April, come she will

I’m finished with Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy, and not a moment too soon. Poor miserable Baba and Kate were getting me down. Now I’m reading Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, which is right up my alley. I read Barbara Pym for the first time last year, when Excellent Women was one of my favorite books of the year. An Unsuitable Attachment is more of the same, really - English clergy families in post-war Britain, women young and middle-aged and old preoccupied with class and busy morning to night with church bazaars and household affairs and - of course - food. Every single English female novelist of the postwar era wrote in great detail about provision gathering and meal preparation and serving. Food was scarce and they probably all thought about eating a lot. 

I was the only person home this morning, so I picked up my book to read as I ate my very Barbara Pym breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and a piece of toast. I was sure that food would appear within a page after I opened the book, and I was not wrong. The young librarian from the good clergy family was taking a Christmas parcel of chocolate, chicken breasts in aspic, and shortbread to the recently retired elderly library secretary. I’ve never understood the whole idea of meat jelly, but at least I’d heard of it. I had to look up fairy cakes, which appear in another scene. They’re basically British cupcakes. I learn something new every time I read Barbara Pym. 

I’m about a third of the way through the book, and the characters - the vicar Mark and his wife Sophia, the canon’s niece and librarian Ianthe, the veterinarian Edwin and his sister Daisy and all of their friends and connections in and around the Anglican church, are preparing for Lent, which they observe with rigor - no meat or sugar or butter, and not just on Fridays but every day. I’m also observing Lent and it’s hard enough just giving up sweets and sugar six days a week and meat on Fridays. Post-war Britons lived an abstemious life already, even without Lent, and a certain moral imperative surrounded their choices regarding what and how much to eat and what clothing to buy and wear and whether or not to turn the heat on. Read Barbara Pym or Muriel Spark or Elizabeth Jane Howard and you’ll find that all of the characters in the books that take place in the immediate post-war years and throughout the 1950s are preoccupied with thoughts of material comfort - not wealth, but comfort, because the moral imperative to live frugally and simply and rather uncomfortably applied even to the rich. 

I thought about this this weekend, the third weekend of my own personal Lent. After an unusually mild winter, it is of course sharply cold and damp, long days of gray dullness and chill, unrelieved by sweetness, not so much as a single Hershey’s Kiss, which would go a long way toward brightening up this rather dreary March. Yesterday was Sunday, so I had some chocolate but it’s Monday again, the Mondayest of leaden gray Mondays. My energy is so low on days like this. I took a walk around the track at the base today. It was more like a trudge. I took a trudge around the track, wrapped up in my coat and scarf, as two young Air Force officers practiced kicking soccer goals. These young people and their energy. 

But just as I’m settling into the cold early spring London gloom of a 1950s Anglican Lent, Mark and Sophia and Edwin and Daisy and Rupert and Ianthe and Penelope are all about to abandon me, flying off to the warmth of Italy where presumably they’ll look at paintings and eat pasta and drink wine and Rupert will probably fall in love with one of the two single women (Ianthe), while the other one (Penelope) falls in love with him and they’ll all revel in a romantic, sun-drenched, wine-soaked holiday and forget about Lent altogether. Protestants, I tell you. But it’s all good because it’s already March 50th, so we’re a third of the way through the third and longest month of the year. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now, just as cold as yesterday - maybe even more so because it’s very blustery today - but at least the sun is shining. I worked from home and now it’s 5:10 pm and I’m looking at a parallelogram of sunlight (that is Ian McEwan’s phrase, not mine, sadly) on the carpet, and rejoicing in the second full day of Daylight Savings, which means that we’ll have daylight until about 7:10 PM. We’re paying for it on the dark black coffee-bitter mornings when my son gets up for swim practice in what seems like (essentially is) the middle of the night, but it’s almost worth it. The days will get longer on both ends, and the warm days will be more frequent, and the figurative postwar gray London of early spring in Maryland will give way to the sunshiny Italy of summer, and I’ll stop complaining for five minutes. But now I’m going to go for a walk. I’ll need to bundle up first. It’s freezing out there. 

Housekeeping

Wednesday was one of those days, one of those work all day and come home and work some more days that draw me into my own little vortex of I-work-so-hard grievance, all cranky and huffy and put-upon. It took me 15 minutes just to get out off the base and then another 30 minutes on Connecticut from Jones Bridge to Randolph (IYKYK) so I would have been cranky already but I was really cranky because I had so many things to do, so much food to cook and laundry to wash and dry and fold and compulsive housecleaning to do. And I had to call our old lady to get her shopping list, too. Why me? I have to do everything around here! Sheesh.  

