Nice Day, Don't It?

It Doesn't Quite Add Up

2012-02-13T21:32:00.002-05:00

It began with a stream of unexceptional thoughts: Katherine's birthday is tomorrow, oh, yeah, I want to mail that birthday card and I still have time to get a coffee before school starts and here's the place where I can turn around and BLAM! I ran my new blue Prius up and over a snow-covered curb with a wrist-wrenching thud, and jerked to a stop 100 yards from where I had intended to turn. DAMN! I yelled. HOW STUPID! Air hissed from my left front tire, and the plastic sheathing protecting the undercarriage was buckled and torn. Screws dangled. Pieces of mangled black plastic lay in the road.

Just yesterday I had been congratulating myself on how carefully I was driving these days, how long it had been since my last speeding ticket - except for the one in California two years ago - how my insurance rates had dropped, how mature I was becoming in general...

BLAM!

I drove to school and parked, resigned to the fact that my tire would be flat by the end of the day. I would deal with it later.

"Good morning!" the school secretary greeted me.

"Hi," I said.

"Let's see, today you're in 7th grade math."

"Math?" I repeated. "Are you sure you don't mean language arts?"

"No, it's math."

"Not social studies?"

"Math."

I have taught some math, an extremely elementary form of it, possibly up to fourth grade level, but no further. If, in my role as assistant, it fell to me to teach a lesson in fourth grade, I could safely turn to the answers in the back of the teacher's manual. If a student asked me how I had arrived at an answer, I solicited aid from Hannah, aged 9.

The 7th grade teacher had thoughtfully left me a lesson plan. The math text book lay open to a page filled with what was quite possibly ancient Sumerian, although it was titled "Coordinate Graphing." I identified charts with intersecting and bisecting lines and arrows and points and letters. There were some algebraic terms: x-axis, polynomial, and linear equation.

I remembered that when I had coached middle school students in remedial math, a fellow teacher had organized the lessons for me. We had shared space in the same classroom, so when situations arose - such as the rare student actually wanting to know the mechanics of something - I could summon my friend for help.

Once the school principal had pulled me aside after observing a literacy class, and after congratulating me on the efficacy of my teaching style, the engagement and liveliness of my students, he asked bluntly, "But, you don't really teach much math, do you?"

"Not much," I admitted.

After the 7th graders swarmed in, and we ran through the pledge and morning announcements, we played a few rounds of Mum Ball. Mum Ball is a game played silently in which a soft Nerf-ish ball is pitched around the classroom. If you drop it, you're out, if you throw it too hard, you're out. If it goes in the fish tank or out the window, game over. I figured if we played for 15 minutes, that would be nearly half the class.

"Are we gonna to do some math today?" Jimmy finally asked.

"Oh, we have time for one more game," I told him. "What's the rush?"

When the Mum Ball flew onto a shelf containing glass beakers, and a scuffle between 2 basketball players broke out, I grudgingly agreed it was time to stop.

I stood behind a wooden podium at the front of the classroom, math textbook open, and read the instructions aloud. Then I had Jimmy read them again. I pointed to the white board where there was something that looked like an example of the indecipherable Coordinate Graphing and said, "If you get confused, you can just um, look here."

"Any questions?" I asked.

Heads shook no. I breathed. I remained at the podium poring over the answer page, willing some sort of meaning to emerge.

Please I thought don't let anyone have a question.

"Mrs. Palmer?"

"Yes?" I replied.

"I don't really get this," a girl with red hair muttered.

"Hmm," I said, feigning thoughtfulness, "Well, what's your best guess?"

"Huh?"

"Okay," I said. "I'm going to level with all of you."

Heads looked up.

"I don't do math. I'm a writer. So if people are having trouble, perhaps one or two of you who actually understand this coordinate graphing stuff could help the others out. Practice some team teaching or something."

Hands went up. The class worked it out; so did the succeeding class. I remained behind my protective wooden podium, math text open. Nestled ever so discreetly between its pages was my Kindle. As the class worked, I finished The Art of Fielding.

At the end of the day, having arranged for a mechanic to put on my spare "donut" tire and having limped to my automobile dealership, and having conversed with the insurance company, I actually practiced a little math myself. I was able to calculate that the repairs to my car, out-of-pocket, would roughly total a month's pay.

Substitute

2012-02-04T15:10:00.006-05:00

They swarmed through the second grade classroom door, puffy snow-suited legions of them, dragging back packs, their snow-booted feet scuffing the floor.

"Good morning," I said in my teacher voice, my sub plans clutched in my hand. "I'm Mrs. Palmer." I pointed to the white board where, after five attempts, I had neatly printed my name in red marker.

"Where's Mrs. D?"

"She's in a meeting today."

"Ooooohh."

"What meeting?"

"Will she be back tomorrow?"

"Yes," I said, "She will be back tomorrow."

Momentarily mollified, they milled about, shoving a bit, piling their clothes into cubbies, pulling out snacks, stacking colored homework folders in a basket by the door.

I surveyed the classroom: books and print and letters and numbers and pictures and student art and projects filled the learning space. There was a milk carton village and a helper chart; tables everywhere held stacks of books and piles of mad minute math sheets and cursive practice sheets. More bookshelves lined the walls. A display in the front of the classroom contained books about Chinese New Year and groundhogs and science and re-cycling and thunderstorms. Color and space coalesced to form a riot of language and sensory stimuli.

A little girl with glasses and brown hair tugged on my arm.

"Did the groundhog see his shadow?" she whispered.

"We-ll..." I stalled. In my rush to pick up my courage inducing Dunkin' Donuts cappuccino, I had missed that vital bit of information.

I needn't have worried.

"Yes, he did!"

"No, he didn't!"

"Actually, in Vermont they're called woodchucks," said a little boy whose blonde hair stuck up in electric hat hair tufts.

"It doesn't matter whether he did or not," said a little girl with a lime green barrette, arms akimbo, "because, it's always winter somewhere."

"No, it's not!"

"Yes, it is!"

"All right," I interrupted, "Let's go have circle time."

"Circle time, what's that?"

"You know, when you all sit together in a circle and talk a bit about the day," I stammered, glancing again at the day's typed schedule before remembering that circle time was a ritual in a previous grade.

"It's not called circle time, it's called morning meeting!"

"It's when we read the morning message!"

"Oh," I said. "Then let's all sit down over on the grey rug and get started."

What they heard was: Everyone twirl in dizzying concentric circles while flailing your arms and yelling at the top of your voice.

"First, you do the calendar," Fee explained, placing a comforting hand on my leg.

"I have to go the bathroom!" Jeremy announced.

"Okay," I said.

"Can you tie my shoe?" Tommy demanded, proffering a black sneaker at eye level.

"Sure," I said.

A little girl approached me solemnly and gently pried a yellow plastic star with the number 97 on it from my hand.

"I'll put this up for you," she offered.

"Okay," I said.

As she pulled a chair to the window, clambered up and stretched on one toenail to press the yellow plastic star with the number 97 to a number line after the number 96, someone shouted, "She can't climb on a chair!"

"She's getting down now," I said, hastening over and helping her down.

"I have to go to the bathroom!" Jeremy shouted again, pinching the front of his pants while hopping on one foot.

"Didn't you just get back?' I asked.

"I have to go again!"

"Okay," I said.

Eventually, everyone sat or, if they were boys, collapsed dramatically as if shot.

"Now, let's take turns and greet each other," I said. "Fee, will you please start?"

"Good morning, Charlie, how are you?" Fee chanted, turning to Charlie and grasping his hand.

"Good," said Charlie, who turned to Brian.

"No, you're supposed to ask Fee how she is!" Several voices shouted.

"Charlie, please ask your friend Fee how she is," I instructed.

"Friend? She's not my friend," Charlie stated. "She's just in my class."

"Sarah took Sam's pencil," a little boy said, tapping my shoulder, "And you're supposed to send the attendance down now."

"Leah has mints!" Conan said, and she's selling them to Tommy."

"Okay," I said, "I'll take care of it, but you need to keep the focus on yourself."

"Focus?" asked Conan.

"Like a camera!" Several more voices shouted.

"What I mean is - oh, look, let's just finish greeting each other," I sighed.

"Good morning, Mrs. Palmer, how are you?" Jeremy shouted close to my right ear.

"Frankly, not so well," I replied.

During the ensuing clamor that began as Literacy Block, I attempted to capture everyone's attention.

I turned the lights off.

I turned the lights back on.

I flicked them twice.

"One, two, three, look at me!" I tried loudly, turning two fingers toward my own eyes.

"It's not 'one, two, three, look at me,'" Shelby giggled. "It's one, two, three, eyes on me."

"Thanks, Shelby," I said. "ONE, TWO, THREE, EYES ON ME!" I more or less bellowed.

"You will now work on your literacy packet," I explained. "First, practice your spelling words; next, please do 2 handwriting sheets - "

"I have to go to the bathroom!" Jeremy shouted.

"You've gone twice," I said. "That's enough."

"But, I have to!"

"Okay, but this is it," I warned. "Make the most of it."

"Where was I?" I asked.

"Over by the white board," Fee said.

"No, I mean... thanks Fee, never mind. All right, troops, you will be working on 2 handwriting sheets, then you will take turns reading with me."

"Can I go to the media center?" chirped Freddie.

"After you finish your work," I said firmly, feeling a modicum of control within reach.

"But, I don't have any books to read!" Freddie wailed.

"After...you...finish...your...work," I repeated.

"You're allowed to send four people down," Freddie explained.

"I'll go!" 12 voices shouted.

"No, no one leaves until his or her work is finished," I said. I circled the classroom slowly with one arm outstretched as if leveling a death ray.

"Can I read with you first?" Shelby asked.

"Sure," I answered. "It needs to quiet in here, so everyone can concentrate," I said, placing a finger over my lips.

"I can't concentrate," Tommy complained. "If my sneaker is untied."

"I don't want to do any work," Jeremy complained. "Can't I just go to the bathroom?"

"NO!" I said. "And no more talking!"

"Let's play the quiet game!" someone said.

"Yay, yay, the quiet game!"

As Shelby read to me, the quiet game was played eleven times. Jeremy demanded bathroom privileges four more times; two little boys hung by their chins over their chair backs; hundreds of pencils were sharpened; dozens of tiny water bottles were crinkled in small hands; packages of cold Eggo pancakes were consumed.

"You're a doof," Shelby read aloud from her read-aloud selection.

"A douche??" Tommy repeated.

"I don't want to do this work now," Madison complained.

"I'd rather be home in a quiet room drinking a nice cup of coffee, but I'm here," I said. "We all have to show up and do our work."

"I can't even have coffee," sniffed Madison.

"It is a half day today, right?" I asked a passing teacher in the hallway as my students skipped and leaped and jostled their way to music class.

"Subbing today?" she enquired.

Ringing in the New (Job)?

2012-01-03T09:29:00.002-05:00

I allowed myself a few days of scathing self-criticism for being fired from a mere month's employment as a telephone service representative for a company whose owners made a guest appearance on the Martha Stewart Show to promote some sort of puff candy.

I withdrew and ate avocados, with the curtains drawn. I watched NCIS.

Finally, I had to agree that it had not been the right job for me.

"It was a dumb job," Jane commented. "Let it go."

I decided to call my daughter for help with re-vamping my resume.

"Hi, Claudia," I said to her company's receptionist. "Is Katherine available?" I asked, wondering if this might be the day after 5 years of frequent calling that Claudia would recognize my voice.

"Who's calling, please?" Claudia asked.

"It's her Mom," I sighed.

"Hi, Mom. What's up?" my daughter answered cheerfully.

"I need some help with my resume."

"Oh, boy. Do you have anything written down yet?"

"Of course I do. I've had other resumes, you know, for other jobs."

"Well, send it along and I'll take a look at it."

"Could you possibly look at it now?"

"Yes, now would be okay," she agreed. "But, you're sort of pushy."

I emailed what I had, and waited.

There was the sound of muffled guffawing when my daughter returned my call. "Okay, so what is this?" she began.

"You know what it is," I said.

"Well, first of all, everything ran together on the page. Do you even know how to send an attachment?"

"Of course I do!" I said grouchily.

"Well, never mind, it has to be redone anyway. Completely redone."

"I know, I know, that's why I called you," I said with mock sweetness.

"First of all, no one cares that you played on a traveling 4.0 tennis team, or that you like to hike, garden and take pictures."

"But - "

"And where are the dates? You can't just put "The 80's," and list stuff. It has to be specific. But, don't worry, we'll fix it."

We laughed while my daughter patched my resume, and I was able to remember some important dates, like when I had graduated from college, and what years I had taught and the specificities of teaching literacy and writing. My happiest times, career-wise had been working in school, exploring literary themes, encouraging reading skills and self-expression. I remembered the sweetest expression of pride, when a child struggled through reading a difficult passage aloud. The shy triumph. I had loved connecting with those students.

Recently, I assisted at a Montessori School. The space with its many windows and wooden floors and plants was large and bright, filled with sun. There were learning stations where the 4 and 5-year-olds did their "work." They swept the floor and connected a set of wooden railroad tracks, and kneaded and rolled homemade play-doh. They shared. They painted wooden holiday trees. They mixed food coloring with soap suds and made observations.

"Sam is my boyfriend," Lela said, indicating a small boy wearing a ball cap and grey plastic sunglasses with orange lenses.

"I'm not a boyfriend," Sam said.

At snack, the teacher Steff and I sat at the oblong table with the children, me trying to tuck my long legs under the child-sized table. Sara and Jarod passed plates of carrots and dip, while Susanna and Zeke handed out napkins and cups. I shared my dried papaya.

"Shall we say our poem today?" Steff asked.

"Yes!" everyone cried.

"1-2-3," the children recited, "Take a deep breath. Bon appetit. It's time to eat."

"Now Miss Amy will teach us some meditation," Steff said, as we reassembled in the circle area.

We each had a small mat and I smiled at the rapt little faces, at the flexible little bodies sitting so effortlessly cross-legged, hands placed on their knees.

"Does anyone know what a sentient being is?" I asked.

"Is it a planet?" Jarrod asked.

"Close enough," I said. "Let's just sit and feel our bodies breathing. It's how we relax and just be."

"I like just being," Susanna said.

That's how I discovered the classroom is where I want to be now, in some capacity, preferably at an elemental level - say kindergarten, where I don't have to worry much about math.

Pink Slip: Not a Garment

2011-12-11T17:13:00.006-05:00

I was staring down a frozen computer screen at my third computer of the morning, engaged in deflective patter with a customer as I waved an arm at the Watcher to come help me.

"We've already ticketed this computer to be fixed," the Watcher told me. "Maybe it's you that needs a ticket."

Liz told me later that this was an attempt at wry humor.

Another customer berated me for shipping costs, and refused to supply me with her phone number.

"I don't give my phone number," she scolded. "I'm a lawyer, and I know what happens."

"Okay, ma'am," I said.

I was cheerily urging someone to purchase an epilator to go with his nose and ear hair trimmer, when my supervisor appeared and deftly pushed the "make busy" button.

"Let's go talk," she said.

We wound through the building until we found two chairs in an area surrounded by merchandise: sock monkeys, chattering chimps, xylophones, boxed chocolates and soaps nesting in gift boxes.

"So," she began.

I sat erect in my folding chair surrounded by puppy pajamas and bathrobes on hangers trying to assume a position of dignity in my squishy Uggs and jeans, but I felt as she explained numbers and the unfortunate circumstance of over-hiring based on last year's projections, like a chastised school girl.

The words "laid off" were used.

"I don't want you to go home thinking this has anything to do with your performance," she said.

