State champions

My eight-year career as a high school swim parent is over, and it ended on a high note. After Metros, Rockville's boys' team went on to win the Maryland Public Secondary School Athletic Association (MPSSAA) Class 3A West Region Championship. One week later, they walked into the state final meet at the University of Maryland and walked out as state champions, the first-ever state title for Rockville swimming and the school's first state title in any sport in over 30 years. 

Eight of the boys qualified for the meet, including my son, and those eight boys won three individual events, scored points in every event they swam, and swept the three relays. They took down a dynasty, beating a school that had been expected to win and that had won for the past ten straight years. Eight boys standing together on a podium, crazy swim hair and Rockville hoodies and medals around their necks and huge smiles on their faces, holding the trophy that they worked so hard for. We walked out of the aquatic center high-fiving other Rockville parents, thrilled for our boys. It was a memorable afternoon, a memorable season, and a wonderful eight years. 

Bibliography 2022

I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting my 2022 book reviews. A word to the wise: “Review” is a loose term. Lots of things could be called a review. Anything from an observation to a comment to a rumination could be described as a “review” vis a vis books. 

Normally, I write something about every book I read during a year but I didn’t quite manage to do that this year. And I started writing this post with a story about thinking that I had paid a bill then realizing that I hadn’t after fighting with the company whose bill I had neglected to pay. Because I did the same thing with a book, too. I started to write something about Cloud Cuckoo Land and then something about my own words seemed familiar to me so I searched my Google Docs and realized that I had already written about it, at some length. It’s only two things but I’m a worst case scenario kind of person. If I wasn’t, I’d probably laugh these two things off. I’d consider them unrelated incidents. But being me, I see these two occurrences as illustrative of my growing tendency to do or not do things and then to forget entirely the things that I did or think that I did the things that I did not do. It’s troubling. But I can still read and write, so here we go.

These are most of the books that I read in 2022. It is as always an odd and haphazard little collection, most of the books chosen for no reason other than that they happened to interest me for one reason or another. 

*****

Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier. I don’t know about this book, in several senses. I read it at the beginning of 2022, and I don’t really remember it that well, except for its rather urgent tone. Abigail Shrier is a journalist who became alarmed at what she saw as an epidemic of young people claiming to be transgender, especially young girls and women claiming to be trans men. 

I haven’t studied the science behind gender theory. And I won’t, because I’m not a scientist. Shrier’s assertion that it used to be extremely rare for children and teenagers to claim trans identity is certainly true. It’s also true that this is fairly common now, in the sense that almost everyone knows or knows of someone who is trans or whose child is trans. 

Here’s where her thesis breaks down a bit for me. Shrier believes that the recent emergence of trans children is a cultural phenomenon attributable to mass hysteria. One girl comes out as trans and a whole slew of others follow, like lemmings to the sea.  I don't think it works that way. 

*****

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard. I read this early in the year, and it took me a long time. I remember sitting around on the pool deck at high school swim meets, reading a page or two during warm-ups. As with every other work of philosophy I’ve ever read, I retained practically nothing, and can tell you only what every Cliff's Notes explanation could tell you, which is that Fear and Trembling is an examination of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac, a story that has always troubled me. It is difficult to have faith in a God who would demand that a person sacrifice his only child, and that is why I have always chosen to take the story of Abraham and Isaac (and almost everything else in the Old Testament) as allegorical. Anyway, I read it very slowly, a little at a time; stuck with it until the end, and was profoundly relieved when I finished it. That’s probably what Kierkegaard intended. 

*****

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr. A very memorable book. I have no idea how I could have written a whole post about it and then forgotten about it.

*****

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Rule of the Unruly Woman, Anne Helen Peterson. I never can remember the whole title of this book, so I think of it as the Unruly book. You can probably just read the title, and you’ll get the point. That is not to say that it’s a bad book. It’s very well written and very well researched. And I don’t dispute the premise that women are expected (still) to be thin and pretty and sweet and generally pleasing to men. I guess I’m just tired of thinking about this, having lived it for over half a century. 