I hung up my coat and washed my water bottle and thought about each chore that I had to do, ranking them in order, the most odious to the least; and then I project-managed my way through a plan to work through my rank-ordered list and just get shit done. And yes I’m aware that I could have finished at least one and maybe two of these chores in the time it took me to rank them by relative odiousness and then plan out a whole PMP-certified Gantt chart timeline but then I’d be a whole other person and you wouldn’t be reading this. 

Long story short (yes, I’m aware that it’s too late), that totally worked. Not only did I get everything done in record time if records existed and they should, but my mood improved and my perspective returned and I was clearly able to see that I’m actually not the most overworked working mother in the whole world and that my life is actually pretty easy, relatively speaking. And relatively speaking is all we have, right? 

Sinead and Edna

It’s a rainy Friday, a WFH day for me, and I’m still in my pajama pants, though I am wearing a respectable business casual sweater and could pass muster as a working professional from the neck up, if an unplanned teleconference forces me to show myself. I was going to change out of the pajama pants but it’s almost three o’clock now and I have no plans to leave the house unless it’s on fire so I think I’m dressed (or half-dressed) for the day. 

The thing is that I’m tired because I was out until after midnight last night, a rare occurrence for me on a Thursday night. The AFI Silver is hosting an Irish film festival and last night’s feature was “Nothing Compares,” the Sinead O’Connor documentary. I suppose I could have rented it but an Irish film festival seemed a better venue than my couch. An opportunity to see it with my people, so to speak.

The evening did not disappoint, although full disclosure, I did fall asleep for a bit in the rather long interval between our dinner at the Limerick Pub in Wheaton and the 9:45 movie time. We arrived at the AFI at 9 o’clock, to an almost empty lobby. The box office person told us that the early screening was running late and that our show wouldn’t start until 10, leaving us with an hour to sit and wait. An hour at 9 PM, which is when I always hit the wall, especially after a hamburger and 1.5 Smithwicks. And we were sitting there in the nearly deserted lobby, on a pair of comfortably cushioned movie theater chairs, and there was nothing stopping me from closing my eyes for a few minutes, and so I did. My husband sat next to me, scrolling through his news feed. He might have napped for a few minutes, too. I don’t know because I was fast asleep, sitting right in the middle of a movie theater lobby in downtown Silver Spring. 

And then another movie let out and all of a sudden the lobby was a whirlwind of Irish film festival energy, and the ushers and concession stand employees were strolling amid the crowds handing out pints of Guinness in plastic cups. 

My husband, who is not a documentary film fan nor a particular admirer of Sinead, was very impressed with the free Guinness, although “free” is a pretty loose term considering that the movie tickets cost $22 each. I thought for a moment, as I held my free plastic pint cup of Guinness, which I don’t especially like, that maybe as lower middle-income parents of college students, we might have been wiser to just stream the movie at home. But sometimes you need to get out. 

I’m a very very very introverted person but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love people. I love being out among people. I have to plan ahead and muster my energy and maybe take a nap in public just before the people descend upon me but with enough preparation, I can really enjoy a crowd. I was wide awake as soon as the people filled the lobby, the people leaving the early showing and the people arriving all at once for the later showing, all of them excited to be out on a Thursday, dressed in jeans and sweaters and skirts and t-shirts, some in Irish sweaters. It was cold, so there were lots of interesting jackets. Women outnumbered men by 2 to 1 or so (not every man is as good a sport as my husband) and so there were also lots of interesting handbags. People were laughing and talking and hoisting their “free” pints of Guinness. There was lots of energy. It was something of a scene. 

The movie was excellent. I read Rememberings last year, and most of the events depicted in the movie were covered in the book (including the now-infamous SNL performance, though why infamous I don’t know because what did they think that Sinead O’Connor was going to do, just stand and look pretty and sing her little song and go home?), although not the reverse. The movie didn’t get into Sinead’s difficult professional relationship with Prince, except for an ending credit explaining that Prince’s estate refused to allow the filmmakers to use the song for which the movie was named. But that’s not my favorite Sinead song anyway, and there were lots of clips of performances during her early stardom, when her extraordinary voice was at its best. She really is one of the greatest female singers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Definitely worth leaving the house on a cold Thursday night in March. 

*****

And Sinead is not the only rebellious Irishwoman on my radar this week. I’m reading Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy and although I can see its literary merit and can understand why it has become a modern Irish classic, I also cannot wait to be done with it and will not miss Caithleen and Baba, not one bit. Or rather, I won’t miss the mid-20th century Irish misogyny that shaped these two hot messes in female human form. 

Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Brigid (Baba) Brennan, although they both live well outside the very restrictive circa 1955 Irish Catholic social norms, do not enjoy their rebellion. Kate, in fact, is not rebellious at all; she’s just a book-smart and street-stupid girl with no emotional self-control who falls for the wrong man and proceeds to make her life miserable over him, and his as well (spoiler alert - he deserves it). Kate’s lifelong friend Baba is the spoiled daughter of a prosperous Irish country veterinarian. Baba is hilariously funny, as mean as a snake, and completely without morals of any kind. She is almost nihilistic in her lack of normal human sympathy and her boredom with everything and everyone. Baba is also married to a terrible man with whom she lives a miserable loveless existence. 

The trilogy was apparently extremely controversial in Ireland when it was published, and it’s still shocking in places. But the most shocking thing about it is that it’s not just a whole novel, it’s three whole novels, about two characters who are so unlikable that they can’t even stand themselves. I kept reading until the end because I generally do that, and because the trilogy has enough page-turning need-to-know-what-happens-next appeal that I wanted to keep going. But I will not miss these books or these characters at all, and I can’t wait to not read another Edna O’Brien book, pretty much ever again. 

I didn’t plan for this to publish on International Women’s Day but here it is, a serendipitous coincidence in which I finish a post on the perfect day to publish it. St. Patrick’s Day might be just as appropriate but if you have seen “Nothing Compares,” or if you’ve read The Country Girls and its sequels, you won’t feel much like celebrating Irish culture, especially if you don’t have a Y chromosome. 

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. 

Last things

It's Thursday night and I'm here at Rockville High School for the annual cluster concert. Old jokes being the best jokes, I will tell you that the cluster concert is a cluster in more ways than one. When they tell you that motherhood is sacrifice, they were talking about the cluster concert. 

The cluster concert is a performance of all of the music ensembles at Rockville and its feeder schools, known collectively as the cluster. This is my first cluster concert since my older son's senior year, in 2019. The concerts were cancelled in 2020 and 2021, and I missed it in 2022.

Well I didn't really miss it if you know what I mean. 

The concert is different this year. In past years, the elementary school band played, followed by the middle school bands, and then the high schoolers would take the stage, resplendent in concert dress. Their entrance always brought the house down, partly because they look so nice, and partly because their arrival is a visible reminder that no one will have to listen to an elementary school band for another year. 

This year, the ensembles are combined. Symphonic Band, Orchestra, and Jazz Band, each with musicians from all of the schools. It's just as well. No one who isn't closely related to the elementary school kids should have to listen to them playing musical instruments. 

I'm just keeping it real. 

*****

It's intermission now. The Symphonic Band played very well and now we await the orchestra. This new format is less cluster and more concert and I'm all for it. As always I chose my parking spot carefully and I have already planned my exit strategy. I'm not a senior parent for nothing. 

But that's why I'm writing about this silly thing to begin with. It's because I am a senior parent, and everything is the last thing. It's the last cluster concert. Saturday morning will be the last regular season swim meet before the championship season begins. The last team dinner, the last baseball game, the last spring concert - 8 years as a Rockville High School parent, all coming to an end, and the year is passing with breakneck speed. I'm not ready but I'll have to get ready. 

*****

It's Friday now, and we're doing a college visit today. The swim coach at a small Catholic college that my son never even considered invited him to come for a tour and breakfast with the team so here we are. I think he was just flattered to be recruited at first, but after a full court press visit that included breakfast with the team (waffles are very convincing) and a 1:1 meeting with the coach, who made clear that he wants my son on his team, I think that this small college is now his first choice. It’s not as prestigious as Villanova and Virginia Tech, but prestige is not all it’s cracked up to be. Ted Cruz and Jared Kushner went to Harvard, know what I mean?

*****

And back to last things. It's Saturday morning now and I'm sitting on a bleacher at the Germantown Indoor Swim Center, waiting for the officials briefing to begin. I'm a stroke and turn judge to today, not the referee, so I just have to attend the briefing. I don't have to conduct it. 

It's the last regular season meet of the year and my last regular season meet ever. More importantly, it's senior day, and there will be a little senior send-off during the break. All three schools competing today will be recognizing their seniors so it could go on for a few minutes. 