"It doesn't?"

"Oh, no, you were... " She smiled and swept the manilla folder in her hand in an encouraging upward arc. "On the upswing."

"Did you have a chance to use your 50% off?" she asked.

"Not yet," I said.

"Oh, that's too bad, because we don't really have a way of tracking..."

I was to be stripped of my 50%. I considered racing up the mountain, going straight to the company's flagship store, and using it before the system noticed I was terminated.

"But, you will be invited to return next year," she added. She showed me a paper with a little box that had been marked with a hasty blue inked check. It read "re-hire."

I reflected upon my brief, not quite brilliant career. It felt as though I had mostly been in the center of a disturbance: computers freezing, taking three weeks to master the digital punch, hired on at the very end of seasonal hiring and therefore missing the final training. I had faxed paper punches to the wrong department. At night I had begun to awaken to imaginary beeps in my mind. My dreams were haunted by frantic conversations to do with oilcloth tablecloths and fruit cake. There had been, perhaps, overly frequent calls to CS and Product. I still "hunt and peck." I had dropped a call or two.

No sooner had I punched back in from lunch than the Watcher appeared.

"What time did you punch out?" she demanded.

"At 2pm," I said.

"You took an hour for lunch?"

"I did," I admitted. "I had a very bad morning, and then I was let go."

"What a terrible last day," someone said mournfully.

"Have a cookie button," someone else offered.

"Would you like to stay for the rest of the day," the Watcher inquired, "Or would you like to go home now?"

"I think now," I said.

I handed in my white, credit card sized fob and my name tag and shook hands with my supervisor.

"I'll miss your smile," she said.

"Don't worry about being fired, " Dick said trying to be helpful.

"I was laid off," I explained.

"Well, call it what you will," he said, "But, it's just great. In fact, I'll check back with you in exactly a year from now and you'll be shocked to see how things will have opened up."

"Hm," I said.

"Basically, they looked around the room when it came time to cut and saw you," was my daughter's comment.

I've already started the search for future gainful employment at findtherightjob.com. There are some intriguing possibilities: Foreign Trainer for Disney in China, Gas Plant Operator, Clinical Dog Specialist, Central Intelligence Officer.

Don't Call Me

2011-12-07T19:33:00.001-05:00

Today was a difficult day on the phones.

I was in the middle of taking an order, keying information like a fiend, peppering my conversation with deferential, oft-used "yes, ma'am's," my voice occasionally adopting a southern lilt or a western twang to match my customers. ("Da, S RazhdestvOm!" I responded to a Russian woman from West End Avenue in New York.) Then, without warning, between screens, passing from shipping to credit information, a large red ERROR flashed across everything, and all that carefully pecked out information vanished. Gone. 0 items in Shopping Bag.

"Whoops," I muttered inadvertently.

"Oh, no," groaned the customer from Bad Axe, Minnesota.

"I'm so sorry, sir, but I'm going to have to transfer you to customer service."

"Why?"

My thoughts raced. I'm not supposed to admit to any deficiency in our system. Where was my script? I pawed through catalogues. I dug through forms.

"Sir, it's taking a moment to access...."

"Oh, fine, then just transfer me."

"Yes, sir, and I'm so sorry for this inconvenience."

This happened 7 times before my mentor, L, pushed the "make busy" button on my phone. I removed my headset like a defrocked queen.

"Let's go through this again," she said.

"I don't think it's me," I said, a whit away from a whine.

"We'll see."

"Did you move your mouse?" she demanded.

"I did not move my mouse."

"Did you double click ship?"

"I did not double click ship."

"Did you enter the credit card type before you entered the number?"

"Yes," I said. "I did."

She gave me a few technical suggestions, keys to push, items to shade, things to paste. I was to press Control C, then V.

I went back to my headset, I dutifully noted the time spent in my Daily Log: .25 minutes under OTHER.

Three orders later, ERROR!

Someone seized my headset. I was instructed to log out.

"We're going to take your cookies," they said.

"You are?" I asked. I had already missed the plate of Luscious Lemon Cake. Was I to lose out on lebkuchen?

"Your system is in default," I was told.

"Oh," I said.

"Don't worry, this won't count against you," L said.

"What a relief," I breathed. I don't need things counting against me.

After they fixed it, and I had logged back in, I was conversing with a gentleman from Louisville, Kentucky. He dictated his email, stressing that it be in upper case.

"Thank you, Mr. Wide Glide," I said. "Have a happy, healthy Christmas." Then I froze.

L poked me.

"Did I just hear you call your customer Mr. Wide Glide?"

"Whoops," I said. "I guess I did. I-I-I-I..."

L shook her head and turned back to her screen in silence.

L passes me notes: Suggest other items. We're upselling tufted chair pads today. Don't use the word "intersperse," our customers will get confused. Our customers don't need to know that your mother has a house in Florida.

At the end of the day, I spent .50 minutes with a gentleman from New Jersey. He changed his order three times, twice after I had keyed his credit information. He added boysenberry jam. He subtracted cherry jelly sticks. He forgot to mention the promo code for free shipping.

When I had wished him a good rest of his day, I sat back and moaned, "Man, what does that guy think, that I have all day to wait around while he thumbs through his catalogue?"

L swiveled toward me.

"Yes," she said, "You do. It's your job."

I'm Seasonal

2011-11-20T08:35:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting in front of a computer screen, hand on my mouse, my personal "foamies" on the headset I'm using. I glance nervously at the phone. The LED display is blank. An infinitesimal beep sounds. I pounce.

"Hi, this is Amy, " I chirp. "How may I help you today?"

"I'd like to place an order."

I"d be delighted to help you with that today," I say enthusiastically. "May I have your first item number?"

As the customer tells me her first item number, I click on the "search" box in the top right hand corner on my company's web page.

I am live.

After completing my day and a half of training, during which we had practiced taking orders while our instructors role-played being customers with a variety of requests and gift cards and additions or subtractions from their orders, we were ushered into an area called "nesting."

I had notes. I had catalogues. I had shipping information. I had a button on my phone labeled CS, for customer service, which meant if there was any sort of situation other than me feeding information through a variety of screens all the way through to checkout I could, with extreme courteousness, pass my customer along.

"Ma'am?" I had been instructed to say, "I am so sorry, but may I place you on hold for just a second? I'm going to put you through to Customer Service. Thank you for your patience, and again, I apologize."

There was another button I could push should I need information on a product. That button was labeled, as one might imagine: Product.

In "nesting," I had a red flag I could wave if I got stuck, or panicked, or if the screen froze mid-order and I lost everything. That first afternoon, I waved that flag like a seaman on an aircraft carrier. I stood and gesticulated until one of the instructors came to my rescue.

I was certain that my first call was a test. Or a prank. How had one of my friends gotten through and how clever she was at imitating a little old man from the midwest hunkered down in his Laz-Z-Boy, thumbing through our catalogue.

"Hello, Amy? I'd like to place an order, uh, uh, oh, damn, I gotta go turn that durn television set off."

Who talks like that?

A little old man from the midwest. From Anamosa, Iowa, in fact.

"Amy? You still there? I nearly got the durn thing off, uh, oh, I just gotta sit back down." I hear a muffled rustle and then a thump. "There, all set now. You in Vermont?"

I picture cornfields and a surrey or two. Perhaps chicks.

"Yes, sir," I respond. The customer needs to hear the smile in my voice. He is a potential friend, and I am a storekeeper, selling nostalgia and occasionally, an "intimate solution."

The first time a sweet little old lady from Tennessee sneaks an intimate solution into her order sandwiched between rum balls and a Lanz nightie for her granddaughter, I am astonished to see something that looks like the neon mouth guard my son used to wear playing hockey pop onto my screen. I spend a few seconds pondering the practical usage of this item.

"Yes, ma'am, we do have the Dual Pleasure Intimate Massager in stock. And how would you like that
shipped?"

When we graduated from "nesting," our instructors clapped their hands together vigorously and cheered "Bravo."

"You're gonna be okay," said the instructor I accidentally smacked with my flag.

"I know," I said. I felt proud.

I'm live all the time now. I'm a TSR, a telephone service representative. I have two 10-minute breaks and a half-hour for lunch during my 8-hour day. I field about 100 calls a day.

"Amy, I like you, I do," a lady named Billie from West Virginia tells me. "I thank you shorley can shoot
the shit."

"I shorley can," I answer. "But, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our holiday fruit cake, made from the finest ingredients right here in our bakery."

That's the up-sell.

"Why, honey, I thank I'll take one."

"Why, yes, ma'am," I say. "And y'all have a wonderful day."

Beauma Goes to Florida

2011-11-12T17:07:00.001-05:00

When my daughter, Katherine, first invited me to The Breakers in Florida to babysit for Tripp, I imagined dipping his tiny toes into the ocean, or sitting on the edge of one of the four pools and gently splashing his chubby legs protected by SPF 60 sunblock. I figured we'd drop in at some of the activities my daughter was orchestrating - perhaps wave "bye-bye" at the dock as the catamaran adventurers set sail, observe a croquet match, peek in at dinner. I pictured us strolling lazily up and down Worth Avenue.

Not.

Tripp is five and a half months old. The wind blustering off the ocean took his tiny breath away. There would be no toe dipping, nor would an ounce of chlorinated pool water mar his perfect skin.

On the first day, as we unpacked and opened our sliding doors that gave onto the ocean, admiring our sumptuous adjoining rooms and marble baths, Katherine glanced at my clothes hanging in a color-coordinated row in the closet.

"Why did you bring all this?" she asked. "You're not going to be seen."

"I'm not?" I asked. "By anyone?"

"No, remember, your job is taking care of Tripp."

The schedule was rigorous. The door between our rooms opened at 6:00AM the following morning.

"Rise and shine, nanny," my daughter sang. This didn't mean "rise and shine, Nanny," as in dear beloved Grandmother, this meant "rise and shine, nanny," as in servant. Well, to be honest, a servant with room service privileges and pretty much carte blanche.

After feeding the baby, Katherine disappeared to attend to a myriad of tasks and organizational details to do with the arrival of approximately 60 women who had earned a deluxe three-day, all-expenses-paid vacation at one of the most luxurious resorts in Florida. Tripp and I were left to ourselves.

We read the cloth edition of Goodnight Little One.

We played with our red dinosaur pull toy.

We explored the hotel and discovered where Beauma could purchase her three daily cups of cappuccino. We strolled along the brick boardwalk by the ocean, and through the gardens by the raised herb beds with little signs proclaiming: "Pardon Us, We're Germinating." We found cozy corners under porticos, we gazed at expanses of flower-bordered lawns. If we were lucky, one of us napped.

Katherine and I kept in constant text communication.

Me: "When will you be back?"

Katherine: "In a few hours."

Me: "Can I have my break then?"

Katherine: Long sigh. "We'll just have to see."

My break consisted of racing to the gym, working out for slightly less than an hour, flying into the shop to purchase a smoothie, and speeding back to my tiny charge.

"It's about time you got back," my daughter would say. She had Things To Do: 60 goodie bags to pack and make sure were delivered, meetings with hotel personnel to attend, schedules to plan, menus to oversee, transportation to and from off-site events to coordinate. I just had the baby.

At night we took turns reading verses from the onomatapoeic oeuvre Roadwork. We invented a game. First Katherine chanted, "Plan the road. Plan the road. Mark it on the map. Hammer in the marking pegs. Bing bang tap!" Then, I would repeat the refrain, "bing bang tap!" in Donald Duck. Tripp caught on fast. He would turn to look and listen to Katherine, then swivel his head to me. In case you didn't know, "bing bang tap!" in Donald Duck is howlingly funny. Just ask the baby.

One day, Tripp and I were gazing out to sea at fishing boats and trawlers when a line of dolphins leaped and dove and leaped one behind the other right in front of us.

"Tripp just saw his first dolphins!" I texted my daughter.

"He saw his first dolphins with YOU?" she texted back.

"He did," I replied.

"Don't even think of taking him down to the ocean," she told me later. "I want him to see his first ocean with me. I'll smell his feet and I'll know."

I sang "Edelweiss" to my grandson, and held him in my arms for hours and hours and we engaged in long one-way conversations. While to the casual observer I might have appeared to be a dotty woman under an enormous sun hat in Ray Bans talking to herself in a dreamy, singsongy voice, Tripp listened intently.

He learned about palm tree bark.

And magical shadows.

And color.

And when his mama had finished all her work and all the ladies had gone home, he was very very happy.

We kept the fact that he had glimpsed his first parrots to ourselves.

The End

Fried

2011-10-17T18:12:00.003-04:00

A few days ago I had surgery to excise two areas containing basal cell carcinomas from my face. They had appeared as tiny - smaller than the tip of a pencil eraser - scaly little patches that would scab over but not completely disappear.

I had a pre-op interview by phone as I slurped a low-fat cappucccino minutes before boarding a plane from San Francisco to Boston. As I replied with a series of no's to questions about the health of my heart and lungs and alcohol consumption, and tonsillectomy at age 6 to a question regarding previous surgeries, I became confused. I was just having two tiny little rough patches removed, a simple, 15-minute procedure, right? Why all these annoying intrusions into my medical history?

"Are you sure you don't have me confused with someone else?" I asked.

"No, you're the right person," a nurse reassured me. "Height? Weight? Are you a smoker?"

"This is unbelievable," I groused to Juan the Gardener. "They want to give me anesthesia for this."

"Hospitals are big business," he said.

At a little after 8AM the following day, I was lying on a gurney in a super-sized purple paper johnny, with purple socks on my feet, an IV in my left hand. The anesthesiologist told me I would be given something to help me relax and then some medicine would be injected at the sites, which my surgeon had carefully outlined in black marker.

"But, this is just a little procedure," I protested. "Right?"

"We want you to be comfortable," the anesthesiologist murmured.

"Oh, all right," I said. "Bring on the drugs."

During the surgery, I woke once to hear everyone discussing chipmunks. Someone was patting my lip and the area between my eyes.

"I like listening to you," I heard myself say. "Are the margins clear?"

"Oh!" someone said.

Then I woke up in recovery, dimly aware of gauze and a headache.

Juan the Gardener came in, and gave me a look that might best be described as startled.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Okay," I said. "How do I look?"

Mom was right. I would ruin my skin if I baked in the sun. Spring, sophomore year of high school, we lay on the roof holding reflectors made out of cardboard covered with tin foil to our chests and faces, slicked up with baby oil and iodine. Tan was best, the darker the better. Some girls turned brown, but I burned. Peeled. Burned again. Freckled. My friends and I lay on chaises on my deck at home, flipping every half hour like fried eggs, gossiping, cranking up the tunes, drinking Tab and Diet Coke. We wore white to emphasize the glow, spent hours in the sand at Jones Beach, checking our tan lines.

At home, I'd hold a sunlamp inches from my nose, achieving a swollen, scarlet visage.

"What's the matter with your face?" my mother demanded.

"Nothing," I muttered.

"You know you're simply going to ruin your skin," she warned.

"Mmmhmm," I would reply, heading to the drugstore for another tube of Bain de Soleil.

In photographs taken during the summers in my 20s, 30s and 40s my skin looks unnatural, my smile too wide. At my sister's wedding, I am swarthy in a pale pink bridesmaid's dress. My two sisters look pink and healthy; I look fried.

Years of sun. Decades. I wasn't comfortable in my paleness. What I really mean is I wasn't comfortable in my skin, period. A tan, I thought, made me better - prettier, more desirable, hid the me that didn't quite fit, glossed over the anxiety.

