Beyond Pickles

Sabbatical.

2010-06-16T19:42:00.000-04:00

In case it wasn't circumstantially clear, I am on...sabbatical. Until further notice.

When I return, it will be with abundant bells and whistles. I promise.

The skinny on my skinny.

2010-02-22T20:49:00.001-05:00

I’m not trying to be immodest, but it didn’t take me very long to lose the “baby weight” I accumulated during my pregnancy. In fact, during the past five months or so, I have found myself thinner than I have been in years.

I know. I just lost half of my readership.

For those of you remaining, bear with me. We all have our crosses, and it just so happens that excessive weight is not one of mine.

Many people ask me how I stay slim. Frankly, I’ve been wondering the same thing myself recently. A huge part of it is genetics. But there are other lifestyle factors that come into play. In fact, when it comes down to it, it seems that I have suddenly begun living the weight-loss pointers you might find in a "Redbook" article.*

No time for exercise? The "Redbook" article might ask. Leave that car in the garage and take a walk!

I no longer go to the gym or otherwise get any formal exercise. However, I live in Manhattan. My husband and I do not own a car. I am home every day. I walk everywhere. And it’s not only that I walk everywhere. I walk everywhere, pushing my 25 pound son in an 18 pound stroller with a 7 pound diaper bag hanging off of it.

My husband bought me a pedometer for Christmas. It was on my wish list. I love this thing. Apparently, on an average day, I walk about two and a quarter miles. There are many days when I walk close to four miles. Pushing 51 pounds.

So there’s that. Is it realistic for people who live outside of major cities to walk to the store for milk and bananas? I doubt it. It would take too damn long, and likely would require a trek on major highways. But me? I do it, "Redbook." I’m living the “Oh my God it’s pouring rain, the store is ¾ of a mile away and I have one diaper left” dream.

Boss on your case? Try to cut back on stress where you can!

My job is to be the full-time caretaker of Acey. This job is not easy. It can be exhausting, overwhelming, and at times, confusing. Acey’s recent interest in living room gymnastics has lead to countless bumps, bruises, and yesterday, a shiner. Four weeks of off-and-on baby diarrhea have left me with the ability to sniff that sour awfulness from three rooms away. The periodic skipped nap can trip me up and leave me unable to schedule a shower until 7pm. But none of this is really stressful in the way, say, a court-imposed deadline is, or a client who insists on micro-managing the drafting of a brief. Tiring? Yes. Challenging? Yes. Stressful? Well, not for me.

Tempted by a cocktail while watching that football game? Why not opt for seltzer instead?

If there is any area of my life that was decimated by pregnancy and motherhood, it’s my alcohol consumption. I remember looking forward to the end of pregnancy and breastfeeding and thinking then, then I’ll go out and really let loose with my husband and friends. Of course, it’s hard to do the math about hangovers and sleep deprivation before you become a parent. Alcohol consumption for me is limited to that place between “enough to relax that knot that popped when I had to carry Acey in the stroller down two flights of subway steps with no help” and “not enough to diminish my already-borderline-cantankerous demeanor in the morning, which begins promptly at 6:15 regardless of the day of the week.” Yeah. Pass the seltzer.

Cut back on snacks. Do you really need that candy bar at 2pm?

Candy what? I can’t eat anything in front of Acey without sharing it. Well, unless it’s broccoli. And I’m just not inclined to give a Milky Way Dark to a 14 month old. I can’t snack. There are days I don’t even get to eat lunch until 2pm. There is no time to troll and to be honest, no snacks available that aren’t pretty healthy. Yes, apparently we’re one of those households.**

Treating yourself to an indulgent meal? Schedule it earlier in the evening to give yourself time to digest before hitting the hay!

The husband and I do like to take advantage of New York restaurants when we can. Granted, opportunities to do so aren’t as plentiful as they used to be. We’re limited to babysitter availability and Acey’s body clock. The overlap between these two categories is embarrassingly large. Acey is in bed by 7. If we’re going out to eat as a family, we need to be all-butts-in-seats at 5:00 and diapered-butt-in-stroller by 6:00, or risk a fireworks show. If we get a sitter, sure, I want to eat at a more civilized hour. But I ate breakfast at 6:45 and lunch at noon! I’m hungry at 7, and ravenous at 8. And there’s the aforementioned early morning to consider.

Needless to say, the days of our 9:30 reservations seem to be in the past for now.

And as a result of all this? My baby weight is gone. As is my desire to wear anything on my feet other than Merrells and my capacity to entertain a phone call after 9 pm. Maybe I will subscribe to "Redbook." The articles are fairly accurate.

*I don’t think I’ve ever actually read "Redbook." Nor is it likely I ever will, since we already have more periodicals in my home than the waiting rooms of my dentist, GP, and pediatrician, combined.

**I wonder how long we will be one of those households without a lot of junky snacks. I’m guessing until Acey gets to the age where I can successfully bribe him?

Those are mine.

2010-02-12T14:15:00.001-05:00

I have mentioned here at Beyond Pickles that I like to keep a fairly neat home. I do. And so does my husband.

But we like to do other things more than we like to clean.

End result: a cleaning person.

Luckily for us, our new building is “full-service.” By this I mean that there is a business, of some sorts, located by the service entrance. It runs a convenience shop (where you can conveniently purchase a dozen eggs for $5.) It collects your dry cleaning and sends it out. It runs a cleaning service.

The cleaning service really seemed great: a good bargain for these parts, and flexible. We hired them a number of times, and all on the fly: “Can you come tomorrow at 11:30? Really? Great.”

And so, a team of two women came and cleaned our place. Five, maybe six times. The same woman came every time, but she was often accompanied by a different helper.

I have to admit, I have never been comfortable with having a person clean my home. In high school, when I would come home from school and the cleaning lady was there, I would hide upstairs until she was finished. This is impossible to do in a New York apartment, though. So when the cleaning team would come, I’d skedaddle.

A few weeks ago, the cleaning team was set to come at around 4pm. Acey and I went to playgroup at 3:30. When we approached the building at 5pm, I could see by the lights in our windows that the team was still there, doing its thing.

No problem. The woman with whom I had become familiar said they would be done in about an hour. This was fine. I went about the business of feeding Acey his dinner and moving toward bath and jammies.

So, as I sat down to feed Acey, a young woman was working in our living room, which is separated from the kitchen by a large island. She was probably about 19 years old, though she looked 15. She was pleasant enough.

But as she moved over the floor with a mop, I noticed something strange.

She was wearing my slippers.

We actually don’t wear shoes in our house. Acey is still crawling, and taking off shoes that have been pounding the ground in the subway and Manhattan gutters seems a nice way to cut back on germs. There is a doormat by our entryway, and we tend to have 3 or 4 pairs of shoes hanging out there at any point. My husband and I wear slippers, though, in the house, and often when we have to go short distances inside the building.

My slippers had been on the doormat. But now they were on the cleaning lady’s feet.

I was flummoxed. At first I thought maybe they weren’t mine. But I saw the familiar spit-up stains on the left one, and the place where the sole was separating from the body on the right. Plus, they were far too big on this tiny girl: truly, she could’ve taken one and used it as a toboggan.

Anyway, I was so startled and confused by the situation that I didn’t say anything. Silly, I know, but true. It’s because of my discomfort with cleaning people. I almost felt like, “You clean my toilets for me, so I can’t ask you to not wear my slippers.” Instead, I emailed my husband and reported the happenstance.

Acey finished dinner, had his bath, and changed into his jammies. The cleaning team left.

I checked my email to find a message from my husband that was riddled with alarm bells. He wanted me to report this to the manager of the building, the head of the little convenience shop, the Mayor of New York. He was nervous this team was wearing other articles of our clothing, and perhaps was the reason my watch was missing.*

Okay. So, I carried Acey downstairs and I talked to the store manager. But before I did this, I slipped my foot into my slippers. They were damp with perspiration. Oh. God.

“Hi. I’m from 516? I had the cleaning service in this afternoon.”
“Yes?” he said.
“Well, I actually wanted to complain,” I began. “When I got in, I saw that one of the women was actually wearing my slippers.”
The gentleman met this with a blank stare.
“She was wearing my slippers,” I tried again. “On her feet.”
“Um, okay.” The man started leafing through his book. “What apartment were you, again?”
“516.”
“Right. I guess I’ll tell my boss?”
“I mean, I don’t want her fired or anything. They did a fine job. But she may not wear my clothing. This is not okay. I feel like my privacy has been violated.”
“Okay. Um, okay.” The man was not apologetic, but neither was he irritated. He just seemed confused.

I left feeling not exactly like I had righted the situation, but at least I had done something. The damp slipper thing actually turned my stomach.

An hour or so later, my husband and I were eating dinner when someone knocked on our door. I guessed it was the store manager, and asked my husband to deal.

But when he opened the door, I heard a kind of hesitant back-and-forth, and my husband called for me to come. Ah. The cleaning team must be here.

They were.

The more senior member began: “Hi. Um, the man downstairs said you had a problem with the Swiffer®?”
“Swiffer®?” I said. “No. No. The cleaning is fine. I did speak to the man downstairs, but because one of you was wearing my slippers.”
“Oh. Because the man downstairs said there was a problem with the Swiffer®.”

A few things here. Clearly there was a bit of a communication problem between management and employees. You might also note that I explained why I had complained, but this didn’t seem to matter. I started to get a little confused. Maybe by keeping my slippers on the front mat, I was suggesting that all who enter should wear them inside? Like a Japanese household? No, that can’t be the case. We’re not Japanese. And for what it’s worth, nobody was wearing my husband’s slippers. Or his filthy Pumas, for that matter, which were also on the mat.

“There is no Swiffer® problem. I had a problem because you were wearing my slippers.” I looked to the younger girl. “That’s not okay. I don’t want you wearing my things when you are here.”
“Oh. Okay, well I was wearing these.” The more senior girl motioned to her high top sneakers.
The younger girl finally spoke up. “I was wearing them last time but you didn’t say anything so I thought it was fine.”

Time out. She wore them the last time she cleaned in our apartment? Was I home? How did I not notice?

“Look, I can assure you, had I realized you were wearing my slippers, I would’ve said something. I mean, they were damp on the inside when you were finished here tonight.” My face involuntarily contorted in disgust. I should point out, however, that I never raised my voice. I was really trying to explain why I had a problem.

The younger girl had had enough. “If you had had a problem with me wearing those slippers, you should’ve told me yourself.” She slowly cocked her head from side to side as she spoke, while moving a finger in a circle until it came to rest, pointing at me.

So this is my fault? You leave a puddle of perspiration in the slippers that carry me through my days and nights and you raise your voice at me?

“Okay. We’re done here.” I closed the door.

Needless to say, nobody ever apologized. We have never hired the cleaning service again. What is more, I had to throw the slippers away. I know that seems a bit compulsive, but I could sense the dampness long after they had dried out. And with the stains and the loose sole, they really were ready to go.

Meanwhile, I see Little Miss Sweaty Peds frequently. I smile at her. It’s too awkward to be unpleasant, especially since she will never see my point of view. Initially, she gave me the death-stare. Now she smiles back.

I can practically hear her talking to her coworkers as I walk away, “That tall lady? She told me to wear her slippers, then she went all bat-shit-crazy because we didn’t use a Swiffer® to clean her place.”

*I later found my watch in my robe pocket. Whether the cleaning team had donned my robe, watch, and slippers at some point, I can’t be sure.

Warm and rubbery.

2009-12-23T21:25:00.002-05:00

By some small miracle, I find that it is 8:15 pm on December 23rd, and I have time to write. It’s Acey’s birthday. We had dinner (slow-cooked brisket in homemade barbecue sauce with roasted asparagus and brown rice), Acey’s first cake (Duncan Hines yellow, but with homemade whipped cream frosting), and presents. Our clockwork boy was in his crib and dreaming of sugarplums at 7:05 pm. I’m done my shopping – almost all online this year, for obvious reasons. I’m done wrapping. I made a dinner reservation for Saturday night when we have a babysitter. I have groceries here set to go for Acey’s little birthday party on Sunday. The place is clean. Even our laundry is done.

And I have time to write.

There’s snow on the ground here in New York. I’ve been chugging through it with Acey in his stroller for four days now. And man, is it cold.

I must admit, we city parents deal with babies-in-the-cold on a much more urgent level than our suburban counterparts. While I know nobody in Westchester is bringing their child to the car in a bathing suit, few babies out there spend more than a moment or so in this kind of frigid weather. House to car; car to store. Reverse.

With city babies, it’s different. They either must stay indoors, or their parents have to get them really freaking prepared.

Acey has never been homebound. My husband and I took him out to dinner on New Year’s Eve last year; he was eight days old. It was freezing. But we walked the several blocks to the restaurant and home and nobody was worse for the trip.

It was a little easier then. We could wrap him up in his jammies and a hat and a blanket. We’d tuck all the extremities into a carseat cover, and pop the weather wrap on the stroller to block the wind and away we’d go.

It’s different now.

Acey despises his coat. When I pull it off its hook, Acey’s reaction reminds me of when I used to go for my dog’s sweater when I was a child: he whimpers, shakes his head, and begins to crawl away in reverse.

Damn it.

The rodeo that is getting Acey into his coat is only part of the battle, though. He must be buckled into the stroller. Getting his stiff arms in through the straps is not unlike trying to fit a king-sized down comforter into a small washing machine: push, pull, push, pull…almost…push…CLICK. Done.

But wait, there’s more. Hat beneath the hood. Mittens on those itty-bitty hands: Do I bother to find the thumb? I know he’ll be happier...okay. Where’s your thumb? Is that your thumb? Did I just put your pointer finger in the thumb hole? Does it matter? Oh, well. Zip his bottom half into the Bundle Me blanket-sack that used to cover his whole newborn body.

His blue eyes will peer out at me in resigned submission. I know I should put the weather guard on his stroller to block the wind, but I haven’t done it yet this season unless there is actual precipitation.

What is this weather guard I keep mentioning? In the City, we need our strollers when it rains. Walks aren’t just for the hell of it.* Hence, we purchase the optional weather guard that resembles a huge piece of Saran Wrap that stretches over your baby carriage. You might think it looks dangerous. You might wonder if we want our babies to suffocate. It’s not and we don’t. It’s as necessary as the wipers on your car. And our babies don’t suffocate: they stay dry and warm.

But he hasn’t needed the weather guard yet. I press the inside of my wrist to his little nose whenever we get to where it is we’re going: he’s always warm. I find this sort of miraculous, given that my own nose is usually numb.

But my feet? My feet are warm.

Why?

Let’s go back in time.

It’s Christmas 1994. I am home from college for holidays for the first time. I dig into the presents under the tree. Typical Freshman-in-college stuff: some magnets for my mini-fridge, a men’s XL flannel from the Gap, maybe a Dave Matthews “Under The Table and Dreaming” CD. But there is also this huge box. My mom quivers with excitement when I go to unwrap it.

I open it to discover Wellington boots. They are green.

They are, to my 18 year old eyes, ridiculous.

My mom is crestfallen.

“But…you get so much snow in South Bend! It’s so cold there! These are so high and air-tight!”
“Mom. I can’t wear these. They are huge. And if I do wear them to walk to class, during the hour I spend inside the classroom, my feet will be swimming in sweat. There’s no ventilation!”

Besides. They were so awful. I wear a size 10. These boots looked like huge rubber torpedoes.

Naturally, my mom purchased them in a Vermont boutique from a man who showed her a photo of Princess Diana wearing them on a rainy English holiday. They were expensive and non-returnable.

I dragged them back to college, where my roommates nearly bust a gut laughing at them. They nicknamed them “the foot condoms.” I would put them on during all-nighters with my pajamas to get a laugh.

I have dragged these boots to eight different apartments since then. The only time I ever wore them seriously was when I would take the trash out in Chicago. They came in handy crossing the marshy ground beneath the L tracks.

And then something happened.

I moved to the West Village. My Wellington boots were on sale in the uber-trendy boutiques all around the meatpacking district surrounding my apartment.

I know you know I’m being serious, because chances are, you own a pair. You may, in fact, own a knock-off pair from J. Crew. Maybe you bought a real pair of Hunter Wellingtons, like mine, from Saks?

I had mine before you had yours.

And now I wear mine with a bit of an ironic smile. Not because I have always thought they were cool, but because I am, in fact, falling in with the crowds who love them, and I was not hipster enough to like them prior to their official coming-out.

But I’ll tell you what? My feet are warm.

Thanks, Mom.

*When Elle’s mom moved to Connecticut, one of her biggest adjustments was coping with the fact that walking the baby became recreational. She lamented going for a walk around the neighborhood with no destination in mind: “At least in the City, if I needed to get Elle out of the apartment, I’d go to the grocery store for one piece of fruit. Here I’m tooling around aimlessly.” I have no sympathy. She shouldn’t have moved to Connecticut.

Friendly.

2009-11-17T21:37:00.002-05:00

I know what you’re thinking.

“Where are you, Actchy? Why aren’t you writing?”

Why, indeed?

I don’t know. It’s a little of this and a little of that.

I wonder if I should continue with this blog? I’m clearly not very consistent. And I have this idea knocking around in my head for a book, but I’m not sure what to do with it. Maybe I would like to focus on that for a bit, see if it leads me anywhere.

And yet.

Well, I like writing the blog.

I dunno.

Of course, there are other reasons I’m not writing, including the full-time rearing of Acey. And settling into the new neighborhood. And making new friends.

Making new friends?

Yes. Or, no.

You see, I have a lot of friends already. I really don’t want to make new friends.

But apparently, when you are a new mom, you need new friends.

Even if you already have a lot of friends.

Even if you have friends who have babies.

And even if you have friends who have babies who live in your city.

When you are a new mom, you need friends…who are also new moms…and who have a baby who is exactly the same age as your baby.

You do. Really. You do.

Your old friends will continue to be as important as they always were. They will be your lifeline to your former self. They will remind you of your non-mom persona and encourage you to keep that personality alive. And the ones with babies will also offer invaluable support and sympathy, if needed.

But unless they have a baby the exact same age as yours, your old friends won’t quite fill all of your friendship needs.

You see, if your baby is, e.g., 10 months old, you will have no recollection whatsoever as to his sleeping routine at 7 weeks. There is no room in your brain for yesterday’s sleeping news. All you can think about is this 10 month-old’s far-too-infrequent bowl movements.

Whereas to the parent of a 7 week old, sleep is the only thing in life worth discussing. And that parent needs to talk to somebody in the Same. Exact. Boat.

I’m guessing that this isn’t always the case. The 10 month-old and 7 week-old will eventually be 7 and 6 ½ , and I’m sure they’ll be dealing with basically the exact same things. But it’s just not that way when they’re babies.

Anyway. I learned this the easy way.

Through some amazing trick of fate, I met Obie’s mom. Acey was 7 weeks old.

Obie’s mom lived in our building!
Obie was born four days before Acey!
Obie’s mom was home with Obie!

What would I have done without Obie’s mom?

Nobody else was interested in a conversation that went something like this:

Actchy: So, Acey went down at 8:43 last night.
Obie’s mom: Oh my God. I would die. Why?
Actchy: Because he didn’t nurse until 7:05!
Obie’s mom: Wow. I can’t believe that.

Ugh. What a bad conversation. And yet Obie’s mom was down for it. Hell, she was living it. And so we lived it together.

And then I met Elle’s mom.

I picked up Elle’s mom at the pediatrician’s office. She was easy prey. It took me all of five minutes to get her digits.

She pulled up next to me with her stroller, and lifted out her daughter. Small talk established that Elle was a mere three days younger than Acey. Aaaand, Elle’s mom was a lawyer, comme moi.

I was all, “Would you be interested in getting together some time?”

Score.

Yes, it was a little forward on my part. But she seemed perfectly normal and capable of carrying on a good conversation. And that’s all I was really after.

And when I Googled her (yes, I Googled her), I discovered that she and I had gone to the same law school.

I knew she seemed like a good egg.

One thing led to another, and before I knew it, Obie’s mom, Elle’s mom, and I had all fallen into a delightful trio of new-mommy-girlfriends. Granted, initially our friendship was based entirely on the fact that nobody was getting a good night’s sleep. But things changed, and the babies grew, and despite this, we remained friends.

Good friends.

Good new friends.

Right.

But then Acey and I moved. It was only 15 blocks south of the old place, but it was certainly different not living in the same building as Obie’s mom.

And then…Elle and her mom moved to Connecticut.

Connecticut? Yep. They bought a car and everything. Oooooof.

And now. Well, now Obie and his mom are moving way up to the Upper West Side.

It’s not Connecticut. But it’s practically upstate New York.

WTF, girls? We are supposed to be downtown people!

I must say that because these past nine months have brought us so close, I don’t actually fear that I will lose touch with Obie’s mom and Elle’s mom. I mean, this is the digital age. I’m on Facebook, for crying out loud. I can’t fall out of touch with anybody. Even people I want to lose touch with.

But the new distance does make it difficult to have play dates.

And so I need some new friends.

Friends with babies.

Friends with nearly-eleven-month-old babies, to be specific.

And once I find these friends…then…then I will write.

Right?

We’ll see. Bear with me.

Color me frustrated

2009-10-16T10:16:00.005-04:00

Naturally, the GWW text stresses the importance of revision. While your writing may seem pretty good the first time through, it will be one hundred percent better after the fourth or fifth re-write.

Of course, the same thing goes for many things in life. We were very happy with our last apartment, including its décor. However, with respect to our new apartment, we needed to revise our approach to getting to that end product.

When we moved into our old place, we decided to paint. We knew we’d be there for a few years, and thought it was worth it to go through the rigmarole, though it was just a rental. And so we went to Home Depot and chose paint for the living room, bathroom, and kitchen.

It was the first time in our marriage that we had the opportunity to choose colors for our living space. Naturally, we agreed upon almost nothing. The husband wanted Tuscan yellow in the living room. I wanted brown. He wanted navy in the bathroom. I wanted anything other than navy. I wanted red in the kitchen. He wanted anything other than red.

But we compromised. The kitchen is my domain; I got to choose the color. That left my husband to choose the paint for the bathroom. We decided to sample both yellow and brown for the living room, and in the end, went with brown.

Right. Let’s paint.

But.

Um.

We weren’t unpacked. See, it is very difficult to unpack when your living space is small. There’s no place to spread out. You want to unload the box of large utensils but you have to put it to the side until you find the box with the container for large utensils. But there’s no space to put anything “to the side.”

In fact, our apartment looked like this:

We decided that if we were going to paint, we should probably just push everything to the center of the apartment and do it. If we waited until we were unpacked, it’d never get done.

But I was starting a new job. As was my husband. And we had moved to Manhattan, so we didn’t have a car. This made going to Home Depot and loading up on brushes and ladders and drop clothes challenging. To say nothing of the fact that there was no storage space for brushes and ladders and drop clothes when the painting was complete.

And that’s when we decided to bring in Willy.

Okay. So who is Willy? He is both a highly-skilled painter and a highly-functioning alcoholic. My father-in-law discovered him when he was preparing to sell his home. He politely describes Willy as “a character.”

Character. Vagrant. Same-same. To give you an idea, Willy doesn’t have a phone. In order to get in touch with him, it is necessary to call a saloon in Yonkers, NY. He gets his messages from the bartenders.

But he’s a good painter. And he doesn’t charge much.

And so it was that Willy arrived at our unpacked apartment at seven o’clock on the morning I was to begin my new job. I had just exited the shower and was in a bathrobe, so I quickly closed the door to the bedroom and dressed. My husband let him in and gave him instructions. He then left for the office. I emerged from my room to find Willy already at work, accompanied by the blaring AM radio.

Willy began assailing me with questions and stories. He had used the same brown on someone’s study up in Westchester. He missed seeing my father-in-law on a regular basis. He was almost done his novel and heard that I was good at proofreading.

You will recall that I was trying to get ready for my first day of a new job.

“Um, okay, Willy. You can send me your manuscript if you’d like.”
“Thanks, Actchy. It’s great to see you. You know, I was saying to your husband, it’s weird that I never have had the chance to meet your folks.”

Whaaaa? My parents? Um, yes. It is weird that I haven’t introduced my parents to my father-in-law’s painter.

On and on. Eventually, I was ready to go. I bade Willy farewell. But he stopped me.

“I think your husband forgot to leave me some money for lunch.”

Money for lunch? Does one give cash to one’s painter for his meals? Well, okay.
I looked in my wallet. I discovered $10.

“Willy, all I have is a ten. This should get you a sandwich at the bodega.”
“Perfect, Actchy. That’s all I need.”
“Okay. Well, there’s orange juice in the fridge if you’d like.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I had orange juice hours ago.”

Fast forward. Midway through the afternoon, my husband goes in to check on Willy, who was finished the living room and had begun the bathroom.

I receive a call from my sheepish husband.

“Well, the living room looks excellent. But the bathroom looks like the murder scene of one of the Blue Man Group. I’m not sure we can live with this sort of wild blue yonder.”

Wild blue yonder indeed. Hoo-boy: white tiles, and blue paint that was far darker than we ever dreamed.

I refrained from the “I told you so” dance. Sort of. And only because we determined we’d have the same problem with my red kitchen. So the kitchen stayed white.

We sent Willy out for a pastel blue that neither of us would’ve chosen but for the fact that we needed something fast, and hell, it matched a shower curtain that we already owned.

Problem corrected. No more Greek-flag-themed bathroom.

Finally I reached the end of the day. I was exhausted from meeting people and being on my best behavior and figuring out a new computer system. I got home to discover that Willy was done. In fact, he was paid and had left the premises by the time I got home.

And things looked…pretty damn good.

I went into my still-white kitchen.

Huh.

There were four empty 24 oz. cans of Bud Light next to my trash can.

Wow.

I did the math and realized that Willy had a liquid lunch with the sawbuck I gave him.

Well, okay. I mean, I knew he was a drinker. And the paint was no worse for his alcohol intake.

But then I looked in my fridge.

Missing were one half of a block of fancy imported Irish cheese and three of a five-pack of Italian sausages.

We had just moved in; we had almost no groceries. I had picked up the sausages and cheese so that we’d have something at home for dinner my first night of work. I was sort of in a quandary. I saw no evidence of cooking: no pots – dirty or clean. No plates. Had he eaten the sausages raw? Had he cooked them with no container in the microwave? Shudder.

And I then I saw my bottle of Chardonnay.

The bottle of Chardonnay was the last remaining bottle of a wedding gift from my best friend. She had sent us two great bottles of wine each month for six months. I had saved this one, and went through the effort of packing it with my overnight bag for safe transport in my car when we drove from Chicago to New York. It was a celebration bottle. We were going to open it on our first wedding anniversary, which was fast-approaching.

Now it was 50% empty.

And now I was angry.

I called my husband in a rage.

He talked me down. There was nothing we could do at that point, save to contact the pub in Yonkers and ask the bartenders to tell Willy to call me so that I could chew him out.

“For what it’s worth, I did tell Willy to help himself to whatever we had in the fridge.”

Okay. Fair enough. I mean, I had offered him orange juice, too. We didn’t have all that much in the fridge. Regardless, I wouldn’t think that an invitation like that would lead him to open the wine. He was the painter, not a freaking house guest. And really, what house guest opens a bottle of wine without asking?

And for that matter, how did he open the wine? I had absolutely no idea where our corkscrew was.

Amazing. Okay. Let it go.

I checked the freezer. It was with relief that I noted Willy had not defrosted the top tier of our wedding cake, which we had also saved for our first anniversary.

Revision: prior to our move to TriBeCa, I contacted a painter. I gave him the code for a paint color. I mailed him a check.

On moving day, Acey’s nursery was a soft, gentle green.

And our wine reserves were intact.

Moved.

2009-08-17T22:36:00.002-04:00

“It’s time.”

He was right. In so many ways.

