Fruits and vegetables

I started writing something a few days ago. It's coming together I guess. Today I had an idea for a conclusion and I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget. What was the idea, you ask? Well, I know that it must have had something to do with the words "inverse proportion." I’m sure this made perfect sense to me at the time, but now I really don't know what I was getting at. I don't know what I was thinking. 

That last sentence? An answer to the question: Can you write your autobiography in 7 or fewer words?

I'm only about halfway sure that I will eventually remember what "inverse proportion" was supposed to mean. It's OK, though. I'll think of some way to finish the silly thing. It does bother me that I forget things. A lot. 

Both, really. I forget things a lot and it bothers me a lot. 

*****

The next day, I wrote down the word “banana,” certain that I wouldn’t forget what it meant, and I didn’t. A banana is a concrete thing, after all, not an abstract idea like inverse proportions. A few minutes earlier, I had walked through the lobby of my building today, past the glass case with the scale model of all of the buildings on campus. I really love architectural models, and sometimes I stop to look at this one. Today, as I walked past, I saw that someone had left a banana on top of the glass case. I’m easily amused, and that banana made me laugh right out loud. I mean, a banana, right? Even the word is funny. I don’t think that it was intended to serve as a comedy prop, but I’m telling you, a banana just left where it obviously doesn’t belong is hilarious. I imagine that someone stopped there to dig through their bag, placed the banana on top of the glass case to free up their hands, and then forgot about it. It sat there pretty much all day. It was a perfectly good banana, and no one wanted to throw it away, I guess. 

Later, I had to sit through a required active shooter training video. I’d rather actually face the active shooter than watch that training again. I'm never more restless, more tear-out-my-hair desperate to escape than when I am watching a mandatory training video. Mandatory training videos serve to remind us that Annie Lennox was right: Every single one of us is made to suffer. 

Well of COURSE I don’t want to face a REAL active shooter. Just a little bit of hyperbole, for effect. I really needed to convey just how much I hate mandatory training videos. I hate them a lot. 

*****

It’s Friday now, late afternoon. I’m finished work for the day, though I haven’t logged off yet. I stay connected for a bit at the end of the workday, just in case someone needs me. I’m very dedicated. 

But there’s such a thing as being too dedicated. For example, we’re going to the Nats game today. Not only are we going to the Nats game, but we’re leaving insanely early so that we can arrive insanely early so that we can be among the first 10,000 fans, who receive a bobblehead, which my husband is so insistent that we must obtain at all costs that you would think it was the gosh-darn tesseract. So we’ll arrive about 90 minutes early for a late-season game between the third-worst (Cincinnati Reds) and worst (Washington Nationals) teams in all of Major League Baseball. I mean, I love the Nats, but this is a game that I’d be happy to half-watch and half-ignore in the comfort of my air-conditioned house. Instead, I’ll be hustling through the Glenmont and Fort Totten and Navy Yard Metro stations, trying to catch up with my husband who will break into a full run rather than miss a train and possibly lose his bobblehead to another, more fleet-of-foot fan. It should be fun, really.  He’s buying the drinks. 

*****

It actually was fun. Gollum secured his Precious, which made him very happy and if he’s happy, I’m happy. There was a pre-game concert and as it turned out, we know the band, so that was really fun. Trust me, we are not cool people, but we do have some musician friends, which allows us to occasionally bask in reflected “we’re with the band” coolness. 

We had seats in two separate sections of the stadium, because another bobblehead fanatic friend was unable to attend and asked me to go in her place and get her bobblehead. These people are crazy, I tell you. But the stadium was half-empty and it’s late in a now-meaningless season, so we found seats together in the much better of the two sections, sat down with our drinks, and watched the game. Stadium personnel (who are lovely, by the way) were not checking tickets last night, so people could sit wherever they wanted. Our team has the worst record in the entire league, but there’s an upside to everything, right? 

*****

This wasn’t supposed to be a “that was the week that was” kind of a post, but here we are. It’s Sunday morning now, and I’m probably going to go to Mass, but right now I’m sitting in my backyard listening to cicadas and pondering a tomato. Our tomato plants have underperformed this summer. They’re not achieving their targets. They’re not meeting their metrics. And they don’t give a shit, because they are tomatoes. 

The tomato that I am pondering is ripe enough to pick, I think, but perhaps it would be better to wait a bit. Perhaps it needs just a little bit more time. And it’s not the only one. Today is the last day of summer (yes, I know it’s still August but school starts tomorrow and although it’s maybe not the complete end of summer, it’s the beginning of the end), and I think I would benefit from another day or so. I think I need a little bit more time. I’m going to let that tomato sit for a day or so. The rest of us have to keep to a schedule, but tomatoes are free. I never did remember what “inverse proportion” was supposed to mean, but this thing is over 1,000 words of absolute drivel, and so there’s an inverse proportion for you. The less I have to say, the longer it takes me to say it. 

My cup runneth over again

I am writing much more about my own life and the ridiculous things that sometimes happen to me than normal. It’s easier to write about my day or about whatever happens to be going on in my head rather than to try to write about events or books or movies or anything external. It’s been a stressful year and work is occupying so much of my time and my mental energy that writing has to take the proverbial back seat, but I’m not ready to kick it out of the car altogether. I’m still writing every day. 

*****

Like right now, it’s early in the morning, almost 6:30. I woke up too early and couldn’t go back to sleep so I thought I’d get up and get some things done before the day begins in earnest. I’ve been writing a few little book notes for my end-of-year list, which won’t see the light of day until February 2022 at least. I might even have something ready to post some time next week. Anything could happen. 

*****

It’s the next day now, right in the middle of the workday. I am going to take an actual lunch break today, and instead of eating lunch I’m going to write more Seinfeld-esque nothing about nothing. It’s Thursday, and I wake up very early on Thursdays. My son has early morning swim practice on Thursdays, and he drives there, with my husband riding shotgun. Having been in the car with him for his first accident a month ago, I’m not quite past my fear that he’ll crash the car again, and so when they leave at 4:45, I am up for the day. I suppose I could have written this earlier, but I moved my regularly scheduled anxiety attack to the early morning part of the day, leaving the later hours free to write. 