I've had a few basal cell carcinomas removed in the past couple of years and a squamous cell carcinoma the size of a lemon slice carved from my belly. I've applied Effudex, with results approaching an outbreak of leprosy, angry lesions and all.

"Is that something you intended?" the owner of the food co-op blurted when I made my black-eyed, steri-stripped appearance earlier today to buy some bread.

Everyone gaped.

"No," I said. Then I had to explain.

"Do you need me to help beat someone up?" a woman acquaintance asked.

"No, I'm good, but thanks," I said.

Suffice it to say, I'm basically done with the sun. These days I seek shade and sunblock with high numbers and I take cover under beach umbrellas.

I still love the summer sun, I just don't need to fry.

Why I Won't Be Playing Racquetball Anymore

2011-07-31T09:31:00.002-04:00

It happened like this: I was running backward, back pedaling, chasing the nasty little blue rubber ball. I was going to pivot and flick it or flick it and smash it. I forget. I was dreamily aware of Juan the Gardener to my left. It seemed, as I glanced off him, that I flew through the air.

Smack! My tail bone hit first. CR-R-ACK! A thundershot, as my head flew back and bounced off the wooden court floor. Hmmm, I thought, lying there. That smarts.

"Are you okay?" Juan the Gardener asked, peering down. "That was a nasty sound."

"I don't know," I said.

Then I grunted, "Ice."

"Ice?"

"Ice."

I moved parts of my body incrementally. Other than a wicked headache, everything seemed okay. Sore. Juan came back with a plastic bag filled with ice. I sat up slowly and held the ice to the back of my head.

"Do you think you can finish the game?" Juan asked, half grinning. He had been winning.

"Absolutely not."

For the next few days I just wanted to lie on the living room couch and be still. Light seemed to pierce my eyeballs, and I couldn't concentrate enough to read more than a sentence. I slept. The headache intensified. Finally, the two of us looked up the symptoms of concussion.

I don't know why, but whenever I am sick or injured I have a hard time believing it. I need hard evidence. Sensitivity to light and noise. Check. Headache. Check. Confusion or feeling as if in a fog. Check. Fatigue. Check.

"I think you should go to the hospital," Juan the Gardener said.

"Okay." My mother had pitched face first onto the floor recently and had sustained a tiny bleed in the brain. It made sense to check it out. I still felt a vague sense of guilt, as if I were wasting someone's time.

"Or, we could wait until after the Red Sox play and go this afternoon," he teased.

I had a CT scan and some x-rays of my lower spine, and it was determined that I had sustained a concussion and cracked the tail bone.

"You need to rest both your body and your mind," the friendly ER nurse explained. "The symptoms could last for weeks."

I actually did as I was told. I lay on the couch, my feet propped on a pillow. I listened to a CD called Radical Acceptance: Guided Meditations by Tara Brach. I read selections from Wherever You Go, There You Are by John Kabat-Zinn. I skimmed a forgettable novel. I stared into my phone at the changing expressions on my new baby grandson's face. I slept. Other than occasional forays out to the garden to pull a weed or two, I mostly did nothing.

Juan the Gardener cooked, and treated me with great gentleness. As I rested, I began to feel drifty, as if rising and falling on draughts of air that breezed in through the screen, and then, surprisingly happy. A touch of bliss. Without the driving lash of my thoughts exhorting me to get up get going get moving get doing, I began to relax completely. The present moment, foggy and out of focus though it was, was where I resided. What arose, as they say, was appreciation.

I began to suspect I had brain damage.

"I really like you like this," Juan the Gardener commented. "I mean, of course I love all of you," he hastened to add. "But," he wondered with his usual sense of tact, "Do you think you'll come back?"

He meant the compulsive, obsessional me whose nose wrinkles in disgust when ant scouts scurry across the counter tops, or the me that washes our sheets every two days; the me that ferrets out sources of complaint.

"I don't know," I said.

"No, you don't have brain damage," my learned friend (well, okay, he's my therapist) Andy laughed.

"No, I don't think you have a brain tumor either."

He didn't even think the concussion accounted for my unfamiliar state of mind.

"You mean I feel like this because I succumbed to being concussed?" I asked.

Yes, he did.

I pondered how it had happened that about a year ago, a proverbial portal had opened and I had been guided to a therapist who wanted me to focus on the present moment, upon perception and sensation, rather than the past.

The moment, to paraphrase Kabat-Zinn, as it blooms.

How strange that the past few years of practicing meditation, and reading some dharma and engaging in long philosophical discussions with Juan the Gardener and listening to Buddhist teachers should lead me to this.

Bouncing my head off the racquetball court did cause me to stop. I ceased struggling against life - my life. Stopped battling and scrambling. I surrendered. What I found in my mind's foggy corridors was peace - moment upon moment.

It's not if the struggle resumes, it's clearly when. I like floating in my cirrus-filled thoughts. But, I do have a point of reference: a comfy couch in a sun filled room, a vase of flowers, luminous light bouncing off cream-colored walls, birdsong, humming insects, my grandson's beautiful face, Juan the Gardener checking in, kissing the top of my head.

Cereus Magic

2011-07-17T09:21:00.002-04:00

We were sitting at the dinner table at our friend Tune's house, finishing off a mixed berry pie, tart and sweet. There were vases of flowers, lovely as paintings, arranged around the sun room that glowed in hues of yellow and salmon. Through the windows we could see gardens and rocks like giant dorsal fins rising from the earth. Wendy brought her dog, Ben, who was happily tethered outside in the cool summer night. Tune's mom discussed books and her recent trip to Tanzania.

Next to our places, small pieces of paper had been placed, face down. When it was time, I opened mine and found a question: Describe a time you spent with one of your grandparents.

"First thought best thought," Tune said, meaning don't take time to think, just respond.

"I remember sitting on my grandfather's lap on a porch, probably at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. We were in a rocking chair and he had his arms around me. I felt safe. He died soon after of Parkinson's."

Someone else was asked to describe an earliest memory. Wendy remembered sensations and light and being outside on grass that was parched white from the sun. Tune told about taking a match and trying to light her younger brother's trundle-bundle on fire, just to see if she could. Juan the Gardener remembered sitting in his dad's lap, picking splinters out of his dad's face.

"Splinters?" We cried.

"His beard was scruffy. It must have been a weekend and he hadn't shaved."

I remember climbing out of my crib using my teddy bear as a stepping stone to reach the bureau, and having the bureau tip over on me so that I was holding it up with two hands, like a baby super child. Now I realize it was a co-mergence of memories. At a later time I had climbed up the bureau by pulling out the drawers and it had tipped over and I had to call for help and Arnie, the nanny, was not amused. I had to climb: up into closets, into kitchen cabinets, up into the dancing tops of trees.

Juan described being at a party at his parents' house. He and a little girl were running naked from one end of the room to the other, laughing as they passed, not touching.

"So, that's the origin of our special game!" I laughed.

"Do you think it's true that men are led around by their peckers?" Tune's mom asked.

Then Tune said that tonight might be the night when her night-blooming cereus, a sprawling spineless climbing cactus opened its buds to produce pure-white flowers.

"It's so amazing," she said. "It only opens once all year and the fragrance fills the house."

"Maybe we ought to check." I said.

Tune quickly left the table and we heard her exclaiming,"Oh! Oh! Come see!"

We raced into the den, and there framed by the window, dangling from snaky, green, glossy stems, two enormous white buds had begun to open; a magnolia-like fragrance spilled out into the room.

We murmured ooos and aahhhs, and examined the flowers from underneath, from behind, from outside; we shone a flashlight into their creamy depths; we inhaled their perfume.

"Oh!" Wendy called from outside where she was walking Ben.

"What?" We answered. On a mid-summer night like this, anything was possible.

Suspended in the silky near-darknesss, visible between pine trees, round and pumpkin-orange, was the full moon.

I realized as we stood together like rapt children all grown up, that to truly connect, one must dare to open from the heart bud, to open constantly, to burst into flower like the magical night-blooming cereus.

After that, anything is possible.

Sinking Ships & Desperados

2011-07-13T08:42:00.001-04:00

"Hello! Hello!" My mother sang out, opening her front door to admit Tripp and his mother and me. She led us into the living room for iced tea and cake with white frosting and pink flowers. Vera, one of my mother's aides, leaned in to view the baby.

"I wasn't here for his first visit," she said.

"Well, Tripp meet Vera," my daughter smiled.

"So, you're a great-grandmother," Vera told my mother.

"I know that, Vera," my mother said crossly.

"You're GG," Vera said. "Little boy, that's your GG."

"We call my grandmother Gogs, and Tripp will too," Katherine explained.

"Oh, why not GG?" Vera asked. "I like GG."

"Vera, would you pour the ice tea?" my mother asked.

"I did," Vera said.

Vera lingered, eating cake, and then disappeared into the kitchen.

"Thank you, Vera!" Katherine and I called out. Vera is charged with keeping my mother safe, which includes guiding her to bed at a reasonable hour. Although she will grudgingly acquiesce, mostly on her own terms, Mom will often sneak out of her bedroom and back to the pale azure lure of the computer screen.

"What did you do today?" I asked as Tripp slumbered in his car seat, emitting the occasional uh or guh.

"Well, I went to the beach for lunch with the Sages, and on the way back in the car Andy and I suddenly broke out into song."

"Song?" I repeated, fork in hand.

"Song," my mother laughed. "I used to sing it you and your sisters," Mom said to Katherine.

"I think you mean to me and my sisters," I corrected.

"Well, it goes like this: A big bold man was this desperado from Cripple Creek way out in Colorado, and he came to town like a big tornado and everywhere he went he gave his WA-HOO!"

As my mother sang, gesturing with her hands like a band leader, I remembered.

"Wasn't there something about how he came into Chicago just to give the West a rest...?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Wasn't there a song about the Titanic?" Katherine asked. "You sang me a song about it," she said to me.

Without pausing a beat, my mother and I immediately launched into the Titanic song: "Oh, they built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue, and they thought they had a ship that the water would never go through, but the Lord with his mighty hand said the ship would never land. It was sad when that great ship went down..."

"It was sad," Mom sang.

"It was sad,"I echoed.

"It was sad when that great ship went down (to the bottom of the) husbands and wives little children lost their lives..."

"More cake, Katherine?" my mother asked after the last verse.

"I'd love some, Gogs, thanks."

"Oh, look, the baby is waking up!" Mom exclaimed, brandishing the cake knife.

Katherine lifted Tripp in his car seat throne as he stretched and snuffled, and brought him close to his great-grandmother, who touched his tiny feet.

"They're so soft," she said, gently tickling them. "Ticky ticky."

Conversing with Little Gobblets

2011-07-05T09:09:00.003-04:00

We were all hanging out in the kitchen: Yeh Yeh (Grandpa) was making his special blueberry pancakes breakfast with yogurt and fresh berries and maple syrup, and Oliver had pulled himself up onto the kitchen island by his elbows to explain the finer points of a game called Gobblets, a game of strategy not unlike tic-tac-toe.

"First, we do rochambeau to see who goes first," Oliver said.

"Okay," I agreed.

"Once, twice, thrice," I chanted, as my mother had taught me a good fifty years before.

"It's not once, twice, thrice," Oliver corrected. "It's rochambeau." He shook his head, as if having to explain something to a child much younger than himself, say a three-year-old.

"When I learned, it was once, twice, thrice," I said, feeling ancient, "But, let's just say rochambeau."

We counted off and I threw rock. Oliver instantly formed something that looked like a peaked roof with his hands raised at eye level.

"Volcano!" he crowed. "Volcano beats everything."

"Volcano? What do you mean volcano?" I asked. "There's no volcano in rochambeau."

"Well, let's say there is."

"Let's say you throw lava," Oliver elaborated, making a wavy motion with his hands. "Volcano would beat lava."

"Or dinosaur," Maggie suggested. "Volcano would definitely beat dinosaur."

"I see your point," I said. "Why don't you just go first, Ollie."

"How about a game of I Spy?" I suggested later as we drove towards the politically themed Bread and Puppet Museum in Glover, Vermont. "Maggie can go first."

"I spy with my little eye something blue," Maggie said,

"Is it in the car?" asked Oliver.

"Yes, it's in the car."

"Is it Yeh Yeh's shirt?"

"No."

"Is it Maggie's fleece?" I guessed.

"No."

"Is it the cover of the Map of Vermont?" Yeh Yeh tried.

"No."

"Is it the sky?" I said absently.

"No, in the car," said Maggie.

After a few more rounds of incorrect guesses, it was determined that what Maggie had spied was a thin line of blue writing on an envelope just barely visible poking out from behind the sun visor on the passenger side.

"Are the puppets we're going to see scary?" Oliver wanted to know.

"I think some of them could be scary," I said, "But, I've never actually seen them. They're pretty big."

"How big?" Maggie asked.

"I'm not sure," I said, not realizing that some of the puppets are actually 15 feet high, described as some of the largest puppets in the world.

"What if I don't actually want to go in?" Oliver asked a few minutes later.

"What if I just want to peek inside from the front door to see if they're scary, and not actually go deep into the heart of the museum?"

"That's fine," said Yeh Yeh reassuringly. "You don't have to go in at all. You and I can wait outside while Maggie and Amy go in."

"But, if I change my mind, can I still go in?"

"Of course," we said.

"It's okay, Ollie, if you don't want to," Maggie said.

"Just because I don't want to doesn't mean I'm not brave," Oliver said emphatically.

"Of course not," we said.

"Because I am brave."

"You're a brave warrior," said Yeh Yeh. "Like me."

We all peeked inside the entrance of the Bread and Puppet Museum which was housed in a large old barn with a wide-planked wooden floor. An elderly woman, her long white hair pulled back, wearing an apron, long skirt, faded lavender blouse and black shoes greeted us and suggested we might particularly like to see a flying pig puppet. She had wisely deduced that some of us might be feeling a bit timid.

"See?" she said, as she rapped gently on a large puppet face. "They're all made of papier mache - paper. There are some interesting ones down this aisle," she smiled at Oliver.

The puppets were thrilling and frightening and brilliant. The Bread and Puppet troupe, which performed in New York City during the Vietnam Era, travels throughout New York and Vermont, participating in parades and performing live theatre. We found the flying pink pig and then Ollie and Yeh Yeh waited while Maggie and I tiptoed upstairs to where the truly GINORMOUS puppets were.

"It's okay, Ollie," Maggie called down to her brother. "They're not too scary. You can come up."

So, Ollie and his grandfather joined us, Ollie safely ensconced in his grandfather's arms, and we explored and touched cautiously and imagined what it all might mean, and told stories. We spied George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and the Devil.

"Let's go now," Ollie said.

"We were all brave," said Maggie.

"We were all brave warriors," Yeh Yeh echoed.

Berry Pickin'

2011-06-24T07:20:00.002-04:00

"Time to get ready to go pick strawberries," I announced after Maggie and Ollie, Juan the Gardener's visiting grandchildren finished up their breakfast of made-from-scratch blueberry pancakes. Ollie liked his pancakes with just a bit of butter spread on top ("even the corners") and requested his own small bowl of maple syrup for dunking each bite. Maggie asked for seconds.

I was anxious to get us all going. The weather forecast had called for rain and I had visions of endless games of hide n' seek, or worse, getting trapped inside the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

"Are we there yet?" Ollie asked after we had turned out of the driveway onto the main road.

"Not quite," we laughed.

"How much longer?" Maggie asked.

"About 20 minutes," Juan the Gardener aka Yeh-Yeh replied.

"How much is that?"

"About as long as your Flowertop video."

"That's the stupidest movie ever," Ollie grumbled from his booster seat. "Only two-year-olds watch it." (The twins are five.)