*****

And that's a wrap. The meet was a blur of splashy starts and fast races and screaming kids, and the senior send-off went by so quickly that I almost missed it. Names were called, senior swimmers shook hands with their coaches, and the seniors, balloons in hand, lined up for photos. I didn't get a good shot. I hope that someone else did. A few minutes later, I saw my son on deck. He held up his arm to show me the curly black and orange ribbons wrapped around his wrist. “My balloon broke,” he said, shrugging. 

Feudal

Did you know that it’s possible to write a whole darn thing and then forget completely about it? Yesterday, for example, I started compiling my 2022 book list, and I started writing about Cloud Cuckoo Land, thinking to myself that it was one of the few books that I had read and not written about. And then as I started to write about it, I remembered that I actually HAD written about it. 

Did you also know that Google Docs will allow you to give two different documents the very same name? That doesn’t seem wise. 

Anyway, here is what I wrote about Cloud Cuckoo Land, the book; by way of “Heartburn,” the movie, just about a year ago. There’s a connection, however tenuous, I promise. 

*****

Last week on the very cold MLK Day holiday, I watched “Heartburn” on Hulu. I wrote about the Nora Ephron book upon which this movie is based right here. I don’t think that the movie was particularly popular or well-received when it was released in 1986, but it’s a good movie, as 80s movies go. Or maybe it’s not so much a good movie as a movie worth watching because of the great acting and the amazing scenery and sets and costumes: upper middle class homes and gardens, and spot-on bourgeois bohemian fashion, and mid-80s Washington and NY street and restaurant scenes. So I enjoyed watching “Heartburn,” but of course, it doesn’t hold up in a lot of ways. Few 80s movies do. 

*****

In the first act wedding scene, which takes place in Rachel’s father’s dream of an Upper West Side pre-war apartment, I noticed a Black guest. The actress who played her looked like Anna Maria Horsford (and I later looked her up on IMDB, and she was Anna Maria Horsford, thus explaining the resemblance). I thought that maybe Mike Nichols, who directed "Heartburn," thought that representation was important, and that’s why he made sure that his wealthy and artsy but powerful characters had Black friends who would naturally be invited to their weddings. 

LOL, no. Eventually we learn that Horsford’s character is not a wedding guest at all. She is Rachel’s father’s housekeeper, Della. There’s a scene in which we see poor Della minding her own business, doing her job, when Meryl Streep's Rachel (who has just left her philandering husband, played by Jack Nicholson) blows into the apartment like a hurricane, hugely pregnant, all wild hair and maternity sack dress and oversized big-shouldered jacket, with a toddler in one hand, and a Kenyan sisal tote bag* slung over the opposite shoulder. She takes up a lot of space. In five seconds, the large room is filled with nothing but Rachel. 

She flings her jacket and her bags and her personal belongings all over the apartment that Della is trying to clean, and immediately asks Della to babysit so that she can run right back out the door to do New York writer things. There is no mention of any additional compensation for the extra work, which is exactly what you would expect from Rachel and her ilk, now and then. What makes the scene typical of the 80s is that there is no real acknowledgement that for the housekeeper, caring for a toddler IS extra work in the first place. Spoiler alert: Della agrees to take care of the baby, of course, because what choice does she have? 

*****

In some ways, the whole movie is like that, all about the pretty much feudal relationships between upper class Washingtonians and New Yorkers and the people who clean their houses and care for their children and deliver their groceries. We don’t know if Rachel’s own nanny, Juanita (played by the same actress who played the housekeepers in “Clueless” and “Regarding Henry”) receives vacation pay or Social Security or any of the formal acknowledgements of the dignity and worth of her work that Rachel and Mark take for granted, but it’s safe to assume that she doesn’t. It was widely accepted then (as it is now) that only certain occupations are worthy of respect and therefore worthy of fair compensation, job security, dignified working conditions and treatment, and benefits. 

Still, working class people were better off then, in a lot of ways. Even if Juanita doesn’t receive benefits, she at least knows who her employers are. They interact with her daily. They pay her directly, cash in hand, not through a third party and certainly not through a mobile app. The grocery delivery man receives a tip from Catherine O’Hara, but he also gets a paycheck from the grocery store. He’s not subject to the vagaries of a five-star rating system designed by software developers whom he will never meet and who will never have a clue about any aspect of his job. 

*****

Wait, did you not come here for Soviet social realist film criticism? Yes, sorry, that took a bit of a turn. The thing that I can’t get out of my head is that I was an adult–a barely formed adult, but still an adult–when that movie came out, and the world that it depicts is almost completely gone. And in some ways, good riddance, obviously. But the gap between the working class and the well off, though it was wide enough at the time, still seemed bridgeable. Now that gap is more of a chasm, vast and ever widening; and the system of work and compensation has been so disrupted by the high tech industry (and not for the better) that it feels like the rich and powerful will continue to get richer and more powerful and the rest of us will be ever more subject to their whims until in 30 years or so we become a 5G feudal state. 

