Thanksgiving 2023

Today is the day before Thanksgiving. We used to host a blow-out all-are-invited open house party on the night before Thanksgiving. People would start arriving at 7 and the last stragglers would depart at 1 AM. And then I’d get up in the morning and spend the entire day cooking a giant Thanksgiving dinner. Madness, I tell you. I don’t know how I did it, really. I had a lot of energy then. 

“Then,” of course, means 2019 and earlier. We couldn’t hold the party in 2020, of course, and for one reason or another, we just stopped altogether. It’s OK. That party had a good, solid 12-year run. People still talk about it. Oh, the before times. But since we don’t have guests tonight, we’ll go to the Capitals game instead. Always a silver lining, 

*****

I didn’t work today. Well, I took a vacation day and didn’t work at my paid job. But I worked like a fiend all day. Today is Thanksgiving prep day, and Thanksgiving prep day means potatoes, and potatoes are a lot of work. How much work? Maybe I’ll tell you. 

*****

It’s 4:03 PM on Thanksgiving Day. Or day. You can style that however you like. The rest of the food is done and has been done for some time. Only the turkey has stubbornly refused to reach the recommended temperature of 165. It’s at 162 now, and it’s on the stove, resting. That turkey can fuck right off. I’m the one who should be resting. We’re going to wait five minutes, or maybe ten; and then we’re going to cut that turkey, and we’ll just see what happens. It’ll be delicious or it’ll be undercooked and we’ll all end up sick. There’s only one way to find out. 

*****

I made a lot of mashed potatoes - enough to fill two large baking dishes. That is what I do - I make the potatoes a day in advance, spread them out in glass baking dishes, and then warm them up in the oven on Thanksgiving day. It takes almost ten pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes to make enough mash to fill two large baking dishes. Why two large dishes? Because these potatoes are really good and everyone wants leftovers, and I like to give the people what they want. 

I worked like a swimmer, in sets - take five potatoes, peel them, cut them, and then take a  two minute break to clean up or stretch or move the laundry from the washer to the dryer; and then back to the potatoes. Work methodically, psyching yourself by chunking tasks and setting very short-term goals, and you’ll be done in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, as Sue Ann Nivens used to say. I hate peeling potatoes like nobody’s business but it’s very satisfying to complete a hated chore a little bit at a time, and to watch your progress, counting down in five-potato units until you have a nice pile of potato peels and two pots of chopped potatoes boiling merrily on the stove. 

Of course, that’s not all there is to it. There’s the mashing and the beating, adding butter and cream and salt (this is not vegan spa cuisine), continuing to beat until you have a nice fluffy puree that still has some potato texture. When you finally have the perfect potatoes, you dish out two huge bowls for your college student sons to have as a “snack,” and then you spread the rest out into the baking dishes, warning all present that the preview was a one-off, and that the rest of the potatoes are off limits until dinner on Thursday. 

And then you clean up. And let me tell you that there’s no mess like a mashed potato mess. The coffee maker and the toaster and the sugar and tea canisters have absolutely no involvement in the making of mashed potatoes, but they all have to be thoroughly scrubbed afterward, along with the countertops, the stovetop, and the floor. Is it worth it? Yes, it 100 percent absolutely is. That’s how good these potatoes are.

Still, I won’t be making them again for another year, not in those quantities. I don’t know why, but if you double or triple a recipe, you will increase the mess by 10-fold or 100-fold. It’ll take a while to recover from that. The kitchen’s been through some shit. 

*****

Did I tell you that the turkey was perfect? Well, it was perfect. It turns out that 162 is a good out-of-the-oven temperature, and that the turkey will continue to cook from the inside out for a few minutes after you take it out of the oven. I let it rest for 15 minutes, and then my husband started carving, and it was just right - not dry, but not undercooked, and very flavorful thanks to salt and pepper and onion and apple and celery stuffed in the cavity, and butter slathered all over the outside and underneath the breast skin. I have had very good luck with turkey roasting, but every year, I worry that the previous year was just a fluke and that I won’t be able to duplicate my turkey success. So now I have a written record. Even if no one reads this, I’ll at least have some notes to refer back to next year. 

*****

The holidays are now well underway. We put up our Christmas decorations on Friday morning, as has become our custom since 2020. I used to put up our indoor decorations two weeks before Christmas, but 2020 changed that, too. And it’s nice having the Christmas things around a little earlier. No tree yet, because we get a real tree and it would dry out by Christmas if we got it now, but the house is festooned with all of the other Christmas swag and trinkets. 

Last Tuesday night, I went shopping for some last-minute Thanksgiving groceries, and the Safeway was alive with the happy energy of all of the other parents welcoming college students home for the holiday, looking forward to four or five blessed days of having everyone under the same roof again. Those five days passed with lightning speed of course. Thanksgiving leftovers in the family room, Christmas movies on TV, kids coming and going, a house full of kids watching college football together, perfect silvery pale skies and early blazing gold sunsets, and now it’s over. We’ll all be back in the grocery stores later today, laying in supplies for the week, but the energy will be very different. Yes, they’ll be back for Christmas but every holiday is just a reminder that they’re only visitors now. But I’ll take what I can get, and I’ll be thankful for every minute. I am thankful for every minute. 

High effing finance

Do you know why I can’t be a rich person? No, it’s not because I keep buying stupid handbags (although that doesn’t help). It really has very little to do with income or spending - I could make a lot more money and/or spend a lot less money, and I still couldn’t be a rich person. And this is why.  

I have two checking accounts in two different banks - a smallish community bank and a credit union. The credit union account is really both a savings and checking account. It earns a little bit of interest, and it’s where I save money for short- and medium-term goals; things like travel and holidays. My emergency fund money is also in that account.

I keep a very simple tally - on paper, mind you - of money in and out of the credit union account, categorized by type of expense or fund (travel, holiday, emergency) for which deposits are intended. Every so often, I reconcile my total with the actual account balance to make sure that I have the money that I think I have. 

This is all fine. Where it gets complicated is electronic transfers between the accounts. 

I have a Visa card, which is my only credit card, from the credit union. I normally pay the bill for that Visa card, on the rare occasions when I actually use it, from my primary checking account, which is how I pay all my bills. However, I used the card for some holiday shopping and rather than pay the bill from the primary checking account and then transfer funds from the credit union, as I normally do and definitely will do again for reasons that will be clear in just a moment, I decided to pay it directly from the credit union share draft account that holds my holiday short-term savings. The money intended for holiday shopping goes directly toward the credit card that I used to make the purchases. Eliminate the middleman. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Except that I made this payment on November 8 and on November 17, it still does not appear in my payment history, although it is showing clearly as a debit to the share draft. 

I don’t usually use the banking app for the credit union, because I don’t pay bills from that account, and so I had been hesitant to pay a bill using this untried app. Rather than pay the entire balance as I normally would (it was about $470 or so), I made a $100 payment. Even as I sent that payment, I thought that the test payment amount should have been $10, not $100, because who am I, Oprah? Anyway, just to be sure, I checked for this payment every day for several days, and when it didn’t appear in my credit card transaction list, I realized to my dismay (dismay defined as 20 percent “what happened to my money?” and 80 percent “Oh my God, I have to CALL SOMEONE?”) that I had no choice except to call the credit union to figure out where it had gone. The money came out of one place but didn’t go into the other, so where was it? That was my question for the member services representative who answered my call today. 