"Ollie and I are Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn," said Juan the Gardener.

"Who are they?" Maggie asked.

"Boys who go on adventures," he explained.

"Well, I'm Mary Poppins," Maggie said. "And she's magic."

We met Elizabeth at the farm and she guided us down to the long, neat rows of strawberries. On the way, we stopped a few times to kick a soccer ball for Bob the Border Collie. Elizabeth explained that we were to pick only the berries that were bright red all the way around; we were to examine them carefully, leaving the ones with white tips or those partly orange for another day. We picked on both sides of our row, wandering off occasionally into adjacent ones and needing to be summoned gently back once or twice. While Juan bent to search beneath the leaves, Oliver danced back and forth, popping berries into his mouth. Maggie and I brought up the rear.

"Is this a good one?" Maggie would ask, before gently plucking each one off its stem.

"It's perfect," I said.

As we picked, it began to rain, a soft drizzle at first, then harder.

"Let's go!" Juan called, so we gathered our trays of berries and raced back up the hill.

"When we get back can we first cozy up and then have strawberry smoothies and strawberry milkshakes and strawberry jam and watch the rest of Mary Poppins?" Oliver asked.

"I'm not sure we have enough berries for jam," I said, "But, I could make strawberry crisp."

"Then can we first cozy up and then have strawberry smoothies and strawberry milkshakes and strawberry crisp and watch the rest of Mary Poppins?" Oliver asked.

"Sure," we laughed.

"Ollie is eating all the berries!" Maggie said.

"Here, Mags, you can have some," Ollie offered.

"So then," Ollie continued, "Can we follow my plan when we get home? Can we follow it exactly?"

"Yes," we said.

"What time is it?" Juan yawned.

"Just after 10," I yawned back. "10am."

Cool Dude Meets Julie Andrews

2011-05-31T09:50:00.010-04:00

Harsh words were said. Items were dumped from drawers. A suitcase was packed. A paintbrush lay in a congealing pool of yellow paint in a room half-painted. We, unwilling participants in a dispute over money that churned with childhood echos and blurred images of how things should be, retreated unhappily to our corners. At times, we are both wounded and dramatic and stubborn and angry and confused and ever so vulnerable. Our feelings get hurt. We attack. We go too far.

Coming back to sanity after such a lapse is painful. It's like walking with cement boots. Each step back towards the other requires such willingness. It would be so much easier not to. But here we are, and where else is there?

It feels like pushing through heavy curtains. We reach for each other's hand, someone makes coffee, we sit on the couch in the living room, and gently begin anew.

It was there on the living room couch earlier this morning surrounded by potted plants and our favorite framed art, when I met the Cool Dude.

"Why didn't you come down to welcome me home when I came back from Long Island?" I asked. (This wasn't the basis of The Fight, but a tiny thread in my own skein of resentments.)

"I don't know," Juan the Gardener replied thoughtfully, "But, I think I have certain pictures in my mind about how couples relate. I think you do too. I think most couples do. When our images cross, we begin to have problems."

"Tell me about your pictures," I said. I felt a familiar flicker of fondness.

"Mine go way back," Juan said. "Way back to my hippie days, to when I wanted to be a Cool Dude. I had a good friend and I thought we were Cool Dudes and Cool Dudes related to one another in a certain way. We were, you know cool, laid back. When he didn't behave the way I expected, I realized for the first time that my ideas about how things should be weren't necessarily like someone else's."

"So, a Cool Dude doesn't welcome his girlfriend home with too much enthusiasm, is that it?"

"Yeah, sort of. We're cool, you and I, we don't have to get all caught up in convention. You know how much I love you. We're relaxed, we'll just relax into being back together after you've been away. Not too much effort."

"Well, I have more of a romantic idea of how couples relate," I said. "Sort of a Sound of Music idea. You rush downstairs to greet me, bearing flowers, possibly edelweiss, perhaps singing. An unseen orchestra would swell. Our lips would touch."

We laughed.

"Probably when I was hanging around with long hair imagining myself to be a Cool Dude, people were saying to themselves that guy, he's just strange," Juan said.

We laughed again.

"Yeah, I completely understand," I said. "It's like we don't know our parts in each other's plays. We haven't read the scripts, we haven't rehearsed our roles."

We misread the cues, we flub our lines.

I looked at Juan and he looked back, and we saw each other, as if for the first time.

I Bought Bought Bought and Survived

2011-05-29T08:41:00.015-04:00

Tripp and his mom were napping when I first forayed to the mecca of box stores for new parents: Buy Buy Baby. Clutching my list on which I had scribbled a few simple items like night light, diaper bag, organic baby wipes, kimonos and breast pads, I froze in the doorway in the face of bewildering arrays of... BABY STUFF. Miles of baby clothes on circular racks, a parking lot sized space of jog strollers, walls of car seats from infant carriers to convertible carriers to booster seats, rolling shelves, aisle upon aisle; what looked like striped baby circus tents hung from the ceiling. I felt instantly nauseous.

"Can I help you?" a cheerful woman piped up.

I may have muttered something unintelligible, but mostly I was backing away.

"Do you have a list?" she tried.

I nodded.

"Can I see it?"

I held it out.

She found me a cart and guided me to where newborn kimonos - what Tripp's dad refers to as Jedi Knight shirts, because they snap cross-ways across the baby's chest - could be found. I took a breath. They came in white, three to a pack.

"N-night light?" I stammered.

"Right over here." She pointed to a shelf, excused herself, and vanished behind a stack of pink musical potty seats that twinkle when baby tinkles. There were yellow star night lights, vintage Mickey Mouse night lights, nights lights with 72-hour ultrasonic humidifiers, night lights that talk and tell time. I chose something jungle-ish with a monkey and giraffe on it, and fled.

I called Katherine in front of a floor-to-ceiling display of designer diaper bags. A video extolling the benefits of temperature-controlled baby whirlpool spas played softly nearby.

"Huminahuminahumina," I stammered into my cell phone like Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners when Katherine answered.

"Mom? Where are you?"

"D-diaper bags," I said.

"Mom? I trust you completely. Whatever you choose will be fine."

After I finished up the remaining items, having consulted a variety of mothers on the subject of nursing pads and grooming kits, and having bypassed "Boogie Wipes," but scooping up a few bottles of hand sanitizer, I ventured by elevator to the second floor. Katherine had mentioned needing a rocking chair. A saleswoman pounced the instant the elevator doors slid shut behind me.

"New grandmother?" she demanded.

"Why, yes."

"Lunatic on the second floor!" she shouted.

Several people who didn't look much like new parents were seated in what were termed "rockers." One man held a venti-sized cup from Starbucks and was reading the New York Post. A woman was doing her nails.

"Can I help you find anything?" asked the saleswoman who had denounced me as a crazy person.

"I think I'm done," I said, overwhelmed by clusters of jungle-themed baby furniture sets, baby swimming pools and masses of stuffed monkeys.

"I nearly got you one of those Baby on Board stickers," I told Katherine later.

"I'm so glad you didn't," she said. "Have you seen those stickers that people paste on their rear windows that tell everyone on the road who's in the family? There's a mother, a father, two children, a parakeet, a dog, a gold fish, whatever."

"Yeah, they're really dumb," I agreed. An open invitation to home invaders I fretted, with some of my usual paranoia. In my day, had we been sticker people, our family station wagon would have boasted cutesy stickers depicting a mother, a father, three girls, two dogs, numerous cats, a few ducks, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, languishing baby turtles, newts, and a horse named Sam.

"Once, I saw a car with 13 cats on it," Katherine laughed. "Can you imagine?"

"No," I said. "Can I hold the baby now?"

PS: By the way, no one, not even a lunatic grandmother's first grandson, needs this. Am I right?

Naming Grandmother

2011-05-20T21:55:00.005-04:00

I'm obsessed with finding a grandmother name. It needs to be perfect, which is why my daughter (the baby's mother) was 6 weeks old before her older sister came home with the name Katherine from pre-school. It was the name of a classmate's new baby sister. The name on Katherine's birth certificate read "Baby Girl Robinson" until she was 10, when a trip from Vermont to Long Island was required to change it.

Katherine was adamant about me - or anyone else - not knowing the names she and Ty had chosen for Baby Tripp. When Juan the Gardener and I visited at Thanksgiving, The Big Book of 60,000 Baby Names lay on the coffee table. I picked it up and it fell open to a page marked by a small white piece of paper. Despite my determined resolve to say nothing, my mouth fell open when I noticed the name of a well-known Southern writer printed in Katherine's neat script.

"Oh, my God," I blurted, before I could stop, "You're not thinking of naming the baby ---? I mean, I doubt the baby will pen another -----." I named a literary classic featuring a feathered creature in the title. That's all I can say.

"And that," said my daughter, clanging pans, "Is exactly why we're not telling anyone."

Juan had to walk me around the block a few times while he suggested that I not mention one more word about names.

"Use discriminating awareness," he urged. "You can do it."

Even while Katherine lay post c-section in recovery, babbling happily through exultant tears about seeing the color blue in the operating room, she wouldn't give so much as a hint of a name until Ty was present. I love that.

Back to grandmother names. There's "Granny," which I kind of like. It's just sort of how I feel, and it's light-hearted. My mother, the baby's great-grandmother is known to grandchildren and greats alike as "Gogs," short for "grand old gal." But, that's her name. My grandmother wanted to be called "Grandmere," but the best we could manage, not being French, was "Grumma." On my father's side, our grandmother was known as "Nan" short for Nancy, or "Nin-Nin," which is what I called her.

Katherine likes "Mormor," the Swedish equivalent, but I don't, particularly as it sounds too much like More! More! which is a failing I wrestle with most days. More peanut M&Ms, more Tate's Oatmeal Raisin cookies, etc. There's "Oma," which is German and which, quite frankly, leaves me cold.

Juan is known as "Yeh Yeh" to his grandchildren, so I went with the feminine version, "Ya Ya." Positive and playful. Perfect, I thought. "Ya Ya."

"I'm Ya Ya," my sister Helen stated, when I tried it out on her and my mother at lunch one day. Even though I was a mite disappointed, she got to be grandmother first, so the only mature action was to defer.

Some other thoughts, returning to Francophilia, have included "Beauma" and "Bellemere."

"Goodnight, Grandma," Ty said, when I left after dinner the other night.

"Hm," I replied, banging myself with the screen door, "Not bad. Grandma," I repeated.

"Kind of traditional," Katherine commented.

After some serious reflection, I decided "Grandma" sounded like a grey-bun-and-support-hose type of grandmother. I'm more the jeans, tee shirt and Tory Burch flip-flops type.

Next, I looked up grandmother names on-line. There was even a test to match one's personality to a corresponding name. The ensuing results described me as "intellectual" and "literary," the sort of grandmother likely to take my grandson on a museum outing, and to read him The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I was also depicted as "natural." Tripp and I shall splash in puddles and hike Vermont's Long Trail. The name this test produced, however, was an insult: "Me Maw." Me Maw? Like Hee Haw or Gee Gaw? No, thanks.

Then I came up with "Lela," pronounced "Layla," after the Spanish word for grandmother: Abuela. I know a little Spanish, and I spend time in Mexico. Both Juan the Gardener and Katherine liked it, but Jane didn't.

"What? You're hanging out on the corner in Spanish Harlem?" she snorted. (She doesn't get out much.) "Besides," she continued, "Did you ever hear a baby burbling "lalala"? They can't. Find something else."

Names can be difficult.

"It was a pleasure to meet you, Tree," my mother said sweetly after her visit to the hospital to meet her great-grandson.

"Actually, it's Tripp," corrected my daughter.

"Of course. Goodbye, Trey," said my mother.

Back to the original dilemma: I still have a fondness for "Lela," but, c'est moi?

Grooving on Grannyhood

2011-05-17T08:34:00.002-04:00

I waited outside the glass doors that separated "Labor and Delivery" from the operating room, knowing my daughter was on the operating table, and that her husband, clad in white paper scrubs, booties, cap and mask was by her side. I paced. Was that, finally, the unmistakable cry of a newborn? Did Katherine call out, "Is that my baby?"

Then, there was Ty as they rolled out the newest littlest being. Elation lit up his face like a torch. The glass doors opened, a nurse was reaching into the incubator and picking up a little swaddled bundle of baby boy and asking, "Is this the Grandmother?" Ty said yes and she handed him to me. The moment has gone. The feelings are stitched into my heart, that sort of love that is forever, an echo of holding my own newborn children, giddy and tremulous and grateful and delighted and delirious with joy. Someone took a picture. When I looked later it was all face, wet-eyed, stoned with happiness. The baby wore a tiny knitted blue cap.

I followed behind the rolling caravan of nurse and Daddy and baby boy. Ty stopped and pushed the button that caused "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to issue forth from invisible speakers, announcing the latest new birth. In the hallway outside the nursery, we ran smack into Katie and Jane, who are two of the Aunties, and the baby's 9 year-old cousin Isabelle. We wept and hugged and bounced and cheered and gazed through the nursery window at Ty as he gazed at his son, squiggling around and howling as the nurse examined him.

Then Katherine was in recovery, numb-legged and groggy, happier then I've ever seen her, and she and Ty stared at each other in another one of those fat moments where words are unnecessary and they said his name: Anthony Fowler Cirelli, III. "He'll be called Tripp," Katherine said. "With two ps."

Welcome little one. You are perfect.

Baby Coming

2011-05-11T09:54:00.003-04:00

"Mom?"

"What's going on?" I spoke into the phone with carefully practiced calm. I had been to a weekend meditation workshop with Pema. I was chill.

"Something's different."

"Different how?" I asked. I gripped the phone and mimed a state of joy to those in the room.

"I've been having pretty strong cramps about 4 minutes apart."

"Hm," I said.

"Should I call the doctor? I probably should call the doctor. I'll call the doctor. I'll just go ahead and call the doctor."

"Sounds like a good idea," I said. "Then call me back."

"Is this IT?" my friend Jane squealed. "This is IT, right?" A burgeoning ebullience lit her face from to grin to eyebrows. "I knew it!" (She always knows it.) "And you're here! Isn't that completely amazing?" She meant that there I was, about to participate - well, if not actually in the delivery room at the end of things, so to speak - in one of the most beautiful experiences ever, and there I was with her. My friend.

"She's going to have a baby girl tonight!" she stated.

"Not necessarily," I said.

"You got 20 bucks?"

After Katherine had spoken with the doctor, and called her husband Ty, she decided to pack a bag just in case, and sort of putter at home and sort of time contractions.

"Just come over," she requested.

I nearly drove over Jane backing up out of the driveway, but I was totally present. I swear.

"Oops, there goes another one," Katherine said, rubbing her belly and wincing. "What time is it?"

"7:15."

"Write it down."

"Do you have a pen?" I wrote "7:15" carefully at the top of a white legal pad, feeling terribly important.

Upstairs in the nursery, we looked at all the tiny baby clothes packed neatly away in the built-in bureau painted white. Blankets had been folded and stored beneath the changing table. There were oodles of onesies. A bucket of spackle and a can of paint were under the window. Goodnight Moon was in the bookshelf. A little cow-ish rocking toy stood in the corner. Two little outfits for taking Baby C home from the hospital lay in the crib.

"I know... the paint and spackle cans, but, the baby won't be in here -- ooh, what time is it?"

"7:19."

"Mark it down."

"I'll clean everything," I said. "Don't worry about a thing."

"What do you think?" Ty asked when he arrived home.

"I don't know, I guess this could be it," I shrugged.

"He's asking me, Mom, ooh, another one. What time is it?"

"7:30." Ty said, looking around. "By the kitchen clock."