*****

I told you that I was going to write about nothing. I wasn't kidding. That's truth in advertising, right there. 

Yesterday, I really did write about something. I'm still working on it. Need to let it sit for a bit, get ripe, know what I mean? It's a thing about a book. 

What's that line from "You've Got Mail"? Something about how so much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the opposite? Nora Ephron wrote that. Of course she did. Nora always knew what was what. 

Anyway, while I let the other thing stew for a while, I'll write about what's happening now. It's Saturday morning and I'm leaning against a railing at the Kennedy Shriver Aquatic Center, known to us locals as "KSAC," waiting for the early meet to end. Then it'll be 30 minutes or so for the dive meet and swim warm-ups, and then the main event, Rockville v Magruder. It's two weeks before Christmas, and the kids are all in, wearing red and green plaid pajama pants and Santa hats and tinsel garland leis. 

We're in the natatorium now. It's an unseasonably warm day but the lobby at KSAC is still December chilly. But the natatorium is like a greenhouse. I'm wearing my officials' uniform of navy shorts, a white polo shirt, and flip flops. I shed my sweater the moment I entered this little haven of tropical warmth. Any minute now, and I will be summoned to attend the officials briefing. And when duty calls, I respond. 

*****

It’s Sunday now. That was a productive Saturday. Swim meet, Christmas shopping, grocery shopping, 5:30 Mass, and performance reviews (which I wrote while sitting on my couch wearing a sweater and pajama pants, the long day behind me). I even managed to watch a movie and to read a book and to write all about it.  An altogether successful day. 

After some rain, a windy cold front pushed yesterday’s odd spring-like warmth out of here, and it’s clear and sunny and dry and rather chilly. It’s 11:10 AM, and I’m trying to decide what else to do today. I thought about starting to make cookies but it’s too early to have cookies in the house. Everyone will eat them and then I’ll have to make cookies again. And I hate making cookies. 

I’m not finished shopping yet, so I suppose I’ll do that. I didn’t have time to exercise yesterday, though I did rack up 11,000 just-walking-around steps, so I think I’ll do that, too. I went to bed too late last night and woke up too early, so maybe my brain will cooperate with my body and allow me to take a nap on the couch with the Christmas tree lights on and the 4:30 December twilight turning to darkness outside the window. That would be nice. Anything would be nice, really. It’s nice to have a day. 

Baggage claim

Saturday: After I finished making soup last night, I felt out of sorts. I haven't been depressed in some time, and I didn't really feel depressed, just anxious (more so than usual). I was worried, because things seemed worrisome. Then for some reason, I started singing Donna Summer's "Heaven Knows," a song I haven't heard or thought of for a very long time.

I sang Donna's part and Joe Esposito's part. I don't know the song that well anymore, so it wasn't one of my better performances. But I felt better anyway. I remembered most of the words, and I sang it twice, yielding to my imaginary audience's demand for an encore. Then I stopped, because you should always leave your imaginary audience wanting more.

As I washed the dishes, I had an idea for a story, but then I thought that it might be too close to my real life. Of course, that's where the greatest writers get their best ideas, but I'm not one of the greatest writers, so I'm not going to write this particular story. I don't even remember the idea.

Actually, I totally do remember the idea. But I don't want to write a story about myself. I'm the least interesting topic to write about that I can think of.

Oh who am I kidding. I'm my favorite subject. What else do I write about 95 percent of the time?

*****
Sunday morning:Yesterday was an exhausting day. My mother-in-law had chest pains and shortness of breath, so I took her to the emergency room.

If nothing else, the emergency room on a Saturday is a place to watch people, and I love to watch people. The staff checked us in and hurried us to triage right away, but after the nurse determined that my mother-in-law was in no immediate danger, we sat and waited.

When my husband called from work and asked me to take his mother to the hospital, I was already up and showered and dressed, well into my second cup of coffee. So I had a distinct advantage over most of the other ER waiters, most of whom appeared to have rushed out the door after an unexpected early wake-up call. They wore pajama pants or leggings and sheepskin boots and whatever coat happened to be closest to the door as they ran out of the house. One lady in her 60s or so was the exception; she had obviously dressed very carefully before she left the house, and she looked very nice--neat and stylish. She was alone, and I couldn't decide if she'd already been up and dressed and ready for a day of shopping or museum-going and then had a medical emergency and headed to the hospital instead; or if she just didn't like to leave the house, even for the hospital, unless she has herself organized. Either possibility seemed likely.

It was hard to tell what the other people were there for. The well-dressed lady was a heart patient, I think. She was wheeled away for a chest x-ray just after my mother-in-law returned from hers. Neither of them were thrilled about the mandatory wheelchair ride, but hospital policy is hospital policy. The other patients were in various stages of discomfort or distress, which they had to endure in the very public waiting room on the hard plastic chairs. I hoped that all of them would soon be in private rooms, resting in semi-comfortable beds.

One lady was carrying a grocery store tote bag that was obviously her purse for the day. She rummaged through it every time her name was called, pulling out insurance documents and prescription bottles. After 30 minutes or so of just waiting, she pulled out a magazine and a bottle of water and a sleeve of crackers, and settled in for what she must have expected would be a long wait. She looked a little disappointed when a nurse called her name a few minutes later.

*****
I thought about this woman as I planned obsessively for what to bring on my trip next month, and what to wear on every day, and in every possible weather scenario. I get very anxious when I'm far from home. I usually define "far from home" as any distance from my house greater than 20 miles, so overseas trips are a source of acute anxiety. Control helps me to manage the anxiety, and there's no greater feeling of control than having exactly what I need, and exactly the right way to carry it all. Bags and shoes and jackets are the most important items; but any time I take a trip, I overthink about every item that I'll need to bring or wear.