*****

I thought that maybe I had made up the phrase “5G feudal state” but I Googled it and found that of course somebody else got to it first. Did I say thirty years? Make it ten.

*****

Sometimes after I watch a movie, I’ll read the book upon which it is based but I have already read Heartburn and as we have already established, the book doesn’t hold up any better than the movie. It’s not Nora’s best. I like her essays better than her fiction. 

Instead, I read Cloud Cuckoo Land. I started this book with absolutely zero knowledge of the plot or the characters or the themes or anything at all. A friend whose taste I share recommended it and so I just opened it and started reading. My friend was not wrong - it’s a great book. The plot bounces around in time and space, moving the reader back and forth between 20th and 21st century America and the (of course) post-apocalyptic future and 15th century Constantinople (soon to become Istanbul). 

I won’t reveal any plot details except that there’s a part that involves an infectious disease and a quarantine. I don’t know if Anthony Doerr started writing Cloud Cuckoo Land before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but I guess that he did because the research and plotting for a book this complex must have taken more than two years. Well, it would have taken me more than two years, anyway. 

*****

The Cloud Cuckoo Land plot line that involves the virulent disease takes place in the post-apocalyptic future and given the last two years of plague, you’d think that this would be the most compelling part of the book. But it’s the 15th century scenes that seem most modern and relevant to me right now, filled as they are with desperately poor vassals and slaves and indentured servants who are utterly powerless and subject entirely to the whims and demands of their wealthy and powerful overlords. I don’t think that it’s likely that a small remnant of humanity will end up on a spaceship on a decades-long journey to a possibly hospitable planet (OK, one spoiler) but I do think that it’s likely (very) that we will return to a late middle ages social and economic and political system. It’s already happening. The 5G feudal state is under construction. 

*****

Again, I wrote most of this about a year ago, when people still thought Elon Musk was a genius. Things change in a year. 

We just had a three-day weekend, so we drove back to Philadelphia where we had just been two weeks ago so that my high school senior could visit Villanova. My sister lives ten minutes away from Villanova and she is also an alumna. My son is interested in several schools but his aunt is pushing him toward Villanova. 

My children are quite different from one another in many ways, including politics. My older son is a Bernie Sanders and AOC fan, and very attracted to radical progressive ideals. My younger son hates Trump but has no other thoughts about or interest in politics. 

Older son is a student at the University of Maryland. He's opposed to private colleges and universities, on principle, but he's still on winter break so he tagged along for the trip. We stopped at the bookstore and I asked him jokingly if he wanted a Villanova sweatshirt. 

He scoffed. "No," he said. "And I also don’t want golf clubs or a sailboat or a Vineyard Vines belt with little whales on it.” 

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “If you’re out here wearing a Villanova hoodie, you can’t stick it to the man because you are the man.” We said the “because you are the man” part in unison. This is one of my favorite jokes, and my children know it well. 

*****

And so I’m still hopeful for the future. Young people aren’t going to knuckle under to high -tech feudalism, not without a fight. Yes, they're all scrolling TikTok all the livelong day, but they’re not stupid. They are immune to the charisma of genius tech bro disruptors. They are wise to the gig work sector’s false promises of “flexibility.” They are neither afraid of nor awed by the Internet. They are less materialistic than their parents and grandparents, less worried about the right house and the right car. They aren’t afraid to fight the power, whatever and wherever and whoever it is. They aren’t afraid to stick it to the man. 

*****

* I used to have one of those tote bags. I bought it in 1985 when I was a student at Temple University, after months of seeing them on the shoulders of the most stylish students on campus. Some things never change. 

The smell of snow

I remember when I first noticed that I could smell when snow was coming. I was probably in sixth or seventh grade and it was a school day in late December, just a day or so before the last day of school before Christmas vacation. My classmates and I were giddy with anticipation. We weren't allowed to run at recess because our schoolyard was nothing but a tiny cement quad surrounded by the school building, the enormous stone church, the parish hall, and the convent with its cemetery for a backyard. It sounds like 19th century Dublin but it was a parish Catholic school in 1970s Philadelphia. We weren't allowed to run because there was no room to run freely without crashing into other kids, and the cement wasn't kind to the bodies that landed on it. Arms got broken. Foreheads split open and bled like geysers. The nuns, who weren't always kind or reasonable, were entirely justified in enforcing the no running rule. But with vacation approaching, they threw up their hands. They knew and we knew and they knew that we knew that there was no stopping kids from running with Christmas on the immediate horizon.  