The movers were done; it was about to rain. My son’s crib needed to be moved into his new room and put together ASAP. It was time to go.

“I just…” my voice trailed off. I looked around, helplessly.

We didn’t own it. But it was ours.

“Remember how relieved you were when you first saw this place?” he asked me.

I did. I just couldn’t get away from work in Chicago when we had to find an apartment in New York, so my husband came out and pounded the pavement. The agent took him all over downtown. When they finally walked into our place, my husband stepped in, looked around, and asked for a lease. I had left it in his hands and he had done me right.

The first time I saw it was the day we moved in. And sure, moving in had been ridiculous. God knows unpacking a Chicago 2BR’s worth of stuff into an NYC 1BR took forever.

But man: this awesome set of windows on the greatest neighborhood in Manhattan. And on Sundays, the soft sounds of the mariachi band that played outside of Los Dados, there on the corner.

The building had a breathtaking roof deck that was home to several of our infamous cocktail parties. We watched fireworks up there, and the aftermath of Captain Sully’s handiwork on the Hudson.

Yeah, the building was replete with characters, but I loved them all.

“It doesn’t feel right empty,” I said.

Probably because it wasn’t empty. I could see the faded areas on the paint where our furniture and pictures had been. I noted the vacant cabinets of the smallest kitchen ever to allow me to work my culinary madness. I traced my finger against the door molding. No, it wasn’t empty. It was so full of memories.

“Well. I won’t miss our neighbors,” he said.

“Good God. Neither will I,” I agreed. “And neither will Acey.”

Acey. I worked through hard labor with him right here on our couch before we left for the hospital. This was his first home. Our doorman met him before much of our family did. I paced up and down this one stretch of floorboards for hours trying to get him to sleep in the wee hours of the morning when he was brand new. He rolled over for the first time right there; that’s where he sat in his bouncy seat when he said “Da Da” for the first time.

When we discovered we were expecting, all of our New York friends would look at our apartment and say, “This place is huge! It’s plenty big enough for a baby!”

Those who lived outside of the City would gasp in horror: “You’re going to stay here when the baby comes?!”

But stay we did. We shifted our living room over, and created a Baby Den. Acey learned to sleep with the noise of the construction right outside his window.

“At least we got to be here for the High Line opening.”

We had a direct view of the hottest new park on the East Coast. Our windows faced its entrance. We watched the creation of the park, the construction of the new hotel that straddles it, the demolition of the old industrial meatpacking building that was adjacent to it. Now that all was said and done, we could see trees and flowers at eye level, twinkling at night with evening lights, on the elevated park. With the old building gone, we had river views. Hell, I even got to see people do unspeakable things in their hotel rooms when I was up doing 4am feedings for all those months.

“I will miss this. My heart hurts.”

“Our new place is awesome. It will be just as special. And it won't have mice.”

“I know. But…”

But…

I pushed Acey’s stroller as we left the apartment for the last time. I wasn’t just teary-eyed. I was crying. My face screwed up and my mouth turned down as the tears started to fall.

Acey had never seen me make such a face.

He laughed at me.

It made me smile.

“Yeah. It’s time to go.”

Dairy Era

2009-08-12T10:28:00.003-04:00

My family calls me the Milk Nazi.

It’s a well-deserved nickname, and stems from the fact that I can detect even the slightest upward change in milk temperature. I’m not one for tantrums, but am not above throwing one if I go to make myself a bowl of cereal, only to discover that the milk was left on the counter for upwards of five minutes.

Warm milk: yuck. In fact, I’m even squeamish about a little bit of spilled milk, because it’s only a matter of time before those drops on the counter become warm milk…and then become rancid milk.

Milk should be cold, contained, and sterile.

These days I think a lot about milk, because I am still nursing my son, Acey. I love breastfeeding. I never could’ve anticipated the bond I feel when I nurse him. I am so glad I decided to stick with it past the initial three months, for that is when it became the most rewarding: Acey popping off and gazing up at me at 4 months old, looking surprised and delighted to find that I was there. Acey at five months, when his preferred nursing position was to hold onto my nose as though it were a handle. Acey at six months, babbling and humming while he nurses. Acey now, at seven months, in a post-nursing euphoric state, grabbing my ears and snuggling into my neck as though to say thank-you for his dinner. So, so sweet.

I’ve had a few hiccups along the way. I am prone to duct blockages, which result in what I like to call “cookie boob.” Cookie boob is so-named because when the ducts along one hemisphere become blocked, the breast starts to look and feel like someone slid a chocolate chip cookie right beneath the surface. I have learned how to clear these blockages, though, and have only had to cope with two actual infections.*

Regardless, the downsides of nursing certainly pale in comparison to the benefits for me. Hence, when it came time for my husband and me to take our first weekend trip away from Acey, my primary concern was that after a full weekend of bottles, he might be reluctant or unwilling to nurse. I eventually had to chalk it up to “out of my control” and hope for the best. However, I did plan to pump the entire weekend, four times a day as per Acey’s feeding schedule, to keep my milk supply up. Also, in preparation for the trip, I had stocked my freezer with 100+ ounces of expressed breast milk. This was enough milk to keep Acey full for not only the whole weekend, but also for the time it might take in the event that his father and I became stranded in Chicago and had to, say, walk home to New York.

Yes. I realize that the preparation was a little crazy. My Fancy French NYC Disco Pediatrician raised his brow a full 6 inches above his Versace eyeglasses when I told him about my banked frozen milk and said, “Ehhhh, you realize it will not kill your child to have a bottle of formula?”

Whatever. I am the Milk Nazi. I will express and keep cold, contained, sterile milk-cicles for my baby boy if I so choose.

Okay. So, my parents arrived to care for Acey for the weekend, and I left them with, um, five (typed, single-spaced) pages of instructions, and a freezer full of milk. My departure was a whirlwind of tears (mine) and promises to pump faithfully, a fact that Acey seemed to appreciate. Or something.

Naturally, our flight to Chicago was delayed by a full hour. I had already failed to take into account the fact that there is an hour’s time difference between New York and Chicago, so by the time we landed, I was ready to burst. I made a bee-line for the women’s rest rooms in O’Hare with my trusty breast-pump.

I entered a handicap stall, and set up shop. I carefully tucked my purse into the protective anti-theft sleeve, and hung the pump off of the hook on the door. While meticulously trying to avoid touching anything in the stall that might be filthy (read: everything around me), I attached the battery pack, which I had never previously used, and hooked up the various jumper cables, horns, and pull-tabs that make up the pump. It’s a “convenient” two-side-at-once appliance, which is great because pumping takes less time. That being said, it’s somewhat of a feat to turn on the machine and hold both milk-catching vessels. But whatever. I undid my nursing bra and bit the edge of my shirt to hold it above all the components. I turned the pump on and positioned the horns and cables and bottles what-not appropriately, and waited for the familiar “whack-a-doo” noise that signals all systems are “go.”

Nothing.

Um.

I tucked one set of cones and tubing beneath an armpit (because that’s a sanitary place) and I grabbed the battery pack.

Tap-tap-tap. Surely if I knocked on it, it would start working.

Nothing.

I took a closer look at the pack only to discover that it requires four AA batteries on each side of the pack. Riiiight. The fact that I had put four new batteries on just one side was not really all that helpful.

Okay. Plan B. I had a two-hour drive from the airport ahead of me, and thus if I wanted to express the milk from my now-quite-full breasts, I had to do it right then. I was supposed to be on a schedule! If I waited two more hours, I would have effectively already skipped one of Acey’s feeding times. And the weekend had just started! Bad mommy. No excuses. Get this done.

I swallowed my pride and exited the stall with the pump slung over one shoulder, components still attached.** I had dropped my shirt’s edge from my teeth but continued to hold the horns and bottles beneath it, as though I were hiding a bomb, which is a good look for an airport.

The women’s bathroom in O’Hare was set up with stalls on either side of the room, and a huge island of sinks in the middle. There was a semi-private baby-changing station at one end, near the opaque windows. It had no outlet.

The only outlet was, of course, right above the gaping hole in the counter, into which women throw wet paper towels, coffee cups, dirty tissues, etc. Oh God.

I laid about 67 paper towels on the slick surface of the countertop. I rested the pump on top of them, single-handedly plugged in the pump, stretching the cord across the vast trash abyss, and removed the components of the pump from my armpit, where I had been holding them. I sighed, lifted my shirt, and turned on the machine.

Whack-a-doo, whack-a-doo, whack-a-doo…

During the following 10 minutes, I was very grateful for my enormous head of hair. I sought its shelter, letting it hang over my face as I bowed my head. It was a minor miracle that I did not run into anybody I knew in that bathroom, given that 75% of my college class lives in Chicago, and I myself had lived and worked downtown for two years.

I wished I had a sign that read “My battery pack is dead!” As I rinsed milky components in the sink and tucked eight ounces into my small cooler, I reconciled with the fact that I was just doing the best that I could.

No, actually I didn’t dump that milk over fear of contamination. It was the hardest-earned milk I had ever expressed, and goddamnit, my son was going to get it and delight in its healthful qualities.

Needless to say, as soon as we arrived at our destination, my husband went out to get me four AA batteries.

And of course, upon our triumphant return, Acey snuggled right in and was happy to nurse again. And his whack-a-doo Milk Nazi mom wept profusely with relief.

*The second of these infections conveniently occurred the morning after we moved homes. It was really a treat to wake up in a box-filled apartment with a giant cookie boob, a raging fever, and the shakes.

**I left my purse in the protective anti-theft sleeve in the stall. I realized this after the entire episode was over, and I had finally made my way out of the bathroom. I had to charge back in at a gallop, shoving my way through a crowd of teenagers wearing matching yellow t-shirts, only to discover it gone. Thankfully, the eastern European janitor saw my torment and led me to a back closet where my good bag hung next to the nearly-full bucket of ammonia on her cart.

Overheard.

2009-05-20T09:37:00.002-04:00

“Actchy, stop break-dancing!”

My parents entertain frequently. When we were growing up, my brother liked nothing more than to stand at the top of the stairs during a party and bellow this line so that the adult guests would overhear.

Mortifying.

Also, totally false. If anyone was attempting to break-dance in those days, it was my brother, not me.

But I think that’s what started my interest in overheard dialogue. It really can be so much funnier to overhear something silly than it is to say it directly to someone. And, you know. So much more embarrassing.

I think I was about twelve or thirteen when my college-bound brother and his friends surprised me with a round of applause. I had been home alone, standing in the center of my parent’s bedroom. It had the best acoustics in the house.

I was singing the national anthem at the top of my lungs.

They overheard me as they walked up the driveway.

What’s funnier than overheard dialogue? Overheard singing. I should know.

The first time I got a headset for my cell phone, I was entirely unaware that it was set so that it would automatically answer an incoming call if I had the headset engaged. Accordingly, I was more than a little surprised when I was interrupted by the voice of my best friend as I bellowed out the long note during “Fool in the Rain” by Led Zeppelin.

I was in my car. Is nothing private anymore?

No, nothing is. Last week, I sent a text message to one of my dearest friends, with whom I hadn’t spoken in a while. I was nursing Acey at the time. A few minutes later, she called me. I was delighted. I picked up her call.

“Hello?”
“…And when someone needs a makeover,
I simply have to take over.
I know… I know… exactly what they need!”
“Um. HELLO?”
“Popular! You’re gonna be pop-u-lar!
I’ll teach you the proper poise when you talk to boys…”

Frankly, at first I thought she was kidding. So I let her finish the verse. But she kept going. I couldn’t shout to get her attention; it would’ve startled my nursing baby. But then again, I didn’t actually want to interrupt her. She has a spectacular voice, and indeed, I thought I was listening to the Wicked soundtrack for a few moments.

I actually had to hang up and send her a text message to get her attention.

But not all overheard dialogue is amusing. When we first moved into our apartment, we noticed that (a) we could, from time to time, hear our neighbors through the vent in our kitchen and that (b) our neighbors hated each other. They had arguments – nay, full-on fights – the likes of which I have never had with anyone.

One night, the hollering got so loud that we hovered over the telephone, debating whether to call 911. But then we were able to make out the following:

“I just CAN’T believe you! It’s GORGEOUS!”

He had proposed.

Great idea, kids. Yes, marry! Spend the rest of your lives throwing the f-bomb to each other.

The only upside of having neighbors like them was that in comparison, our marriage seemed absolutely perfect. Hell, we may bicker from time to time over who did or did not clean out the kitchen sink drain catch, but at least we aren’t them!

Well, those neighbors moved out last month. We had purposely avoided ever getting to know them, because really, it was embarrassing to have the mutual knowledge that they scream at each other all of the time. But I did run into the wife right before they moved. She had yet to see Acey, and offered her congratulations.

“Wow! He’s so adorable!” she said.
“Thanks! I hope his crying doesn’t bother you guys,” I replied, insincerely. (Please. Acey actually very rarely cries for longer than five seconds.)
“Oh, no! We never hear him! In fact, I always feel bad when my husband turns up the TV. I keep telling him to keep it down, that he’ll bother the baby next door!”
“Yeah, we never hear…your TV.”

And now they’re gone. I am a little nervous over who will show up next. I tell my husband that the known evil is better than the unknown. He totally disagrees. Nothing could be worse than sharing a vent with a feuding, expletive-happy couple when you are raising a child who is trying to learn how to talk.

Perhaps. We’ll see. Or maybe…we’ll overhear?

Not exactly lullabies.

2009-04-30T14:18:00.004-04:00

Dialogue. Per Chapter 6 of the GWW text, dialogue is critical to a story. But I guess dialogue is critical generally. I’ve been reading up on child development; it’s essential, even for a baby, to engage in regular dialogue.

For about a month, Acey has been “talking” with us. It’s adorable: a fantastic alternative to his initial sole means of communication, i.e., crying. He’ll concentrate on our faces, screw up his little mouth, jut out his lower lip, murmur “Ooooooo”, and await our reply.* Other times, he seems to tell a tale, gurgling out assorted sounds of varying volume, finishing with a juicy raspberry.

He’s so smart.

I never really thought about how people learn the art of conversation. Surely I never knew it happened so early in life. But it makes sense. Accordingly, I talk to Acey all day long about all sorts of things. ** He loves the chatter, and is answering us more and more.

So, I suppose there are many activities that benefit children long before I would’ve guessed.

Because we live in Manhattan, there is no lack of services and opportunities for babies, many of which still seem like they might be…unnecessary. Infant massage. Newborn “Movement” classes. Baby Mandarin lessons.

Yeah. It’s a little obscene. With this range of alternatives before us, no wonder parents start flipping out about preschool a few months after childbirth.***

I remember when I was looking for job here in the New York area. I had flown in from Chicago for an interview, and I decided to swing by and see my niece. I hadn’t seen her in several months. I was told by my sister-in-law that because of the time I’d be available to stop by, I should try to meet her and her nanny at Music Class.

Um. Excuse me? Music Class? The child was six months old! What on earth was she learning at music class?

Fast forward. I have a baby. After all is said and done, I decide to stay home with him for a while, for I am thrilled with being his daytime caregiver. This decision feels right to me.

But. At the end of each afternoon, just when I’m starting to wilt a little, I note that Acey needs a bit more attention than usual. He gets antsy and, during these later hours before his final meal, he prefers to be held, bounced, walked around the apartment, etc. He has no patience for the bouncy seat or his gym mat.

Naturally, this is also the time of day during which he is awake for the longest stretch of time.

And my biceps are getting a little tired.

So, um. Yeah. I sign us up for a weekly music class. The child is four months old.

Our first class was yesterday. We arrived at the “school” (read: Disney World-like storefront replete with fancy organic toys and teaming with moms and nannies pushing $700 strollers) a half hour early, so that I could nurse Acey right before class. Checking in was much like doing so at the airport: ID, please; here’s your badge; please give me your son’s pediatrician’s number and the name of his alternative caretakers and any known allergies and here, leave a blood sample and please list your previous four addresses and your mother’s maiden name and the age you were when you first rode a bike and…

I exaggerate. But only a little.

Acey and I retired to the “nursing room.” This was actually a closet with a plush chair. No complaints here: I’ve nursed in much more uncomfortable places. **** However, I panicked, slightly, because there was no clock in the nursing room, and thus I had no way to gauge how long Acey had been eating, or when the class began. ***** We paid an embarrassing fee for this class, and I was loathe to miss even a minute of it.

Luckily for us, Acey and I had not enrolled in the class alone. We were joined by his buddy, who was born a few days before he, and his buddy’s mom, who is a friend of mine. They knew of our plans to nurse prior to the class, and rescued us when they arrived.

My friend was nonplussed by the nursing room.

“Really? I thought it was going to be a spacious lounge. I guess I should’ve knocked?”

Nah. I’m not shy, and was relieved someone could now tell me what time it was. And I was sure that 18 year boy old who worked at the facility was used to bare breasts?

Apparently, my friend had already reported to the classroom, where she was immediately admonished for wearing shoes. She had also met the only other baby there at the time, whose name was the same as her son’s. Perfect. Not confusing at all.

Whatever. We ventured to the classroom, removed our shoes, and stepped in.

Initially, the “teacher” was speaking like a regular human being. She introduced herself, in a normal speaking voice. She asked if we minded waiting for stragglers, explained our best tact for the class, etc.

But something happened once she decided to start the class.

She blew a pitch pipe and started singing.

“Of course she started singing,” you might say. “It was a music class.”

Yeah, but she started singing and didn’t stop for forty-five minutes. She sang not only songs, but instructions and general comments. It reminded me of the way in which priests chant “The Lord’s Prayer.” I felt like I should be responding to her with “Amen” when she sang out “Do yooooou think it’s too warm in heeeeere? I believe I’ll gooooo adjust the thermostaaaaaat.”

There was also the fact that she was…screaming. I mean, she was on pitch, but she was still screaming. My friend went so far as to inquire whether the class was a touch too noisy for the little ones’ ears. The teacher responded, in song (obviously), that the sound of the maracas (which had been passed out during the percussion portion of the program, and which Acey promptly sucked on – very hygienic) was generally fine for the babies.

Um, yeah. Not the maracas that were really the problem.

Query whether it was helpful to Acey’s musical development to have his mom alternatively skipping, jumping, and running in a circle during the class.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, really. I had sort of envisioned all of the moms sitting in a circle, singing soft songs and maybe tapping out rhythm. I thought my friend and I might meet and befriend other new moms.

While we did sit in a circle for a short portion of the program, there was far more activity than I would’ve guessed, owing in no small part to the fact that there were older kids in the class, kids who needed to run, tumble, etc. And making friends seemed out of the question, given that it was far too loud to hear myself think, let alone make small talk with, say, Jason’s mommy.

All this being said, I have to admit something. Acey loved Music Class. He was enraptured with the constantly-singing teacher, and he squealed with glee when she barked like a dog (which she did more than once.)

Also, he was totally tuckered out by the experience, and required no excessive entertainment when we got home. Indeed, he was happy to lay on his back and converse in a quiet, inside voice for a full 40 minutes when we got in. I think he was trying to decompress.

Do I think this class will make for Acey’s certain future as a Julliard prodigy? No. In fact, do I think I could’ve achieved the same amount of delight in the boy by singing really, really loudly at him in the comforts of his own home? Probably.

But an outing is an outing. If dialogue is good for him, musical dialogue is arguably better.

So we’ll continue to attend. We will not be drop-outs.

But I may shop for earplugs. For both of us.

*When he first began the back-and-forth, I reported his milestone to my best friend. She noted that “her cat did the same thing.”

** “That was an impressive poopy, Acey! I can’t believe you were able to shoot straight down your leg into the footy of your pajamas like that.”
“Are you tired of this nursing top, Love? Does Mommy wear the same thing every day?”
“Can you tell if this is a milk stain or a spit-up stain, Little Man?”
“I would love to know from whom you have inherited your chipper morning disposition; are you sure you want to giggle and play right now? Can you wait until at least 6:30?”

***One of my girlfriends was chastised by a fellow mom for failing to begin researching kindergarten for her son. Her son is 19 months old. Seriously? Gross.

****A church pew.

*****Look at my watch? I forgot to wear it. Use my cell phone’s clock? I dropped it into an auto-flushing toilet two days earlier.

Speaking of speaking.

2009-04-26T00:00:00.002-04:00

“That’s a nice bike. What is it, an Orbea Volata?”

The man speaking had a Brian Dennehy look about him: barrel-chested and grey-haired. He was smiling broadly at the woman folding her laundry next to me. She was roughly his age, and silvery blond.

My eyebrows lifted. I wondered if he was hitting on her. This would be fun.

“Yes. Yes, thank you.” She spoke efficiently; clearly she would rather not continue the conversation. She flicks her towels a little more crisply than she had been, and focuses on her pillow cases.

The Brian Dennehy guy did not notice her body language. He continued to talk about her bike, and had shifted his stance to better appreciate it. He continued enthusiastically.

It occurred to me that he wasn’t exactly talking to her anymore. Rather, the bike seemed his conversational companion. He nodded at it, tilted his head. He’d been going on for a full two minutes with basically no encouragement. From anybody.

“….Yeah, I used to have a few bikes, as a matter of fact. Used to bike to work….”

I noticed for the first time that this guy was wearing spandex pants. For some reason, they weren’t as horrifying as most. Possibly because his torso was so massive and his legs so chicken-like: his t-shirt hung long, covering any potential horribleness.

“Man, those were the days! Of course, back then, I looked more like…”

He looked away from the bike. He noticed me.

“Her.”

I blush appropriately. “Yes, I’m a real princess.”

I hadn’t had a full night sleep in over two months at the time. I was wearing an old sweatshirt of my husband’s and a pair of gym shorts with my law school’s name partially worn off of them. My hair looked like a lion’s mane and I hadn’t brushed my teeth since Wednesday evening. It was Friday morning.

Brian Dennehy’s doppelganger gestured at the array of baby clothes spread before me. “My guess is that your son thinks you’re a princess. In fact, he probably thinks there are two different kind of people: you, and everybody who’s not you. Does he call your husband ‘Not the Mama’?”

“My son can’t talk. He’s nine weeks old,” I tell him.

He nods, unhearing. “I’ll bet. Remember that show? Really good show. What was it called? They cancelled it too quickly. There were some dinosaurs. And the baby dinosaur called the father ‘Not the Mama.’ The dad was funny; sort of a Ralph Kramden guy. But, you know, a dinosaur. Yeah. Kramden. You’re too young to remember ‘The Honeymooners.’”

I agreed. Yet I wasn’t getting any younger listening to this diatribe. I decided to quicken my pace with the folding of the clothes.

A weeks later my husband went out to get some take-out for dinner. He was gone forever; I wondered whether he had been hit by a taxi.

“What the hell took you so long?”
“Don’t ask. I got cornered by some guy in the lobby. I don’t even know how it happened.”
“Was it Avery?”*
“No, I’ve never seen this guy before. Older dude. He was wearing spandex pants.”

It was Bob. Bob was able to engage my husband for a while by pontificating on his theory for saving the economy. My husband was too polite to extricate himself.

His willingness to be Bob’s sounding board that one time has trapped him in a terrible new role: Bob’s buddy. Bob has taken to following him down the hall and into the elevator these days. My husband, in turn, has taken to fake cell phone calls to avoid him.

Last week, Bob materialized outside of the building entrance. A friend and I were on our way out with our babies, and Bob held the door for us and our strollers.

“Look at ‘em. Yep. Big guys!”

We have identically-aged boys. They are not big.

“Yeah, my daughters were big babies. Not my son, though. He was so pretty when he was born that I was nervous.”

I tried not to let his comment get too far under my skin. Bob turned to consider the babies again.

“You should know my brother’s boys. They were on a camping trip once and…”
“WE HAVE TO GO.”
“…once they got to the camping grounds upstate…”
“WE’RE REALLY LATE,” my friend bellows. She plows forward, leaving Bob to address the sidewalk.

I’m startled.

So is Bob. He blinks rapidly and turns his head toward the next person headed to the building.

It’s my out. I take off after my friend.

Chapter Six of the GWW text is called “Dialogue: Talking it up.”

Frankly, sometimes I think that “talking it up” isn’t dialogue at all. It’s monologue. And the best way to deal is to just plow forward.

*Avery is another building goofball. He has no apparent line of work and seems to spend all day, every day walking his noble, sad-eyed hound dog. He often stops us in order to admire Acey, but begins each conversation with “How old?” We find this irritating, as it suggests that while he is desperate to talk with us, and has no problem eating away precious moments of Acey’s nap time, he can’t be bothered to remember us.

Ho-rrendous.

2009-04-14T21:12:00.002-04:00

There’s a “Your Turn” exercise on page 190 of the GWW text that asks me to “find an annoyingly dry and difficult piece of writing, preferably a legal document…” I’m then supposed to rewrite it.

Man. There is nothing drier than a piece of legal writing.

In fact, legal jobs are fairly dry, in and of themselves.

Or at least, some legal jobs.

That is, some legal jobs that I’ve had.

I have worked in the litigation departments of two very large law firms. I did some white collar defense, SEC investigatory work, trademark infringement, and ethics laws stuff. If you look at my résumé, my time spent working at these places actually looks like it was pretty cool.

That’s the trouble with a résumé. Even when it tells the truth, it may not be giving the whole story.

The whole story about my two big firm jobs is that they were, by and large, really boring.

But. That’s not to say there were no good times to be had. Indeed, I have some really fond memories of those years, and especially those years at my first firm.

That firm occupied six floors of a skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia. The floors were basically segregated according to practice: Real Estate on 51, Business and Finance on 50, etc. The Litigation department was on 46.

Well, most of the Litigation department. We had the largest group, and did not all fit on the same floor. So, while they tried to keep everybody sort of together, inevitably, they ended up stashing a few junior associates in various places around the firm. This is how I ended up on the north side of the 47th floor, tucked among three other female junior litigators.

Coincidentally, we all had the same aspirations, that is, to pay our dues professionally, pay our loans financially, and move on to greener pastures. Hence, not one of us minded our stomping grounds. Conversely, we loved it. Our offices were located alongside of those belonging to blue-haired retired partners and tech people who were never actually there. Nobody cared if you didn’t change out of your sneakers all day or rolled in a little later than you probably should have once or twice.

But by far, the best perk of working on 47 North was the fact that there were no big guns around. All of the important partners were down on 46, where the lifeblood of the department ran. Up on 47 North, we could freely bitch about who was making our lives miserable and not worry that anybody would overhear. We could ask dumb questions, loudly, without worrying that a bad review would follow, come bonus time.

In essence, being on 47 North turned an annoyingly dry and difficult job into something a lot more digestible. We rewrote the job, if you will.

In fact, we, the four lit associates on 47 North, came to be quite good friends. Come Christmastime, I even received a small gift from one of them. It was a scented holiday candle, and it came wrapped in “Ho! Ho! Ho!” paper, appropriate for the holiday.

But I can never leave well-intentioned actions alone. Instead of thanking my friend for her thoughtfulness, I decided to make an annoyingly drawn-out joke and continually gripe about the wrapping paper: Why was my paper adorned with “Ho”? Neither of the presents given to the other girls had this paper. What was she trying to say? Did she think I was a ho? I was offended!

Blah, blah, blah.

Needless to say, the bearer of the gift was really tired of me after about 10 minutes of this mock-pout.

Faced with the fall-out from my own bad pun, I decided to flog it. Why let a perfectly bad joke die?

My friend who had graciously given me the candle was in the midst of planning her wedding during this time. As a result, her mom was calling her on a regular basis. And by “regular basis,” I mean “every twenty minutes.”

Thus, when she left for lunch that day, I took a pair of scissors to the wrapping paper, and cut out the word “Ho.” I then taped this word to the mouthpiece of her telephone receiver. I knew that her mom would be calling, and relished the idea of her lifting the phone to answer it, only to find herself looking at the word “Ho.”