It would be nice to be the person who could just grab the nearest re-usable grocery bag, throw in her wallet and keys, and maybe a snack and some water, and just run out the door. I should be that person. As many times as I've obsessively planned for every item that should accompany me around the country (or around the corner if we're being honest), I can't think of many times that it made a difference to the trip.

Or maybe it did. Because maybe I'm just so good at packing that I've never forgotten anything and so have never felt the lack of whatever a less-careful packer might have left behind.

******
Thursday: So my mother-in-law is fine now. Her chest x-ray, EKG, and blood work were all clear. She'll see a cardiologist next week, just in case, but she's in very good health and I'm hopeful that we'll have her for many years to come. I suppose I should have told you that right away, but then you'd lose the element of suspense that's so important to a rambling, no-point blog post about absolutely nothing. Nothing but me, of course. I'm still my own favorite subject.

SIng with me

Friday: Last night, my sons and I were driving home from dinner and I found myself singing along with Aerosmith's "Dream On." This is a song that was already old when I was a teenager, and my snotty 18-year-old self would not have been caught dead singing along with it or any song like it, even if dead people could sing.

In fact, I am so completely not a fan of 70s classic rock that I wasn't even sure if "Dream On" was an Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin song, though I was pretty sure that it was one of the two. So I looked it up, and found that this question is a pretty common one. Go ahead and Google "Dream On Aerosmith." The suggested auto-fill options will include "Dream On Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin."

I sang along with my sons, wondering if the song is actually good, and I just never realized it before; or if I'm just developing a new appreciation for the things of my youth. I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

*****
Saturday: Did you know that Charles Mound, elevation approximately 1,200 feet, is the highest point in Illinois? The mountain range closest to Chicago is the Great Smoky range, over 500 miles distant. Have you ever looked this up? If so, was it because you were watching "Christmas Vacation," and you wondered how far the Chicago-based Griswolds would have had to drive to cut down a tree in the mountains?

No? Just me?

*****
It's December 1, so we're watching "Christmas Vacation." It's not my favorite Christmas movie, but my teenage sons love it so much that it's entered my top ten. I sing along to "Mele Kalikimaka," while my younger son whistles. He is an exceptionally good whistler, and I can carry a tune, so we sound pretty good. It's cozy here, and I have to say that we're the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse.

*****
Diane Ladd played Chevy Chase's mother in "Christmas Vacation." They are eight years apart in age.

*****

Monday: Diane Ladd had to fake old ladyhood in "Christmas Vacation," but my Nana is the real thing. Nana looks very much like Aunt Bethany; though unlike poor Aunt Bethany, my grandmother is still as sharp as the proverbial tack. She might wrap up a cat and give it as a gift, but she'd do it on purpose. And you can trust me that if someone asked my Nana to say grace, she wouldn't confuse it with the Pledge of Allegiance, or with anything else.

She'd be quick about it, too. Like most Catholics of her generation, my grandmother is devout, but she doesn't waste time on long, flowery prayers. And she doesn't waste a lot of time on the phone, either; partly because she doesn't hear too well anymore, and because she doesn't like long phone calls. This is a sentiment that I share. I just spoke to Nana, to wish her a happy 95th birthday. It was a five-minute call.

*****
When you're 95, you watch as your spouse and siblings and friends and contemporaries die, one by one. My grandmother is lucky; she hasn't outlived her children, and her health is as good as a 95-year-old can expect. She had to give up driving about 10 years ago (and about five years after she should have); and she can't read any but the largest print anymore. And now she's outliving all of the greatest figures of her generation.

George H.W. Bush was born a few months after my grandmother. They lived very different lives, but they shared the experience of having been very young, but very grown-up, during a time of war. Like Barbara Bush, my grandmother married very young (18) and then waited for her husband to return from the war. Unlike the Bushes, my grandparents were ordinary, working-class people. Neither George H.W. Bush nor my cranky, Trump-supporter (yes) Nana led perfect lives, but they did the best they could and that's all anyone can ask. They are among the last of a generation that lived during a time when their country was almost totally united.

I wasn't a Bush supporter. I didn't vote for 41 or 43. But today was still a sad and solemn day. Maybe it's just nostalgia. Maybe President Bush is like an old Aerosmith song, and I like him now because he's a thing of my youth.

No, it's more than that. Politics aside, there's no hypocrisy in recognizing George H.W. Bush's greatness, as a public servant and as a human. Politics aside, there's no way that a reasonable, feeling person could fail to be moved at the sight of 95-year-old Bob Dole assisted from his wheelchair to give a standing salute to his friend. An era has ended. The past is gone.

American Tune

I was born in Connecticut, in a small town near New Haven, and I lived there until I was six. We lived in an apartment; in the converted second floor of an old house, not in an apartment building. My parents didn't like the landlord. In fact, it wasn't until I was a bit older that I realized that "landlord" wasn't an insult.

*****
My memories of that place are of course very vague, but I do remember a few things. The house had a big yard, with trees and a stone wall that was covered with ivy and moss or something. We played out there every day. My sister and I liked the fuzzy caterpillars that hung out on the stone wall.

I got pneumonia the winter that I was in kindergarten, and I remember spending all day, for several days, in my mother's bed. Like most parents at that time, my parents didn't allow the children to play in their bedroom, so I remember feeling very privileged to be allowed in there, especially in the giant bed.

My mom had a radio in the bedroom, and I remember hearing "Sounds of Silence" over and over again as I slept and woke. "Sounds of Silence" was released in 1965, so I don't know why the radio station was playing it so frequently in 1970. Maybe it was about Vietnam. I don't remember that I understood anything about Vietnam when I was five; I just remember that I knew that Vietnam was something that grownups talked about. Or maybe I only heard the song once and remember hearing it over and over. I was five.

My parents' marriage was troubled, and they divorced. I barely remember my father. He left and I never saw or heard from him again. We moved to Philadelphia, my mother's hometown, when I was six. My mother used to take us there to visit her family; we took the train from New Haven, because my parents had only one car. On one of these trips, my mother had the three of us children and herself in two seats. My brother, a baby at the time, was on her lap; and my sister and I, who were probably five and four, shared a seat. The train was full of mostly young people. I remember the train ride.

