The New Year's Thing

[copied from dland]

**In 12 days I will be 50 years old**

The mystique of Happy New Year has always escaped me.

I remember when I was a kid and I would be babysitting on New Year’s Eve, and I would get all excited as I watched the ball drop in Times Square and then I would realize that it was a minute later than it was before, and the clock turns over past midnight every night, and really, why all the fuss? There I would be, sitting alone in somebody else’s house watching TV and thinking, Okay, now what?

I did spend one semi-raucous New Year’s Eve freshman year of college, so that would be 1971-1972. Oddly, I found myself with my two best buddies from college (Maryland) in a house in New Jersey, which belonged to my guy buddy’s best high school friend, except his parents were away and there was no one in the house but the three of us and we got majorly stoned and then laughed at the TV news. For me, this was raucous. We laughed a lot and then fell asleep.

So, whatever. I guess this has some flavor of new beginnings and bad times behind us. I’m all for that. I just don’t get why the clock turning over past midnight tonight is any different from any other midnight. Each day is a new beginning, if that’s what you want to do with it.


ENTRY #36

The Universal Sign for Moron

[copied from dland]

**In 15 days I will be 50 years old**

Sometimes I think I really am turning into an old curmudgeon, like Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes. Or as my kids would say, I'm turning into an old fart.

Here's the thing today's rant is about. Now, I understand that there are styles and there are fashions, and no one should expect kids -- teenagers -- to look or dress like adults do. I completely endorse the rights of teenagers to look and dress however they want to.

Unless they look like idiots. Or like common thugs or sluts.

The one that really got me for a long time is the baseball caps. This year, students in my high school are banned from wearing caps or any hats in school (except for religious reasons, or with a medical note, which I won't go into now), and I really didn't care if they wore hats or not. It's a style, who cares. But when they wear baseball caps backwards, or worse, sideways, they look like they don't even know that their clothes are on wrong.

When I was a kid (i.e., when dinosaurs roamed the suburbs), wearing a cap sideways was the universal sign that the wearer was a moron. Literally. Anyone and everyone knew that someone with his hat on wrong didn't know how to dress himself, and had somehow gotten lost from the caretaker he had to have to tell him when to inhale and swallow.

Even worse than the caps backward is when they wear those visors on upside down or backwards. And they wonder why they're not getting into Ivy League schools.

And then, my god, the thongs. Listen, girls, these things are called underwear for a reason. They're supposed to be worn UNDER the other clothes that you are WEARing. Seeing someone else's underwear is supposed to be a rare privilege for those near and dear, not for your chemistry teacher (not to mention the 750 teenage boys roaming through the school corridors.)

Not only do the top of the thongs show in the back (because their pants are so incredibly low cut), so many of them are wearing these obscene little items of lingerie under pants that are so snug they look like tattoos. And they're showing three inches of belly between the bottom of the top and the top of the bottom, and no matter what rules the schools make and what rules they enforce, short of requiring big baggy uniforms for all, there just isn't much you can do.

So it's official: I'm an old fart. And I really couldn't care less what they wear or how they look. What I really want to know is how there can be so many people between 12 and 21 who are walking around with absolutely no sense of self-respect or values. Girls think that if they look like sluts they will attract boys, and they will, but what boys are these? Boys think that if they look trendy everyone will think they are cool, but what they don't look like is men with brains; they just look stupid.

It's the universal sign for going to hell in a handbasket. It's just so much easier to see when you've got years and years of perspective.


ENTRY #35

With Remote Firmly in Hand

[copied from dland]

**In 16 days I will be 50 years old**

I admit it: I am the keeper of the remote control in this house.

I know this is generally considered a male thing, but since my Husband likes to think of himself as anti-technology, he prides himself on never touching the remote. He doesn't like it when I keep flipping though the channels either, but since we rarely watch TV in the same room, it doesn't matter. I watch by myself and I keep a firm finger on the remote. I have no attention span anymore, and I can't stand to watch commercials.

So a few weeks ago, I was flipping around and I came across Touched By an Angel, a rerun. I rarely watch the show because I rarely watch hour long shows, but I have seen it from time to time. Here's the scene that caught my attention:

A young man (the young doctor on Dick Van Dyke's doctor show) seems to be clearing away the possessions of his deceased wealthy father, and he asks the butler, an older man, if he too has lost both his parents. The butler assures him that both his parents are long gone. And the young man asks "Do you get over it?" meaning the loss of one's parents. And the butler says, "Oh no, sir, you never get over it. But you get past it."

I was driving around yesterday morning, running last minute errands for Christmas eve, when I began to feel something I can only describe as a heavy heart. So what is it exactly about Shirl dying that I still need to get past?

The last 8 years, not to mince words, sucked. I felt miserable for her -- she was the one dying -- but she made life miserable for everyone around her. Not intentionally, I like to hope, but she was not above manipulation and guilt to get people to do things for her, not even before. Sister and I made a pact that, once she was gone, we would not glorify her in our memories in death. We would want to remember everything, bad along with the good, and not sugarcoat honest feelings.

Yet I miss her - what is it that I miss? She drove me crazy, no question.

Maybe I miss my childhood, not unlike the way my daughter at 18 is now confronting that her childhood is over. Maybe this is the struggle that never ends: growing up. Getting past all of it.

The adventure continues.

ENTRY #34

Can You Go Home Again?

[copied from dland]

**In 17 days I will be 50 years old**

Younger Daughter says that since she left for college this past September, all our family traditions have changed. This is as much as she can currently understand of that same thing we all go through: we grow up, we are no longer children, our parents can no longer fix everything, and the home of our childhood becomes a memory. Even if we still live there, it feels different.

Our house is different; a few days after she went away, we had vinyl siding put up, new windows put in, the vestibule-front porch demolished and rebuilt without the vestibule, and took out the dead shrubs. So the house does look different. But that's not what she said. She said that our family traditions are gone.

True, we didn't have our annual "Birthday Sunday" in September, when my in-laws celebrate the birthdays of their two children and one son-in-law. (My birthday, as we all know, is in January.) With three of the four grandchildren away at college this year, there was no day in September available. We agreed that starting next year, Birthday Sunday would become Anniversary Sunday, celebrated in July. One tradition down.

We've never missed a Christmas with the in-laws, until today. Now that they're an hour and a half drive away, snow matters, and boy did it snow today. We're nearing a foot, and my sister-in-law, almost an hour north of us, has got to have lots more. So, for my kids, even though they're grown up, it's the first Christmas without Nannie and Gramps. Second tradition down.

What else could she have meant? We had Thanksgiving at my father's, just like we did last year. We ate all the same food, and welcomed the addition of my nephew's wonderful girlfriend to the dinner table. Young Daughter didn't even mention Thanksgiving; she just said "all our family traditions." So she must have meant Thanksgiving, too.

We didn't lose our Thanksgiving tradition, it just changed. No Shirl this year. So it was her first Thanksgiving without Grandma.

I know she was cranky today because she feels like her childhood is slipping away. It is. They do that. They're supposed to.

She'll get over it. I just wish she didn't have to go back to school for the spring semester three days before my birthday.


ENTRY #33

A Christmas Story of Us: Jack and Shirl

[copied from dland]

Christmas, 2002 will be the first day in almost 60 years that my father will not be celebrating – or at least, taking note of – his wedding anniversary. Jack and Shirl were married on Christmas Day, 1943, and Shirl died in May, just four days before Jack’s 83rd birthday. And so, for them, a Christmas “Story of Us.”

They didn’t meet on a Christmas, but close. In 1941, Jack, a college graduate since the previous June and unable to get the job this should have gotten him because of a low draft number, was coming to New York for the New Year’s weekend for a fraternity convention. He would be with all of his friends again, and all their girlfriends, his included, and they would have a great weekend in a hotel in New York City. There was only one problem: his girlfriend’s mother thought this sounded as fishy as it sounds now to you and me, and said she couldn’t go. So here’s Jack, a really good-looking, smart, nice-Jewish-boy college graduate with no date for the fraternity weekend. What to do?

His sister suggested that he write a letter to a cousin who lived in New York, about their own age, whom he had never met, and ask her if she could fix him up with a date for the weekend. No dummy, this pretty and popular girl seizes a golden opportunity and tells her plainer cousin from the other side of the family that she’s got to go. This guy is great. (Remember, she’s never met him.) So Shirl decides to go, and her mother is easily convinced since she’s actually met Jack’s parents in years past, in fact, before Jack and Shirl were ever born, since Jack’s father’s first cousin is Shirley’s mother’s sister-in-law. (Got that? Here, it’s easier like this: Edith had a first cousin on her father’s side named Shirl and a second cousin on her mother’s side named Jack. When we draw a family tree, it only works if we roll it into a tube, since both sides meet at Edith.)

I digress. Edith takes Shirl shopping at Klein’s, where they pick out a fabulous weekend wardrobe that probably cost a total of $10.00. And Shirl gets packed off to the hotel. She told me years later that there was one room for the guys and one room for the girls, but several of the girls were not exactly … behaving. There was certainly drinking, but they were all 21 or over. That very first night, Jack got so drunk that he was sick for hours and hours. This, by the way, is the last time Jack has ever had a drop of alcohol, New Year’s Eve, 1941. It is also the last time he danced.

Weekend over, he went back home to Massachusetts, waited to be drafted (he had already taken his physical on December 8), broke up with his girlfriend, and started writing to Shirl, who started writing back. When he got leave from the Army, he visited. Mostly they wrote. They actually told us only a few years ago that from the time they met to the time they got married, they only saw each other about ten times, although each of those was a weekend.