We didn't run during recess, we 6th and 7th and 8th grade girls. We didn't really even play anymore, although sometimes a girl would bring a Chinese jump rope to school and we'd jump rope, for old time's sake. But mostly, we stood around in little circles and talked. 

You couldn't just say anything. The bossy girls didn't let us talk about schoolwork or our families (except to complain about unfairly strict parents) or books or current events. You could complain about nuns and teachers, you could say mean things about other girls, you could talk about pop music (and only pop music) and movies and TV shows and clothes and hair and who was allowed to have pierced ears (not me) and who wasn’t. And of course, you could talk about boys. You definitely couldn't talk about the weather and so when I blurted out "It smells like snow," I braced myself for the inevitable scoffs. We were working class Irish Catholic Philadelphia school kids in the 1970s. We scoffed at everything, on principle. But no one scoffed. "It does," everyone squealed. "We're gonna get a white Christmas!" I don't remember if it actually snowed or not. I don't remember if we had a white Christmas. But I remember the relief of abandoning the cool soon-to-be-teenage girl facade for that minute or so, and just being little girls again, excited about Christmas. 

*****

That was a very long and roundabout way of telling you that it's Saturday morning, chilly and January gray, and I'm on my way to a high school swim meet. Rockville vs. Magruder. This is one of the last regular season meets of our last high school swim season. It's 8:45 AM and it smells like snow. 

More Mitfords

I started writing this on December 26, 2022, which was a holiday, but only because Christmas was on a Sunday. So we Americans got the Boxing Day holiday, just this one time.

I’m not really an Anglophile (well maybe a little bit), but I do think that the British get some things right, and Christmas is one of those things. Or at least it used to be. Maybe they don’t get any more time off than Americans any more. Down time is not profitable. It’s not efficient. It’s not hard core. The UK is just as capitalist as the US is now. Mrs. Thatcher made her mark. 

But since I was lucky enough to be on vacation at the end of the year, I had time to read, and to write about it, and Mary S. Lovell’s The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family was probably the most British thing I could have been reading on December 26, the most British of days, at least to an American. 

Last year, I read The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (edited by Charlotte Mosley, Diana’s daughter-in-law). The sisters documented their lives very thoroughly in their letters, so I was already familiar with the events detailed in the book, but I wanted to read about the family from a more detached perspective. But Ms. Lovell, though somewhat impartial, is far from detached. She generally avoids taking sides in the well-known disputes between and among the sisters, though she does seem to favor Jessica a bit. But she also repeatedly makes excuses for Diana, who was by all accounts beautiful and brilliant and generous but also an unrepentant Nazi and so clearly indefensible. Unity was an even more committed Nazi than Diana and far more overtly anti-Semitic and although she was obviously mentally unstable even before she shot herself, she knew right from wrong and still chose to follow Hitler and embrace Nazism. Nevertheless, the author defends both Diana and Unity. To be fair, though, she’s certainly not the only Diana and Unity apologist among Mitford fans and scholars. You’d think that the “Nazis are bad, period” school of thought would be the dominant one but this does not seem to be the case. 

But maybe it’s not fair to call Lovell an apologist. I can’t point to any specific example where she outright defends the sisters’ politics. However, as she points out the inconsistency of Decca's willingness to forgive Unity but not Diana, she also seems not to understand why anyone would really condemn either of them. Late in the book, Lovell acknowledges that Decca is right to criticize Diana for complaining about the miserable conditions at Holloway during her imprisonment, while failing to consider the far worse conditions in Hitler's concentration camps. However, during the passages that detail the Mosleys' detention, Lovell makes the very same error, asserting that prison conditions for the political prisoners at Holloway were unduly and gratuitously harsh, while failing to note that entirely innocent prisoners in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen suffered much worse punishment. 

Try as she does to come across as scholarly and reserved, Lovell is really just a Mitford fan girl. She loves the whole Mitford family, including the often-maligned Sydney (“Muv”) and David (“Farve’) also known as Lord and Lady Redesdale. She loves them personally and particularly, and she loves the English class system that produced them. And she expects that her readers share her understanding and admiration of that system. We’re meant to laugh along with the author when she shakes her head at Hitler’s ignorance of English titles (hearing Unity mention her father, “Lord Redesdale” Hitler seemed to mistakenly assume that Unity, with a different surname than her father, must be illegitimate, and he pities her). That Hitler - such a bumpkin! So provincial! So non-U!