Long story short (yeah I know, too late) the representative also saw the payment on the outgoing side but not the incoming side. He and I agreed that this was very weird, very weird indeed. He suggested that the whole mess was kind of my fault because I made the payment using the bill pay application and not the credit card application (although there is absolutely nothing on the bill pay application site that tells customers not to use that application to pay credit union Visa bills). Then he said that I could wait a few days to see what happens, or stop the payment for a mere $30, or 30 percent of the amount in question.

Lol! After firmly but politely disabusing him of the silly idea that I should pay for the credit union’s mistake (remember -  it was a payment from the credit union to the credit union) I decided to wait until Monday, and see what happens. No big deal, right? Easy come easy go. A hundred here, a hundred there - whatever. What's a single Benjamin in the fast paced world of high finance?

******

Sometimes, I tell myself that I long for the days of Friday-is-payday, so you go to the bank and deposit your check, you take out some cash so you have some walking around money, and then you write checks for all of your other bills. It was a simpler time. And it actually sucked. Imagine having to stand in line at a Center City Philadelphia bank at lunchtime on a Friday, you and every other schmoe who just got paid, because direct deposit didn’t exist. Credit cards existed, of course, but they were not as easy to obtain as they are today. We even had ATMs, but they weren’t on every corner and in every grocery store like they are now. And the check-writing. My God, the check-writing. I hate writing checks SO MUCH. Just thinking about having to open all of those envelopes, dig through the inserts to find the bill, write the checks, address and stamp the envelopes, and then get them to the mailbox or the post office - it just doesn’t bear thinking about. So no, I do not long for those days, not one bit.

****

The payment finally posted, ending a few days of minor stress and worry. I think I’ll go back to my old way of doing things, when I’d just spend the holiday or travel funds as appropriate, and then reimburse my checking account by writing an actual check from the credit union share draft account. 

And that is why I cannot be rich. I can earn money, save money, and save money, but I don't want to track the flow of cash through the electronic ether of the American banking system. I don't want to balance my books. I can't manage this level of administrative complexity. I need to keep it simple. 

Late in the year

It's Sunday morning, and I'm on my way home from visiting my mom in Philadelphia. It's golden November now, the short interlude of perfect light and color as autumn winds down and winter comes swanning in, throwing its weight around and trying to assert its dominance. The deciduous trees are at peak color right now and the sky is milky pale blue, decorated with delicate pink- and gold-edged clouds. The air is light and fresh, soft and slightly misty, not dry and crisp. It’s lovely, so much so that I’m going to stop writing so that I can just look out the window at the fleeting November beauty. It’ll be gone in a week or two. 

*****

We made the drive home in near-record time. My mother is OK, except that she’s not, and there is not much we can do about it because she persists in certain terrible health habits, and refuses to take care of herself and refuses to listen to anyone and refuses to even acknowledge that anything is wrong with her. Living in her own reality is a top ten skill for my mother, and it always has been, so at least some things never change. 

Does that sound harsh? Yes, it does and it probably is but there we are. I’m just here to keep it real, and to tell you that it’s possible to love someone and be furious at them at the same time. It’s possible to both blame someone who chooses to do the wrong thing all the time, and to feel sorry that they have to live with the consequences of their choices. Sometimes people cannot help their poor health but sometimes they can and it’s hard to watch someone stubbornly cling to their worst habits and not be angry at them. 

*****

Yes I know. I’m one to talk. I don’t really have any bad health habits to speak of, but I do avoid doctors like rich people avoid the IRS. I’ll do better, and I’ll stop being so judgmental. 

Well, I’ll do better and I’ll TRY to stop being so judgmental. No promises. I can only do what I can do. 

My mom is doing better now or so she says. She insisted on going home to her own house, which is really not the best place for her right now. But I understand. I'm very attached to my own house. I like being in my own environment surrounded by my own things. I like living by the house rules when they happen to be my rules. When I’m old, I don’t think I’ll want to live with grown people other than my husband, even if I grew them myself. There is really no freedom like the freedom of home.

*****

It’s Wednesday now and I’m so immersed in my routine that I’m not thinking about my mom every minute of the day. For a few minutes at a time today, I forgot about her and her health and what I think she should do; and instead, I just did my work and lived my life. But it’s always there, always in the back of my mind. Today, a coworker’s mother suffered a stroke, and it was a reminder that my own personal mama is not in the best shape and that any moment could bring bad news. 

But there’s no bad news right now. She was fine yesterday, and I’ll check on her again today, and I’ll keep doing my work and living my life until she needs me again. I’ll shop for Thanksgiving groceries and read books and walk outside in the still-perfect November light and watch college swimming and compulsively clean my house until other priorities intervene. We’re all living on borrowed time, anyway. 

Leaves

I live in the suburbs, in an old-fashioned Levitt neighborhood filled with colonial, ranch, and Cape Cod-style houses built in the late 1960s. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s and 90s in America, then you’d probably picture something like my neighborhood when you hear the word “suburbia.” 

In the suburbs, you cut your grass and you shovel your snow and you rake your leaves. Well, someone does all of that, and it’s usually not me. My husband and sons have always been in charge of the outside of the house, and I have always been in charge of the inside of the house. It’s not necessarily a good bargain for me, but it at least keeps me out of the cold and rain. 

But it wasn’t cold today. It was a balmy, mild early November day. Our yard, front and back, is buried in leaves, and no one has been home to deal with them, except me. So I finished work at 4 today, fired up the leaf blower and went to work. 

Yes, yes, leaf blowers. I know. Everyone hates them. Well, not everyone, because a lot of people including me have leaf blowers and so it’s not possible that all these people have leaf blowers, and that everyone also hates leaf blowers. That doesn’t add up. That math doesn’t work. 

It’s more accurate to say that certain influential, thought-leader-type people hate leaf blowers. For example, there is a very prominent historian and writer who sometimes dedicates an entire issue of his Substack newsletter (one day, I’m going to write about Substack) to his hatred of leaf blowers. He especially hates gas-powered leaf blowers and I suppose I don’t blame him. But most of this man’s leaf blower opposition centers around noise. My leaf blower is battery powered so it’s not discharging fumes into the air. But it is loud. And I don’t care. I have too many leaves to gather them all with a rake. I don’t use the leaf blower early in the morning, nor later than 7 PM or so, so I’m not waking people up first thing in the AM nor keeping them awake at night. I don’t use it very often at all, full stop.  And who said that Mr. Man was entitled to perfect quiet and peace at every moment of the day, anyway? Rich people really are something else. I wonder what he does with his leaves. I am guessing that other people take care of his landscaping and his other menial chores, leaving him free to complain about the noise as the poors clean up their ramshackle little properties. 

Really, every time I hear a rich person complaining about leaf blowers, I want to go and buy a jackhammer. 

God, I’m petty. LOL. 

*****

My front yard is pretty big, because we don’t have sidewalks in our neighborhood. I think that sidewalkless streets with lawns that slope right down to the road were a suburban ideal in the late 1960s. We have three shade trees out front, and those three trees drop a great deal of leaves. Somewhere between a boat load and a shit ton, if we’re being exact. With a rake, it would take all day to wrangle those leaves into a pile. With the leaf blower, it took me one hour. I moved in methodical rows, the leaves swirling and eddying as I blew them down toward the ever growing leaf pile. I watched with satisfaction as neat green paths of grass opened through the leaves until the entire front yard was pretty much clear. 