"7:25." I said simultaneously, checking my watch.

"What does it say on the TV?" Katherine demanded.

"The TV? It doesn't say anything on the TV," I said.

"You two are retarded. Can't you even tell time?"

At the hospital, things were light, joyous, edged with a touch of anxious humor.

"You're going to be so much fun," the admitting nurse proclaimed. "Labor and Delivery is upstairs around the blahdeblah elevator around the blahdeblah corner," I heard.

Upon exiting the elevator, I went South, Ty went East, and Katherine strode West.

But, we found it, and a young nurse placed a blue disk like a laundry pellet upon Katherine's mountainous belly. We tracked Baby C's heartbeat chugachugging on the computer screen and watched a little rounded hump of a curve marking a contraction.

"Oo," Katherine breathed.

"That's it, Sweetie, you're doing great," I croaked. Ty's legs danced and jumped. I had no saliva.

But, after a quick examination from the MD on call, it proved to be a non-starter. We checked out.

"Keep the phone by your ear," directed my daughter. "I have a feeling we'll be going back later. Oh, that was a strong one."

I called Will.

"It's started," I said.

"Uh huh."

"She's in labor!"

"Uh huh."

"She's not quite a centimeter dilated and her cervix is 90%..."

"Whoa! Whoa! Hold on!"

"Oh, come on, Will. This is a fact of life. You'll be dealing with this yourself someday," I giggled.

"This is my sister, all right? There are certain things I don't need to know. Boy or girl, niece or nephew,
that's it."

"Oh, for Pete's sake! I'll call you when things get going."

"I love you. Oh, sorry I didn't call you back on Mother's Day. I didn't have my phone."

As I reached for my cell about 6 a.m this morning, it rang.

"We're back in the hospital," Katherine said, sounding exhausted. "It's definitely today."

"Oh, boy," I said. "Or girl."

"Don't rush, but come over," she said.

"Okay."

"Oh, and that breathing thing you were teaching me? They don't do that anymore. You're supposed to go hehehehe now."

"Oh," I said. Note to self: No more suggestions. Just be there.

Then I called Jane. "I win," I said.

Whack it! Ball

2011-05-03T08:43:00.000-04:00

We thought it looked fun. It would be a sport we could share, we agreed. Plus, there were the benefits of exercise. So, we signed up to take a few lessons, swinging our racket ball rackets impatiently as we listened to Bob explain the finer points of the game. The truth is: put a racket in my hand and I just want to hit something, I don't want to listen. It was harder than it looked, and we spent hours striking out in every direction like twin windmills run amuck, trying to anticipate where the blasted ball would bounce next.

"Try not to hit the ball over your heads to avoid shoulder injury," Bob instructed.

"Right!" we grunted, flailing wildly. We caromed off the walls. We collided. We fell to the hard wooden floor, limbs tangled, howling with laughter.

We bought special sneakers: white with removable colored plastic chevrons. Red for Juan and green for me.

There is something about a racket sport that ignites an aggressive streak in me. I play to win and, as I suspected, so does Juan the Gardener. It began with the rules.

"If I hit myself with the ball first, is that my point or yours?" Juan asked.

"Mine," I said.

"It wouldn't be a do-over?"

"No."

If we couldn't agree, we went to the front desk like two children to have a grown-up decide. One of us might say, "Ah ha!" if she were right. We limped from the court after an hour's combat, gingerly kneading our shoulders, our necks torqued.

"Isn't racket ball kind of hard on the body?" concerned friends questioned.

"Nah!" we said.

Once, one of us hit the other deliberately.

"That's it! I think we have to break up," I said dramatically.

"No, we don't! I'm sorry. I just lost it. It can be your point."

I didn't heed Bob's warning about hitting the ball low, because smashing an overhead with all my strength felt so delicious, so within a few weeks I couldn't lift my right arm above my shoulder. Massage didn't help, but two months of bi-weekly physical therapy did.

Now, seven months later, we're back at it. We've gotten better. We play the angles; we vary our serves. Juan has a sneaky serve that glides along the wall and slides down, rendering a return impossible. When he uses it, I want to bash something. We wear plastic goggles for protection, which proved to be a good thing since recently the ball hit me dead on between the eyes, leaving a red indentation. Yesterday in the midst of a skirmish, a loud thunk! sounded behind me. I made the shot first, then spun around. Juan was prostrate on the floor.

"What happened?" I asked, trying hard not to grin until I had assessed the damage.

"I hit my head on the wall and bounced off," Juan explained.

"Are you okay?" I asked. I rubbed his poor sweaty head and offered him a hand up.

"I'm fine," he panted. "Did you get it?"

"Yeah, I did."

We quit at two games each, but I've been wondering: is this a game for two Buddhists who believe in practicing basic goodness and non-aggression?

Last night after showers and quesadillas, we sat together on the couch and watched baseball. Juan held the clicker.

"If you rub my shoulder, we can watch the Yankees," he said. "If you don't, we watch the Red Sox."

Is there a grown-up in the house?

Keeping my Mouth Shut (Mostly)

2011-05-02T10:32:00.001-04:00

I try to keep my mouth shut - really, I do. But there are just certain subjects, like using pesticides on one's lawn, where I just can't help myself.

"You're what?" I asked someone in my family who owns a dog named Quincy and is about to produce the Baby of the Century.

"Mom, our lawn is dead."

"Okay," I said, with that extra little inflection I sometimes use when it really isn't okay. Then I got off the phone.

The next morning I sent an email:

Hi Sweetie,
I've been worrying about you using pesticide on your lawn. I really wouldn't, not with Quincy and the new baby. They say to keep off it for 24 hours, but the lasting effects are extremely toxic. What's a little crab grass? Please consider using something organic or just leaving it be. It's just grass, and the risks of pesticides are proven to be hazardous.
xxMom

"Oy veh," my daughter's response began. "Relax. It's not just a little crab grass - it's all brown and dead and looks terrible. I'll look into using lemon juice and vinegar as an alternative..."

I used to blurt things out. I just had to. I believed that keeping things to myself could quite possibly cause cancer. I also used to fire poison darts of emails and then sit back, fingers poised above the keyboard ready to do battle. Eventually I realized that emails sent in anger had far reaching consequences. First, they were preserved in writing and could be referred back to or forwarded on to members of one's family, which made small, interpersonal dramas much worse. There were those initial rapid pulse, heart thumping feelings of self-righteous indignation, but they evaporated leaving me deflated, vaguely guilty, and embarrassed. Ugh.

"You need to practice restraint of pen and tongue," a wise friend suggested. "Give it the three-day rule," she advised. "You can write it all out, but don't hit send." After several dozen false starts, this strategy worked. By the third day, I usually no longer cared; or, if I did feel strongly about a particular situation, I had time to fashion a thoughtful missive.

Back to my daughter. We were discussing the actual birth, who would be where, who would NOT (sigh) be in the delivery room, and I casually inquired would she be attending lamaze classes.

"No," she said. "I don't have time, and besides I know how to breathe."

So Close

2011-04-20T09:37:00.003-04:00

One minute she was there: playing by the open door of the dress shop. My mother and I were trying on clothes.We had instructed my then two year-old daughter, blonde hair gone curly from Floridian humidity, to "stay put." I was half-listening behind the louvered dressing room door.

A few seconds later, an instinctual warning tugged at my heart. I peeked out. She was gone.

"KATHERINE!" I shouted. I leaped to the door and searched up and down the sidewalk and out into the street with frenzied laser-beam eyes. I took in a cream-colored station wagon, sidling down the block, slowly, shark-like, as if cruising for prey. I saw my little daughter, trundling away, holding a strange woman's hand.

"STOP!" I bellowed. "THAT'S MY DAUGHTER!" I bounded up to the woman, heart hammering.

"Oh?" she said. "I was trying to help her find her mommy."

I knew and I didn't know how close we'd come.

"I'm her mommy. I was in that shop," I pointed, trembling. "Right there."

I picked up my daughter and turned away. I knew. I didn't speak another word to the woman, not a single stuttered thank-you, not an accusation. I turned around once, saw the cream-colored station wagon cruise up to this stranger who had had my daughter's hand in hers. A door opened, the woman got in, the car drove off.

"What happened?" I asked Katherine. I shuddered with guilt.

"She gave me some taffy," Katherine answered.

We had the talk about never EVER EVER going anywhere with anyone, about never EVER taking candy from strangers. But, the truth was, if my mother's watchful heart had skipped a single beat, she would have been gone.

How could a mother EVER live with that?

Hours later, a blurry slow motion image of the cream-colored station wagon driving slowly by re-played itself in my mind. A glint of sunshine obscured the driver's face. In the flood of feelings - terror and guilt and relief - it hadn't occurred to me to call the police. I had been consumed with my daughter's safety. What about the other children?

I'm haunted still.

Finding a Place in the Sun

2011-04-15T11:28:00.000-04:00

Following a lengthy operation to repair our 6 month-old baby daughter's broken heart, her dad and I took her to my parents' new place in Florida - a dock's length away from the ocean. We needed to rest, to let half a year's anxiety and vigilance drain away. I had slept on the floor by her crib, dropped heart medicine into her mouth like a mother bird, my senses attuned to the slightest change in her breathing. We hadn't even dared to hope.

Within days of luxuriating in balmy sunshine Katherine's previously gaunt little face with its pale bluish tinge blossomed into bountiful cheeks flushed with healthy pink color - the sort of cheeks that elicited exclamations of delight from strangers in supermarkets.

I held my daughter against my heart as we basked like sea animals in the pool. Her blue eyes sparkled under the yellow sunflower of a sun hat. She grew chins. She sprouted a tooth.

"I don't think that baby's mother would want her to be in the pool," a dour observer remarked.

"I am the baby's mother, and she loves it!" I said, twirling my daughter like a baby seal.

Her dad and I lay on the beach while Katherine sat beneath a beach umbrella gumming rattles and grinning.

At 11th months old, she wobbled in her grandparents' living room from chair to coffee table to couch. She raced in circles on the springy spongy green turf a year later. We picked strawberries with my father.

When my parents gave endless streams of cocktail parties, Katherine hid beneath the square stone coffee table in a little blue smocked dress and red sandals, reached a hand up to filch cooked shrimp.

"Hurry up! Scat! Go!" she ordered, when my mother lingered too long saying good-bye.

Once, when her brother Will was about 4, we drove down from Vermont. To distract her brother, Katherine read the entire "Goosebumps" series aloud.

"Keep reading!" Will and I demanded, when she paused for breath.

Over 32 years we've seen dolphins, herons tall as toddlers, miles of fish flipping and dying in the sun from strange tides; we've searched for gold doubloons following a tropical depression that carved away sections of sand dunes; we've spied sea turtle eggs, gathered shells, made mermaids' purses from seaweed. We've jumped the waves holding hands and squealing. We've watched the Space Shuttle, felt the earth tremble, stopped our ears against its mighty roar. We've breakfasted with Mickey. We've balked at Space Mountain.

There was the time when delectable orange blossom perfume wafted in through the car windows as we approached Indian River County.

"Welcome to Florida," I told my daughter.

"This isn't Florida," she stated.

"Why, yes it is, Sweetie," her dad and I laughed. "See - palm trees, orange groves..."

She shook her head.

Only when we pulled up in front of her grandparents' place did she agree. She crossed her 7 or 8 year-old arms, leaned back, and announced, "Now, THIS is Florida."

And not everybody's Florida, to be sure. Not most people's.

In about a month, this daughter and her husband will be having their first child, known fondly to us all as it swims in its mother's womb as "Baby C." My aspiration is for Katherine and her family to find their own place where new experiences and memories will blend and tumble and roll like surf.

Hello?

2011-04-04T08:53:00.004-04:00

My son Will is a busy man. I imagine him happily ensconced in the warmth of a gigantic snow moving machine in Burlington, Vermont, music blasting when a small fluttery disturbance in his Carhart jeans alerts him to an incoming call. He slides his cell phone from his pocket, glances down expectantly, then frowns. Takes a slug of coffee. Calls from me - especially if it's the third or fourth call of the morning and it's only 6:45am - are not relished. I'm not a dazzling 20-something. I'm his Mom.

Chances are quite strong that they are, in fact, dismissed. A chirpy message from me might go something like this: Hi, Will, it's Mom. Again. So, ah, what's new? How are you? How's work? What are you doing for fun? (Giggle.) Are we supposed to get more snow? Well, that's about it. Call me when you get a chance! Okay, love you lots!

When he does return a call, usually after I take a stab at inducing a sticky blanket of guilt, he often cannot keep the beleaguered, annoyed and long-suffering tone from his voice.

Yeah, Ma, it's Will.

Hi! How are you? What's new? How's work?

Deep sigh.

Nothing has changed since our last conversation. Everything is the same. It's cold. There's snow. I get up, I go to work, I come home, I go to bed, then I do it again.

So, nothing is new? Not one thing?

Deep sigh.

If something were new, you'd be the first to know.

(I'll bet.)

Is there anything else?

I guess not, it's just I wish you would tell me one tiny snippet about your life is all.

I don't have any snippets. I don't have time for snippets.

Deep sigh.

You are 24 years old! You must have time for a snippet or two. Giggle.

Are we done talking about snippets, 'cause I gotta go.

Okay, bye, then.

Bye, love you.

Love you too.

When I learned how to text, I sent him a message: M txtng! His retort was swift: Don't.

Yesterday, I noticed his name on my Facebook page, in the bottom right corner under Chat. I pounced. I had been thinking about my sisters, and wondered if he had any strong feelings about his two sisters. He is 13 years younger than one, and 8 years younger than the other.

Do you feel you are close to your siblings? I typed. They weren't mean to you growing up, were they? (The way I was to mine.)

I smiled to myself, picturing the aggravated scowl on his scruffily bearded, handsome face. I could even hear the prolonged sigh.

Where is this coming from?

Just thinking about sisters - mine, yours, and writing about it. They adored you, didn't they?

I don't wanna be in it. And yes, they adored me. Gotta go. Love you.

Wait! I typed hastily.

A small automatic message appeared in the message box: Will is offline.

Confessions of a Mean Sister

2011-03-31T08:04:00.000-04:00

After spending some time on Long Island with my two younger sisters, memories and feelings have been percolating. It was a stressful time. We were traversing new territory regarding care for our mother, who was transitioning between the hospital and a rehabilitation facility. Emotions connected to past family history surfaced and receded. I was not a kind sister. I wanted to be, but when my sisters were born, it was complicated. I felt misplaced, if not erased.

My sister Helen was indeed a special baby. My mother had endured the loss of six previous babies through miscarriage. As a mother myself, I can't begin to imagine that realm of suffering. After my parents adopted me, it became possible for my mother to undergo a procedure that would enable her to carry a baby to term. Her own baby. After the procedure, she was confined to bed for the duration of the pregnancy.

My mother moved downstairs to our family room which, with its large open white brick fire place and comfy chairs and rug just right for somersaults and cartwheels, became the heart center of the house. Her bed, strewn with books and papers was an island to which I swam. Mom and I played checkers and backgammon and made recordings for the blind on funny green plastic records, and she read to me. I did errands with my father on weekends - to Britton's Hardware store and to Bauer's Drugstore for ice cream cones. He and I made pancakes or waffles with sausage on Sundays. I acquired a taste for kippered herring. When it was time for my mother to give birth, my father trundled her joyfully down to the car in a wheelbarrow. There was an anticipatory feel to things - as if the house itself were holding its breath.