They got engaged on March 25, 1942. Jack had finished basic training by this time, had been stationed in a variety of places around the country, learning to shoot German planes out of the skies with anti-aircraft artillery, and was still writing, writing. And then, he got stationed in Fort Dix, New Jersey, near Trenton, only a couple of hours by train from New York City.

It was 1943 and Christmas was coming. Jack was an officer, a second lieutenant, and, not surprisingly, the only Jewish guy in his outfit. So when his commanding officer said something about there being no passes for Christmas, except for unusual circumstances, he probably never expected Jack to step up. He asked if he could have a 24 hour pass on Christmas so he could get married. After he got it, he called Shirl and told her that if she could plan a wedding in one week, they could get married before he was shipped overseas.

It was a gamble, sort of. Jack wanted to marry Shirl, but thought it would be better to wait until after the war, so she wouldn’t end up a widow, or married to someone crippled, or worse. She said she would marry him anyway, regardless of injury, so why not marry him before? Whatever happened, she would love him anyway and they would be married. So he gave her one chance, one day, and she ran with it.

She planned a small wedding, in a rabbi’s study (which is to say, a religious ceremony, but not a big fancy one.) There were only about a dozen people at the ceremony, their two families, and then a few dozen went out for lunch afterwards. Jack’s family came down by train.

Here’s the honeymoon: they went out for dinner to some Hungarian restaurant (we have a picture taken by the roving photographer) and then to a hotel. But remember, it was a 24 hour pass. So Jack had to leave at midnight to get the train to get back to Fort Dix on time, I guess by 6 AM. So here’s Shirl, on her honeymoon, alone in the hotel room in the middle of the night. After an hour or so, there’s a knock on the door, and to her amazement, there stands one of her new sisters-in-law, telling her that, since there’s a shortage of hotel rooms in New York, due to the war and the holiday, and she’s knows that Jack’s just left, can she spend the night here? Really. My mother spent more of her honeymoon night with her husband’s sister than she did with her husband.

Jack spent their first anniversary sleeping in the barn in France, surrounded by potatoes, soldiers, and shellfire. He spent the next 56 of them with her.

We didn’t celebrate Christmas as such when I was growing up, no tree or anything, but each year we would go out to dinner, or into the city to see a show. Maybe that’s why I felt Christmas was still a special day, even though it wasn’t really a holiday for us. It was the day we celebrated Shirl and Jack. Since I’ve been married (and for a couple of years before, so now that’s 27 years) I celebrate Christmas with my in-laws, although I would stop by to see Shirl and Jack in the morning to wish them a happy anniversary. Since my in-laws moved a couple of hours away, I haven’t had time to fit in both. Don’t know what I’ll do tomorrow. It may snow hard, eliminating the drive to south Jersey all together. I could spend the day with Jack, if I wanted to.

What will it be for him, Christmas 2002? Does he miss her? Is he glad her suffering is over? Does he wish that his was, too? Will he even stop and notice the day, or mention it to anyone? This is the generation that won the war, remember. They don’t let those pesky emotions get in their way. They just do what they’ve got to do.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Jack is the best, and he is my hero. Let the day be whatever he wants it to be, and let it be easy for him. He’s earned it.

Merry Christmas to all. Happy Anniversary to one.


ENTRY #32

They're Back

[copied from dland]

**In 21 days I will be 50 years old**

I haven’t written for a few days, and the reason is clear: they’re back. And, as I noted once before, they suck up your life.

Younger Daughter came home by train Tuesday afternoon, after which I dashed to my therapist appointment and came home, fell asleep, and got up the next day at 5:30 to go to work. But the true adventure of the week is with Older Daughter, who, last Saturday, went ice skating at college and fell and did something or other to her arm. Her right arm, of course, where the shoulder hasn’t been good since a minor car accident four years ago. Her right arm, of course, which she had to use to take finals all week. A visit to the emergency room in Poughkeepsie last Sunday night was not much help. So here was my week:

I spent Monday morning on the phone trying to track down an orthopedist a) who would see her when she got home, and, b) that she would be willing to see, since, after her original shoulder problem wasn’t diagnosed for a few years, she does not have a high opinion of them as a group. Got one.

Tuesday was spent mostly in the car, as described. And now the fun begins.

Because Older Daughter had a final Thursday night and had to be out of her dorm Friday morning and had a useless arm, on Wednesday after work, Younger Daughter and I made the drive up into New York State, filled up the car with all her stuff, and drove it home. Where was Husband in all of this? At the mandatory Christmas party for his new job, which I only escaped because I was spending the evening as a temporary teamster. So we loaded the car, unloaded the car, drove about 65 miles each way, and, in the middle there somewhere, took both my girls and two of Older Daughter’s friends out for dinner. Okay, this was my idea. They were taking finals all week, after all.

Thursday, at work. Older gives a call and gives me her decision: her arm is too painful for her to drive home. We thought it might be, would be, but now she’s up at school with her car. So, for the second night in a row, we drive up there, this time Husband and I, after her final. She comes home in my car, he drives home in hers.

Friday. No work for me today, having called in sick. Older to the orthopedist at 9, from there to get an MRI of her shoulder. And then, an unexpected hour all for me! (I finished my Christmas shopping.)

Saturday – a good one. Older is also having a bone scan, which means she gets an injection of something or other at 10 and then we go back for the scan at 2:30. Which effectively sucks up the day.

Sunday morning. Nothing to do today but decorate the tree and go visit Jack, first stopping to pick up the jar of herring he asked for. Really.

Will I read, will I write? Will I have a moment to call my own until they go back to school? Will I ever get to sit on the couch again, or use the DVD player? All these questions and more will be answered in the upcoming weeks. Same time, same station.

ENTRY #31

A Very Merry Re-Birthday to Me

[copied from dland]

**In 26 days I will be 50 years old**

A short happy entry today: it is my re-birthday, and I am 11 years old.

Not to be confused with the real birthday, the BIG one, coming up in just 26 days. (See above.) The re-birthday is the day I celebrate that I had a brain tumor cut out of my head and lived to tell the tale.

Eleven years ago. Holy cow. More than half out of the lives of either of my children. They have no clear memories of me before hearing with both ears and being able to walk a straight line. But really, why would they?

Enough, enough. It is really very cool that I get to celebrate this one each year, and that as a result I get to celebrate the other one, too. That's all!


ENTRY #30

Happy Birthday, Grandpa Sam

[copied from dland]

**In 27 days I will be 50 years old**

Okay, I know it's time for me to stop doing this, but today would have been Grandpa's birthday. Let's see, it's 2002, so if he were still alive, he would be ... 110.

Perhaps I'm being a little unrealistic here. When he died 31 years ago, I was 18, and his presence in my life was so strong that I couldn't imagine going on without him. So every year I would imagine what it would be like if he hadn't died. For a while it seemed realistic enough. When I was 21 he would have been 81, celebrating my birthday; that was possible. He would only have been 85 at my wedding; people live to be 85 all the time. He would have been 92 when my first daughter was born. Hey, didn't his own brother live to 92, and their mother to 96? It could have happened!

I'm not sure when it got to be weird, I guess ten years ago when he would have been 100. Not so many people make it to 100. And now I've got to make peace with it: he's not coming back. I mean, I knew of course that he wasn't coming back.

But he never would have seen me reach 50, not under any circumstances, not under the best possible health, and here's 50 coming up fast. What would it have been like for him, to see his grandchildren all grown now, and one of them a grandmother herself? It would have been some ride.

But no transfer at the end of the line, not even for a guy who spent half his life riding the New York City subways.

What the hell. Happy Birthday, Grandpa. Love you.


ENTRY #29

The Story of Us: The Real Thing

[copied from dland]

**In 29 days I will be 50 years old**

So it was the summer after high school, and we went to the movies every Saturday night and then out to a diner somewhere for cheesecake. The first movie we saw was The Andromeda Strain, a scifi flick about an alien virus that threatens life as we know it. A real date movie.

It was a pleasant way to spend a summer, but it was a relationship – if you can call it that – that was going nowhere. Never once did he kiss me, or try to. I never could figure out what was going on, but since we were both going off to college in September, I didn’t have to work very hard at it. We would go to college and it would be over.

What I didn’t count on was that he would be at school in DC, I would be at the University of Maryland, just ten miles away, and I would be homesick for a familiar face. So after a few weeks at school, I got in touch with him and we started dating again. I think he came out twice by bus and picked me up and we went into Georgetown, and when we were home, we went to the movies. This went on for a month or two, by which time I wasn’t homesick anymore, and I had had it. I decided that it was over, and then on our last date, after he brought me all the way back to Maryland from DC and had to turn around and run to catch the last bus back, he kissed me. Wow. It was great. And then he was gone.

But I had already decided. I sat down and actually wrote him a “Dear John” letter, and sent it. I justified this to myself somehow, probably by saying “Well, I’ll never see him again anyway,” and let it go. I started seeing someone, went with him for about three years, and fully expected to marry him. The fact that he wasn’t Jewish was absolutely irrelevant; the fact that he turned out to be from Mars was not. Once I realized that this was not the guy I ever wanted to be the father of my children, I got it that this meant I didn’t want to marry him after all. Right around Christmas of my senior year of college, I broke up with him, perhaps one of the smartest things I had ever done.

So here I was, unattached. My few friends made it their project to take me to bars and teach me to drink, so that if I ever got to go on any kind of date again, I wouldn’t look like a four-year-old. I was living at home now, my senior year of college at a local state school. I knew I needed to go to graduate school in September, but I missed the application deadline. So I got a job, and planned to in January.