*****

That was Tuesday, and now it’s Friday, a Federal government holiday and an unearned gift of a day off, which is my favorite kind. Blowing those leaves was much more fun than I expected; so much so that I would like to do more today, but it’s raining and I’m not going to do yard work on a 55-degree rainy November day. It was also much more physically demanding than I’d have guessed. The leaf blower is heavy, but it’s well balanced, so you don’t necessarily notice how heavy it is until you blast leaves for an hour. I had to stop because it gets dark so stupidly early now but I’d have had to stop anyway because I was physically exhausted, and my hands hurt so much that I had a hard time holding on to a glass of water. But I was fine the next day, and my front yard looked very nice. 

*****

It’s Saturday now. I might have planned to do the rest of the yard today, a beautiful sunny, not-too-cold November day, but I have to drive to Philadelphia in a few minutes to see my mom, who is not in good health. That’s probably all I have to say about that right now. Except that she probably can’t live in her house anymore. She can’t take care of herself there, and she certainly can’t take care of that house. There aren’t many leaves to rake - there are no more than five trees on the entire street - but the house has three stories and a dungeon-like basement, and no first-floor bathroom. She hasn’t really been able to live there reasonably for some time but she is stubborn and would never listen to the slightest suggestion that she downsize and find an accessible and safe place to live. But she fell last night and ended up in the emergency room, and likely cannot return to the house at all. And so I think that someone else is probably going to have to finish our fall yardwork here in the Maryland suburbs. I have some work to do in the city. 

Red Line

We are going to our second Capitals game of the season later today. Just two of us, so we’re taking the Metro, which I vastly prefer over driving to the game. My husband is a much more aggressive driver than I am (to be fair, almost everyone is) and the ride down Georgia Avenue through jaywalking pedestrians and crazy kids riding in and out of traffic on their bikes and scooters and skateboards and people randomly flinging open the driver’s side car door without a care in the world is hair-raising on a good day. It’s raining today and it’s Marine Corps Marathon day, so it really will not be a good day on Georgia Avenue or any other main state-named avenue in the District of Columbia, so I’m happy that my husband agreed to take Metro, a quick and easy 20 minute ride on the Red Line from Glenmont to Gallery Place. 

But does that mean that I am not anxious about the trip? LOL, that is hilarious. It’s like you don’t know me at all.  Well, you don’t, but you know what I mean. There’s always something to worry about. There’s always a new source of anxiety. 

You might be thinking that urban crime is my biggest Metro-riding fear, but you would be wrong, and it’s not even close. I’m not cavalier about crime; I know that it’s a real problem But I grew up in Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s and early 90s and have been a crime victim myself - several times, in fact - and so crime is not a fear that keeps me awake at night, because I have been there and done that. The things that keep me awake at night are either a) stupid and trivial or b) vanishingly unlikely to happen or c) genuinely horrible but unknown to me. The unknown is the scariest, especially for people like me who can imagine the worst and then make it even worse through sheer panic. It’s a skill. 

But we’re talking about Metro, and the things that scare me about Metro fall into categories a (What if I drop my phone on the train? What if I leave my jacket on the seat? What if I fall asleep and end up at the wrong stop?) and c (What if the train derails? What if there’s a fire in the station? What if the tunnel floods and we all drown?)

*****

Well it's Tuesday now and we traveled to and from the game without the slightest of hitches. Trains arrived quickly, the ride was smooth and uneventful in both directions, and I came home with everything that I had with me when I left the house, and that’s an accomplishment because I had to carry my wallet and my phone in either my hands or my stupidly shallow pockets thanks to the even stupider handbag embargo at Capital One Arena - but I digress. I didn't get left behind and I didn't leave anyone else behind. And it wouldn't be a big deal if someone had been left behind because we're all grown ups now and no one is going to get lost on the Metro. 

That leaves me with a brand new cause for alarm. It's 745 AM, or 0745 as we say at NSAB and I'm preparing for a very large and important meeting. I expect at least 100 people in person in the lecture hall, and another 150 or so online. There are a lot of moving parts, lots of things that could go wrong. But everything is set up, the technology cooperated, and my speakers are here and ready to go. It'll be fine. 

Well, it totally wasn’t fine, but it was still fine, if you know what I mean. The audio wandered in and out at will, the recording randomly stopped in the middle, and we had to admit online attendees one by one even though we set the meeting up to allow self-admittance with no waiting room. I do love it when Google decides to do its own thing. I find it whimsical. Charmingly quirky, even.  You’re delightful, Google Meet. 

*****

That takes us to Wednesday, also known as today. Today’s worry spiral is actually legitimate. My younger son has COVID - for the very first time - and he’s home recovering. As delightful as it is to have him home, I’d sooner he stay healthy. And I have another meeting tomorrow, which I really should attend in person, but I’d rather not carry the gosh-darn coronavirus into a closed meeting room filled with 40+ military physicians. I don’t want to be a disease vector. I’m going to just stay at home but I’m worried that people will think that I’m attending remotely because I’m just too lazy to attend an 0730 meeting. 

*****

Ridiculous! I hate 0730 meetings more than I hate pumpkin spice latte, but I show up for those meetings in person, all the time, and no one is going to think that I’m lazy if I work from home for an extra day. My reputation around there is sterling. No one blamed me for the Google Meet fiasco, either; first of all because it wasn’t my fault, and second of all because I work really really hard to do things right and people are inclined to let me slide a little bit when things go awry. That is the upside of being an extremely anxious, overly conscientious people-pleaser. There is always an upside. There’s always a silver lining. 

*****

It’s Thursday now, and my son tested negative this morning. He’s technically not allowed to return to school until Sunday, but his coach is trying to persuade the AD and campus health services to allow him to return tomorrow, pending results of a PCR test, so that he can swim in Saturday’s meet. He won two of his three individual events last week, and swam the eighth-fastest 100 breaststroke time in program history. He’s a point-scorer. He is a mainstay of the team, just one week into his freshman season. 

*****

Friday afternoon. It’s been an extraordinarily long week. My in-office and at-home days were all out of order, and we started the week with August-like weather, and finished with an overnight freeze last night. I was in shorts last Sunday, and this morning, I had to scrape the ice off my windshield. Halloween came and went. “Spooky season” and its accompanying sweaters and jeans and PSL are gone, replaced in a flash with early winter sunsets and Christmas decorations in the grocery store and Christmas carols on the radio as we enter the relentless, no-turning-back run-up to the holiday season. Once again, I’m amazed by people who look forward to the imminent “fall back” time change and its hour of extra sleep in exchange for six months of darkness. It’s not a good trade, people. It’s not a good deal at all. We’re getting ripped off. We should complain.  

*****

And now it’s Sunday. I’ve had the benefit of that much-lauded extra hour of sleep, and it’s all downhill from here. My son did get to swim yesterday and although he didn’t win every time he got in the water, he did come away with two 2nd place finishes and a first place - not bad after a week of COVID and no practice. And I conquered one of my biggest new demons, which is driving on the under-construction and heavily barricaded George Washington Parkway. It was a clear, bright afternoon, with moderate traffic, and I told myself that it would be ridiculous to take the long way just to avoid that four-mile stretch of GW Parkway, so I pulled myself together and drove. And it was fine. I was terrified, but it was fine. It’s hard to drive when you’re holding your breath, but it was fine. My hands are still a little sore from maintaining a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel for the entire drive, but it was fine. My son is fine now, my family and I are all fine, and I’ll battle each new stupid trivial fear and manage each new idiotic panic attack as and when they occur, which will be every minute of every fucking day. The Capitals won last Sunday, and the Marymount swim team won yesterday, and I also went three for three this week. #Winning

When the Saints go marching in

It’s Saturday morning. One day I’m going to use some kind of crazy AI technology to crawl through everything I’ve ever written and tell me how many times I’ve started a paragraph with the words “It’s Saturday morning.” It’s a lot. 