The clock started to tick.

Her mom must’ve been trapped under something heavy or something, because for the first time since the proposal, she never called. In fact, I started to forget that I had even planted that “Ho.”
It got to be early evening, and we, the big firm lit associates, were all still at work. Both my gift-giving friend and another of our quad of colleagues were slogging through a huge, huge document review as part of discovery for a monstrously nightmarish case. Each of them had at least fifty or sixty boxes of documents overflowing her office and spilling into the (almost always un-traveled) hallway. It was a mind-numbingly dull task that monopolized all of their time, but it was for one of the firm’s most important clients.

It just so happened that on that night, the Chairman of the firm stopped by their offices to see about the document review’s status.

Now, consider this.

Not the partner-in-charge of the case. Not even the managing partner for the Philadelphia office. The Chairman of the firm stopped by.

He’s an amicable guy. When he came by, he noted the pyramids of boxes exploding out of my friends’ offices and inquired whether there was anything he could do to help facilitate the review.
My friends peered out from behind their box towers and nodded vigorously. They had tried to secure the conference room across the hall to store their boxes, but their request was denied. They were told the tech people needed it for a weekly meeting.

“Ridiculous,” declared our Chair. “Let me call the conference room coordinator for you.”

You see where this is going.

With purpose, the Chairman strode into my friend’s office and behind her desk.

The desk of the friend who had gifted me the “Ho” paper.

Of course, she knew not of my little wrapping paper caper. Imagine her confusion when one minute, the Chair was lifting her phone to make a call, and the next minute, he had “Ho” paper stuck to his cheek.

Right. Because it wouldn’t have been enough for him to lift the receiver and discover the “Ho.”

He didn’t notice the "Ho." That is, he didn’t notice the "Ho" until he was wearing the "Ho."

Frankly, I’m not sure how the transfer from phone to face happened, but suffice it to say, it did.

Now, all the while that this is going down, I had my rear firmly planted in my desk chair, and my eyes glued to my computer. Nobody of import ever lingered in our hallway; I was sure as hell going to appear to be working my ass off when the Chair of the firm did. Hence, I didn’t notice anything was amiss until I heard the accusatory proclamation of my colleague.

“Actchy did it!”

During the next few minutes, I attempted to explain my silly joke. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to stop using the word “Ho.” I must’ve broken the record (to the extent one existed) for the number of times that term has been used at once:

“Um-she-gave-me-a-present-wrapped-in-ho-ho-ho-paper-but-I-called-it-ho-paper-like-ho-the-prostitute-not-ho-like-Santa’s-laugh-and-I-cut-a-ho-out-of-the-ho-paper-and-taped-the-ho-to-the-phone…”

Ho-no.

To his credit, the Chair never used the term “Ho” throughout the entire uncomfortable situation. Which is probably why he got to be Chair…and I left the firm nine months later.

But, you know. At least I added some adrenaline to an otherwise long-ass day. Even if my pun was . . . “ho”pe-less?

I don't scrapbook.

2009-02-06T18:42:00.004-05:00

I am avoiding some of the “Your Turn” exercises in the GWW chapter on Voice because they seem difficult. I’m supposed to take something I’ve written and rewrite it with a different Voice. Because I use a casual Voice for almost everything I write for fun, this means I’d have to rewrite using formal Voice. I’m then supposed to consider how the shift altered the story.

I may just slap this into the “too hard” pile and move on.

I am perfectly adept in writing in a formal voice. I mean, I am a lawyer. But when it comes to writing for my own edification and enjoyment, I’m not inclined to step back into the formal realm, regardless of what lessons I may learn. GWW text be damned.

Besides, I think it’s apparent that my signature Voice is informal. You can’t force someone to be something she is not.

There are times, of course, when I kind of try to be someone I am not. I suppose we all do? I will occasionally attempt to do something that falls into the “I wish I were the kind of person who did this” category rather than the “I am inherently talented at this” category.

When my husband and I were married, my cousin and his wife gave us a gorgeous, Italian handmade personalized scrapbook as a wedding gift. It is lovely: a very generous, thoughtful gift.

Who wouldn’t want to make a scrapbook after their wedding? Why not create something for posterity that contains casual snapshots and clips of fabric from the dresses and copies of the programs and a few cards from important loved-ones?

Well, maybe because you’ve never done something like that in your whole life, you’re not especially artistic, and you spent a sick amount of money for a professional photographer and videographer to do something extremely similar so you wouldn’t have to worry about it.

Is it really okay to give someone a gift that’s not tailored for them? I like to cook. Nay, I love to cook. But I recognize that there are people who do not like to cook, and who fear their kitchens, and who would rather have a full body wax than be responsible for preparing a dish from scratch. Would I purchase a mandolin slicer or a bamboo steamer for such a person?

I would not. I would realize that the person might then feel obliged to use it, when in reality, they don’t want to use it, nor should they try to force themselves to like using it.

Whatever. This doesn’t change the fact that after my wedding, I owned a really freaking nice, really freaking blank scrapbook.

I decided that it was imperative that I complete this wedding scrapbook. My reasons for this were several. First, I’m shanty Irish enough to be completely incapable of letting good money go to waste. This was a pricey gift; I could not let it sit in a closet somewhere, nor could I (::blush::) re-gift it, as it was emblazoned with our names and wedding date.

Second, it arrived at the start of my marriage. It was the beginning of an era, and I wanted to start off on the right foot. You see, I like photo albums and assorted homemade records of families. I like them more than the average person. I think this is because my own parents never created photo albums and assorted homemade records. My brother and sister and I were loved unconditionally and were showered with attention and support, and we were regularly photographed.* Unfortunately, almost forty years’ worth of these photographs sits in assorted shirt boxes in my parents’ basement. For years, my mom claimed that when she retired, she would sort these pictures and put them in albums.

Well, she’s been retired for over five years, and the photos remain where they have always been.

I guess I feel a little “there but for the grace of God go I” about this. I also know that eventually, I’m going to be the party who sorts those piles of photos (and it’s quite a mess: I think my First Communion photos are in the same box as ones from my dad’s tour in Viet Nam), because the piles bother me far more than any other family member.

The third reason I decided to make use of the scrapbook is because I decided I want to be the kind of person who scrapbooks.

Now, as it turns out, the kind of person who scrapbooks is the kind of person who has a lot of scrapbooking shit. So, I headed to the scrapbooking shit store.

Walking into this place is like joining a cult. Holy cow. First off, the slogan is irresistible: “Don’t let your memories blow away!”

Oh my God! Thank God I decided to make this scrapbook! I don’t want my memories to blow away! I want to nail them down! I will do this with adhesive photo corners and I will tailor my memories by trimming them with this paper cutter and I will narrate my memories with these amusing phrases printed on attractive stickers! I will maybe even come back here and take a class, or sit with those attractive ladies in the back, who wear fashionable outfits and who sip coffee and laugh while they deftly make ribbons from their sons’ little league jerseys and sing along to…what is that, Joni Mitchell?

I bought about $100 worth of crap. And I made a wedding scrapbook. It took me a year and two apartments in two cities to finish. I found it stressful, and treated it as a chore. I got a backache every time I worked on it.

Fast forward.

I have a baby boy. He is wonderful. He is full of promise. I want to record every single thing he does: the genius he displays when he finds his mouth with his fist, how adorable he is when he smiles, the way his hair seems to be transitioning from dark-like-mine to reddish-like-Daddy’s.

I will make a baby book for him!

Now, to be fair, it’s not that I’ve forgotten that I’m not the sort of person who scrapbooks. It’s that my husband has this amazing baby book. It is a full record of first smiles and favorite foods, and it contains useful information like childhood illnesses and when he first slept through the night.** We open it and compare his newborn photo to Acey, and we marvel at how similar they are.

I have a baby book, too. Inexplicably, I kept it in the underwear drawer of my dresser throughout my childhood. It contained an envelope from Cut-N-Curl containing a lock of my baby hair, and a coffee stain. My name isn’t even written on it.

So, I’d say that the baby book project isn’t so much about my desire to be someone I’m not, but more about creating an important treasure trove for my son.

And that’s why I have a pretty blue blank book sitting on the desk beside me. I’m keeping it the clear box in which it came, to protect it from coffee.

*Some of us were photographed more than others. There are hundreds of pictures of my sister, the oldest, and full Super 8 tapes of her taking a nap. There is one baby picture of the youngest child, and I’m unconvinced it’s actually me and not a shot that came with the frame, as the child looks nothing like me.

** Six weeks. This is a talent his son did not inherit.

Special Delivery

2009-01-30T19:18:00.004-05:00

I just started looking at the GWW chapter on Voice: it’s Chapter 8. “Voice” is an interesting topic for a writer: it’s sort of difficult to explain, and it’s tricky to distinguish from “Point of View.” It seems to boil down the cadence and delivery of a story: the same story can take on very different meanings, depending on the author’s Voice.

For example, as regular readers know, I recently gave birth to my firstborn: a perfect baby boy, Acey.* His arrival into the world was fabulous, but I could probably tell the story a hundred different ways, not changing any facts, and give the story a number of spins: a spiritual spin, a nostalgic spin, a light-hearted spin…

But no matter which Voice I choose, I’d like to get the story out here at Beyond Pickles. You all can determine how I have spun the story, okay?

The fact of the matter is that I had really wanted to deliver Acey naturally, without medication. However, I really wasn’t sure I had the constitution for it. My sister delivered two of her children naturally, after having to have an emergency c-section for her first, and she swore that not having to slog through the medication post-delivery allowed her a more significant connection with the delivery process.

I really bought into this idea. But I couldn’t bring myself to really commit to going natural. Common experience dictates that saying “I’ll play it by ear” is tantamount to saying “I’ll get an epidural.”

But whatever. I played it by ear.

And I went natural.

Go, me!

It all started at 3:30 in the morning on December 23rd, when some cramps woke me up. The first thing I did was calculate how many hours I had to have the baby if I wanted him or her to avoid having a Christmas Eve birthday: twenty and a half. Okay.

Funny, really, because now that all is said and done, I realize that the date of his birth is so, so inconsequential.**

I made a vested effort to get back to sleep, realizing to some extent that my time for continuous sleep was nearly over for the foreseeable future. Alas, no dice. I got up at 4 am and took a long, hot, thorough shower.

“Take-a-shower-before-you-do-anything-else” was an instruction from my mom. It was an excellent one. I relish the memory. I haven’t had a good shower since. And by “good,” I mean “relaxing,” not “effective.” (Although I suppose that point is up for debate, given that most of my showers these days last roughly 3 minutes and sometimes there is a baby in a bouncy seat on the bathroom floor while I give myself a once-over. Certainly that final shower pre-Acey was better than the first ones post-Acey, i.e., the ones I took in the hospital, during which I wasn’t sure whether I was more afraid of wetting something on my body that maybe should stay dry or of contracting athlete’s foot, for I ended up with a roommate and I was unable to check the soles of said roommate’s feet for fungus prior to my bathing.)

I decided not to wake my husband, figuring that perhaps one of us should get a little shut-eye. Ideally, of course, I would’ve been the one who got the shut-eye, since I was the one who later had to squeeze eight-plus pounds of baby from her body, but that’s beside the point. I waited until a minute before his alarm went off at 6am, and let him know that he needed to call work and tell them not to expect him.***

The morning went quickly, as did my labor. Our doctor told us to report to the office rather than to head directly to the hospital. This was fine, except that it meant an extra two cab rides.

Note: I will never again drive over a bump and not recall what it’s like to be in active labor in an old New York taxi, i.e., a Crown Vic with little-to-no suspension. Query whether I have those vicious cab ride jolts to thank for the speed of my delivery.

The doctor confirmed what we already knew: our baby would arrive that day. The doctor essentially said we could head to the hospital, or, if we like, we could walk around for a while, and then head to the hospital.

Okay.

At Lamaze class, I heard all about this whole business of walking during active labor to move things along. And I am here to say I don’t buy it.

“Walk around”? I was barely able to stand! My husband had to heave me from the cab into the doctor’s office, and I won’t even go into the trip from our apartment to the elevator in our building (keep in mind my husband also carried our two sizeable bags of crap for the hospital, my purse, a bag of snacks, and he felt inclined to keep the camera at grabbing distance, so that he could document me, our exit from home, the doorman’s reaction to our departure, the cab driver, etc.)

Needless to say, we decided to forego the walking around, but we did determine we’d like to do a few hours of labor in the comfort of our own home before skipping over to the hospital, which, blessedly, was just across town.

I’m thrilled we made this call, for a few reasons.

(a) My husband got a nice workout again dragging our assorted bags and his incapable-of-walking wife in and out of our doctor’s office, taxis, and our building. Exercise is good for a new daddy.
(b) I was able to eat a little yogurt when we got home. I think that had I gone the whole day with no sustenance, I may have really lost it. Fasting during labor is, in my opinion, another absurd idea. I mean, I didn’t want to eat a cheesesteak or anything, but a little protein was certainly warranted given the task at hand. For the record, despite my snack, I neither threw up nor did that which all first-time mothers dread (it starts with a ‘p’ and ends with “on the table.”)
(c) Prolonging arrival in the hospital eventually allowed me to decide I could go without pain meds, because by the time I got my ass in a bed, I was already 8 cm.

So yes, when we finally made it to the hospital, I was really far gone. And here’s the only part about my delivery day that burns my butt: nobody ever offered me a freaking wheelchair. Seriously. I thought (based on TV and movies) that as soon as a pregnant woman came within 2 blocks of a hospital, she was forced into a wheelchair. Not so for me, that’s for damn sure.

Perhaps this harkens back to the fact that medical professionals seem to believe that the laboring mom-to-be should take her daily constitutional. All I know is that as my husband checked us in, nobody even offered me a seat. I had to beg for a chair, and eventually someone rolled an armless desk chair around the counter for me.

Right. This was kind of crappy, but I figured I’d be in a room under a doctor’s supervision soon enough.

Ah, but apparently, every pregnant woman in the City decided to start her contractions on 12/23. It was a zoo in the hospital, and a full 40 minutes elapsed before we were told a room was ready for me.

Finally. Wheelchair, please?

Not so much. A woman who was a quarter of my size told me to “follow her.” At this point, someone had distracted my husband with further queries about some sort of administrative nonsense. I found myself really starting to get ticked off. Follow her? No. Enough walking!

“Um, how am I supposed to follow you?” I asked from my wheeled, wobbly, armless desk chair.

“It’s just down the hall; follow me,” the pint-sized lunatic hospital worker instructed.

Wouldn’t you think the hospital would want to reduce possible exposure to liability by *not* asking their laboring patients to meander on slick linoleum without support? Not for nothing, but I am a lawyer. I would.

This woman didn’t even offer me her arm. Not that it would’ve helped. My 6’4” husband could barely keep me vertical at that point.

But I got my ass out of the chair. I took five paces, and was hit by another violent contraction, which were about a minute apart at this point. I demanded that someone roll my perch up to me and I sweated it out there. We inched along that way until my husband cruised up and incredulously inquired as to why nobody was offering me help. Of course, at that point, we were outside of my room.

Thank God.

I do think that the last bit of “walking” is probably why I went into shock as soon as I sat down on my bed. But the angelic labor and delivery nurse popped an IV in me and I was right as rain in no time. (My hallway escort disappeared. Perhaps my husband murdered her? It would’ve been warranted, in my opinion...).

An intern came to ask if I wanted an epidural. I had just discovered I was already 8 cm dilated, and I knew I could handle the rest on my own. I declined, much to the intern’s surprise, who told me I “didn’t need to be a hero.”

Please. Of course I needed to be a hero.

And the rest was smooth sailing. We worked through the final parts of labor so well that I actually slept between my biggest contractions. Really, I did. My doctor ended up hanging out in our room for the final hours because I needed it as quiet as a church at midnight, and she needed to do paperwork. All of my planning for music and construction of Itunes playlists appropriate for labor was for naught. I needed to concentrate and I wanted no noise.

I had no energy for anything other than dealing with labor. I actually stopped speaking in full sentences: My husband would massage my hands gently until a contraction began, when I’d utter, “No rub; just hold” as though I were a bad 1960s TV take on an American Indian.

Toward the end, I decided I did need just a little distraction. My husband had been reading the New York Times Magazine while I slept between my contractions, and I looked him square in the eye and said, “Read. Aloud. Now.” He inquired what I wanted to hear, and I said, “No matter. Just start.”

My husband made his way through an article about Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He began mid-article, mid-paragraph, just as I asked. I saved that magazine, and if I ever meet Mr. Hoffman, you can bet he’ll be surprised to hear he helped deliver our son.

Now, when I was finally ready to push, the surprise was that, well, I wasn’t ready to push. I asked my doctor how I would know that we were ready to go, and she promised me that I would be overcome with an overwhelming desire to bear down.

Not so much. I was overcome with exhaustion, but that’s not exactly the same thing. In fact, it’s actually the opposite.

In the end, my doctor encouraged me to “exit from that Zen place we’d been during labor.” Which is remarkable because I did not realize I had the capacity to visit a Zen place. Also because I’m almost certain my husband didn’t know we were going to go to a Zen place, and if he did, he probably would’ve objected, as he’s not really into that sort of thing. Whatever the case, we exited.

But I found I had no idea how to push. Maybe I’m not hard-wired for intuitive baby-having, but it does seem odd that my body was neither instinctively ready to send the baby on his way nor was I able to intuit how to expel him. I actually had to get instructions from the doctor and nurse.

I’ve always been able to follow instructions fairly well. So, after about 30 minutes or so, Acey arrived. He was perfect, healthy, and screaming his head off. The screaming was not a precursor of future habits: since his arrival, he’s been a fairly mellow little guy. He demonstrated his mellowness on his way into the world: during delivery, his heart rate never dropped when he entered the birth canal. Both the doctor and nurse commented on this, saying neither had ever, ever seen a baby whose heart rate didn’t fluctuate at that point. It’s naturally stressful for a baby, and they usually respond accordingly. Our little guy was cool under, well, pressure.

As were his mom and dad. The delivery nurse told our waiting families that we “should teach childbirth classes.”

Just what we’ve always aspired to do.

I’ll never forget when my fabulous doctor**** announced those three amazing words (“It’s a boy!”), confirming that which nearly everybody had already guessed. Our little guy. So, so perfect. I remarked later that I was surprised that I didn’t cry when they first handed him over, to which my husband furrowed his brow and said, “Um, yes you did?” Did I? I was far too ecstatic to realize. The little angel.

So, despite not fully committing to foregoing an epidural, and ignoring carefully crafted musical set lists, and failing to put together a “birth plan” as instructed by our Lamaze teacher (our birth plan was “have baby”), I had a fabulously successful natural delivery.

So I hear. I didn’t watch a thing. In fact, opening my eyes fell into the same category as listening to music: I had no energy to do so. And, to be honest, I didn’t really want to see what was happening to my body. When the nurse proffered a mirror so I could see my son’s head crowning, I declined. She raised her eyebrows in a “okay, if that’s really what you want…” sort of way, but didn’t dwell on it. She was surprised, however, by my reaction to the…um…afterbirth.

When my husband saw the placenta, he was impressed. “Holy crap, that thing is huge!”

This, finally, caused me to perk up: “Really? Lemme see.”

The nurse was incredulous: “You shut your eyes when you gave birth to your gorgeous baby boy, but when the slippery gelatinous placenta arrives, that you want to see?”

Well. Yeah?

And so it is: our Special Delivery. I could retell it a thousand times, and, no doubt, I will. Perhaps my voice will alter its nuances over the years. I’ve been told I will forget the pain.

I know I will. Indeed, I already have. There was no pain associated with the arrival of our little man. Only glory. At the end of the day, I wasn’t the hero, and neither was my husband: Acey was.

*New blog handle for the little one. Upon reflection, I like it so much that I almost could’ve chosen it as his actual name.

Well, maybe not.

**That being said, I’m sure my accountant father-in-law is pleased that our little man came before 2009 did, rendering us a tax deduction.

*** I suppose I could attempt to include in this story my thoughts on my husband and his role in Acey’s delivery. However, I think that would make this already-lengthy post far too long. My husband was a superstar. He was a hero. He was everything I needed him to be and more. Perhaps the fact that we’ve been a couple for over a decade has enabled us to be of like minds when push comes to shove (no pun intended) but whatever the cause, his demeanor and support were truly the reason the delivery went so well. Again, I could go on and on, but I won’t. I just couldn’t let his role in all this pass without note.

***I have a bit of a crush on my OB. Aside from being a great doctor who always made me feel comfortable, she is totally cool, extraordinarily stylish (a trait she seems to exhibit even when wearing scrubs and that shower-cap like hat), and was a professional ballerina before she went to medical school. What’s not to love? A few days after Acey was born, I dreamed that she invited my husband and me to have dinner with her and her spouse, and I woke up all a-twitter, as though we’d been invited to dine with the President. Alas, just a dream.

What Child is this?

2008-12-28T16:33:00.001-05:00

I suspected that our little one’s entrance to our lives would inspire endless stories, but I was caught totally unaware by the magnitude of all there is to say about becoming a parent. As my mind processes all of this very new and very wonderful experience, please stay tuned. For now, know that the arrival of our baby boy on December 23rd was safe, awe-inspiring, and to date, the very best thing that has ever happened for your author.

Down She Goes

2008-12-02T21:54:00.002-05:00

In the GWW text's Chapter 7 on Setting and Pacing, there is a “Your Turn” exercise that asks the writer to recall the most frightening moment of his or her life, and to write about it. The exercise notes that “chances are time slowed down for you as you were living that moment.” I’m lucky enough to say that I am not really sure what my most frightening moment of life has been. Sure, I’ve been scared plenty of times, but I don’t have much to complain about. However, I certainly know what it feels like to have time slow down for a few moments.

I’m getting fairly close to term over here, creeping up into my 37th week of pregnancy, which, for all of you novices, means that I’m more than 8 months along. I am a bit of a wonder of physics, really, in the way that many pregnant women are: my belly is unbelievably balanced on my abdomen in an almost-comic way. The baby is truly all up front,* to the point where in many outfits, it appears I have shoved a beach ball under my sweater and am actually pretending to be pregnant. While this is good for laughs, it really impedes my ability to see my feet.

So, a few days ago, I was making my way to the Path Station during my daily trek to work. There are a couple of details relevant to this trek. First, and most importantly, I was wearing dressy flats rather than my sneakers. I had plans to have dinner with my girlfriends after work, and had made a vested effort to look “cute.”** Whereas I had kicked my other work shoes to the curb for the purposes of my third trimester generally, this day was a special occasion, and the New Balance were home in the closet. Secondly, I need to point out that it was freezing. As such, I had two options for outerwear: my ski parka and my dress coat. All of my other coats are narrowly tailored and therefore useless to me right now. As I was attempting to avoid the dowdy-pregnant-lady look, I had donned my dress coat.

My dress coat is an A-line, and has a hugely full bodice. Normally, the drape of the coat is rather dramatic, because I am so tall. Sadly, the effect of this drape nowadays is that I pretty much look like a living, breathing mountain. Whatever. It’s nicer than my ski parka.

So, back to the trek. I was a few blocks from the station and attempting to cross the street in my flats and my giant, ankle-length coat, when suddenly I was falling.

This was the part that went in slo-mo.

Now, I know I’m tall, but the fall down to the street seemed to take forever. I don’t even know what sent me off my feet: no, it wasn’t icy, and I didn’t seem to actually trip on anything. I just fell. And I was afraid.

And on the way down, I cried, “Oh, NO!” Which, in and of itself, is sort of strange for me. I would’ve thought I would’ve yelled “Holy Shit” or something similar.

But in a way, I am glad at what I said, and the borderline-pathetic way in which it escaped my lips, because it caused a passer-by to stop. He saw me in a pile next to the curb, clutching my coffee mug (no, I didn’t drop the coffee – some things in life are too important to let go), and inquired whether I was okay.

I looked up from my puddle of brown wool and said, “I’m actually pregnant; can you help me up?”

He gasped in horror and gallantly heaved me to a standing position.

He was roughly the same age as I, and must’ve thought I was just about to give birth to quads, because that’s how big my dress coat makes me look. He was so concerned, and took my coffee from me, and asked if there was someone he could call for me, and…and…

I started to bawl.

Not because I was hurt – I had landed as though I was sliding into second base and didn’t even come close to banging the belly. And not because I was worried, because I could tell that I and the baby were just fine. I started to cry because he was so nice to me.

But of course, as soon I started to cry, the guy who helped me up thought I was hurt. And in need of a doctor. He started looking around for a cab for me.

I was finally able to choke out some words to explain that I was fine, and just surprised. He chatted with me for a good minute until he finally deemed I was telling the truth and passed my coffee back to me with instructions to wear sneakers for the remainder of my pregnancy.

Down she goes. Up she came!

The funny thing is that I actually ran into my Good Samaritan only two nights later while my friend was trying to hail a cab. He recognized me (perhaps there is not an abundance of 6 feet tall pregnant women in the West Village) and asked if I remembered him.

Did I remember him? Please. He had made my day – my week, even!

Well, apparently he is a therapist in the neighborhood, and on the morning of my spill, he was rushing out between appointments to grab a cupcake for his one client who was having a birthday. He almost didn’t stop to help me, but was apparently persuaded by the tone of my voice.

It really is strange that people have the sense that New York is an unfriendly place to live. It’s not. And nothing makes this more obvious than when you wander around the City pregnant. I am offered seats on the subway, up-sies in the line to vote, and random blessings by the mentally unbalanced. To say nothing of the aforementioned gender-predictions.

So perhaps this isn’t exactly what the author of Chapter 7 had in mind when she created the “Your Turn” exercise. Because while the way down was scary and seemingly-slow-moving, the way up was both tender and faith-affirming. And I will continue to seek out the latter.

*The way I am carrying has encouraged nearly everybody I know to tell me that I am having a boy. We do not know who we are having, but if majority is correct, there’s a penis in my uterus. I have had perfect strangers on the street tell me I’m carrying a boy. Needless to say, we’re pretty sure it’s a girl.

**Looking “cute” is a totally new phenomenon for me. Because I have always been so tall, I haven’t been called cute since roughly the second grade. Tall girls -- and tall women -- who look nice are generally referred to as “pretty” or “elegant”, but very rarely as “cute.” Apparently, this totally changes when you are pregnant. Much of this has to do with maternity clothing, i.e., when your options for dress-wearing are limited to jumpers and frocks with empire-waists, it’s tough to not look like a six year old. Albeit, in my case, a 6 feet tall…pregnant…6 year old. And thus, well, sort of cute.

Go get me the mop.

2008-10-18T14:39:00.006-04:00

I’m reviewing the portion of GWW text Chapter 7 that deals with the pacing of a story. This portion of the chapter explains how an author can control the passage of time in a story, such that certain details are conveyed accurately and emphasized for import. Conversely, the writer may choose to speed through events that are not truly essential for plot.

Man, do I wish I could do this in my actual life.

I’m thinking particularly of this Wednesday morning. I slept through both my alarm and my husband’s urgings to get out of bed, and was running late for work. I was down to one clean pair of maternity work pants, a fact that may have actually saved me some time initially, eliminating any “what should I wear today” dilemmas. But as I was ready to walk out of the door, I created a giant, ridiculous mess.

In addition to limited clean clothing, I was also out of clean travel coffee mugs. No problem, I thought: I’ll just fill up one of our Sigg bottles. I’ve done this before, and realize that Sigg bottles, while environmentally-friendly, are made from aluminum. They are not insulated, so that once you fill them with a hot beverage, the vessel becomes really hot.

So, I filled the Sigg bottle with coffee, and with due care went to pick it up with my hands protected by a nice slick dish towel. The damn thing left my grasp like a reverse-trajectory rocket, landing on the floor at an angle, scattering its lava-hot contents all over the kitchen floor, the sides of the appliances, and, as I became painfully aware, my upper thighs and (ballooning) belly. Ouch.