Apparently (this part I don't really remember), I asked my mother if the young people across the aisle from us were hippies. And apparently, the hippies heard me, and thought I was hilarious, and they entertained my sister and me for the rest of the trip. One of the boys had a guitar--that part, I do remember. I don't remember what songs he played, but I think of the train ride every time I hear "Scarborough Fair (Canticle)," so maybe he played that. Or maybe that song is just another hard-wired memory of my early childhood during the Vietnam War, riding trains to the city that would become my home.

Our first few months in Philadelphia were confusing. We lived with my grandparents, whose tiny three-bedroom rowhouse barely accommodated them, my youngest aunt (who was 8 at the time), and their German schnauzer, Toby. I slept on a cot in my aunt's bedroom. My mother, sister, and brother slept in the spare bedroom, which had a trundle bed. My mother worked during the day and was unhappy when she was home, and my grandmother was overwhelmed, having quadrupled the number of young children in her house.

*****
I'm watching old episodes of "The Office" as I'm writing this. Two separate Chewy.com commercials feature two different white women of about my age. Both women have shoulder-length wavy blondish hair and they both wear stretch jeans and long open cardigans. It's like they screen-tested two different actresses and then just decided, "what the hell, we like both of them."

*****
Soon enough, my mother found us a place to live--another rowhouse less than a mile from my grandparents' house. She got a car, and I started school at St. John the Baptist, where she had also gone to school, and we settled in to life in Philadelphia, and I grew up there.

Before the days of Apple Music and Pandora, kids listened to the radio. Kids still listen to the radio, because there's nothing like the random serendipity of just hearing your favorite song while you're driving along. It's even better when you're in a car full of people who love the same song, and you can all sing along together. In 1973, "Kodachrome" was one of those songs, and not just because we got a bad word pass on the word "crap" when we sang along with Paul Simon. I loved "Loves Me Like a Rock" even more than "Kodachrome," but "Kodachrome" is the song that recalls my childhood, like a photograph, like my mother's Instamatic, like the Fotomats that occupied every other street corner in Philadelphia.

I didn't think much about Paul Simon after 1973 or so, until 1979, when we sang "Sounds of Silence" at my first high school choir concert. I remembered it, and I dug out my mother's old Paul Simon and Simon and Garfunkel records, and then I was a fan all over again.

A few years later, I was out of college (not finished, but out) and working as a proofreader for an old-fashioned offset printing company. I was 21, with the wrong job and the wrong man and the wrong apartment in a very wrong neighborhood. Not gonna lie, as they say on the Internet: My life was a bit of a mess.

I was at a party one night, and the TV was on, tuned to "Saturday Night Live." Paul Simon was the musical guest (and maybe he was the host, too).  I went out and bought "Graceland" the next day, just so I could listen to "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" a  hundred more times. There are lots of albums that I really love, but "Graceland" is the one that I know best. I could sing every single word of that album. That's not a threat, just a statement of fact.

*****
In another of my favorite songs, "The Cool Cool River," from the 1991 "Rhythm of the Saints," Paul Simon sings "Sometimes, even music cannot substitute for tears."

But sometimes, it can. Music has substituted for tears for me more times than I can count, and no one's music more than Paul Simon's, which I have listened to for literally as long as I can remember and even longer. I probably heard it "Wednesday Morning 3 AM" in the womb.

Tonight is the last date on the "Homeward Bound" farewell tour. Who knows what "farewell" really means--lots of artists and athletes "retire" only to return a month or a year later. And last Friday night, when I finally got to see him live for the very first time, he sounded great. So maybe he'll perform live again--maybe he'll even tour again. But I'm glad I was there, last tour or not. I'm glad I got to share over 50 years of music with 40,000 or so of my closest friends, many of whom weren't even alive when even "Graceland" or "The Rhythm of the Saints" were first released, let alone "The Sounds of Silence" or "There Goes Rhymin' Simon." I bought a t-shirt, and then I bought another one. I can still hear the music, a week later. I've been hearing it for my entire life.

Something strange in the neighborhood

It's Saturday night, and I'm the only person home. My husband and younger son are at a baseball game, and my older son is at work. I'm unusually tired, so I'm in for the night at 8 PM. I'm going to watch the "Ghostbusters" remake with Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. I'm sitting on my couch with my computer on my lap, and without a thought in my head.

After I finished Lynn Freed's Leaving Home, I returned very briefly to Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends. I'd intended to finish it, in fits and starts, in between reading other books, but I find that I can't make myself care about what happens to the Seekers. Right now, I'm reading Entering Ephesus, by Daphne Athas, an author I'd never heard of before I found this book. Entering Ephesus is a novel about three sisters whose family loses its fortune during the Great Depression and is forced to move from an unnamed New England beach town to Ephesus, a fictional southern college town. Apparently, the novel is somewhat autobiographical, and Ephesus is loosely based on Chapel Hill.

I'm almost finished with Entering Ephesus, and I don't know what to make of it. The racist language on almost every page is shocking, even considering the context of 1971, when it was published; and 1939, when the story begins. And the characters are mostly unsympathetic and unlikable; even borderline evil. On the other hand, it's hard to completely hate a book that includes passages like this:

"The linoleum rugs could not be taken up because the house was riddled with termites. In the middle of the night they could hear tiny, intermittent chain-saw noises as the termites worked, laborious as Communists digging the Moscow subway." This is part of a description of the broken-down house that the family rents when they arrive in Ephesus, having finally lost their beautiful 15-room mansion overlooking the sea.

In a later scene, the girls have entered the local school, where the youngest is instantly the most popular child in her class. Asked by the teacher to comment on an oral report presented by the  poorest, least fortunate child in the class, she praises the boy sincerely and winningly, causing his classmates to see him with new respect: "Even Miss Bogue felt a lump in her throat. There was a victorious feeling in the depths of her being, that feeling that arises when it is manifest that the underdog has won."