Yes, it’s swim season again - college swim season. In about three hours or so, my son will swim in his very first college meet. Marymount is swimming a tri-meet against Cabrini and St. Mary’s of Maryland. The Saints are about to go marching in, and we’ll be sitting in the stands. 

It’s early now. I’m watching the Commissioner of the Maine Department of Public Safety briefing the press about the Lewiston gunman’s apparent suicide. The ASL interpreter is extremely animated. She is, as they say on the internet, a whole vibe. 

I’m not so solipsistic that I don’t realize that a college swim meet is the least important thing in the on-fire world right now, and that the word “privilege” was coined for people like me who are not burying our dead today, and who are neither fleeing from a war zone nor trapped in one. Other than giving money where it’s needed and praying for everyone everywhere, and doing my own job and taking care of my own people, I can’t do a thing about the state of the world. I hope that everyone who is suffering now will be free and happy soon. Go Saints. 

Rumble at the jumble

Every year, St. Patrick’s Catholic church in Rockville, Maryland holds a huge rummage sale that benefits a community in Montrouis, Haiti. Since 2012, the church has built a school, a clinic, and about 20 houses in Montrouis. A delegation of parishioners used to travel there every summer but now even the most intrepid missionaries are reluctant to enter Haiti, so the money is distributed directly to their Haitian friends in the town. 

I hadn’t been to the rummage sale in several years, but my friend invited me to go, and rummaging seemed like a good way to spend part of a rainy Saturday morning, so off we went, with reusable shopping bags and cash in hand. 

*****

A few months ago, I read a three-novel Barbara Pym anthology. The three novels all blend together in my memory now, but like all Barbara Pym novels, they featured genteel 20th century English women whose lives center around home and church and social life. In one scene, the protagonist helps to organize the church jumble sale (I think almost all Barbara Pym novels feature at least one mention of a jumble sale) and then she watches as several women squabble over a coat or a dress or something. We call them different things on each side of the pond, but it doesn’t matter if it’s a jumble sale or a rummage sale or even a flea market - the shoppers are highly competitive. There’s usually only one of any item, and the first person to see it, gets it. 

I hadn’t planned to buy anything at all on Saturday, but after a few minutes in the crowds of rummagers, I found a very nice oversized Christmas coffee mug, a tiny souvenir dish with the coats of arms of the four provinces of Ireland, and a Charles and Diana commemorative plate. I looked at the plate closely, wondering if it was an authentic souvenir of the July 1981 royal wedding, and then decided that for $2, authenticity didn’t matter, so I picked it up to buy it. Then I saw an older (than me) woman nudge her friend and incline her head in my direction. The women didn’t speak to me, but they followed me around the parish hall as I continued to browse. When I stopped to look at something, they stopped right behind me. Obviously, one of those ladies wanted that plate, and they were waiting for me to put it down. But I wasn’t putting it down. And the more they followed me, the more determined I became not to release that plate from my Kung Fu grip. 

I was holding my three planned purchases in my left hand and my phone in my right, when I thought of an idea for a presentation that I’m working on. Rather than forget the idea, I decided to email it to myself; but just as I was about to put my items down so that I could write this email to myself, I noticed that my stalkers were lurking, tracking me ever so closely. Hmm, I thought. That’s how you want to play this, is it? We’re predator and prey now, are we? I held onto my finds with my left hand, and drafted the email, badly spelled and poorly punctuated but who cares because it’s an email to myself, with my right hand, and my adversaries’ plans to swoop in while my guard was down was thwarted. Nine dollars later, my purchases and I were safely out the door. 

It’s Thursday now, and between the passage of time and the undeniable fact that I don’t really need a Charles and Diana commemorative plate, the thrill of victory has subsided somewhat. I don’t even know what to do with that silly plate, really. Honestly, I feel a little foolish about the whole incident. The thing is that they could have just asked, and I’d have handed Charles and Di right over. It’s not like I had been hunting far and wide for a 1981 royal wedding souvenir. It was an I-can-take-it-or-leave-it scenario, and if one of the ladies had just approached me politely and said something like “Hey, if you change your mind about that plate, please let me know because I’ll be happy to buy it,” I would have given it up without a moment’s hesitation. But that’s not how it played out, is it? I wish I was nicer, but sometimes I’m just not. Bitches want to make a rummage sale into a contest, then I’m going to win, I tell you what. 

Material Girl

When it comes to jewelry, I am simple and low-key. In fact when it comes to all matters of fashion and style  - hair, makeup, clothing, jewelry - I am what the young people call “basic.” I’m a basic bitch. Or maybe it’s Basic Bitch. I’ll see if the AP Style Guide has a ruling on capitalization of that term. 

I own probably 8 pairs of earrings. Four of them could be described as what we used to call “good jewelry” - a pair of plain white gold hoops, a pair of thick yellow gold hoops, small diamond studs, and a pair of brushed platinum “huggy” style hoops (the kind that open on a hinge) embedded with small diamonds. I have had all of these earrings for some time - decades in the case of the diamond studs and the brushed platinum hoops. 

This last pair is the one that I wear 80 percent of the time. I sleep in them, I swim in them (maybe not a good idea) - I hardly ever take them off. One time, I wore the gold hoops, which are rather delicate, and took them off when I got home, meaning to change back into the platinum ones the next morning. Only I forgot, and I left the house that morning without any earrings at all. It was terrible. It was as if I’d gone to work in pajamas, with unbrushed teeth and uncombed hair.  I didn’t feel underdressed so much as just undressed. I felt indecent. OK, that’s a (slight) exaggeration. Let’s just say that I was very ill at ease. 

*****

In the delightful movie “Blinded by the Light,” the lead character’s mother, a Pakistani immigrant in 1980s England, is forced to pawn her few pieces of jewelry after her husband is laid off from his job at the Vauxhall Motors company. The family does its best to scrape by in Margaret Thatcher’s England - the mother takes in sewing, and the teenage children hand their pay packets to their father every week. But the bills keep piling up, and the family is forced to sell some valuables, including the mother’s gold bangle bracelets and rings. She watches as the jeweler sizes up the pieces, determines their value, and then hands the cash over - to her husband of course. She stares forlornly at her unadorned hands and wrists, ashamed of her family’s loss of position and bereft at the loss of the only beautiful things she owned. 

*****

The other “good jewelry” in my small collection includes my platinum wedding band and matching engagement ring, a white gold and diamond ring that my mother-in-law gave me, a small ruby and diamond ring that was my grandmother’s, and a string of pearls. About a month ago, I was on the phone with my sister-in-law, walking around the house as I do when I talk on the phone, and twisting the white gold and diamond ring around my finger, also a phone-talking habit. The prongs felt sharp, and I looked at the ring to see if the setting was loose. Not only were the prongs loose, the diamond was gone. I panicked for a bit, but realizing that the prongs hadn’t been loose for long (because I twist it around my finger all the time, and would have noticed) I started looking around the house for the diamond, and I found it within minutes. It was on the floor. An hour later and it would have been vacuumed up. I put the ring and diamond away, resolving to get them to the jeweler’s as soon as possible. 