I will spare you the details of the clean-up, the search for an acceptable replacement maternity work outfit, and the moment of “maybe I should just call in sick” that followed the spill. Suffice it to say, it took forever and I pretended that the pants I pulled from my hamper were not, in fact, rumpled like a sharpei and smelling somewhat of pizza and sweat socks.

I so wished I could’ve just picked up the pace, as I would have, had the event been literary rather than literal.

But that’s always the way it is with big messes. I’ve seen my share.

I remember one of my more genius moves in law school, when I put a still-sort-of-warm iron on the top shelf in my closet next to a full gallon of Tide. The heat from the iron was just enough to melt the plastic container, creating a slow leak. That slow leak allowed the entire gallon of Tide to seep from its container down the right side of my closet, drenching the clothes in its path and finally pooling in the industrial carpet at the foot of the closet. It was such a slow process (and I am such an infrequent laundry-doer, see, e.g., lack of clean maternity pants this week) that I didn’t notice this phenomenon for a solid two weeks.

At that point, the Tide container was empty and the detergent had reached full saturation. I had to scrape it from the carpet with a large metal soup spoon: it was too thick to soak up, and adding water created a comic mountain of bubbles that was nearly impossible to control. The clothing required four go-rounds in the (quarter-operated) washer, and even then I wasn’t quite sure if they were fully rinsed.

But at least the closet smelled good.

My entire family is fairly adept at creating giant messes, really. Or at least, with dealing with them. My mom has a great story about an exploded jar of tomatoes that crashed from her pantry down the basement stairs. The splatter was so extensive along the white ceiling that my dad ended up having to spot paint, it being too tough to fully remove the red tinge.

My sister was once dressed in a gown and ready to attend a wine tasting when her two-and-a-half year old daughter called “Mommy! Mess…Big one!” up the stairs. My sister came down and saw a trail of white liquid that ran from the kitchen into one of the living room closets. When she opened the closet, she discovered that my niece had decided to empty an entire quart of half-and-half into one of her husband’s snow boots.

Perfectly wrong timing, really. Although a snow boot does seem like a good place for dairy. If only the boot had been water-tight.

But at least my niece told on herself. Can you imagine discovering the half-and-half a few days later, when it had a chance to become ripe? Yikes.

So, yeah, we know messes. Clearly. At one point last year, I was cooking and had a major, 911-type mess-tastrope, if you will. I was so overwhelmed at the clean-up that faced me that I instead stepped from the kitchen to call my mother.

She picked up the phone. I said to her, “What do you think the worst possible thing is to splatter all over your cabinets, walls, and kitchen floor?”

She paused, but only for a second.

“Oh, no. You spilled bacon grease, didn’t you?”

I had. I had transferred warm bacon grease from the pan to a tin-can. As I went to put the tin-can back into the refrigerator so it could solidfy, it slipped from my hands.

The thing about cleaning up cooking grease is that it is unlike cleaning up scraps of paper-clippings or getting rid of clutter -- it really has to be done immediately and super-thoroughly. I mean, we live in the City. Keeping patches of grease on open surfaces is totally verboten. You may as well put up a sign that reads, “Roaches Welcome Here!” And while we have seen a mouse or two in our place, we’ve never had to encounter that other NYC house menace (knock wood…hard.)

I lost two hours that day on my hands and knees with a scrub brush.

I can’t help but think it would’ve been so much easier if someone had been narrating my life story. That narrator could’ve noted that I made bacon-and-eggs that morning for breakfast, and left it at that. The spill and following clean-up could’ve been a footnote, or even skipped over entirely. But I suppose life will go at its own pace.

And in the meantime, if anyone needs tips on how to successfully eradicate bacon grease from stainless steel, give me a ring.

Allow me to escort you out.

2008-09-30T21:05:00.004-04:00

In its chapter on Setting and Pacing, the GWW text notes how essential location is to fiction. The first “Your Turn” exercise of the chapter, at page 152, instructs its reader to choose a story and to note the level to which setting is layered into its action and description. If I were to use Beyond Pickles as my preferred literary example (and why not?), I would note that the first mention of your author’s location occurred as early as her third post.

Indeed, I’d say that here at Beyond Pickles, the fact that I live in Manhattan, and specifically the West Village, plays an intricate role in the tales I tell. And I think I’ve made it fairly clear how I feel about my neighborhood. In short, it is a spectacular place to live, for countless reasons: proximity to restaurants, bars, parks, book stores, farmers’ markets, and quirky shops. I love it both for how close I am to public transportation (and thus work and friends and other neighborhoods) and to the roads that lead to Jersey (and thus family). I love that our building sits across from the Hudson River and borders the excitement of the new-ish vogue of the meatpacking district while being firmly a part of the familial atmosphere of the Village, and that it offers us a view of it all from a lovely roof deck.

Yes. I love where I call home.

But.

While I am loathe to admit it, there is something about this setting that I despise, and it is as much an inevitable part of Manhattan living as is pizza-by-the-slice and perfect Fall weather.

I am talking, of course, about mice.

Naturally, I just heard fifteen readers* scream and remark to whomever else is in the room with them, “See, this is why I could never live in the City.” To these folk, I say…

Dudes. I hear you.

In the two-plus years we’ve been in our place, we’ve had three separate mouse incidents. The first was, by far, the most dramatic, the most surprising, and the most like a (bad, kind of boring) horror film. It started out rather quietly. It was New Year’s Day 2007. My husband and I had been weighing down our huge couches for countless hours, as is our prerogative on New Year’s Day. At some point that afternoon, a teeny-tiny mouse ran into the middle of our living room. Metaphorically speaking, it extended its middle finger at us and ran back beneath the Christmas tree.

We were startled. But truth be told, we were more hung-over than startled. Plus, the damn thing was so little; it was actually kind of cute. It certainly seemed harmless. And we reasoned that it only appeared in our place to have a drink of water, i.e., slurp from our Christmas tree stand.

But of course, we didn’t want to see it again. So, the next morning, we reported the mouse to maintenance, and we got rid of our tree. Maintenance folk came in. They put down horrible, horrible sticky traps that did nothing but catch dust bunnies and drip glue onto our rugs and, allegedly, they scattered poison pellets underneath our kitchen appliances.

And that’s when things started to get sort of nasty. It became apparent that the little baby cutie-pie had parents, and, in all likelihood, older siblings. We started to see mice dart across the kitchen floor, scramble behind our bookcase and dash to make retreat beneath our heater.

I found that with all of my education, my feminist leanings and my belief in equality, when it came to seeing a mouse in the comforts of my home, I was no more progressive than the character Bugs Bunny mocks when he screams “Eek!,” jumps on a chair and lifts his skirts above his ankles. (Read: I actually did scream “Eek!” and jump on chairs when the little devils appeared.) I think we hit bottom when I was in the bathroom – with the lights on, of course – in my bare feet, brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed, when one of the mo-fo’s sauntered beneath the door, thereby coming within inches of my unprotected flesh. That night, I dreamed of mice ensnared in my hair, and woke in a near-frenzied state.

I started to seek counsel from my friends and colleagues who were long-term City dwellers. I was devastated to learn that despite what the maintenance folk promised, the only way to stop a mouse problem is with old-fashioned snap traps. They are sold in every single pharmacy in the City. They are cheap. They look like they will never work. They involve a spring and a flimsy piece of plywood.

They catch mice.

The first time we got one, my husband and I were both at home. Horrifically, the snap trap didn’t actually finish off the job as intended. Thus, we were assaulted by the sound of the snap, followed by the injured squeals of the trapped mouse. My heroic husband immediately vacated the trap with the attached mouse from the premises. When he returned, we could barely look at each other. The guilt was palpable.

“I feel so bad. It’s not like he was doing anything wrong,” my soft-hearted beloved offered.

I had to concur.

But the fact was, it was one mouse down.

We proceeded to catch others, until eventually they seemed to realize ours was not a hospitable home to uninvited guests. The last occupied trap was removed from the apartment by a maintenance guy. I recruited him when I discovered the carnage and was home alone. He took the mouse off the trap with his hands (gloved hands, but still…) and inquired whether I wanted him to re-set the trap.

Um. WHAT? Get that plague-covered fifty cent contraption out of my home! I will buy a new one if we need it!

About nine months later, I was reading in bed when I swore I heard…nibbling. Okay, this was a 911-type emergency. The nibbling came from the shoe caddy that hangs on the back of my then-closed bedroom door. I was home alone.

What on earth was the mouse doing in my bedroom? There is no food in the bedroom!

And holy crap – I was trapped! Trapped in the bedroom with the mouse! I sure as hell wasn’t about to venture toward the door and exit. The dream about mice-in-my-hair was seemingly about to come true.

If you are wondering whether I called my husband and insisted he leave his work event to come home and rescue me, I won’t leave you hanging. I did.

Again, our hero saved the day, albeit while disbelieving my version of the events. That is, he disbelieved me until he began removing shoes from the caddy and a mouse jumped out of a shoe pocket and raced into the living room. Little whiskered bastard. (The mouse that is…not my husband.)

We caught that one the next night. I saw it hit the trap. I didn’t even flinch, instead feeling victorious and powerful. It appeared to be a loner, a scout. He didn’t invite friends, thank God.

This takes us to the present day. You will recall that I am now, if you will, with child. My emotions run a little high these days. I do what I can, but I have been known to cry at Honda commercials.

The weather got chilly. We had a visitor. “Had” is the operative word.

I awoke when he hit the snap trap in the kitchen. There was no squeaking, only the sound of rapid movement as a small square of plywood gyrated across the floor. It went on for at least a full two minutes.

I can’t lie: I heard that struggle, sighed with relief, and fell promptly back to sleep. The next morning, I asked my number-one guy and general mouse-evacuator to please check the trap.

“Oh. We got him. And it appears that he struggled.”

I giggled.

Whereas a puppy brings tears to my eyes these days, the prolonged death of another sort of mammal only makes me smile?

I have become a barbarian.

But then again, it appears that the mice have left the building.

*I am aware that I am, perhaps, flattering myself by believing I actually have fifteen readers, but this is really beside the point.

So Far, So Good

2008-09-02T21:40:00.004-04:00

Well, now. My dear friend MEP has tagged me for a “meme.” I think any writing exercise is good writing exercise, GWW-originated or not. Hence, I’ll give it a go, with some modification.

The rules of the meme were that I was to list six of my unspectacular quirks, and tag six other bloggers to do the same.

Right.

Okay, so, first off, I don’t actually know six other bloggers, I don’t think. Second, all of my quirks are bordering on the spectacular, thereby rendering any list I might author suspect, if not altogether misleading. I have therefore decided to alter the meme slightly, and forego the tagging aspect. Instead, I’ve spent some time thinking of another list I’ve been mentally running as of late, and it has to do with someone to whom I’ve alluded at Beyond Pickles. I’m referring to my unborn child, the one due to arrive on Christmas Day.

(Yes, I’m actually due on December 25th. Of course I am.)

I give you, for your reading pleasure, the Six Slightly Unorthodox Activities To Which I’ve Treated My Unborn Child:

1.) The Wearing of a Bridesmaid Dress
Now, naturally I didn’t actually have a neonatal surgeon enter my womb and put a bridesmaid dress on the little one. Indeed, at the time I wore said bridesmaid dress, my child was roughly the size of a sesame seed, and his or her presence was totally unbeknownst to me and my husband. However, I was lucky to be able to perform matron of honor duties to one of my oldest and best friends at the very earliest stages of my pregnancy. I have this child to thank for my feelings of extreme light-headedness while I stood on the altar during the nuptials, and also for my hair, which rivaled Diana Ross’ on the morning of the wedding (thank heavens for up-dos. Extreme hair has been a hallmark of my pregnancy. Fortunately, I have a long history of coping with this.)

2.) Drinking Jersey Shore Bar Tap Water Out of a Miller Lite Bottle
It’s not unorthodox to withhold news of a pregnancy until after one is out of the first trimester, and this is precisely what we decided to do. It was easy, with the exception of the fact that to be totally honest, I’ve haven’t been a teetotaler since I was 16. Not to say that I’m some sort of blathering drunk, but I knew that were I to show up at social events and order “a seltzer and lime, please,” our friends would have us pegged as pg faster than you can pee on a EPT. So it was all about appearances.

I delved into momentary brilliance when I figured out that Pom Wonderful juice has the exact color and consistency as red wine. With a glass full of this and an open bottle of Shiraz on the counter, my girlfriends never suspected a thing when they came over for dinner. (Despite the fact that they all inquired why I had been to the bathroom three times since they arrived at my home an hour and a half earlier. I feigned a newfound cocaine habit.)

It was more problematic when we and two other couples hit the Jersey Shore for a big night out. I dumped at least four bottles of beer down the drain, and refilled the vessel with water from the tap in the ladies’ room. Query whether a belt or two of beer would’ve been more or less harmful than the water from those old, rickety faucets. Yick.

3.) Rocking Late Night at the Linebacker Lounge
The above discussion of faux-imbibing relates to a command performance at my 10 year college reunion. I was a mere 11 weeks along at the time, and unwilling to share our big news with our graduating class. Naturally, most of the weekend’s festivities centered on beer. I drank more plastic cups of lukewarm water with a tablespoon of beer mixed in for color and head than I care to admit. Horrid. But perhaps most impressive for the youngster-to-be was that he (or she) appeared late night at our favorite old watering hole, albeit in-utereo. Together we braved the wall-to-wall crowd of sweat-drenched Notre Dame has-beens, stone cold sober. We jumped up and down to Chumbawamba. We made it all the way until they played “Oh What A Night”at 3am. Not bad for the first trimester, though I’m the first to admit I had a sleep-deprivation hangover for three days after.

I feel it’s worth mentioning that when we finally came out with the news of our pregnancy, many friends of mine said “but I remember that you were drunk back when…” Indeed, I think one of my friends from college still disbelieves me when I insist on my sobriety the night of the ‘backer performance. I’m not sure what this says about my personality, positive or negative, but there it is.

4.) Windsurfing
When my mom discovered she was expecting my brother, she asked her doctor whether it was advisable to go ahead with her plans for a ski trip. The doctor gave her an all-clear, with the caveat that she not break her arm. What happened? She went skiing. She broke her arm.

The story was foremost on my mind as my husband and I decided to try windsurfing for the first time when I was 18 weeks along and vacationing in Aruba. I envisioned myself in a neck brace at my next OB appointment. I imagined my doctor shaking his head in wonder at my decision-making ability and lack of maternal instinct.

I needn’t have worried, though. While I’ve never been accused of being coordinated, I’ve always been fairly good at water sports. Windsurfing was not an exception. My husband, who had a hard time staying upright on his board, actually wondered if my newly-developed spare tire had something to do with my advanced ability to balance. I say nay; I’m just a natural.

5.) Boogie-boarding
This activity actually dovetails quite nicely with the above-noted windsurfing. Of course, I am no boogie-boarding novice. I’ve been excelling at catching waves for years. And really, were there an Olympic event for boogie-boarding, I’d never have gone to law school, and instead put myself into debt in order to finance training.

I love boogie-boarding. I have a well-honed sense of when the wave is beginning to break, that perfect point when you can really ride in. I know boogie-boarding is a far cry from surfing. But it does require some skill, particularly if 99.9% of your boarding takes place on the Jersey shore, where waves are available, but hardly at the level of those offered in the Pacific (or even the southern Atlantic.)

The one thing about boogie-boarding is that it’s not exactly a sport pursued with unbridled enthusiasm by those over the age of 12. And needless to say, they do not make maternity boogie-boards. However, I am not dissuaded to boogie by either of these facts. The women in my family are ocean-fanatics. We will stay in the water until our lips turn blue and our fingers pucker; we will boogie-board until we develop board burn (something I actually suffered through at the age of 30. Painful, but nothing a surfer shirt won’t prevent.)

This being said, I was a little sheepish when, at 5 ½ months pregnant, I caught a wave that brought me all the way up to the lifeguard’s stand. I had been riding side-saddle, as it were, due to the afore-referenced problem of where to put my burgeoning belly. As I got to all fours and prepared to push myself into a standing position in the ankle-deep water, I looked to my right. My 61 year old mother had just arrived in the sand next to me on her board, having caught the wave right after mine.

If retirees can boogie board, so can pregnant ladies.

6.) Attending a Dave Matthews Concert
My final slightly unorthodox activity for my unborn child has not yet occurred. However, barring disaster, the littlest member of my family will join his or her mom and dad at the Dave Matthews concert at the Garden on September 10th. I have read in my What to Expect book that my child’s hearing is developed at this point, and can hear our voices. I am somewhat concerned as to what, if any, long term damage may result from attending a rock show next week. Yikes. Perhaps in this instance, I will seek my doctor’s opinion. And then I’ll likely don seven or eight thick sweatshirts to serve as additional soundproofing and head uptown for the show.

And there you have it. As I said earlier, I will forego tagging other bloggers this time. Unless someone knows six pregnant women with a penchant for squeezing in adventures prior to delivery?

SPF, Yes

2008-08-07T19:49:00.000-04:00

The author of the GWW text chapter on “Description” goes to great lengths to explain the importance of putting together a full portrayal of events and characters for a reader. Indeed, you really do want your audience to have a full understanding of the extent of your story.

I was recently trying to get a friend of mine to understand the sunburn that my husband had sustained on his right shin. I felt as though I was failing miserably, as this particular friend is of pure Italian descent, and has beautiful Mediterranean olive skin, which she regularly protects with sunscreen, and which likely has never seen sunburn. As I was detailing the upset stomach that accompanied the aftermath of the burn, she was looking at me quizzically: “Nausea? And Sunburn?”

Now, had I been on the receiving end of this story, I would’ve been able to grasp every detail, even if my storyteller neglected the highlights. Let me tell you, I know from sunburn.

My husband and I have pale skin and are prone to freckling. His German-Irish-Ukrainian blood and my Irish-English genes did nothing to bring pigment to our epidermises (epidermi?). We are the sunscreen poster children.

My parents were early converts to the sun block movement. My father worked for a company that sold one of the first commercially available sunscreens in the 1970s. It was called Sunguard, and came in a smallish white bottle with a nifty textured image of a blazing orange sun on its front. We had these bottles in abundance. In fact, we used Sunguard for years after my dad left that company, years after that company stopped making Sunguard, years after, I suspect, that Sunguard was still effective. I recall going to get a bottle of Sunguard from my mom’s linen closet and scooping out the top layer beneath the cap, which had yellowed and solidified to the point where it seemed closer in consistency to plastic than to lotion. My mother assured us it “was perfectly fine” and helped us apply it to our backs before forcing us to wear t-shirts over our bathing suits as we headed out to swim lessons.

Of course, my mother was right in her concern for our skin, having suffered through a lifetime of burns and eventually having to have some pre-cancerous cells removed from her face. However, because of her extreme diligence, which only became more aggressive as we got older (and the sun got stronger), we became anxious about confessing any over-exposure to the sun.

I can recall being in high school and accidentally getting burned on my chest. My mother was beside herself. “Actchy, how did this happen?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is, especially in this family?” One would think I had been riding on a motorcycle in a snowstorm…without a helmet…while drunk.

We all fear that my mom will find out about our pink skin far more than we fear the pain (and long-term damage) of the sunburn itself. My sister once forgot to reapply block to her upper thighs while we were all down the shore together. She borrowed a long pair of shorts from me and made me swear not to tell our mom. She was 35 years old at the time and had three children of her own.

In any event, my mom is not alone in her concern over our skin. My husband and I are regularly approached by strangers and told we need to either get into the shade or to apply some SPF ASAP. When we were in Australia, an elderly couple next to us on the beach asked if we thought it might be a good idea to go inside for a while, noting that “many Americans aren’t used to the strong Aussie sun.” We had just set up our chairs and opened our books at the time. We were on vacation last week, when a random couple from Chicago encouraged me to “layer it on thick” when I was putting block on my husband’s back. They (accurately) noted that skin such as ours was susceptible not only to the equatorial sun, but also to wind burn. Thanks, guys. We’ll be sure to be careful about windburn here in Aruba. In fact, we’ve often had people at the Jersey shore remark, “first weekend down?” when they walk by our chairs.

Um, no, actually. We’ve been here all summer, but we’ve been slathered in SPF 55.*

So, yeah. We know we’re pale and freckly. But we’re also human. Hence the aforementioned burn on my husband’s shin. We were at the shore for about four hours that day. He totally missed his right shin.

Do you have any idea what happens to the German-Irish-Ukrainian skin of a red-haired, blue-eyed man when it is left unshielded from the brutal New Jersey sun for four hours?

Holy shit.

My husband woke up the next morning and had to limp to the bathroom. His leg was the color of a raw porter house steak and I could feel the heat coming from it half-way across the room. Even after multiple applications of pricey organic aloe from the nature store, the burn was sucking in every drop of moisture in the vicinity like a black hole. The scorched skin threw his stomach into a lurch. I thought we were going to have to amputate.

But we didn’t. Over the next few days, the burn grew huge blisters, which popped a few nights later, leaving his whole leg dripping in…well, in whatever that clear liquid is that comes out of blisters. (Perhaps the same thing they put in snow globes?) The skin eventually got even redder (“Did you go out today during work and get even more sunburn?”), and finally peeled away and left him with new skin that looked a hell of a lot like plastic. Pink plastic.

But the good news is, my mom never found out.

Well, until she reads this post.

Crap. I’m in trouble.

*Regular readers may notice a trend here. Yes, I am one of those people who is frequently approached by strangers. My very nature seems to convey the message that I welcome comments from the peanut gallery, as it were. It’s genetic. My dad has the same problem talent, and calls it the “family charm.”

Summer Weekend

2008-06-29T16:41:00.001-04:00

There is something truly spectacular about an unplanned weekend in my neighborhood, no matter the season. The past two days bring sun and heat and humidity and incredible thunderstorms to New York City. The thick urban warmth chases many citizens of Gotham out to the area beaches on summer weekends, and indeed, we are frequently among the folks heading for the Atlantic. But not this weekend.

This weekend I follow a random trajectory, walking all over the neighborhood, picking up a few baby gifts for recent arrivals, stopping in at the electronic store to attempt to remedy a computer glitch we are having at home, wandering through the Union Square farmer’s market. The sun filtering from high clouds burned my husband’s neck in the half hour he spent reading up on our roof deck, so I hit the street slathered in SPF 45, and its lemony smell wraps around me, shielding my nose from some of the less pleasant metropolitan funks that tend to surface on main thoroughfares like 14th Street or 6th Avenue. I maintain a moderate pace as I flip-flop my way around town with my canvas earth-saving shopping bags, soon filled with baby books and a video card and ripe tomatoes and homemade peach apple sauce and zucchini and eggplant. I try not to topple a smaller bag with the basil, rosemary, and lemon thyme plants for my window herb pots, feeling some regret for neglecting to grow the little garden from seeds this year.*

My neighborhood is resplendent in rainbow flags, this being Pride Weekend, and the usually laid-back summer vibe of our patch of the City is more celebratory than it usually is. Tourists pack the sidewalk tables of our local restaurants and even those pubs that usually cater to the football-watching hetero crowds don their support with multi-colored pennants. The community is fully in touch with its ties to the heart and soul and history of the movement, and the Village is a village of brother- and sisterhood this weekend. The unquestioned unity is tangible, and reminds me of Chicago on St. Patrick’s Day, or South Philly when the Eagles win the NFC championship.

When I get back from my wanderings, moments before the skies open and unleash an incredible torrent of rain, the slicing and chopping required as I begin following a recipe for ratatouille are therapeutic, offering a fabulous contrast to the research and drafting and phone-calling that occupies my working days. I slip downstairs to check the mail while the pot of veggies is simmering, and delight in the way that my cooking has scented our entire hallway with garlic and tomatoes and fresh herbs. As I put my feet up on the couch and envelop myself in my book, the only interruption is the sound of my husband slapping his hands together periodically, in his unsuccessful attempts to kill a pesky fly who has taunted us all day.

Somewhere around 10pm on Saturday night after the rain and the reading and the ratatouille, we decide to follow our taste buds to one of our favorite restaurants for dessert, and as it’s getting late, we get a terrific corner table. We plow through bread pudding and strawberry rhubarb crumble; we take in the scene through the picture windows: revelers stumble by, lurching their ways towards hangovers, middle-aged couples walk their dogs, gaggles of girls hail cabs.

I spend the early afternoon on Sunday in an independent coffee shop, reading the New York Times until my backside is sore from the metal chair. I try not to stare when I see Jason Bateman come in and order a latte, and hope he doesn’t notice that I frantically alert my husband as to the sighting moments after he enters. Thunder announces the arrival of another incredible storm as I head toward home again, past several groups of police officers stationed nearby in preparation for the parade. I’m saddened by the deluge and the way it will put a damper on the afternoon’s main event, but after 15 soaking minutes, the sun comes through, and I can’t help but look for the rainbow that God must’ve put out in solidarity.

Folks who don’t live here often recoil in horror when I tell them where my husband and I make our home. “It’s nice to visit, but I could not imagine living in New York City,” they exclaim, picturing Time Square or Rockefeller Center at Christmas or the Port Authority bus terminal. “No way.” But New York is not Times Square or Rockefeller Center at Christmas or the Port Authority bus terminal. Or at least, it is not these places alone. For me, New York is the West Village on a lazy summer weekend alone with my husband, when we know that exciting change is on the horizon, and that weekends like these are, in some sense, numbered.

Chapter Five of the GWW text explores “Description.” Can I describe to you where I am in my life? Probably not, but let me just see if I can offer you a snapshot.

* Perhaps best for me to focus on nurturing one life from its inception at a time. More on this later.

Taller than you'd think.

2008-06-11T22:18:00.004-04:00

“Can I ask you a question, at the risk of coming off as inordinately rude?”

I was walking down Broadway today when a man who appeared only mildly crazy approached me and offered the above query. I gave him the once-over and kept walking, half-heartedly explaining I was in a rush.

I am pretty sure I can accurately guess the substance of his question.

Well, let me start at the beginning here. As some of you will, no doubt, recall, I have an on-again/off-again relationship with the man who works the morning shifts at my neighborhood Path Train station. When last I reported, Jimmy had breached what I thought was the tacit understanding between train-rider and train-turnstile-moderator (seriously, I really don’t know what his purpose is other than to stand by the turnstile). He had hugged me. He had hugged me, though I never invited him to do so.

Any-hoo, ever since that run-in, I’ve been a little wary of Path Train Jimmy. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why.

But now? Well, now I’m actually really irritated with Jimmy. He has a new shtick, and it is the sort of shtick I appreciate not at all.

Every morning, I walk through his turnstile and am met by Jimmy’s booming announcer voice (or, actually, given his musical aspirations, I suppose it’s his emcee voice…):

Ladies and Gentlemen, here she is! The tallest woman on the platform! She should be playing for the WMBA!

Every morning. Same damn line.

I wouldn’t be irritated if he had some other, more innocuous line. My daytime doorman says the same thing to me every day, and I love my daytime doorman.* No, it’s the substance of the line.

I am tall. I have mentioned this before at Beyond Pickles. I am actually really quite tall, for a woman. In bare feet, I am nearly 6’0”. In my work shoes, I probably skim 6’3” on some days.

I won’t say I have no “tall girl” issues. One doesn’t grow up as the tallest girl in the neighborhood and come out completely unscathed. And I wasn’t one of those girls who hit puberty and had a growth spurt; I was always tall: tall in Kindergarten, tall in high school. Tall.