*****

It was December 28 and I was on an airplane heading to Florida. This was unusual for us. We always go to Philadelphia for a few days at Christmas (and we did that, too) but we really never take a bona fide winter vacation. I felt like a jetsetter, sitting on that plane. I felt like a Mitford sister. 

My sisters and I had been texting each other the previous day.  My youngest sister sent us a link to the website for a place called Gatorland. She suggested that my middle sister, who was also going to Florida, and I should visit Gatorland. But then she told us not to even think about going to Gatorland without her. There was trash talk. There were funny gifs. The Florida-bound sisters sent cartoons and gifs of silly alligators. "Gatorland here we come!" The youngest sister sent angry faces and a gif of a lady maniacally waving both middle fingers. "Don't you fucking dare!"

I don't know if any of the Mitford sisters would have tossed around the F word as often as my sisters and I do, especially when we're texting. Maybe Decca would have, just to try to shock Diana. On the other hand, Diana spent almost two years in prison so I'm sure she was familiar with that word, and probably unshockable in general. 

*****

I wrote most of this and then I set it aside to work on something else and to think about why I keep reading about the Mitfords. Part of the answer to that question comes from Simon Pegg, an unlikely source. In a video that is making the social media rounds, Simon Pegg rants about Richi Sunak and his government. “Fuck the Tories,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. 

Fuck the Tories indeed. I don't like the Tories either (and I do hope that Mr. Sunak and his henchpeople lose their seats in Parliament assuming they ever allow a general election), and I don’t wish for a return of the early 20th century British class system that produced the Mitford sisters. But if it weren’t for the Tories and the aristocrats, there wouldn’t be a Labor party. There wouldn’t be punk rock or working class solidarity or Simon Pegg waving his middle finger at a video camera. Rebellion isn’t possible unless you have something to rebel against. 

I have lots of other books in my queue right now and it will be a while before I return to the Mitfords. But I will return eventually. Appalling politics aside, the sisters were endlessly interesting. They always make good reading, and good company. 

Clearwater

I never thought of myself as a Florida vacation in winter type of person if that is in fact a type but it might be time to rethink because I'm up to my eyeballs in Florida warmth and sunshine on December 30 and it is all that and a bag of chips. The good chips, too. The crispy kettle chips. 

This is a relatively short vacation - we came in on Wednesday and we’re out on Sunday. But it's enough. A few days of nothing planned and no deadlines and sand and water and palm trees is pulling me right out of a pretty bad episode of depression. Maybe the effects won't last but I will take it for now. 

*****

I've been to Florida several times but this is my first time on the Gulf Coast. Normally I take a little time to study the geography of a new place before I arrive, get the lay of the land. But I didn't have time. I've been zombie-walking my way through my days and when my husband told me that we were coming to Clearwater Beach, I said "OK," requested the vacation time, and packed a bag the night before we left, perfectly willing to go wherever he wanted to take me. I'm looking at the view from my hotel room balcony and I don't know if the causeways spanning what I think is Tampa Bay connect to the mainland or another island. Maybe one of each because I can see two different causeways. But who cares. I'll look at an atlas later. 

*****

Avalon, New Jersey has been my beach town for many years. We usually go there for a week in August, staying in a little rental house or condo; and we spend that week sitting on the beach, swimming in the ocean (and pool when we're lucky enough to have one), walking and bike riding and looking at boats and seabirds, and collecting shells. Well, my younger son and I collect shells. We have bowls and jars of shells collected over many years. I like looking at them. From a distance they're all white and beige but up close you can see delicate stripes of faint pink and blue and yellow and gray. It's always amazing to me that something so beautiful just washes up on the shore, free for the taking. I never tire of walking slowly along the water's edge and spotting a perfect tiny shell to scoop up into my collection. 

No offense to my beloved Jersey shore, but shell collecting in Gulf Coast Florida is next level, as they say on the Internet. You don’t have to hunt for them. You can stand still just as a little wave breaks on the beach, then bend over and scoop up a hundred perfect little clam and scallop shells in colors both pale and bright, varying shades and hues of pink and blue and coral and gold. I picked up in one short walk what it normally would take a week to collect in New Jersey. 

I collected these shells in 15 minutes. Really!