Summer passed. I should say here that although I had no idea where John was, I figured he was somewhere in town, at least for the summer, and I always had it in the back of my mind that I would run into him somewhere. A year or two earlier, driving around town with the soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, I saw John out running. If I had to go someplace, the drugstore, the library, I always made sure I was at least presentable looking. You never know.

It was late August, the 25th, I think, maybe around 7:00. I wanted to go out and buy myself a cassette recorder, but when Jack asked where I was going, I knew that I would get an argument about saving my money if I told him the truth. So I grabbed a couple of books to return and said “To the library.” I bought the cassette recorder, but then I had to get the books out of the car, so I went to the library. When I parked in the car, I saw John’s car there, an adorable and very distinctive red Firebird with a black vinyl top. He was not the sports car type, and it had always seemed an odd car for him. I hoped that maybe his sister was at the library, although I knew it was him.

I looked like crap. Torn cut-offs, stained t-shirt, sandals, probably legs not too recently shaven, no make-up, hair a mess. All I needed to do was step inside the library, drop off the books, and be off. No way I would run into John here, now. I went up the steps and reached to open the door. But before I could, it opened and he came out, and stood right there in front of grungy old me.

We talked for a minute or two, how was school, what are you doing now, etc. I wanted to get away and at least brush my hair, but I was fascinated. And then, after a minute or two of silence, he said “Would you like to go out for a drink later?” Muttering a casual “Sure, okay,” I raced inside, dropped off my books, waited until I was sure he was out of the parking lot, and then beat it back home, showering, dressing, all of it. By the time he came an hour or so later, I was calm, collected, casual. No big deal.

We went to a bar/restaurant he knew of, and had to wait for a table. While we stood there, he reached into a pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes, and offered me one. Wow. I had just quit in June, but I took one. Wow, I thought, he smokes, he drinks. He grew up. What next?

We sat over drinks for a few hours. The conversation was easy and fun. He took me home and we sat on my front steps for maybe another hour, mostly kissing. Turns out he was really really good at that.

He said goodnight, after making plans to see each other the next night. I stood inside my door, watching him get into his car. As he pulled away from the curb, I actually said out loud to no one but me: “Oh my god. I’m going to marry John.” I just knew.

Yada, yada, yada. Within two weeks he had ditched a girlfriend, started graduate school locally, and that was it. He never once in all these years has brought up the “Dear John” letter, and I apologized for it right away. We got engaged the next summer, and married the summer after that. That was 25 years ago this last June.

Here I am, a librarian, and when I tell people that John and I found each other on the front steps of the public library, then this is the part that’s all how romantic, how sweet. And it really was.

Life is not always a picnic, and it is certainly not always what you think it’s going to be. But when I remember how it felt to stand just inside the door that night and watch him pull away and know I was going to marry him, him of all people, I know how great a feeling that was and how right it was, then and now.

P.S. As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I’ve also been teaching for the last 25 years in the same high school both John and I (and our sisters, children, etc.) went to. Over the years, I have warned many girls to be careful what they say about the geeky boys in their classes, because you never know who you’ll end up with. And dear Mr. Buckley, our speech teacher, before he retired, was fond of telling the girls in his classes that if they were good students, he would do for them what he had done for me. When they asked what that was, he said that he had gotten me a husband. He took credit for the whole thing.


ENTRY #28

The Story of Us: High School, Part 1

[copied from dland]

**In 32 days I will be 50 years old**

One of the diaries I most enjoy, that of wifemotherme, recently wrote her Story of Us, and wanted to see others’ stories of us (them?). So here goes.

As you can all see by the countdown at the top of the page, I’m old, man. Half a fucking century, can’t believe it. I still feel like a kid inside. (Not the bones and muscles, they feel like 95. But I feel like the same person I always was.) Here’s a quotation I especially love, by an author named Jill Ciment, whose books I have never read. I just saw this somewhere:

“The anomaly of childhood is that despite its brevity, childhood takes up a lot of square footage in memory’s tight quarters.”

Here goes.

Back in the day, junior high school consisted of grades 7, 8, and 9, and then we moved up to the big school for three years of high school. Here in my little suburb, there were two junior high schools, one for the east side of town and one for the west. Most of us (about 675 kids) never met each other until the first day of 10th grade. That first day of 10th grade is the day I met John.

Doesn’t that sound sweet and romantic, that we met on the first day of high school? Keep reading.

I was very shy, couldn’t talk to boys at all. If a boy said hello, I couldn’t think of an answer, let alone say it out loud. The thought of speaking in public really terrified me. So of course, like everyone else in the 10th grade, I was taking a class in public speaking. Since the only alternative was a class in acting, it was the safer choice.

The teacher, as it turned out, was a very special guy, the school character, but in a good way. He looked like a leprechaun and had more energy than any kid in the school. He was funny and wonderful. No one was allowed to remain shy in Mr. Buckley’s class. He made everyone feel important. I guess he must have gone around the room and made us introduce ourselves. When it was John’s turn, I recognized his last name at once; his father was in charge of the school system at the time and his name appeared at the bottom of practically every notice we took home. So it was like he was the principal’s kid, only more so.

I didn’t think much of him. He had short short dark hair, was maybe a little plump, and was dressed like it was 1958 instead of 1968. And then I saw it: an American flag pin on his shirt collar. Uh-oh. This meant he was a hawk, pro-war, maybe even – GASP! – a Republican!

1968, remember? Lots going on in the world, Viet Nam, recent demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago, and a big election for president in just two months. True, Hubert Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon, but, dove as I was, I still had the McCarthy button on my bag. That’s Senator Eugene, not Senator Joseph of the 1950s. This was the Senator who ran on a Peace Now ticket for the Democratic nomination. I was a supporter.

And here was this kid wearing an American flag pin? What was he, 50 years old? What kid wasn’t against the war in Viet Nam? I got closer. He had bumper stickers on his notebook, one on the front and one on the back. Here’s what they said:

“Reagan for President.” Remember, this was 1968. And “Better Dead Than Red.”

So when class was over, I went up to him and said something like “What’s wrong with you? Anything is better than dead.” And so it began.

We baited each other daily over political issues that were extremely important. When it was time to give our persuasive speeches, I gave mine on the topic “Why we should pull out of Viet Nam unconditionally now.” His was “Why we should end the war in Viet Nam by dropping a nuclear bomb on Peking.” Hmmm.

The teacher kept us apart. Our friends would watch down the halls to make sure we wouldn’t accidentally encounter each other. I hated this kid.

More to follow.


ENTRY #26

TV Guide

[copied from dland]

**In 33 days I will be 50 years old**

And another milestone reached in life. It has finally happened.

I didn’t renew my subscription to TV Guide.

I have never lived anywhere where there wasn’t a subscription to TV Guide. My parents were charter subscribers, and the magazine made its first appearance the week after I was born, so it was there when I came home from the hospital. From the time I could read, I would read each issue cover to cover every week. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to. I mean, it was a magazine, right? Isn’t that what you do with magazines, read them?

It was a magazine about TV; could there be anything better than that? I read TV Guide while I watched TV, while I watched in amazement as Jim Anderson came home in a jacket and tie, kissed Princess and Kitten and mussed Bud’s hair, and changed into a sweater with patches on the sleeves. That was so cool. My dad just went to work in a sport shirt. He didn’t even wear a hat like all the other men on TV did.

All summer long I would wait for the Fall Premiere issue, the one that had that neat grid in it that said when all the new shows would be on, and it had pictures from the new shows, too. I couldn’t wait to see Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island, what great shows they sounded like. Okay, even I caught on right away when I saw them, but I still watched.

I never saw Dynasty, not once, or Knot’s Landing, but I always knew what was going on in their plotlines. I read it in TV Guide. I had a subscription in my name when I lived in the dorm away at college. Sometimes there was overlap, like I would get the holiday issue at school even though I was home for the holiday break, but that was okay. As long as there was TV Guide someplace, I was okay.

I always knew what was on, always. When I was a kid, nobody else in my house even looked at TV Guide. They just asked me what was on.

But after 50 years (almost), I’m thinking: maybe it’s enough already.

Too many articles about movies and music. Too many articles about how wonderful TV Guide is. And the cable people just keep adding channels, and poor old TV Guide just can’t keep up.

Time to go, TV Guide. Time for me to move on.


ENTRY #25

Who Am I, Anyway?

[copied from dland]

**In 40 days I will be 50 years old**

So I’m sitting there with my therapist last night and I’m telling her about my sucky day in the hospital and how nobody in my family came to see what I was doing there in the Emergency Room for hours and hours, and the first thing is that my cell phone rings. Since it seems like the height of rudeness to answer your cell phone while in therapy, I didn’t. (I only keep it on all the time because I don’t wear a watch anymore since the Purple Chai came into my life.) My issue of last night’s session seemed to be my sense of myself as unimportant and insignificant and have I trained my family to think that I can handle everything and they never need to worry about me. Lots to ponder on. And then the phone rings again on my way home and it’s the Older Daughter, totally panicked. About an hour and a half away at college out of state, she saw on TV that there was a terrible car accident in our town and she couldn’t move on until she knew I was okay and not involved. When I didn’t answer her first call she freaked out, called my Sister, and on and on.

So what was I saying again?

So I’m thinking about this being a speck of dust in the universe and no more meaningful in the grand scheme than a worm or a stereo speaker, and thinking, I ought to write this down. It’s good grist for the Purple Chai mill. I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Still working on it.

