She was an insider who was really an outsider, or an outsider who was really an insider, depending on how you want to look at it. She brings a different perspective to West Point and the Army and the cadet experience, and she captures a lot of the spirit of what it means to be a cadet. My only qualms were that the cadets she wrote about seemed so much smarter and well read than any of us ever were! I think West Point is one of those places where the more things change, the more they stay the same, and cadets are basically the same kinds of young people they have always been: motivated, gung ho, naïve, innocent, overachieving, patriotic, and determined to do their best. (Which, at times, can produce a few who are cynical, jaded, and/or proudly underachieving.)

I really loved the way Samet could talk about literature and poetry and why they are important for soldiers. And how her cadets showed her how important literature really was in their lives, especially as they headed off for Iraq and Afghanistan. We don’t really think of soldiers as being thoughtful or thinkers or contemplative. We think of them as being readily obedient, doers, active, following orders, accomplishing the mission. Samet and her cadets show how it is possible to be both.

Term End Exams

2009-06-05T21:12:00.002-04:00

As my kids were taking their final exams this week and wrapping up the school year, it brought back distinct memories of final exams at West Point and what that was like.

First of all, West Point doesn’t have final exams. It has Term End Exams, or TEEs. (West Point, like the Army, has to have a weird term and acronym for everything.)

Believe it or not, West Point was most like a “regular” college during exams. Why? Because a lot of the military stuff was kind of put on hold. We were allowed to keep our rooms in permanent PMI (PM Inspection), as opposed to AMI (AM Inspection) in the morning and PMI afterwards. And there was certainly no SAMI (Saturday Morning Inspection, THE most stringent form of inspection that usually happened each… Saturday morning) to worry about. Plus, meals were all optional and we didn’t have to march anywhere and we had fewer formations. We were also allowed to stay up later and hang out in more casual uniforms (Gym Alpha and sweats, mostly) in the barracks. Plebes got hazed less and were pretty much left alone; the upperclassmen had more important things to worry about – like studying for their own final exams. We would get together in groups and study and go over material. They would bring snacks to the company area – hot water for cocoa and coffee and cookies or other snacks. We were pretty much left alone most of the time to study and take our exams.

The exams were three hours long, and you could certainly have more than one exam per day. It would just really depend on what courses you were taking and how the schedule played out.

For most people, final exams week was the time to cram in everything you were supposed to have learned all semester long but never really did. Or it was a time to go over facts and figures and dates and make sure you had everything memorized. There was a lot of “spec and dump” mentality. You only needed to know stuff for the final exam, and then you could forget it. Usually there was a LOT of material covered in any one term in any one course, so there was a lot to review and go over.

This was a very stressful, high pressure, adrenaline- and caffeine-fueled time, but it was also, curiously, very relaxed and laid back, militarily. I actually really enjoyed final exams week. Not having to take the final exams, but how everything else was more relaxed and laid back so we could focus on studying. Or staying up late. Or just bull shitting in the hallways or in our rooms.

I guess you could say final exams week was the least military time of the year. So, that was why we thought it was more like what “regular” colleges were like, not that most of us really had any idea what “regular” colleges were like.

I think it is kind of odd, in retrospect, that final exam time, probably THE most stressful time at “regular” colleges, was for us what we considered the time most like what a regular college was like.

If the shoe fits....

2009-06-01T11:15:00.002-04:00

OK, am I the only woman out there who is not made orgasmic by high-heeled platform shoes?

Sometimes I feel like I come from another planet!

Honest to God, these women were on TV this morning going ga-ga over these shoes with insanely high heels. They called them Skyscrapers, or some such.

And then there were these gladiator shoes (which even I know are all the rage right now and I still think they are butt ugly) with high heels and platforms. The fashion coordinator consultant, who probably made more money for this one segment than I do all year as a librarian, said, “Now, wouldn’t these shoes just make you feel like a goddess?”

I am looking at these shoes, squinting really, because they are so ghastly ugly and obviously uncomfortable, and I am thinking: “No, not really. They would make me feel like a cross between Victor Mature and the Lady Chablis from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”

The best shoes, though, were the – now, get this! – toeless boots. Honest to God, toeless boots. They looked just like boots, black leather and all, but they had obscenely high heels and platforms , to boot! (ha), AND… they were open toed!!! I am thinking, OK, we wear boots to protect our feet from snow, cold, mud, falling trees and I-beams. What the hell good are toeless boots going to be? But everyone was going super gaga over them. And, guess what? They only cost $1200! A true bargain, if I ever heard of one.

And just because I am a librarian, does not mean I wear orthopedic shoes! I have a whole variety of shoes, in different styles, for different purposes. Granted, a heel of two inches would pretty much be stiletto for me. When I go for shoes, I go for comfort. My favorite pair of shoes, by far, is my Dansko clog-like things. They are great for having to spend a lot of time on your feet, which I do as a roving, teaching reference librarian. I also have a wide variety of slip on shoes, loafers, low-heeled pumps, and sandals. Right now I am wearing flip flops, which I quite enjoy but which I do not wear when it is twenty degrees outside and snowing, which I have seen many a teen girl -- and boy -- doing! New Balance running shoes, several pairs of mocs, Teva’s, Bean boots from 1980, hiking boots, and even a pair of Doc Martens. (All of my boots have toes, thank you very much.)

Now, I really don’t care if other people want to wear really high heeled monstrosities. That is their personal business. If they like them and feel comfortable wearing them, go for it! Hell, I guess I shouldn’t really care if they feel comfortable in them or not. They are all grown ups. If they are happy with their shoe choices, more power to them! I just don’t “get it.” But then again, I guess I don’t have to.

Now, where the hell did my other flip flop go…?

Bedtime Story

2009-05-31T20:13:00.002-04:00

“The gnome-mobile, the gnome-mobile, we’re driving around in the gnome-mobile!”

I am probably one of the few people who remember this rather obscure Disney film (The Gnome-Mobile) and still have the song playing in my mind some forty years later.

My memory of it is the two kids from Mary Poppins make friends with gnomes and then drive around in the forest in a big car called the Gnome-Mobile with Walter Brennan, some old rich Irish guy and the only real adult in the film. (I think Walter Brennan also played one of the gnomes.)

I swear I saw this movie, or at least part of it, on the Wonderful World of Disney, but maybe not. Maybe I only saw a preview of it on Disney.

Sunday nights at our house growing up meant the Wonderful World of Disney. I can actually remember Walt Disney introducing some of the segments. Since he died in 1966, that is kind of impressive as I would have been… three. In fact, it may mean they were using canned footage of him introducing the Wonderful World of Disney well after his death. Or not. Who knows, maybe I have an incredibly good memory!

My recollection is also that the Wonderful World of Disney ran from 7 to 8 pm on Sunday nights; the Internet tells me it ran from 7:30 to 8:30 pm. Whatever. What I do remember is that for a while, my sister and I had a bedtime that fell halfway in between, and honest to God, my father would make us go to bed halfway through Walt Disney!

I am not kidding. At the time, I thought that was the cruelest thing imaginable. I mean, really, give us the half hour more; let us finish up with Disney and then we will gladly go to bed. Of course, we would never have argued with my father; we would have just gone to bed. Unhappy, yes, but we would have gone without putting up, well, really any kind of fight.

I distinctly remember having to go to bed halfway through Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, with Fess Parker. What father in his right mind would make his kids miss out on Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier?

Just because bedtime was bedtime?

In hindsight, I would have made bedtime half an hour later on Sundays.

Unfortunately, I was not in charge.

I believe in rules and routines and all, but only if they make sense and make things run more smoothly. I don’t believe in rules for the sake of rules, or rigidity.

I am sure I would have let my own kids stay up to watch the entire episode of the Wonderful World of Disney! In part because they would have been transfixed and quiet; in part, because it would have been insanity to try to tear them away. Because they would have protested vociferously! And it wouldn’t have been worth it. But also in part because, quite simply: why not? Who wouldn’t want to watch the entire episode?

I can remember when my sister and I would wake up too early on Saturday mornings and go turn on the TV to watch Saturday morning cartoons. I am not sure what “too early” was, but if my father decided it was too early, he would send us back to bed. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. And, of course, we would go. With little, if any, protest. We wouldn’t go back to sleep, mind you. Normally, we would go to my bedroom, which was further away from my parents’ room, and we would play covered wagon on my canopy bed. So, maybe that was more creative and engaging than watching cartoons, which we would watch later anyway.

As a parent, I can appreciate the desire for sleep that one has on weekends and the fact that little kids get up way too early for their own good. Although one could argue that if our father had let us stay up a bit later in general, we might have slept in a bit later the next morning. But – sigh! – I guess there was no desire to have us sleep in on Monday morning.

I think our bedtime was pretty much set period. My memory of it was as 7:30, at least on school nights. I guess the Wonderful World of Disney research bumps this up to 8:00. I have memories of watching The Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family on Friday nights, but not anything past this, unless we had some unknowing babysitter we could dupe, and got to watch Room 222 or Love American Style on occasion.

I know Saturday night and a babysitter meant a bath followed by The Sonny and Cher Show.

Now, that was living life on the wild side!

Later on, Saturday nights meant The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. I can still sing the theme song from Love Boat and remember fondly Tattoo shouting “Boss! Da plane, da plane!” as that week’s guest stars (mostly movie and TV has beens) would arrive to be greeted by Ricardo Montalban, himself a former movie star.

Nowadays, I go to bed before my two teenaged sons, more often than not. Of course, if it is a weekend, I will be up early and they will sleep til noon!

There are no bed times really.

Sometimes, if it is late and they wake me up, I will tell them to go to bed, if it is really late. If it is a weekend, I am less likely to do this. If it is a weeknight, and I know they have to get up at 6:30 am, more likely. As I am the one who is going to have to get them up!

They do not watch the Wonderful World of Disney. I am not even sure if it is still on or not. Of course, they would be far too old for that now. They watch things like South Park and Family Guy and Futurama and Adult Swim. And the Comedy Channel. I know this because sometimes I am still up and see them watching these shows. And sometimes because when I wake up in the morning and go to turn on the CBS Morning News, the TV is still on Cartoon Network or what have you.

Am I a bad mom because I let my children watch these shows?

Well, I may be a bad mom for a bunch of other reasons, but, frankly, I am not big on censorship. And to be honest, I find a lot of these shows to be funny myself.

They are just on way too late for me to stay up and watch them.

My kids are good kids. They do well in school. They seem well-adjusted. Granted, they are teenagers and drive me to distraction at least several times a week. But I think they are old enough to select their TV shows. Even if they are a bit raunchy. The TV shows, not my kids.

Plus, when my bedtime rolls around, I need to skedaddle under those covers pronto ASAP!!!

Because Lord knows, morning will be coming soon enough….

Sensations of Summer

2009-05-30T20:37:00.001-04:00

What does summer smell like to you?

freshly cut grass, charcoal grills firing up, chlorine, honeysuckle….

What does summer sound like to you?

lawn mowers, the whir of bike tires, the splash of a dive, the incessant chatter of birds, the buzz of bees….

What does summer taste like to you?

soft shell crabs, fresh corn on the cob, watermelon, tomatoes fresh from the garden, popsicles….

What does summer feel like to you?

hot, humid air, the sun beating down on your body, cool grass between your toes, an itchy mosquito bite, a cold, refreshing drink….

What does summer look like to you?

green, green, green, flowers of many colors, waves above the pavement, fireworks, lightning bugs flashing randomly across the yard, condensation dripping down the side of a glass….

What does summer mean to you...?

Out on a limb

2009-05-28T21:45:00.001-04:00

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

You know those quotations people put at the ends of their emails? Kind of as part of their signature block?

Like they are supposed to inspire you somehow? Or make you think?

Generally speaking, I don’t much care for them. I mean, sure, the first time you read a quotation, it might be interesting. But then when you start seeing that same quote forty million times a day, it – uh – starts to lose something.

A lot.

Fast.

If people could arrange it so the quotations changed each time they sent out an email, now, that might be something.

But then, they would have to have like forty billion quotations!

Well… I saw the above quotation the other day.

Somewhere. In one of the millions of emails I receive.

And for some reason, it struck me.

Boom.

Right there between the eyes.

Do you know who said it? Or wrote it? Originally. Not the email. The quotation.

Don’t think too hard. Keeping things simple often does you right.

Dr. Seuss.

Yep. Theodore S. Geisel. Dr. Seuss. Of Hop on Pop and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish fame. That Dr. Seuss. Am not sure where this particular quote appears, but I would be willing to bet it was in Oh, the Places You’ll Go! You know, that book people give to young people who are graduating from high school or college, even though Dr. Seuss books are meant for small children.

The quotation sounds so simple, so straightforward, so commonsensical.

"Be who you are and say what you feel…”

OK. Yes. That sounds simple enough.

“…because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

It’s quite disarming in its simplicity, its seeming charm, isn’t it?

I find it quite profound myself.

I probably worry too much about those people who mind (and don’t matter!) and take far too much for granted those people who matter (and don’t mind).

I would do well then -- wouldn’t I? – to follow Dr. Seuss’s advice more closely.

I am not by nature a risk taker.

At least not when it comes to myself. If I see injustice being done to others, generally speaking, I will step forward and say something or do something on their behalf.

But on my own behalf…?

In my own interest…?

Hmmmm. Not likely. Not very often.

It is funny. I think of myself as very quiet, very introverted, very reserved. I do not feel “the need for speed.” I love challenges, but they don’t need to be risky, life-endangering, sportsy, or inconsequential. I don’t need the feeling just to have the feeling.

I mentioned this once at work, and two of my co-workers whirled around.

“What?!? I would have imagined you loved risky adventures!” they each said.

“Why on earth would you ever think that?” I asked, incredulous.

“Because you were in the Army!” said one.

“Yeah. Because you climbed mountains and drove tanks and flew airplanes and …”

“Shot big guns and crossed glaciers and jumped out of airplanes [I did not really jump out of airplanes]!” said the other.

“Because you were always doing dangerous things!!!” They both said in unison, nodding their heads vigorously.

A light bulb went on in my head.

“Oh. Well. Yes,” I said, “but I didn’t do any of those things because I wanted to. Just for the fun of it. I only did them because I was told to do them!”

They both stared at me.

“I never would have gone out and done them on my own,” I explained further.

The continued staring at me.

“Hello! Those things are… you know… dangerous!”

They both laughed.

It is true, though. I do not seek out danger for the sake of danger. I will do dangerous things, if they need to be done. But I am not going to be one of those people who bungee jumps off the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia once a year just because I can.

In fact, I can’t imagine myself ever bungee jumping off the New River Gorge Bridge period. No matter what.

When it comes to interacting with others, my close friends tell me that I need to… “go out on a limb” more.

Take risks.

Put myself on the line.

Sure. They can say that. They don’t have to “go out on a limb.”

I am not good at going out on a limb.

Going out on a limb is not going to come to anything good. I know this ahead of time.

In fact, I am positive it will only cause embarrassment.

For myself, mostly.

Once in a while, it is true,

I will feel it right to take that extra step, venture out onto that limb, speak up, express myself…

BUT…

generally speaking, it is a mistake, not right, ill-timed, inappropriate.

And I am left feeling foolish.

The fool.

Stranded out there on the middle of that bare limb.

OK. Fine.

So, I guess that is when I really need to remind myself: “those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”

Or, more in line with my own style: “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!"

And I am one of them.

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T12:34:00.001-04:00

Thoreau had a pond. Annie Dillard had a creek. I have a cemetery.

Some may find that unnatural, or, at the least, morbid. I find it neither. The cemetery sits atop a hill overlooking the village and the river and the bridge down below. A winding road takes you up through sylvan forests, full of birds, squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, and deer. The seasons are broadcast fully, from vivid green in summer to a snowy wonderland in winter; autumn is magnificent with all the changing colors and falling leaves. It is quiet, peaceful, beautiful, a place to get away from it all, simply by walking out my front door and up the hill.

This is an older cemetery, for the United States, dating back to the mid-1800s. A large, recently rebuilt statue of Fame creates a memorial to all those locals who died in the Civil War. It sits at the very top of the hill, behind the large American flag, where an opening has been cut in the woods. From here, you can easily see the river and the bridge below, and from the bridge, you can see the opening in the trees and the flag and a glimpse of the white statue above.

Normally, I walk around the winding roads in any number of permutations, thinking, thinking, thinking. Walking, walking, walking. Writing, writing, writing. Taking note of the changing seasons, absent-mindedly acknowledging the names on the gray and white and pink headstones. They are like old friends.

This past weekend I left the paved road and ventured amongst the headstones, examining graves that had been marked with American flags. Wherever there was a veteran’s marker, groups of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts had carefully slipped a small American flag. I found veterans from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. I did not see any markers for veterans of Desert Storm or the more recent Iraq/Afghanistan wars, but I may have missed them. As I said, this is an older cemetery; most of the veterans were from WWII. I was surprised by how many Spanish/American War markers I saw. This is not a military cemetery; it is simply a local town cemetery. Full of local townspeople. Many of whom served their country. Most of whom then went on to lead long, productive (or short, perhaps contentious?) lives back in their communities. I saw very few gravestones where the person had been killed in war. It was a cemetery full of veterans, full of survivors.

I recognize many of the names on the headstones, from families who were famous in my town’s history or in the rise of industrial Pittsburgh. Many of these families still live here. I do not tend to think of cemeteries as sad places or places of death; rather as places of history and families and lives led. I see people, spirits, moving in the distance, just out of sight, walking back and forth amongst the headstones, wearing clothes from all different time periods. I hear the murmur of their talking and their laughter and their sighs. The cemetery is humming, buzzing, with generations of lives led, most very ordinary, but in their own ways extraordinary. I imagine their stories, their loves, their heartaches, their hopes and dreams. The cemetery is full of stories. The cemetery is full of life.