*****

I expected Clearwater, on the Gulf Coast as it is, to be a lot more Trumpy. Of course, we saw our share of Trumped-up Trumpity Trumpsters, including plenty of people sporting Let's Go Brandon gear. Perhaps they don’t realize that even Joe Biden makes fun of that one now. But other than those few silly people, I didn’t get an overt Trumpy vibe from anyone else in Florida. The people on the streets and in the hotel and on the beaches seemed very cool and nice, regardless of what their politics might or might not be. And there were quite a few international visitors from various races and nations of origin. All of them seemed comfortable. All of them seemed to feel welcome in Florida. 

*****

It's New Year's Day now. We're in an Uber on our way to Tampa International Airport, where we will catch an 11:30 AM flight back to DCA. 

Our driver, in his cargo shorts and turquoise bar t-shirt, with long and unruly gray hair flowing from underneath his ball cap, looks like central casting’s idea of Florida Man. But he is actually from the Czech Republic. He and my husband are chatting about NHL hockey while the rest of us sit quietly in the back seat, gradually preparing for the transition back to reality. 

Mr. Czech Republic is our 4th Uber driver this week and they have all been lovely. A nice Black lady picked us up at the airport on Wednesday, and she gave us an overview of the area with cheerful and funny commentary about the good and bad of life on the Gulf Coast of Florida. A native of Michigan, she moved south to escape the cold. Our second driver, who carried us from Clearwater Beach to Amelie Arena for the Tampa Bay Lightning game, was an Air Force veteran who now works for the Navy in Newport News. He drives for Uber during his winter vacations at his little house in Clearwater. On our way home we rode with a full-time Uber and Lyft driver, who is also from somewhere in Eastern Europe if the accent was any indication. His SUV was brand-new and he proudly pointed out the panoramic sunroof, multi-zone climate control and Bose sound system. He is putting two children through college on what he earns as a full-time rideshare driver. He offered snacks and hand sanitizer and bottled water with an air of magnanimous hospitality. A delightful person and a very pleasant ride. 

I have issues with tech-driven service platforms that exploit workers with the promise of spurious "flexibility" and "independence." But all four of these drivers seemed happy and prosperous, likely in spite of and not because of their gig work lifestyle. In any case, we are good tippers. And we were happy to meet all of them. 

*****

In our one evening in Tampa, we learned that Florida is home to some serious hockey fans. The Lightning’s fan slogan is “Be the Thunder,” and these people absolutely were the thunder for their beloved Lightning. Amelie Arena is loud, I tell you what. We were happy to root along with them, since the Lightning were playing the New York Rangers. I still think it’s crazy that Florida has hockey teams (two of them!) but there’s no way that I’m going to root for the stupid Rangers. 

*****

We made the vacation last until the last minute. We flew to Florida direct from Washington National to Tampa International but there were no affordable direct flights home so we had to connect through Charlotte. Our flight from Tampa to Charlotte was quick and easy - in fact, both flights were shorter than our 2.5 hour layover in Charlotte. But it was a nice day in the airport. Charlotte has a decent airport, and we ate lunch in one of its restaurants. After a stroll through the terminal, we sat at our gate, reading and relaxing, watching planes land and take off in the clear post-fog sunshine. 

A young couple near us was wrangling twin baby boys, chubby and lively, about 8 months old. Baby number one was smiling and cooing, while baby number two had had it with the airport and was making his displeasure known. Their mother pulled a coffee shop muffin from a white paper bag, and both babies suddenly sat at attention in their twin stroller. Baby number one insisted on feeding himself, grabbing the little muffin pieces as his mother offered them and stuffing them flat-handed into his mouth, squealing with delight the entire time. Baby number two, placated by the snack, was no longer complaining. He was perfectly content to allow his mother to feed the muffin bits directly to him. He opened wide like a little bird as each morsel approached. I could have watched those silly babies all day long, but the boarding call put an end to the show. 

*****

It’s January 4 now and the party is well and truly over. I teleworked on my first day back to work and went into the office today. It was nice to be back. Work is not a problem at all. I like work in general, and I like my job in particular very much. 

But the funk was back. I could tell as soon as I woke up this morning. See, last week, I thought I had turned a corner. I felt as though someone had pushed a reset button somewhere on my person. But it was just the warmth and sunshine. It was all illusory. 

The day got better, though. I left work at 4:30 and even though I took a slight detour to drop a friend off at the Medical Center Metro, and even though Connecticut Avenue was its usual jerkface self, I still made it home just before darkness fell. For the last few minutes of the drive, the sky, still blue, was streaked with pink and gold. The whole palette was very Florida, very Gulf Coast retirement community. I pulled onto my street just as the very last daylight faded. 

And tomorrow I’ll have another minute or so of daylight. And the days will just keep getting a little longer each day. The sun will return. It won’t be cold and dark forever.