*****

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel. The title story in this compilation of short stories is one that only Hilary Mantel could have written, an imaginary what-if story about a gunman killing Margaret Thatcher from the apartment window belonging to an innocent bystander who admits the assassin, who claims to be a news photographer, into her home. All of these stories, in fact, just like everything else Hilary Mantel ever wrote, could only have been written by her. I still can’t quite believe that she’s gone, and that there will be no more essays and stories and historical epics. The Wolf Hall trilogy helped get me through the summer of 2020. It’s been long enough now that perhaps I’ll just read the Thomas Cromwell saga all over again. I know how it ends but of course, I knew how it would end the first time I read the books and that didn’t stop them from being wonderful. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel. "You know how fear spreads? Danton thinks there must be a mechanism for it, a process that is part of the human brain or soul. He hopes that, by the same process, along the same pathways, courage can spread, and it can go out from him. Mme. Recordain sat in a high-backed chair and surveyed the opulence of the Minister of Justice's palace. She sniffed. They began digging trenches round the city walls."

This is Hilary Mantel, stirring and inspiring and terrifying in about 75 words. Danton is Georges Danton,  Minister of Justice in revolutionary France. Danton knows what the trenches are for; he just does not yet see their direct relevance to himself. He doesn’t yet see that the sans culottes will soon need a place to dispose of his body. Danton knows how fear spreads. He knows that courage can spread, too, but he doesn't know how. Courage can inspire more courage but it can also inspire fear in those who are already fearful, especially people in power. 

The end of A Place of Greater Safety was just like the end of Wolf Hall and the Mirror and the Light, reminding me that no one but Hilary Mantel could have made a foregone historical conclusion nearly unbearably suspenseful. Everyone knew what was going to happen to Anne Boleyn (Wolf Hall) and then to Thomas Cromwell (The Mirror and the Light), just as I knew exactly what Robespierre was going to do about Danton and Desmoulins. Heads rolled. This is well-documented historical fact. But Hilary Mantel made it page-turningly suspenseful. 

Suspenseful and sad all at once. Mantel takes us inside the still-attached heads of the doomed and makes us feel - really feel - their realization that the last-minute reprieve is not coming. We experience the fear and sadness of people who know with certainty that their lives will end at a known time, and that that time is very soon, and that the end will not be peaceful. Rest in peace, Georges Danton and Claude Desmoulins. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

Rememberings, Sinead O’Connor. “All I wanna do is just sit here and write it all down and rest for a while.” What an astonishing book, and an astonishing life. Sinead O’Connor is one of the greatest pop singers of the 20th and 21st century. An outstanding lyricist (the quote is from “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” one of my favorite songs), she is also an outstanding memoirist. She had an incredibly difficult childhood, with an abusive, mentally ill mother and an absent father; and she has the kind of personality, colored by mental illness, that makes her constitutionally incapable of making things easy for herself. She is a fighter; the kind of fighter who throws herself into and up against any and all pain and injustice. The most famous example, of course, is the 1992 SNL appearance when she tore up the photo of Pope John Paul II. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, looking right into the camera. And then all hell broke loose. 

It’s hard to imagine now, but almost everyone was outraged at the “disrespect” to the Catholic Church, of all things. Note that I am a Catholic, but I wasn’t really in the Church at that time, and knowing what I did about the Church’s actions in Ireland, I cheered for Sinead. Shockingly, few others did. SNL banned her for life. Joe Pesci, the host of the show, threatened to punch her. Even Madonna took a potshot at Sinead, and Madonna’s work was far more transgressive and even sacrilegious than Sinead tearing up that picture. The Pope isn’t Jesus. I remember at the time thinking that I’d never thought one way or the other about Kris Kristofferson but I became a fan of his because he was the only celebrity who stood up for Sinead O’Connor. 