I was always a little sensitive about my height, but not devastatingly so. I am blessed with fast metabolism, and being thin counterbalanced some of the tall issues that arose while I was growing up. Though the boys in my 7th grade class may not have been interested in me, some kind adults were able see through the giant frizzy 12 year old hair and my broken-out skin and predict that my woefully bony frame and 5’9”-and-still-growing body might eventually yield an attractive adult. While the feminist side of me hates to admit it, comments like “I’ll bet you could be a model some day” are much appreciated by gangly pubescent pre- teens.

My family never really focused on how unusually tall I was during those years. In fact, the only real ribbing came from my brother, who used to call me “fat.” This was uncharacteristically uncreative for him, and easy for me to let roll off my back. As we are cut from the same cloth, I suspect that his own body-image may have had something to do with his reluctance to mock me. In any event, that I grew to be nearly six inches taller than my mom and three inches taller than my sister was sort of a non-issue at home.

As I edged into the world, I became increasingly aware of how tall I was – and am. College was a bit of a blessed respite, because for whatever reason, many of my girlfriends were upwards of 5’8”. (I did have a roommate who once donned a pair of heels and then looked at me and asked me if the shoes “made her look too tall.” She was still a good two inches shorter than me in the heels, so I reckoned not.) Those were good years. Hell, it was at that time that I met my now-husband, who soared above me at 6’4”. I suppose after my body stopped growing physically, I grew emotionally into my height and began to really enjoy it.

And now, I’d say that I like being as tall as I am . . . about 95% of the time. I love being able to have face-to-face conversations with my husband and our tall male friends. I loved being significantly taller than some of the megalomaniac male partners with whom I worked at my former big law firms. I love being able to see above heads and avoid the sense of claustrophobia that must hit those of shorter stature in subway cars packed wall-to-wall. I love being able to make use of all the shelving in my kitchen without a step-stool.

Of course, there are some irritating things about being tall.

There is the clothes-shopping business. Yes, it’s difficult to find clothes that fit me perfectly (unless it’s a wedding gown. Those of you who are not built like me and who have shopped for a wedding gown might agree when I note that wedding gowns are, apparently, tailored exclusively for thin women who are six feet or taller. I would have a collection of them and wear one to work every day if it were practical.) Indeed, I am still actively boycotting Brooks Brothers after an unpleasant run-in with a salesperson in the Philadelphia store’s women’s department. I was looking for a suit. The sales person told me that Brooks Brothers’ suits “run tall” and that “they were sure to fit me.” She said perhaps I’d have to get the hem let out on the pants. I told her that pants were seldom a problem (everyone makes long pant legs now), but that jackets were. She shook her head vigorously, saying the sleeves in Brooks Brothers’ jackets “ran long.”** I rolled my eyes and tried on a jacket right then and there. Naturally, the cuff hit somewhere about an inch south of my elbow. Her eyes widened as she gasped, “Where do you even find anything that fits you?” I told her I was certain I wasn’t the biggest freak she’d seen all day, handed her the jacket, and left.

Then there is the men-in-bars business. I’ve had separate men, in separate bars, approach me and tell me they were interested in me because I made for “good breeding stock.” Okay. Perhaps these men spent too much time in their 4-H clubs, talking about cattle? I’ve had men send their shortest friend over to hit on me, presumably because they thought it would be funny. Because nothing is funnier than mocking a short friend and a tall stranger, unless it’s dong so from across a crowded bar.

There is also the random-comment-on-the-street business. This is a little odder than the men-in-bars business, because presumably, the people who make these comments are not influenced by alcohol:

I’m in line for pizza when the woman standing next to me smiles and says, “I have a girlfriend who is 5’11”!” I never know what to say to people like this. “Congratulations”? “Good for her”?

I’m waiting to board a plane and the ticket-scanner asks me how tall I am. What? Why? Is this like an amusement park ride? Am I too tall to fly?

Or, I’m trying to commute to work like a productive adult, and the turnstile guy wants to announce to the entire platform how I should go pro in a sport I’ve never been able to play with any measure of success.

I don’t mean to whine. But come on. Why is it okay to comment on how tall I am? Would you go up to an Indian person and say, “I have a girlfriend who is Indian!”? Would you ask a heavy person how much she weighs? Would you announce the presence of a short man on a train platform, and suggest he should be a jockey?

You would not. It is not generally acceptable to comment on the physical characteristics of a stranger.

So, what about that marginally-unbalanced man on the street today? What was he going to ask me? Well, I’ll never know for sure. But if I were a betting girl, I’d wager he was going to inquire about my height.

But I’m not really upset with him. At least he appeared a little off-kilter, and therefore has some sort of an excuse for his behavior. It’s everybody else that needs to have…maybe just a little more couth.

*This is true, even though for the life of me, I can’t seem to remember to call him by his real name, which is ‘Ramiro.’ Instead, I call him ‘Emilio,’ which is the name of my street. I am particularly aggrieved by this error, because it forces me to confront the possibility that I believe all Latino names are interchangeable, which can’t possibly be the case, given that I am so progressive and open-minded, and know many, many Latino people. Of course, I don’t call the other doormen ‘Emilio.’ Is it because their names are Pierre and Tony? Ugh. I hope not.

**It drives me nuts when people who aren’t “tall” talk about how I should try so-and-so brand because it “runs long.” Does it? Let’s see. You’re 5’5”. I am seven inches taller than you. Does that brand run seven inches long?

Long Before the Real Slim Shady Stood Up

2008-05-10T18:14:00.000-04:00

The exercise on page 85 of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop text instructs the writer to draft a passage from the point of view of an “unreliable narrator”, i.e., someone who skews the facts, intentionally or unintentionally. The exercise brought the book Atonement by Ian McEwan to my mind right away, wherein a small girl’s misinterpretation of a romantic encounter has catastrophic consequences.

Little kids usually do make unreliable narrators. In fact, I can think of a number of times when I, myself, was the unreliable narrator in my own internal monologue. Much of this was due to my own misinterpretation. When I think back on what I thought was true, my “logic” makes me laugh.

For example, as a small child, I somehow got the impression that when I was a baby, I had been black. What? This makes no sense to me now. I’m not black. I don’t even get tan. I don’t recall having a theory on what had happened to turn me white, or whether I thought my siblings, too, had been black as babies. It is possible that this theory stemmed from the fact that as the youngest in my family, there was a disproportionately small number of photographs of me as a baby, and those that existed inexplicably were often of me in a shadow. Perhaps I thought my skin-in-shadow was actually African-American skin.

Hm. What else? I recall inquiring as a child about the large tower near the highway that bore the name of my home town on its large, spherical top. My parents explained that it was a water tower and that it was the source of our entire neighborhood’s water supply. I gave this some thought, and figured out how it worked. With my own rudimentary engineering skills, I determined that late at night, while I slept, the tower shot water out of a blow hole. This water then soaked into everybody’s yard and was absorbed into our homes via pipes. (For what it’s worth, I’d probably do no better today trying to figure out how a water tower actually operates.)

One summer, when I was about seven years old, I went to our swim club in the late afternoon with my dad. He carried with him a small Tupperware thermos that he planned to offer to my parent’s friends while we ate dinner alfresco. One of the men teased my dad, mockingly asking what he might have in his thermos. My dad then laughingly swore to the man that it was lemonade. About forty-five minutes later, I came out of the pool ready for a thirst-quencher, and proceeded to take a good long swig of what was probably the worst-tasting lemonade I ever had.

Indeed, I would have supposed that the “lemonade” landed in the incorrect slot once it burned its way down my throat, for I had also figured out digestion and anatomy on my own. I envisioned that if I were sliced open, you would find something that looked a lot like a pinball game. Instead of organs, I imagined my insides had specific slots for every kind of food, e.g., an area for chicken, a small area for soda (which one could only consume on special occasions in my house), an underused area for peas, which I despised. I mean, how else would things work?

I must’ve spent a lot of time thinking about food, because I also used to think that if you ate a product at the same time you were watching an advertisement for it on television, that product would taste better. This last one actually makes me want to cry, for certainly that was exactly the intent of the advertisers. I remember the time I figured out that this wasn’t true. I was eating Corn Flakes while watching Saturday morning cartoons, and determined that they did, in fact, taste exactly as they always had.

It’s such a strange thing, remembering your old theories and ideas. Some of mine are actually a little embarrassing (as opposed to the above, which clearly demonstrate my developing genius?). My best friend, with whom I played all of the time, from my toddler years on through the first or second grade, had the same first name as I. We spelled it differently, but our formal names were the same, and we both went by the same nickname. I can recall introducing ourselves to people. We’d both say our names:

“I’m Actchy.”
“My name is Actchy, too!”

But then I’d always add: “…but I’m the real Actchy.”

Um. The real Actchy? Why on earth would I say that? My friend wasn’t pretending her name was Actchy. Her name was Actchy just as much as mine was. And yet I remember feeling really strongly that people should know that I was the real Actchy, because I was the real Actchy.

What’s even stranger is that the other Actchy didn’t protest this at all. She would just sort of nod and we’d be along our way.

Years later, I asked the other Actchy what that was about, and, specifically, why she hadn’t protested my claims as the real Actchy. She remembered things differently. She does recollect that I would always say I was the real Actchy, but she claims that this assertion would be followed by a lighthearted mock debate that consisted of the two of us exchanging the line “No, I’m the real Actchy!” until we got tired of it.

Okay. Well, maybe? That would make me feel better about myself, at least. I would rather think I was part of an Abbott and Costello-like routine (albeit sort of a lame one), than a self-important bossy mini-diva.

Who is the unreliable narrator here? Sadly, I think it might be the other, “unreal” Actchy.

But I’m curious. Do you have any memories that could bring the unreliable narrator into focus? Do share.

My Favorite One is from TV's "The Jeffersons"

2008-04-28T21:23:00.004-04:00

So, some of you loyal Beyond Pickles readers may be wondering whatever became of Path Train Jimmy. When last you heard, I had illegally purchased one of his “R&B” CDs for the bargain price of five dollars.

“So?” I hear you asking. “How was the CD?”

Um.

Dream sequence:

Actchy arrives in the Christopher Street Path station and feeds her fare card through the turnstile. Path Train Jimmy approaches her timidly.

“I wanted to thank you again for supporting my musical aspirations, even though it meant risking an unfortunate interaction with the Port Authority police. I would love to hear about your thoughts on my album, if you have the time before your train arrives,” Jimmy entreats.

Actchy offers Jimmy a kind smile.

“Jimmy,” she begins, “I listened to your CD. It was much different than other R&B albums I have in my collection. And while your voice is not bad, and the fact that you have pursued the production of an independent musical collection demonstrates a certain amount of industriousness on your part, I wish you would consider the ramifications of your lyrics. They are both degrading to women and vulgar to the point of embarrassment. And while it sounds like you have given a great deal of thought to your image, perhaps you could try to consider exploring themes aside from what you, personally, find physically alluring in the opposite sex? It might make for a more meaningful artistic expression.”

Jimmy nods. “Actchy, I hadn’t thought of it that way. You know what? I think you might be right! I hope the album didn’t offend you, and that you didn’t play it on your computer at work or within earshot of small children.”

Actchy beams at Jimmy, and gives him a wave as she boards the train. Jimmy offers a thumbs-up as the train pulls away. He resolves to work on new material when he completes his shift.

End sequence.

Oooooog.

Okay. So, first off, Path Train Jimmy’s CD is a really, really bad rap album. It is crude without any hints of humor to temper the vulgarity. Each of the songs* includes a lengthy lyric about EJ(AKA “Path Train Jimmy”) and how jealous all of humanity is of his prowess and how talented and successful he is on the rap circuit (“Dey don’t kno-o-o-ow what dey fuckin’ wid…”) Suffice it to say, this seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

Oh, and I fear Path Train Jimmy has engaged in a bit of copyright infringement, in that one of his songs includes a verse from the theme song from TV’s “The Jeffersons.” I suppose it’s possible that Jimmy secured permission before dubbing in Ja’net Du Bois’ voice belting out “We finally got a piece…of the pie” during the beginning of “Gangsta Funk,” but I tend to doubt it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how inherently odd it is that Path Train Jimmy/EJ is a white guy.

Now, I didn’t listen to the entire album, soup to nuts. It was just too much for me to digest. Frankly, I didn’t feel like I owed the guy anything, at that point. I mean, I didn’t have to purchase the CD to begin with.

But the fact remained that Path Train Jimmy awaited me every morning at the turnstile.

First he asked me if I loved the album. Not what my thoughts were, but “if I loved the album.”

“It was great.”

“What’s you favorite song?” he wanted to know.

Favorite song? Crap. Oh, wait. I do remember the Jeffersons theme song! I offered that as my preferred EJ number.

“Yeah!” Big smile from Path Train Jimmy. “That’s what everybody says!”

Bah.

Anyway, I thought the exchange was over. Done and done. No more talk about this stinking album. (Which, for the record – pun only partially intended – is called “November, 2007: V. 1”. Very creative, Jimbo.)

Except then Path Train Jimmy began a daily series of inquiries over whether I had added his work to my Ipod. Okay, honestly? Enough of this. I am NOT putting that crap on my Ipod. (This is really saying something, because as you may recall, my standards for music on my Ipod is pretty low (read: MMMBop by Hansen).) I would reply every morning with, “Not yet!” and an increasingly irritated smile.

Eventually, of course, I lied and told him that I had, indeed, added him to my Ipod.

And somewhere around this time, he began greeting me by doing a fist punch high-five: the knuckle-to-knuckle variety. This greeting makes me a little uncomfortable in general, because it’s totally unnatural for me. I’m not even a regular high-five person (I tend to “miss” every once in a while when pursuing a high-five; coordination isn’t necessarily my strong suit.) But, whatever, I figured that it’s far more sanitary of a ‘hello’ than a high-five, and certainly more so than a hand-shake. So, knuckle-punches it is. Word.

And then, all of the sudden, he was gone.

Path Train Jimmy disappeared from the Christopher Street station. I thought at first that he was on vacation (South Beach seemed a likely destination). Weeks passed, though, and I began to suspect the worst. Clearly Path Train Jimmy was canned. Probably for selling albums during his official work hours, on Port Authority property.

Fast forward to this past Monday morning. I am heading through the turnstile, per my norm.

“Heeeey!”

I look up. Jimmy!

“Hey! Where the hell have you been? I thought you were gone for good!” I exclaim, removing one of my earbuds.

I was astounded at my delight in his reappearance. I had actually been somewhat relieved when Jimmy ceased to be a part of my routine, for I had begun to dread our exchange each morning. It was as if he were a joke that went on for too long.

“No way man! EJ is right here, in full effect!”

And then he moved forward, and – I shit you not – gave me a hug.

Welcome home, Jimmy.

*“Heated on the lock”
“Sexy”
“Haters”
“Gangsta Funk”
“C-N-D Anthem”
“Ghetto Vibe”

I'll tell you what to do with that coffee can

2008-04-06T19:19:00.003-04:00

Page 81 of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop text instructs the reader to draft a story about a person who goes to mail a letter that will deliver bad news. The trick is that the assignment asks for a re-write of this same story a few different times. Each time is supposed to include the point of view of a different sort of person: a teenager, a middle-aged man, a widow, etc. You, the writer, have to consider how the same set of facts can affect people in myriad ways.

It’s certainly true that a situation will mean different things to different people. And indeed, as I would’ve gathered from the chapter heading, it’s all about point of view.

I recently went to visit the new home of one of my friends for the first time. She took me on a tour, including the room of her fiancé’s teenaged daughter. The room was a little messy. My friend expressed mild frustration, noting that she had asked the teenager to make it spick-and-span clean, and that apparently this disorganization was the result.

I shrugged, though. I was a sloppy child, and a disgracefully messy teenager. My parents eventually gave up on me to some extent, and only forced me to clean my room when the clutter was “four feet high and rising.” Indeed, as a young child, I thought “bomhidditt” was a word that meant “a really messy room,” for my mother frequently announced that my room looked like a “bomb hit it.”

With hindsight, I really appreciate that my parents seemed to comprehend that I was innately unable to keep a tidy room. They didn’t force the issue, and seemed to understand where I was coming from. They had one child who was a neat-nick, one who was a disaster, and one who fell somewhere in between. They instituted an early rule that so long as I hung my uniform up after school, general chaos could otherwise reign.

Chaos really did reign, too. My Lord. During my high school years, when my mom was back to work, my parents hired a cleaning person to come in every couple of weeks. On those days, they insisted that I make it so that Vavoom* could vacuum and dust. I took the instruction literally. I would pick up the piles of clothing, books, notes, CD cases, bottles of Dippity-Do, etc., from the floor and bureau surfaces and pile everything onto my bed. At the day's end, my room was clean, but still a nightmare.

Hell, I remember my sister standing in my room and observing the carnage and saying, “Actchy, your college roommate is going to hate you.”

So, did I think my friend’s stepdaughter-to-be was a disgrace? Hells no.

The thing is, I outgrew being a disaster. I really did. I’m not sure exactly when the change occurred, but I’m no longer a messy person. And I’d have to survey my college roommates, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t hate me. Perhaps I heeded my sister’s warning? I mean, I wasn’t the “neat” roommate by any stretch of the imagination, but I wasn’t Oscar Madison either.

I actually believe there was an evening out among my siblings and me, eventually. My neat-nick sister is now tidy but not anal-retentive-ly so (of course, this may be attributed to the fact that she has three children and couldn’t keep a perfectly neat house unless she was some sort of cyborg). I keep my home neat and clean (occasionally tricky, for my husband is, in his natural state, pretty damn sloppy). My brother has stayed somewhere in the middle. Perhaps we had some sort of blending of our points of view?

Although, I suppose one of the reasons for my eventual transformation was the roommate I had during my first year of law school. She had never lived outside of her parents’ home, having been a commuting undergraduate student. We were randomly assigned to share a two-bedroom efficiency in the law school’s residence.

She was So. Freaking. Messy.

She actually explained herself to me on this matter, once. Apparently, her mother forced neatness upon her when she was living at home, and the fact that she now controlled her own realm made her feel independent. Bully for her independence, but it nearly killed me. Aside from the giant hairballs she produced which migrated into my room, my closest, and occasionally into my food, she was horrific at cleaning. For there is a huge difference between “sloppy” and “dirty” and I am sad to report that she fell into both categories. For example, she was one of the early adopters of the Atkins diet. For weeks on end, she ate nothing but gefilte fish, cheese-filled hotdogs and bacon. (For what it’s worth, I do understand the irony of her eating patterns, choosing both traditional Jewish dishes and that which is completely non-kosher, i.e., “meat”-wrapped dairy and, well, pig.) She would place the empty gefilte fish jars next to the trashcan, where we kept our recyclables, but would actually place them there while still full of the liquid in which the gefilte fish came. (If you think days-old, non-refrigerated fish juice smells funny, you are correct.)

And then there was the bacon. The bacon was a huge problem, for she had absolutely no idea how to clean up after bacon-cooking, nor, apparently, a desire to do so. After realizing that everything in the kitchen was covered in a half-inch of congealed fat, I gave her an empty coffee can with lid and instructed her to keep the bacon grease in it, noting that it would solidify in the refrigerator and we could then throw the can into the trash.

Fast forward a few weeks. I was making myself dinner, and was out of olive oil. I began opening up various cabinets looking for a substitute – because we had very different eating habits, my roommate and I kept separate cabinets and I seldom ventured into hers.

I think you may guess where this is going.

In one of her cabinets, I found the coffee can full of bacon grease.

The can did not have the lid on it.

It was just sitting there, its sides slick with fat, containing an uncovered putrid stew of indescribable awfulness. I almost hyperventilated. I mean, we weren’t attending a school out in the woods somewhere: this was Washington, D.C.! Divine intervention is the only way I can explain the fact that we didn’t have a colony of cockroaches scrambling in our cupboards.

Man. I’m getting the willies just thinking about it again. It was horrible.

So, yeah. After that I really tried to keep things orderly in my home, wherever that happened to be (and you might guess that home never again included this Atkins-loving woman.) Maybe the bacon-grease deal was a “there but for the grace of God go I” moment, but to be honest, I don’t really think so. I had started to transition long before my first year of law school.

And I think I can thank my parents for not forcing me to keep my room ship-shape. Perhaps the answer to the question “how can I get my child to keep a clean room” is “you shouldn’t.” I mean, one minute you’re insisting they pick up their dirty laundry, the next thing you know, they’re stowing fish juice on the floor next to a hairball the size of the family cat and unrefrigerated bacon grease in dark closets.

The desired point of view should be somewhere in the middle, where a random pair of shoes on the floor won’t send you off the deep end, but there is no immediate threat of plague-bearing vermin in your walls. Admittedly, it’s a slippery slope.

*Our cleaning lady was not actually named “Vavoom.” The name stems from the very first time a cleaning person arrived at our home. My father was expecting some sort of doddering, white-haired older lady (I’m not quire sure why; possibly he thought there was an abundance of English housekeepers in New Jersey), and was startled when an attractive, mid-30s woman arrived in tight-fitting aerobic attire. She cleaned the house while bopping along to her Walkman. After that first day, my dad reported to the family his surprise. “Vavoom” stuck, irrespective of the different women who have come and gone: “Actchy, pick up your room; Vavoom is coming tomorrow.”

Aries, the Ram

2008-03-28T00:19:00.004-04:00

The Point of View chapter in GWW got me to thinking about Beyond Pickles, and the fact that I have inserted myself as your narrator in the first-person. This is typical for a blog, I suppose. Could I have written from a different point of view? I’ve always liked the idea of the “omniscient narrator.” Maybe I should’ve tried that?

“Actchy glances at the calendar on the wall, notes the circled ‘28th’ and smiles. She has always loved her birthday.”

Today is my birthday. I am thirty-two years old.

I’m not one for getting hot and bothered about another year under my belt; indeed, I sort of like to look back and think about how I’ve grown. (Figuratively, not literally – although during my youth it was truly amazing how much I had physically grown each year. I used up several adolescent birthdays wishes pleading my body to stop. I think it worked, though it was touch and go there for a while; fortunately, I didn’t get past six feet.) This year is no exception. Birthdays are for celebration: another year spent with people I love, generally doing things I like to do.

I’ll have a fine dinner tonight with my beloved. Tomorrow we are hosting a small get-together, which should be fun. I kind of wish, though, that I could consult with the omniscient narrator, to see what excitement awaits me.

Last year, on the night before my birthday, I had dinner with some college girlfriends at Pastis, a restaurant in our neighborhood. I love the restaurant; though it gets a little scene-y, it has nice food and fantastic warm, lively atmosphere. Also, it gets its fair share of interesting clientele. That night was no exception, and indeed, Barbara Walters sat at the table next to ours. New York restaurants being what they are in terms of space, she was sitting about six inches to my left, conservative estimate. I said nothing to her, though I did smile at her when she left. (Regular readers might guess that I no longer trust myself to speak in front of celebrities.)

A few hours later, in the middle of the night, my husband woke me up by shaking me lightly and exclaiming, “Actchy. What the hell are you doing?”

Hm. I was trying to scratch my back. I had been dreaming that my back was itchy.

Wait. My back was itchy. It was really freaking itchy.

I got out of bed to examine myself. Sure enough, my back was covered in a rash.

There is only one explanation for this: I am allergic to Barbara Walters. (I had thought that perhaps I was allergic to being 31. However, I did not pass the remaining 365 days of this year in hives. Further, I have not seen Barbara Walters since this encounter. Ergo, Barbara Walters is the probable cause of my creeping scourge.)

I’ve had a few other goofy birthday-related mishaps. When I was sixteen, my birthday fell in the middle of the week. My best friend joined my parents and me at home for a small celebratory dinner. My mom brought out my birthday cake with the obligatory sixteen candles. When I leaned over to blow them out, the left side of my (admittedly large, Jersey-esque) hair caught fire. Nice. The force of my scream actually extinguished the flames before anyone could dump a container of water on my head or pursue other fun flame-quelling tactics. I will tell you what, though: few things smell worse than burned hair, unless it’s burned hair that had been shellacked with Dippity-Do to control the frizz.

Me and my big hair. For my 30th Birthday, I got to revisit those big-hair days when I attended an 80s Prom-themed house party. It was a really freaking great party. So great, in fact, that it went on into the wee hours of the night. So great that I thought, in those wee hours, when my husband and I walked our friend out to find a taxi, and a strange woman -- in what could’ve been deemed 80s attire -- asked if she might join the party, I readily agreed.

And that is how I accidentally let a prostitute into a house party when I was way old enough to know better. (Not to worry. She eventually left.)

Anyway, I’m hoping I don’t break out into a rash, catch fire, or invite a hooker into my home this weekend. But I suppose a small part of me wants something ridiculous to happen. And maybe I am glad there is no omniscient author at Beyond Pickles. It’s nice not to know for sure what will go down. But something, no doubt, will. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t feel like my birthday.

The devil in my gym

2008-03-17T22:46:00.006-04:00

I have this thing about stories that aren’t true.

I always want to believe them.

It’s not that I am gullible. On the contrary, I think I’m fairly good at picking stories that are grossly exaggerated from instances when the speaker is telling a verbatim account, to the extent possible, of what happened. It’s more that I hate when people tell lies. I’d much rather just play along and try to convince myself that the person speaks the truth. I’m not one for calling people out, even when I should (e.g., my client who assures me that she “sent me the information I requested last week” and that my computer must’ve “eaten the email.” ::eyeroll::)

I try to give the benefit of the doubt especially in those instances when I can’t get a read on the veracity of the story, but it comes from somebody I know and trust. Like, say, this old friend of mine from high school.

She lived in an old house in an historic town. The summer after our senior year was a strange one for that old house.

It was visited by a devil.

My friend saw him. She saw him when she came home late at night. He was a very small man -- a little person, actually -- wearing an old-fashioned 1920s era suit and a top hat. He didn’t move. He sat in her living room, in the middle of a formal sofa, and stared straight ahead.

She ignored him for several weeks. I’m not really sure why. But then again, I’m not sure what I would do if I saw a strange little person in my living room late at night.

Eventually, one night, her best friend slept over. While the little man didn’t appear that night on the sofa, my friend finally decided to share her story. It was her best friend, after all.

The next morning, her friend woke up and reported that she had dreamt of the little man.

When my friend opened her closet to get changed, she looked at the inside of its door to find an outline of the little man, complete with the hat.

At this point, my friend dissolved into hysteria. She woke her mom and told her the entire story. She showed her the drawing. Her brother heard the tale and reported that while he had never seen the little man, lately, every time he walked through the living room, all the hair on the back of his neck stood up.

The family had the house exorcized.

I kid you not.

The little man never came back.

Right.

So, do I believe this story? Well, I’m not sure. I saw the drawing on the back of the closet door with my own eyes, and my friend’s mom confirmed that the house had been exorcized. Her mother shuddered when she told me, shaking her head swiftly and saying, “And that’s the end of that!” I.e., no more questions, Actchy.

I have no reason to believe my friend wasn’t telling the truth. I do, however, have some questions as to whether her best friend is a crazy bitch who decided to freak the shit out of my friend by etching a small man on the inside of a closet door.

I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts. Or devils. But to be honest, I don’t really ever think about ghosts. Or devils. Who am I to say whether they exist or not? I mean, this was New Jersey.*

Anyway.

So, I go to this great gym. The facility is vast and clean, and it offers a ton of classes, a pool I will never use but seems worth mentioning in a list of the gym’s attributes, a basketball court that hosts games I can watch while I lift weights, and an extremely diverse membership. (The diverse membership is arguably my favorite thing about the gym. I once got on a treadmill only to notice that the man next to me was Hasidic. His treadmill was winding down, and unfortunately, I was never able to ascertain whether he had been walking, jogging or running in his dress shoes, white button-down, and black socks and trousers.)

I’m not fanatical about working out, but I am fairly good about it. I’m best when I’m working toward an event on my calendar. My best friend is getting married soon, and so for the past three weeks, I’ve been getting to the gym regularly. But by “regularly", I don’t mean that I’m there at the same time on the same days – I tend to hit the gym somewhere in the course of a 3 hour window on a few random days during the week, depending on my work schedule.