My father is buried in this cemetery. I remember well his funeral and the humid heat of the day when he was buried. The folded American flag that was given to my mother because he was a veteran. I don’t really think of his being there, in the ground. Visiting his grave has little real meaning to me, but occasionally I pass by and take a look. To make sure his gravestone is still there. To ensure the wreath is placed there at Christmas time, the geraniums planted in spring. Things that my mother has arranged to have done.

By his grave there is a marker designating him as a World War II veteran; a crisp new American flag, probably made in China, flutters in the late afternoon breeze. My mother had worried earlier if there were enough geraniums planted at his grave; she was thinking of driving up in the heat of the day to plant an extra flower. I had reassured her that there were plenty. I counted them today: four red geraniums and three white flowers whose name I do not know. That seemed like plenty to me.

I think a small town cemetery can tell you a lot about a place and its people and its history. About those who served in uniform in any number of conflicts. This cemetery has massive stones and obelisks and mausoleums from very wealthy families, next to very ordinary stones and the occasional quixotic stone with dueling guitars or a bowling ball and pins carved into it. American flags dot the hills with fairly regular precision, regardless of the stone or its size. And then there is the section where veterans are buried with government-issued bronze plaques or simple stone markers. That section is a sea of American flags, lined up symmetrically, in row after row. The cemetery is as different and varied as the town. Yet, on this day, Memorial Day, you can tell easily all of those who served their country proudly, in uniform, for reasons they felt right. So, those of us now can walk amiably through the cemetery or watch the Memorial Day parade, where the Korean War veterans are now the “old fogies.” I remember them as being young; it was the World War I veterans who were old! And today there are only a few World War II veterans left, riding in cars, many too old or too crippled to walk. The people lining the sidewalks in their array of red, white, and blue clothes and waving small flags or clutching red, white, and blue balloons clap for all the veterans. Of every war. And for any active duty soldiers as well. They do this once a year, before they head off for the swimming pool or their barbecues or picnics and welcome the beginning of summer.

"Gray"duation

2009-05-23T20:46:00.005-04:00

Graduation Day.

Memorial Day.

Graduation Day.

Memorial Day.

Hmmm…

OK. This year, West Point graduation is on Saturday, May 23rd, and Memorial Day is on Monday, May 25th.

I honestly don’t remember Memorial Day being all that close to West Point’s graduation day when I graduated, but I am sure it must have been……

May 22, 1985.

Graduation Day.

I think it was a Wednesday. But that doesn’t make any sense.

Does it?

Here, let me check… (the beauty of the Internet and calendars/time throughout the ages!)

Hmmm… yes, May 22 did fall on a Wednesday in 1985.

Memorial Day was on Monday, May 27th, which would have been light years away from Wednesday, May 22nd,

AND…

light years ahead of Saturday, June 1, 1985.

Wedding Day.

But I digress...

May 22, 1985.

Graduation Day.

The anniversary, on Friday, was noted by several of my West Point classmates on Facebook. Twenty four years ago today, they said. And they remembered…..

A dad or mom who pinned their 2nd LT bars on.

A parent to whom they gave their West Point saber.

The day.

Period.

They remembered it.

And Memorial Day?

Several of my classmates and friends have pointed out the importance of Memorial Day, whether it be thanking soldiers for serving, remembering those who have served and sacrificed, or acknowledging those who have died while serving their country.

Or tipping one’s beer in a toast whilst imbibing at a picnic.

The sentiments vary.

This is what I remember about Graduation Day….

This was the day I had waited for FOREVER. We had counted down for four years to this day. We were going to graduate, be commissioned as 2nd lieutenants in the Regular Army, leave West Point, and go out and do stuff.

My parents were there. My sister. My aunt from Alaska, my aunt from San Francisco (well, they had come East early for the big wedding that was going to be happening soon). My aunt and uncle on my mother's side, from Pittsburgh.

We had had all sorts of festivities: a graduation banquet, a graduation parade, award ceremonies, company parties. It is all really just a big blur.

But I do remember graduation day. It was hot and sunny. We were wearing full dress over white. It was hot. We were in Michie Stadium. We were all lined up. We were sitting in order. We were ready to toss up our white caps and be done with it. The Honorable John O. Marsh was the speaker. Who???

I got my diploma. I sat down. We tossed up our hats into the air. And cheered and cried and hugged each other. Did we really realize we might not see each other ever again? Or at least not for a very, very long time?

We changed into our Army Class A greens for the commissioning ceremony. Company A-2 had theirs up at Fort Putnam. Overlooking West Point and the Hudson.

I had assumed that my father would administer my oath of office. I had never asked him if he would do this; I had just….assumed…. My tactical officer had assumed.

I mean, why wouldn’t he????

But there, at Fort Putnam, on the top of the hill above West Point and the Hudson, and all of the history of the military academy and the Revolutionary War and every other war since, he said…

no.

I couldn’t believe it. Surely, I had heard wrong. Surely, he would be honored to help commission me as an officer in the United States Army, to administer the oath and pin those gold second lieutenant bars on my shoulders.

wouldn’t he…?

He had gone to West Point himself, a Nebraska farm boy from the Depression era who had made his way, arduously, to the US Military Academy and graduated with the Class of 1939. He had served in World War II.

But he said, no.

I don’t think I have ever been so incredibly devastated in my life as at that moment in time.

I had been through so much. I had done everything, EVERYTHING to win his approval. I had been through hell at West Point, as so many of my classmates, both male and female, but probably more so female, had. I could not possibly have done any better than I had.

And he said… no.

That was it.

I was stunned.

Speechless.

Punched in the gut.

In retrospect, twenty four years on, I honestly believe it had nothing to do with me. I am not sure, exactly, why he said no. But I think it had more to do with him. His thinking you had to be a career Army officer, or an officer still on duty at the least. Or something. I don’t think he realized that it was an honor, a request. And I had surprised him, caught him off guard. I had not talked with him about this beforehand, because… well, I had just assumed he would do it!

I don’t know.

Actually.

I really have no idea.

Why….

I just cannot believe that honestly, truly my father could have ever done something so cruel and hurtful. Intentionally.

I remember standing there, on top of that mountain, in the ruins of this Revolutionary War fort, in my new Army greens, in the hot, hot sun, the breeze blowing by us all, surrounded by all of my classmates and their families, everyone so proud and excited and chattering and laughing.

And feeling so alone.

Lower than low.

Completely deflated.

I had to fight back the tears.

Of course, I was used to that. After four years at West Point. I was used to being strong and stoic and showing… nothing. Because for a woman to show emotion, that was the worst possible thing you could do. For a female cadet to cry, that was anathema.

But I was not a female cadet. I was a second lieutenant in the United States Army. And I was proud to serve my country.

I would NEVER cry about something so silly as my own father refusing to commission me! That was childish, ludicrous.

My aunt, my father’s sister who was closest to him in age and closest to me in personality, was one of the few people who had witnessed what had just transpired.

I stepped to the edge of the stone ruins to regroup. And she came up to me. She spoke to me. She knew exactly what had just happened.

I almost lost it. Tears were overflowing, no matter how hard I fought to keep them back.

“I did everything,” I said. “I did everything for him. You have no idea what I have been through. This was all for him!”

“I know,” she said slowly and nodded. “I know. But he doesn’t. And he doesn’t mean to….”

The wind rippled by us.

She gave me a long, hard hug.

And I sucked it up.

My tactical officer, a captain in Air Defense Artillery and a nice enough guy, if one is to like one’s tactical officer, administered the oath of office on the top of the hill, on Fort Putnam, overlooking the Hudson River, in the hot, hot sun on Wednesday, May 22, 1985.

Someone’s younger brother, a cadet at VMI or the Citadel, in his institution’s West Point-imitation uniform, caught me as I was leaving Fort Putnam and saluted me. I saluted back and gave him my Eisenhower silver dollar. It was a tradition. A new second lieutenant always gives a silver dollar to the first person to salute him or her.

And I was indeed a new second lieutenant….

"Rollin', rollin', rollin' ... Keep them doggies rollin'. Rawhide!"

2009-05-16T18:32:00.002-04:00

I bought a gasoline-powered weed whacker today. Well, it uses a mix of oil and gas, a 32 to 1 ratio. I have to pour 8 ounces of this special weed whacker oil in this special gas can and then add 2 gallons of regular unleaded gas to the can, mix it up, and voila! -- one weed whacker cocktail!

I was very nervous buying a weed whacker. I never bought one before. And it is not the sort of thing I would desire to purchase, or know anything about. I used to have a personal weed whacker; I was married to him. And we had a simple weed whacker machine that was plugged in with a mega long extension cord, you know the orange kind on a spool. Well, I no longer have either the machine or the operator.

But I DO have weeds.

Sigh.

Alas!

I actually have a local lawn service come once every two weeks to mow all the grass, because 1) I don’t own a lawn mower; 2) I don’t have the time to mow the grass; 3) my big strapping sons are gone most of the summer mowing someone else’s grass and probably using that same plug-in weed whacker; and 4) the service is reasonably priced. The problem is: I can only afford the reasonably priced lawn mowing service once every two weeks and the lawn grows WAYYYY faster than that. And they only run a lawn mower over the overtly grassy parts. They don’t get all those nooks and crannies and hard to get places where weeds seem to grow as tall as an elephant’s eye overnight!

Add in the fact that I am anal retentive and have OCD and all those weeds make me twitch.

I have a real NEED to cut them down with a motorized swath of fishing line!

The guy at the hardware store was very helpful, I have to say. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I could not get a weed whacker that had to be plugged in. Because the weeds are far, far, far too far away from any plug, I don’t care how long of an orange extension cord you’ve got! I knew there were cordless, rechargeable weed whackers, but I also knew how worthless all those Dustbusters I have ever owned have been. If a gadget can’t charge up enough to suck up dirt from my car mats, how is a gadget going to whack all those Amazonian weeds???

I had a feeling going in that I was going to have to get a gas-powered weed whacker. I didn’t really like the idea, but there was certainly no way I was going to whack weeds with a machete or nail clippers.

I have used a weed whacker before, precisely the version that plugged in with the ultra long orange extension cord because my personal weed whacker was often not home when the weeds needed their whacking. So, I am familiar with the action involved.

The idea of a motor and having to add gasoline made me a tad nervous.

I felt like I was going out to buy a new car.

The hardware guy reassured me, though, that I definitely wanted a gas-powered machine and not a cordless one. He said he would NEVER buy a cordless one. I figured as much. And he was very helpful at finding me one that was the right size and weight for me to handle. He did NOT try to sell me the deluxe $300 model! In fact, he sold me one of the models that were on sale. Which I appreciated. But he did not sell it to me BECAUSE it was on sale. But rather because he felt it fit my needs. And he gave me an already assembled weed whacker, so I didn’t have to assemble it myself. Again, most appreciated. (Yes, I realize he was giving me the floor model, but that was OK with me. The thought of having to assemble this piece of machinery from scratch was NOT a desirable one. Plus, I just wanted to go home and start making my swath ASAP OCOKA!)

The hardware store guy even put some of the oil/gas mixture in the machine and taught me how to start up the machine and use it and turn it off again. He hooked me up with a gas can and the right kind of oil and told me how to add the oil to the can first and then 2 gallons of gas and then mix it up. He even wrote “32 to 1” on the red plastic gas can with a black Sharpie so I would always know the correct mix of oil and gas to put in! (Frankly, the “add this 8 ounce bottle of oil, followed by 2 gallons of gas” instructions worked just fine for me, but whatever.)

And… he carried everything out to my car.

Clearly, this hardware store guy does a lot of business with women who need weed whackers but know absolutely nothing about them, or else this was just an incredibly kind and helpful man. Or both. I was impressed.

Whacked my first weeds this afternoon.

Feel sort of like a lumberjack or a manly landscaper kind of person dude.

Feel a great sense of accomplishment.

Feel like an American.

"Do not go gentle into that good night..."

2009-05-03T18:04:00.002-04:00

One of my students died. He was a freshman, only 19. An athlete, he played on the college men’s volleyball team. One evening, a week or so ago, he complained of heartburn after dinner, took an antacid, and went to take a shower. Later that night, someone found him in the dorm, unresponsive. He was rushed to the nearest hospital, which is less than a block away, but it was too late. He was dead. Of a ruptured aorta. He was 19.

When I came into work the next day, I had not heard anything about it. I was preparing to teach a research session for a Public Speaking class that had to develop a presentation on Thomas Merton’s classic The Seven Storey Mountain. I knew most of the students would be freshmen, who had already taken the core Research and Information Skills course I teach every fall; this was the same course I had taught the student who had just died. Only I did not know yet that he had died.

One of the other reference librarians left a note in my cube to come see her. She was working out at the reference desk, and when I went out there, she had a story from the online version of the newspaper up on her computer screen. “University student dies,” it said. Oh, no, I thought to myself. Occasionally, a student would die, it was true, in a car accident, from alcohol poisoning, an accidental drug overdose, unfortunate, unusual circumstances that took young people way too soon. When I looked more closely at the text of the article, I recognized the student’s name. My heart lurched a bit, but his name was a fairly common one; surely, it was someone else with the same name. Not him. It couldn’t be him, he was only 19. But then I saw that the article included his signature nickname. And I froze. No. This wasn’t possible. I had just seen him the other day on campus, in passing, we had said hi. And he had given me that big grin of his, the one that always allowed me to recognize him instantly.

I typically teach four sections of freshmen in the fall, about 160 students total. The classes of about 40 students each are held in computer labs, for 50 minutes, once a week. Most of the time, these kids’ faces are hidden behind their computer screens as I lecture and lead them in conversation and in class assignments. I am not really very good at remembering people’s names, and I find it especially hard to remember all of these freshmen names. So many of the students look so much alike, and they have so many names that are alike. I have mixed up some of my students more than once, especially if I run into them outside of the classroom. And it can be very embarrassing. I have actually gotten better over the years; I try harder, I think, to remember people’s names. Of course, there are always those few students who stand out for one reason or another; often because they are in trouble or have been doing poorly. Then, of course, there are those few who distinguish themselves in the classroom for other reasons – they say something really funny, they ask a memorable question, they are so physically different in appearance from everyone else it would be impossible not to recognize them.

But with “my student,” it was something different. He stood out from the rest, not for any particular reason, but just because he did. His amazing smile certainly had something to do with it; afterall, it was a smile I could pick out amidst throngs of students crossing campus between classes. It was also the fact that on that first day of class as I was taking attendance by calling the names off the roster one by one, to check for nicknames and make sure I was pronouncing names correctly, he told me I could call him by a nickname that clearly had no connection to his given name. I must have paused or looked at him quizzically as I was jotting that nickname down on the roster, because he smiled that amazing smile of his and shrugged, “It’s a family thing. There’s a story behind it.” He didn’t elaborate, but from that point on I had absolutely no problem whatsoever remembering his name. I think even he was surprised a bit in the weeks to come when I called him by his nickname. Afterall, we only met once a week.

He was a good student. He did what he was supposed to do. He always came to class and he always turned in his assignments and they were fine. Once there was a problem with one of his electronic submissions. I think it was more of a technology glitch than anything else, and I had him resubmit his assignment. He thanked me for “allowing” him to resubmit it. I told him that I had seen him completing the assignment in the classroom, so I knew he had done it correctly and I just wanted him to get the credit that was due. He thanked me again anyway.

He was friendly, easy going, funny. He made people laugh. And he had that amazing smile.

I did not really know my student all that well. I only had him once a week for fifty minutes during the fall term. I saw him occasionally on campus and said hi. He would always say hi back. And smile warmly. One time he happened to come into the library when I was on duty at the reference desk. The library was crowded with people studying and doing group projects. Clearly, he was surveying the crowded room, looking for someone. I asked him if he was “lost.” He turned around to look at me, sitting at the reference desk. He recognized me and laughed. No, he was just looking for someone, he said. I asked him how he was doing, how his term was going, and he said fine. He gave me that signature smile. And moved on.

I call my students, MY students, not because I feel any sense of ownership, but rather because I feel a sense of responsibility and fondness for them. It is my job to try to better prepare them for doing research while they are at university, to get them to see that college is different than high school, and that really, although they think they already know how to search and find information, they really don’t always at the level that they need to. Most learn very quickly. Many don’t really pay much attention to our course, because it has no relevance to them yet. They haven’t had to write research papers and haven’t gotten into their majors in any depth. They are new, they are freshmen, they are getting a feel for things.

Each of my classes has its own personality, its own rhythm and temper. Some sections are more jovial and fun, others more serious, some even temperamental or downright crabby. Some learn faster than others, some have more problems turning in assignments or understanding what is expected of them. Some are kinder, more patient, more forgiving. Others think their time is being wasted. Some think their time is being wasted, but they are still kind and respectful.

It always amazes me how my different sections take on different personalities. I am not always sure what causes the differences. Sometimes most of the students in a section might come from the same school or program; maybe that has something to do with it. Other times I am teaching a section that is particularly early in the morning or late in the afternoon or right at the lunch hour. Maybe that has something to do with it. Or maybe it is just the simple fact that I have different people in each section and they interact/gel differently as a group.

I love teaching. I love engaging with students. I love experimenting with different technologies and approaches to teaching. I strive to make my class entertaining and fun; given the subject matter of the course, that can be difficult at times. I really like to make my students laugh. My feeling is: if my students are not paying attention and engaged, then I am wasting my breath.

I learn a lot from my students. And I enjoy running into them around campus or in the library in years to come. It is fun to watch them mature and get into their majors and thrive while in college. I enjoy it when they stop by the reference desk or stop for a few moments when we run into each other on campus. Even just, in passing, when they recognize me and smile or say hi.

I cannot believe that I will never see my student again. I keep seeing him all over campus and do double takes, until I realize it is simply another young man with a similar build or haircut. I keep looking for that amazing smile in the throngs of students I pass. I am stunned, in disbelief. How can a young, healthy man just die like that, boom, out of the blue, for no seeming reason? It makes no sense to me; there is no sense, I think.

I told my children about my student, because it upset me so much and I wanted to share with them this amazing young man who had been taken so suddenly. My younger son suggested, “Well, maybe he was needed somewhere else.” “What? To play volleyball on God’s team?” I felt like asking, but didn’t.