Possibly the most heartbreaking part of this book that contains so many heartbreaking stories and memories is Sinead’s observation that children of abuse tend to have a hard time with their siblings as adults. As a younger sister, Sinead knew that her older siblings wanted to protect her but they could barely protect themselves. As an older sister, Sinead was in the same terrible predicament with her younger brother; she is still guilt-ridden at what she considers her failure to protect him when she was only a child herself. Apparently, Sinead and her younger brother bore the worst of the abuse. By the time that Sinead’s mother’s mental state deteriorated to the point at which she no longer could or would control her violent temper and outbursts, the older siblings were old enough to fight back or to get out of the house and stay out. The siblings all share terribly painful memories and don’t see one another very often. And yet the most beautiful chapters are the ones dedicated to each of the individual siblings, whom she still loves. Heartbreaking. Highly recommended. 

*****

Bagman, Rachel Maddow. I had this on my 2023 list but that was a clerical error on my part because I read this when I was in Florida, and that was the end of December. 

Did you know that Spiro Agnew was possibly the most corrupt member of the Nixon administration, even worse than Nixon himself? I knew that he’d been forced out of office because of corrupt dealings but until I read Bagman, I really had no idea how corrupt. He was Mafia corrupt. He was Byzantine Empire corrupt. He was Trump corrupt. He was so corrupt that the Nixon Department of Justice felt duty-bound to force him out of office knowing that the President faced likely impeachment and possible removal from office and they believed that an Agnew presidency would be an existential threat to the United States. I won’t recount the details (not just because I don’t want to spoil the book for you but because I’m just not very good at recounting details) but this was as shocking as a 50-year-old political scandal could possibly have been, at least in our wide-eyed exceptional American experience. And it reads like a Rachel Maddow monologue - this is a feature, and not a bug. 

*****

Corrections in Ink, Keri Blakinger. For a few years, on the surface, Keri Blakinger was the epitome of white upper middle class American girlhood. A champion figure skater and a Cornell student, she was likely an object of admiration and envy for many people. But nothing is ever as it seems on the surface. Mental illness drove Keri to self-destructive behavior beginning with an eating disorder and spiraling downward into drug use, petty crime, sex work, and abusive relationships. It’s kind of a wonder that she lived to adulthood. She did survive, but ended up in prison for several years - Ivy League to incarceration, the ultimate American downfall. Happily, she came out of prison clean and sober and capable of using her considerable intelligence and brilliant writing talent to tell her story and document the injustices of the prison-industrial complex. She now writes for the Los Angeles Times, after a time at the Marshall Project, and is a tireless critic of privately run prisons, unjust (and unfairly applied) drug laws, and the death penalty. Her story is compelling and really well told - sad, sharp, and funny all at once. Highly recommended. 

*****

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith. I cannot imagine how I, a bookish girl who grew up in mid-century America, never got around to reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I’ve been meaning to read it for some time. Caitlin Flanagan mentions it frequently, and even without her recommendation, I was conscious of this major gap in my reading. I finally picked it up and read it late last year and I’m so glad I did. First of all, it’s so very different from what I expected. I imagined Francie Nolan to be an idealized rosy example of innocent but brilliant girlhood - like an urban American Anne of Green Gables. And nothing against Anne, whom I love and always will love, but Francie Nolan is an infinitely more complex and nuanced and interesting character, whose early life is almost unbearably hard but whose intelligence and wit take her to places that I didn’t imagine were possible for a poor Irish-Catholic Brooklyn girl in the early 20th century. Betty Smith was an amazing writer, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an almost-perfect novel. 

*****

Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino. Just the opposite of Cloud Cuckoo Land. I was sure that I had written something about this very sharp and funny book of essays, but a search reveals that I did no such thing. And I read this many months ago so I don't really remember much about it, except that the titular trick mirror has something to do with social media and how people create idealized and downright false personal narratives and how others judge their own lives against these false ideals. I remember being impressed by the writing, not necessarily the thinking, behind most of these essays, and that is not a criticism. Tolentino writes about important things; it's just that most of what she has to say has been said in one way or another. But she's a fine writer. 