When my mother came home with my new little sister, a fearsome Gorgon of a baby nurse took charge. Entry to the nursery involved stern admonitions regarding germs, and not touching the baby; I felt lost in the shuffle. I loved my baby sister, but then I grew jealous, and afraid that maybe I wasn't needed.

Lacking the language of fear, I acted out in a variety of destructive ways. When my youngest sister, Tina, was born 11 months later, I panicked. Oh, no, I must have thought. Oh, no.

I was mean. I teased relentlessly. A lot of the time. Our nanny was wont to say I "tormented" my two sisters, younger than me by 6 and 7 years.

I was daring my parents to give me back. They didn't. But, my behavior caused deep rifts between my sisters and me. I've made amends, knowing that deeper trust takes time. Meanwhile, I am trying to be a good sister, the sort of older sister I would want. A blossoming wellspring of love for them both has arisen that words written in a blog can't begin to express. Words can't erase damage done, but a faithful adherence to remaining present through all the discomfort of regret does help to ease the pain of the past. At least somewhat.

I am hopeful that we three sisters can turn toward each other, rather than away. Patience for our halting progress is required - and gentleness.

Fun with Dick and Helene

2011-03-26T14:03:00.040-04:00

Lynn, my mother's chief caregiver/secretary/computer tutor, also known as Lynne 1 to differentiate from Lynne 2, who usually spends nights, stands in the hallway outside my mother's hospital room. Lynne has Valkyeric presence: tall, with long, rippling blonde hair, she's a gentle persistent force, invaluable to Mom. Lynne gets things done.

At times, I'm fairly certain Mom considers Lynne to be the daughter she never had, even though she already has three daughters, but that is just a thought.

"We've been banished," she tells me, grinning.

"Banished?"

"Your Mom is on the phone with Dick."

Dick is an old flame of my mother's. Once, long before my father proposed, Dick asked Mom to marry him. My mother received lots of proposals in those days, and a few engagement rings, which she returned. She kept notches on her hairbrush. I knew about some of these suitors, but this was one about whom she'd kept mum. She had said 'no' to Dick, and they had each married other people.

Then, a few years ago - when she was in her mid-80s - his name came up. They'd been in contact. I was stunned.

"What are you talking about?" I demanded. "Who is this Dick?"

"He's a very successful newspaper publisher who lives in New Jersey, a dear old friend. He knew me when I was a girl at Saranac Lake."

"Oh, brother," I said.

"I've always felt badly, somehow, about saying 'no' to Dick," she said wistfully.

"What about Dad?"

"Oh, I would never have married Dick, and I loved your father, it's just..." she trailed off.

"No one but Dad would have been able to stick it out," I muttered.

"What was that?"

"Nothing."

Mom and Dick wrote letters, and talked on the phone. "He's a Democrat," she complained. "A liberal."

Once, she visited the liberal at his home in New Jersey.

"How did that go?" I asked, with the dubious fascination of a rubbernecker passing the scene of an accident.

"He doesn't own a computer, and it felt as though the bed I slept in hadn't been made up in years. There were clothes under the bedspread."

"Whose clothes?" I asked, half imagining lacy lingerie from the 30s.

"I don't know whose clothes, his, I guess. He's been a bachelor for several years ever since his wife, my old friend Franny, died...but, I can't get over the fact he doesn't have a computer!"

When Dick, lanky and stooped, visited Mom, things didn't go so well. He couldn't figure out how to put my mother's Lexus in gear, and a neighbor had to come out and help.

"He got so mad," my mother reported. "He said, 'I'm not going anywhere when I don't know how to drive the car.'"

Nor did he compliment her on her appearance. My mother was swift to retaliate.

She ignored him at that night's dinner party at the club. She talked to the man on her left, leaving Dick to talk to Ethel, who did go on. And on. Then, my mother left him there, cane in hand.

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"I didn't want him to think I was after him for his money," she said.

"What?"

She giggled. "I said to him, 'I think the big important business man can find his own way back to the house.' I was dreadful, really."

Yet Dick persisted. He went to visit Mom in Florida, but he, as she put it to me later, "lacked enthusiasm." He preferred to sit on the couch and chat. My mother had organized enough activities to fell Porfiro Rubirosa: bridge games, dinners, luncheons, concerts, cocktail parties, musical theater. At one point Dick appeared to be having an anxiety attack. He required medication.

"Also," she admitted nervously, "He wanted to have a little kiss."

"Ah!" I interrupted. I batted her words away with my arms. "I don't need to hear another detail!"

"Oh, Amy," she laughed, "Don't be so silly."

See Dick and my mother, Helene - both in their 90s. Dick has recently suffered a partial stroke. Helene is in the hospital, recovering from a nasty fall that left her looking like the survivor of a bar fight, stitches, black eye and all. Dick still doesn't have a computer. He continues to be a Democrat. Helene still doesn't want him to think she's after his money, so she hangs up on him regularly.

"Lynne!" My mother bellows.

We enter the domain that is her hospital room.

"So, how's Dick?" I ask, smirking.

"Well, it wasn't much of a conversation," my mother reports.

"Mostly, I yelled, "What? I can't hear you!"

"And mostly, he said,"Dammit, I can't hear you either!"

Our Patient is Trying...Very

2011-03-24T10:09:00.009-04:00

"Get me out!"

My mother's voice quavers with indignation on her end of the phone.

"What's wrong, Mom?" I ask, my heart thumping.

"Can't talk," she whispers. I take that to mean that Midge, her white-haired diminutive roommate is awake.

"I'll be there soon," I promise. But first, I think, the gym. Without certain routines - meditation, Qi Gong and exercise - it's difficult to stay present.

Last week my mother fell at home. She slipped on some mail and pitched forward face first. Luckily, two of her caregivers were there, changing shifts, and heard the thump.

They exhorted her to lie still, offered reassurance while an ambulance was summoned. She had been taking the drug Coumadin for a blood clot in her groin; there was imminent danger of excessive bleeding. A plastic surgeon stitched her forehead, two places under her right eye, and her left hand. She sustained a concussion.

I drove straight from northern Vermont to the hospital in Glen Cove, New York the following day, hooked on CD after CD of The Time Traveler's Wife, traveling through time zones myself of the interior kind: past and present, hurtling toward an unknown future.

My mother looked frail in her hospital bed, surrounded by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, her phone book, the phone, and small spiral bound notebooks. A yellow begonia, a tiny basket of primroses, and a St. Patrick's Day arrangement of shamrocks lined the windowsill. I glanced at one open notebook page where she'd written the names of her neurologist, her plastic surgeon, the vascular specialist, and the head nurse. My mother thrives on information. She makes lists:

   Willy's b-day!
                                                     Call Rosie, M.L. and Gloria.
                                                     Find out what to do about Debbie's granddaughter - gets headaches during the winter, but not in the summer - wi-fi in the school?

A scarf decorated with shamrocks was draped over a pillow. A tiny open ceramic box held hearing aids, nestled together like cashews.

"Hi, Mom," I said.

She grimaced ruefully at me beneath a mosaic of angry purplish bruises and a blackened right eye - like she'd been ko'd by boxer Micky Ward.

"I was just so stupid," she began.

"It was an accident, Mom. What happened? How are you?" I pushed papers aside and perched on her bed.

"It was the strangest thing, as if the rug just came rushing up to meet me..." Mom said dreamily, gesticulating with her hands for emphasis. She had a headache and felt dizzy; her hospital tray appeared to be sliding away from her. The neurologist explained this was a normal reaction to concussion.

Frail, but feisty.

"How do you get this damn thing to work?" she interrupted herself mid-tale, brandishing the white phone receiver. "They tell you to push 9, I push 9, and nothing happens!"

Frail, but bossy.

"Why didn't anybody get me anything to drink last night?" she snapped. "I asked that one nurse for some water, and it seemed she just couldn't be bothered! It takes these people ages to respond." She made the haughty face - the one that used to instill terror - and glowered.

"I don't think you were allowed to have anything by mouth," I reminded her. Earlier in the day, she had undergone an inferior vena cava filtration procedure to prevent the clot in her groin from moving.

"Well, no one explains anything to you here. I'm going to call B and complain!" I translated this to mean she feels trapped in alien surroundings, anxious, no longer calling the shots. Here, they don't serve 5 prunes in a crystal bowl for breakfast.

My two sisters and I confer by phone. We speak to doctors. We arrange for our mother's caregivers to be with her when we can't, and throughout the night. It's the best we can do. We bring flowers, organic chocolate bars, life savers, her green quilted bathrobe, cookies. We convey phone messages.

After several days, she's deemed too wobbly to return home, but gets the okay to be released to a nearby rehabilitation facility, from which this morning's frantic phone call originated. My youngest sister, who arrived last night from Florida and I are staying at our mother's house on Long Island. We are sitting in the kitchen drinking black tea with soy milk, and eating bowls of raw oats soaked in cider topped with yogurt and sliced apples. It's delicious.

The phone call reins us back abruptly from strategizing a coverage schedule for our mother in the new facility during the day, between bouts of physical therapy.

"What did she say?" my sister asks.

"She wants out."

"Mmmm, how about more tea?" she offers.

Invitation

2011-03-15T09:30:00.000-04:00

Recently, I received an invitation to my 40th high school reunion, a school from which I didn't graduate. I was kicked out. Bounced, as my father said. 40 years later, and I still feel remnants of shame. I can see the girl I was then, sneaking cigarettes, richocheting from exuberance to despair.

The first joyous flash of insight when I realized that A Separate Peace by John Knowles was a theistic story about good and evil, and not just about events at a boys' private school, that literature contained clues about what it is to be human. (It's ironic that there in a southern all girls' boarding school, we were reading about the experiences of boys.) I listened for themes in music appreciation class, studied Jean Valjean in French class, whacked a tennis ball around the courts with my Latin teacher, Jorge Suarez, whom I alternately adored or despised, or ridiculed during class. I charged our pinny-swathed opponents during field hockey games, girded in goalie pads, my face obscured by a face mask. I never passed geometry.

But, increasing swells of anxiety lay beneath the gregarious facade of my rebellious, uniformed teen-age self. When we read Childhood and Society by Erik Erikson, and discussed identity, I felt empty. Who was I? I had no idea. The issue of being adopted, being different and somehow lacking filled my mind with dread.

I told no one. No one must know.

I felt wild. A friend pierced my ears with a safety pin, I dyed my hair. I shrieked and giggled and gossiped and linked arms with my chums. I sprayed a substance into a brown paper bag and inhaled it until I blacked out.

On Father's Day weekend sophomore year, I performed Gunga Din with a practiced cockney accent. Later that day, my cousin would find out from her father that her parents were getting divorced. What had seemed solid was collapsing.

By the following fall, girls riding horses and school team allegiance to mascot Foxes and Hounds seemed superficial and silly. I spent time alone in the woods reading Thoreau, or re-playing Paul Simon's I Am a Rock lyrics:

I have my books

And my poetry to protect me;

I am shielded in my armor,

Hiding in my room, safe within my womb

I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock

I am an island.

I found a separate, uneasy peace, of sorts, taking long walks in the woods. In those days, I didn't know the language of frozen emotions. I turned inward, dis-connected. Eventually, they sent me home.

I was given a second chance: repeating my junior year. But, my friends, now seniors, had outstripped me, were moving rapidly away. I didn't know how to do life, and I was tumbling through space.

One day, after hiding out in the infirmary to avoid an algebra test, I drank a bottle of Romilar CF, the drug of choice for angst-ridden, risk-taking private school girls. The pain stopped, and I literally bounced around campus, giddy and high, with no thought at all about consequences - which were swift.

Within hours of detection, I was packed up and shipped home. There had been the incident of the horse in the academic building, and those illicit cigarettes in the attic, and that undermining mockery of school rules and school spirit.

As Robert Frost's poem - The Road Not Taken - ends: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled
and that has made all the difference

I am the girl I was then, know her bones and spit, foibles and strengths; we're on intimate terms. I am friends with what was once frozen and inexplicable.

Mowin'

2011-03-11T10:18:00.003-05:00

On an early Spring day a small, stooped woman with shoulder length gray hair waited near a plain, battered mailbox. She was wearing a long dark dress over black boots. Her homestead, a collection of gray weathered outbuildings and a large red barn collapsing in upon itself lay across a busy highway in Southern Vermont. A solitary goat munched grass inside a wire enclosure. A cow flicked a languid tail. The yard needed mowing.

I felt a pang as I sped by in a stream of cars, dust whirling. How long would she have to wait, I wondered. And why didn't I stop?

On my way back into town, I stopped at a farm stand and bought a dozen purple tulips tied with a pink ribbon. I turned into the dirt driveway, walked to the front door of the sagging white house in need of paint and knocked. There were some geraniums on the windowsill. The door was opened by a gray haired woman of similar stature to the one who had been waiting by the roadside. She wore a dusky blouse and a blue skirt that fell to her knees, a straw hat and glasses. Her eyes looked sore.

"Hi," I said. "I'm looking for a woman who was standing by the road this morning trying to cross against traffic."

"Oh, you mean my sister Ruth," the woman said. "She ain't here. She's to market."

"Oh," I replied, disappointed. "I brought her these flowers to say I'm sorry that I didn't take time to stop."

The woman peered at me. "Ay-yup."

I handed her the bunch of purple tulips.

"I'm Mildred," she said.

"Hello, Mildred, I'm Amy," I smiled.

"Ay-yup, people just race up and down; sometimes it takes Ruth near a half hour to get acrost the road. She's only goin' for the mail."

"I see," I murmured.

"It's just Ruth and me here now. Our cousin died last year. He used to help us out with chores and such."

"What sort of chores?" I asked. I straightened my shoulders. "Maybe I can help."

"Well, you jist missed the milkin,'" Mildred remarked.

"Oh, no," I said, having never milked a cow, but eager to try. "Maybe I could help with that another time."

"Uh huh," said Mildred.

"As a matter of fact, I'll be right back." I walked to my car and wrote my name and phone number on a piece of paper. I handed it to Mildred, who stood with the purple tulips resting in the crook of her arm.

"If you ever need help with anything, will you give me a call?"

"Ay-yup," Mildred said. "See, we plant marigolds over there." She pointed to an old tractor tire filled with dirt lying on the ground. Someone had cut a design in the rubber. "We save the seeds."

Mildred and I looked around her yard. "We keep some chickens, and I've got a goat, and my sister's got a cow up t' pasture."

"Whatever I can do," I said. "And please say hello to Ruth."

A few days later I was in bed recovering from a virus when the phone rang.

"The yard needs mowin'," a voice said.

"Mildred?" I croaked. "I'll be there directly."

I found the old push mower in a corner of the barn covered with an empty grain sack, and for several hours I dragged and shoved it around the sisters' yard through prickers and matted grass. Mildred planted marigold seeds. I coughed and dripped sweat, but when I quit there was a tidy area of rocky yard.

I told Mildred good-bye, and promised to be back in a few days to finish up.

Two days later I got a hand-written note.

Hi Amy
We hope you are feelling better from our cold.
We are paying you $7 dollars
for mowing of some our lawn
for us.
One of our nephew mawed the
rest. For us.

In Motion

2011-03-05T08:09:00.001-05:00

I admit it: winging home from Patzcuaro, Mexico after 12 days of vacation en sol, drinking morning cups of cafes con leches on the Plaza Grande and gorging on enchilladas and chiles, and tiny, honeyed cheese filled pies, and already I was thinking Where to next?

I'm reminded of a Little Rascals episode, one involving a homemade fire engine, with dozens of Our Gang aboard applying the brakes with dozens of scuffling feet, plunging down hill, the rear of the fire engine swinging forward to meet the front half. Spanky demands of Alfalfa, "Where are we going?" Alfalfa responds, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."