So I don't completely hate it. But I don't love it either, and I won't be sorry to finish it. I can overlook the racism, given the historical context. And unsympathetic or evil characters can make great novels, even if they win in the end. But I have an old-fashioned need for redeeming value in a novel; evil characters must be evil for a reason and must more importantly be opposed by good characters. And that's the deepest textual analysis and most insightful literary criticism you'll get around here. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's a 5, and three of those five points are conferred on the linoleum passage.


*****
Now it's 8:10 PM on Monday night, and I'm taking a break from work to write about work. I work too much. And that's all I have to say about that. Actually, I'm not really writing about work, but about something that happened where I work. Melania Trump visited HHS today to speak at a summit on cyberbullying. And if you think that I'm going to snark it up about the wife of the mother of all cyberbullies speaking out about cyberbullying, then you're wrong. Because I like Melania. I think that she means well, and that she's trying her best to make something positive of her situation. And her spokeswoman is savage AF, as the kids say. She'll probably lose her security clearance.

*****
Tuesday. Once again, it's 8 PM; and once again, I still have work to do. And once again, I'm writing about it rather than doing it. It's a pattern.

I took a break for 30 minutes, to swim in a pool that was a tropical haven of rest yesterday and an icy Norwegian fjord today. OK, so I'm exaggerating. But it was cold. And it occurred to me, as I swam one chilly lap after another, with the sky gray and lowering, that yesterday might have been the turning point. It might have been the last day of warm-water swimming for 2018. Two weeks from today, the pool will be closed. I kept swimming as a few raindrops fell.

If you have ever worked on a huge proposal, then you know that some proposal tasks are worse than others. If a proposal is an aircraft carrier, then resumes and letters of commitment are KP. Do they have that in the Navy? Whatever the kitchen duty is called. I guess on a ship, it's a galley.  But it could be worse. I could be writing a compliance matrix. That's latrine duty.

I turned on some music a little while ago, because I needed an energy boost.

• "Mr. Blue Sky," Electric Light Orchestra. It's not possible to sustain a bad mood through this song.
• "Cheap Thrills," Sia. This song appeared on at least five "Worst Songs of 2016 According to Snotty Hipster Critics" lists. Morons. This is one of the greatest songs ever.
• "Forever," Chris Brown. Yeah, I know. Me too. But no one can be all bad who can make people so happy with just one song. 
• "Party in the USA," Miley Cyrus. Shut up. 
• "(Lay Down) Candles in the Wind," Melanie. My mom had the album, and we played it all the time. I could listen to this song a hundred times and never tire of it. I sing along like a six-year-old holding her mother's hairbrush like a microphone. 

*****

It's Wednesday now, and I have work to do, so of course I need to write about having work to do before I can actually do the work. The whole house of cards might be about to come down now, but I can't worry about history in the making. I have a proposal to write. 

Let's go back

It's Sunday morning. Normally, I write for a little while on Sunday morning, but I haven't left myself much time. When we return from a trip, the unpacking and laundry will often provoke a too-much-stuff-driven anxiety attack, and last night was no exception. Because we really do have too much stuff. So this morning, I cleaned rather than wrote.

I clean all the time, but routine everyday cleaning is different from turn-this-mother-out CLEANING. I'm organizing closets. I'm cleaning under things, and behind things, and on top of things. I'm purging.

But that's enough of that. What is this, HGTV?

*****
Memory is tricky, isn't it? You can be quite sure that something happened in a certain way, at a certain time. You might even be sure that you remember exactly what you were wearing, or what song was playing on the radio. And you can be wrong, even in your certainty that you remember every detail.

We went to Canada in 2010. We got passports for our children, who were 9 and 5 at the time, and renewed our own passports. I remember sitting at the Aspen Hill Post Office, waiting for our names to be called; and I remember completing the paperwork, and receiving all of our passports a few weeks later. My husband remembers the same appointment. And we did all go together, and we did sit and wait to hear our name called, and we did get our children's first passports.

Last Saturday night, we returned to the U.S. from Canada, via the same border crossing at Champlain--St. Bernard de Lacolle from which we'd entered Canada the previous Saturday. The very friendly U.S. Border Patrol agent chatted with us for a few minutes, asked us a few pro forma questions about why we'd been in Canada, and what we had purchased, and where else in the country we'd traveled. We answered, and then handed over our passports.

The border guard looked at our passports, and then looked closely at my husband. "Did you know that your passport is expired?" he asked.

"What?" we both exclaimed in unison. "No, that can't be," my husband said. "I renewed it in 2010, so it expires in 2020."

"No," said the border guard, "your wife's expires in 2020, but yours expired in June of this year. Didn't the Canadian border guards check it when you came into Canada?"

We looked at the passport, and realized that the man was 100% right. In 2008, my husband made his first return trip to Korea, the land of his birth (any excuse to write "the land of his birth"). He had renewed his passport earlier that year, and was only along for the ride when the boys and I got our passports in 2010. We had completely forgotten that small, but critical detail. Je ne me souviens pas. 

And the Canadian border guard? He had one job, as the hashtag goes. #RocketScience.

*****

Let's go back let's go back 
Let's go way on way back when
I didn't even know you, you couldn't have been too much more than ten
I ain't no psychiatrist, ain't no doctor with degrees
But it don't take too much high IQs to see what you're doing to me

I never used to cry at celebrity deaths, but as I've gotten older, I've come to understand the relationship between ordinary people and their favorite celebrities. They speak for us, or express something for us that we can't. And we don't have to know them personally, or to even meet them for a moment, to feel love and kinship with them, and gratitude for the gifts that they share. That's how I felt about Mary Tyler Moore, and Carrie Fisher, and Kate Spade. And Aretha Franklin. "Think," one of Aretha's own songs, was the one that I couldn't get out of my head today. You have to watch her perform that song, not just listen to it, because she used her whole body when she sang, with a combination of freedom and abandon, but total control, that was unique to her. I kept singing "Think" to myself, but I didn't cry until I saw a later performance of "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman," a song written by Carole King but owned by Aretha.

We can listen to Aretha forever; but it won't be the same, knowing that she's gone and that there won't be any new Aretha performances.