I do know that my student was a young man with many friends. I do know that he touched many, many people deeply with his kindness and humor and energy and love of life. He was one of those people who live life to the fullest, and thus, the kind you can never imagine no longer being here.

I think I shall always see my student’s smile as I cross campus. His smile will always be there inside of me, and inside of all of those he ever knew or touched, even in passing. And I will miss him.

Bird's eye view

2009-04-26T20:15:00.002-04:00

I have not written in... forever.

Well, in well over a month.

I have no excuse. No reason. Other than life.

Which is no excuse.

Cuz I write in my head virtually 24 hours a day. Only I don't always do anything with it. On paper.

Or electronically.

I was sitting on this bench late this afternoon. In the cemetery. Up on the hill overlooking the village below and the river and the bridge.

I don't think this was the same bench, but I do remember my mother taking me on a picnic when I was about two. And we were sitting in the same place, more or less. On this hilltop, in the cemetery, overlooking the village and the river and the bridge. I am not sure why we went on a picnic together. Perhaps because it was a beautiful day and a beautiful view. I do remember the cookies we had. Store bought, but with marshmallow and cookie and covered in chocolate. Why do I remember this? I have no idea. Was this right before my baby sister was born?

Or after?

I suppose I could ask my mother. Who is 82. But I doubt she will remember this picnic.

I sat on the bench today and watched birds gliding overhead. Big birds. Big enough that their gliding reminded me of learning to fly glider planes at the Air Force Academy.

When I first saw these birds, I thought they were bald eagles. But that is because I am an idealist. Then I thought they were hawks of some sort. Because I live in the real world, and I am expected to be practical.

Then, I saw them sitting atop a tree with a yellow band of tape around its trunk. This yellow band of tape means the tree has been marked for cutting down. For disposal. And it upset me that all the upper branches were currently occupied by bald eagles. Errr, I mean hawks.

Or whatever.

I looked closely again, and then it dawned on me that these birds were probably vultures. Looking for carrion.

Because anyone who is an idealist for too long ultimately turns into a cynical pessimist.

Honestly, I had to wonder if these birds were wild turkeys. Which I see running rampant throughout the cemetery. But I am not sure that they can fly. Or roost atop high trees. And wild turkeys give me the heeby-geebies. Because I had a very bad encounter with Wild Turkey in high school. And because I read about these overly aggressive birds attacking people willy-nilly in our parks and public areas.

I don't usually write my blog postings stream of consciousness. But maybe I should. Maybe I would get more postings done that way. Because Lord knows I do not have a dearth of things to talk/write about!

Heart to Heart

2009-03-10T08:52:00.001-04:00

There is a persistent, dull ache in the center of my chest. I try to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. I am not really sure it is real. I fear that it is a form of hypochondria – or sympathy pain – or fear -- borne of the latest spate of heart problems in those around me from Barbara Bush to Robin Williams to a college classmate whose aorta exploded in church last Sunday as he sat there in front of his wife and young children and died. A fourth friend of mine was recently diagnosed with a heart valve problem as well and must soon undergo open heart surgery to fix it. Fixable, yes. Thank God. But open heart surgery sounds so violent and major and invasive to me. It scares the shit out of me just to think about it. Much better, however, than there being no alternative, of course.

The point I am making, I guess, is that sometimes we are reminded suddenly, forcefully of the fragility of life. And of our own mortality. As we enter middle age, telling ourselves that 50 is the new 30, and we run off to our Pilates classes and yoga sessions and power walk around our neighborhoods and slather on that Oil of Olay nighttime firming cream and eat healthy and drink that glass of red wine because, really, it is good for our hearts, what are we doing? Giving ourselves a false sense of security? Staving off old age? Ignoring and denying the inevitable?

It is not my intent to be negative here. I think it is a good thing if we take care of our health. There is a sign in my chiropractor’s office that says: “If you don’t take care of your body, where are you going to live?” But the fact of the matter is, our bodies are still going to age, no matter what we do. We will get old and die. Or else we are going to get hit by a bus whilst crossing the street; get some terrible, awful disease that is not preventable and for which there is no cure; or in one of a zillion possible ways, be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The end result is all the same.

So, I worry about what we are doing today. I would suggest to myself that being a bit more purposeful might not be a bad thing. Being a bit more grateful. A bit kinder. Having a bit more patience. Being a bit more willing to take small risks. I don’t have to jump out of airplanes or climb Mount Kilimanjaro to take a risk. It might be as simple as saying hi to a passerby, allowing that person with his blinker on to merge in front of me, smiling at the stranger in the grocery aisle.

There is a saying that life is what happens to you when you are busy planning for the future. Or dwelling too much on the past. What is going on today? Right now? This very moment, this IS life. This is it. Of course, we should plan for the future and learn from the past. But today, right now, what exactly is it we are doing and why and how?

Just yesterday on my way to work, as I was listening to a novel on CD, one of the major characters died suddenly, unexpectedly of a massive heart attack. It took my breath away. People all around me, both real and fictional, are suffering from heart problems all at the same time. What does this mean? Or does it mean anything? Heart problems occur every day, all the time; I just happen to be noticing it more right now because I have seen it happen to a string of people I know or know of.

I can dismiss it. This sudden attack of heart problems. Or I can embrace it. And have a heart to heart with myself. And use it to add meaning to my daily life. And hopefully to those around me.

In a Time of War

2009-02-15T20:08:00.001-05:00

In a Time of War by Bill Murphy, Jr. is a powerful, moving, heart-breaking book.

I cried through most of it.

The book details the lives of several members of the West Point Class of 2002 as they graduate and begin military careers that take them almost immediately to Iraq and/or Afghanistan. (I will not reveal what happens in the book, but obviously there are things in it that none of us would ever want to have happen.)

I hesitated, debated, wrestled with myself about whether I should write a post about this book that moved me so deeply. I felt a huge need to discuss it, to express my feelings, to share it with others. At the same time, most of the friends with whom I would want to discuss this book have loved ones currently deployed to Iraq and/or Afghanistan, about to deploy to Iraq and/or Afghanistan, just back from Iraq and/or Afghanistan and likely to return, or have children at West Point or in ROTC and thus likely to deploy somewhere in the not too distant future.

And thus, it did not seem very sensitive of me to talk about it.

If I were in a similar position, I doubt I would have read the book.

So many of my close friends have loved ones serving their country in a time of war. They know all about separation and sacrifice.

Yet, the irony, to me, is that most of America remains oblivious to the sacrifices our service members and their families are making, often again and again and again. They may watch the evening news, put “We Support Our Soldiers” bumper stickers on their cars, even send Girl Scout cookies to our troops overseas, but their lives have not really been affected in any tangible way.

I recently read a quote that said (and I paraphrase): America is not at war. Soldiers are at war; America is at the mall.

Wow. That about says it all.

When I read In a Time of War, I was not only moved by the sacrifices and loss incurred by war, I was also overcome by feelings of guilt and feelings of fear.

Feelings of guilt as someone who served in the military but never in a time of war. I graduated from West Point, served my country as an Army officer at a time where we practiced our combat training against thinly disguised Soviet/Eastern Bloc forces, whether on the plains and in the forests of Germany whilst on REFORGER exercises or in the California desert at the National Training Center.

I cannot control the fact that our country was not at war when I graduated from West Point any more than I can control the fact that we were when the Class of 2002 graduated. Yet I still feel a sense of guilt: Why was I so lucky when these young men and women were not?

Feelings of fear that perhaps all mothers feel when it comes to thoughts of their children and war.

These wars – or wars like them – or wars I cannot even yet imagine – may well be raging when my children come of age to serve. I believe strongly in service to one’s nation, and clearly if our children do not serve in the military of the future, who will? Yet, I have to admit, I do not encourage my children with thoughts of joining the military. I do not tout West Point as a first choice for college. If my children told me they really wanted to join the military or go to a service academy or join ROTC, I would support them fully. But I would never push them in that direction. In all honesty, I would not even nudge them.

I come from a family with a very long tradition of military service, both as enlisted soldiers and officers: WWI, WWII, the Vietnam Era, and the Cold War. My children have two parents and a grandparent who went to West Point. Their father was a career military officer and a veteran of the first Iraq War. I admire the soldiers and young officers of today who knowingly enlist and volunteer; they KNOW they are going to make huge sacrifices. I would support my own children if they decided to serve in the military, and I would be proud of their service. But it would cause me great anguish and concern.

As it does every parent who has a child in the military in a time of war.

I worry about our country, a nation where most people never serve anything beyond themselves.

A place where the malls remain very crowded.

"Do a little dance, make a little love..."

2009-02-07T15:47:00.002-05:00

“Do a little dance, make a little love. Get down tonight, get down tonight…”
-- KC and the Sunshine Band

Yo, girlfriend, you need to get your act in gear.

Huh. Are you talkin’ to me?

Uhhh, yeah. Duh. I live in your head. Who the hell else would I be talking to?

I don’t know. So…..?????

Yes?

What do you want???

I’m fine. Thank you for asking. And you?

Uh-uh.

Uh-uh what?!?

Uh-uh means no.

Yeah. I get that. What do you want?

No. No. No. I don’t want anything. It is YOU who wants something. YOU are the one who started this whole thing. I am just sitting here getting down to some music on my birthday.

Yeahhhhhhh. Hello. It is like KC and the Sunshine Band.

So? It IS KC and the Sunshine Band. It is not like KC and the Sunshine Band.

Yeah, whatever. So, what takes us back to the Disco Era all of a sudden?

Us?????

Well, I live in your head, dear. So whatever shit you listen to, I have to listen to it, too. I am just wondering why we have gone back to the 70s.

Wellllll, I’m not really sure.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Wellllll, I just kept hearing the song playing over and over again in my head. Only I couldn’t really quite place it. I mean, I could hear the music. I could sort of fake make out the lyrics. It was killing me. I needed to know what song it was.

OK. Given that you are musically impaired, that makes sense. So, then what?

Well… I Googled for the lyrics.

I thought you said you didn’t really remember the lyrics.

Yeahhhhh. That is sort of a problem I have. I can never remember song lyrics, so I just make them up and sing the song anyway.

Well, you can’t sing, either.

I realize that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like music. Or hear songs playing in my head all the time.

With erroneous lyrics…?????

You know what? YOU try living in my head. Try it on for size.

I DO live in your head.

Oh. Yeah. Right.

So, what did you Google for?

Well…. I could hear the music playing in my head big time. But I couldn’t quite place the lyrics. So I tried searching for: lyrics “play a little love”

“Play a little love”?????

Yeah, I didn’t think that was right.

So, what did you come up with?

Interestingly, the Grateful Dead song “Touch of Grey.”

Oh.

Yeah. I’m not good at remembering song titles. I had to go listen to it. This was the one with “I will get by, I will survive.” Kinda famous. You probably heard of it.

Not really disco.

No. I get that.

So then what?

Well, I tried a few other possibilities. None of them worked.

So, then what?

I went on with my life. I went to yoga class. And as I was walking there with my son, I told him I kept hearing this song in my head. He told me to sing it.

Ouch!

Yeah, I know. I said I couldn’t really remember the words. But I tried the tune.

And…?

He looked at me like I was deranged. He asked me what the words were. I said I didn’t know. He said, "Give it a shot." So, I sang it.

Sang what?

Ummm. I think I sang, something like “Play a little love, do a little song…” as close to the real tune as I could get.

And?

He looked at me and said, “Oh, I know that song!” “What is it?” I asked. “I don’t know the name,” he said, “but it goes like ‘Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight.” “That’s it!” I cried ecstatically.

Ecstatically?

Yeah. He got it. On the first try. Only he had no idea who sang it.

And he is how old?

Just turned fifteen.

And HE knew. But you , oh, Dancing Queen, did not?

Yes, that is true. But...

But now you know?

Yeah. Because I looked up the real lyrics. And then other people knew what it was right away. I am just bad with music. Even though I hear songs in my head all the time.

With the wrong lyrics?

Yeah, well, that’s true.

But now you have it?

Oh, yeah! I downloaded it from iTunes, and I’ve been playing it ever since. I am grooving down big time. It is awesome.

Well, Happy Birthday, girlfriend! You go, girl!

Do a little dance, make a little love. Get down tonight, get down tonight……

Egadz!

2009-02-06T14:21:00.003-05:00

I have not yet written a blog post for 2009, and it is already into the second month of the year!

Not good.

Sad.

Bad.

My bad.

My big bad.

Will try to improve. Much to say, but I suffer from the inability to put my blog much further up than the very bottom of my priorities.

Sigh.

Everyone and everything else seem to come first on my to do list. Not really sure what I can do to change that. Not really sure where in my day I should be fitting this in. Granted, I seem to do much better at it when I have huge chunks of time off and/or my kids are gone visiting their dad. Maybe I should just focus on writing entries during those times.

I know, I know.

No excuse, sir!

Auld Lang Syne

2008-12-31T15:24:00.002-05:00

Why do we feel compelled to clean and organize and make resolutions as one year comes to a calendar end and another begins? Is it just that “clean slate” feeling, where we tell ourselves NOW is the time to set new goals and propose new changes in our lives? Or what?

I mean, really now, why couldn’t we do this on ANY day of the year? Why do we wait for New Years? I am not really sure.

I have spent the better part of an hour cleaning my one teenaged son’s room: digging out a pile of shoes and video game cords and duffle bags and football shirts from his closet and stacking his books at least semi-neatly on a shelf. Old school papers and other detritus into the giant black garbage bag. Yesterday, I purchased a huge plastic tote, which was on sale at Target’s, and I am planning on placing all of his loose videos, DVDs, and CDs in it for him to sort through later as he wishes. I just cannot stand the piles of loose CDs and DVDs lying about, waiting to get scratched and stepped on and ruined. Why it is so difficult to keep these things in their cases is beyond me.

Why I am cleaning my son’s room – or at least straightening it out a bit so HE can clean it upon his return – is also beyond me. It somehow makes me feel productive or useful. I just feel this incredible urge to organize and throw shit out!

I need to tackle my older son’s room as well. He is getting a new bed, but I cannot possibly move a new bed in there until we clean all the old crap out. This past fall he and his friend lugged home several computer monitors, a hard drive, and other computer accessories from a local church yard sale. There was some talk about creating a “super computer,” but really I think the driving force was the fact that this crap was all free for the taking. It had been the end of the day at the yard sale, and, as my son described it, “the man was just giving computers away!”

Of course, he was: they are worthless junk and if he didn’t get rid of them, he would have to find a way to dispose of them himself.

Which now I must find! And I am finding it a bit more difficult than I first thought. I know you are not supposed to just throw an old computer out with the trash. That it has all sorts of toxic components with mercury and lithium and whatnot inside just waiting to pollute the landfills and taint the water and air of planet earth. Also, just because a computer has outlived its existence in one homestead does not mean it cannot find a home elsewhere, or at least be scavenged for parts. I am not so sure, however, about the usefulness of any of the computer components my son dragged home. He insists they all work, or at least turn on when you plug them in.

I scoured the phone book for a place that takes old, dead computers. With no luck. I tried calling the waste management company, but was on hold for so long I finally hung up with disgust. I mean, get real! How many phone calls can the waste management company possibly be getting? I turned to the Internet, but still was not having much luck. I found one place that said it recycles computers and sends them to Asia. Or sends them to Asia where they are then recycled. Or something. But when I tried the phone number, it was disconnected. Not a good sign. There was an email address associated with the site, so I tried that. Ended up it was the mother company located several states away. Not much help there.

Then I vaguely remembered someone at work telling me there was a Goodwill store on the far side of the city that sold used computers and parts. I googled Goodwill and finally found info on the store. It said you could donate your used computers at any local Goodwill store. That sounded too good to be true, but I called the store closest to me and, sure enough, they said I could bring my computers there.

Now, that sounds like a plan. I can have my son load all his rescued computer components into my car this weekend, and we can tote them down to Goodwill, where hopefully some computer guru will be able to at least salvage some parts from the lot and put them to good use. And if not, I at least hope they will know how to dispose of old computers properly.

Earlier in the week, I cleaned out all of my files and threw out a bunch of old paperwork. I sorted through some clothes, finally moved my summer clothes up to the attic, and weeded out some other clothes for the Saint Vincent de Paul box. I organized all of my children’s insurance forms and medical bills and receipts, so I can give copies to their father, under whose name their medical insurance falls. I organized my drawer of checks and checkbooks and registers and ordered new checks for one of my accounts.

I put my thousands of emails from the past year in alphabetical order by sender and then went through ruthlessly deleting every single one I possibly could. I know, I know, you are wondering why I didn’t just delete all of them, but some included new addresses and phone numbers for friends who have moved, others contained photos and attachments I want to keep or download, and still others account information or subscription renewals I might need to access.

I bought new socks and panty hose and bras for the new year. And a variety of storage totes that I think are going to help my life be more organized, or less cluttered. I hate clutter, and teenagers seem to create it wherever they go. I have this fantasy that if I box up stuff and no one notices it is gone for a year or so, then I should be able to just dump that box of stuff. Good riddance!

I am not sure why we are so partial to so much… stuff. I hate stuff. But I guess one man’s stuff is another man’s treasure. Or something. I think it is pretty much all stuff and the less we had of it the happier we would be. But it is also a pain and tiring to sort through stuff and then either organize it, move it elsewhere, or throw it out. I guess that is why we take advantage of things like the end of one year and the beginning of the next to muster the energy and gird our loins for massive cleaning and organizing and de-stuffifying.

When I went to the gym this morning, it was packed. I hate the gym and the swimming pool this time of year. They are overly crowded with people who have made New Year’s resolutions that they are going to work out this year. I think it’s great that people want to try to keep fit and get physical exercise, but most of these people are not very sincere. Their ranks thin out significantly by the second or third week in January and are not seen again until the next new year. If that many people were really going to seriously work out and get fit, just think of all the new gyms and swimming pools that could be built!