So you can imagine that I was a little surprised when I noted that lately, I see the same person every time I go to the gym.

I realized it tonight. I noticed this person initially because she’s so distinct. She’s very short of stature – perhaps even a little person. She appears to be wearing the same outfit constantly: cotton black pants with a black, long, full-sleeved cotton t-shirt and a baggy black cotton vest. She always wears the same black visor tucked into her voluminous shaggy hair. Every time I see her, she is on the abdominal crunch machine. Her face is always expressionless, and she wears no headphones. She works at a slow, methodical pace: a mechanical push forward…a mechanical ease backward. Repeat.

You see where I’m going with this, of course?

I thought of it today, because I was at the gym much later than I usually am, and I was flabbergasted to see her again. I suddenly realized that she’s always on the same damn machine. Whenever I’m doing my free weights. No matter what time I am there!

I have never seen her in the locker room.** I do not see her on the track. I don’t even see her on the other machines.

Is she really there?

Can anybody else see her?

Wait, did the hair on the back of my neck just stand up?

Believe me or not. But do consider the source: here at Beyond Pickles, we do not lie.

I may tell my husband about her tonight. So help me if I wake up to an etched image of her on the inside of my closet, though. It’d be tough to find a priest with an open schedule during Holy Week.

*For those of you who aren’t up on your Garden State history, I will explain that the Jersey Devil is a real part of state folklore. Hence the name of the NHL team. Which, for what it’s worth, is a sore spot for one dapper octogenarian I once met on the Newark Light Rail. I helped him get his ticket when he was having trouble navigating the automated dispenser, and thereafter he saw fit to tell me that he was in town entreating everybody under the sun (the archbishop, a professor at NJIT, the mayor of Newark, the CEO of Prudential) to band together and remove "satanic imagery from the State of New Jersey's Ice Hokey team." I quote from his petition papers, a copy of which he gave to me to share with the law students with whom I was working at the time. I may have forgotten to do that.

**I actually usually keep my head down in the locker room. I’ve had an uncomfortable run-in or two, e.g., the time I saw a colleague of mine on her way from the shower with a towel wrapped solely around her waist. I have heard tell of worse stories: my friend T. was once changing in a crowded locker room, when he bent down to take off his gym shorts. In so doing, he accidentally hit the man sitting on the bench adjacent to the lockers. He hit him in the face. He hit him in the face with his bare ass. T. still hasn’t recovered.

Open wide

2008-03-06T21:41:00.003-05:00

And, on to Chapter Four of the GWW text, “Point of View: The Complete Menu.” I don’t mean to get ahead of myself, but I intuit that I will be good at this chapter, as I am known to be a fairly empathetic person. Point of View* is all about being able to tell a story from a certain someone’s mindset. I can do that.

Case in point: I recently went to the dentist office. It was, by almost anyone’s standards, ridiculous.

I have only a short history with this office. I was a new patient there last spring, when I got in trouble with Esther the hygienist, almost as soon as I sat in the chair. Before she looked in my mouth, I told her that I have been warned by other dentists that I brush too hard (because I'm a maniac) and have some gum recession. When I opened my mouth she nearly died (a distinct possibility given her advanced age, which is difficult to pin down exactly: while her wig shaves some years off her appearance, her mustache does the reverse.) She told me I have far too much recession for someone in her thirties, and instructed I go to Costco for a Sonicare toothbrush immediately, if not sooner. She then berated me for what seemed like hours about how I needed to floss more. Esther actually made me demo my flossing while she watched, hand on hip, head shaking slowly in despair, before thoroughly critiquing my method.

I felt like I was in the Principal's office, and found myself promising that I'd do better next time.

Fast forward six months. Well, actually nine months; it takes me some time to schedule appointments. In this meanwhile, I do, in fact, go to Costco with my mother and purchase myself a Sonicare toothbrush, which I love with a passion I normally reserve for family pets. Sadly, despite my promises and Esther’s extensive lessons, I do not floss more frequently. On this I blame my friend M., whose father is a dentist and who tells me that after she began using a Sonicare, her hygienist complimented her on her flossing, which she had all but given up entirely. I hope to pull a similar fast one on Esther.

I arrived at my recent appointment early, which is quite a coup for me. I was sitting in the chair by 8:30 on the nose, when Esther shuffled in. Much to my surprise, she was sporting a broken finger that was wrapped so extensively it would have resembled a baseball bat, had it not included a metal rectangular splint sticking out of its tip. Esther wore a glove on her remaining fingers and had wrapped the entire hand in a clear plastic bag, taped securely at her wrist.

You might think that dental hygienics is a two-hand job.

You would be correct.

Esther took a full set of x-rays of my mouth. This consisted of twenty separate shots (including the two she double-exposed, necessitating a re-take at the end of my appointment.) I endured twenty separate instances of her using her pointy-edged jumbo sausage index finger to wedge a razor-sided slide in the various soft recesses of my mouth, while I tried to remain still under the lead blanket. (There is no doubt I was glowing with radiation upon my exit of the office.) If you are wondering whether the injured digit was on her dominate hand, the answer is ‘yes’.

A nice teeth cleaning followed my photo shoot. It was, to put it mildly, somewhat awkward for her to scrape my teeth with the deadly hook that doubles as a water-squirter. In fact, because her bionic finger was serving as a sliding board for the stream of water coming from the death-hook, an entire river flooded down the front of my cotton button-down. Exactly zero percent of the water was evacuated by the saliva vacuum.

So, at this point I got a horrible, horrible case of the giggles. This happens to me from time to time. Whenever I find myself experiencing uncontrolled laughter, I am visited by thoughts of like moments in my life. Now I am reminded of sitting on the altar in front of my entire high school, waiting to do a reading for Mass, when the school’s chaplain began singing the Alleluia into his oops-it’s-still-on microphone with his strange Martian-like broken tenor. Now I am thinking of doing downward facing dog in a quiet Yoga class with my college roommates when someone farted. Now I am seeing my husband galloping on a horse behind me in Mexico, his stirrups far too long to allow him to brace himself for the ride. (This last one was much less funny to my husband than it was to me.)

Esther removed the squirting hook of death and the saliva vacuum and her good hand and the fist of sharp edges and abundant plastic out of my jaw and asked me, rather sternly, if I was okay.

I was finally able to choke back the giggles, but only by considering her point of view. This was an injured, wig-wearing, mustache-having old lady. Despite her oddities, she was doing her damnedest not to take the easy road. Though perhaps the most senior, she was not the only hygienist in the office, and she was clearly determined not to become obsolete despite her personal obstacles. She never complained about her injury-cum-patient-torture device, instead reaching into her endless coffers of small talk in an effort to pass the time. Dare I say that if there was an endurance award for dental hygienists, she would get the gold medal?

An entire hour passed before I was done with my x-rays and teeth-cleaning, tasks that normally take maybe 20 minutes. And from where I was sitting, it was pretty annoying, painful, and damp. But from Esther’s point of view, it was quite an accomplishment.

*The last sentence of the first paragraph of this chapter begins, “Point of view (also referred to as POV)…” What? By whom? People on the street? Teenaged text-message senders? What are your thoughts on the Border Fence, Senator? "Well, if you take the POV of our Latino community…"

Holy crap, what time is it?

2008-02-20T06:34:00.003-05:00

I suppose it’s only fair that after complaining about my husband’s inability to fight jet lag, I would be stricken by it, full force. I guess one would have to be a cyborg, really, in order to be travel to the earth’s farthest reaches without succumbing to the pull of one’s body clock. And yet upon our arrival in Sydney, I felt super. I’m not sure if it was the healthy snacks or my somewhat astounding ability to sleep in public, but I felt fairly rested for most of our Australian adventure.

Not so now. I’ve been fully awake since 3:30 this morning. As has my husband. Miserable. We thought we’d won yesterday when we awoke at normal times and were able to stay up during all of the day lit hours. As it turns out, however, our victory was tainted by performance-enhancing drugs (read: Tylenol PM). Go ahead, call George Mitchell.

And while I’m enormously frustrated that I’m facing today without a full night’s sleep,* it’s not all bad. In fact, we just noticed that the moon, in the last moments of darkness, is huge, seemingly-full, and spectacularly orange as it hangs low over the Hudson River.

In any event, I suppose it’s time to confess that I did absolutely no GWW writing over my magnificent vacation. I did, however, do some journaling of assorted observations that I think may be useful in the event I ever put together a work of fiction. (For example, did you know that Aussies refer to British people as “Poms”? Our hosts seemed to think that this references the vicious sunburn the British inevitably suffer on Australia’s sunny shores, making them look like pomegranates. While many, many white Australians I saw look like poster children for early stages of skin cancer, they were, in my experience, a concerned population when it came to skin care. My nearly-translucent husband and I were repeatedly offered hats by our friends and warned to cover up on the beach by perfect strangers.)

Okay, I’m going to stop this now. I’m a little nauseated at how boring this entry is. Do forgive.

And do share if you have any tips as to how I can make my body believe in Eastern Standard Time again…

*Today is my first day back from work, I am co-hosting a full day’s workshop on the cumulative impacts of urban pollution. This means I will not be able to do a George Costanza retreat beneath my desk for an afternoon snooze. This evening my parents are coming into town, and my dad and I will be in the audience of the former poet laureate Billy Collins as he interviews the legendary Paul Simon. If I fall asleep during this event, I may have a nervous breakdown/ retreat in a fit of self-loathing over my lack of self-control.

Writing with American Airlines

2008-02-08T12:34:00.000-05:00

So, my husband and I are leaving tonight for a vacation to Australia. I am super-excited, irrespective of the fact that the flight from L.A. to Sydney will be 14 hours long….and that this 14-hour flight will occur after our 6-hour flight from New York to LA. (I won’t even mention that Sydney is 16 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. How on earth my body will know what to do at 3am on Monday when it thinks it is actually 11 o’clock in the morning on Sunday is beyond me. Moreover, I will be traveling with a man who has zilch in the way of try-to-kick-jetlag stick-to-itiveness. Every time we go to Europe, my beloved husband exhibits zero self-control and takes a four-hour nap starting at 4:15 pm, later grumbling when he is wide awake at 5am and no restaurants are open for dinner.) In fact, I am hoping that I will capitalize on some of this air time to get a good GWW text work-out. (My father has cautioned me to also do a bit of a physical work-out to ward off blood clots and, what, bedsores? I’m sure nobody will be alarmed by the super-tall couple doing calisthenics in the back aisles of coach during the flight.) My calendar has disallowed me from blogging much as of late, and my GWW exercising has been even more infrequent. Hence, I am planning to go at it the old-fashioned way, i.e., with a pen and one of the many beautiful and empty journals I’ve been saving for a rainy day for the past, um, decade. (No, I don’t keep a diary with any kind of regularity, regardless of my occasional musings on the subject. Indeed, I don’t like to even think about journaling for too long because if I do, I will feel like it’s something I should be doing and the next thing you know I’ll have another freaking project to tackle.) I hope I will be able to ignore the 5 unread magazines, 2 novels, deck of cards, book of crossword puzzles, myriad healthy snacks* and in-flight movies for long enough to concentrate on writing. I will report my progress upon our return.

*I read somewhere that one way to help fend off jet lag is to ignore the crappy, preservative-filled, partially-hydrogenated-oil-containing airline munchies and enjoy nutritious provisions from home. Accordingly, among the assorted shitski in my overstuffed carry-on is a bag containing nuts, dried cherries, four Kashi TLC snack bars, two apples, three oranges and two PB&J sandwiches. I feel quite proud of my packing prowess because of these snacks. This is, however, the only part of my packing of which I can be proud. I am admittedly spatially-challenged and drive my husband insane with my inefficient packing. I’m not sure why I’m so terrible at it: I excelled at high school geometry. But be this as it may, I am known to use a five-gallon Tupperware container for 5 oz of leftover pea soup. Compare this with my husband, who can fit seven suitcases, a large lamp, four basketballs and two pairs of ski boots in the trunk of a Honda Civic.

Showered

2008-01-28T22:42:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Straight Man, a Richard Russo novel I picked up at the suggestion of my dear friend MEP. It was delightful. And so funny. And rather a timely choice for me, really, because the author makes use of a whole host of literary tools to propel his story, many of which I’ve reflected upon here at Beyond Pickles. Yet he also rather ingeniously uses the thought processes of his English Professor/Creative Writing Teacher protagonist to explain some basic rules of fiction at work in the novel. So clever. For example, at one point, our hero explains an exercise he uses with his students called “I know you, Al.” It’s not terribly complicated. Basically, the exercise suggests that the writer consider his or her character (whom we – and William Henry Devereaux, Jr. and his students in Straight Man – will call ‘Al’) and complete the sentence: “I know you, Al. You’re the kind of guy who ...” This is supposed to encourage a student to create consistent characters. It would be no good if you have a character like, say, Julia Child, who suddenly and inexplicably began championing Pillsbury Crescent Rolls. This would cause any reader worth her salt to say “But I know you, Julia Child! You’re not the kind of gal who would serve processed food from a tube to dinner guests!”

You get the point. As does Richard Russo.

Ah.

Great book.

I’ve been involved in a few showers recently, of the baby- and bridal- variety. Showers are interesting. They are a rite of passage for American women, aren’t they? In many ways, they are vestiges of sexism: a party for a woman – not a man – who is getting married or having a baby. It’s a showering of presents that usually encourage cooking, housekeeping, and child-rearing: the more traditionally female roles. The husband-to-be, or father-to-be, usually pops his head in at the end and fills the car up with the new mixer and towels or the diaper genie and pack-and-play, does a quick thank-you tour and does the skedaddle.

I know you, Actchy. You’re not the type of woman who goes for gender stereotypes. You couldn’t really like showers.

Right.

Except that I do sort of like showers. I like finger sandwiches. I like looking at new kitchenware and cute baby clothes. I like that showers usually entail complicated social etiquette and convoluted politicking that makes peace in the Middle East seem simple by comparison. And I especially like hanging out with multiple generations of women at the same time.

I was recently at the baby shower for the wife of one of my oldest friends. It was a lovely, typical shower: quiche, sheet cake, punch, a wishing well of baby books. The mom-to-be was very gracious, and held up each gift for all of the 40 or so guests to see after unwrapping it. My girlfriends and I let our moms and their friends take the front row seats, and we hung out toward the back so we could chat while the present-opening occurred.

You have to do that, you see, to facilitate the peanut gallery comments. There is a marked difference between what the women in their 30s and younger discuss at a shower and what the women in their 50s and older discuss.* More accurately, there is a marked difference in what the women in their 30s and younger don’t discuss, i.e., the perfection of the gifts. My friends and I sat around, half-noting who gave which present but generally using the unwrapping period as a chance to exchange gossip and news. The older generation, however, made a federal case out of every gift. At one point, the mom-to-be opened up a package that honestly almost brought the house down. The collective “Ohhh!” was deafening. I actually thought for a moment that the guest-of-honor had given birth right there in her mother-in-law’s living room. False alarm. She had opened up a 3 feet tall plush rock-a-stack. I should’ve known.

Showers can be time for nostalgia for the older generation. At my sister’s baby shower, my mom’s friend looked around at the car seats and outlet-protectors and baby gates and noted how things had changed. In her day, she recalled, one couldn’t wait for the eighth month of pregnancy because the mom-to-be could balance her ashtray on her belly with ease. And baby Tylenol was totally unnecessary: you would take the bourbon from your own glass, which fit nicely next to your ashtray, and rub it on your other child’s gums to soothe him.

Of course, there are some things that happen at showers that are universally amusing, no matter which generation is yours. My friend L. received a sack-like pair of legless fleece pajamas from her fiancé’s mother at her bridal shower. Not exactly something one would pack for the honeymoon. But is this better or worse than the time I witnessed another girlfriend open a box from her future mother-in-law that contained edible tattoos and a thong for her fiancé in the shape of an elephant’s trunk?

I know you, Actchy. You’re not the kind of woman who would delight in the discomfort of the guest-of-honor at her shower! No, I’m really not. And yet I am a willing participant in perpetuating the American tradition of showers. Even if they are silly. And sexist. Why?

I guess it’s the finger sandwiches?

*I realize I’ve excluded a decade of women. I think I did this because women in their 40s aren’t generally at showers. They’re busy hashing out the most productive time in their careers and raising tweens and teenagers and have no time to befriend women who are about to either get married or bring more future tweens and teenagers onto the scene.

The subplot is moving

2008-01-15T22:57:00.001-05:00

On page 70 of the GWW text, the Plot chapter touches on subplots. It notes that a subplot is not absolutely necessary, but that a secondary plotline running along the main plot of the story can add texture and depth to a work of fiction. I think this is true.

In my own life, it seems that right now, the subplot of my personal story is the fact that my place of work has moved office locations. In fact, not only have we moved offices, but we have taken independent office space for the first time, necessitating the outfitting of our new offices with new furniture, none of which was actually ready for delivery on the day we officially moved all of our files and miscellaneous bric-a-brac from the old space. Oh, and we’ve not only moved offices and ordered new furniture, none of which arrived with our files and bric-a-brac, but we got new computers, all of which are iMacs: a computer that is beautiful but as complicated as a space shuttle dashboard if you aren’t familiar with Apple, comme moi. It’s been...well...it’s been quite a month for me thus far. Every aspect of my life seems to have been touched by this move. My work schedule, always hectic in January, has been relative chaos because I have had only sporadic access to my calendar, hard drive, computer server, and case files. My typically fine-tuned ability to balance a few personal tasks during the work day has shattered. The move has crowded my weekends with a multitude of calls to return, errands to run, holiday decorations to take down, etc.

This is the first time I’ve ever participated in an office move like this.

It is not, however, by a long shot, the first time I’ve moved. Holy cow. A quick and dirty count allows me to report that I’ve lived in nine different apartments in four different cities since I graduated from college ten years ago. I remember that when my cousin got married, his fiancée received a list of addresses for invitations from my aunt and next to my name it read “Check closer to the wedding. She moves a lot.”

Yes, I have moved quite a bit. And I’ve had some fairly ridiculous moving experiences. Moving allows you to interface with some extremely interesting characters and organizations. Some are pretty damn shady. For example, my law school roommate and I used a storage facility in Washington, D.C. for our belongings for a few months one summer. It was a national chain, was fully insured, and seemed pretty secure. It required extensive paperwork to sign up for the space; my roommate gave her name for the contract and signed the papers. In August, I got to the facility the day before she arrived back in town. I did not have a key to her lock, nor was my name anywhere on the paperwork. I told the folks up at the front desk that I wanted to get into the space, but that I didn’t have a key. The employee shrugged, handed me bolt cutters that could’ve sliced the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge in one fell swoop, and told me to have at the lock. No request for identification, no chaperone to verify that I would only destroy the lock on my own space. Nice.

And then there are the movers themselves. The fact is, once you employ someone to help you move, you never go back to doing it yourself. But this decision shouldn’t be as straight-forward as it actually is for most people. I mean, sure: moving is a horrific thing. It brings out the very worst in human nature. If you’re going to have a day where you accidentally punch a nun in the face and/or use the f-bomb in front of a group of girl scouts, it’s going to happen on moving day. It’s just that stressful. You might ask your buddies and family to help you move a few times, but do it too often and you will find yourself friendless and disinherited.

So, once you find yourself even somewhat gainfully employed and ready to switch apartments, you go ahead and hire help.

But who are you hiring? Professional movers? Good God. Is there a worse job? I have already described the wretchedness of moving: can you imagine doing this several times a day? With a varied set of strangers, each in the throws of their own moving day? *Shudder* These people must all be psychotic, right?

Well, some of them are. I have interfaced with a few sketchy professional movers. These are folks who bail on you the night before your move when they realize that the address you gave them is for an apartment on the oldest residential street in America, in a building with Alice in Wonderland-esque shrinking hallways and claustrophobic spiral enclosed staircases. True story.

But then there are other folks. The folks who are good movers because the Good Lord gave them a magical combination of characteristics, perfectly suiting them to the task: untarnishable optimism, openhearted pleasantness and frightening super human strength. Folks like Bubba.

When the unspeakably-evil-movers cancelled on my friend M. and I, we were in a panic. We called everybody we knew, looking for a suggested replacement. Finally, one random mover told us that while he was booked, we should contact Bubba. And we did. And he arrived the next morning with Seagull, his 13 year old son who could carry a 200 lb. entertainment center up a steep muddy hill in ten seconds flat. When the box springs couldn’t fit up the stairs and it was starting to rain, Bubba removed a window on the third floor and had Seagull scale the roof of our neighbor’s patio and edge those bad boys up the side of our 250 year-old building and into our bedrooms. He was our hero. He moved us in and out of Elfreth’s Alley, and he moved us individually two more times. We even sent him across the river to move our other friend. Insured? No. Trustworthy? Hell, I’d bet my life that he wouldn’t allow me or anyone else to hack at a storage space with bolt cutters.

Sadly, Bubba isn’t available for moves outside of the Philadelphia Metro area. So for my most recent move from Chicago to New York, we used a company recommended by my husband’s business school classmates. They cut us a deal, and didn’t balk even though my husband estimated our move would include 20 boxes (actual number: 67). When they moved us into our place here in the West Village, I was in charge of supervising, for my husband had, unlike me, already begun his new job.

I should take a step back here. My husband and I are quite tall. And so we have these couches that really might deserve their own post. They are enormous. They might, in fact, be the biggest couches on the planet. Many, many people who sit on them immediately bear a striking resemblance to Lilly Tomlin’s Edith Ann character. The love seat comfortably sits three adults and, in a pinch, a small child. The sofa is so wide that my husband and I can lay down on it, side by side, and watch television together (the reason for the purchase). We love these couches. Hence, when we planned to move into our new building, I asked my husband to verify that the door and hallway clearance was sufficient for them. He assured me that he had done so.

Okay, back to my supervision of the Manhattan move. It goes without saying that the movers could not fit the couches around the corner leading to our apartment. Not even close. This was not the first event of the day that strongly indicated to the movers that I was a moron. (Earlier that morning, when I noted they were speaking some sort of eastern European language, I asked the movers if they were Russian. They told me no and explained they were from “____”. I asked them to repeat the name of the country and they did so: “____”. I had no idea what they were saying, and so I gave what I thought was a knowing nod but which they astutely deciphered as a baffled mental shrug. I believe that one of the men asked me if I had heard of it, but I could barely understand his question and, against my better judgment, shook my head ‘no’ and raised my eyebrows pleasantly. The movers then looked at each other in total surprise and exchanged a look, the only part of the entire exchange I could translate: “This stupid American woman hasn’t even heard of our homeland, no wonder she didn’t realize this elephant-sized sofa won’t fit around a three-feet-deep 90-degree turn.”)

So, I did the only thing I could think to do. I called my husband at the office and told him that if he didn’t figure out a way to fix our couch nightmare, I was going to have his ass in a sling faster than you can say Jack Robinson.

And God bless him, the man delivered. Enter Doctor Sofa. Doctor Sofa (not a real doctor) is the company who will send some folks to dissect your furniture in the hallway and put it back together in you living room. For the bargain price of $299, they saved my marriage. My husband said that his call to Doctor Sofa was not unlike the scene from Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta accidentally shoot the passenger in their car and enlist the aid of Harvey Keitel. When he called and requested Doctor Sofa’s service, they took the address and promised help within the hour. When my husband tried to go into details, apologizing in advance for the extremely tight hallway, he was cut off by Doctor Sofa: “Don’t worry. We’re on it.”

There is a psychological factor to Doctor Sofa’s work. Seeing my beautiful gargantuan year-old sofa crammed into an enclosed corridor and envisioning it on the curb outside, certain to become a repository for the urine of drunkards was more than I could bear on a moving day. But when Doctor Sofa disassembled the thing down to its 2x4’s, had he not been able to fix my problem, I would’ve been okay pitching it. But the thing is, we didn’t have to.

I’m looking across the room at my husband, snoozing on our vast expanse of reconstructed poly-cotton and wood and smiling contentedly. Doctor Sofa, how I love thee.

But I digress. My office move. It was fine. The movers were Ukrainian, a country I can actually point to on a map (largely because my husband is descended from Ukrainians, but who’s keeping score of my knowledge of former Soviet republics, anyway?). The head guy told me that in his former life in Ukraine, he was a medical doctor. With absolutely no slight to the amazing vocation accepted by our medical professionals, it’s possible this man was offering an even greater public service with his second profession.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure whether moving, and my recent office move in particular, is a subplot or the main storyline of my life. But I suppose that in a way, this blurring of the distinction is its own dramatic tool, no?

Nice meat.

2008-01-03T22:31:00.000-05:00

Apparently E.M. Forster once theorized that all works of fiction have one of two plots: either someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes for a visit. I am not quite sure that this is entirely true, but it’s an interesting theory. Especially the “stranger comes for a visit” business.

Often it takes an observation by a stranger -- or an outsider -- to make you consider your life’s relative normalcy. I remember the first time my now-husband was visiting me when my parents came in from food shopping. I thought absolutely nothing of the discussion that ensued among my family, but to him, it was as absurd as a Saturday Night Live sketch. You see, my mom was unpacking grocery bags and she pulled out a bottom of the round:

“Look at this roast. I mean, look at it!” she commanded.

“Oh. My. God.”
“It’s gorgeous!”
“Now that is a beautiful cut.”

We were in raptures. We shook our heads in wonder, murmured in appreciation.

Well, of course we did. It was a freaking spectacular roast. If we had it handy, we would’ve dumped a cooler of Gatorade on my mom’s head and carried her out of the kitchen on our shoulders in celebration of her success at the market.

My husband could not comprehend our reaction:

“It’s not like it was a new baby, for crying out loud. It was a piece of meat. It was raw, to boot. And bloody!” he pointed out to me.

He was right, of course. My family is a quite zealous when it comes to food: the buying, the cooking, the ordering, the eating. There is not one of us who will get bored if you spend twenty minutes recounting your meal at a restaurant. Indeed, if I am on the phone with my parents, odds are quite good that my husband, overhearing my side of the conversation, is listening to this:

“Really? But what did Dad order? Oooo. Was it pan fried? Wait, sweet potatoes or Yukon golds? Hm. It sounds like that set of chops you made at home that one time back in May, remember?”

In my mind, I can’t comprehend food not being interesting, impressive, and worthy of extensive discussion. It’s a damn big part of the day. The way that I eat often dictates my mood. Certain weather, activities and days of the week allow specific foods to call to me from my fridge, begging to be made. I know this happens for my family members, too, and often it is a family-wide phenomenon. I can’t tell you how frequently I’ve telephoned my sister and discovered that we’re both making the same thing for dinner. And not like, we’re both making chicken for dinner – more like, we’re both making a Middle Eastern lentil soup for dinner.

We maintain an obsessive rule about going to restaurants: Nobody at the table is allowed to order the same dish. I enforce this rule strictly within my marriage, and am always astonished when we are out with friends who don’t obey. I am astonished, I should say, even though I don’t tell anybody the rule. I won’t go so far as to call people out when they start repeating orders one after another like Rainman. I will, however, engage in a hostile internal dialogue that sounds something like, “What the hell was John thinking when he went with the salmon? Thomas and Ellen both ordered it right before him! This is such a waste. Now nobody is going to order that pork tenderloin and I can’t get it because I just had a barbecue sandwich for lunch.” (We have another rule disallowing the consumption of the same food twice in one day, even if the dish is substantially different. E.g., if you have a turkey sandwich for lunch, turkey chili is not an option for dinner.)