But another conversation I had today with my Colleague at work leads me off at a slightly skewed angle. Somehow we got onto the topic of what I was like as a kid, I’m not sure why. I think I said something about being the baby of the family and that I was very indulged, not with things, but with attention. I remarked that I was a little kid who demanded a lot of attention and got it.

She looked stunned. “No,” she said, “that can’t be. They all depended on you, always.”

“I mean when I was three, four, five.”

“No,” she said. “Not possible.”

I tell her that I was a whiny kid, and that they would give in to me just to make me shut up. If I didn’t get my way I would stamp my feet, maybe throw something. (Yes, I was sent to my room here or properly spanked. It was the 1950s, after all.) I tell her that when I was playing games with Grandpa and he had to go to the bathroom that if I didn’t want to stop playing I told him not to go, and he didn’t.

She’s looking at me like I just dropped in from Mars, not knowing what to say now that I have insisted that I am not making this up and she can call Jack at the old people’s place and have him verify it all for her. So finally she says:

“When did you change and become the total opposite?”

Whoa. Who the hell am I, anyway?

I’m the doer who sucks up every negative feeling and hasn’t gotten angry at anyone in about 20 years. I’m the turner of the other cheek. I’m the handler of all bad things, therefore the dumpee of all the crap no one else does or want to do. But I’m still the little whiner inside, it’s just that I learned in my life that other people don’t so much like to be around little whiners, so it’s best to keep that to yourself. I learned that lesson real, real well.

No answers here, except that I am all of it, and I can’t get a handle on it at all. Not at all.


ENTRY #24

Christmas, and the Jewish Thing

[copied from dland]

**In 39 days I will be 50 years old**

One of my family rituals each year around Christmastime was taking a ride one evening, in and out of all the streets in the town we lived in and neighboring towns, oohing and aahing at all the pretty, lit-up houses. One year my mother and I went into the city to shop at Macy’s, where the real Santa was. I never did think Santa was real, though, I always knew it was a man in a suit, pretending to be someone that other kids thought was real. But I remember the crowds, and the Macy’s toy department, and the excitement. I guess this was around 1958.

At home, we lit the candles on a Menorah, a plain, chrome-plated, ordinary thing. Sister and I got several presents, not one each night, but all at once. We never got anything fancy or expensive, since that was out of the family’s budget range, and anyway, Chanukah wasn’t really a big deal holiday. We didn’t celebrate the really big deal holidays at all, in our Jewish-by-culture-but-not-by-religion family. And all of that was totally okay. I never felt cheated, I never felt that I missed anything. I was grateful for what I got. (Especially the Quick-Draw McGraw doll I got when I was 7, that was the BEST! Thanks, Mom!)

Since religion wasn’t a big deal, marrying someone who wasn’t Jewish wasn’t a big deal either. When we got married, my grandmother gave me a Menorah that someone had brought her from Israel as a gift, but she had never used. (She never used anything anyone gave her – that’s another story.) I didn’t like it much, but I liked that she had given it to me, and when Chanukah rolled around in early December that year, I fired it up.

And then, a week later, we got a Christmas tree.

I GOT A CHRISTMAS TREE!!!! How cool is that?

So here I am, 25 years later, and I still just love this whole Christmas thing. We’ve got more ornaments than we know what to do with, because I’ve made a whole lot of them and I collect all kinds of others. We’ve got traditions, man, real American traditions. It all makes me feel like I finally put a foot in that candy store doorway.

I’m not belittling the religious aspects of Christmas, not at all. My girls have always been free to join their grandparents at church, and to make the most of their mixed heritage. But Christmas is many things, and different things to different people.

We light the Menorah still, the beautiful one I bought myself a few years ago, and the ugly Israeli one Grandma gave me, because the girls insist on using that one. When they were little, I gave them a present each night for 8 nights: one night a book, one night a video, one night the “big” gift, etc. They got to pick which one they wanted each night. Once in while Chanukah would start on December 26, and they felt like they hit the jackpot: the Christmas that didn’t end.

Christmas, of course, was spent with my husband’s family. I loved that I had children who believed in Santa Claus, and when they asked me if I thought he was real, I would think seriously and answer honestly, “Yes, I do.” Words mean different things to different people.

I asked Jack just a few years ago why we had always driven around town looking at the lit-up houses, and he admitted that he had just always gotten a kick out of Christmas, all his life. He grew up as one of just a half-dozen Jewish kids in a town near Boston. And Shirl told me that when she was a kid growing up in the Bronx, her father, her Orthodox Jewish father, would take her to Macy’s each year to sit on Santa’s lap, because all children deserve to believe in magic things, and to know that if they are good boys and girls, Santa is there for them. Even if they have a Menorah at home, and not a Christmas tree.


ENTRY #23

And Then I Went to the Hospital

[copied from dland]

It's not that I ate all that much on Thanksgiving. I never really do. I had about a mouthful of turkey -- never my favorite -- and Husband's vegan stuffing, which is always such a big hit with everyone, has always tasted just a little weird to me. Sister made the wonderful family cole slaw, Shirl's recipe, and I do like that. So I ate the cole slaw, and damn, it was good. Even so, I don't eat that much of anything, even that which I love.

Did not feel so good Friday morning, and took an hour or more to get up. I had planned to hit Target first thing in the a.m., to return a couple of things and pick up a few more Christmas gifts, but I stayed in bed for a while instead. Within the hour, the gut began to hurt.

I spent most of the day popping Advil while doing a minor errand or two

And getting a haircut I really didn't need. By six p.m. I was in bed trying to find a comfortable position where I wouldn't be in agony. I was sure I knew just what it was: diverticulitis rearing its ugly head -- um, colon -- again. It was the raisins in the rice pudding. It was the sesame seeds ion the Whopper I had on Tuesday. No doubt, diverticulitis. Or maybe -osis. Diverticulosis goes away in a day or two, but -itis needs antibiotics. Either way, gut pain, gut pain, gut pain.

Nasty night, Friday. All I wanted to do was (excuse me) get rid of whatever was going on in there, which seemed to have found a home in my pocket-filled system. More Advil, and more, and an ice pack on my belly.

Woke up about 8:15 am, saw the note from Husband that he had gone out for a few things. (Because Home Depot is always open.) My doctor was off (it was Saturday, after all) and the gut doctor I had seen a few years ago for a previous bout of the same was already at the hospital working, so he said to come on in, get the CAT scan, and he would see me at two. Girls both still sleeping, I left a note and headed off to Emergency. My main fear at this point was that they would put me in the same cubicle where Shirl died.

I was settled into a cubicle (not that one) by 10, and my day began. Curiously, about this time, my pain disappeared. It's amazing what getting rid of all that stuff can do for you.

The Emergency Room is never a good place to be. Either you are really sick, which certainly sucks, or you're not sick enough to warrant much attention. Hmm. I was definitely in the second category.

They gave me the delightful contrast drink to drink and there I was. I read four magazines. By about noon, I began to wonder where my wonderful family was. The girls, true, might still be asleep. Husband not home yet? A sale on leaf suckers, was there? Did he see the note? Did he not read the word HOSPITAL? Where the fuck was he?

I thought about calling home to tell them I was still alive, but screw it. Someone could be making the ten minute ride to the hospital to see if I was living or dead, right?

Started crying about 1:00. Not big time weeping, mostly sniffling and tears rolling down the old cheeks. And I'm thinking:

"They all think I'm fucking supermom and I can handle it. To them I'm just a competent doer of things that need doing. Needs, I don't have needs. I don't mind being alone in the fucking hospital. I'm just a zero to them, nothing. I'm invisible."

You get the picture.

I finally went for the damn CAT scan at 1:30 and was back in my cubicle by 2:15. Oh wait, someone else was in my cubicle now. They parked my bed in the hall, where I sat crying until about three. At which time I started asking them to take out my IV because I was going home.

Not that I wanted to go home. I didn't want to see them at all. I thought, if only I had remembered to bring a credit card, I could go to a hotel. They'll be sorry. Everybody hatesmenobodylikesmeI'mgoingtogoeatworms.

They kept putting me off, and my doctor finally showed up at 3:45. Seems like the guy who reads the CAT scans had already gone home. But wait, the pain's gone. Why am I here again?

I begged them to let me go, and told them that my family sucked. The doctor said that I was okay (duh) and let me go.

I'd been thinking all along, don't lose the anger, you never get angry but you're right this time, don't lose it. I got in the car and lit a cigarette and got about three blocks away from the hospital and suddenly realized that I wasn't angry anymore. I was okay.

Got home about 4:30. Husband looked worried and relieved. "Why didn't you call?" he asked. "Why didn't you come?" I asked. So know we know: both of us are jerks. It was very nice that he insisted that he was the bigger jerk, since I was the one in the hospital. It didn't matter anymore. I was okay.

Then I found out that Sister found out where I was all day, and as I was about to call her and tell her I was home she called me and yelled at me and made me swear never never never to do anything stupid like that again, going to the hospital by myself and not calling anyone. I said it wasn't a big deal. She said, if she had gone to the hospital, would I have come right way? And we knew that I would, so she said she would too. And she was right.

And then talked to Jack, and he yelled at me too. He said he would have been there if he knew. Like I would have let him, all 83 years of hardly walking him. But he would have been there.

How do you like that. They love me.


ENTRY #22

The Story of Us: High School, Part 2

[copied from dland]

The year goes by, and in 11th grade I find myself in a history class that turns out to be just a great class, great teacher, and of course, John is in it. We sat in a circle around the room in alphabetical order, so I sat directly across from him, where we never really had to speak. He was in my English class, too, but I didn’t even remember that until he told me years later.