People walking around everyday
Playing games, taking score
Trying to make other people lose their minds
Ah, be careful you don't lose yours

I'll be careful I don't lose mine. Aretha Franklin, rest in peace. 

Burn baby burn

Monday: It's a beautiful day. And almost 20 years to the day after this happened, I was walking across Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville, returning from the badging office in one Federal government building to the Federal government building where I work, when a man drove past me and shouted something too obscene for me to repeat here. Three construction workers, walking away from a food truck where they'd just picked up their lunch, all turned their heads, as shocked as I was.

There was nothing I could do, of course. It was 11:45 on a Monday morning, and he was driving, fast. Later, when I told my husband about it, I couldn't even remember what the car looked like.

One of my government bosses has nicknamed me "Liam Neeson." He says that I'm like Neeson's character in "Taken," because I have a special set of skills, honed over a lifetime. Unfortunately, they're not the kind of skills that make me immune to public harassment and humiliation. But that's fine. I'll just use this little episode to fuel my rage. I'll need it someday.

*****
Speaking of bosses, can we talk about how many I have now? Four. I have four bosses. Fortunately, I like all of them.

But still. Four bosses is a lot.

*****

I didn't think about what happened for the rest of the afternoon. Then I went for a walk after work, with the iPod cranked up to 11. I skipped around, looking for a song that was angry enough to sing along to, and settled on Erasure's "Hallowed Ground," which doesn't really sound like an angry song, at least in terms of melody and instrumentation. But what's angrier than "Who will be the next victim of the criminal dawn?" I sang along, like I do. I can be loud on the street, too. I also sang along to the Pretenders "Talk of the Town:" "Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday. Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday. You'll change..." And maybe I will. Maybe someday, I'll change into a person who can have an upsetting experience, and then just let it go, like it was nothing; like the proverbial water off the back of the proverbial duck. Maybe.

*****
Saturday: It was a bad week, and not just because of the stupid man and his stupid verbal assault. But it got better.  My son had a baseball game today, during which my husband was nearly chucked by the umpire. He never argues with sports officials or coaches. But he did today. Too long a story to make short, but five years from now, we'll refer to the whole episode as the infield fly rule incident, a day that will live in infamy. But that's another story, for another day.

After the game, I was running errands and listening to the radio. It's almost never so bad that singing along with "Disco Inferno" can't make it better. The Capitals just won Game 5 against Pittsburgh, and April is over, finally. Burn that mother down.

Children play in the dark

I haven't gotten around to writing my 2017 book list yet. It won't be as long as the ones from 2016 and 2015. I'm one book into 2018 now, having just finished Joan Didion's The White Album. This was my first for 2018, and my second Joan Didion  and I think that I like her non-fiction better, at least based on this limited selection. She's pretty prolific, so I'll probably read a few more. 

In "On the Morning After the Sixties," one of the last essays in The White Album, Didion writes about college life in the early 1950s, when she studied at Berkeley, and "the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies." I remember reading, a long time ago, something about hand-washing wool sweaters and blocking them on Turkish towels. I think this might have been part of Jacqueline Kennedy's famous Prix de Paris essay, which I cannot find online (Joan Didion was also a Prix de Paris winner); or maybe it was advice from one of the characters in The Group. I didn't know what it meant to "block" a sweater; though I assumed that it meant simply to reshape it so that it dries neatly; and I also didn't know what was special about a Turkish towel versus any other variety. 

The point is that Joan Didion, born in the 1930s and educated in the 1950s, is a member of the last generation of American women who would have known how to block a sweater, and who would have been able to identify a towel as Turkish without looking at the label. 

I was thinking about this as I sat at a table at Chadwick's Restaurant in Audobon, PA, with my husband and sons and my sister and brother-in-law and nephews. It was December 28, a weeknight, still early enough in the holiday week that you can revel in several more days of leisured Christmas coziness, but late enough that you're already thinking about the return to work, and school, and daily routines.  Chadwick's is a nice place, so I found it odd that there wasn't a convenient coat rack to be found, and we had to hang our bulky coats and sweaters and scarves on the backs of our chairs. This would have annoyed Joan Didion, I thought; enough that she might even have written about the sad decline in standards that has made it perfectly acceptable for nice restaurants to offer paper napkins and paper packets of sugar and paper-wrapped straws, and no place to hang your coat. 

*****
The live musician was just starting a break when we arrived, so the restaurant played recorded music. In the Philadelphia suburbs, you can switch stations on your car radio all day long, and never hear anything recorded after 1985 or so, and the recorded music selection at Chadwick's did not vary from local custom. The first track we heard was England Dan and John Ford Coley's Light of the World. 

*****
You know, sometimes I lose the thread on these things. I start with an idea, but I forget details. And sometimes, I remember every detail, but have no idea why they're relevant. I think I had a point when I started this, but I can't remember to save my life what it was. Something about Chicago? But it's too late to abandon it now. I'm too far in. 

*****

Oh, I know why I was thinking about Chicago! It was the band Chicago, and not the city! Because of the Gateway Pharmacy. That's it. 

Yes, I see that I need to back things up a bit. I'll begin (yes, I know--too late) by saying that I'm not particularly nostalgic about most things. Time marches on, and all that. Things change. But like any other almost-old person, there are things about my childhood and youth that I miss. One of those things is old-fashioned neighborhood pharmacies. No, not the kind with the soda fountains, because I'm old, not ancient. I'm talking about the kind of neighborhood pharmacy where you could buy candy and gift items and greeting cards and perfume and I suppose you can buy all of that at Rite-Aid, but it's different.  The Gateway Pharmacy is like the 1978-1983 Tardis stop. And I'm not nostalgic for that particular period of time at all, but drugstores were definitely better then.  I didn't know that they still made Alyssa Ashley Musk, or Vitabath, or Fa, but apparently they do, and the shelves full of vintage toiletries aren't just nostalgia props. I thought about the extent to which so much of the narrative on which I grew up no longer applies, and smelled the Charlie tester, and sang along to Chicago's "Make Me Smile." 