*****

Hons and Rebels. Jessica Mitford

*****

The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman. Here's one that I did write about, at length and in detail, but what I wrote is not ready to publish. However, I am done with this book list for now, so I'm going to have to depart from my usual practice and publish a review in 2023 of a book that I read in 2022. In fact, it could take me until 2024. The thing is already five pages long, with a bunch of bullet points at the end, and I could very well take the rest of this year to finish it. I have a lot of feelings about the nineties. And the book was very good, by the way. 

*****

Cool, Calm, and Contentious, Merrill Markoe 
Poison Penmanship, Jessica Mitford. 

I wrote about both of these right here, for no reason other than that I finished them back to back. But Markoe and Mitford go together very well anyway. 

*****

City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert. A book that I read by mistake. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir, Susanna Moore
Invisible Ink, Guy Stern
The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron
So Sad Today, Melissa Broder
Big Summer, Jennifer Weiner
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

Six books, one post. It's kind of a long one. 

*****

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, Sheila Weller
You're on an Airplane, Parker Posey
Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, Emma Goldberg

I read this little odd grouping of books when I was on vacation in August, so I also covered them all in the same post. 

*****

I read a few others that I won’t bother to list. A few of these not-to-be-listed books were just not very good. Not every book is a literary masterpiece, of course, but just because I wasted the time reading a bad book doesn’t mean that I need to waste additional time writing about it. And then there were a few others that I know I read because they’re on my list and I don’t put a book on the list until I have finished reading it but I don’t remember a thing about them so I can’t write about them. 

And also because it’s almost the end of February for crying out loud and it’s time to finish the half-baked reviews of books that I read in 2022 and start on my incompetent reviews of books that I’m reading right now, in 2023. So mark your calendars for my next book list. Preview: Zadie Smith will feature prominently. It’s going to be a good reading year, I tell you what. 

Metros

I'm in the middle of several drafts, which are all in varying hot messy stages of incompleteness. One or two of them are almost ready to share with my reading public. The others might never see the light of day. But right now, rather than try to clean them up and sort them out, I'm going to clear my head for a bit and just write about whatever. 

It's Saturday morning and I'm in the passenger seat of my husband's car. We're on our way to Metros, the high school championship meet. Metros has a full formal name but I don't remember it. I'll look it up later. 

OK, I looked it up: Washington Metropolitan Interscholastic Swimming and Diving Championships. That’s quite a name, which is fitting because it’s quite an event. Katie Ledecky swam Metros, and still holds several records. Several swimmers who competed yesterday will go on to Olympic fame, too. It’s a fun meet to watch. 

*****

My son is a senior. He just missed the Metros cut time when he was a freshman. In his sophomore year,the meet and the entire season were canceled because of the COVID. He made the cut last year, but no spectators were allowed, so we watched the meet from home on a dodgy live stream, grainy video fading in and out and our son in the lane farthest from the camera. It's hard enough to tell these kids apart in the water even when you're there in person. On a live stream, any one of those rangy boys in tech suits and caps and goggles could be my kid. Now we get to watch the meet live. He’s swimming in three events, and the program will tell me which lanes to watch. 

*****

It’s Sunday morning now. The Rockville boys placed 11th at Metros, one of the best public high school finishes, and it would have been even better had it not been for a few rule oddities that kept them out of the championship final in the medley relay. This is the thing about Metros - a relay that broke Rockville’s school record and has lowered its own new record twice this season is still not quite top-ten material at Metros. 

My son’s co-captain and senior teammate, and possibly one of the future Olympians I mentioned earlier, tied the Metros record in the 200 IM. We returned last night for finals, just to watch the medley relay, which is event 1. We’d been at the aquatic center all morning for prelims, so our plan was to watch the relay final and leave. But our son told us to stay through the IM - “Toby’s going for the record, and he’s going to get it,” he said. And he did. The senior boys gathered at the turning end to cheer on their teammate, and they screamed themselves hoarse. Even though I was in the stands on the opposite side of the pool, I could still hear those boys over the already-deafening Metros finals din, cheering with such intensity that they were almost a physical force propelling their friend through the water just a tiny bit faster. I’m sure that Toby felt their energy. They all wanted that record. 