Out with the old, in with the new! A time for change. A time to renew.

Whatever.

I think I’m about ready to take a cup o’kindness yet.

Or even better, a right guid-willie waught!

Happy New Year and all the best in 2009.

Now, where did I put that large black trash bag…?

Memento

2008-12-28T15:27:00.002-05:00

This thought occurred to me the other day, as I was snaking along a mountain highway through unexpected afternoon fog, having just dropped my children off with their dad for the holiday: Maybe other people don’t think the same things I do or, at least, think the same way I do.

That was a revelation.

I had this thought, because I drive this same circuitous mountain route several times a year, either dropping my kids off or picking them up. While my children are in the car with me, we are usually talking or else they are listening to dreadful heavy metal/alternative rock music either on their iPods or my car stereo. On the half of the trip where they are not with me, though, I listen to books on CD, because radio reception in the mountains is very unreliable and I like to listen to something intriguing, in an attempt to stay awake.

I have driven this same route dozens of times over the past five years, and I have listened to quite a few audio books, some fiction, some non-fiction.

The result of this is that as I round a particular bend or pass a particular town or road sign, I am invariably reminded of a particular passage from a book on CD that I happened to be listening to at that point on a previous trip. This in turn reminds me of the whole book and this makes me think of all sorts of things: other books by the same author, other similar books, things that were going on in my life at that time, things that were going on in the world at that time, things that have no relation to either that book or that time. But that initial memory is a trigger all the same. It is a visual trigger that sets an audio memory in action that sets a whole string of weird thought sequences into gear. And makes for very interesting drives indeed!

Songs do this to me, too. When I drive to work, I occasionally listen to a radio station that plays what they call “The Nine at Nine.” They pick a year between the 70s and now and play top hits from that year, usually from that day. Invariably, certain songs bring all sorts of memories whooshing back to me: from middle school, high school, college, the Army, young adult life, what have you. Often I have not heard many of these songs since the time they were giant hits, and I am surprised by how effectively they can trigger memories from my past.

Smells can do this, too. Especially if they are smells I have not experienced in a while and they are associated with powerful events in my life. Black shoe polish would be one of these smells. Whenever I smell black shoe polish, which would not be very often, I am instantaneously transported back to West Point and often Beast Barracks, where that smell first entered my olfactory senses. Black shoe polish, of course, represents all those hours I spent spit shining my shoes and combat boots. And all of the weird methods we would try as plebes to try to get our shoes to shine even better for the upper classmen who inspected us, whether formally in formation or whimsically as we passed them in the hallways.

I cannot imagine that I am all that different from anyone else. Don’t these visual, audio, and olfactory cues stimulate memories in all of us? Sure, different cues stimulate different memories in different people, but that feeling of suddenly being whisked back in time is unmistakable. In splashes, smatterings, even entire scenarios.

Wow! I hadn’t thought of that in years.

Gosh, I haven’t heard that song since it first came out. And with good reason….

Gee, I had forgotten that. The memory was so sudden, so fresh, so vivid. How could I ever have forgotten that?

When I was a little kid, I had this theory that all of our memories are stored in filing cabinets up in our brains. Only as we get older the rooms up there get over-crowded with filing cabinets and it is impossible to keep track of all those files, all those memories. Yet, if something leads us to a particular cabinet, a particular drawer, a particular file, that memory is still there, for us to remember, to enjoy, or to suffer through. I used to think that everything we ever saw, heard, smelled, tasted, said, or felt was stored up there in our brain somewhere, but that it was just too much for our brains to keep a manageable grip on everything. So, we tended to be selective in what we remembered, at least on a daily basis. And how many of our memories, especially as we get older, are really memories of memories and not memories at all? Yet, is there something like a sight, a smell, a sound, a hypnotist’s trance that can transport us back to any or all memories that are stored up there? Can we remember a lot more than we think we can? Or are memories actually lost?

Why do we remember an event in one way and someone else remembers it in a different way? Why do we not remember a particular event, but a close relative or friend who was there with us does remember it? And when they speak about it, we sometimes remember it, thinking: wow! I haven’t thought of that in years!

Or else, we think, gee, I seriously do NOT remember that at all. And secretly wonder if it is true.

Chin up!

2008-12-26T12:10:00.001-05:00

I’m not sure what it is about Nora Ephron and her neck. I’m more concerned about my chins. All eight of them.

Well, OK, I may be exaggerating a tad. But there is definitely more than one. And they LOVE to be caught on film. Which is one reason I eschew being photographed.

I used to think it was my ex-husband. That he just had a real knack for catching me at incredibly bad angles and creating an optical illusion where I had multiple chins. But unless there really is a vast right wing conspiracy and he is far more powerful than humanly possible, then the cameras simply do not lie. I definitely have a couple of chins going on there.

It is distressing. I do not think of myself as a particularly vain or self-enamored woman. I do not wear make up. I have never had a manicure in my life. I work out multiple days a week, trying to swim my cares away. Hell, I even do yoga. I do not really eat a whole heck of a lot. And yet….

There are those chins!

My mother insisted on yet another family Christmas card photo this year. Usually she takes the photos herself and then has a separate super image of her PhotoShopped in by the folks down at Photo Depot. This year, she managed to get a friend to take the photos.

My fourteen year old said to me: “How come Grandma looks like a movie star in every photo she’s in?’

“I don’t know,” I said. I was more worried about the fact that I was standing right next to the movie star, with all my chins, in all their glory.

My mother pooh-poohed me. “Well, look at me. I have a chicken neck.”

“OK. Well, you’re 82, you’re supposed to have a chicken neck. Besides, you still look like a movie star.”

She laughed demurely.

But it’s true. She goes to her high school reunions and comes back with this photo of a bunch of old people and HER. She looks gorgeous. Amazing. Just like a movie star. Only movie stars her age don’t look half as good!

I, meanwhile, have to deal with all those chins. I am not really fat, I don’t think. People from my past tell me I look just like I did in high school or college. That horrifies me! Please, dear God, don’t tell me I looked like a middle aged woman with multiple chins when I was in high school!

Sigh.

Maybe I am overly sensitive. I truly hate having my photo taken. I like being neither seen nor heard. I like to be the one in the background soaking up the scene at hand and eavesdropping on all that fabulous conversation that I am then, somehow, going to incorporate into a short story someday.

I am a very modest person. Changing in the gym locker room is anathema. In college, in the communal shower room, I took my glasses off. If I couldn’t see anyone else, they couldn’t see me. I am sure I was one of those young children whose idea of hiding was sitting in the middle of the room and covering her eyes.

But I still have those damned chins to contend with!

My older son, who had just taken a course in Digital Imaging, reassured me: “Don’t worry, Mom, I can take care of that with PhotoShop!” Afterall, hadn’t he just created a photo of himself in a black trench coat, arms folded across his chest, imperious, in the midst of Churchill, FDR, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference? What are a few chins?

Gee, thanks.

I, meanwhile, decided to employ legerdemain. Let my mother send out her Christmas card with the egregious photo of herself as a movie star, my two sons as strapping young men, and me with all my chins! What did I care? I was going to do something different.

I decided to employ the technology of the Internet and post a brief yet festive PowerPoint presentation on a site I never knew existed until I asked my high tech, young friend at work. “Slideshare,” he said. And it was free!

The boys and I corroborated on a holiday-themed PowerPoint. They helped me select the photos and put them in the order they liked. Most of the photos, of course, were of the boys. That was the point. In the end, I did include one of the horrific family Christmas photos my mother had had taken. But I chose the one with the least chins, and I realized that if I framed the photo using one of the PowerPoint image formatting options, it was a bit blurry. This decreased the number of chins even more.

I figured the recipients would be so taken with the groovy red slide design and fabulous photos of the boys that they wouldn’t really notice me and all my chins. I could have not included any photos of me, but then I worried people would wonder why I hadn’t included any photos of me. What was wrong? Had I suddenly ballooned out to 300 pounds?!?

Oy vey.

It’s tough to go through life and see how gravity decides to play her cruel tricks.

Ah, well, that little voice inside me says: “Chin up, ducky!”

Lo! Behold!

2008-12-24T16:41:00.003-05:00

My children are with their father this Christmas.

We alternate Christmases. On odd years the boys are with me up until the day after Christmas and then go visit their dad for the rest of the break. On even years they are with their father for the entire holiday break. Or as much of it as he wants or can do, given the constraints of his job and the fact that he has a new family as well.

It sounds very legalistic and antiseptic. Because it is. It is part of a child custody arrangement. Which was hammered out by lawyers who do that sort of thing for a living. It is in no way, shape, or form ideal. But it is what it is.

And you have to deal with it.

We celebrated our Christmas last Friday as the boys left to visit their dad on Saturday. This arrangement entailed their missing two days of school before the official holiday break ensued, which meant I had to write a letter to the school explaining their absence as best I could. Unless illness, education, or a death in the family is involved, the school really doesn’t want to hear about it. As a parent – and as a divorced parent whose ex-spouse lives several states away – I tend to feel that there are other reasons a child might miss school. Like being able to spend more time with the other parent.

It is not as if the boys were really going to miss anything. They were not missing big tests or midterm exams or even any major assignments. In my experience, the day or so or three before holiday breaks is spent with assemblies and watching Finding Nemo. This year there was even a two hour delay for arctic frigid temperatures thrown in. As a parent, I feel that I should be able to decide when my children can miss school, if I so deem it appropriate. I mean, it is not as if they were going to Disney World or playing hookey. They were going to spend time with their father. If you want to call that an “unexcused absence,” then fine. So be it.

I mean, it is not as though I actually “like” or “enjoy” my children being gone. But it is the price I have to pay in order for them to live with me during the regular school year. I understand that they want to spend time with their father and he with them. I get that. It is completely understandable. And good. But it does not mean that it is easy for me.

It also means that I pretty much have to forgo every major holiday. According to our custody agreement, they may spend every single Thanksgiving break with their father. Don’t ask me why this is: at the time, I was trying to find a few extra days to put on his side and I really didn’t like Thanksgiving and he tended to have it free. So, fine. Thanksgiving break it is. And then there is the alternating Christmas thing. And then Spring break, which seems to always coincide with Easter here. It didn’t in the state where we made our custody agreement. And then as much of Summer break as he wants.

If it is important to you to have your kids live with you during the school year, then you have to be willing to compromise. For me, it meant giving up most holidays. It also means I don’t really like holidays anymore.

You could say I am a baby.

Or that it would still be a holiday whether my kids are here or not. Which, of course, technically is true. But somehow, holidays without one’s children really just don’t seem like holidays. I would almost rather forgo or ignore the holidays totally. But then I guess I would really be a baby.

But it is still hard.

I want my children to see their father. I want them to have fun holidays. But it is still very, very hard for me when they are not here.

We celebrated our Christmas on Friday. This meant some scrambling on our part to get things ready in time, almost a whole week early. But we managed. Tree bought, set up, and decorated. Presents obtained, wrapped, and placed under the tree. Lights put up outside the house. A wreath on the front door. Traditional decorations inside. A holiday meal, in accordance with the wishes of the children in this case, met. A celebratory dinner of shrimp cocktail, buffalo wings, and pizza. And then the unwrapping of the gifts. Christmas music playing softly in the background, lights on the tree shining brightly.

My younger son, who is fourteen, actually said to me on Friday morning: “I don’t think we should have to go to school today. It’s ‘Christmas,’ and you don’t go to school on Christmas.”

I had to stifle a laugh. “You are already going to miss next Monday and Tuesday of school because you are leaving early for dad’s,” I said.

“Oh. Right.”

We had a tradition when the boys were young that they could each open one gift on Christmas Eve night. So, on Thursday night, both boys, now fourteen and sixteen, asked me if they could open one gift, since really this was “Christmas Eve.” I said no. More so because I hadn’t yet wrapped any gifts than that I was a curmudgeon.

Very, very early on Saturday morning, when it was still very cold and dark, we set out on the drive to meet their father for the holiday break.

Twelve hours later I would be home again, alone.

I will not lie. It is very, very difficult for me to do this. I do not think I am some great martyr or angel. I think I am the parent who has the children living with her for most of the year and the other parent has the holidays and breaks. I am sure the other parent is not very happy about not having the children living with him for most of the year. I am sorry that we are divorced and that our once whole family is no longer. At the same time, I cannot imagine it differently. Doing the right thing is not always easy and simple.

At the same time, I am a human being and I have very human, very real emotions. Which I try to contain as best I can.

I am not a total Scrooge. I mean, I have a life, with or without my children, and if I chose to ignore all holidays, that would be wrong.

So, I listen to Christmas music on the radio and in the house. (Handel’s “Messiah” is playing in the background as I type up this posting.) I send out Christmas greetings. I look forward to receiving Christmas cards and family photos and letters in the mail. I watch old time sentimental Christmas movies on TV. I touch base with friends who are in town visiting family. I will go to Christmas Eve mass with my mother. We will have a small Christmas Eve celebration, sitting around our tree, unwrapping one last gift. We will spend Christmas Day with friends.

This is all good. I am thankful for all that I have and for my two wonderful children, who are teenagers and drive me crazy at times with their teenagedness. I am hoping that they are enjoying a wonderful Christmas with their father and their other family.

But I still miss them. And I think it would be really strange if I did not.

Lo!
Behold!
A child is born.
They call his name Emanuel.

Mingle, mingle, mingle!

2008-12-22T18:54:00.001-05:00

What is reality…?

I’m not really sure.

I mean, have you ever really thought about how much our own personal experiences and points of view cloud – or direct – everything we think and believe to be… real?

I was at a high school alumni holiday party the other night. I probably would not have been there at all, except for the fact that I am on the Alumni Council and “expected” to attend. I eschew social functions if at all possible. My idea of mingling (NOT an activity at the top of my “to do” list by any means) is to seek out and talk to people I know. The thought of walking up to and talking with complete strangers is enough to put me in cardiac arrest.

Now, I know – or at least, I have heard – that there are people out there who THRIVE on this sort of thing. They actually gain or acquire energy by talking with others, particularly people they do not know.

[I would type that entire paragraph over again for emphasis, but you get my point. Or not.]

Hello??!!??? Enjoy being in a room full of total strangers and…. [gasp!] talking(!?!) with them????

Uh-uh.

Ain’t happening.

No way. No how.

It was bad enough that I had to participate in a phonathon earlier in the year, asking other alumni to contribute money to their alma mater.

Did they ask me to call my classmates or ANYONE I knew?????? No. They gave us a chunk of the list, in alphabetical order. There was one – ONE – count them – ONE of my classmates on the list. I started with him, and he wasn’t even home.

Then I moved on to…. well, OK, they graduated within so many years of me, I might know them or remember them or NOT. I’ll call them.

And the whole time I am screaming out loud in silence inside my head: “Don’t pick up! Don’t pick up! Don’t pick up! Please, dear God in heaven, let it go to voice mail!” And if it did…. WHEW!!!!

That meant I only had to leave a very poorly delivered message full of stuttering and whatnot.
And if they DID answer… oh, my! A conversation full of stuttering and whatnot. But in real life. In real time. With someone else I didn’t even know.

Awkward.

Horrible.

So… there I was, on Saturday night, at a holiday reception for alumni. Ninety percent of those present were from classes that had just graduated. Although I was informed that the class with the largest number of attendees was the one where everyone had just turned 21 and was now allowed to drink!

When I arrived, I had been instructed to find my nametag, which included my graduating class year. There was a huge green dot on the nametag, and I asked what that meant.

“It means you can drink,” I was told.

OK.

I am forty-five. NO ONE is going to think I am underage.

They had red dots for those not old enough to drink.

Hello!!??

Couldn’t they have made it simpler by just putting red dots on those not old enough to drink????

Well, THAT in and unto itself made me go in search of a drink.

The holiday reception was in the school library. A vast expanse, temporarily decorated with a tree and strings of white lights. It looked quite nice, actually. The “bar” was behind the checkout desk. That was a bit much for me, being a librarian and all. But I dealt with it.

I chatted amiably enough, while in line for a drink, with a grad who was four years younger than I, so not that much younger in the grand scheme of things, I just didn’t really know him at all from Adam. Four years is a huge chasm when you are talking about high school. Our mothers knew each other, so that was a link.

I ordered a vodka tonic. The bartender asked me if I wanted a slice of lime. “Yes, please!” Then he whispered to me: “If this drink is too strong, just let me know. I kind of got carried away with the vodka.”

“Oh, I am sure it’s just fine,” I said and took a sip. WOWSA!!!!

“Oh.”

“Is it too strong? If so, I’ll just throw it away and make you another.”

WHAT??!!??? Waste perfectly good alcohol?????

“Oh, no, that’s all right,” I reassured him. “I’ll just… uh… ‘nurse’ it.”

The woman behind me in line (whom I did not know at all) gave me a big smile of understanding that also said, “Could ya hurry it up? I need MY drink! Thank you very much.”

Armed with the most potent vodka tonic I have ever had in my entire life, I now felt empowered to… “mingle.”

Which, of course, meant “seek out people you know and talk to them.”

Which is what I did.

There weren’t too many people there I actually “knew,” though, so once I had taken care of all of them, I was now faced with talking to people whom I at least “recognized.”

I approached the woman who was in charge of the Alumni Council. She had graduated a few years ahead of me. I did not know her, but, of course, I knew OF her. In fact, I remembered her senior photo in the school yearbook and remembered thinking at the time as an awkward, pubescent teen: “Wow. She is so mature. So with it. So beautiful.”

I didn’t say that to this woman. It might have horrified her.

I might have said it to her if I had drunk my entire vodka tonic that was all vodka, but I was, like, ya know, “nursing” it.

Instead I told her, boldly: “My idea of mingling is talking to people I know.” She laughed lightly. “Well, my definition would not be much different,” she said.

And we then proceeded to have a semi-normal conversation about our kids.

OK.

Not so bad.

And that became my ice breaker for the evening: “Hi. My idea of mingling is talking to people I know. I don’t know you, but….”

Well, not entirely.