*****
And once again, I don't remember how I was going to finish this now way-off-the-rails post. Joan Didion would probably be horrified at this rambling mess. I'm reading Fire and Fury now, because of course I'm reading Fire and Fury. And although I can't resist "stable genius" jokes (which are never going to get old), I'm actually sorrier for Trump now than I am angry at him, because I believe that he might be well on his way to losing his mind, and it's never funny to see the deterioration of a human person. But I'm plenty angry at the sycophants who are loyal to Trump at the expense of loyalty to right over wrong; and even angrier at the cynical politicians who are willing to use this falling-apart mess of a man as a tool toward their own ends.  The narrative on which I grew up no longer applies; and the narrative on which my children are growing up gets crazier every day.  And love is still the answer, and always was, and always will be. 

Ghosts appear and fade away

Sunday:  This morning was a legitimately cold December morning; cold by anyone's standards, which means bloody well freezing for me. But I couldn't sleep past 6:30, so I went for a walk anyway.

With enough clothing, the temperature was just bearable, and even I had to admit that it was a really beautiful, sparkling morning. There was still a coating of snow on the grass, leftover from the tiny bit of snow that fell on Friday, and it was sunny and clear, but just a tiny bit misty. Beautiful.

I walked past the pool, which was frozen over, with a dusting of snow on the deck. Later, I heard that one of the neighborhood boys had posted Instagram video of himself and his dog, walking on the frozen water. Teenage boys are idiots; this is something that I have personal experience with. No more so than the rest of us, of course, but idiots in their own particular way. I myself did more stupid things this week alone than I'm prepared to write about on this blog, but you can trust me that walking out onto the surface of a frozen swimming pool was not among them. Idiots.

*****

Sometimes I like to listen to NPR when I walk, but I usually like to listen to music. My husband and I share an iTunes library, and I usually just put the whole thing on shuffle and listen to whatever shows up (within reason), but this morning, I felt like selecting songs. I found a playlist with my name on it (literally; it was named "Claire") so I started the first song and was on my way.

It was a good playlist, beginning with my beloved Erasure's "Heart of Stone." Sometimes, I get tired of even my favorite songs, and I skip past them, but I can't remember ever skipping over "Heart of Stone."

It got even better, with Gladys Knight and the Pips "Midnight Train to Georgia." I'm always all aboard for "Midnight Train."

Three excellent songs in a row! The third was Men at Work's "Overkill" (the acoustic version). I've always liked the original recording of this song, but I really love the acoustic version, and the lyrics are my life on the radio:

Especially at night
I worry over situations
I know will be all right
Perhaps it's just imagination

But day after day, it reappears
Night after night, my heartbeat shows the fear
Ghosts appear and fade away. 

Anyway, these songs were among my favorites when I made the playlist, probably sometime around 2012 or so. They held up. 

*****

One reason why I like to go out walking early on Sunday morning is that I like to sing, and there are only a handful of people out at 7:30 on Sunday morning. Running Lady, The World's Happiest Dog and his person, Bike Helmet Guy, and maybe a few others here or there, but mostly, I have the streets to myself. And I need the streets to myself. Alone on the streets, I'm free to really cry for your heart of stone. And when L.A. proves too much for the man, I can sing, loudly, about his decision to leave the life that he'd come to know. In fact, I usually sing "Midnight Train" twice: Once as Gladys, and once as a Pip. 

I know both parts equally well, and I slay them both. 

The low battery warning came just as I was turning back on to my street, about halfway through a performance of David Bowie's "Modern Love" that would have blown the roof off the joint, had I not been outside. It was a good walk, and a good morning.

It doesn't seem a year ago to this very day

I love movies, as anyone who has read this blog probably knows. I don't go to movie theaters that often, though; and when I do, it's usually weeks after the movie opens. In fact, I often don't even hear about movies until their theatrical runs are almost over. Who knows what movie lovers did before TV and Netflix.

Because I don't usually see movies when they're new in theaters, I also don't usually notice trailers. Occasionally, though, I see a trailer that makes me really really want to see the movie. In 2015, my kids made me stop what I was doing to watch each of the "Force Awakens" trailers as they were released. I didn't mind, because I love Star Wars. And for a long-time Star Wars fan, there was nothing better than seeing Harrison Ford smile and say, "Chewy. We're home." We saw "The Force Awakens" a week after it was released.

Now, I'm almost Star Wars-level excited about a new movie.  I can't believe that it has taken this long, but someone has finally made a movie about the epic 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The movie is, of course, titled "Battle of the Sexes," and the trailer soundtrack is Elton John's "Love Lies Bleeding," which is 1973 itself, set to music.

*****

This is, believe it or not, the swimming pool at Kendrick Recreation Center.
You can't see the tennis courts, but they're behind the pool and to the left.
My kids and their swim team friends don't believe my stories about swimming
in shifts because the pool was so crowded during hot Philadelphia summers. 

I was eight years old in 1973, and I really loved tennis. I wasn't good at it--I didn’t have the necessary speed or coordination. It didn’t matter, though, because I still loved to play. I loved hitting a ball against the brick wall down the street from my house. I loved playing on the summer team at the Kendrick Recreation Center and in the juniors tournaments in Fairmount Park (during which I was usually eliminated in the first round). I loved my Wilson Chris Evert racket (wood!) that I’d gotten as a Christmas present. And I LOVED the women’s tennis tour.

I was kind of a girly girl. Not a cheerleader or a pageant aspirant type, but not what anyone would, at that time, have called a “tomboy.” (I hate that word.) I liked clothes, I worried about my hair, and I wanted my ears pierced, which my mother would not allow until I was in high school. I admired stylish, beautiful Chris Evert, with her shining blond ponytail and diamond bracelets sparkling on tanned arms. But Billie Jean King was my favorite. She was different from the other women on the tennis tour. She wasn’t elegant or fashionable or regal. But she was radiant and fierce, and I thought (and still think) that she was beautiful.