The 200 freestyle events precede the IMs, so we got to watch a tour de force performance by another likely (almost certain) future Olympian, Erin Gemmell of Stone Ridge Academy of the Sacred Heart (Katie Ledecky’s alma mater and a girls’ swimming powerhouse team). The Stone RIdge girls had been upset in the medley relay, falling to third place behind two public school teams, to my great delight. I am frankly and unabashedly prejudiced against the private school teams in interscholastic competition, especially at Metros. I spent the entire morning at prelims rooting for the public school swimmers, even in races that Rockville had no part in. I’m especially prejudiced against Stone Ridge because they’re around the corner from the base and I get stuck behind Stone Ridge drop-off traffic almost every damn morning. They need to move that school because it’s in my way. 

But even though I hate Stone Ridge, it was hard not to root for Erin Gemmell. She went out first and maintained a small but commanding lead for the entire 8 laps, finishing short of Katie Ledecky’s record but with an impressive time. What was so amazing about that swim was not the speed or the first place finish against very tough competition, but the graceful and calm manner in which she propels herself through the water, long and elegant strokes and beautiful turns executed so neatly and quickly that you almost miss them. It was obvious that she was not going anywhere near as fast and hard as she could - she had other events to swim and was wisely conserving her energy, knowing that if anyone threatened to pass her, she could open it up and easily reclaim her lead. Instead, she maintained a steady pace and cruised to an easy first-place finish. Stone Ridge or not, I was rooting for her and I was delighted when she won. And she was right to dial it down. My son texted me later that she broke the 100 freestyle record and anchored Stone Ridge’s 400 freestyle relay to another record finish. I almost wish that I’d stayed to watch. Well done Ms. Gemmell. I’ll be watching your future career with considerable interest. 

That was a fun meet. Regionals next week, states the following week, and then we’re finished with high school swimming. I’ll miss it a lot. 

Disappearing people

Do you ever think about places or events or people from your past and wonder if you dreamed them? So many of the everyday places of my childhood have a dreamlike quality for me. I remember riding my bike through alleys behind rowhouses, and it seemed that I never actually rode on the street, just one narrow back alley connecting to another, a network of secret passages set aside for 10-year-olds on their bikes. It’s not possible that none of those alleys ever intersected with the street. That’s just how I remember it. 

I remember riding down one of those alleys and ending up on a pine needle-carpeted path through the woods. This is possible, actually. My grandmother’s neighborhood backed up on city parkland. What doesn’t seem possible is that I rode past an opera house and heard the singers rehearsing inside. I’ve never been able to find any evidence that this opera house existed but I remember what I heard. 

Was it real? I don’t know. It was probably just a house in which someone was listening to opera. Although I lived right in the middle of a city, in a very working class neighborhood. Houses were on the street, not in the woods; and we weren’t much given to opera or other high culture. I don’t even know why I’m thinking about it, except that I’m older now and I think about the past sometimes.

*****

One day last week, a name popped into my head. The name was the name of a classmate - a girl - from my class at St. John the Baptist parish school in Philadelphia. SJB is closed now - the church is still there but the school closed a long time ago. 

St. John the Baptist school, may it rest in peace, was an old-fashioned Irish Catholic uniform-wearing Mass-before-school nuns-with-rulers throwback to another time. St. John’s was old-fashioned (and just old) even when I went there, which was a long time ago. Now, I think, people my children’s ages would simply not believe me if I told them about piano lessons in the convent, where you didn’t speak in a voice louder than a whisper; or Chinese jump rope in a cement schoolyard surrounded by that same convent, a rectory, and a graveyard; or the veils that we had to pin to our hair for Mass and confession. If you’ve seen “Doubt,” you’ll have some idea of what it was like to be a working-class child at a Philadelphia archdiocesan Catholic school in the middle of the last century. Many years later, I found out that we even had a creepy molesting priest. Though I think we all knew about him even then - or rather, we knew that there was something terribly wrong about him but we couldn’t put it into words. Some of us (girls) could avoid him. Some of us (altar boys) could not. I believe he’s dead now. God will judge him. I certainly have. 