Come spring, the teacher suggested that some in the class might want to go on a weekend trip with her, to a high school in south Jersey that was holding a Model Congress Convention. We would write bills, work in committees, argue before the assembly, and so on. Sounded good. I was one of about eight people who signed up, as did John. The funny thing was, the teacher wasn’t sure she could get the school van until the last minute, and so she asked for volunteer daddies to show up and drive us down there if needed, and the two who signed up were his and mine, although the van showed up and Jack (my daddy) got to go home.

So we head on down to wherever this was, and when we got there, we saw that other schools actually had political parties for school government elections, and they were all promoting them, all of them liberal and pretty much the same. Our school didn’t have that, but we knew that half the fun of this convention was going to be creating conflict and then trying to solve it, so on the spot we created a conservative political party and rallied around John as our leader. He wasn’t too crazy about all of us being insincere on the issues, but we went for it and it was great. Turns out I didn’t hate him after all. He really was bright and funny and cared a lot about all of his causes, horrible as I thought they were.

Senior year, and we are together again in a history seminar class taught by the same teacher. There are only about 12 kids in the class, and we find, to our amazement, that we can have normal conversations with each other. By this time, I have a boyfriend (since early Junior year, actually), and had no thoughts of anyone else, especially John. But we went to the Model Congress again, and it was great. And we also both went on a trip with the same teacher and a busful of kids to spend a week in Washington DC in March. By the time we got back, we were friends. We even played tennis together once a week or two later, not that I can do that. And then, just before graduation, the boyfriend and I called it quits.

One week after graduation, John called and asked if I wanted to go with him to see the Fourth of July fireworks. First date.

Sweet? Romantic? I’m not done yet.


ENTRY #27

They Suck Your Life Right Up

[copied from dland]

It's been a while, and here's why.

They came home from college, both of them. It was wonderful having them here, and I love them so much. Yet ...

They are so incredibly disruptive to the quiet little life we so naturally settled into about five minutes after they both left in August. For all of you out there getting edgy about sending off your youngest to college and falling into that empty nest thing, I am here to tell you that sending both -- or all, whatever -- of your kids away is the most relaxed you will have felt since you got pregnant. When they are gone:

there are no dishes in the sink.

there are clean towels in the bathroom.

there is hardly any garbage to take out.

you can watch whatever you want to on tv.

the phone almost never rings.

no one is coming and going at odd hours.

This one amuses me. Okay, we're hardly late-night-type folks, but when someone is sitting around in her pajamas at nine o'clock on a Saturday night and then leaves for a minute and comes back fully dressed, telling me she's going to a movie and someone's picking her up at 11, I've got to wonder. Their evenings BEGIN at 11:00? By 11, I've usually already slept for an hour or two and am just coming alive for my first bout of insomnia/eating-everything-in-the-kitchen for the night.

But no complaints, really. They came, they went. Aside from their bizarre random moments of sibling rivalry, they got along great, as they always do, and were most pleasant to be with. I made a point last night of telling Older Daughter (while waiting for her 11:00 pickup) that I am proud to be her mother, and that I am proud of the person she has become. Younger Daughter has grown so much while away at school, and I am proud of her too.

And I am proud of me. Thanksgiving is to our family what Christmas is to others: our ultimate coming together, the holiday that means the most to us. Nephews flew in from California, drove down from Boston. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving, all of us there. Except, of course, Shirl. Our first Thanksgiving without Grandma.

We made it.


ENTRY #21

I Really Am a Cranky Old Lady

[copied from dland]

When I was a girl ...

It still doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I guess in real time, it is. I've never been particular about rules or following them; I still like to believe that there's a lot of flower child still in here somewhere. Keep in mind that from 1969 to 1972, I covered the hole in the seat of my jeans with an American flag patch.

Having said that, here are the things that are bugging me lately about people and how they don't know how to behave in a public place.

Despite the Viet Nam war, I was taught that the American flag is always to be properly displayed and handled. I was a Girl Scout and a Girl Scout leader, and y'know, these flag handling rules are not so tough. A worn out or frayed flag is never displayed. Flags are taken down in the rain unless they are specifically made all-weather flags. The flag never touches the ground.

So all these flags everywhere since 9/11 are driving me crazy. Abby Hoffman was arrested for wearing a shirt made out of a flag. But now you can buy a flag thong, and there are flags flying from car windows in all weather, and they're blowing off onto the road and cars are driving over them, and by the time they're blown off your car they're practically hanging in shreds. So if we're showing the flag for whatever reason we've got to show it, can't we show it some respect while we're at it?

And why are people always clapping for themselves, huh? I was taught that this was BAD MANNERS. You can see it on Oprah, on anything. They introduce someone and say "Here's so and so, she did some terrific thing or another" and everyone in the audience claps (as they should) and then so-and-so CLAPS FOR HERSELF. This looks tacky, like so-and-so's mother never showed her how to behave in public.

Am I wrong here?

Or am I just old?


ENTRY #20

Crackers and HTML

[copied from dland]

So I haven't written in a little over a week, and I must say that there's something off-putting about writing and knowing that no one ever reads it. Not that I don't understand that IT'S A DIARY and generally people write in diaries without expectations of being read. Even so. An entry in the guestbook just to show that anyone has some idea that I'm doing this would certainly boost my self-confidence.

So I'm working on the school website and eating crackers, since I don't feel particularly interested in eating anything else. Husband is off teaching, as he does two nights a week, not that I would be making dinner if he were here. For one, I don't cook, almost never have. I used to like to cook. For two, since he's a vegan he makes all his own food, which I suppose is a good thing for me. So there you go.

I don't have an eating disorder, but I do have what I tend to call an extreme eating style difference. (For you fellow teachers out there, it's a like those learning style differences we keep hearing so much about.) I don't seem to eat like other people (except my sister). Meals are unimportant; I wouldn't care if I ever again sat down to eat a scheduled, or for that matter, complete and balanced, meal. If I'm hungry, I'll eat.

Which begs the question, am I hungry? The answer: rarely. And if I am, it doesn't generally bother me enough to make me want to eat. Most of the time, anyway. I have days when I can eat all day, one little bit of junk after another. I can never eat a lot of anything, but I can keep snacking -- noshing -- on and on. That's when I'm eating. Other days, I can have a cup of coffee in the morning, a slice of cheese in the afternoon, and a bowl of Lucky Charms at 11 pm, after I've slept for an hour or so and gotten up again. So my diet is pretty fucked up.

So I must be skinny, right? Sadly, not right. According to the charts and body mass index crap, I'm overweight by ten to fifteen pounds. How this happens I cannot imagine.

6:45 pm and I'm having Arizona iced tea and Ritz crackers. Since I'm trying not to have macaroni and cheese every night (my most favorite of foods, not that Kraft crap, and I can eat a lot of this food) and not more than once a week, that's out.

Maybe I'll have a fluffernutter again. I had two last night. Hmmm.


ENTRY #19

Groovin' to the Beat, On Medicare

[copied from dland]

Haven't written in several days, even odder since I had Thursday and Friday off and had a lot more time. One of the tasks I accomplished -- and accomplishing tasks is probably my most favorite thing to do -- is that I re-organized all the .mp3 files on my computer. I have about 900 files, god knows how many gigabytes. I like my music.

Not great music, mind you, and a pretty strange mix. Most all of my .mp3s came from my own CDs. In my earliest memory, the music I remember is pop rock'n'roll, what my big sister listened to on the radio in 1958, when I was five (songs like "Running Bear" and "Tall Paul") and show music. My parents brought that home. By the time I was seven or eight, I could sing all the songs from The Sound of Music.

I have no music in me at all. I cannot sing, although I like to. I sing when I’m alone, or I sing to babies. I’ll sing the national anthem if everyone else in the stadium is singing it, too. But I can’t carry a tune and I have no sense of pitch or rhythm. I can’t play any musical instrument despite a few years of piano lessons. And I absolutely cannot dance. You can ask, but it won’t make any difference.

I almost never listen to music in the house, maybe because I’m so rarely alone in the house. I’m all alone right now, and listening. Mostly I listen when I’m in the car. When I listen to my music, I sing along, and dance, if you can call it dancing. It’s chair-dancing, or car-dancing, to be more accurate. I’m moving, but I still have no rhythm.

Here’s the thing: most of my music is 60s and 70s pop. It’s crap and I know it is. Right now the song that’s playing is “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. Next up: the Captain and Tennille.

God I love this stuff. Does it make me feel like a kid again? I don’t know. It makes me feel good. And the best of all is Motown. About a half hour ago, when “This Old Heart of Mine” by the Isley Brothers was blasting through the house, I got this picture in my head of a whole floor of rooms in an assisted living facility, say, 2025, when those of us riding the crest of the baby boom are all there. In each room, some geezer blasting Motown, or, in secret, wearing headphones and grooving along with the Carpenters. Or Springsteen. Or, most likely, the touchstone of our music, the Beatles.

I get so pissed off when I hear a Beatles song, or even Neil Sedaka, in a commercial. It’s not just that schmuck Michael Jackson who’s getting all the money for the Beatles songs; it’s that this is my youth, my soul, selling crap on TV. I wonder if this is how my mother felt when there were commercials in the 50s using Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman as their music.

I’ve noticed lately that the muzak in the supermarket is Creedence and Clapton. Can’t help but notice. Is it because there are more of us boomers than there are of anyone else? Have we got all the money? Are we the only people at the supermarket at 7:30 on a Saturday morning? In 2025 are we going to hear Kurt Cobain on the muzak on Saturday mornings, and on commercials?