About two weeks later, I went to Cleveland for a wedding. I was wearing my platinum hoops because they’re my travel earrings; and my wedding ring and engagement ring, because I never take them off; and my pearls because I always wear them for dressy occasions. Believe it or not, I noticed, when I was getting dressed, that one of the prongs on my engagement ring felt sharp. When I looked more closely, I saw that the prong had pulled away from the diamond almost completely, leaving it perilously loose. I took the ring off and stowed it away for safekeeping. Then I caught the pearls sliding off the string, which snapped as I tried to put the pearl necklace on. So now three of my favorite pieces of jewelry - not even pieces of jewelry, just things that make me feel like myself - were unwearable. I went to the wedding feeling ill at ease and underdressed - and like the mother in “Blinded by the Light,” a little bit bereft. 

*****

In some ways, I might appear not to be especially concerned with possessions. I drive a 6-year-old RAV 4 that I often have to hunt for in the grocery store parking lot, because it looks exactly like every other suburban lady’s RAV 4. This happened just yesterday, in fact. Mine was one of at least four dark blue, almost black late model RAV 4s in the Safeway parking lot, and I had to look carefully to find the right one. My house is neat and clean and cheerful but would not pass HGTV scrutiny. It’s not on trend. My kitchen and bathrooms need “updating.” My furniture is a mish-mash of good, not-so-good, and indifferent; and my walls are covered with everything from family photos to actual art to my children’s school creations, preserved in inexpensive frames. I wear shoes until they wear out. I buy some nice clothes but I also have my share of second-hand items, not to mention some streetwear from the House of Costco. 

But that’s not the whole story, now is it? I also buy at least five new handbags every year. That is not an exaggeration, sadly. I own at least 25 jackets and as much as I tell myself that I won’t buy ANY MORE JACKETS, we all know that this is not true. We all know that it’s only a matter of time before Number 26 shows up to keep the rest of the jackets company. And while I’m quite content with the jewelry that I own and don’t intend to acquire any new jewelry, I also cannot feel comfortable and normal and properly dressed and fit to interact with humanity unless I’m wearing at least my core pieces, no matter where I’m going or what I’m doing. I got my engagement ring and pearl necklace fixed last week (still need to get the other ring fixed - one thing at a time) and I can’t tell you what a relief it was to slide that ring back onto my left ring finger and to know that it’s there, catching the light and anchoring my wedding band in place. I suppose this makes me vain and materialistic. I do like the way that ring sparkles. 

Averted

It’s Thursday, September 28, and we’re 50-some hours away from a Federal government shutdown that seems very likely to occur. I dodged a bullet with the last one, but I won’t be so lucky this time. I’ll be at least partially furloughed and as a contractor, I won’t be made whole as Federal government employees are. Yes, I know that I’m still relatively fortunate and I also know that there are people who will suffer more than I will, but right now it’s all about me. Well, it’s all about me and about 10 Members of Congress representing less than one percent of the population of the United States, who are gleefully steering us directly toward the edge of a cliff. Way to own the libs, assholes. 

*****

It's Friday now. It's payday; possibly my last one for a while. I am still awaiting word on my furlough status. No rush or anything. Take yer time. 

Everyone has known about the funding lapse deadline for some time, but things only started to get real this week. Wednesday and Thursday felt very much like the week of March 9, 2020. Everyone knew that everything was about to change but most of us didn't know exactly how. We found out and we're about to find out again. That's how this works: Lunatics in the House of Representatives fuck around, and the rest of us find out. 

*****

There is a silver lining, because there's always a silver lining. Even if I do end up on the excepted list, it will be part-time, and so I’ll end up with some time off. Yes it will be unpaid time off, and I’m more than a little anxious about this, but I do have some money saved and my husband is still working, and we’ll be fine, as far as paying the bills goes. Meanwhile, a day or two off would not be a bad thing at all. 

*****

It’s Saturday morning, a really lovely Saturday morning, in fact; and I still don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if the government is going to shut down (although it seems almost certain that it will) and I don’t know if I will be on the excepted list if it does (that’s a 50 - 50 proposition). I can’t really plan anything today because until midnight, anything could happen. At 0800 on Monday morning, I could be at work as usual (let’s say 0807 because I can’t get there at 8 to save my soul from Hell) or I could be at home still in my pajamas. 

If it’s the latter, then I’m going to make a to-do list. I’ll cancel some subscriptions and memberships to improve cash flow, and I’ll do some fall cleaning. Maybe I’ll drive to Philadelphia to see my family. Maybe I’ll get all of my Christmas shopping done. Maybe I’ll try out some new recipes. 

*****

Or maybe I’ll just go to work tomorrow morning like usual. It’s Sunday morning now and in the most unexpected of unexpected developments, the shutdown was averted and it’s business as usual. Stunning, really. It’s just a stopgap, and we’ll very likely be right down to the wire again in 45 days, but for now, all’s well that ends well. See you at 8:07 tomorrow morning. 

Midwest

We’re going to Cleveland this weekend, for a wedding. I’m hard-pressed to be excited about a trip anywhere right now. Nothing against Cleveland but we’re going to go there, stay overnight, go to the wedding, stay one more night, and get the hell out first thing on Sunday morning. I don’t need to Google anything about Cleveland other than the best land route out of town. No offense, Cleveland. It's not you. It's me. 

*****

It's Friday afternoon now and we're on our way. Our original plan was to fly, but I couldn't find reasonable nonstop fares and with two college tuitions, a new water heater, and a very expensive recent overseas trip, $1000 airfare to Cleveland and back was not in the budget. 

Yeah I know I sound like an old lady. That's because I am. I turned 58 last week and let me tell you that any 58 year olds out here identifying as "middle aged" are kidding themselves. The women in my family live a long time but not 116 years. 

And I feel like an old lady too. A few days ago, I slipped and fell down in the parking lot at work landing hard on my hands and knees. Thankfully I didn't break anything but I'm still sore. I expect to break a hip any day now. But not today. Today it's a beautiful sunny early fall Friday afternoon. We're just past the I270 northbound early rush hour traffic, with nothing but open road all the way to Ohio. You can't feel old when you're on a road trip

*****

Ohio is a five-hour drive from the DC suburbs of Maryland, give or take. It's not that far. But as soon as you cross the Pennsylvania - Ohio line, you see signs that say things like Great Lakes and Mississippi River Watershed, and you know that you're out of your zone. Ohio is definitely of the Midwest. It's flat and open, industrialized, gritty in some places and fancy in others. We attended a wedding in Berea, a charming town with a strong Polish flavor. I hadn't heard a polka played at a wedding in many years, but they played three. They all sounded the same. 

What I danced to:

• Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA”

• Usher's "Yeah"

• Nicki Minaj's "Starships"

• "Cupid Shuffle"

• Sister Sledge’s "We Are Family"

• Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling”

• All Pitbull because you can't sit down when Mr. Worldwide is singing

What I didn't dance to:

• Slow country

• The chicken dance

• Polkas 

*****

The drive to Cleveland was pleasant and easy, and it was lovely to fall into a comfortable hotel bed after a very long day. The hotel was fine - clean, simple, everything we needed and nothing we didn’t. It even had a pool, and we got to swim on Saturday morning, since the wedding was not until 1. The wedding was beautiful, and the reception was a blast. Even the clean-up was fun. Yes, we cleaned up afterward. The reception was held in a parish Knights of Columbus hall, like every wedding I ever attended in my working-class Catholic youth, and that’s how it works - you rent the hall for a very nominal fee, you hire your own DJ or band, you bring in your own food and liquor and decorations, and you clean it all up at the end. Technically, the guests can just walk out and leave the hosts to take care of the clean-up, but that is not how it’s done. That is not cricket. Everybody lends a hand with the clean-up. 