*****

I grew up in a rowhouse in a blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood, and attended a parish school with all of the other children of secretaries and sheet metal workers. I’m not sure that I or any of my friends would even have noticed tennis had it not been for Billie Jean and Arthur Ashe, who tried to bring tennis out of the country club and into the public parks. But as much as Billie Jean did to democratize tennis, she did even more for women's equality. She pioneered the then-radical notion that female athletes should make the same money as male athletes. How obvious does it seem today that the men’s and women’s champions at Wimbledon or the US Open should earn the same prize money? It wasn’t even remotely obvious in 1973. It was near-revolutionary.

The Battle of the Sexes was silly and show-businessy, but it was still a landmark event for women’s sports, and Billie Jean was a heroine. At that time (even more than now), women who spoke out for simple fairness and equality for women were often mocked and derided as "women's libbers" or worse. Lots of women were afraid of that kind of mockery--in fact, lots of women still are. They'd rather endure sexual harassment and inequality than have men dismiss them shrill or unattractive. But Billie Jean was fearless. Because she stood up for women's rights, she faced relentless scorn, and not just from Riggs. Like most eight-year-olds, I believed that life should be fair, and I was perpetually outraged by sexism in general, and by the over-the-top chauvinism of Riggs in particular. My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and siblings were all heartily sick of me and Billie Jean and Bobby Riggs by the time the whole thing ended in a decisive victory for Billie Jean.

*****

1973 was a pretty big news year. I paid attention to current events more than most eight-year-olds did, so I knew about the oil embargo, and Vietnam, which was still raging; and the growing Watergate scandal. War and scandal and economic crises meant nothing, though, compared to Billie Jean King shutting Bobby Riggs up, even for five minutes. It felt like a victory not just for women, but for little inner-city working class school girls, too. Billie Jean, who also came from a working-class family, showed girls like me that things were possible, even likely, no matter where you lived, or who your parents were, or whether or not you had the right hair or clothes. My friends and I couldn’t really aspire to Chris Evert’s cool elegance and beauty, but we could all aspire to be like Billie Jean. She looked like our older sisters and cousins, and if we worked hard, we could be like her. We could be fearless, and strong, and really good at something. We could kick ass and take names and still look cute in a tennis dress.

*****

As an eight-year-old girl who liked a good old-fashioned to-the-death blood feud between good and evil, I would have been appalled to know that Billie Jean King actually liked Riggs, who was pure evil as far as I was concerned. Now, of course, I love Billie Jean even more for her friendship with crazy, loud-mouthed, flamboyant Bobby Riggs, who probably wasn't as much of a chauvinist as he pretended to be for the cameras. Even today, I can think of lots of worse sexists than Bobby Riggs. Not mentioning any names, of course.

*****
The summer of 2017 will probably feel a lot like the summer of 1973. My kids are much older than I was in 1973, but they're still young enough to believe that life should always be fair and that the good guys should always win. Twenty-five, or maybe 35 years from now, movies will be made about the cultural and political earthquakes of their youth, and they'll tell their children what they remember, and what it all meant to them.  And they'll see a trailer, and hear a song, and they'll say "OH MY GOD! THEY FINALLY MADE A MOVIE!" I hope so, at least. 

Cutting edge technology and young Luddites

Two 11-year-old boys are sitting on my family room floor; they have a card game spread out on a small, round, low-to-the-floor Japanese style wooden table.  The Capitals are playing, but the boys aren't paying attention to the game, although one of them is an avid fan—he’s even wearing an Ovechkin jersey.  The boys, best friends since they were 4, are convinced that something weird is happening, because they keep rolling dice in combinations that add up to six, or drawing combinations of cards that also add up to six.  I’m tempted to ask them if they know that President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln and President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, but that might be too much for them.  The Penguins just scored; cards and dice are forgotten for now.

*****

I can’t decide if I should buy a new phone or not.  My phone is fine.  But I want a new one.  I keep shopping for new phones; I’ve even had phones in my shopping cart, but I never actually complete the transaction.  Other things we need, I think; other things to spend money on.  Still, the phone keeps calling me (see what I did there?) 

*****

While I shop for the latest and presumably greatest mobile device, I spend Saturday evening with two young boys who love everything old.  They went through a typewriter phase a few years ago; now, they use giant Clinton-era camcorders to document their adventures.  Like Snapchat for the Stone Age. They disagree on which is the best Beastie Boys song; my son's friend favors "Fight for Your Right," while my son holds out for "Paul Revere."  Both of the boys agree that "Sabotage" is far inferior to their favorites.  "I liked their old stuff so much better," my son says.  

Now, during the intermission between the second and third periods of the game, the boys are watching old Harlem Globetrotters videos on an iPod, but they need a larger screen to do Meadowlark Lemon justice.  They want to borrow this computer, so that's all for now.  Let's go Caps. 

Illuminate the main streets and the cinema aisles

Isn't it so much easier and more pleasant to clean your kitchen when you have music to listen to?  I forget this sometimes, but I remembered it tonight, and the nightly dishes and counters routine was much more pleasant as a result.

I skipped around a bit on my husband's old iPod, landing first on The Brothers Johnson's "Strawberry Letter 23", followed by Al Stewart's "Time Passages". Then I found Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha", and listened to it three times.

So many reasons to love "Brimful of Asha". I'm an Indio-Anglophile, if such a thing exists.  Years of working with Indian scientists and software engineers left me with great affection for Indians, who seem to combine razor-sharp wit with kindness like few other cultures can.  Even better than Indian Americans are Indian Brits (or British Indians?)  Because they're BRITISH AND INDIAN.

I like to think that "Brimful of Asha" probably gave at least one record company executive heartburn when he first heard it.  It's a longer-than-five-minutes song about a Bollywood star, and Indian sociopolitics, and life in late-20th-century England, with vaguely Indian melody and instrumentation.  Who would have expected it to be a huge hit? I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it in 1996, and it's held up beautifully.

I'm listening now to Toad the Wet Sprocket's "Nanci".  If only I could bend my words like Uri Geller's spoons.