I might try to argue that I’m not completely single-minded and rigid in menu diversification. After all, I believe in leftovers and am fairly okay with eating the same meal a few nights in a row in the interest of waste-not-want-not. And, you might not believe me but I tell the truth when I say that I have had the same thing for breakfast nearly every day of my life, and it’s pretty pedestrian: cold cereal, juice, coffee. Every once in a while, if we’re out of milk, I’ll have instant oatmeal or, in a real pinch, a cup of yogurt.

I know. My clockwork breakfast routine isn’t really an exception to the obsession with foodstuffs that my husband pointed out years ago, it’s just another symptom at a different mealtime. Yikes. Who's Rainman now? Yeah.

Well, maybe it took the “stranger” in the kitchen to point out the import of the role of sustenance in our family. Comfort food isn’t merely about the dish, but the ritual that surrounds the choosing and eating of the dish. It may be quirky, but goddamnit we eat well.

And really, you should’ve seen that roast. It was a beaut.

Hold Your Head Up High

2007-12-15T00:36:00.000-05:00

As a writer, one has to make certain decisions about one’s story. (I didn’t learn this bit from the GWW text. And…errr…I haven’t actually done enough writing to discover this fact on my own. I actually learned this from the movie Wonder Boys*.) In terms of plot, one has to decide not only what one's character is going to do, but why.

Not just what, but why.

When I moved back to New York, I decided to indulge my aforementioned Annie inclinations and find a group with whom I might be able to sing.

Yes, that’s “sing”.

I like to sing. I always have. I’m not great at it, but I’m not terrible either, and I really enjoy it. And when we moved here, I purposefully took a job that didn’t require 100 hour work weeks so I could make room in my life for other, non-legal pursuits, one of which was singing.

As you might guess, in New York City, there are dozens and dozens of amateur singing groups. This includes one made up entirely of lawyers.

The City Bar Chorus.

I tried out. Why not, right? I’m a lawyer. I like to sing. This would be a way to pursue a lifelong interest while making some like-minded friends. The open-call auditions promised to be low-key, and the commitment of time seemed perfect: two or three nights a month for an hour and a half. Oh, and it seemed right up my alley in terms of performance: the Chorus has a pro-bono mission, singing only at nursing homes, children’s hospitals, centers for the blind, etc. (We do not sing at centers for the deaf, as was suggested by my brother-in-law.) In the middle of each show we hand out song sheets and do a sing-along with the audience members. It’s nice. Good. Yes.

And suddenly there I was, a member of the City Bar Chorus.

And I felt a little embarrassed.

It’s just that…ahh…well. Singing in a Chorus isn’t exactly the coolest leisure activity. Not that I’ve ever been particularly cool, but, well, there was that. And then there was the music. I started singing with them last January, and during that first “season” (we take a break for the summer), the most modern piece of music we sang was written in 1960. Further, there was the issue of the “making friends” impetus: the other members. It seemed as though all of the people in the Chorus remembered 1960 vividly.

Don’t get me wrong: they were all very nice. But I had nothing at all to say to them. We sat in groups based on our vocal parts, and I found the women around me complaining about the heat as I sat shivering and still wearing my winter scarf to keep warm. The men made corny Dad-jokes: in order to make the hot-flashing women more comfortable during rehearsal, the director brought in a fan. But the fan didn’t oscillate. So she told us that she would direct the fan toward the altos or sopranos according to who was singing the best. This prompted one of the basses to say, “But if you sing well, you’ll always have a fan!”

And so on.

Okay. What was I doing? I was singing with a group of lawyers. Why was I doing it? I guess because I really do like to sing, because I sure as hell was not making a lot of new friends.

But I stuck with it. I’m not a quitter. I figured I’d hang on until the end of the season and reassess. And so I trudged through three months of rehearsals, skipping the periodic happy hours because I wasn’t sure I could stomach being hit on again by the tenor who was at least as old as my dad but who apparently lives alone with his cat and periodically gets bit parts in episodes of Law and Order. (This, by the way, is a total phenomenon. I can’t believe how many random New Yorkers get bit parts in Law and Order. I should totally look into it, given that my Alec Baldwin run-in did nothing to advance my somewhat serious interest in doing a TV cameo.) I learned to cope with the fact that “Stormy Weather” ran through my head for hours every day.

And then, at the end of March, we had our first concert. It was at a nursing home. Not a retirement home or a senior residence, but an old-fashioned, funny-smelling, bleak nursing home, way on the east side of Manhattan. We warmed up in the hallway, and filed into a room that looked suspiciously like my grade school’s cafe-nasi-torium. I opened my song book and we started to sing the first song, “On the Street Where You Live.”

And I heard a collective, delighted sigh.

I looked up, startled. In front of me were several rows of old people. Really old people. These folks were in wheel chairs and wore voluminous clothing that hung on their angular bodies. Most had thick glasses perched on oversized noses. They were looking at us, listening to us, many with expressions of pure pleasure. These were the people who knew all of our songs, who sung along to “In the Still of the Night” – the 1937 Cole Porter version, not the Five Satins doo-wop version.

I became absolutely overcome with emotion.

I have found this to be the case every single time we perform.

One of our last performances in the spring was at a home for people living with AIDS. During the sing-along part we had a request by an audience member to do "You'll Never Walk Alone." Our director knew it on the piano, and asked a woman from the chorus to lead it. And so she did:

When you walk through a storm, hold you head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark…

People in the audience began standing up. They were singing at the top of their lungs. Halfway through it, the tenor with the cat and the Law and Order walk-on parts stepped up to the woman leading the song and sang the harmony, and it was beautiful. Our choral director sent an email in the morning that said after the concert, the man who had made the request took her aside and said the music had made him forget he had AIDS for just a short while.

Holy cow.

I used to not really care for "You'll never walk alone." (Indeed, it usually reminds me of a scene from a Cheers episode where Sam, Dianne and the gang sing it to a pregnant Carla on her way out of the bar.) Not so anymore.

The Chorus isn’t perfect, God knows. I wish I were kidding when I tell you that we did "I Can See Clearly Now" as one of the sing-along songs at the center for the blind. At one performance during a 1950’s number, the man singing the solo did a surprise “funny” quick-change from his navy blazer into a denim jacket and sunglasses. The denim jacket had Looney Tunes characters embroidered on its back. But be this as it may, I have noticed that both the what and the why for me have changed with respect to the Chorus.

This week we performed at the Salvation Army for a program of adults in substance abuse recovery. This crowd is different than our other ones. Younger, for one thing. Much rougher around the edges, too. There were probably 120 people there that night. I can only imagine what they have been through, and how hard the holidays might be for them. It was cold and sleeting outside, not exactly a night that would make a person predisposed to pandering. I felt almost embarrassed that we would think we could entertain these folks with these songs. I wondered how “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” would fly.

They were so supportive of us. The applause reverberated around the room after every song. Funny, we were there for their entertainment. But in actuality we – I – really needed that applause.

And then we sang “This Little Light of Mine.” I’ll tell you, there was not a single person who wasn’t clapping along. And like the performance last spring, many were standing and waving their hands back and forth to the music. At the end of the number, I looked around at my fellow altos and found I was not alone wiping tears away.

Won't let anybody blow it out, no, I'm gonna let it shine!

Singing lawyers. Not too bad. What do I do? I go to every rehearsal and every performance and I look for something that pulls a thread inside of me that triggers a feeling both that I’m helping someone and that my help is okay. Why do I do it? Because it is an honor to be a part of this Chorus.

*It appears that the Blogger software does not offer a way to underline text. I find this infuriating. This is the reason all of the book titles in my Oprah post were italicized. Of course, I just did some internet research and discovered that apparently, both italics and underline are appropriate for film titles, so long as one is used consistently throughout a piece. Huh. So I guess we’re okay for this post. But don’t hold it against me in future posts.

What has no arms and no legs and scares the crap out of me?

2007-12-04T23:29:00.000-05:00

I really need to become more focused on fiction writing. Writing blog posts is just so much easier, so much more succinct. See, there is an exercise in the GWW text that I’m dreading because it requires me to develop a story climax.

Yeah, right. I’m going to develop a story climax. I’m exhausted from creating Path Train Jimmy, and that was well over a month ago now. I can hardly stomach trying to “decide where this character is going and why, bearing in mind that this is the story’s cinematic moment.”* Good grief.

You know, on Thanksgiving Day there was an article in the New York Times about Gratitude Journals, i.e., a diary wherein you record the things for which you are thankful. First of all, this sounds exhausting to me (and apparently to many others, including the article’s author). But I suppose that in a way, keeping a Gratitude Journal is a de facto system for recording the climax of every day. I mean, often the thing for which I am most grateful is also the pivotal, major dramatic moment of my day.

But sometimes that dramatic, “cinematic” moment is, well, anti-climatic. Or at least, it might be anti-climactic for someone other than me. And this has me calling into question my ability to decide on what constitutes a true cinematic moment in my work of fiction.

For example, a few weeks ago I had to monitor the progress of settlement for one of my cases. In this instance, “monitoring” meant that I had to accompany my clients as they surveyed some property. The land is going to be designated by our opposing party as protected bird habitat and we needed to determine its appropriateness.

I should explain here that I am not, in fact, a biologist. Or a naturalist. I am not even a bird enthusiast. (Not, that is, unless you count my enthusiasm for the series of birds my sister kept as pets when we were growing up, each of which had an interesting and complex personality, e.g., a cockatiel who whistled a number of tunes including the Jeopardy theme song, the opening notes to Fiddler on the Roof, and “Hi-ho-hi-ho It’s Off to Work We Go”, all off-key because my sister taught it and she can’t carry a tune in a bucket, or the parakeet who inexplicably but endearingly smelled like an ironing board). I am a lawyer. The only science I studied in college was political science. The idea that I would be a good person for designating land as bird habitat is absolutely ludicrous. This may surprise you in light of the fact that I am, indeed, an environmental lawyer. However, most of my cases are urban cases, and deal with clean air (er, dirty air.) I haven’t had too many "birds and bunnies" cases. This whole “trek through the great outdoors” thing is totally new for me.

It’s not that I’m against trekking through the woods. Except that…

Okay, I am against trekking through the woods. And I’ll tell you why. I am absolutely terrified of snakes. And not in a “oh my that is scary” kind of way. In a primal, screaming, clawing, crying, rushing-blindly-into-moving-traffic-to-get-away kind of way. I have Ophidiophobia: a really, really bad case of it. I have no idea why. I have always been this way. And though I’ve lived in major cities for all of my adult life, I have had countless snake run-ins. I have seen people carrying snakes in Philadelphia, New York, DC, Miami, and Denver. This has not helped me move toward recovery. If anything, it has made things worse by reinforcing my *perhaps* irrational conclusion that I can run into a snake at any time at all. My fear is so profound that I cannot comfortably look at a photo of a snake. My husband reflexively shifts his hand in front of my eyes if a snake appears on the TV screen. It’s not good at all : there was an animated python in a recent episode of “The Simpsons” that caused me to turn away with a sharp intake of breath.

We all have our personal albatrosses, and snakes are mine. God forbid it should ever literally hang around my neck, though. Shudder.

Needless to say, when it comes to walking through the woods, I get a little nervous. Voluntarily entering my enemy’s home turf isn’t really on my bucket list, if you catch my drift. The fact that I have positioned myself squarely in a career where I not only find myself representing folks who keep the interests of the snake sacred*, but where wandering into snake territory is a part of the job, well, it gives me the occasional pause.

I was really torn as to how to handle the situation of the habitat survey. Should I tell my clients in advance that I am afraid of snakes? These people are in the freaking snake business!

Okay, so it’s not really the “snake business.” They don’t work as charmers or create boots and pocketbooks for heaven’s sake; they are conservationists and they believe in the inherent value of natural resources. (For what it’s worth, I also believe in the inherent value of natural resources, with the exception of reptiles lacking arms and legs.) Perhaps it would be better to take my chances and just hope not to see a snake.

Alas. Who am I kidding? My friend E. once had a roommate with a pet snake. She had a party and I attended because she swore to me the snake was kept locked away in its terrarium in a room I could avoid. I was so on edge while there that when I saw a girl with a silk scarf around her neck walk into the room I almost had a nervous breakdown. It would be even worse out in the woods. I would mistake every low-lying branch for an anaconda (common in the Northeast, from what I gather.)

I made my final decision while we were in the car on the way to the woods. I admitted my trepidation and tried to encourage my clients to steer me away from any slithering offenders, and, while they were at it, tree roots that could be mistaken as such.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. My. client laughed and said, “Actchy, it’s far too cold for snakes. There is no way we’ll see any today.”

He has a Ph.D in Biology. I believed him.

He was right.

My client’s little biology lesson was my cinematic moment. It was the climax of my day, the thing for which I was most thankful. Were I keeping a Gratitude Journal, I would’ve listed “that which was too cold to come out” as Monday’s entry.

I’m not going to lie to you. Even typing this out made me a little squirrelly. Scary! Thrilling! Chilling, even!

Well, no. It’s just a blog entry. I guess if you’re not just a little bit crazy, as I am, it’s not really climactic. And it’s not fiction.

I have not completed the exercise. I will have to keep trying to think of a good story climax. Let’s see. I just wish there were something in life scarier than snakes.***

*GWW text, page 74.
**One could make a plausible argument that earlier in my career when I was working at large law firms, I was representing the snakes themselves. Food for thought.
***N.B., I do not wish there were something in life scarier than snakes.

Beginning. Middle. End.

2007-11-28T21:43:00.000-05:00

The Plot Chapter of the GWW text spends some time discussing the structuring of stories. It talks about beginning, middle and end, and the elements essential to consider for each of these. Now, in actuality, not every story starts at the beginning and finishes at the end. But does life operate this way? This chapter got me to thinking about the parts of my life that have had distinct beginnings, middles, and ends. I can think of some obviously linear stages, like, say, “college” or “my AmeriCorps year.” But it’s more interesting to consider less-defined and seemingly less-consequential chapters of life. Maybe the less-consequential chapters are actually pretty important. Can we extract elemental truth about the self, or life in general, just by contemplating who we were when, for example, we got braces and how we changed by the time the orthodontist removed them?

Perhaps. Maybe this is what coming up with an idea for a story is all about?

It’s funny, though: it isn’t necessarily easy to rattle off a list of phases, even in one’s own life, other than those defined by degrees or job titles or addresses. It’s fairly straightforward to talk about the points in life that seem like “beginnings”, but more difficult to pin-point “ends.” I mean, I remember exactly when I started obsessively tracking my expenses on Quicken, but I can’t quite remember when that phase ended. The same can be said about my Annie phase.* And there are parts of my life that strike me as something that might be a phase, but I’m not really sure when the end will occur. For example, there was a certain point in my life when I began taking public transportation. It was the year after I graduated college. Prior to this point, I either lived in the suburbs or at my university, where I shuttled about in a car. Now, I didn’t give much thought to the import of the fact that I started taking public transportation. In the scheme of things, this was actually a small part of the massive changes -- or, if you will, “beginnings”-- that occurred during my first year out of college. It was much less-consequential than moving into my first apartment or starting my first full-time job. But it does seem like a good seemingly-inconsequential narrative outline for purposes of the Plot chapter.

However, there is no “ending” in sight to my public transportation phase (nor would I really want there to be, given my environmental proclivities.) I think, however, that perhaps an “ending” is not necessary in order to extract elemental truths from a public transportation phase. I suppose a little introspection may permit me to glean a few lessons learned as a result of my train-taking.

I have learned that it is better not to rush. Back in my rookie public transportation days, I used to try to squeeze in through closing doors. Then one day, I tried to do this while wearing a white button-down shirt. I ended up with a huge black stripe extending from right shoulder to left hip, on my front and back. Naturally, this occurred on the morning commute, not the evening. Now, as they say, clothes do not make the person, but if you are trying to make a good impression, it’s best not to be covered with filth. Note that subway grime is not easily removable, and attempting to rub it with a wet paper towel will, in my experience, only make its stain worse.

I have learned that it is better to hold on than not to hold on. When I first started riding the train, I was fairly paranoid about germs. The handle bars in the New York Subway are so slippery with…grease? sweat? snot? …that grabbing them with a bare hand offers the same sensation that you might expect handling a ball of fresh mozzarella cheese. Gross. So I’d try to “surf” the subway by not holding on to the bars at all. I’d position myself with a wide stance and try to anticipate bumps and turns, using my body weight to keep myself upright. Right. This doesn’t always work. Just today, in fact, a grey-haired, bookish gentleman actually ended up sitting in my lap as a result of his attempted no-hands subway surfing. If you think this sounds embarrassing, you are correct. The man could not even look me in the eye when he apologized. Also, this man happened to be slight of stature, so when he landed, I had the sensation that an eleven year old boy had perched on my lap to tell me what he wanted for Christmas. Awful. Better to hold on. Wash your hands when you get where you are going if you are really concerned with germs.

I have learned to acknowledge people I know. I hate talking to people during my commute. Really. If it’s the morning, I’m under-caffeinated and probably running late. If it’s the evening, I’m hungry and exhausted. Either way, I don’t feel like chatting with anybody, be they my best friend or a hobo. The fact of the matter is, however, if you see somebody you know, you really should at least say hi. When I lived in Chicago, I used to take the “L” to the office. One morning, I saw an administrative assistant from my firm standing a few feet away on the Brown Line train. I decided to pretend like I hadn’t seen her, and instead faced the window. A few moments passed, and the train came to a screeching, unexpected halt. I had been holding on with one hand, lazily leaning on the opposite leg as I am wont to do. The force of the train was such that I had to lurch forward. In so doing, I reflexively extended my back leg, the one not supporting my full weight, behind me to counter my forward momentum. And I kicked the administrative assistant in the ass. I kicked her in the ass. Of course I did. Now, not everybody will end up becoming a tort feasor and/or opening themselves up to a possible sexual harassment lawsuit because they didn’t greet a coworker on the L, but I’m here to say it’s possible. Had I just freaking said hello, it’s quite unlikely that I would’ve still been standing at an angle that resulted in my foot’s transgression.

Hm. Okay, so, my lessons:

(1) Don’t rush.
(2) Hold on.
(3) Say hi.

I think we’re getting somewhere. Yes, these are good rules for public transportation. But they are good rules in life in general, too! Excellent.

I do realize that from these same examples, I could’ve extracted:

(1) Stand by and let the train pass you by.
(2) Be dirty.
(3) Talk to people when you are grumpy.

But this would’ve made for a different, glass-half-empty kind of post. And I’m not there right now. In the meantime, I think I’ve got this whole beginning-middle-end thing figured.

*There are some people who will suggest that my Annie phase has not, in fact, ended. This subject probably deserves its own post.

Book Memories and Coming to Terms with Oprah

2007-11-18T16:04:00.000-05:00

I have been somewhat lax in my GWW exercises as of late. This is because I have been consumed with “one of those books.” I’m sure you know what I mean: one of those books that is, if not life-altering, then life-affirming or -enriching. I was devouring one of those books, the kind of book that gets into your psyche and becomes a new and significant personal point of reference. I’d been reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry for about a month, and I just finished it yesterday. Dern.*

Interestingly enough, my completion of Lonesome Dove coincided with an announcement by Oprah Winfrey concerning the latest selection for her Book Club. She has selected Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.

Oprah’s Book Club. Where do I begin? Her selection and the Club in general make me want to scream, though initially I couldn’t figure out why. But I think I’ve figured it out. My frustration with Oprah’s Book Club is about book memory.

You see, I read Pillars of the Earth about a year and half ago. I didn’t love it quite as much as I loved Lonesome Dove, but I think I would say that it, too, is “one of those books.” I picked up Pillars of the Earth because it is among my mom’s favorites. She says that during the time she was reading it, everything else in her life became secondary: work, sleep, the feeding of her children. This is really saying something because my mom usually takes so long to get through a book that she forgets the plot and has to reread chapters at a time. (Sometimes I swear we’re not related.) So when I finished Pillars of the Earth, I felt like my mom and I had a shared experience. Because reading this novel was life-enriching, it forged an even greater commonality between me and my mother. I loved the story, but I also loved the reason I read the story. Pillars of the Earth is a single, complete book memory for me.

Now, I started reading Lonesome Dove because it falls within of one of my many and varied slow-moving projects. A few years ago I realized that I had unwittingly read and truly enjoyed many of the Pulitzer-winning works of fiction. I decided that I would, over the course of my life, finish each of the Pulitzer winners for fiction, starting with the year of my birth and moving forward indefinitely. Lonesome Dove won the award in 1986. As a matter of course, after I started reading and enjoying Lonesome Dove, I brought it to the attention to my cowboy-loving friend C. She reminded me that she read the book in college. Oh, yeah! I do remember that. I remember seeing its dusty yellow and green cover perched next to C.’s top bunk, and I recall being impressed that she made time to get through its 858 pages while she maintained a varsity athlete’s schedule, an active social life and a double major. The book memory of Lonesome Dove: the cattle drive, its characters and their era somehow packaged with not only my former roommate and her collegiate rigor and but a separate and distinct affirmation of my decision to tackle the Pulitzer winners.

And I think that’s it. For me, sometimes it’s not just about the book, but about why you chose the book: Trinity because it was the last book my grandmother read before she died; The Devil in the White City because I was moving to Chicago and wanted to embrace the City’s origins; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because it was the first book to ever make my dad cry. Of course, not every book has a meaningful source. Flouting all conventional wisdom, I picked up The Blind Assassin because I liked the cover. But it was a really good read, and so I passed it along to my father, thereby creating a book memory for him. (For what it’s worth, my dad and I read almost all of the same books and tend to forget who chose which ones. We are still arguing about A Prayer for Owen Meany. I swear that was my pick. Although I guess this is a part of the book memories for those books whose origins were lost in the passing back and forth, no?)

It’s the story and it’s the book memory and it’s the want and need to pass the book on for someone else to create his own book memory. It’s the vast network that exists through the book. And it is personal. Sharing a book with someone because you know they will love it is like saying, “Read this because when you are finished, we will know each other even better than we do now and that's what I want.”

So back to Oprah and her Book Club. I’m not anti-Oprah. In fact, I’d say that I have pretty much no opinion on her, positive or negative. I am one of the few women who have never watched an entire episode of her show. I struggle to criticize Oprah’s Book Club because damn it, she does choose pretty good books. And while I’m not one of them, a lot of freaking people watch Oprah’s show. People take Oprah’s advice on everything from buying jeans to child-rearing; book selection seems fairly harmless. I suppose if one is going to take advice from a celebrity/perfect stranger, there are worse people to choose (read: Ann Coulter). So really, what is the harm in capitalizing on Oprah’s selection? The woman certainly has the resources to dig in and find a good read, and her track record is, in my opinion, not bad at all.

And frankly, is there a difference between choosing books based on the Pulitzer Prize list and choosing based on Oprah’s Book Club list? Apart from snobbery, maybe not. I mean, I could argue that I’d rather take my literary suggestions from Columbia University, the administrator of the Pulitzers, than from Harpo Productions, but again, that sounds more ostentatious than anything else.

I guess it’s the commercialization of the book recommendation that fundamentally irritates me. I don’t think I would have such a special place in my heart for Pillars of the Earth if I read it because of Oprah’s suggestion rather than my mom’s. I guess I wish we lived in a world where everybody had a friend who loved cowboys and who made time to read Lonesome Dove during college. It would be so much better if we all had parents who kept track of a grandmother’s last novel. But I suppose in today's world, Oprah will have to do. On the whole, better to get folks reading good books recommended by Oprah than not to get them reading at all.

That said, does anybody out there have a good book memory worth sharing? As I’ve noted, I’m in the market for a new novel. . .

*Because Lonesome Dove is a cowboy book, the characters frequently express frustration and/or wonderment with the expression “Dern!” As I began to fall in love with these characters, I found myself using this same turn of phrase, if only in my mind, when I came up upon an exasperating situation, e.g., sustaining a small cut on my thumb from my apple-corer. The same sort of syntax absorption happened nine years ago when I read Bridget Jones’ Diary and began thinking in sentence fragments… N.B., however, I am not suggesting that Bridget Jones’ Diary is in any way a literary equivalent to Lonesome Dove.

Oooo Barbereda*

2007-11-11T19:11:00.001-05:00

It’s been about three weeks since Path Train Jimmy offered to sell one of his R&B albums to me . Because his offer had me so flummoxed, I took some time to decide how to proceed. I knew I had to purchase one of his CDs; if nothing else, I am a woman of my word. However, once I got over my initial shock that Path Train Jimmy was not actually the character I created, I felt it necessary to think about what kind of character he was. Would he just take my five dollars, give me a CD and be done with it, or was he some sort of scam artist… a sharpie…a con man? Perhaps I was dealing with a smooth operator. Would it start with a CD purchase and progress to a request for a loan until payday? Would he take my sawbuck and refuse to give me any change? Was there actually a CD to purchase, anyway? One can never be too careful as a woman traversing the streets of Gotham, right?

I thought it best not to rush to the purchase. He needed to know I was in charge of the transaction and wouldn’t withstand any shenanigans, that I would know right away if things weren't on the up-and-up. I imagined blowing by Path Train Jimmy in a rush the next morning, giving him the raised eyebrows and a brisk shake of the head to indicate “no time for you today, I’ll get to it when I’m good and ready.”

The next day I went through his turnstiles to find Path Train Jimmy there, pleasant as ever. Much to my chagrin and completely out of synch with my plan, a ready excuse tumbled out of my mouth at 100 miles per hour:

“I would still really like to buy one of your CDs, but I don’t have any small bills today,” I said to him, nodding encouragingly.

Shit. Great idea. Did I actually just walk into the underground Path Station and publicly suggest to a group of New York City strangers and a transit worker who has offered to sell me an unlicensed product that I’m flush with cash? I may as well have opened my bag and started pulling out gold bars as I searched for my fare card.

For what it’s worth, though, Jimmy looked at me blankly. He seemed to have no recollection that we had a conversation 24 hours earlier about his CD. Insanely exasperating to have blurted out the reminder, let me tell you. After a few beats, he put together what I was talking about, though.

“Oh! Hey, well, that’s no problem! I think I can make change!”

Naturally, I then found myself standing with my wallet open in one hand while my other hand kept a death-grip on my coffee (no need to lose another mug), leaving my fresh trip to the ATM exposed for the entire platform to see and/or snatch. I started to pray that the Journal Square train would arrive.

It did.

“I’m so sorry, I can’t miss my train today! Another time?” I explained desperately, snapping my wallet shut and racing toward the open doors.

So that went well. Clearly if Path Train Jimmy is a hustler, he hasn’t marked me as a target at all. Sheesh.

Eventually, I did come prepared to the Path train with a fiver tucked into my coat pocket. I was so ready for the purchase that I was, perhaps, suffering from tunnel vision. When I strode toward Jimmy and explained I was ready to buy his album, he looked around surreptitiously.

“Shhhhh...” He opened his reflective vest and did a 180 degree turn, passing the CD to me as though it were a runner’s baton, underhanded and behind his lower back. This covert action confused the crap out of me.

“Um, okay?” I awkwardly took the album and shoved the five dollar bill at him as though it were a pie I intended to plant on his face. He snatched it up posthaste.

“We gotta watch the scene, knowwhatImean?” Jimmy made a comical/frightening Muppet-like grimace, raising his eyebrows a few times.

I didn’t actually knowwhathemean…until I made my way down the platform and saw three uniformed Port Authority police officers.

Reader, I kid you not. I absolutely panicked. Within the span of ten seconds, I convinced myself that this CD was a bluff, that it was actually packaging for illicit substances and that I had just committed a federal offense within steps of law enforcement. Stupid, stupid, stupid! No wonder Path Train Jimmy was acting so strangely (or, at least, much more strangely than was his norm.) I knew I was right to suspect him of hooliganism.** Just my luck that “R&B album” is apparently the code word for “illegal narcotic” these days.

Right.