The dishes were rented and needed only to be collected and stacked for pick-up - we didn’t have to wash them. We gathered trash, stacked dishes, removed tablecloths and chair covers, and were out of there in 30 minutes. The young people then held an after party in the hotel. They kindly invited their elders, but it was after midnight, and I had already turned into a pumpkin. After party. These kids, I tell you. Crazy. 

*****

Have you ever had food poisoning? Well, I have, and it’s no way to end a weekend. No, it wasn’t the wedding food, thank goodness. That would have been bad. I ate one thing this weekend - a turkey sandwich - that my husband hadn’t eaten - and I paid for it dearly. I didn’t think it was possible to vomit that much. And vomiting wasn’t all I did. 

The illness ran its course very quickly. I woke up on Sunday morning feeling vaguely unwell. Within an hour, I had gone from vaguely unwell to very very sick. Within another hour, the sickness had passed, leaving me pale and weak and exhausted but otherwise OK. Barely OK, but OK. My husband drove us home while I alternated between waking and sleep, wrapped in a blanket in the shotgun seat. I felt vaguely guilty that he had to drive the entire way home in the rain, but I couldn’t have driven even if I wanted to. And he would have driven anyway. 

*****

And you know, that was still an 8/10 weekend. Food-borne pathogen encounters are an automatic two-point deduction, but 8/10 is solid. I’d do eighty percent of that weekend over again, no questions asked. 

Bag packing

If you’re old enough to remember grunge and if you watched “Friends” when it was still the most popular show on prime-time TV - in fact, if you even know what prime-time TV is - then you might remember the ‘zine. Short for magazines, ‘zines were underground, homemade publications, sometimes produced on the earliest desktop publishing software, and sometimes just typed on a typewriter, and then photocopied and sold or handed out to anyone who would take one. People made ‘zines for all kinds of reasons. Activists made ‘zines to share news or political content. Amateur writers self-published their work in the form of ‘zines. Humorists, artists, photographers, poets, weirdos - anyone could make a zine with pretty much no equipment. ‘Zine producers were bloggers for the Stone Age. 

Two friends of a friend of mine produced a ‘zine pretty regularly. I don’t remember what it was called, nor do I remember the two women’s names, but I do remember that they were both librarians, and that they were a bit older than me. They both had young children, and they sometimes wrote about their children and about their lives as the mothers of toddlers. Those children probably have children of their own now. 

I never actually met these women, and I never had my own copy of the ‘zine. My friend shared it with me when the two authors published it, which happened maybe three times over the course of two years. They were full-time working mothers of very young children and so they didn’t have much time to write, let alone type, photocopy, and distribute their small publication. But they did the best they could, because they had something to say. They had a distinctive voice - funny and sardonic but not mean. Silly but not precious. Passionate about the rights of women, especially working women, but not “strident” or “militant” or whatever adjective people like to use to ridicule anything even remotely feminist. My friend and I were big fans of their work. 

*****

Other than cat videos, handbag videos are my hands-down favorite thing on the whole internet. “Pack the cafe bag with us,” reads the caption for the Tom Bihn Instagram video, and they reeled me right in. I watched that video three times, rapt all the way through. I cannot get enough of handbag packing videos. 

And it’s not just social media ads - there is a whole YouTube subgenre in which people pack and unpack their handbags, tote bags, and backpacks. I love them all. The commercial videos tend to begin with a pristine brand-new empty bag, and you watch as a disembodied pair of well-manicured hands packs the bag with a wallet, phone, water bottle, book, notebook, pens and pencils, makeup, sunscreen, keys, and every other imaginable random accessory that a person might need or want to carry. These are fun to watch because everything is new and clean and pretty and elegant, and what’s better than a perfect bag with perfect accessories?

The homemade YouTube videos, though, are even better. In those videos, a woman unpacks a bag and shows us what she carries every day in her Longchamps Le Pliage or her Prada backpack.. Sometimes, the bag is new, and the person in the video is showing the audience how much it can hold, and how well - pockets and other organizational features, ergonomics, etc. These are usually sponsored videos in which a handbag company pays an influencer to share her impressions of their bags. But sometimes, people just record videos of themselves, taking everything out of their bag, whatever it looks like, and showing those things to us one at a time, without filters - a Fendi wallet and some balled-up used Kleenex; an elegant leather notebook and a Bic 4-color pen, a few hairpins and a few old receipts, a half-eaten granola bar, some gum - everything and anything that a person takes with them when they leave the house and all of the other things that they accumulate along the way. It’s not all stylish or beautiful but it’s all interesting and revealing. 

*****

It was that Tom Bihn video that made me remember my favorite ‘90s ‘zine; specifically, the “purse dump” issue in which the authors and a small group of their friends emptied their purses and wrote about the contents of each other’s bags. Each participant agreed to empty their purses exactly as they were, and to allow others to freely examine the contents and write about everything. As a reader, of course, I did not have any way to verify the claim that the purse dump descriptions were complete and accurate and unfiltered, but I also didn’t have any reason to believe otherwise. It didn’t matter, though, because it was excellent reading, far better than anything I’d encountered in Vogue or Allure or even my then-beloved Vanity Fair. What could be better than reading a detailed (and hilarious) commentary on the things that a person carries around with her, the things without which she doesn’t leave the house? 

I saw myself in some of the contents of these women’s handbags - lipstick, of course! I don’t carry other makeup but I always carry lipstick.  Two pens, because what if your first pen runs out of ink? Hmm? What then? Bandaids, because if you work in an office, you’re going to get paper cuts. A book - sometimes two books - because you can read on the subway. A snack - but not water. People didn’t carry water bottles around back then. 

But I also found inspiration. A pebble or shell from the beach - what a great thing to carry around! A good luck charm - of course! I should also have a good luck charm! Sugar packets and wet naps swiped from restaurants, and sealed in ziploc bags - I immediately resolved to swipe sugar packets and wet naps from every diner and restaurant in the greater Philadelphia area, so that I could also carry around ziploc bags of these very very useful things. 

Fast forwarding 30 or so years, I find the same I-feel-seen recognition and the same inspiration in purse contents videos, commercial or otherwise. I still carry lipstick and band-aids and a shell or two. I don’t really carry sugar packets or wet naps unless I’m traveling. I always have a pen and usually I have two pens. I carry several hair clips and hair ties, and an extra set of contact lenses. My purse always contains a little plastic tube that itself contains Tylenol, ibuprofen and a few Benadryl tablets. I have a tiny LeSportsac zipper case on a keyring, which contains my earbuds (always with me) and a quarter for the shopping carts at Aldi. I didn’t used to need sunglasses, but now I never leave the house without them. I carry my Kindle with me if there’s even the slightest chance that I’ll have five or more minutes of waiting time or downtime. The inspiration comes in not so much what to carry as in how to carry it, how to make ordinary utilitarian items look pretty so that rummaging through my purse is a joy. 