I did NOT walk up to anyone I absolutely, positively did not know and say that. I only said it to people I would normally… or semi-normally… mingle with.

I commented to the woman who had graduated a few years ahead of me that so many of those in attendance were very recent graduates. She agreed.

I said, “Yeah, I hardly know anyone now, but I can remember coming back for these alumni holiday functions right after I graduated and seeing all my classmates from school….”

She was supposed to nod and agree with me.

But she didn’t.

She looked over at me with surprise. “Oh, I NEVER came back for any of these things.”

“Oh?”

And then vaguely, in the back of my mind, I remembered her saying at an earlier Alumni Council meeting how her class had been full of “trouble makers.” Whatever that meant. Since she graduated in the mid to late seventies, I figured she meant they did a lot of drugs or something.

So, there it was. I had come back for the first few years after I graduated, reconnected with other high school friends home for the holidays, and had a good time. Then I had graduated from college, moved on, married, had a family, etc. and not come back for years and years and years. As had so many others. Now I happened to be living back in the town where I had grown up and was going to the function, not so much because I thought I was going to reconnect with former classmates but because I was on the Alumni Council and this was my… well, er, DUTY.

But, I was also observing a lot of newly recent grads reconnecting, much as I had some twenty five years before. So, I was thinking THAT was the norm.

Only my companion in mingling was telling me this was so NOT her personal experience.

Wow.

It made me think.

What IS reality?

What is the norm?

I see MY experience. I see others having similar experiences some twenty-five years later. THAT must be the norm. That must be reality.

But, clearly, this was not reality for the woman I was speaking with.

Hmmm…

It was sort of an eye-opener.

In an environment where very little eye-opening goes on.

Interesting…..

Maybe this mingling thing is more interesting than I thought.

Army/Navy 2008

2008-12-07T17:02:00.001-05:00

Ugh.

As in a sound of disgust.

Not Ugg as in those butt ugly boots that clueless teen girls persist on wearing with mini skirts when they are not sporting flip flops.

Talk about a depressing football game!

The worst.

Made me feel like I was a plebe back at West Point during Gloom Period with nothing to look forward to. Too many days and a butt until graduation. Cold. Dark. Gray and dreary.

Ugh.

And I remember being at the Army/Navy game in Philadelphia plebe year. It was freaking cold. I actually had on my USMA sweats underneath my dress gray, which boggles my mind as to how I could possibly have managed such a feat! But I was still cold. And those worthless low quarters did nothing to keep your feet warm. And I bought a hot chocolate that burned the inside of my mouth. I should have taken my low quarters off and poured the hot chocolate over my frozen feet!

That game was actually a tie: 3-3 because Joe Sartiano, a yearling in my company kicked a tying field goal in the last seconds of the game. Or something like that. It was a 3-3 tie, anyway. So, not as depressing as a loss. Not like that positively horrific game at the Rose Bowl cow year where Navy scored three touchdowns in about the first twenty seconds of the game, and we were all throwing stale subs from our boxed lunches and those stupid kazoos down onto the field.

I heard on TV that there has not been a shut out like today since 1976, which, as we all know, is a really, really, really long time ago. That is what my son told me, anyway.

So sad. So depressing. So demoralizing. The fact that Army lost by so much, not that 1976 is so long ago.

Think of all these poor kids who have NEVER experienced beating Navy. And then when they graduate they will all have to go off to war.

And is it just me, or did all of those Navy squids look smarmy and uppity and full of themselves in all of those fan close ups????

And they march like crap!!! Geesh, did you see the shots of them marching on? At least Army knows how to march properly. I mean, if you can't play football worth a shit, at least you should be able to march on properly. So, that was a relief at least.

I liked the camouflage helmets and football pants and the Duty.Honor.Country on the back of the shirts. But a part of me was wondering if those special, spiffy outfits were compliments of the U.S. taxpayer....

Now we all know that George Bush is going to miss being Commander in Chief and getting the opportunity to kick the football five yards and watch people flip a coin.

I was glad that one Army player got to at least beat a record set 18 years ago. Small consolation, but better than nothing.

The best thing of the whole day was the spirit ad where some Army cadets kidnapped a guy in a white uniform and then brought him back and dumped him out by his truck. "Sorry, midshipmen look like milkmen!"

My 14 year old son, who was wearing his Army Black Knights t-shirt and the ankle boot/brace that was supporting his broken leg (well, and shorts, too) and who was dying to do push ups whenever Army scored and thus turned to flab in three hours, asked why so many Navy people were Hawaiian.

I still watched the whole, entire game, probably more because I am a masochist, I suppose, than out of a sense of duty and loyalty. I did manage to get several loads of laundry done, though, too. I kept expecting Army to score at least once. Towards the end there I thought they might even get a safety. But, alas, no.

I missed seeing the Supe (as in General Scott -- was there really ever another Supe???) ride the Army mule and do the Rocket. It made me wonder if he was even still alive and if so, if he was cogent enough to watch the game and realize that Navy was beating the hell out of Army.

My father is renowned for turning off the television set one year right in front of all our company, a mix of West Point and Annapolis grads and their spouses, when Navy was trouncing Army by a ton. Huh. Probably that 1976 game, come to think of it!

My son kept asking me: "Would Grandpa have turned the TV set off now?"

"How about now?"

"Maybe now?"

"Definitely NOW!!!"

Oy vey.

And still, at the end, when they played the West Point Alma Mater and everyone stood and sang, tears filled my eyes.

Go Army! Beat Navy!

A Whiter Shade of Palin

2008-09-08T18:35:00.000-04:00

OK. Honest to God. I was in the Y this morning. Working out. Minding my own business. Trying to burn middle age flab on the elliptical machine whilst watching ALL the morning shows at the same time.

You know… multitasking.

This old guy hops onto the machine next to me and starts ellipticizing away. OK. Cool. Great.

All of a sudden he turns to me (keep in mind, I had headphones on; he had headphones on), and he says: “I just have to ask you this.”

OK. I am like 28 minutes into my 30 minute all out fat burning aerobathon.

I tilt my head, indicating that I hear him and am waiting.

“I just have to ask you what you think of Sarah Palin.”

Rrrrright. And if I had been a guy next to him, would he have felt compelled to ask me then? I think not.

He did not strike me as a pollster, out asking everyone he happened to see.

“Well…,” I said, not wanting to stop the finale of my workout, “I think McCain would not have picked her if she had been a man.”

The guy looked at me for a moment. He was still working away, too. “You’re probably right. She IS hot!”

Say, whaaaat?

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I was referring to her qualities and experience.”

“Mmmmm,” he nodded. “Well, I think she’s feisty. And I like that in a woman!”

Okayyyyyyy.

“I like the way she stands up to the big oil companies,” he continued. “I think she would do a great job as vice president!”

“Well, I certainly hope so,” I said. And oops, guess what? My workout was over.

And I left.

"Who do you love?" -- Bo Diddley

2008-09-06T14:27:00.001-04:00

This is my “profound” insight of the week.

After having watched both political party conventions and all the speeches of all the candidates and politicos….

People see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. They don’t see what they don’t want to see, and they don’t hear what they don’t want to hear.

And I will include myself in that gross, vast generalization, which I happen to think is a truism.

If people belong to a particular political party and are ardent supporters of that party and its beliefs, they tend to see the good things in the candidate of their party and overlook the negative things about him or her. Conversely, they tend to focus on the negative things about the opposing party’s candidate and overlook the good things.

If they are not really drawn to any particular party or switch back and forth, I think they still tend to see the good/overlook the negative in the candidate they are most drawn to while doing the opposite for the candidate they don’t care as much for.

If caught in the middle and not really sure which candidate they want to support, I think they then look for similar views or common past experiences or something that makes them feel more comfortable with one candidate than the other. So, they can hear one candidate’s speech and cling to things they hear that they like and then turn around and hear the other candidate’s speech and do the same thing. They are looking for the good or what they most agree with in both, hoping they will connect more with one or the other candidate. Or they might hear one candidate’s speech and harp on the negative, only to turn around and hear the other candidate’s speech and harp on the negative aspects of his or her speech. In the end, they are just looking for a reason to support one candidate over the other or reject one candidate over the other.

Life would be so much easier – wouldn’t it? -- if it were black and white. Only it is not, or hardly ever. Life is so incredibly gray. We live in a sea of gray. We crave certainty and a sense of control and order in our lives. We want life to make sense. We want life to be fair.

I think who we end up voting for is often a gut thing. Sure, we may belong to a particular political party and vote straight party, no matter what. That certainly makes life easier. But for those of us who do not, who look for the best (or least worst) candidate to lead our nation, I think we are so guided by our perspectives and points of view, our life experiences, our interactions with others, and our own personal prejudices and biases, that we do not realize that our take on a speech or a candidate may be entirely different from someone else’s, even though we have just observed the exact same event in space and time. If we watch these events surrounded by people who think like we do and have similar life situations and experiences, then their similar takes and reactions can simply reaffirm our own take and reaction. It is when we interact with others whose takes and reactions are diametrically opposed to ours that we become confounded. We tend to think that truth is what is. Or is what we see it as being. But everyone thinks that same way. Our view and take and reaction seem like common sense and “right,” while other takes and reactions seem somehow “wrong.” I think we get too hung up on right and wrong and there being one right way and only one absolute truth.

If we all agreed that one particular candidate for President was THE best one, that would be kinda weird, don’t you think?

It would mean that we all, all 300 million of us, saw the world in the exact same way and had the exact same take on things. I think that would be a very scary place indeed.

Instead, we are a nation of many different peoples and races and backgrounds and religions and incomes and tastes and life experiences. We have different interests and live in different places and do different things. Yet we are all Americans. We are all part of one country. And we are all part of a country where we may think as we please and speak as we please and vote as we please. We may get involved as we please.

The more Americans who vote, the better. Granted, I would hope they would be well-informed and engaged voters, but I trust that they are voting for who they genuinely and sincerely believe would make the best (or least worst) President. The candidate that most Americans vote for should be the next President, whether we happen to agree with that selection or not. If there are problems with our voting systems and processes, then that is another issue entirely.

I think our elected officials would spend their energies more wisely if they would focus more on the areas where they DO agree and less on where they differ. I think they would get more done together and in our nation’s interest. There are times where we need to agree to disagree and move on. There are times where we need to work together to move forward.

And we all want to move forward.

Time Warp

2008-08-30T21:58:00.002-04:00

Criminy! I have not posted in some time.

I think I was sucked into a time warp black hole vortex. It was August 4th, then there was a huge slurping sound, and now it is August 30th.

Huh.

Funny how that works.

It has something to do with two teenagers returning home, resuming their busy, active lives, which include football and band and getting to and from football and band, never at the same time, and then starting school, which, thankfully this year, is in the same building. And Open House and Meet the Teachers and volunteering to help out with both football and band and attending football games and band half times. And laundering all of the clothes involved with all of these activities. And getting school supplies. And haircuts. And clothes. And shoes. And Fall term starting at work for me and all of a sudden having 160 freshmen, who all look alike and all have the same first names, to wow and motivate and inspire.

Whew!

I am a little bit pooped at the moment.

It is a Saturday night, and my kids are off with their dad for the weekend. I am seriously contemplating a long, hot bath and a good book. And sleeping in.

Or maybe just a bath and sleeping in.

Or sleeping in the bath.

Glug, glug, glug….

Dancing Queen

2008-08-04T21:10:00.002-04:00

If you want to know the best way to connect with your teenaged sons, download the soundtrack from Mamma Mia! onto their iTunes playlist.

How was I to know?

The boys were visiting their dad for the summer.

My grocery bills actually dipped below $250 a week.

What can I say?

I decided to splurge.

Bought myself an iPod. An iPod shuffle, granted. On sale. The only iPod I could afford.

Nevermind that both boys have iIPods and an iTunes library that is quite astonishing.

If you are a fifteen year old boy.

I mean, I scrolled through their entire playlist and found four – count them, four!!! – songs I “might” possibly download onto my new lavender iPod shuffle. If I were being banished to a desert island for life and was restricted to picking from their playlist. Or else silence.

Pshaw!!!!!!

I needed some tunes, baby! Some DANCE tunes!

Some serious dance tunes.

Some party tunes.

What better – I ask you? – than the soundtrack from the new movie musical Mamma Mia!?

I rest my case.

I played the songs for my younger son tonight after dinner. Loudly. Whilst I danced around the room, doing karaoke, and relieving all the stress from my no good, terrible, awful stressful day.

He was not impressed.

I did jumping jacks. I did arm swoops. I hopped up and down. Windmills. Hip blasters. You name it.

I told him this would be a GREAT workout for the football team!

To no avail.

His eyes were wide. He cringed in shock on my bed. His electric guitar grasped tightly in his arms as I switched from “Dancing Queen” to “Super Trouper” to “Mamma Mia” to “Take a Chance on Me.”

I was serenading, lip-synching, gyrating my hips, working up a sweat just for him. Him. Him. Him.

God damn, it felt good!

I should do that more often.

See that girl… Watch that scene…

Blink of a word

2008-07-31T22:00:00.002-04:00

Meryl Streep can convey more in the flicker of an eyelid or the twitch of her lip than most writers can in pages and pages of prose.
I am not sure how she does that.

Talent, genius, hours in front of a mirror. I am not sure.

But she knows how to use her medium – film – to its advantage. Close ups of her face and her (natural, instinctual, intentional?) minimal changes of expression can convey more than anything I have ever seen.

I wish that I could write more like Meryl Streep uses her face to convey emotion, plot, history, life.

I wish I could write more like Sarah McLachlan uses her voice to convey emotion, history, life.

I wish I could write more like Vincent Van Gogh painted the Plains of Auver. I love the three-dimensionality of his paint upon the canvas and the fact that he left blank spots.

I am not sure that written words can do this. It may well be a limit of the medium.

A limit of my talent, surely. But also perhaps a limit of the medium as well.

What works so well in a movie close up is lost on the vastness of the stage. Some actors can master both. Some cannot.

What works so well in a song is lost in simply spoken dialogue. Some can master both. Some cannot.

What works so well in poetry is lost in the novel. Some – a few – can master both. Some cannot.

It has come to my attention that I am physically incapable of writing short emails. IM and text messaging (beyond the simple technical aspects of poking in letters on my teeny tiny cell phone keypad) are hard for me to master.

While I feel the short story is more of my natural pace than the novel, the short email is almost beyond my capabilities. I mean, yes, sure, I can do it.

If I force myself.

And am self-conscious.

And not myself.

Some people complain that my emails are too long. Others don’t say anything, but I can tell they are put off by my verbosity. Still others probably don’t even bother to read my emails. If I can’t write everything I need to say in my subject line, they are ready to move on.

If I cannot say everything that needs to be said in about two or three terse, non-grammatical sentences full of quaint codes and shorthand, then clearly there must be something wrong with me. And what I have to say is most certainly not worth listening to.

Or something.

I think of myself as a writer.

As in someone who is compelled to write.

To put pen to paper or words upon a screen.

Constantly. All the time.

It is almost a sickness. A compulsion.

It is who I am. What I do.

The other day a friend of mine called me a storyteller.

Wow.

No one ever called me that before.

She thought I felt a need to capture life in stories. She didn’t say that. She simply called me a storyteller.

She only needed one word.

I, on the other hand, need more than that.

Whole sentences.

Paragraphs.

Pages even.

To express myself.

I love the fact that the English language has more words than any other language. That we have more options and ways of expressing ourselves than anyone else on the planet. Not that I think of it as a competition. But rather that those of us who speak and write in English simply have a larger chest of treasures to choose from.

That means we should choose wisely.

We get to choose.

We have the privilege of choosing and because of that we should use that privilege judiciously. If we spoke certain other languages, we might have no choice at all. There might be only one word. Or no words. To convey what we mean.

Yes, I can write haikus.

And minimalist prose.

But my soul craves narrative, description, dialogue.

Not like I am Charles Dickens getting paid by the word or anything. I am paid nothing. And most of what I write is never read by anyone.

I don’t write because I want to be read, necessarily. I write because I have to.

I am very conscious of the words I use and the way I craft my sentences. I edit and re-edit. Blog posts. Emails even. Stories most definitely.

I know some of my email readers would be incredulous. How could that impossibly lengthy email have been edited?

Geesh!

Facts. Just the facts. We don’t want thoughts, emotions, fears.

I should convey my thoughts in extremely brief symbols. A hieroglyph might be helpful.

If I could capture the twitch of Meryl Streep’s eyebrow to convey everything I wanted to say, I would.

But I can’t.

I need words.

Lots of them.

I like description.

Narrative.

Witty dialogue.

Stories run through my veins. They pop out of my ears. Leak out of my pores. Seep out of my fingertips and into emails, blog posts, countless notebooks, Word documents. You name it.

I think about things like time. And how there are the same number of seconds in each and every day. But it doesn’t seem like that. Some days, some weeks are interminable. Like the movie Groundhog Day. Others whiz by, a blur.

I cannot believe it is almost a week now since I returned from vacation. This week, when you think about it, was no longer or shorter than last week. But it seems so different. On the one hand, each day seems so long. On the other, the entire week is almost gone.

Like sand through an hourglass, days of our lives….

I think about things like Rice-a-Roni. The San Francisco treat. There was an amazing piece on NPR this morning about the history of Rice-a-Roni. About how a young couple needed a place to live in San Francisco right after the end of WWII. Housing was short, because there were all of these servicemen returning from the war. The couple ended up renting a room from an elderly widow who lived in a small apartment. She had fled the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915, during the last great war. Her two young children had been lost in the chaos. Pregnant with a third child, she had wandered for months through the wilderness with other refugees, eventually ending up in Syria. Somehow she made it to America. She loved to cook, even in the cramped quarters of her small apartment. One of her specialties was rice pilaf, which included vermicelli noodles chopped up into itty bitty pieces. The young American wife learned how to make this rice pilaf, and her husband, who worked for a pasta company, thought it would make a great side dish in a box. A novelty in the late 40s, early 50s. And hence Rice-a-Roni was born.