When my mother went to SJB, it had a lower school (first through eighth grade) and a high school (two separate high schools, actually - the boys’ school on Manayunk Avenue and the girls’ school next door to the lower school). After the high schools were closed (my mother’s class, 1962, was the last to graduate from SJB), the boys’ school was torn down and replaced by an apartment building, and the girls’ school building was used to expand the lower school. When I was at SJB, first through fourth grades were in the old lower school building, and the high school building housed the fifth through eighth grades. Even then, the building was really old, and openly acknowledged to be unsafe. There was an auditorium on the top floor, permanently closed, the stairway blocked off. We were frequently (almost daily) warned not to try to climb those stairs and not to enter that auditorium because the floor was in such bad shape that no one was sure that it could accommodate a person’s weight, even a 7th grader’s weight. 

Normally we’d have taken any such warning as an invitation but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone ever trying to break into the auditorium. I also don’t remember anyone wringing their hands about our safety or demanding that the parish get us out of that manifestly unsafe building. The 70s were different, you know? We were the original free-range children, like a bunch of wild chickens.  

*****

Those buildings are all still standing. I was just there last year, in fact, for my grandmother’s funeral. So there’s no confusion between reality and dreams when I think about SJB in a physical sense. It’s all solidly real, 150-year-old stone and ironwork and cement. But the time that I spent there, eight years of school that felt like 20 at the time, seems remote and dim, steeped in unreality. I remember in a broad general sense what it was like to be an eighth grader, for example, but I can’t clearly recall more than a handful of days or even moments. I know that I spent eight years in that school, in a plaid uniform jumper and navy blue kneesocks and a rosary looped around the button placket on the skirt of my jumper and of course those veils on Mass day. I have photos to prove it. But it’s all a haze. 

*****

I look up classmates from St. John’s and sometimes I find them but often I don’t. An astonishing number of my childhood friends and classmates seem to have managed to avoid the internet altogether, leaving absolutely no trace of themselves - no Facebook, no Twitter, no LinkedIn - nothing. Maybe they don’t exist. Maybe I dreamed the whole thing after all. Or maybe my old classmates are too smart to leave a breadcrumb trail on the internet. Maybe that school taught us something after all. 

I never did find the person I was looking for. She’s not on Facebook; or maybe she just uses her married name without inserting her maiden name in parentheses like most women of my age. She doesn’t seem to be on LInkedIn or Twitter or Instagram. So I stopped looking. Maybe she’s in witness protection. Maybe she just doesn’t want to be found. I just wanted to see if she was anything like the girl I remembered. Sometimes, I want to see if anything is as I remember it, anything at all. 

Volunteers of America

It’s Wednesday night. I just finished some volunteer work (I’m now the secretary for the neighborhood association because why not endure Purgatory while you’re still alive) that I had been dreading, and it turned out to be not so bad. And now I’m done and I don’t have to do that anymore, at least until next month. 

While we’re on the subject of unpaid labor, the high school divisional championship swim meet is on Saturday. Earlier this week, the team volunteer coordinator sent out the volunteer sign-up list. Divisionals is a six-team meet, and each team is supposed to send one official. I read the email and thought about how tired I am and how desperately I didn’t want to officiate this meet and how much I wanted to just sit and watch, just this one time. So I just waited, hoping that someone else would sign up, but no one did. So the volunteer coordinator emailed the handful of us who are certified as officials to ask if one of us could step in to help and of course, the person who kindly and immediately said yes is the one person who is just as crazy busy as I am and who has stood on the deck with a clipboard and a stupid white polo shirt just as many times as I have, and I just felt terrible for being so selfish. 

And of course I almost - ALMOST - jumped right in to say “oh no, you already do so much, let me do it.” But I’m glad I didn’t. First of all, the offer would not have been sincere, because I still don’t want to do it, and I’d have only been volunteering in the hope that she’d say “oh no, don’t worry about it, I got it,” thus allowing me to bask in the glow of my own virtue while not having to actually do anything virtuous. Even worse, if she’d agreed right away and allowed me to step in, I’d be in just the same spot as I was when the sign-up came out, which is desperately not wanting to do this job. And anyway, it really was selfish of me not to volunteer sooner, and it was generous of her to step up, and I should just accept her gracious gesture and allow her to be recognized as the better person. I’m going to feel a little bad about enjoying the meet while she’s standing on the deck with a clipboard all morning, but you can’t have it both ways. 