Exactly.

Juan the Gardener and I were conversing this morning over oatmeal about the differences in our natures. While he prefers a more domestic lifestyle, one in which he can shuffle around the house watering his bonsai, I ache for foreign shores.

"You're energy," Juan stated, after I had mentioned going to Florida with some girlfriends in April. "Up and out, fire and air."

"What would that make you?" I asked.

"I'm more earth and water - down and out -- or, down and in," he amended. "Meaning inward," he emphasized, pointing to his heart region.

"I think you had it right the first time," I said. "With the down and out." I pointed to his attire: striped bathrobe over long johns.

"You're always moving," he said. He stirred yogurt into his oatmeal.

"Yes, mostly I am." He really doesn't like it when we spend too much time apart. He feels we met late in our lives, and he's right - we never know, really, how much time we have.

"I used to want to be away from the house when I was young," Juan continued. "Outside with my friends. Or just by myself playing down by the creek."

"I wanted to be outside too," I agreed. "But, I liked doing projects with my friends."

"What sort of projects?"

"Once, my friend Wendy and I sold daffodils."

"Where did you get the daffodils?"

"We stole them from the cemetery and sold them for 25c a dozen at the end of Wendy's driveway. It was a nice little business until one of my mother's friends caught us circling the head stones. That was pretty much it. We moved on to sling shots and setting small fires."

"I rode bikes with my friends and played ball, but sometimes I just wandered," Juan mused.

"I do like to walk, though," he added. "Remember, we walked a lot in Mexico."

"You meander," I said. "I stride."

"I like adventure," Juan said. "I've been to Mexico 8 times and Europe twice." He held up two fingers.

"And you travel from your office to the den," I teased. "And from the den to the kitchen."

"I also like the Travel Channel," he laughed. "I can do a lot of traveling from the couch."

I went around behind his chair and kissed him on the top of his suntanned head.

Later, I had a memory of being in Pamplona, Spain for the first time, on a family vacation. It was during the Running of the Bulls and my father took us to a bullfight. I was far enough away in years from Ferdinand the Bull not to mind too much, being somewhat more interested in the tight fit of the matador's pantelones and his whirling red cape. I'm not sure how my younger sisters felt. We may have been whisked away before the final violent denoument.

What I do remember is how afterward all of us had to pee something fierce. My father pulled the car over by the side of the road and we all scrambled out. Just as we girls were poised to squat down in the tall grass by the roadside, a small boy meandered by, dragging a stick. We jumped up, affecting indifference, hopping foot to foot until he had passed.

Somewhere there are photographs documenting this event: three young girls hunkered down, my father a bit farther along the road, wearing a light colored sports jacket, his golf hat on his head, my mother snapping the picture, all of us giggling.

Tangles

2011-03-01T07:18:00.002-05:00

I came through the doors from bright July sunshine into the frigid air of building Two South at the Brattleboro Retreat, barefoot, dripping water from the swimming pool. I was wearing appropriate swimming attire: shorts and a dark tee shirt, nothing remotely suggestive. I didn't pack a bathing suit when my doctor called to tell me that yes, there was a bed.

I was there to shed some serious grief. Like puffs of steam issuing through fissures of volcanic rock, powerful emotions were leaking out; the tears had begun. I had not dissolved nor careened off into madness, I simply cried.

At other times, I smuggled breakfast muffins back to my room, listened with my heart-mind to people who had lived in torment greater than mine, jogged around the green rectangle of a field behind the hospital, swam laps.

During rec time, we played a form of softball I called Oddball. People came and went, dragging bats and flat, worn-through leather mitts. A player might run to first or third or right off the field. Someone might choose home plate as a desirable place for a nap. Mac might hand me the softball and say, "You pitch," or he might stand on the pitcher's mound, smoking and humming. One had to be flexible.

I learned about my penchant for perfectionism while I strung glass beads and glued tiny, multicolored ceramic tiles together. The standards I had set for myself now seemed impossible. It was time to relax. It was time to apply kindness.

When my eyes adjusted to the indoor light, I noticed a familiar form down by the front door: my son, Will was sitting in a straight-backed chair amongst tables of tattered magazines. Next to him, Charlie launched into his staccato routine of TV cop dialogue. Will nodded and smiled. Old Ruthie, the laundry thief, was there too, wearing Angie's blue sweater. There would be trouble about that later. A few of Paul's green plastic alligators were taped to the windows.

In that moment, I knew Will to be the bravest person I had ever met. He had come to visit his Mom in a loony bin.

"Hey," I said. He stood and crumpled me in a hug.

"Can we just go to your room?" he asked.

"Sure," I said.

"Mom, there are bars on the windows here," he said, when I had shut the door.

"It's to keep the bad guys out," I joked.

He lay on my bed, his long legs dangling out over the end as we talked.

"So, do you think you might be coming home soon?" he wondered.

"Yes," I said. "I'm getting there."

He sat up and looked me over, then stood and searched around on the wooden bureau. He picked up my hairbrush and with the most tender of strokes, he brushed my hair, all tangled and damp from the pool.

"That's better," he said, standing back and appraising his work. "Now you don't look like such a crazy person."

He grinned.

"None of this had anything at all to do with you," I told him. "I just needed some time to work things out."

"I know," he said.

It would take some more time before the scaffolding was in place and I could venture back into my life, thin-skinned and somewhat teary at first, but stronger, every day a bit stronger.

Alligator Man

2011-02-25T08:28:00.001-05:00

When Paul peeked in, I was folding a warm wash cloth over the thermostat in my room at the Brattleboro Retreat to staunch the air conditioning which, even in July, caused frost formations on the windows.

This had embarrassing repercussions, when one's bra had been sequestered for reasons of safety, along with one's belt. I had taken to walking around my arms crossed over my chest.

We were encouraged to keep our doors slightly ajar and to occasionally venture out into the day room to engage in social activity with the other patients. There were jigsaw puzzles, lumpy furniture, board games like Monopoly, Yahtzee. The previous evening I had apparently absconded with a bag of someone's M&Ms after having been dosed with a medication that had caused me to fall face first onto the middle of the Parchesi board. I came to giggling in my bed, a telltale empty one pound packet of peanut M&Ms in the wastebasket.

"You owe me candy," Wendy told me at breakfast.

And now here was stocky, white-bearded Paul in a maroon polo shirt. Paul carried a suitcase.

"What are you in for?" I asked him.

Paul explained that he was having body image issues of the negative kind. A recent abdominal surgery had left him with a badly distended belly and subsequent feelings of inadequacy.

"What about you?" he inquired.

"Unresolved grief," I told him. The tears had finally begun after an initial sleepless night battling shadowy behemoths. Turning myself over to the care of others had felt like cowardice.

Paul nodded. It was how we patients said "hello" on Two South. Before we trusted each other enough to relate as suffering human beings in varying states of pain, we presented our diagnoses like name tags: Anorexic, bi-polar, manic, multiple personality disorder, borderline personality, obsessive compulsive. The chemically addicted resided on the floor above.

"So, what's in the suitcase?" I knew it wasn't a bomb, because after check-in, the nurses took away everything that might be considered dangerous. I needed permission to use my hair dryer.

Paul smiled and placed his bag on the floor. He deftly sprung the latches, lifted the lid and revealed a tangle of countless green plastic alligators, vacant-eyed, jaws agape.

"Wow," I said.

"Here," he said, and handed me one. "My Grandma told me a story once about a swamp. 'Down in the swamp, there be alligators' was the punch line."

I nodded. Here, we were all down in the swamp. Alligators lurked beneath the surface. It was a choice, I realized: swim towards them, fearlessly, or sink down into the reed-choked depths.

"Thanks, Paul," I said. I held the tiny plastic toy in my hand and made a decision. I would swim for the surface.

Departures

2011-02-23T10:22:00.000-05:00

As my son, Will, marched out into a muggy, rainy June day, his size 13 sneakered feet protruding from beneath his floor-length green high school graduation robe, tasseled mortar board hat askew, my heart clenched with grief.

I watched him, a good head taller than his Dad and his sisters smoking a cigar, gesticulating, thumping his buddies' backs and knew: he was gone.

He had been leaving - bit by bit - for months, and the encroaching sadness creeping over my shoulders became a cloak of despair. As he whirled in and out of parties, I withdrew deeper into its folds.

I had first tasted this particular sadness when his sister had graduated from college, but, then, I still had him - or clung to that erroneous illusion that our children belong to us. The heart-wrench of this child's launching could be postponed. His Dad and I had divorced when he was three and there were relationships that didn't work out; another marriage had dissolved. We had moved from a large house on a hilltop that had, by its intrusion into a forested ridge line area, infuriated the neighbors, into a house smaller than our barn had been.

Losses and changes.

Shortly after Will's graduation day, I tearfully summoned him home. I confessed that I couldn't cope, that I needed help, and that I was that day checking myself into the Brattleboro Retreat, a small psychiatric hospital. A small suitcase was by the door.

"Okay, Mom," he said.

A Priestly Encounter

2011-02-21T10:18:00.002-05:00

When I approached the priest in Terminal B at George Bush International Airport, he was eating an egg salad sandwich. A spot of mayo lingered in the corner of his mouth.

I was in distress.

I was feeling vertiginous, adrift in unfamiliar space, as if there were gaps between my very cells. The ground beneath my feet had shifted in a startling way during a meditation retreat in a lush, five-acre garden sanctuary in Patzcuaro, Mexico. One minute I was present, gazing at a species of Tiger Lily during an exercise called "aimless wandering," entranced by stamen and pistil - then I wasn't, in a way that felt entirely unfamiliar. But, where was I? My sense of time and place had slipped.

"How wonderful," someone said when I voiced my experience to the group. People smiled.

"Is it?" I wasn't feeling wonderful or even enlightened. I felt weak-kneed and rubbery. The feeling stayed with me for the rest of the week. Sometimes I felt anxious, like I had to put my head down and recite a nursery rhyme. At other times I relaxed and floated along, the tips of my fingers tingling, as if I'd just sucked a balloon's worth of helium into my lungs.

As I waited for my flight to Boston at George Bush International, I leaned my head against the large plate glass window overlooking the docked airplanes and breathed deeply. I was standing in front of a Starbucks, lost in indecision between a skinny vanilla chai and a mocha soy latte when I spied my priest.

Oh, what the hell, I thought.

"Excuse me, Father," I began. "Would you happen to have a minute?"

An Irish brogue had suddenly transformed my voice as if I were Ingrid Bergman addressing the kindly Father Flanagan in Boy's Town.

The priest frowned and stood up.

"Yes?" he said.

"I think I've lost my place," I began. "It may be a question of faith."

"Are you a Catholic?" he asked.

"No," I answered. "I've been an Episcopalian and a Jew, but now I'm more of a Buddhist."

"I see," the priest said. His mouth became a straight line of disapproval.

"I feel a bit off, you see, Father."

The priest glared at me as if he thought I might be slightly more than a bit off.

"I don't really see how I can help," he said with annoyance.

"Would you have some sort of a non-denominational prayer for me, something that might help me right now in my, um, hour of need?"

"A prayer? I don't think so." He backed away.

I grabbed at his black surplice. "You don't have any sort of a prayer? What about the Our Father, Father?"

"You could try it, I suppose. Might work, might not. Maybe you just ought to go to church."

As a child, I had gone to church. I remembered reciting the Our Father with the line expressly directed to all the commuting Dads who worked in New York City: "...and lead us not into Penn Station." Even though some of them, like my dad, found religion on the golf course rather than indoors on countless glorious Sundays.

Then he was gone, vanished behind an adjacent Borders without a single, thoughtful proclamation of hope. No "Don't worry, my child, this too shall pass." Nada. Nix.

I was already laughing when I texted my friend, Kerry, back home in Vermont.

"So much for the priesthood," she texted in reply. "Go get a latte."

These days, when I experience that groundless sensation, that subtle shift that nudges me into the not known, a space that can't actually be defined or sought, I go with it.

I welcome it.

Hard Candy

2011-02-11T17:06:00.028-05:00

He taught ski nautique at Ecole Champlain, a french speaking girls' summer camp in Ferrisburg, Vermont. His name was Jean-Claude. I was 12.

I was shipped off to Ecole Champlain for the summer of 1965 with a trunk full of azure blue short shorts and sleeveless, azure blue, v-necked canvas tee shirts (white for Sundays). I was consigned to Chalet X, (pronounced eeks,) at the end of a forest path that wound along the shore of Lake Champlain. There were six or eight girls per cabin. Our counselor was Katie. I learned to sweep the floor, make up my bunk bed, and pee behind the cabin at night so as to avoid the moth infested salle de bains. I also discovered that the little circular plastic disc Katie kept on the shelf above her bunk contained birth control pills. Which had to do with something murky, yet vaguely titillating called sex. Whatever that was, she did it with Jacques when she snuck out at night after taps.

Jacques, the camp director, had a beautiful wife, a blonde, long-legged Joni Mitchell clone called Babe. He roamed abroad with a brace of black leopards on leashes. Apparently, some sort of unspoken droit de seigneur existed. Periodically, one of the lissome female counselors disappeared into Jacques' private office.

We girls in azure blue short shorts cavorted about learning equitation, natation, and sauver la vie all en francais. We joued au tennis, ate gouter (stacks of white bread with vats of peanut butter and raspberry jam), guzzled plastic pitchers of bug juice (pink lemonade with tiny mosquito carcasses floating on top) and speculated endlessly about the sexual lives of the counselors.

The dark-haired Jean-Claude roared into my summer riding a mono-ski behind an outboard motor boat. He carved a dramatic arc of water, threw up his arms to relinquish the tow rope and glided to the dock like the son of Poseidon. He wore red trunks.

I made it my business to stalk the waterfront. I ogled him as he swiped the outboard's engine with a dirty rag. I admired the way those snug red trunks clung to his derriere when he bent over to stack life vests, how the muscles in his biceps flexed as he coiled tow rope. I obsessed over the tiny translucent pearls of sweat on his bronzed back. I watched slack-jawed during French conversation class as he hosed off the boat deck. The gleam from a single Jean-Claude smile as I surfed the wake produced paroxysms of something I couldn't name. Something delicieux.

I inhabited an 8-week delirium that included swiping birth control pills from Katie's circular plastic disc. After spraining my pinky toe attempting a dock start, I rode in the boat blowing kisses as Jean-Claude sprayed spume. I learned to barefoot ski. I repeated je t'aime, je t'aime, Jean- Claude while my cabin mates slept. I French-kissed my pillow.

On the last day of camp, Jean Claude flashed me his dernier Jean-Claude smile, gave me his address, and said he would love to hear from me after I returned home. "Mais oui, ma jeunne fille!" He kissed my cheek. He offered me un bonbon from a tin. He enjoined me to keep the tin. Au revoir!

Once reluctantly en famille, I badgered my mother until she took me to town where I bought a duplicate tin of hard candies. I wrote Jean-Claude a long, amorous letter en francais and after smearing my lips with my mother's Estee Lauder lipstick, I peppered the letter with scarlet kisses and sent it off with les bonbons in an envelope that reeked of Chanel.

Then I waited.

"Are you sure there's nothing for me?" I demanded daily.

"Not a thing. What is it you're looking for exactly?" my mother asked. "Did you order something from the back of one of those comic books again? Seed packets to sell or baseball cards or something?"

"NO!"

One day, I rifled through a tower of mail on her desk and discovered it. Un lettre from Jean-Claude!

"Mom!" I howled. "When did this come?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said carelessly. "Last week? I'm sorry, I guess I forgot to tell you. Is it something important?"