I think about my children. Who are not home yet. Whom I miss terribly. They will be coming back this weekend.

I think about friends who are having health crises. Friends who are well. Friends who are making huge changes in their lives. Friends who are making no changes in their lives. My mother’s friend who passed away on Tuesday night.

I think about all sorts of things. Books I have read. The nightly news. Conversations I have overheard. Things I need to do. The color of the clouds in the sky. Traffic. The squabbling of political candidates. Bills I need to pay. What I am going to make for dinner tomorrow night. Global warming. And how obscene it is that Exxon/Mobile had the largest profits ever.

Meryl Streep would be able to convey all of this with a quiver of one eyelash. I, alas, must wrestle with words. And the fact that words are inadequate. Or that I am inadequate at using words to convey what Meryl Streep could convey with the quiver of one eyelash.

Sigh.

At least I have many, many words to choose from….

Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Woman

2008-07-15T21:07:00.002-04:00

Is it possible to separate the artist from the person, or the person from the artist?

I would say, unequivocally, no.

I can only speak, knowledgeably, to the artist as writer. I cannot address other media or creative processes, but I will take a leap and say that the artist and the person are inseparable.

Personally, I am always writing.

Sometimes on paper or the computer keyboard, yes, but always in my head. I don’t think I am ever “not” writing. I am always observing, taking note, eavesdropping on conversations, twirling phrases around in my head, writing huge chunks of story in my mind. This can be conscious or unconscious.

And then there is what is constantly going on below the level of consciousness, that hum of electric energy, that stewing and fermenting that never stops. And expresses itself sometimes in my dreams, my daydreams, my imaginary conversations and interactions, or even eventually in conscious thought or expressed word.

I am addressing this topic of the creative process because a co-worker and friend began to read my blog and noticed some similarities between things I was writing about and things we had talked about at work.

Where do I get topics for my blog?

Does real life influence what I write about? Or does what I write about emerge in real life?

The answer, of course, would be both.

Sometimes I will be talking about something and that will trigger thoughts in my mind about a possible blog topic, or it will somehow work its way into a current blog topic. Other times I will be writing a blog post, or mulling one over, and express verbally, out loud, some thoughts that once expressed seem right for that particular post.

Movies I see, books I read, news stories, events and interactions in my daily life, all of these can weave their way into something I am writing.

And not just into blog postings. Into anything I am writing: a story, a poem, an essay, a casual email musing.

What if I hadn’t had that conversation about x?

What if I hadn’t suddenly remembered something from my past which I would later weave into my writing?

Then my writing would have been different.

Perhaps I would have talked about something else instead. And a different thought or memory would have come into my head. And somehow gotten integrated into my writing.

As I was writing a recent blog post, I was conscious of the fact that I was weaving in something I had thought of/remembered and mentioned in a conversation earlier in the day. I was also conscious of the fact that the person I had had this conversation with might very well read my blog post and recognize it and call me on it.

Not many people read my blog. A few close friends with whom I share my blog URL, the occasional stranger who stumbles upon it or links to it from someone else’s blog.

Although a blog is open to the entire world, or the entire world with Internet access, I think of it as a more private place.

For me, anyway.

I know that very few people are reading my blog, and those who are either know me really well or don’t know me at all.

And this gives me a certain amount of freedom to write as I wish or to write about things that make me feel vulnerable.

Because I have children, there are certain topics I simply do not write about in my blog. That is my conscious choice. Not that my children read my blog or even know about it. But just in case they ever do.

Yes, it is true, I at times write about my children.

But usually in a humorous or good-natured way.

There are some blog posts they might not be very happy about, because they are teenagers going through all that teen crap and angst and awkwardness. But I would never write things that were intentionally cruel or mean-spirited.

Usually my kids crack me up, or say something profound, or frustrate the hell out of me with their teenness.

My blog allows me to write about my life and life in general as an anonymous citizen.

I am by nature a very shy and introverted person. But my blog allows me to make parts of myself vulnerable in a way that I do not feel is overly threatening.

It also allows me to write something more “real” than fiction, although sincerely I do believe that there is more truth in fiction than there is in real life.

Fiction is all about truth.

Some people insist that the Bible is literally true. Others say it is just stories. If we look at Jesus in the Bible, some of his most powerful truths are conveyed in parables.

Does something have to be literally true in order to convey truth?

No, of course not.

I think what sets man apart from animals is stories. And storytelling. And the search for truth.

Man tells stories in order to try to make sense of his world, his universe. Man is always trying to find the meaning of life, or meaning in life. If he does not find meaning, then he tends to create it.

We have a huge aversion to meaninglessness.

I have a huge aversion to meaninglessness.

I write because I have to.

I cannot not write.

I could no more not write than not breathe.

Is everyone like this?

I am not sure.

My guess would be no.

I think often people have passions or creative urges that are an integral part of their being. Be it writing or singing or dancing or painting or acting or running or gardening or teaching or helping or loving or any number of things.

Does life have meaning, or is the only meaning to life that which we bring to it?

If I had the definitive answer to that question, then the whole world would be reading my blog.

And I would have to stop writing it.

And that would be a sad day for me, at least.

Reading Roulette

2008-07-12T20:46:00.004-04:00

I am in the midst of selecting my reading material for Canada.

I leave for points north in a week, and I want to be prepared.

Last year, during my week in Georgian Bay (a.k.a. – heaven!), I read four plus books; numerous magazines (of the long article variety); and the NYT and Toronto Star on an almost daily basis.

I was very proud of having read four books in one week.

Four good books in one week.

I would like to replicate that accomplishment. It is not the number that is so important, but rather the books themselves.

Thus, I have been checking out recommended summer reading lists; perusing the popular new fiction/non-fiction shelves at both the library where I work and my local public library; and thinking back over books my friends and family have suggested over the past year as “good reads.”

This is the pile I have sitting next to me right now:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (gave this book to my sister and her husband for Christmas; they both loved it -- as did at least two other of my book reading/loving friends)

Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky (again, a book I gave to my sister and brother-in-law for Christmas and that has been recommended to me by several other close friends)

Books by Larry McMurty (a brand new book I just read about and am dying to read, as it is all about books and book collecting by someone who is passionate about books; heck, the cover alone with jam-packed floor to ceiling built-in bookshelves is about enough to make me orgasmic!)

When You Are Engulfed by Flames by David Sedaris (his latest, and he always cracks me up!)

The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis (a rather odd, fantastical book recommended just the other morning on NPR; this is a stretch, but the book is slim, so I may give it a try. The author is described as a modern day Kafka; I am not sure if that is supposed to be a compliment or not. I have never gotten over reading The Metamorphosis [Die Vervandlung] -- in the original German!)

The Nature of Monsters by Clare Clark (she is probably more famous for her first novel, The Great Stink. The dust jacket blurb says: “a consuming, passionate, darkly humorous tale set amid the clamor and chaos of 18th century London.” Sounded interesting, and different.)

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (I actually have already read this book, a few years ago, when it first came out, but I volunteered to lead a discussion group for the Summer Reading Project at my university in August with incoming freshmen. And I thought I should refresh myself. Although I am not so sure I want to do so while on vacation! )

I have some other contenders:

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton (the autobiography of a Trappist monk and his struggle for spiritual belonging; I read about this in Sue Monk Kidd’s Firstlight and promptly went out and bought it)

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson (“one man’s mission to fight terrorism and build nations… one school at a time;” this book comes highly recommended by several close friends)

I cannot possibly read ALL these books on my one week vacation, but I will probably take at least six.

In case.

I may end up reading really fast. And I don’t want to be without a book.

I will never forget the vacation to Mexico where we rapidly ran out of books. I even read my husband’s books and he read mine. And we were still out. This prompted a trip to the hotel giftshop, where the rack of paperback books was outrageously overpriced (this was back in the late ‘80s). We finally ended up picking the thickest book on the rack – a rather trashy book about Mexico and the Mayans, full of sex and violence – simply because it was the thickest book on the rack.

Yep, we were buying a book for price per page! We wanted a book that would last the rest of the trip.

Never again!

There is also the possibility I won’t like one – or more -- of the books I have brought enough to want to finish it. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it is not a good book, just that I wasn’t in the mood at that particular point in time to read it.

Or it could mean it was not a good book.

Whatever. I want plenty to choose from.

I do not want to be left in the lurch without a good book to read.

We spend our days kayaking, swimming, sunning, boating, eating, drinking, talking, reading, talking, reading, reading, reading. My early mornings are devoted to writing. With no TV or Internet or other multimedia distractions, we all get an immense amount of reading done. Even though we keep so active and busy during most of the day.

It is a reading heaven.

I love it!

"And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air..."

2008-07-05T21:29:00.004-04:00

I have spent the bulk of this long holiday weekend – with Thursday thrown in, too – cleaning out the storage room in the attic.

Cleaning out part of the storage room in the attic.

Going through stuff in the storage room in the attic.

I feel as though I have not really done very much.

Have only made a slight dent.

At the same time, there are ten bulging black garbage bags full of “stuff” out by the trash cans. As well as two huge moving boxes filled with dozens of empty boxes I broke down one by one using nothing but a Pampered Chef paring knife. On top of it all is a vaporizer from the 1960s, well used by my sister who always seemed to have colds and coughs as a child, in its original box.

These past three days, I have gone through about a hundred boxes. Condensed some. Reorganized some. Put some contents into new boxes. Rearranged and restacked other boxes.

And purged, purged, purged.

I have finally located some of the items I never could find when we first moved here five years ago.

And I stumbled upon multiple blasts from my past. And my sister’s past. And my parents’ past.

I found baby pictures of my mom. Pictures of her with her old boyfriends during WWII. Photos of my mother’s parents when they were incredibly young and in love. A stunning photo of my grandmother from 1923, standing alone, the wind blowing her dress, by some large body of water. It looks like an ocean, but my mom thinks it is more likely Lake Erie.

A box of family heirlooms that my father’s sister’s estate sent me after my aunt passed away in 1998, the same year my dad, her older brother, died. I only scratched the surface, but found locks of children’s hair, hand scrawled letters to Santa Claus from all of the brothers and sisters, homemade birthday cards and Father’s Day cards, school notebooks, photos, and a letter my dad wrote his dad from Wabash College when he was barely 18, telling his dad how he had thought things over and he now had a whole new view of his father and the kind of man he really was. He said he was going to try to get into West Point and become an Army officer. He wrote: “you can make good money in the Army, too (this was in the middle of the Great Depression when his father was struggling to support a family of seven as a traveling salesman) – why, a general can make as much as $13, 500!”

I found photo albums of my ex-husband and me when we were first married. Of high school and West Point and the Army. I finally found the photos of my West Point roommate who passed away suddenly this past December at age 44 from a rare autoimmune disease. There we were out at Camp Buckner as brand new yearlings, still wearing old Army green fatigues, and posing for the “best summer of our lives.”

Drawings my children had made when they were toddlers. A scrapbook from some sort of brainwashing Vacation Bible School my one son must have gone to with crayon drawings of him and Jesus and his brother climbing trees and playing at the playground. Poems my older son had “written” in preschool. A short story by my younger son about a teenaged guitar player who had long black hair and brown eyes and was “about 5 or 6 feet tall” and wanted to start his own band.

A box of short stories and essays I had presented to my parents the Christmas of my senior year in high school – for them to keep always!

A waffle iron from the 1950s, old Easter bonnets, Jackie Kennedy’s pill box hats (well, they were probably my mother’s pill box hats), my sister’s drawing table and innumerable art projects in just about every conceivable medium. Cigar boxes and glass jars of nails and tacks and screws and nuts and bolts. Old sheets and placemats and linen tablecloths and napkins. My wedding dress, preserved for eternity in a special box. Old golf clubs, badminton racquets, a baseball bat. Books, books, and more books. And still more books.

You know, once you start moving things around and opening up boxes and pulling stuff out, you start making an even bigger mess than was there originally.

Or so it seemed.

After I rolled them down two flights of stairs, I made myself carry out the heavy, full bags of trash one by one to the garage, so I would feel like I was accomplishing something.

I loaded my car up with seven stuffed bags of outgrown (or undergrown) but still perfectly good clothes from my children and me, drove down to my mother’s church, and squeezed them one by one through the slot in the St. Vincent de Paul box. Acts of penance; surely a priest or a nun would walk by and notice my generosity.

There was part of me that thought I should have just rented a giant dumpster, opened up the attic window, and just started dumping shit out the window without even looking at it or going through it.

This job was endless!

There was another part of me that got bogged down, sifting through old letters and papers and photo albums. Snooping into people’s former lives. My former lives. I could spend years going through all of this stuff, reading or, in some cases, re-reading letters, discovering someone’s treasures, flipping through photos of several families’ special moments.

I am tired. I am stiff. I am dusty and sweaty. I have paper cuts on my hands. My lower back and shoulders are killing me. My hair has frizzed up into a mop of curls from the heat and humidity. I am dusty and dirty. And dying to take a shower. Or a long hot bath. And have a stiff, cold drink.

I have seen things I had forgotten about. I have seen things I never knew about. I have seen things I would rather not have. I have seen things that touched my heart and made me cry. And made me say, “Oh, my!”

My life flashing before my eyes. Or my whole family’s lives flashing before my eyes.

And I have only just begun….

Swim, swim, swim for your life!

2008-06-28T13:48:00.001-04:00

Some people swim to Antarctica or across the English Channel.

I swim to a different dimension….

Never mind that the entire time I am swimming I am traversing a space of water that is 25 meters long and 2.5 meters wide, over and over again, to my heart’s content, in a lap lane at my local YMCA.

Granted, I do not do this for hours on end; thirty minutes of continuous swimming is about enough for me. I get a good workout, I retreat from the real world, and I have imaginary in-depth conversations with all sorts of people both real and imaginary. Yes, I am a forty-five year old woman with imaginary friends. What can I say?

Although, really, ultimately, it is probably all those made up conversations I have with real people that require more imagination. I mean, I have to figure out what that real person, whom I know, is going to say, how he or she is going to respond to what I say or do not say. Because, conceivably, someone could respond any number of ways to something I might say. Thus, there are a lot of possible permutations to the same basic conversations. And I can play out a lot of them in thirty minutes.

I have many amazing, intense discussions as I am swimming. Sometimes I am cussing out some boneheaded asshole about his or her egregious error of thought, word, or deed. Other times I am debating someone about the war in Iraq, the merits of the IB program at my children’s high school, or whether parking should be free from eight to ten in the morning so people can run in and out of Starbucks or the dry cleaners or the bank or all three without having to pay a quarter. Or I could be flirting or chatting up some possible – or impossible! – beau. Discussing politics, religion, the meaning of life, the plot of a book or recent film, or just kvetching about daily life. Sometimes I worry about my children or making ends meet. Or the state of my health or love life (or lack thereof).

I worry about a lot of things.

Just the other morning I was fretting about what would happen if I were attacked by a black bear. According to the news, the black bear population in Pennsylvania is on the rise. The recent flurry of black bear sightings in surrounding populated areas is disconcerting. I am already worried enough about cars running red lights and deer leaping out of the woods right into my car. I don’t need to add black bears into that mix. I am not sure how I would react, really, if I came face to face with a black bear in my day to day existence in the Pittsburgh area. I came very close to a black bear last summer up in Georgian Bay, Canada, but that is kind of in the wilderness. Sort of. I mean, relatively speaking. It is still vivid in my mind. First the bear lumbered across the beach of a nearby island, then later it paraded right outside our cabin, and ultimately a few hours later swam right in front of our kayaks and up onto the shore of the next island over. I was sure from that moment on that I was going to run into a black bear every time I went back and forth between the main cabin and my sleeping cabin. I would brace myself and set out with a purpose and run like the dickens and then quickly open and shut the door behind me. Whew! Made it.

I am not even sure what you are supposed to do if you run into a black bear. I don’t think they are carnivorous, or aggressive hunters. I think they eat berries and grubs and stuff. Well, OK, maybe they are carnivorous. I think they eat grubs and maybe fish and probably just about anything they find – cornflakes, beer, leftover meatloaf, cornstarch. But I don’t think they go out of their way to kill people and eat them. Although they might attack people if provoked. Or startled by some insane woman running between two cabins in the middle of the night.

Are you supposed to stand still? Curl up into a little ball and play dead? Jump up and down and make a lot of noise? Beat on pots and pans that you just happen to be carrying with you? Or run like hell in the complete opposite direction? Climb a tree? I have no idea. I am pretty sure I know what I would do. I would probably either faint dead away or run screaming pell mell in the complete opposite direction.

I don’t want to be mauled by a black bear.

I have seen that documentary Grizzly Man.

Thinking about black bears makes me swim faster. Yet I have seen a black bear swim, and they can swim really fast. I was amazed. I am sure a black bear could swim faster than me. I am but one of a legion of middle aged people at the Y trying to swim away in relative vain from middle aged flab and the effects of gravity.

I turn my thoughts to the film I watched the night before. Daughters of the Sun. It was a foreign film I stumbled across at my local public library. With my children away for the summer, it is time for me to watch all those chick flicks, foreign films, independent films, and documentaries at the bottom of my Netflix queue. For six weeks, my films can rise to the top and not be usurped by the likes of 300, Beowulf, The Longest Yard, Full Metal Alchemist, Saw IV, and Cowboy Bebop. While I was awaiting that first crop of grown up movies to arrive, I decided to pick out a movie from the library and splurge, watching a DVD on my laptop computer, in bed, in the dark.