*****

It’s Thursday now, and I’m home from work and getting ready to go shopping for my old lady. Three years into the pandemic, and she’s still not leaving the house. I remember watching Louis C.K.’s first SNL monologue. It’s still worth watching if you feel like looking it up on YouTube. He tells a story about stopping to help a confused old lady in an airport and then realizing that having taken on the responsibility for this old lady, he was now in fact responsible for her, pretty much forever. “I wanted to help an old lady, but now I have an old lady. She’s mine. I own her.” This is my life right now. I helped an old lady, and now I have an old lady. She’s mine. I own her. And actually, I’m resigned to this now. I’m resigned to the idea of doing her crazy ass grocery shopping for the rest of her life or mine. 

Why “crazy ass” you might ask? Because it’s true. I didn’t just write that because it’s a funny turn of phrase (even though it is). Her grocery list is by turns arcane, minutely specific, and slightly insane. It has to be SAIGON cinnamon, not just the regular old ground cinnamon in the McCormick’s jar. It has to be Bob’s Red Mill Farm baking soda. She needs flaxseed and whole wheat matzo and low sodium beans in pop-top cans. She wants at least a gallon of bleach every single week. She asks for 32-ounce bottles of hydrogen peroxide and 70 percent isopropyl alcohol (this is always specified - the concentration and the type of alcohol are always spelled out for me) every single week. She buys tubes of Neosporin ointment AND cream several times a month. I wonder if she’s performing minor surgery on herself. She asked me for iodine, foolishly revealing that she intended to use it to self-medicate since she’s out of her thyroid medication, and her doctor refuses to renew her prescription without seeing her, and she refuses to go and see him. And I refuse to buy iodine when I know she’s going to inadvertently poison herself with it. Thankfully, she gave up on this pursuit, for now. Maybe she has another grocery mule out there who will buy her the iodine no questions asked. She’s not getting it from me, though. 

So yes, “crazy ass” is exactly the right way to describe this weekly supply gathering operation. I’ve never seen the inside of her house and likely never will but I suspect that there’s a fortified underground redoubt filled with Clorox and Neosporin and Cherry NyQuil (not the green kind!) and beans upon beans upon beans. When it all hits the fan, I’ll know where to conduct a supply raid. 

*****

This afternoon I received an email from a new neighborhood resident. She wanted to know about the swim team - how to sign up, what the schedule looks like, do they have to try out, etc. I answered her as I have answered similar emails for the last 15 years. But I also copied the person who is taking my place in this job and let my correspondent know that I am a soon to be alumni parent. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning now, and I’m sitting in the stands at the Germantown Indoor Swim Center. Warm-ups will end in a few minutes, and then the meet will begin. I’m sitting with some friends from our summer team, whose sons swim at rival high schools. We represent three of the six high schools competing today. I’m happy to be able to hang out with friends and cheer for our sons rather than standing on the deck watching for stroke and turn infractions, but I do still feel a little guilty. 

It's hard not to feel guilty about not doing the work that I have always done. I've been the answer person for the Dolphins for a decade and a half. I've been a high school swimming meet official for eight years. Who's going to do all this stuff now? Who's going to hold the clipboard? Who's going to answer the questions?

The answer, of course, is someone else. Guilt is just another word for arrogance. Things will proceed in good order without me and no one will miss me and that is as it should be. That's how it works. With school and sports volunteer responsibilities behind me, I'll take my turn volunteering to run the neighborhood association and then I'll step aside for a new group of volunteers whose children are growing up and who no longer have to run the swim team and the PTA and the band boosters. And then I will just be an old lady. Maybe I'll need someone to help me with my groceries. And I’m sure that somebody will.