"Merde! I can't believe you!" I shouted.

"You've become extremely rude lately, and I don't like it!" she shouted after me as I raced upstairs to my room. "Ever since you came home from that camp!"

Amie, Ma Cherie,
Merci boucoup pour les bonbons! I hope you enjoy un happy year
in your ecole. I will remember very much the summer camp and you.
I enjoy very much being your instructor of ski nautique.
-Jean-Claude

My lust for Jean-Claude ebbed like a sudden Tsunami on the shores of Lake Champlain. School had begun and things plus essentiels, like which boy's hockey gloves would I be wearing, or whose silver ID bracelet would be dangling from my wrist took precedence over my unrequited summer fantasies. Besides, spin-the-bottle required dexterity and intense concentration. French-kissing with braces was tricky.

Labor Intensive

2011-02-09T10:57:00.002-05:00

Whenever I went home to my parent's house for a visit, the first thing I did was rush to my mother's bedside table and leaf through her red leather diary to catch up on all pertinent events. During summer months, it was not unusual to find TAD - "Typical Adirondack Day" - scrawled at the top of the page, followed by tennis match scores with accompanying commentary: "If only Marjorie had come to net when I told her, we would have won that damn second set!" There were endless bridge games, luncheons, cocktail parties and dinner parties, the details of which I skimmed with disinterest. I was looking explicitly for references to ME.

As a teenager, I might find something like this: Just as we're ready to leave for dinner, Amy announced she had to take another shower! I don't think she does anything else but shower. And why does she have to leave it to the last possible second? Or, Amy looked like the wrath of God in some horrible old blue jeans that looked like they'd been dragged behind the car. Why does she insist on covering most of her face with that long hair?

If I had been particularly awful, the entry would mention my name only. Then there would be lines of short hand squiggles interspersed with exclamation points and angry black cartoon eyebrows. This was way before emoticons.

When I was home recently to celebrate my daughter's first baby shower, I found myself meandering through the house and ending up in my mother's room, peeking into my mother's diary from the year 1979 - the year my daughter was born.

Thursday February 1, 1979

Beautiful but cold - 20's

At 9:50 Amy calls - in labor!! Since 5a.m. - now contractions are every 7 minutes - says not going to Albany (phew!) Debates if she should transfer to Glen Cove Hospital to a Dr. Willis that she's just heard of Tuesday night at Lamaze course from nurse giving the course who's head O.B. nurse at Glen Cove. I point out that if she was upset at the idea of having a doctor at North Shore Hospital from the group she'd only met once, she's never even seen Willis! Calls back - going to N. Shore after takes shower - Again, whew!

It's true. It had been our plan to drive to Albany, New York, from Long Island the minute I went into labor. Three hours away. In February. With the distinct possibility of snow, if not a blizzard. The reason being that the doctor in Albany was the not-quite uncle of my husband's first wife and had delivered their child, my step-daughter.

Huh?

At some point it must have occurred to me to have back up. I found a doctor at North Shore Hospital on Long Island, an adorable Italian named Paulo Mozzarella - well, not Mozzarella, but, that is what I called him. He was funny and caring and during my first exam, he stroked my belly and gazed lovingly into my eyes.

Later on, say a week before my due date, I decided that an additional doctor at a third hospital would be best of all.

After I reminded my friend Jane about this yesterday, she said, "When you told me you had three doctors, I began to wonder if I needed more than one doctor too. I didn't know you that well yet, so I thought you knew what you were doing. I went to Allan and asked him."

"What did he say?" I giggled.

"He said, "No, Jane, one doctor is enough."

What my mother's diary entry doesn't include are the details of my birthing experience. North Shore University Hospital is a teaching hospital, and no sooner was I strapped onto the gurney and hooked up to a fetal monitor, then the door flew open and in coursed a stream of medical students who asked if I didn't mind if they "had a look." These were the days before warm baths and walking around and cups of tea and swanky leather birthing chairs. They strapped you down, hooked you up, and admitted scores of onlookers in white coats.

Nor did my mother's diary entry include the presence of a strange man in a rumpled overcoat who appeared in my labor room carrying a box of donuts. I was wrestling with a nurse who was trying, inanely, to make me breathe into a brown paper bag.

"Marcia?" he asked. He trailed crumbs.

I reared up like a 3-headed Hydra and snarled like Regan in The Exorcist, "There's no Marcia here!"

"Down the hall on the right, sir," the nurse said hurriedly.

"That's it!" I growled. "I'm done here. I'm going home." I started to swing my legs over the side of the bed. The baby's father, Michael, grabbed my hands and bravely said, "I think it's almost over."

"Fuck you!" I told him sweetly.

But, he was right. They wheeled me into the delivery room, the adorable Dr. Mozzarella appeared, crowing, "Lovely Signorina, you going to have a bee-yoo-tiful bambino!" And there she was: my daughter. Bambina.

My mother's final diary entry for that day reads: Finally, as I pick up phone to dial N. Shore U. Hospital, it's Michael on the other end - it's a girl! Weighs 8 lbs., 6oz...born at 5:49 p.m. Rush over to see the baby after dinner - very bright & alert, alternately yelling & yawning, pursing lips - pink cheeks, darling.

Spot on, Mom.

Pool Duty

2011-01-31T10:44:00.000-05:00

"Miss?"

A squat, pear-shaped woman glared up at me from the other side of the wooden counter top. Her chubby arms were crossed over her chest. Damp gray ringlets clung to her scalp. She dripped water onto the green, heavily trafficked, all-weather carpet.

I held up a finger to indicate that I was in the middle of a conversation with another resort guest.

"No, sir, our massage therapists do not wear bikinis. No, sir, only one massage therapist per customer. No exceptions. Thank you for calling."

I made a few notes, added a package of Bic plastic razors to the glass fronted display case, filled a wicker basket with hand towels, and placed three pens and one pencil in a precise line before I replied.

"Yes? How may I help you?"

"There's something black in the pool," the pear-shaped woman stated.

"Something...black?"

"Yes," she sniffed. "I'm not sure what it is, but I want you to go and investigate. It could be you know...poop."

"Poop?" I repeated.

I followed the dimply thighs of the pear-shaped woman to the 75 foot indoor lap pool at a popular resort in southern Vermont, where I was employed as "Front Desk Girl." Mostly I whisked carts of bagged dirty towels from the women's locker room to a large closet alongside the indoor tennis courts. I dumped the dirty towels and loaded up the cart with stacks of clean white towels tied in bundles with red string. Then I raced back.

The pool, enclosed in a paneled room with vaulted ceilings, had a wall of large sliding glass doors, clusters of green plastic tables and chairs (from which I removed droplets of water during my rounds) and groupings of plants. Squeaking children with bright orange swimmies tight as blood pressure cuffs cavorted with their parents. Small boys cannonballed into the water, whooping, and screeching Geronimo! A few dutiful lap swimmers churned back and forth, black swim caps poking through the water like the heads of dolphins.

"There! See! Right there." The pear-shaped woman pointed to the deep end.

I peered into the wavering sunlit surface. There were several amorphous black shapes clumped on the bottom of pool.

"Hmm," I said.

"Yes, and there are more over there and over there."

"Poop usually floats," I told her, "But, I'll check it out."

Against one corner of the room leaned a 60-foot long-handled aluminum pole with a squeegee attached to one end. I began to lower the pole, backing carefully along the side of the pool. I balanced the pole in my hands like an aerialist on a tight rope, veering away from the wall of sliding glass doors. I swung it over the heads of the unsuspecting swimmers. Next, I replaced the squeegee head with a blue rimmed pool strainer.

"What's she doing, Mommy?" called out an observant little girl in a lavender two-piece.

"She's looking for poop," the pear-shaped woman stated loudly.

"Poop? Poop? Poop in the pool?" Frenzied voices bounced off the ceiling.

"Poop usually floats," I called out. "No cause for alarm."

"I think everybody should evacuate the pool area," the pear-shaped woman advised.

"Nobody has to evacuate until I say so," I said. "I'm in charge here."

"EVERYBODY OUT! Poop in the pool! Poop in the pool!" the pear-shaped woman shouted.

Swimmers churned to the edge of the pool in a blur of thrashing arms and legs as if someone had suddenly yelled out, "SHARK!" Mothers shrieked.

As I swung the long arm of the pool skimmer around, the pear-shaped woman ducked. I plunged it deep into the water, scraping it along the bottom until it came in contact with the first black clump. I pulled it towards me, deftly scooped it into the skimmer and lifted it aloft.

"Is it poop? Is it poop?" the crowd of towel draped onlookers chanted.

"Hey, if it is poop, does my Dad get his money back?"

I flipped the pool skimmer so that the troublesome black clump landed at the feet of the pear-shaped woman. She jumped back.

I bent down.

"It's not poop," I announced.

"Definitely not poop?" interrupted the pear-shaped woman.

"Not," I said."Just some leaves from those plants over there."

"Well," she sniffed, "that's a relief, but I don't feel like swimming anymore anyway. You need to clean the pool."

"And you," I suggested, "need to go towel off."

Mirror, Mirror

2011-01-26T11:10:00.006-05:00

My thinking went like this: mid-January, time for a lift. And I didn't mean chocolate. There were those pesky frown lines etched between my eyes.

When I called the office of Plastic Surgery and Dermatology to make an appointment for an evaluation, the cheerful receptionist informed me that depending on my needs, I could receive an injection of Botox at my very first appointment.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"I'm terribly squeamish myself," she admitted, "but, when it's my turn, I practically jump in the chair."

I spent the days until my appointment scrutinizing my face in a magnetizing mirror - well, I also went

snow-shoeing and avoided aspirin to prevent bruising at the future injection site - but, when I caught myself retracting the skin on my face with my fingers in different lights, I knew I had acquired a new obsession.

"I'm going for Botox," I confided to my friend Jane.

"Big deal," she said. "You're certainly not the first."

I arrived for my appointment the day after a snowstorm; in fact, I had checked snow accumulation around my car with OCD-like regularity throughout the night. A quick glance in my car mirror revealed the same sort of dark circles produced by those trick binoculars that gave one black eyes in one's youth. And what about those laugh lines? Maybe they should go too.

As I filled out several pages of forms, an older woman - a stranger - bent down and peered into my face.

"What are you having done?" she demanded as I drew back. I noticed that her face was crisscrossed with as many lines as a railroad yard.

"Um, I'm not sure," I said. "But, I think a little Botox right here..." I pointed between my eyes.

"You don't need Botox!" she exclaimed.

"Well, I..." I faltered.

Just then, another patient emerged from an interior office, dark glasses obscuring her face, her hair tied up in a Hermes scarf. She was accompanied by someone I assumed to be her husband.

"You here for a face lift?" she asked me, smiling.

"No! I'm just here for an evaluation," I said. "And possibly a little Botox."

She removed her dark glasses to reveal swollen eyes circled by shiny skin, tinged with faint blue and green bruises and slender tracks of black stitches.

"Dr. X is the best," she declared. "And I've spent the last year doing research."

"You had your eyes done?" I asked politely.

"I had horrible bags," she said.

"Pouches like pillows," her husband piped up helpfully.

"Really," I said.

"We even searched outside the U.S. in Canada, and Dr. X is the top guy."

"Well, that's reassuring," I said, returning to my forms.

Under a question reading: What Are You Looking for in a Surgeon, I wrote "skill."

Smiling men and women began to fill the smartly decorated waiting room. Had they all received Botox? I wondered.

Eventually I was ushered into an inner sanctum with terrible light. As I gazed like Snow White's evil stepmother into a hand mirror, not one thought of being the fairest in the land entered my mind. Instead, I saw sallow, blotchy skin and runnels like trenches on either side of my mouth when I grimaced.

"Hello, Amy, how can I help you?" the boisterous Dr. X demanded, bursting through the door. His eyes roamed my face like a prison guard's searchlight. I could tell that a frown wanted to emerge, but couldn't somehow. He read over my answers on the questionnaire. Under: How Soon Would You Like to Have Your Surgical Procedure? I had written NOT YET.

"I was thinking a little Botox or something," I said. Dr. X's own forehead was smooth as glass.

"We can do that," he murmured. "No problem. I think one syringe will do it. Hmm," he continued, trying, but failing to squint.

"What about the maxio labial blahdeblah here?" He had found the runnels. "We can do that today too, if you wish, but, that might take two syringes, especially on the left side."

My stomach lurched. "I think just the Botox."

Dr. X tapped a pen on his clipboard. "Are you considering plastic surgery?" he asked.

"Um, what would you suggest?"

"We could pull the skin beneath your chin up and under, leaving just a tiny line here," he explained.

"And then tighten the skin here," he added, as he smoothed skin back on my cheeks with both hands.

"Leaving a hairline scar there that would be hidden beneath your sideburns and run behind your ears..."

"Thanks," I said hastily, feeling an anxious heat spread upwards from my belly, "But, I think I'm good with just the Botox."

"Great," Dr. X said. "Make yourself comfortable, this should take about 30 seconds."

"Oh," he said, pausing, syringe in hand, "Do you have any milk product allergies?"

"What do you mean?" I asked. I pictured myself seizing and dropping to the floor when the Botox hit my bloodstream.

"Do you eat cheese?"

"Yes," I answered.

"Then you should be okay."

I closed my eyes as Dr. X drew six little target dots. I felt a tiny pinch and heard a minute crunch as the needle pierced muscle. Six times. Then it was over.

"If you want to consider the face lift procedure," Dr. X remarked casually, "I need to let you know I'll be retiring in August, so be sure to schedule it before then."

"Right," I said.

I wrote out a check for roughly $10 a second and grinned at the roomful of beaming patients awaiting their turns.

The camaraderie, at least, felt real.

For Peggy

2011-01-22T11:22:00.003-05:00

A few years ago, I watched the enormous screen suspended above Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts for a first glimpse of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. He walked slowly through the same chute that emitted the thunderous football Patriots, a smiling monk wearing the most pedestrian looking brown shoes beneath his maroon robes. His Holiness clambered to the top of his seat and beamed his Yoda light out over the crowd. He spoke of peace and basic goodness and gave a teaching that I absorbed through the pores of my skin. The audience rested in contentment, respectful, silent. He wore a Patriots baseball cap.

At intermission I seemingly sailed from my seat on the field upstairs to the food concessions. No one pushed. There was no elbowing, nor jostling. People simply moved together. As I made my way, I looked up and recognized someone I knew, a woman named Peggy. A glowing face in a sea of people.

Peggy had given me her own teaching at a time in my life when despair had become an all too comfortable cloak. My son had left for college, and I felt untethered; my role as a mom no longer defined me. I was a woman obscured by sadness; past losses subsumed me. I had lost my way.

It was then that grace in the form of Peggy appeared. She had come upon me in a retreat, sobbing, great sobs shuddering through my body, and had offered me a space to talk. She listened, handing me tissues. When I ran down, she sat with me as if we had nothing around us but space.

Then she said, "Amy, I wish I could tell you that everything will be all right, but it won't. That's not how it works."

The message was as powerful as a thunderclap. I laughed.

I had been pushing feelings away for years. Dread and fear had lurked beneath the surface and I had been paddling away fast, but like endless sets of waves, the feelings kept coming. I was drowning.

"Maybe you could try to make friends with your sadness," she suggested. "Welcome it, let it teach you. When you truly know sadness, you will know what it is to be happy. You will have endless moments of happiness."

I wrote Peggy a letter of thanks for her wisdom and kindness. I got that it wasn't about my mother or my childhood or my son leaving home. It was about allowing space for every moment, every feeling - as best as I could. It was about unwrapping the cloak and letting in the sun.