Daughters of the Sun caught my eye because it said it was a big hit at the Sundance Film Festival and was the “Iranian version of Boys Don’t Cry.” Well, it was an Iranian film all right, but it was nothing like Boys Don’t Cry. Yes, granted, the protagonist of the film was a girl trying to pass as a boy, but that is where all comparison stops. The film opens with the heroine getting her head shaved by her father and then being sent out into the world dressed as a boy to go become an apprentice at some Persian rug-making sweat shop so she/he could then send all of her paltry earnings home to support her large, impoverished family. I suppose her father thought being a boy meant she was going to be treated better or something, I am not sure. She/he is the only boy in the sweat shop, a boy who can weave ornate Persian rugs better than any of the other girls (and wouldn’t that raise your suspicions just a little?), but she/he is a prisoner in the hovel factory and is constantly getting beaten by the cruel, sadistic Persian rug master who does no work and has a broken arm and a beautiful horse that runs free through the marshlands of Iran. I wasn’t quite sure how the horse fit into the plot. Foreign films are often harder to follow than Hollywood fair, aside from the fact that they are in a foreign language and you have to read the subtitles which takes more effort than I sometimes have late at night after a long day at work. Maybe the horse was a symbol. For freedom or something. Anyway, a girl dressed as a boy in a factory full of oppressed girls. You can easily imagine what is going to happen next. One of the girls falls in love with the “boy.” She/he does not reciprocate the affection of the poor clueless girl but rather breaks her heart by saying “he” cannot marry her. The girl is crushed, of course, because this means she must now marry an evil 60 year old man who is her cousin. She/he (who maintains her shaved head throughout the film and apparently never changes out of her boy clothes or bathes or pees or has her period) dances around at night in somebody’s skirt, all alone in the abandoned Persian rug hovel factory where she is imprisoned. At the end of the film, after a rather severe and unwarranted beating from the evil man whose arm is still broken, she/he sets the rug factory ablaze in a burst of rebellion and dances off into the purple and pink Iranian sunrise with a skirt and shaved head, going Lord knows where, but at least she is free.

Me. I didn’t see how this was anything like Boys Don’t Cry. For one thing, the girl did not want to be a boy like Brandon Teena did. She was forced to be a boy so she could go work at a Persian rug sweat shop and make more money than a girl and send it home to her starving family and sick mother, who dies eventually anyway. Brandon Teena wanted to be a boy. For all intents and purposes, Brandon Teena was a boy. There were no issues about sexuality or gender identity in Daughters of the Sun. This film was more about the oppression of women in Iran. And the amazing level of poverty. I don’t think I could ever in good conscience buy a Persian rug, knowing that it might have been made in a Persian rug sweatshop hovel factory by girls and boys who work ungodly hours weaving, weaving, weaving and being beaten and hardly making any money at all and the money that is made goes to cruel, evil men who do no work and beat their workers.

I squint up at the clock on the wall, through my fogged up swim goggles. Oh, my goodness, it is eight o’clock already! Where did that time go? I must get out and shower and change and get my little booty butt to work.

My swim to another dimension is done for the day….

You can't spell "gray" without "gay"

2008-06-23T22:05:00.001-04:00

One of my pet peeves is when my kids use the word “gay” in a derogatory way. Many teens – and even preteens -- do this, I know, but it bothers me. My kids tell me they are not being homophobic, rather they are using the third definition of the word “gay.”

My older son informed me that gay has three meanings: Gay as in “happy”; gay as in “homosexual”; and gay as in “stupid.”

I tried to tell them that there was no third definition. That by giving “gay” a definition of “stupid,” they were, in fact, turning “gay” (or homosexual) into a pejorative word -- as in, if someone is gay, he or she must be stupid.

My children vehemently disagreed with me. They said they knew which meaning they were using and they were not against people being gay. And everyone knew what meaning they meant.

Sigh.

But how did this so-called third meaning originate? Surely, it was meant in a pejorative way when people started using it that way. I think that is what bothers me. Plus, it seems thoughtless, or at least spoken without any thought.

My children probably are not associating the word “gay” with “homosexual,” when they are saying things like, “That is so gay!” They are probably using the word in this way because they hear others around them using it, and they feel it is just another way of saying “stupid” or “lame.” And so many things are stupid, lame, retarded, and… gay to teenagers.

At the same time, I have to wonder how their friends (who might be gay – and I am sure there are some) or their teachers (who might be gay – and again, I am sure there are some) feel when they hear others so casually toss around this word in a negative way. “Gay” did not used to mean homosexual either. But now it does. In fact, I have a feeling that the word “gay” is embraced by the gay community far more than “homosexual” is.

I realize that language changes over time; that is part of the nature of language.

But when we use words carelessly and without any thought to how they might make others feel, I find that troublesome. I am sure that using the word “retarded” might offend people who know someone who happens to be retarded or have Down’s syndrome. And the word “lame” might be hurtful to people who are physically disabled. Where do we draw the line?

The other day my son called someone a “faggot” because that person didn’t like physics, a class my son had recently signed up for and was looking forward to.

I said, “I really don’t think someone not liking physics makes him homosexual.”

“No,” my son sighed, “I mean ‘faggot’ like a stupid or retarded person.”

“Well, he can still dislike physics and not be retarded.”

“No. He is a faggot. Period. And I am not saying he is gay.”

“Yeah, but when you use words like that, it is being demeaning to gay people.”

“No, it’s not. I am using the third definition of ‘gay’ that you find in the Oxley Dictionary.”

Huh?

“What’s the Oxley Dictionary…?” I asked.

“I dunno.” He shrugged. “I just made it up.”

I told my younger son about this, and he said, “Wow! That was clever. Mixing the Oxford Dictionary with the Quigley Dictionary.”

My older son and I looked at him. “What’s the Quigley Dictionary?”

“I dunno.” My son looked puzzled. “Isn’t that the name of a famous dictionary?”

“God, you are so gay!” his older brother said.

Well, there is no Quigley Dictionary, that I know of. There is, however, an Oxford Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, to be precise.

And, believe it or not, the OED does include the “third” definition of gay that my older son so earnestly suggested:

slang (chiefly U.S.) (sometimes considered offensive). Foolish, stupid, socially inappropriate or disapproved of; ‘lame’.

The OED, in fact, lists eight different definitions for the adjective “gay,” with multiple sub-definitions -- not just three. But it does include gay as in “happy” and gay as in “homosexual.”

I was surprised to see the contemporary, slang version included in a dictionary as venerable as the OED. Although the definition does say (in parentheses, at least): “sometimes considered offensive.”

It does not say that it is sometimes considered offensive because another meaning of the word “gay” is homosexual, and gay people might take umbrage with being called foolish, stupid, socially inappropriate or disapproved of just because they are homosexual. Even if that is not what people “mean.”

What do people mean? And are they truly not being mean?

Perhaps we should be more conscious in general of the terms we use and why we use them. I know that I use the word “retarded” to mean stupid, and that is probably rather thoughtless of me.

I do not use “gay” to mean stupid or lame. But that is probably because it has a different meaning for me.

"Baby, you can drive my car"

2008-06-22T21:47:00.002-04:00

My 16 year old got his learner’s permit on Friday.

He had his requisite physical on Thursday, and I had him do a couple of online DMV practice tests on Thursday night.

Make no mistake. He had the driver’s manual (which he had gotten on his sixteenth birthday back in March), and he said that he had read it and “memorized” it.

I told him that sometimes it is the format of a test that is trickier than the actual content of the questions and that sometimes tests have quirky questions.

I watched him do part of one of the online practice tests. It was on the DMV site and was supposed to be “cool” for teenagers. It had avatar-esque teens with names like Ramon, Shemika, and Jake, and each had his or her own tale of young driver woe to share. After much too much clicking and folderol, eventually you would get to the real questions of the practice test.

It was rather a gauntlet.

Even I, curmudgeonly old mom that I am, found it rather dodgy. I can only imagine how doofy real teens find it. My son didn’t really say anything negative about it, but I could tell he thought it was stupid. Basically, you had to ignore the dumbness of the site in order to take the practice test.

While teens might like cool graphics and visuals and interactive games, just give them the freaking questions all right already! Not everything in life has to be a video game.

I was glad he did the practice test, though, because some of the questions were tricky. I mean, using common sense and thirty years of driving experience, I would have gotten several questions wrong. For example, one question wanted to know the leading cause of teen driving accidents. The choices were a) inexperience, b) speed, c) distraction, and d) something else. I would have picked inexperience. The answer was speed.

Now, I would argue that speed is often a result of inexperience, but….

These questions were multiple choice, not essays. And I figured many of them were based on real life statistics, at least for the state of Pennsylvania.

We drove down to the nearest DMV on Friday morning and took a number. There were two lines and two number sources; one was for driver tests and one was for photos and driver’s licenses. Surprisingly, there was no line for driver tests. Our number was the first one called. We submitted all the requisite paperwork and my son’s original birth certificate with the raised seal and original Social Security card (not laminated!), and the DMV lady stamped and marked and Xeroxed all sorts of things.

My son didn’t have any problem with the vision test, especially after the woman made the rest of the line appear for him to read off aloud. He then was sent to a computer terminal to take the written test, and I was sent back out into the waiting room. There was a sign next to the computer terminals that said: “You may not use your cell phone while taking the written test.”

I wasn’t sure how many questions were on the test, or how many you could miss and still pass. But I figured it couldn’t really be all that hard. I mean, look at all the nimrods that are out driving the roads of Pennsylvania!

A while later, my son came out into the waiting room. I couldn’t tell from his nonchalant teen expression whether he had passed or not. So I asked him. He said yes, he had gotten 15 out of 18 correct and that was passing. Thank God!

I had to write a check and sign a form and then we had to go back out in the waiting room until they called his name again, so he could get the actual permit.

He called his dad on the way home to let him know he had passed. His dad wanted to know if I had let M drive home. I said, absolutely not! He had never driven a car before, as far as I knew (although I knew his dad and uncles had let him drive around a driveway or back out of a garage a few times), and I was certainly not going to let him drive home on a busy highway! What kind of a mother would I be?

While I knew that M would probably get some driving time and experience with his dad over the summer, I also thought he should get a chance to drive on the day he got his learner’s permit. I mean, it is kind of a rite of passage.

And the rules are different now. When I was growing up, you could get your learner’s permit and then take the actual driver’s test, if not on the same day then at least very soon afterwards. Now you have to wait a minimum of six months after you get your permit, and you have to log at least 50 hours of driving time with your parent or other adult who is over the age of 21.

And we had driver’s ed in high school. And everyone took it. There was a classroom portion and a driving portion. They don’t offer that any more. Something to do with insurance or liability costs or some stupid excuse. A friend of mine living in Virginia, though, told me her daughter had driver’s ed as a health class. Makes sense to me! What could have more to do with your child’s health and well being as a teenager than being properly taught how to drive a car?

Anyway, my son could take driver’s ed at a local community college, for a rather large fee. But how would he get there when he can’t drive and I am at work? And it conflicts with other activities?

I wanted to give M his first driving lesson, but I wasn’t really sure what a safe place might be. I couldn’t think of any nearby abandoned parking lots. As I was walking around the cemetery that afternoon thinking about all of this, I realized I could bring him to the cemetery! It has real roads and turns and stop signs but no through traffic. In fact, most of the time, no cars at all.

Now, you might think it somehow morbid or bizarre to take someone to a cemetery to learn how to drive. But we live near this cemetery and go walking around it all the time. It is up on the side of the hill overlooking the town where we live and the river. It is quiet and peaceful and beautiful. And virtually traffic free.

I drove M up to the cemetery, parked on a flat stretch, turned off the engine, pushed back my seat, and handed the car keys to him. “Now, it’s your turn,” I said. We switched places.

The first thing he did, after adjusting his seat some more, was to put on his seat belt. Good job! Then I told him how to adjust all the mirrors. He wanted to know where the lights were. I showed him, but told him I was more concerned at the moment that he know where the turning signals were and how to use them.

He knew where the gas and brake pedals were. I showed him the rest of the panels and gauges. He then started up the car, put it into drive, and took off the parking brake. We were off!

At about ten miles per hour. Which was fine with me. Since he had never really driven a car before. I told him each car was different, and some had more sensitive gas and brake pedals than others. And you just had to practice and get used to them. He said it was almost like driving a golf cart. (Which he has driven maybe once before in his life!)

He had no problem going straight, but then we had to make a turn. I had him practice putting on his turning signal first before each turn. He said, “Oh, that’s going to be a hard thing for me to remember.” And we drove all around the cemetery.

Up and down hills, around bends and curves. Stops. Left and right turns. Parking. Et cetera. It was a great first lesson. I remained remarkably calm, even when he seemed to be way too far on the right side of the road. I asked him questions about what he thought he should do next. I kept giving him choices: “OK. We are coming to an intersection. You can either go straight or turn left. What do you want to do?” I think that helped because it gave him more control about where he wanted to go and what skill he wanted to try next.

I thought the lesson lasted about an hour, but it was really only about fifteen minutes! We did not see any other cars. Which was probably a good thing. M did fine. If anything, he was driving too slowly. But that’s OK. I would rather see him be a bit overly cautious as he is first learning to drive than the other way around. Plus, the speed limit was only 20 miles per hour anyway.

I am not sure what M thought about his first time driving, but I personally found it a very moving, life altering experience.

To be in a car, teaching my son, who is almost a man but who was just a little baby not so very long ago, to drive a car.

Wow.

Beep beep'm beep beep yeah....

Summertime and the livin' is easy....

2008-06-17T22:21:00.002-04:00

It is Summer Break.

That means I have one child I can’t keep in the house, and another child I can’t get to leave the house.

Oh, OK… so I exaggerate. A tad.

But my children are as different as night and day.

Which is fine.

It just means I have to be more creative when motivating them to do something or not do something. What works for one is obviously not going to work for the other.

It gets tricky when they are both in the same room, and you are trying to motivate one to do the complete opposite of the other!

My children are not really children any more, though. They are teenagers, manchildz.

This makes motivation even dicier. Telling people who are now bigger than you to do something because you said so and you are the mom often meets with smirks, if not downright laughter.

Needless-to-say, my inveterate sarcasm and smart assedness get thrown back at me in a heart beat. (As does my Army cussing, much to my chagrin.) I guess my kids learned by example as far as those habits are concerned!

Interesting how they don’t seem to pay that same attention to detail when it comes to making their beds, brushing their teeth, or keeping their rooms clean….

My philosophy of parenting is to lead by example. Follow me! This includes sharing less appealing chores or at least doing them together. If that doesn’t work, nagging and yelling are always options. Although neither of them is very effective, truth be told. Bribery or money for chores sometimes works.

I wear a bike helmet when my kids aren’t even with me! Now that is a sign of leading by example for sure. Or being a creature of habit.

The last time I went for a bike ride with my younger son, the only way I could get him to wear a helmet was for me to wear his super cool motorcycle-style helmet and for him to wear my bike helmet. Don’t ask me why! I tried to convince him how “kool” his helmet was, but he would have nothing to do with it. He said the only way he would wear a helmet was if he got to wear mine.

OK.

Whatever.

I couldn’t help pointing out to him that that meant he was wearing a LADIES’ helmet. I mean, it wasn’t pink or anything, but it was smaller and more streamlined than the man’s version. He didn’t care, he said.

Fine. Then I didn’t either.

He could wear a ladies’ bike helmet as we cruised the streets of our hometown (possibly passing girls he knew from school), while I donned the super kool motorcycle style helmet. No skin off my ass!

At least he will still ride bikes with me.

My older son would not be caught dead riding bikes with me. Or riding bikes period. He tries not to be caught out in public with me at all too much any more. (Although he has no problem with my being his free taxi service!)

We used to do family bike rides all the time. But then he decided that was no fun. He used to go swimming with me, too; he liked to race me doing laps. Or we would go for long walks where he would regale me in minute detail about his latest favorite video game. Now he doesn’t even want to do that anymore. To be honest, I think it has less to do with me, than with his strong aversion to physical exercise.

He came into my room the other day and plopped down on my (neatly made!) bed with a sigh.

“I’m bored!”

Usually I reply to that excuse with “Sounds like a personal problem to me.” But instead I said, “The Y’s only five minutes away. Why don’t you go swimming?”

“I don’t wanna go swimming.”

“Well, then go for a walk. It’s a beautiful day out. Take your iPod with you and walk and listen to music.”

He grunted like I was a retarded Maria von Trapp suggesting he go sing “Do Re Mi” whilst skipping through the outskirts of Salzburg.

“You need fresh air!” I exclaimed. (Which was a euphemism for “You need to get off your fat ass and go outside and get some exercise!”)

“I hate fresh air.” (Which was a euphemism for “I hate exercise.”)

“When was the last time you went outdoors?” I gave him a suspicious, sideways glance (the kind that was normally reserved for, “When was the last time you brushed your teeth?”).

“I dunno.” He shrugged. “I don’t keep track of that sort of thing.”

“Don’t you want to get some exercise?” I gave up all pretensions of subtlety.

“Not really. Exercise is boring.”

“Swimming?”

“Uh-uh.”

“A walk?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Surely there must be some form of exercise you will do!”

“Martial arts,” he replied tentatively.

“Great!” I clapped my hands with glee. “Go out in the back yard and practice your martial arts.”

“I don’t know how to do martial arts.”

“Well, just twirl around and kick your leg up above your head and make weird noises! You’ve seen The Matrix.”

Although I was thinking more along the lines of Kung Fu Panda.

“When are you going to be done with the computer?” My son changed the topic.

My younger son can’t seem to get enough exercise or outdoorsness. I have a hard time keeping track of him. He could be out for a run, riding his bike, down at the Y shooting hoops, over at the Middle School field playing touch football, swimming, lifting weights, hiking through the woods, or jumping on a friend’s trampoline. He needs one of those electronic ankle bracelets like Martha Stewart had to wear. He constantly needs to be busy. And he is Mr. Social. He wants to be around other people all the time. He is always going over to other friends’ houses, or they are coming over to ours, like swarms of ravenous locusts.

This week my younger son is busy with high school football. They pretty much practice all year long, although during the off-season it is limited to weight training. Now they are weight training and doing some sorts of drills or practices. “Real” football camp is in August.