ENTRY #18

On Racism, and Racists

[copied from dland]

In the spring of 1999, I was enrolled along with my sister in a graduate class in Education called Principles of Curriculum Development. It was no such thing. It turned out to be a class, perhaps the only one I’ve ever taken, that cause me to challenge and examine my own beliefs and thoughts about things that I had become cynical or complacent about. The professor was an unusual and fascinating sprite of a man, who challenged us at every opportunity.

One evening he showed us a short video in which a young woman, an undergraduate at the school I was attending, had spoken at a seminar about racism. The seminar had been conducted by a member of the university staff. Both of these individuals were of African-American heritage. Afterwards, we were asked to react to what we had seen, I said that I was saddened because the young woman was in so much pain. At this point, two women in the class with me, the only two individuals in the room (in which all the students were working teachers) who were also of African-American heritage, took me to task for my reaction. A discussion followed. Later that evening, at home, I wrote this reaction to what had happened and later gave it to the professor to read.

“I am angry, and because this is an emotion that is not comfortable for me, I want to intellectualize it, to resolve my anger by having an objective, clear discussion about its cause. But that does not appear to be possible.

Perhaps I was not clear in my response to the video we saw in class. In no way did I mean to negate the repugnancy of racism on any level. I only meant to say that, when I saw the speaker, I saw primarily the personal pain that racism caused her, rather than the social issue of racism itself.

To quote the fictional Ferris Bueller, 'isms, in my opinion, are not good.' I do not tend to see things in the greater societal context; I am more likely to see how individuals are affected by the conditions that surround them. To observe that each person is motivated primarily by his or her perceptions is not to say something especially radical or even strange. It is true on its surface. These individual perceptions can be based on 'isms,' on our sense of how others perceive us and treat us based on those perceptions. As clearly evidenced by the speaker in the video, racism is an insidious, pervasive horror. Certainly the Muslim peoples in the Balkans would agree.

A word or two here about the kinds of words we use when discussing these issues. I do not care for the words 'race', 'color,' 'black' and 'white' in this context because I believe that all of them are used inappropriately. I don’t know exactly what 'race' means; I thought it meant species, and all humans are of the same species. I don’t think it means distinctions made purely on the grounds of skin color. Similarly, I use the expression 'people of color' because it sounds charming; I don’t know if it actually means that much. I prefer not to think of myself as a colorless person. I certainly do not think of myself as 'white.' Not only does this imply being bland and colorless, it also lumps together all those individuals who are not perceived as people of color as if they were the same. No more than all people lumped together under the meaningless term 'black' are all people designated 'white' the same. When I am asked to indicate my ethnicity on a form of some kind, and I am offered several options, including African-American, Hispanic, Native American, White, or other, I feel that I am a victim of racism. What I perceive as my race doesn’t even rate a line on the form. I get the message that I am not a member of a race that counts for anything at all. When I can, I check other. I am not any of those things, and I am not white, either.

I was challenged in class on the grounds that I am not discriminated against based on the color of my skin. This is also clearly true on its surface, and I agree with it now as I did in class. I must also agree that I do not have the capacity to perceive personally what it would be like to experience such discrimination. However, I found it most curious that the individual who said this to me had also stated that she could never understand how the Jews in Nazi Germany could be distinguished from the other people there, the Aryans. Yet this is a perception that has been clear to me from birth. I always knew that the Nazi organization had been able to make this distinction with no trouble at all, and I always knew that I would be perceived as easily, should that time ever come to pass. (In essence, the message I got here was that all 'white people look alike.) Just as I am unable to experience the perception of discrimination based on skin color, this member of the class is unable to experience the perception of discrimination for being Jewish. I imagine that neither of us is capable of experiencing the perception of being an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo. Part of my anger of the moment stems from the fact that I am unable to explain to this classmate (I don't know her name) that this is something we share in common, this inability to feel another person's pain. Yet I sensed very strongly that it is her perception that my sense of being discriminated against in society is not as valid as her own. Certainly it is not as valid in this particular time and place in world history. Yet it is my perception, and so it is as valid as her own, on those grounds alone.

I recently attended a faculty meeting at which the guest speaker was the professor who appeared in the video we saw in class. I found him quite interesting and articulate (as opposed to most of the guest speakers we have at faculty meetings.) He spoke about the perceptions of students 'of color', and indicated that it should be clear to everyone why, because of the situations in which they are raised, we should understand when students 'of color' choose, for example, to sit together in a class. He gave a few other examples of why students 'of color' would choose to group together in various circumstances. I asked him if he would agree that, when students who are generally recognized as 'white' make this same choice, it is perceived by those 'of color' as racism. He agreed that it was. I asked him why it should be perceived as racism on the one hand, but normal social behavior on the other hand. He did attempt to explain his reasoning, which I was unable to understand. He further explained that, for example, when teenagers are at a mall, those who are 'of color' are treated differently than those who are, for example, Jewish or Italian. Incredulous, I asked him after the meeting if he actually believed that, at the mall, he could distinguish between those teenagers who were Jewish or Italian or anything else. I expected some equivocation here, but to my amazement, he replied that he absolutely could tell the difference. When I asked how, he said something about credit cards which show names. (Did this imply that all Jewish teenagers carry credit cards?) This was nonsense. Most teenagers do not carry credit cards, and even if they did, they wouldn't carry them openly. He claimed to be able to distinguish the ethnic identity of teenagers walking around the mall.

The only answer, of course, is that he is very much a perpetuator of racism himself, which he denied quite definitely. The truth is that, although he can see the very real possibility that I might be a racist, he cannot begin to conceive that he might be one himself. The reason for this, I think, is that, just as I am unable to know what it feels like to be discriminated against because of skin color, he is unable to know what it feels like to be discriminated against for any other reason. There is one chief difference between us, and it has nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity. The difference is that I can see that his perceptions are the lens through which he sees the world, and I can understand his right to do so, even though I can't see things through his lens. He, however, cannot understand the possibility that my perceptions cause things to appear to be different to me. He can neither understand this, nor can he acknowledge my right to do so. Like the Supreme Court and pornography, he believes that he knows racism when he sees it. To him, I am wrong, and possibly -- perhaps even very likely -- a racist. I don't think that I am. He, however, is.”


ENTRY #17

I Believe That

[copied from dland]

It’s almost eleven years. It all started around this time of the year, autumn, eleven years ago. It sounded like I had an ear infection all the time, a rushing sound in my right ear. Actually the sound had started during the summer, but sometimes I could make it go away. By October, I had it all the time, and sometimes the throbbing noise. Not a throbbing pain, in fact, no pain at all, but the sound of throbbing in my ear, especially when I would lie down at night to go to sleep. Sometimes I would get up and watch TV, because the sound of the throbbing in a quiet room would drive me crazy. When I could hear the throbbing, it would drown out other sounds, but in and out, in and out. It was like a heartbeat, and whenever it would beat, I could hear nothing else.

It was the throbbing that finally made me ditch the allergist who was treating me for an ear infection and go to see an ear specialist. There were tests, yada yada yada. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving that I went to get the results and while we were waiting for the doctor to come in, sister and I looked at the x-ray in the light box on the wall. There was a silver spot about the size of a quarter, but not quite round, right in the middle of someone’s brain. I saw my name on the x-ray and said “Oh shit, they’re gonna make me go back and get another x-ray. There’s something wrong with that one. There’s a big spot on it.” She didn’t say anything, but I think that was when she figured it out. But not me.

So he came in, the doctor, and took my hand in one of his. Odd, I thought. He said, “It’s not good.” I looked at him. He said, “It’s a brain tumor.” I thought – maybe even said – “You mean that silver thing in my brain is really there?” He nodded. I said “Can you get it out?” He said “Yes.” So it was okay.

I went to see the neurosurgeon the next week, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. He said it was a tumor, one of three possible kinds. One, he said, a glioma, always malignant. I didn’t want that one. Next, he said, a meningioma, maybe malignant and maybe not, but taking it out would have consequences. I didn’t so much want that one either. Remotely possible, he said, was an acoustic neuroma. Never malignant and would leave me deaf on one side, maybe a little facial paralysis. I was rooting for the acoustic neuroma, even though he said they almost never happen as deep in the brain as my tumor was. “I can have it done after the holidays, right?” I asked. “After Christmas?” “No,” he said.

Nasty day the next day, all the pep rally crap going on in school and me thinking that everything I saw I wouldn’t ever ever see again. I was having Thanksgiving dinner at my house on Thursday like every year, and I figured this was going to be my last one of those, too. Cousin was coming in from Colorado with her new husband. Maybe I wouldn’t ever see her again either.

I came home from school, half day before a holiday. The kids would be home a little later. They really were kids then too, only ten and seven years old. Maybe they wouldn’t even really remember me when they were all grown up.

I sat there, wondering about all kinds of shit. I thought, this will be okay if I can only think of something to hold onto, something that I can plan to do when this is all over. Something that would make me happy.

I said out loud to no one else there, “In April, when spring vacation comes, I’m going to DisneyWorld.” Just sister and I, just the two of us. No kids. “I’m going to DisneyWorld.” And then I was okay.

Went over that afternoon with the kids to see Jack and Shirl, and cousin, and all the assembled family, including my two girls and my sister’s three kids. Nephew #1 was a senior in high school then, in my high school, and going through a lot of crap times. Everybody in the room was depressed except for me. They weren’t sure that I was as okay as I seemed to be. I assured them all that I was fine, because I was going to DisneyWorld. There was a heartbeat’s worth of pause, and then Jack said he’d pay for us to go. So then everybody was okay, pretty much.