*****

And of course I bought the stupid Tom Bihn bag, too. This was not my fault. That bag chased me all over the internet for weeks until I finally caved. That is some effective advertising because I didn’t even like the bag when I first saw it. But it grew on me. I started imagining myself packing it just as the person in the video did, and after a few more viewings, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about this bag and how it would fulfill a very specific need. I haven’t had a utilitarian nylon crossbody bag for a long time and it just felt like it was time to revisit that style and that aesthetic. I’m very happy with it so far, and it will be perfect for my upcoming road trip to Cleveland. That’s what a bag is for, of course - to make you feel prepared when you’re out in the world. Maybe I’ll write a whole post just about the contents of that bag. Videos are not my thing. 

Damn the torpedoes, bring on the (vile) PSL

My drafts folder is stuffed right now; stuffed, I tell you. I pulled out a draft and started to polish it a bit, thinking that I’d finish and publish it. But it’s missing something. So I’ll write instead about Labor Day weekend, which it is right now as of about 20 minutes ago (it’s 5:20 on Friday afternoon). Did I ever mention that I hate LDW? Well, I do. LDW is the end of summer and the beginning of pumpkin spice latte and stupid NFL football and the downward slide toward winter. LDW can go fuck itself. 

I wouldn’t normally be cooking on the Friday of LDW, but I am. I’m making a nice Nicoise salad, with salmon rather than tuna. I cooked the potatoes, and blanched the green beans, and broiled some salmon, and cut up some tomatoes. Now I just have to assemble the whole thing. I also cooked a take and bake pizza for any members of the household who don’t want salad. I even cut up some fruit. It should be a nice summer dinner, suitable for our people-coming-and-going summer routine. 

*****

It turned out to be a rather nice evening. I sat at the pool for a bit with some friends. Both the water and the air were early autumn cold. I wore a hoodie and draped a towel across my legs and we watched as a handful of kids inched their way into the icy water. When even kids aren’t jumping right in, you know that the water is cold. When even I am sitting in a deck chair rather than swimming laps, then you know that the water is cold. It was Baltic, I tell you. Baltic. 

And my son came home for the weekend, which was lovely. He arrived at 11 PM or so, and then I stayed up watching TV for a bit with my husband and both boys - only until midnight, but it was nice going to bed knowing that the rest of the family were just a few rooms away. It’s Saturday morning now, and I’ll make breakfast for anyone who’s awake in the next few minutes. You have to get up early in the morning if you want breakfast around here. It’s not a restaurant, know what I mean? 

*****

Saturday of LDW was kind of an ideal summer weekend day, making summer’s imminent end even sadder than it usually is. That is the most pitiful glass-half-empty-and-quickly-draining sentence, but that’s where my head is right now. All I do around here is keep it real. 

It took an act of will to immerse my entire body in the still-very-chilly water but with the temperature quite a bit warmer than it had been on Friday and the mid-afternoon sun sparkling on the water’s surface, the chill felt refreshing. I never really warmed up even after a solid lap swim at a pretty brisk (for me) pace, but I didn’t mind. The deck was warm and sunny and it was lovely to sit there after the cold swim, wrapped in a towel and watching as others approached the water, slowly and gingerly. Good luck with that, I thought, as the sun dried my hair and the feeling returned to my extremities. 

*****

Saturday of LDW feels like the first day of a little vacation. Sunday of LDW feels like the beginning of the end, and I’m very sad this morning. I should probably do something about the fact that I am crying every day, often more than once a day, but I probably won’t. I’ll probably just ignore this mental health crisis until it goes away, exactly as I do with every other thing that’s wrong with me, real or imagined. 

*****

It’s Monday now, Labor Day itself. I went to a party of sorts last night. A fellow Rockville swim mom, whose son was one of the four seniors on Rockville’s state championship squad, invited a bunch of women to her house for drinks and snacks. All of the guests had just recently sent a child off to college - some are younger mothers whose oldest children just graduated from high school, and some are older mothers sending their last children off. 

Going to a party, even a low-key, come-as-you-are party, was really the last thing I wanted to do, but I went because I like the hostess very much and because I should get out of the house more. And it was a lovely evening, and I’m glad I went. I had one drink that I didn’t finish, because my night driving is bad enough without adding alcohol to the mix, but the rest of the group, who all live within walking distance, were throwing back Moscow Mules and Dark and Stormys with abandon. I was one of the few completely sober people in that crowd, and it was OK. It was nice to be with people who understand. 

*****

The nice thing about having your kid home for the weekend is that he’s home for the weekend. But the bad thing of course is that he has to return to school and then you have to endure the separation again. It’s Tuesday now and LDW passed as quickly as it always does. It’s like a little mini summer in itself; long anticipated (by the people who actually like Labor Day weekend) and then over in a flash.

We spent most of the day at the pool. Labor Day is amateur night - everyone in the neighborhood shows up. Even if they haven’t made a single appearance at the pool all season long, people consider the summer wasted if they haven’t been to the pool at least once. It was the usual crazy Labor Day scene; pizza lunches and potluck dinners in the pavilion, frantic games of beaver and Marco Polo and knockout and sharks and minnows and water polo; balls flying through the air left and right. The lane ropes were gone by 6:30, and the pool was just a big open tub of splashing kids wringing out the last bit of summer fun. At 7:45 PM, there were at least 75 people in the water, and more people just kept jumping in ahead of the last whistle of the night and of the season. At 8 o’clock, seeing the head lifeguard about to blow the whistle, the children begged “Please? Just a few minutes?” And the head lifeguard, a grown-up pool kid himself, gave them 15 more minutes. Spontaneous applause - for a great summer and a kindhearted lifeguard - broke out when the whistle finally blew. It was dark at 8:15, and no matter what the meteorological calendar says, the summer was over. 

End of summer reading and writing

It occurred to me a little while ago that I hadn’t written anything about what I’ve been reading lately, and so maybe I’ll do that because I have to write something and because that’s a way to avoid thinking about the end of summer and the day that I have to send my son off to college and not have him around every day. I just can’t do it. 

So I’ve been reading. By my estimation, I’ll probably have finished 25 or 26 books by the end of this calendar year. It’s not very many. When I was young, I tore through a book or two every week. Those were the days, I tell you - my eyesight was excellent, and I had all the time in the world. Then I had babies and I didn’t have any time to read. Then the babies grew up a bit, and I had spare moments here and there. Then there were years of sports and school concerts and birthday parties and doctor visits and parent-teacher conferences, and I’d read in between innings at baseball games or in the waiting room at the dentist’s office or in the parking lot while waiting for a kid to finish practice or rehearsal. And then the kids just up and left and now I have all the time in the world again. It sucks, really. 

But back to the books. Books are good. Well, they’re not all good, but books in general are good, is what I meant. 