My older son has Mini Band Camp all week. So at least I know he will leave the house for three hours each day. He is a leader in the band now as a rising junior. He is in charge of the tenor saxophone section. Although he is the only one who plays tenor sax. They are teaching the new freshmen how to march and play the high school alma mater and so forth. I like it when they march on the football field. Because that means my son is getting both fresh air and exercise. And he likes band. Although, personally, I would find marching in weird patterns around a football field whilst playing music for hours on end excruciating. But whatever. “Real” band camp is in August.

This Saturday my kids will leave to go visit their dad for the summer. They won’t be back until the first week in August when they have those respective “real” camps. This means I won’t have to nag, cajole, feed, clothe, chauffeur, bribe, encourage, hug, or lead by example for six whole weeks!

Let’s get this party started.

God, I am bored already…..

There is a hole in the middle of our life

2008-05-18T17:14:00.001-04:00

It is not often these days that someone lives as an adult in the house he or she grew up in. Although I never in a million years ever expected to do so, I happen to be living in the only house I knew as a child. I am back.

There are ghosts in a house, at least to the people who have lived there before. You might call them memories.

Sounds, smells, feelings. Memories. Whatever you want to call them. They make the house a far different physical place for me than it does for my children, who have only lived here for a few years.

I was born in the hospital right down the street. This is the only house I knew as a child. We never moved to a different town or state or country, as my children, Army brats, did time and time again. I went to the same school from nursery school all the way through twelfth grade. I cannot walk through the business district without remembering every single store or business that had been there when I was a child.

It was a much different town then, with hardware stores, bakeries, mom and pop drug stores and clothing stores, a shoe store, Isaly’s, and a five and ten. Now it sports Starbucks, Chicos, Talbots, Pendleton’s, and a smattering of trendy boutiques, jewelry stores, banks, beauty salons, and spas. I don’t just see the town as it is today; I see the town as it was and is. It is not the same town my children see.

When the men came to cut down the large, old maple tree in front of our house this past week, I felt physical pain and sadness. I felt as though I were losing a member of my family. I know that sounds retarded. It was a tree. But it was more than just a tree.

This maple tree was large and tall, and it had stood in the center of our yard far longer than I could remember. Our house is on the side of a hill, overlooking the village and the valley and the river below. This tall maple tree had always, always, always been there. It must have been well over a hundred years old, if not two hundred or more. But now it was hollow. We saw squirrels scampering in and out of it, making their nests or hiding their nuts or whatever it is squirrels do. We peeked through the hole in the side of the trunk. Yep, it was hollow inside. The tree was not dead; it still sprouted leaves and those helicopter seeds. But we worried that a strong storm might topple the tree onto our house, or someone else’s house. And it had to go.

Our gravel driveway comes down off the side of the hill from the main road and makes a U-shape before exiting back onto the road. In the center of the U is a large green grassy area and a rose garden. As children, we thought of the gravel driveway as an ocean and the grassy knoll with the large maple tree in the center as an island. We used to play “Gilligan’s Island,” my friends and my little sister and me. My friends would fight over who got to be Ginger and Mary Ann. That was fine with me; I wanted to be the Professor. We made my little sister be Gilligan.

I watched from the house as the men methodically and persistently cut the tree down. A lithe, fearless man dangling on a rope cut huge branches and chunks off the tree from the top down. Each hunk was anchored to a rope, and as the chain saw finished its cut, the wood would swing down to the ground with a controlled thud. Other men would scamper around the massive piece of tree, move it out of the way into the rapidly forming pile of wood at the side of the driveway, and the man in the tree would move on. I could only watch so much of this. And then I had to leave.

It took them two days. Three really; there was a day in between because it rained.

And then the tree was no more.

They left the stump; they said we could plant flowers in it, or something. We had not wanted them to take out the stump or the roots, as it was such a large tree we were afraid its total and complete removal would leave the hillside more prone to erosion.

I envisioned all the homeless squirrels parading in front of our house with placards of protest. But it never happened.

There are big dents in the earth around the tree stump where the large, heavy branches and chunks of tree landed with heavy thumps. The gravel driveway is covered with sawdust and all those little green helicopters. I peered down inside the wide, hollow stump the other day and saw black carpenter ants scampering around in a muted frenzy. King Solomon’s mines had been taken away from them, and soon they, too, would be homeless.

Trees come, trees go. Sometimes we must cut them down before they fall down and damage something.

There is a big hole in our front yard now. There is a big hole in my heart. This was not just a tree that went; it was a whole childhood of outdoor play. It was my father out mowing the grass, tending his rose garden. It was my sister and me sled riding down the hill past the tree. It was my children sled riding down the hill past the tree. It was all the leaves we raked over the years and piled into sheets and dragged across the road for the borough to take away. It was the squirrels and the birds and the empty locust shells clinging to the trunk. It was the snow, the rain, the wind, the sun, the night. Ring after ring after ring – and I cannot tell how old the maple was because it was hollow. But the stump stands a good three to four feet across in diameter. This maple tree saw a lot. This maple tree was probably older than the house, which is 182 years old. Which is old by American standards.

This maple tree was a monument.

This maple tree was part of the family.

And now it is gone.

Truly, Madly, Deeply

2008-04-28T22:10:00.001-04:00

I always imagined we would get married whilst scuba diving.

Well… not while actually under water, swimming around.

Maybe after a really cool dive.

While we were still in our wet suits.

And we had just seen really cool fish and seaweed and sunlight through the water. And we would be tired. And want a beer.

We would stand in the water, hand in hand, and get married.

There might be a few other people there. Around sunset. And it would be warm and beautiful.

And we would kiss as the sun sank, orange and pink and purple into the sea.

And we would be married.

For real.

Of course, we had always been married.

In my mind.

That is what I told you.

You would say, “I want to get married.” And I would say, “We’re already married.”

Because that is what I felt and truly believed.

Perhaps it was childish. But it was sincere. I did really believe it.

Because I felt it.

I knew it to be so.

I heard Savage Garden singing “Truly, Madly, Deeply” on the radio today as I was driving to work.

I used to imagine us in that song.

Standing on the top of a mountain, bathing in the sea.

Of course, when that part comes with “I wanna lay like this forever,” I would cringe and the record in my head would scratch, because really, it should be “I wanna LIE like this forever.”

I know.

I know.

I am insane.

It is a sickness.

But really? Couldn’t they just as easily have sung “I wanna LIE like this forever”? I mean, it wouldn’t add any extra syllables or anything.

Why?

Why? I ask.

Did you ruin your beautiful song with bad grammar?????

OK, fine. The skies fell down on me.

And you are not there.

Here.

But I still love you.

Truly. Madly. Deeply.

Thinking of our marriage by the sea.

Story

2008-03-21T16:45:00.001-04:00

“The shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story.”
-- Anthony de Mello

The question I hate most during job interviews is: “So, where do you see yourself in five years? In ten years?”

I don’t much see myself anywhere in particular in the future. I certainly don’t want to jinx myself by saying something ridiculously aspirational. Or hem myself in by saying something too plausibly realistic and mundane.

I don’t know where I will be in five years. Or ten years. I know how old I will be. And how old my kids will be. And anyone else I know. But that is about it.

I know lots of places I don’t want to be. Things I don’t want to be doing.

If I look at where I was five years ago, I would never in a million years have imagined myself to be where I am now.

I kind of like the unknown. The thought that I could be somewhere totally new and different and unpredictable.

And I am sort of rooting for that path toward the unknown.

At the same time, are we not responsible somewhat for our own destinies? If we want to do something or be something, then shouldn’t we look ahead, plan ahead, start taking the necessary steps to get there?

But get where?

Ever since being in two car accidents in less than one week during the month of February, I have been a basket case whilst behind the wheel. Granted, I am finally back in my own trusty little car now. And that makes me feel much better. At the same time, whenever I am driving I see (and imagine!) people going through stop signs, running red lights, and changing lanes without turning signals as if they were a part of the Indy 500. I see them neglecting to stop as they approach me from behind and merging into traffic without a glance at what might be coming their way. I see deer leaping out from everywhere, from behind bushes and trees and billboards, even in the middle of downtown! I see crashes in my mind’s eye. I hear crashes in my mind’s ear. I get chest pains and feelings of acute anxiety whenever I commute to and from work. I break out in a cold sweat. I grip the steering wheel too tightly and cuss like a drunken Russian sailor at every idiot (too slow) or maniac (too fast) I encounter.

Normally, my commute misses the worst of rush hour as I don’t have to be at work until ten and I don’t get off until six or later. This past week I had to go in early on several occasions, and I felt as though I were taking my life in my hands each and every time I merged into rush hour traffic.

And it is not as though the rush hour in Pittsburgh is really even a rush hour. I mean, I have driven around Chicago before, when it was not rush hour, and it was about a hundred times worse than Pittsburgh during a torrential downpour right at five o’clock. Which was what I experienced last Friday when it took me half an hour to move two blocks in the midst of gridlock and honking horns.

As I was cold-sweating my way to work early one morning this past week, I had an epiphany. “As God is my witness, I need to become a recluse!” I declared, hearing the strains from “Tara’s Theme” well up around me.

Yes, that was it! My future.

I need to find a job where I can stay home, work at home, and walk to most of the places I want to go during the day. This rush hour crap is for the birds! It does nothing but distress me, discombobulate me, and send horrible fight or flight chemicals into my bloodstream that are probably going to give me either a heart attack or stroke. And for what? So I can go to my little job that hardly pays any money and then turn around and give what little money I do make to taxes and paying bills? What’s the point?

What do I see myself doing in ten years?

I see myself with the kind of job where I can stay at home and work during the day.

Where I do not have to make stressful commutes. Where life moves at a slower pace. Where I have time to go for walks and talk with friends and read and do errands. And write and write and write.

I know. It doesn’t sound very realistic. But other people do it. Why not me?

In my heart of hearts, I see myself as a writer. Writing. Writing all day. Telling stories. Thinking about stories and how to tell them. And then writing them down. For others to read. And think about, too.

I have never really wanted to be anything else but a writer. I have always written. And I always write. Why can’t my writing be published, too? Why can’t my life’s work be something that I am truly passionate about? I don’t need to make a lot of money. When my kids are grown and gone, I will need to make even less. Money has no real meaning to me anyway, except as something you need to have to buy food and clothes and pay the electricity bill.

Who am I?

I am a writer.

And a writer needs to write.

And tell stories.

“I believe in stories. The world has enough dogma. It’s stories we need more of, stories that reverence the still, small voice that sings our life.”
-- Sue Monk Kidd, Firstlight

Part II: Life with a PT Cruiser and how life comes at you fast

2008-02-29T17:24:00.002-05:00

OK.

I have to be honest with you.

I did not like the PT Cruiser.

At all.

I felt very uncomfortable driving it.

It seemed so big, for one thing. And certain features were located in obscure places. For example, the automatic window controls were NOT on the driver’s side door, as they are on every other car I have ever driven or seen. They were… on the dashboard, in the center, by the radio/CD player! Go figure.

The passenger side dashboard was all shiny and reflected everything I was passing. This was distracting and unnerving, as I was already jumpy from having just been hit.

The car is not AWD, like my beloved Subaru. And we are in the dead of winter here. A completely awful, snow, rain, sleet, ice-covered winter. The very next day after I got my PT Cruiser, it snowed a ton and the boys’ school was canceled. I spent hours shoveling the driveway, and the snow just kept a-coming. The roads were terrible, and I decided there was no way I was going to risk my life driving in to work with this new rental car that I had had less than a day and which did not have AWD. The place where I work ended up closing down at 3 anyway and sending everyone home, so I felt pretty righteous about my decision to call off.

I just could not stomach the thought of another accident.

Oh, and did I mention that the PT Cruiser reeked of cigarettes? My younger son commented: “Gee, this car smells just like a hotel room.” Well, the hotel rooms HE might ever stay in. Not me. But I knew what he meant. It was disgusting. So bad, in fact, that when I picked up Valentine cookies and candy on my way to work, I ended up dropping them off at home first because I was afraid if I left them in my car all day they would smell and taste just like cigarettes. Ugh.

I know, I know, you are thinking I am just a whiny baby. But I have to tell ya, the karma just was not right with that car.

I was ill at ease driving it, and it was not a fun car to drive. Plus, I was totally stressed out about my first accident, and I was very jumpy as I drove. I kept seeing people going through stop signs and stop lights and swerving and slipping and plowing into my car. I was a nervous wreck making my commute to and from work every day.

Then on the Sunday after I got the PT Cruiser, as I was just starting to come to terms with my new rental vehicle, life came at me fast.

My one son and I had just dropped off a gift at his friend’s house, and we were on our way to pick up my other son from a sleep over. We were driving through a residential area, that, granted, was in the woods. We were just driving along, minding our own business when – WHAM!!! – I head a loud crash sound.

I immediately imagined that a car must have hit me (as I had flashbacks to accident day), but I couldn’t imagine how as there weren’t any cars near me. My son later said he saw a flash of black to his right (he was in the front passenger seat), and he imagined it to be a person running into our car!

I turned to my right rear, where the noise had come from, and I saw a deer running off into the snow and woods.

I could not believe it! Where had this deer come from? I had not even seen a deer!

Another car was coming from the other direction, toward us, and the driver momentarily stopped. As I was getting out of the car, he drove on. Apparently, he didn’t think it was anything too serious.

I walked around the back of the PT Cruiser to see what the car looked like and was stunned to find the right rear passenger window completely shattered and the passenger door dented. There was deer hair all over the place.

I simply could not believe this had happened.

A deer had come running out of the woods and right into the rear of my PT Cruiser RENTAL car and then run off again.

My son got out to look for the deer. It had not been a large deer and it had no antlers, so it was either a female deer or a really young male deer. I could not imagine, given the extent of the damage, how the deer could possibly be all right. And I am sure that it wasn’t. But my son couldn’t find signs of it anywhere.

I wrote down all of the details of the accident in my little notebook. (I was fast becoming an expert on writing accident reports!)

I was so thankful that neither my son nor I had been hurt. I had barely even felt the crash as we were not driving all that fast. I was particularly glad that my son had been sitting up front with me. Usually, I make him ride in the backseat, but I had let him sit up front with me that day. Can you imagine if he had been in the backseat and the deer had come crashing through the window right on top of him?

As it was, he said he saw that flash of black to his right and then turned to see what it was. That was right when the deer hit the car behind him and the window shattered. He said he instinctively turned away from all of the shattering glass (thank God!) and when he turned around again he saw the deer running off, just as I had.

I was left somewhat in a state of shock by this whole episode.

I consider myself to be a very cautious, safety-conscious driver, and now all of a sudden, out of the blue, I had been involved in two car accidents in less than one week!

Of course, it was cold and rainy out, too, so now I had rain coming into my car through the open window. Glass shards and pieces were everywhere. And all that deer hair!

Since it was a Sunday, I couldn’t get a hold of anyone at either my car insurance company or the rental office where I had gotten the car.

I would just have to wait until Monday morning and drive the car back to the rental place and see what they said. I wasn’t sure if they would give me another car or not, but my Subaru was to be in the shop for at least sixteen more days.

In the end, both my insurance company and the rental car place were more than gracious. The representative at my insurance company reassured me that this type of thing happened more than you would think. The rental car place was fine with it, too; they had me in a new rental car that same day.

Luckily, I had taken out the extra insurance. My car insurance company had told me not to, that my auto insurance covered rentals in the same way it covered my own car. The rental place told me that the extra insurance meant I was totally covered. In the event of an accident, I would not have to pay the deductible from my car insurance. Given that the additional insurance was only $10 a day, that was a LOT cheaper than my deductible! Which I may well still have to pay for the FIRST accident. Even though that was not my fault.

I realize that deer don’t have insurance (unless they go through Hartford!), so I could see how I might have to pay for the freak deer accident as no one else would. But the rental company assured me I was totally covered, and they weren't even going to report the accident to my car insurance company.

At first the representative at the rental company wanted to give me a mini van.

I balked.

I was so spooked now; I wanted a small car, something more like my Subaru. I have never driven a mini van in my life, and the thought of driving one in the snow and ice did nothing for me. Hell, I wanted to be invisible!

Never mind that I have driven tanks and deuce and half trucks before.

A mini van is not a tank.

To me, it was just a giant target on the road.

In the end, the rental car place gave me a red Dodge Caliber. I had never heard of such a vehicle before, but then again I am pretty ignorant as far as car models go. As far as I was concerned, it was a “red car.” And it was similar in shape and size to my Subaru.

I instantly felt way more at ease driving this Caliber.

And it didn’t smell like cigarettes.

I am embarrassed to admit that I am somewhat traumatized by these two accidents, back to back.

I am extremely nervous and jumpy as I drive. That fight or flight adrenaline is just a-pumping away as I make my daily commute. But I go the same route I always do, and I pass the scene of the first accident every single day. I notice every driving infraction anyone ever makes; I allow boneheads to cut in front of me, pass me, do whatever they want to as long as they don’t crash into me. I actually had a tailgater honk at me when I stopped for a red light the other day. Apparently, he wanted me to gun it at the yellow light and cross two lanes of highway traffic in icy conditions during rush hour with snow falling pell mell.

No thank you, sir!

Honk away.

Once the light turned green and we turned onto the two-lane highway, he gunned around me and zoomed down the highway. Yeah, a real man.

Or an idiot.

Take your pick.

I even have dreams about getting hit. This is almost like PTSD. (Which makes me wonder how people who REALLY have gone through trauma must feel!)

I was just in two little stupid fender bender-type accidents.

The other night I dreamed that everywhere I drove I had to swerve out of the way of cars in order to avoid an accident. Trucks were backing up into traffic, cars were drifting over into my lane, people were ignoring stop signs and lights right and left. My mom was in the car nagging me, my kids were in the back seat bickering. All of a sudden a pack of wild dogs ran across the road right in front of me. I braked, but I hit one of the dogs and I can still hear its howl of pain and distress.

The dream just kept going on and on like this, seemingly all night long. Finally, I said, “Screw it!” and I got out of the car and just started to walk.

Only then, the pack of wild dogs came back and started chasing me down.

And then my alarm went off.

Oh, joy!

Time to get up and drive to work.