On December 17 I went to the hospital at about six a.m. Husband and sister came with me, and stayed while they got me all set up before the operation, with tubes sticking out of everywhere and hooked up to all kinds of equipment. Then I was in for about eight hours while they cut a hole in my head about an inch behind my right ear and took out what turned out to be a rather large acoustic neuroma that was leaning against my brain stem. They almost never find them there.

I could write all kinds of other things about my surgery, and in time, I probably will. It seems pretty bizarre that after being exposed to the wonderful Grandpa Sam for 18 years, and being raised by two goofy people with solid values, and after dedicating myself to reading and literature and learning and writing, not to mention an amazing abundance of popular culture, the defining experience of my life is that one of my nerve cells went nuts and grew a great big lump right in the middle of my brain, and someone had to cut open my head and take it out.

For now, what made me write this just today is that I came across something I wrote when I was in the hospital after my surgery. I was in for about a week altogether; I came home the morning of Christmas Eve, the 24th. I was in surgery on the 17th, and spent the next two days in the recovery room instead of intensive care. After that I went to a private room, so I wrote this on one of the days I was in there. I hardly slept when I was there, so I may have written it in the middle of the night. I had taken with me to the hospital a steno pad on which I had made notes about the surgery before hand, like what the doctors said to me, schedule dates and times, and so on. Now I was also writing down when they brought me pain medication, because I wanted to make sure they brought the next dose when I was supposed to get it. But I wasn’t in an awful lot of pain from the surgery. It was that they were taking me off the high does of prednisone, and each time the dose went down, I was being torn apart by muscle aches, mostly in my legs and back.

By this time, it was clear that I wasn’t ever going to hear anymore in my right ear, and that the right side of my face was never going to move of its own free will. But my face hadn’t “fallen” so I didn’t look all that grotesque. They were coming from physical therapy to teach me to walk without banging into walls all the time, and to go up and down steps. I remember that one afternoon Jack came to visit when I had to go to PT and he watched while I tried without much success to go up and down two steps. I think if I had to watch my grown child do that, I couldn’t.

So here’s what I wrote in my steno pad, and kept. A couple of years ago I typed it into a file on the computer so I wouldn’t ever lose it. At the top of the page I wrote

I believe that

-I will have some bad days. Most days will be good.

-On bad days, my neck and scar will be stiff and sore. I will have eye sutures removed. I will feel pain, and discomfort, and nausea.

-On good days I will have some stiffness and soreness but probably not much pain. I will not walk into walls or fall down or step on the cat.

-In February I will do laundry again and I will start to prepare to move around the kids' rooms.

-I am very happy that I am alive. I want to see my children grow up, and I will. I still want to go to DisneyWorld.

- It is okay to cry on bad days.

- Life is not all black and white. Mostly it is light gray.

- When I have pain-killers I feel pretty good.

- It is okay to feel good whenever you can.

- Sometimes I dribble.

And I still believe it, all of it, after eleven years.

ENTRY #16

The Purple Chai

[copied from dland]

Here's how I got the purple chai. Like most stories, it starts in more than one place and then comes together, the way streets come from all over the city and converge at a traffic circle. (Forgive me, I spent last weekend in DC).

First Avenue

When I was a kid, I wore a tiny little gold star on a chain around my neck. We were wearing, we said, Jewish stars. All the little girls I knew wore them, no more than a quarter-inch across, on a delicate little chain. All the little girls I knew were Jewish, like me. But back then, when I was small, I never knew anyone who went to synagogue or actually practiced the Jewish religion, except my grandpa. Grandpa is a story for another day.

But they sent me to Hebrew school for a while, in a scary old YMHA, in North Bergen, I think. The building looked like the original Jews who followed Abraham had built it there. I was about 6 or 7. We learned Bible stories and a couple of Hebrew alphabet letters. I learned to read one word in Hebrew: chai. This is pronounced like the word "high", but the first sound is the guttural "hhcchh" you hear in Hebrew or Yiddish.

If I remember correctly, chai is a letter in the Hebrew alphabet that is also a word and a number. The number is 18. The word chai means life. The Hebrew name for Adam, father of us all, is Chaim. The expression, used as a drinking toast "L'chaim!" means "To life!"

Sometimes I would see other Jewish people wearing not a little star on a chain (it is really called the Mogen David, which means the Star of David, and not a Jewish star), but a chai. In fact, I noticed, there was a small letter chai in the center of the little star I wore.

Second Avenue

I moved when I was eight, to a community, my parents said, where there were many more Jewish families. It didn't seem that way to me, I guess because my old home was in a heavily Jewish neighborhood within a larger Gentile community. My new hometown was much bigger, and much more diverse, so I thought. There were at least as many Catholic kids in my school as Jewish kids, and we were all in the same school together! There were kids in my school with Italian last names! I had never met any of those before.

I stopped wearing my star because I didn't like wearing jewelry anymore, and it kept sticking me, and none of my friends were wearing stars or crosses or anything. Some of the Jewish kids I met belonged to the synagogue across the highway, and most of the other kids I knew went to church somewhere. I went to Sunday school, in the YMHA in Paterson; it made the North Bergen branch look like it had been built that morning. This place gave new meaning to creepy, dark, and scary, especially on a Sunday morning when the only sounds in the building came from the old men going to and from the pool.

Still, no one in my house went to synagogue or seemed to believe in anything; my parents just wanted me to be culturally literate in my own background. After a few months they pulled me out of the Y Sunday School (Thanks, Mom! Thanks, Dad!) and found someplace new. Some local organization had decided to open a non-religious (yes, that's right) Sunday school for the local Jewish kiddies, which would be held each Sunday just up the block in my very own real school. The Sunday school group rented the space, and once in a while I actually read Bible stories at my own third-grade desk. They didn't teach us Hebrew (feh!) but Yiddish. If only I had paid attention. We had big Purim parties, you know, the Jewish Halloween where every little girl dresses as Queen Esther. This Sunday school lasted for a year or two, I think.

In seventh grade, the big fashion trend among my set was the name necklace, we each wore a little gold plate about an inch across (depending on your name) in print or script, that hung from a chain attached to it at each end. Everybody had one. One day a girl showed up with a tiny cross attached to the chain at one end of her name. Within about five minutes, each of us found the appropriate symbol and got it soldered on. I found my tiny Mogen David and there it was. The correct fashion accessory. I was okay.

Third Avenue

When I was 16, I got the CHARM BRACELET from my parents, the fashion accessory of that age and place. Friends gave me charms for my sweet sixteen, one kind of another. Grandma and Grandpa, as befit their age and nature, gave me the religious charm, the one I would wear on my cool bracelet as a sign of my Jewishness: a tiny little Torah, gold with a white gold door that actually opened, showing the sacred scroll inside. This is called a mezuzah.

When I went off to college in the strange southern land of Maryland just two and a half years later, I thought I should mark myself somehow as a member of my particular group of people. So I went and bought a cheap little silver (at least, silver-colored) mezuzah on a cheap silver (colored) heavy chain. I think it cost about $8. I put it on and set off to college, Jewish for all the world to see. I had still never been in a synagogue in my life, except once for each of my two cousins' Bar Mitzvahs.

Fourth Avenue

Just after Christmas of my senior year of college, I broke up with a boyfriend I had dated for nearly three years, and whom I had fully expected to marry. I broke up with him, for all kinds of right reasons. His being not Jewish was not one of them, for this was irrelevant to me and to my parents. He was, however, a schmuck. For his last act as boyfriend, he gave me a check as a Christmas gift. He gave me $35. A week later, broken up and with $35 in my pocket, I went to the nearest Service Merchandise jewelry counter to see what I could get. Remember, this was 1975, so it's not as impossible as it sounds.

There it was: a chai. Gold, flat, a little less than a half-inch across, both from side to side and up and down. A charm. Lightweight, but substantial. I thought, this is life, this is my life going on. I am okay, I am strong. I should wear a symbol of life, and of who I am. Jewish is a big part of who I am, not religion maybe, but my ethnic identity, my roots are Jewish. I bought the chai. I began to wear it all the time, on a simple gold chain around my neck.

Fifth Avenue

I wore the chai off and on for all the years since. I made sure to wear it through both of my pregnancies. My husband -- not Jewish -- thought nothing of it; he knew that it was not religious and that it was a symbol of life and of my heritage. In recent years, especially since my mother became ill in 1995, I wore it all the time. The same gold chai I bought for $35 in 1975.

Sixth Avenue

So I'm on a class trip with about two hundred kids and a dozen other teachers in 1995 and I notice that a few of the younger teachers have -- gasp! -- tattoos! These are nice normal teacher-types, not Hells' Angels bikers, and they have tattoos! How terrible! How revolting! How intriguing!

So I ask the first idiotic question that everyone without a tattoo asks: "Did it hurt?" The answer, of course, is a derisive "Yeah." (Tone of voice here says, and rightly so, "What are you, a moron?") Yet my best chum and I remain intrigued. Not only do we begin to consider the amusing possibility of tattooing ourselves for our upcoming 50th birthdays, we begin to realize that there are a whole lot of other women our age doing the same thing.

Chum comes back from summer vacation 2001, now age 50, with a lovely tattoo on the outside of her left wrist. I'm thinking, thinking. Older daughter gets a tattoo the minute she's old enough, a small five-pointed star less than an inch across on the inside of her left wrist.

What will I do? What WILL I do?

Seventh Avenue

I decide: I will get a tattoo. All I have to do is decide what it is I want to carry on my body for the rest of my life. What shape, what design, what meaning, what color?