*****

Against Memoir, by Michelle Tea. I myself am going to come out very strongly against memoir pretty soon if I end up reading just one more shock-the-normies overly frank too-much-sexual-information memoir. I was really about to just give up on this one, and not because I was shocked or disgusted (well, I was a little disgusted but not even a tiny bit shocked because I've read all the same stuff in at least five other memoirs proving that I never learn) but because I was bored. Bored and skeptical. It's not that I didn't believe Tea's stories because why would she make these things up, but because I didn't believe her voice. She was trying so hard - SO HARD - to be daring and outrageous and shocking that I couldn’t really even hear what she was saying. But then she wrote this - or said it, because this is from a talk she gave to an lgbtq writers' group: "Give us your goofiness and your dark depths and your weird family and when you stay up eating cheese on the couch watching bad TV and crying, give us when you feel stupid and the big angry fight you had, give us everything…" in addition to all of the sex and drugs and outre transgressiveness and I thought "Yes, exactly, Michelle Tea, now why not follow your own brilliant advice?" Later, she does exactly that in an unflinching and rather lovely essay about her difficult relationship with her working class hard luck mother and stepfather. The essay is suffused with sadness and guilt but the guilt is unnecessary. Tea clearly loves her mother even though she finds her impossible. So the book wasn't a waste, but I probably won't read any more of Michelle Tea’s work. 

*****

I started writing this on Monday. Five minutes later it’s Wednesday and my son leaves for school tomorrow, making tonight his last night at home. I swam last night and the water was still nice but the air was very cool, making getting out of the pool much harder than getting in. Today it’s warm, but not hot outside, and the breeze has an edge of Canadian coolness that suggests the imminent arrival of fall. Actually, at my house, the falling part of fall has been in full swing for a week. Our cherry trees are shedding their leaves and I’d crunch through them but I don’t want to crunch through leaves. It’s still August. So let’s talk about another book. 

*****

Two Souls Indivisible, by James Hirsch. Our medical students read this during orientation week and so I joined them. It’s an inspiring story about two POWs in Vietnam - Porter Halyburton, who is White and from the South; and Fred Cherry, who was Black (he died in 2016), formed a deep friendship during their shared captivity, which sustained them through terrible suffering and pain. Cherry would likely not have survived without Halyburton, who cared for him through illness and infections resulting from dreadful injuries. The book was originally published in 2005, and in some ways, it does not hold up particularly well. Fred Cherry was apparently rather conservative in his attitudes on race, at least according to Hirsch, and preferred to distinguish himself from Black people involved in the civil rights movement, whom he saw as agitators. This is not to criticize Mr. Cherry, who was clearly a product of his time; but the author’s tone in discussing Cherry’s beliefs is condescendingly approving. Without looking at the publication date, I’d have guessed 1981. It’s a very good story but not such a great book. 

*****

July seems like ages ago, doesn’t it? All-Star weekend (Prince Mont Swim League All Stars, that is) was the last Saturday in July. Our son won one of the League scholarships that day and we left the meet very proud and happy though a little sad, since it was our very last summer meet. It was very hot that weekend and after a swim, we went to the first half of Barbenheimer, a 7 PM showing of "Barbie," which was great but would have been worth the price of admission, even if it wasn't great, just for Ryan Gosling's performance of "Push." Hilarious. We saw "Oppenheimer," also great, the next day. Anyway, this is apropos of nothing, except that it was just a few weeks ago, the very heart of summer, but it seems like ages ago, and summer is all but over. I swam last night and the water was very cold. And we just moved our son into his dorm, and we're driving home without him, and I feel lost. Bereft. 

*****

OK so the Barbenheimer digression wasn't really apropos of nothing, because now I'm reading American Prometheus, the Robert Oppenheimer biography upon which the movie is based. 

*****

The drop off itself wasn't so bad really. I had been dreading it all summer and it hit me hardest when we finally made our way through security and pre-clearance at the Dublin airport last week. As much as I love Ireland, the best part of that vacation was being together, all four of us, every day. That was over. I knew that the boys would be right back at work and doing their own thing as soon as we returned home, and when planning the vacation, I had only left us a few short days between the end of the trip and college move-in day for our youngest. It was all so fast, so rushed. I’m sure that the flight crew and other passengers wondered about the lady who was sitting and crying quietly in her seat, but no one asked me any questions, and I was OK after a few minutes. I tried to watch a movie but the video screen quality on this rather old and beaten-up plane was very poor and so I just returned to my book. 

*****

American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, is what critics used to call a “sweeping biography,” the story of a larger-than-life figure with the events of the day as backdrop. Oppenheimer, one of the greatest scientific geniuses who ever lived, not only witnessed the cataclysmic history of the 20th century, he created it, at least in part. You can admire Oppenheimer or despise him. His life story is compelling either way. 

I mostly admire him. One of the most interesting things about Robert Oppenheimer was his self-transformation, from dreamy genius stereotypically absent-minded professor to brilliant administrator and leader. Authors Bird and Sherwin give almost as much attention to Oppenheimer’s remarkable personal gifts - frequent and unexpected kindness, charisma, social brilliance, communication skill - as to his unequaled intellectual gifts, and rightly so. And added to that is that he was just born at the right time and in the right place - the son of sophisticated, wealthy, indulgent Jewish parents, born at the turn of the 20th century, he had all the advantages of travel and education and culture that that background afforded him, combined with timing that placed him in the middle of the most important events of the century. His Jewish background made the race to beat the Nazis in the nuclear weapons race personal, a matter of life and death in the most personal sense. 

This is another book published in 2005, and once again, certain aspects do not hold up. 2005 was longer ago than I thought, I guess. For example, Oppenheimer had the brilliant idea to hire local indigenous women to help the Los Alamos wives with housework, thus freeing the white women to help as lab assistants and secretaries and technicians. The authors present this in the most uncritical and unquestioning terms possible, as just another ingenious solution to a practical problem, a win win. Everyone's working and everyone's happy.  Never mind that the local women might have preferred to have a chance at one of the lab or office jobs rather than the poorly paid domestic jobs (the book makes no mention of comparative pay rates but I think it's safe to assume that the domestic workers made much less money than the project employees). And there's also very little discussion of how few women (almost none) had real jobs at Los Alamos in the first place.  

The book is also almost completely preoccupied with the question of whether or not Oppenheimer was a Communist and although the authors return again and again to the conclusion that he probably was not, they also don't really consider the idea that it should have been OK for Robert Oppenheimer to be acquainted with Communists without having his loyalty to the US constantly questioned. 

Outmoded thinking aside, though, the book is very good. The was-he or wasn’t-he inquiries into Oppenheimer’s political background are balanced by long and thoughtful discussions of his accomplishments, his personality and his mind, and his relationships with friends and family and colleagues and enemies. He was interesting enough to merit this much thought and consideration. 

*****

It’s Monday now, and Labor Day is a week away and I really miss having my son in the house. It’s a little harder now that the reality has set in and I know that I won’t see and talk to him in person every day. We’re texting back and forth all the time, and he’ll probably come home this weekend, but this is just the beginning of the process of separation, as more and more of his life will be his life, opaque to us except for whatever details he chooses to share. It’s right and normal and natural that this should happen but it’s not easy and it’s not pleasant. 

The pool closes in a week. Right now it’s cloudy and dull and not particularly warm but I’m going to swim anyway. 

*****

And I did. That was Monday, and now it’s Tuesday, still cloudy and dull and not particularly warm, but I swam last night and I’m going to do it again tonight. Even when the water is cold and the sky is gray and I can feel the summer slipping away, a swim always helps. The pool is open for just six more days and even though I can swim indoors after next Monday, it’s not the same. Swimming indoors is an exercise; it’s a thing to cross off your list, just like any other task. Swimming indoors is lap swimming. It’s not going swimming. You have to be outside somewhere if you want to go swimming. Lap swimming is good for your body. Going swimming is good for your soul. After next Monday, I won’t be able to go swimming anymore. But at least I’ll still be able to read.