But it’s not. And the “I inadvertently just executed a drug deal” terror passed fairly quickly, though it was soon replaced by the “buying an album from Path Train Jimmy was not lawful” alarm. I mean, of course it’s not legal for a Port Authority employee to sell goods on the job and at the station. I’m a freaking lawyer. I should know that. Frankly, they should have cuffed me as punishment for my own stupidity.

I almost turned to those Port Authority police officers, waving a white flag with my wrists outstretched.

But I didn’t. As it had a few days earlier, the Journal Square train saved the day. I stepped in and minded the closing doors as instructed by the pubic address system. No need to push the limits of luck now that I was on the lam.

*My friend CK used to think the song “Smooth Operator” by Sade was actually called “Oooo Barbereda.”

** Microsoft does not flag “hooliganism” as a misspelled word. Really? I totally thought I made it up.

Boring Storyteller

2007-11-01T18:11:00.000-04:00

“Think about how boring it would be if your friend told a story about something really exciting but began that anecdote two days before anything important actually got started.” GWW text, page 69.

This sounds familiar, right? You know this person: he or she will begin a story with a deep breath and an eye roll and the declaration that “Oh my God, this is soooo funny…” or “Okay, well, this is a really long story, but…”

Uggghhhh.

The boring storyteller. He can take an outrageously amusing set of circumstances and turn it into something as entertaining as a recitation of a commercial lease. She can keep on a-talking, irrespective that four people have drifted away from her audience of five and the remaining person is sound asleep. He has the ability to speak loudly over those who try to pepper his monologue with interesting nuggets. She can pick up her story’s thread even after her dinner companions purposely drop it six times.

Drive. Me. Crazy.

I once sat in an Applebee’s in Cleveland and listened to a girl tell a bad story for so long that I actually felt myself getting older. She launched into her delivery flying both red flags: the story was going to be lengthy, we were told, but maybe the funniest thing anybody had ever heard, bar none. Good Lord. I don’t remember most of it, because I was busy pinching the insides of my elbows to keep focused, but it had something to do with a lost Passport and a trip to Jamaica. The timing was truly tragic, because her story followed several objectively hilarious recaps of Jamaican high jinks. It was endless. She refused to yield to anybody who tried to move her along. When we would prompt her to skip ahead: “Oh, tell me that they let you get on the plane anyway?” -- she’d push back, “Wait, I’m not there yet! Anyway….” Honestly, when I finally got home, I was tempted to pour bleach into my ears just to help remove the sound of her voice from my head.

Are there ways to handle the boring storyteller? Well, the best tactic I ever saw is executed by my friend J., but it requires a certain set of circumstances, as it only seemed to work on one specific friend:

Periodically, J. would notice that G. was telling a story to a small group, and that the story didn’t have much in the way of legs. J. would then alert the entire, larger group, and tell everyone to be quiet and listen:

“Hey, guys! G.’s telling a story – shhhhh!”

G., eyes darting, panic-stricken, sotto voce to J., “No-no-no…this isn’t a good enough story…”

But the hush falls over the crowd anyway. G. resigns himself to finishing the story. He struggles to cut it as short as possible. We collective berate him.

Ahh. Truly the perfect end to a bad story.

Now, it should be noted that G. is actually a spectacular storyteller, generally. But that’s the catch, the reason J.’s kill-the-bad-story technique works with him: G. knows when a story is going south. It happens. You just cut your losses and run. You have the grace to let someone interrupt and then you refuse to return.

Storytelling is a tricky business. Just as the bad storyteller can ruin a good anecdote, so too, can a genius storyteller make anything hilarious. But there are obstacles, even for the truly great. A bad set-up can ruin a story: “Hey, tell that story about how you slipped in your bedroom when you were on the phone and you sliced open your foot and ended up with six stitches.” Um. No. You’ve just told it. The peanut gallery can ruin a story: "Wait! That didn't happen on New Year's Eve! It was St. Patty's Day! And we were at a restaurant, not Loehmanns!" Thanks. Not relevant, but let me pick up the pieces if I can.

I had this idea for a story at the beginning of this week. It’s sort of floating around in an intangible form, like the conversation bubble in a Peanuts comic. I feel like it might be funny. I think I need to figure out who should tell it. And I need to figure out how long it should be – it’s not clear to me if it’s a short story or if it could really take some time to tell. I haven’t hit upon the correct “Your turn” exercise to help me tease it out, but that could be because I’m only in the first third of the Plot Chapter.

Anyway, I’ll let you know. I hope this isn’t my only idea? But if it is, I hope I don’t stumble into poor execution trickiness. If I do, please use J.’s technique. I’ll be happy to reign it in.

Give me the Plot!

2007-10-28T17:51:00.001-04:00

I have finally finished Chapter 2 of the GWW text. Huzzah! It appears that the focus of Chapter 3 and my next series of exercises will be Plot. I am excited. All of the Character work from Chapter 2 has me ready to start thinking about what my characters will do and why I am even thinking about them. Plot.

I know from Plot. In fact, when I hear the word “Plot” in my head, it is spoken in a very loud, over-articulated, specific voice. The voice belongs to my 6th grade Reading teacher, Mrs. Mogensen.

Sixth grade Reading was great. Every day we would go though a chapter of our textbook, each of which was a different tale. We’d then have to write down the Plot, Setting, Characters, and Style of the story. Mrs. Mogensen had us come up to her desk when we were finished, and she would review our answers then and there. She would repeatedly bellow at students: “No, that’s not the Plot! Give me the Plot!”

It was of particular concern to us sixth graders to give her the Plot. Once you gave her the correct answer, you were allowed to leave your desk and take homework from other classes over to the broken-down naugahyde couch that Mrs. Mogensen kept in the corner of her classroom. No other classroom in the school had a couch, and sitting on it was about as big of a thrill as you could find. Mrs. Mogensen didn’t closely monitor the couch. Boys would squish in next to girls, there was often a lot of whispered gossip exchanged, and it was a first-come, first-seated system. Though we could jam quite a few bodies on the couch, if you were late, you’d end up on the floor, staring at everyone’s knees and trying to act like it was just as cool to sit on a throw-pillow (it wasn’t.)

And that was Reading. Give me the Plot!

At the close of the first marking period and on the day after report card distribution, Mrs. Mogensen made it public that she gave out only one ‘A’ in Reading. She went on to explain to the sixth grade that this person received an ‘A’ because he or she was always able to give her the Plot. When she made this announcement, it created a considerable amount of hubbub. Suddenly getting an ‘A’ in Reading seemed almost as impressive as...as... being allowed to see Beverly Hills Cop II or knowing all the words to “Wild Wild West” or something.

But the thing was, when Mrs. Mogensen made this announcement, I could not remember my Reading grade. I didn’t dwell on the grade when I looked over my report card the day before because at distribution, we sixth graders weren’t a-twitter about Reading and how challenging the class was. It was just another grade.

So it was possible that I was the ‘A’-in-Reading person. I knew I was generally good at Reading, but I couldn’t really gauge whether my ability to give her the Plot was better or worse than anyone else’s. Hm. I confessed my suspicions to my friend Maria, and inquired whether she remembered what I got in Reading.

“Oh, no. I don’t think it’s you. I think you got a ‘B’ or a ‘B+.’ It’s probably Cate Iris.”

Okay, totally annoying. It probably was Cate Iris, who was by far the smartest person in our class, but she didn't have to say it that way. I knew for damn sure that I didn’t get a freaking ‘B’ in Reading. Hell, I rarely got anything lower than a ‘B+’! If I did, it wouldn’t have been in Reading…it’d be in Math. (Slight exception occurred in the first grade when I got all A’s and a ‘C’ in Handwriting. I recall having a conversation about this with my Mom and my Aunt. My Aunt tried to make me feel better about the ‘C’ by telling me that “it didn’t really count.” I had absolutely no idea why Handwriting wouldn’t “count” as a grade and didn’t buy it for one bit.)

Meanwhile, as the time ticked by, I was missing out on some cachet.

At lunch on that day, Mrs. Mogensen had cafeteria duty. She wondered by my table. Jaime. asked Mrs. Mogensen who had received the legendary ‘A.’ Mrs. Mogensen said it was the business of the ‘A’ student if he or she wanted to reveal his- or herself. And then I felt that Mrs. Mogensen looked at me and smiled.

Did she?

I went home after school and checked out my report card. It was me. I got the ‘A’. I was always able to give her the Plot.

But suddenly I felt a little torn. Mrs. Mogensen thought that I was being modest. She probably thought this was honorable. I wasn’t bragging about always slam-dunking it when it came time to give her the Plot.

But that wasn’t actually me at all. I had to acknowledge to myself that I would have crowed out the news ASAP had I remembered my grade accurately. The Catholic guilt kicked in a little. The Last Shall Be First and the First Shall Be Last and what-not.

God-damnit.

I struggled with the decision for most of the night. Finally I decided that at the very least, I needed to tell Maria that I was the ‘A’ student. Her open scorn wasn’t nice, and in fact, it was flat-out Un-Christian. If she happened to turn around and tell the whole class that I was the mystery Reading master, well, that was just the price of correcting her uncharitable comment. This was my Catholic duty.

Naturally, the next morning when I told Maria my news, she shrugged and told me, in turn, that Abbey Dentler had gotten a perm.

My moment was gone. Not only did nobody ever hear (until now) that I was the only one to receive an ‘A’ in Reading that marking period, nobody cared anymore.

But at least I was still able to decipher plot. And in this blog, that’s what’s really important. Perm-schmerm.

Stranger than Fiction

2007-10-21T17:46:00.001-04:00

The GWW text requires its student to choose a person from her daily routine, someone relatively unknown to the student, and to create a persona for him. I chose Path Train Jimmy.

Path Train Jimmy wears coveralls and stands at the turnstile in the Christopher Street Path Station. He greets me almost every morning. He’s very friendly: I often see him interacting with other riders, but I have never said much to him other than hello and perhaps a remark on the weather. (He was not there on the day the Path ticket vending machine refused to take any of my credit cards and continually spat out my proffered dollars, requiring me to miss three consecutive trains and to put my homemade coffee in its travel mug on top of the turnstile until I could fish out the $1.50 fare in coins, only to discover – after I was finally granted access to the platform – that some total asshole had stolen my coffee from its perch. Had he been there, I feel certain the coffee-filching wouldn’t have occurred. If it had, I would bet that Path Train Jimmy would’ve allowed me to vent about said asshole, and to remark on how repulsive it is to even think about taking a stranger’s full, warm, homemade coffee, because one never really knows what is in a coffee mug, i.e., perhaps I spiked it with hallucinogenics (I didn’t), or what kind of germs lurk in the recesses of the porcelain, i.e., herpes (not on my mug). I’d wager that Path Train Jimmy may have even offered me words of condolence because he would’ve understood that the theif who steals coffee-from-home in a travel mug is an extra-jerky thief because he – or she – does not take into account that the sort of person who brings coffee-from-home is the sort of person who is fiscally responsible and environmentally sensitive and, most likely, works a not-for-profit job and would rather not spend her hard-earned money on new coffee travel mugs.) However, you may guess that I sense Path Train Jimmy is a good guy. It was fun to create a character for him.

It became a little weird seeing Path Train Jimmy after I made up his personality, and his history, and began drafting some stories about him. I started to feel like I knew too much about him. I found myself tempted to ask him how his mom was feeling, and to offer him condolences when Rutgers, his favorite team, lost their big game against Maryland.

I was able to contain myself, though.

So, it was especially odd on Tuesday of last week when I walked through the turnstile per the norm and Path Train Jimmy greeted me with his usual pleasantries but also asked me what my name was.

My name? A year-plus of generic banalities and out of the blue, he asks my name? Has Path Train Jimmy hacked into my computer? Does he know I'm writing about him? Is Path Train Jimmy writing a story about me? Are we on the same page of GWW’s text?

Surely not. I’m being paranoid and creating coincidences where they do not exist. I gave him my name (but did not ask his) and went on my merry way.

But then on Thursday, I walked through to find Path Train Jimmy on one side of the turnstile and another Path employee on the other. I smile at both of them, and Path Train Jimmy greets me.

“Good morning! What’s your name again?”

“Actchy.” (N.B. the amazing restraint I exhibit by not calling him ‘Jimmy.’)

“Actchy. That’s right. What are you listening to?” He gestures at my Ipod.

Okay, so, I have really, really embarrassing taste in music. My husband is horrified by the stuff he finds in our shared library. Granted, I do like U2, Coldplay, Dave Matthews, and other artists that are standard-issue in the music collection of most 30-somethings. I adore Bruce Springsteen, which is fairly normal. I even have some “cool” music like Rufus Wainwright and Erykah Badu, but really the only reason I know these folks exist is because my brother will periodically give me a CD for Christmas.* Irrespective of this, more often than not, you can find me commuting to the sounds of the music I grew up with (Simon & Garfunkel, Ray Charles), country songs leftover from my Midwestern college years (Garth Brooks, Dixie Chicks), or – worst of all – corny musical theatre stuff (covers by Barbara Streisand). Whenever someone asks me to explain what I’m listening to, I always weigh how embarrassing it will be to be truthful against how easily I can forward my Ipod to the next ‘normal’ song on my playlist. In this instance, I decide that because it’s Path Train Jimmy, and I know him to be nonjudgmental on account of his solid Irish working-class Jersey City upbringing, I can be truthful.

“I’m listening to Jim Croce,” I admit.

“Ah? Well, do you ever listen to R&B?”

“Sure!” (Aretha Franklin is R&B, right?)

“Well, my name is Earl Jones. I have an R&B album that I think you would really like, and I can get you one for only $5!”

What? Path Train Jimmy is not a musician. And his name is not Earl Jones.

“His music is beautiful.” The Non-Jimmy Path train worker is chiming in. “It really is.”

I am totally taken aback. And, for what it’s worth, I feel a little upset. Singing/Frustrated-Musician Earl Jones might be even more interesting than Path Train Jimmy. Why didn’t I intuit that he was a vocalist? That he was the King of Rhythm and Blues? And honestly: his name is Earl Jones? And I named him James, d/b/a “Jimmy”? Is my Path attendant James Earl Jones?

“You know what? I bet it is. I don’t have any cash on me this morning, but I am here every day, and I would love to buy one of your CDs.”

I hope to see Path Train James Earl Jones this week. I’m hoping to resolve my crisis by then. Please let me know if I can pick up a CD for you.

*Are these artists “cool”? I don’t even really know for sure.

What Can I Say?

2007-10-13T19:41:00.000-04:00

I’ve found that the GWW text tends to ease you into your narrative. As you can gather from my posts, most of the “Your Turn” exercises I’ve tackled thus far focus on small aspects of a story. Actually, the exercises I’ve discussed have focused on characters, because that’s the subject of Chapter 2, and I haven’t made it past Chapter 2 yet. But in addition to requests for lists of character traits or life events to use as story-starters, there are a few assignments in Chapter 2 that ask for a little action.

I’ve been able to come up with some ideas. I’ve even drafted a few scenes. The most challenging thing for me is not coming up with the idea, but having the stamina to sit and focus and get the scene on paper (er, on the computer screen.) I get the descriptions down, I see the characters, and I’m pretty sure what’s going to happen to them. But the execution of dialogue, trying to make the events happen in a believable sequence -- it takes some time.

And actually, it’s not terribly difficult to imagine what fictitious people will say. Hell, it’s easier than trying to predict what I might say in a given situation.

For example, sometimes I wonder what would be a good thing to say to a celebrity in the event of a chance meeting. I never used to think about this, but I actually had a bit of a celebrity encounter last year, when I ended up spending some time with Alec Baldwin. Think what you may about Alec Baldwin as a person; he’s a big environmentalist, which is why I ended up interfacing with him.

It did not go as I thought it would. I did not anticipate that I would be almost beside myself with giddiness when he arrived. I did not anticipate that I would babble incoherently when we rode the elevator together up to my offices to have a group meeting. (I don’t recall most of what we discussed, except that I do recall saying that I was an Eagles fan. Honestly? I talked about football? Objection, your honor: relevance!) I did not anticipate that I would turn so red with excitement that I could have easily passed for a burn victim. I was, if you will, totally beyond pickles.

He did not ask me to do a cameo on 30 Rock. To be honest, I found this to be sort of surprising, as I felt it was a foregone conclusion (or at least, I had felt that way prior to the giggling and the babbling and the blushing.)

The worst part about the encounter is the photographic evidence. After the meeting, Alec Baldwin guest hosted a fundraising activity for my organization. We had someone there who was in charge of taking photos. Now, I know you’ll find this surprising given my utter and complete lack of playing it cool, but whereas apparently I could go on and on about the NFL, I found myself incapable of asking for a photo with Alec Baldwin. It seemed too corny, too unprofessional. After all, he was there to support the environment, I’m an environmental attorney, and this was business. I would not have asked any other person who came to our offices for a meeting for a photograph, so I rationalized that it was totally improper to ask Alec Baldwin. Plus, I was hoping that the photographer might catch a little bit of our interactions in a selection of candids.

The photographer did snap a shot of me standing in a conversational circle with Alec Baldwin. This is it:

Yes, that’s me in the black dress. You can see a good quarter of the back of my head (notice the tame curls), my shoulder and arm, and a bit of my hand. The gentleman with the glasses is blocking most of my back. Basically, this photo is a great shot of my ID badge with Alec Baldwin.

Sigh.

Anyway, I would guess that if I had been better prepared, had given even a little thought as to what to say to Alec Baldwin, things might have been different. Maybe I would’ve made Page Six. I could’ve been at a cocktail party with Tina Fey and the gang right now. At the very least, maybe I could have had the front of me in a photo with the Handsome Actor.

Next time. I just have to figure out what to say.

If I wore my hair natural like yours, I'd be bald*

2007-10-07T18:14:00.000-04:00

Okay, so, Character Traits. Extremely fun to consider, I think. What’s particularly amusing is that you don’t really have to make them up, per se. You only have to think about people you know: your grade school librarian who had orange painted-on eyebrows, your otherwise normal-looking law school professor with the super-bushy handlebar moustache, your friend who has a mole on his arm that grows a really, really long hair…Man, this could be the easiest assignment in the entire GWW book! Hooray for page 38!

The only true danger I can conceive about the exercise that asks for a character with a corresponding list of traits is the fact that it’s far easier to dwell on certain characteristics (name, hair color, identifiable scars) than on others (biggest fears, secrets, place of retreat when angry). For example, today as I’m ticking off traits, I find myself thinking about my character’s hair. And I find that I could spend all day thinking about not only my character’s hair, but hair in general. And not even, if I’m being totally honest, ‘hair in general’ so much as ‘women’s hair in general.’

I suppose most women obsess about their hair to some extent. I don’t actually obsess about my hair too much any more, but there was a time when it was the biggest part of my life, both literally and figuratively. I was one of those unfortunate little girls who had shiny, wavy hair for her entire childhood (although it was tough to discern this because my mom kept it at a gender-confusing length that she swears was necessary because I used to comb it with the wrong side of the brush, i.e., the side without bristles), but who, upon puberty, encountered an entirely different mane. Though I continued to style my hair by brushing it straight through, my locks actually went curly -- very, very curly -- when I hit puberty. Basically, the result was that throughout most of the 7th and 8th grade, I looked like Roseanne Rosannadanna. It wasn’t until some hair dresser got a good look at me and conducted an intervention that constituted a primer on mousse and diffusing hair-dryers that I was able to walk around looking like a normal teenager rather like than a Gilda Radner impersonator.

As an adult, I don’t always look like I’m ready for the runway, but it is accurate that people do not cringe or worry that they will become ensnared in my ponytail when I approach. But there are folks out there who go about life with insane hairstyles which, I suppose, they have decided are appropriate. Or normal. Or maybe they have given up trying?

It is hard to try, sometimes. And I’ll admit that because I’m not very artistic when it comes to hair styling, I’ve pretty much had the same cut (with one exception) since college. I did not jump on the flat iron bandwagon, and it’s not because my hair is just too curly for straightening. It’s because I’m lazy and I don’t want to learn a new technique. But some people really never seem to be able to break from what they consider to be their peak style era.

Case in point. I get pizza for lunch once a week at this place owned by a lovely married couple. I would guess that they are in their mid-forties. I am fascinated by the wife; she runs the register. While this woman clearly goes through the trouble to color her hair to a nice, modern chestnut-red, she feels it necessary to keep the 1983 Aqua Net bangs. Whaaaaat? Why? One need not master a new skill in order to break from 80's bangs. It would be so much easier to just not do that. It’s not like learning to use a flat iron. She would actually drop time from her morning routine if she neglected to pull out her teasing comb.

And then there was this woman I met at a fundraiser last winter. She had this headband that was absolutely shocking. It was structured like a regular headband, and served to push her hair back in a neat, no-nonsense Hillary-circa-1993 fashion. But the headband looked like a braid. Like a thick fake braid made out of hair from a Barbie. What’s worse is that apparently, this wasn’t a style that the woman employed solely for the black tie event. No, rumor has it that this woman actually wears this headband all the time. Why? Am I supposed to think that that thing is real? Made out of her actual hair? And say it was: why would this woman think it would be a good idea, at age 55 (conservative estimate) to grow really, really long hair and braid it into a make-shift headband?

Well. You’re not going to believe this. But in today’s New York Times, there is an article about Yulia V. Tymoshenko, an erstwhile political figure in Ukraine. This article is not in Section 'A', but in the Sunday Styles, and it focuses on Ms. Tymoshenko’s ever-present long headband braid. The thing is apparently a political statement, a symbol of her love of country and Christian Orthodoxy. And here’s the best part: the braid is real.

Clearly I’m wrong to project my own reasons for hair styling stagnancy on others. I am forced to reconsider the fundraising braid lady. It’s as likely as not that she isn’t just stuck in a styling rut but, in fact, making a socio-political comment.

So if someone out there knows what sort of agenda my pizzeria friend might have with her big 1980's teased bangs, do share. I hate to be in the dark on these things. It makes for unrealistic character creation.

*With a tip of the hat to Jerry Herman's lyrics, brought to life by Vera Charles.

Your Chariot Awaits

2007-09-29T16:16:00.000-04:00

I’ve turned down the corner of page twelve of the GWW text to mark it for future reference. Apparently, one way to get an idea for a good story is to list the events of the prior week. I’m totally on board with this. Nary a day goes by for me without some sort of strange incident. I mean, I do live in New York. It’s tough to leave my apartment without seeing something a little goofy that might help launch a narrative.

Case in point: I just got back from my gym. On the walk home, I passed a woman with two English Bulldogs. The woman was about my age, and appeared to be fairly normal (i.e., she wasn’t shouting obscenities, topless, wearing a lampshade as a skirt, etc.) She did, however, have an unusual method for walking her dogs. One trotted along the pavement on his leash in the way you would expect, flexing his shoulders as bulldogs always seem to do. To my surprise, the other one did not walk on a leash. Instead, she rode along in a little red wagon, the kind that might delight a 3 year old boy. This bulldog did not appear to be injured, for she was standing on all fours and smiling contentedly (what is it about bulldogs – they do seem to smile, don’t they?). She did not appear particularly old, or fat. I didn’t detect that she was blind, for she seemed to take in her surroundings fully. Nope, she just seemed to be the Queen of the West Village, riding along, standing on a quilted blanket, waiting for the woman to pull her to her destination.

A friend and bulldog enthusiast once told me that English Bulldogs have to be delivered by cesarean section because they are so broad. Kind of strange, really, for the English to breed a dog that requires so much human help to successfully reproduce. Maybe this great care-taking requirement from the get-go slowly reverses the usual balance of powers between human and pet? Perhaps the wagon-doggy was perfectly capable of walking, but had slowly worn down the resistance of her owner so that she was able to convince the woman that she needed a ride?

I could see it. I know of a family who had a pet St. Bernard. As a puppy, the St. Bernard’s collar used to bang against its metal bowl, making a noise that the dog found quite unsettling. So much so, that this puppy grew to be afraid to eat its supper from its bowl. In order to remedy the problem, the family matriarch hand fed this St. Bernard puppy.

You know, a St. Bernard grows to become a pretty big dog. This one sure did. And it lived well into its 12th year. And every day for over a decade, this otherwise savvy middle-aged woman sat on the floor of her kitchen and scooped Purina into the 215 lb St. Bernard’s mouth because it was afraid of its 6 oz doggy dish. I ask you: who is the boss of that relationship?

Anyway, I'm going to include the English Bulldog parade on my list of possible story starters. And then I have to attend a memorial service for my cousin’s deceased Chow-Chow.

My Turn

2007-09-22T12:52:00.000-04:00

The Gotham Writers’ Workshop text is peppered with a number of exercises labeled “Your Turn.” The “Your Turn” sections follow a few pages of general answers to questions like “How do I come up with an idea for a plot?” or “How can I make my characters seem like real people?” I like this structure because it reminds me of one of my favorite songs from The Electric Company album, a mainstay of my formative years. The song was called “My name is Actchy.” (This was always a bit of a thrill for me, given that, well, my name is Actchy.*) It was sung by a number of kids in the Short Circus, but lead by Actchy, who reported that she liked to sing and play fine music, too. She then invited the other kids to sing verses, and during the course of the song you got to hear about other kids’ lives, e.g., a love for playing the drums, struggles with getting out of bed.

The song suggested that the listener at home should make up lyrics about herself: “Now let somebody else begin. Sing right out and we’ll all join in.” I never made up my own verse. I was probably about 5 or 6 when I was listening to the record, and I used to somehow believe that Actchy, the girl singing, was some sort of future version of me. I didn’t need to make up my own lyric. The singing Actchy was obviously me as a big kid, as she had the kind of big kid life I envisioned for myself: sitting around with other teens, leading them in song, having a record album of her own. *Sigh.*

But I digress. “Your Turn.” Because “Your Turn” in the GWW text is not followed by a page of response written by some sort of successful novelist that shares my name, I suppose it’s time to take the cue. Getting started on this project is tough. When I start something, I tend to finish it, irrespective of how long it takes. But for some reason, it’s more difficult for me to start writing than it was to start, say, “going to the gym” or “making a scrapbook on my wedding,” even though both of those projects were, like this one, things I had never, ever done before. I’m a little daunted by how long this particular project might take. (Hell, it took me over a year to do my wedding scrapbook, and by the time I finished, I was totally Beyond Pickles and loathe to ever look at double-sided tape again.)

Journey of a thousand miles, etc., right? Okay. I’m stepping.

*Okay, so my given name is clearly not “Actchy.” But I have gathered that putting one’s real name out here in cyberspace is sort of a blogging no-no. Privacy, and what-not. As a novice, I’m going to just blindly follow the rules until I discover that either these aren’t the rules, or that the rules are silly.

Beyond Pickles

2007-09-11T15:20:00.000-04:00

The name, by way of introduction, is probably a temporary placeholder. My family has always had a pretty solid lunch-at-home ritual. Among other things, it includes pickles. We got to the end of one such lunch and my mom realized, in relative agony, that we had forgotten to bring the pickles from the counter to the table. “Does anybody want them, or are we beyond pickles at this point?" My sister decided that (a) all of us were, in fact, beyond pickles, and that (b) this would be a great name for my mom's book. However, my mom has no intention of writing a book. But I do. So there you go.

A few weeks ago I bought the Gotham Writers' Workshop’s Writing Fiction, The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School. I chose it from the mountain of writer's books solely because it has a one-line endorsement by Jhumpa Lahiri on the cover. Note I have never, ever purchased any self-help/career-type books in my life.

Okay, wait. This is not entirely true. I actually bought The Lawyer’s Career Change Handbook after an excruciating work week when I was a 1st year litigation associate. That was some time ago, I have yet to peruse it, but I imagine my little project here at Beyond Pickles might be something included therein. Or which should be included therein.

But be that as it may, I'm going to try to work my way through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop text. We'll see. I may drop things as soon as the month is over and I decide I'd rather focus on my window herb garden. Then again, I might not.