September, 2001. What will I do? Suddenly I realize: chai. I have always worn a chai, so I will always wear a chai. I would like a tattoo that looks just like my charm: a small, golden, chai. My daughter points out that they will never tattoo something small that looks gold. Yellow, maybe. Hmmm.

September 11, 2001, and I am watching along with everyone else as the horror plays out on the TV night and day. New York is only ten miles from my home; two of the boys at school have lost their father in the attack on the first tower. Life is short.

September 25, 2001, and I have taken the day off from school to go to the dentist, do some errands. Driving down the road, I think, if only I knew what color to get my tattoo, I would do it today. I would do it now. I would be passing the tattoo place anyway. Looking down, I notice that I am wearing a purple t-shirt with a purple button down shirt over it. I've got this purple thing going on; I've been wearing purple for about two years now. It's from the poem "When I Am an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple." (That's not really the name of the poem.) It says that now that I'm older I don't have to care what other people think, I can just be me. I can wear purple, so I do.

Purple. Chai. Purple. Chai.

So I went, I got it. I wear a purple chai on my left wrist, where I can cover it with a watchband if I have to, but I haven't worn a watch since the day I got it. Each time I look at it I think, I did this for me. I did this because I wanted to. It says what I want it to say. It looks like I want it to look.

Thanks for taking the tour of the city, ladies and gentlemen, here we are at the traffic circle.

Chai.


WATCHING MASH :: ENTRY #1800

The Etiquette of Blog

[copied from dland]

I wrote in one of my first entries about how I had come to start keeping a web diary, and I continue to be intrigued by the process. Who reads these, and why? And now, a new question: what is the proper thing to do when the writer of the blog is no longer anonymous?

To recap, I stumbled onto this whole thing when I came across two web diaries that were being kept by students in the school where I work. One of these was the typical "Omigod I had a test tuday my teacher sux" and it was, thank god, written by someone I couldn't identify. The other turned out to be a continuing work of poetry by someone whose life I have become privileged to observe somewhat closer than I ever expected to. I read her writing and I look for her in the halls the next day, hoping to see that she is still happy, and still arm in arm with the sweet boy I know her to be in love with.

The mistake I made, I don't remember when, was in telling the SCM (Self-Centered Man) about it. I think I was just trying to demonstrate how this new search engine I'd found worked, and I told him that I had done a sample search on the name of our high school and that it turned up interesting results. The next day he asked if I too had begun to read S--'s web diary, as of course, I had.

I feel as if I have violated her privacy. Yes, I know she writes it and she posts it, but can she really expect that her teachers are reading it? I don't feel that I'm invading her space by reading it myself; oddly, this seems okay to me because I know I will never, would never, indicate to her in any way that I know what I know. But I cannot say the same for the SCM. He is curious and nosy. This is because he cannot estimate the damage that he might do by saying things, because if it isn't happening to him, it isn't happening. What if he sees her in the halls one day and says "Are you still seeing T--? Did you have a good time hiking at (wherever) last week? My wife and I like to hike there; when we went two years ago, we brought our dog, and she almost got sprayed by a skunk, although she didn't. But that was our old dog; we had to have her put to sleep last summer. She developed ............."

And so on. Because he really isn't interested in you at all, S--, he's just looking for a way to talk a little more about himself. And if knowing something about you gives him a hook to start talking, he'll use it. And he won't even notice that you are feeling open and exposed and violated.

So what's the etiquette here? If anyone knows, I'd sure like to hear your advice. I'm considering just telling SCM "You know, it's not polite to tell people you've been reading their blogs. It's really an anonymous kind of thing." Isn't it?


ENTRY #14

The Continuing Saga of the Self-Centered Man

[copied from dland]

So somebody comes in early in the morning and schedules her class to come in here and work later in the day. As soon as she leaves, I see that SCM has taken out the equipment the class is going to need to work. I ask why he has taken it out now when the class is coming in for seventh period (assuring him at the same time that I probably heard it wrong.) He says he thought he heard second period, but his hearing is bad, too. His general take here is that his hearing is as bad as mine, if not worse. He begins to regale me with the tales of how hard it is to hear the TV at home. At least he has stopped asking me what volume setting I use on my TV. "I have to turn mine up to about 32," he used to say. "Do you listen to yours that loud?" "Mine only goes up to 10," I would point out. "Every TV works on its own system." Duh.

So he's telling me about his hearing problems, which are basically the degenerating hearing of any aging baby-boomer who's listened to too much rock'n'roll. Hello, hello! I had my head cut open so they could see my brain! Somebody disconnected the nerve that hears so it doesn't go from my ear to my brain anymore! Hello, hello, clinically deaf person over here!

So once again, an encounter with SCM leaves me wondering if I am not as self-centered as he is. Perhaps, perhaps not. Sometimes he just drives me crazy.


ENTRY #13

Living the Stress-Free Life

[copied from dland]

Is this even possible? If there's no stress, is it really still life, or what? One year ago I would not even have been able to believe that anyone anywhere lived life without stress. If they said they were, they were lying, and if they really thought they weren't, then they just didn't get it. One year ago, stress was like a cargo net that contained all the details of my daily existence. Now, it's gone. No net, no threads connecting the dots as it all swung and slipped above the harbor. Dots seem to be connected on their own now, thank you very much.

It is a way of life unfamiliar and strange. If I'm not dashing from task to task all day every day putting out fires, what am I doing? It turns out that I'm not doing much of anything, a little errand here and there, a daily phone call to dad. Life without stress, it turns out, is somewhat boring.

But not unpleasantly so; I wouldn't want to sound ungrateful. No stress is also no pain: no headaches, no gut pain, no body aches (except the backache I've had since I slipped on the ice in 1974, but that's another story). No pain is a good thing. I can tell you exactly when I realized the pain was gone (and so the stress). I made peace long ago with all of this making me sound like the worst person on earth. I'm not.

It was May 27, a Monday, Memorial Day. I had spent the morning with daddy, going to the funeral home with him, picking out the casket. Mommy died the day before, on Sunday. Mommy died. When I talked to my sister later, after we got home from making the arrangements, we both noticed that suddenly our pain was gone, both of us. All because Mommy died.

I was at the hospital with my sister and her daughter, 24. We three were there. Daddy was home. We didn't know that she would die that day, and anyway, he'd already taken his medication and couldn't leave the house. Sister and I went with her to the hospital. Niece arrived about an hour later.

We were in the emergency room all day. They talked about controlling her internal bleeding, about taking her for a CAT scan. It was about noon, I guess, that Mommy stopped knowing we were there, or that anything else was going on. She looked frozen. Her eyes were open. She looked scared, as if she had been frozen about one second before she was going to be okay.

Some tech person came into the cubicle holding two giant cups of yucky something to drink and said brightly "You need to drink this for your CAT scan!" The nurse shhd her and turned her out again. About a half hour later I realized that the nurse had been with us the whole time. That's when I knew what she knew: that mommy was going to die any minute now. The nurse wanted to be with us at the end, not for mommy, but for us.

But, tough old girl, she just wouldn't go. For eight years we had been saying to each other "Doesn't she know she's got cancer? Doesn't she know she's not going to 'beat this'?" That's what she would always say, "What's going to be with me?" She was wasting away, physically and mentally, and she still thought that one day she would get better, would drive again, would go out to lunch. She was 81. She'd been smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day since she was 15, and had only just stopped in March when she was in the hospital for a week.

"What's going to be with me?" She wasn't asking anymore, even though now we knew the answer. We knew what was going to be, and it looked like it was going to be any minute. We held her hand and talked to her and looked into those scared, frozen eyes.

Niece turned up and took center stage. She told grandma that she was beautiful and strong and wonderful. She was a source of stress and pain to her daughters, but to this grandchild, she was still beautiful. Imagine.

Sister went outside for a smoke and to make a phone call, while niece and I watched the heart monitor beep less and less often. Finally the nurse turned it off; it kept setting off alarms each time it went below a certain level and it freaked us out. Sister returned. We watched, all three of us, as the heart monitor went lower and lower. I felt like I was having a stroke. I felt light-headed and foggy. I'd been having blood pressure problems for a few weeks; my blood pressure went up each time mommy called on the phone. I was thinking, this is it and I'm going with her.

And then it stopped. She hardly looked different. Still frozen. No heart monitor beeping. But we could see that there was no line any more. Over. Over.

We went home and told daddy. He went into captain mode, telling us what had to be done and who to call. No one was stunned or startled, except niece, of course. She thought grandma would live forever, always suffering and dying, but living forever. I called mommy's best friend, who was in the bathroom, and her husband gave her the message.

I went home so I could tell my daughters in person. As I entered the house I saw #2, age just 18, standing in the middle of the room with the phone to her ear and a horrified look in her face. She saw me: "I don't know what she's talking about!" she said softly, gesturing to the phone. I took the phone from her. It was my mother's friend, calling back for details, and telling my daughter how sorry she was that grandma had just died. So that's how she found out.

I told and hugged both girls, and my husband expressed sympathy. Within minutes, we four were imagining where mommy was now: sitting someplace in a comfortable chair, her feet up, with a cigarette burning out of each side of her mouth, both nostrils, her ears, and one in each hand. There were clean ashtrays everywhere. She was sighing in constant contentment. Ah, death!

Am I macabre? Black humor is our crutch, all of us. Mommy liked it too. And I liked thinking that wherever she was, she was happy.

As was I. Eight years killed her, and took its toll on all of us. I thought I was getting old, going through menopause, developing an ulcer, maybe. My heart was going, my blood pressure was going up. I'd been wondering if I would live long enough to be a grandmother.

Then she died. My mommy died, and my pain all went away. Living the stress-free life. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.


ENTRY #12