mappa mundi

Happy Valentine's Day!

2010-02-14T22:24:00.002-05:00

Hope everyone's was sweet.

Coats of Arms, Shoes of Feet

2010-01-23T14:02:00.006-05:00

In January 1610, Galileo Galilei set up a telescope on the grounds of the Jesuit Collegio Romano in order to decisively show his colleagues, at long last, the movements of the planets and the moons of Jupiter. Once he had demonstrated his new findings to his satisfaction the Father of Modern Science, in true Italian fashion, threw a banquet, and several months later he published his treatise, The Starry Messenger. Astronomy was changed forever.

Four hundred years later, Meridith McNeal is celebrating her own findings with “In the Footsteps of the Starry Messenger,” an exhibition of pen and ink and watercolor drawings at Figureworks in Brooklyn. In the spring of 2009, McNeal found herself working in a studio at the American Academy in Rome on the very spot where Galileo made his celestial discoveries. In his honor, and in the spirit of inquiry both artistic and historical, she set out to capture the essence of the place and its people.

The starry messenger’s footsteps here are not just metaphorical but visible: Shoes, of every description and period, dominate the show, as well as representations of the bounty of the Academy—its toweringly stocked kitchen shelves, ripe fruit, attendant cats.
But the shoes are the headliners. Hung singly and in one magnificent constellation of 16, the drawings are incarnations of a city’s worth of souls, and just as diverse. There are ghostly baby shoes, a sexily reclining pair of ’70s wedges, shiny red Mary Janes, a pair of buckled shoes with a skirt in the brown, pink, and lemon of ’50s trim, expressionistic bold black heels, and the wonderfully graphic “Black Boots with Orange Skirt,” which surely would have made Andy Warhol’s heart beat a little faster. Each work is as different as a face on a busy street, and together they form an intensely pleasing collection of temperaments and slices of time.
There are also some larger pieces to locate us in place and pay homage to Galileo’s banquet. A black and white portrait of the Academy’s kitchen looms dark but not in the least ominous, holding all the quiet promise of a public space at rest. The ink is laid on lushly, with shelves of glassware gleaming from a breakfront cupboard like stars in the firmament. “Apples by the Academy Gate” is voluptuously tactile: pebbles, leaves, a plastic bag, a newspaper, metal bins, and the fresh apples. The rendering, as in all the work here, is strong and personal, each texture given its own character but all part of a bustling whole.
In a way, though, the linchpin of the show is one of the quieter pieces, "l'Accademia." McNeal’s drawing, done in nib pen and ink with watercolor and Italian glitter eyeliner, is a refashioning of the coat of arms representing l'Accademia dei Lincei (the Academy of the Lynx-Eyed), Galileo’s scientific brotherhood. Here the wreath serves as a window onto her studio, with wineglass, brushes and hula hoop rampant, but it also sets the tone for the collection as a whole. For what are the shoes if not coats of arms or a sort? Whether the central image on a textured field of cobblestones or surmounted by the mantling of a woman’s skirt, each is an emblem preceding and representing its wearer. If they aren’t riding into battle, they are at least stepping out into the street, which is close enough. The two handsome black and white cat portraits that dominate one wall are heraldic as well, classical lions couchant composed as central elements crossed with strong diagonals.

This modern heraldry brings the span between 17th and 21st centuries to a human scale. These are Meridith McNeal’s stars, her banquet, her Accademia; although largely concerned with street-level imagery, “In the Footsteps of the Starry Messenger” is celestial in scope. The show is infused with the progression of her gaze: First down, then up and out, over and over—much as Galileo’s would have wandered in the process of discovering how the universe works. In 1610 he wrote in his foreword:

“THE STARRY MESSENGER: Revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles, opening these to the consideration of every man, and especially of philosophers and astronomers.”

I would add to that artists, and the rest of us as well.

(All artwork © Meridith McNeal 2010.)

The Very Definition of True Love

2010-01-14T14:33:00.003-05:00

Look at these two. I mean, really.

Two Oh One Oh

2010-01-01T22:35:00.004-05:00

Two-oh-one-oh. That's what my mom, who is nearly 82 and tends toward wild imprecision, calls this year. Last year was two-oh-oh-nine. "Two thousand nine, mom," I would correct her endlessly, and she would agree until the next time, and eventually I just had to give up. I wonder if it isn't an oldster inability, on her part, to wrap her mind around the fact that the name of the year now starts with "two thousand." It rolls off my tongue just fine. But maybe if I were 82 it would be a bit more conceptually difficult.

So, two-oh-one-oh. I always say that I'm not really one for reflection prompted by the calendar date, but that's a big old lie. Sometimes I'm happier than others to see the numbers roll over, to say goodbye to a certain period, but there's something satisfying in looking at a big chunk of time like a year to see what I think of it. And this one in particular is fun. Two-oh-oh-nine was a very good year, by my reckoning.

The main thing to recommend it was that I did everything I set out to do. Mind you, we're not talking about finding a cure for cancer or ending world hunger or fostering troubled teenagers. I didn't even pay that extra month on my mortgage that I always say I'll do when I get my tax return. My goals are generally not real lofty. I have a few directives to live by: Do no harm, be compassionate where possible, don't litter, don't gossip, and don't be lame. I hate—loathe—lameness, both personally and in general. But since I can't do anything about other people's lameness and it's pointless to even try, I just worry about my own.

And 2009? Was a year that I wasn't lame. I started blogging for Readerville at the beginning of the year, and while that was something I hadn't really given any thought to before beyond this chatty half-assed enterprise, I liked doing it right away. And when Readerville closed up shop in June my immediate, gut-punch reaction was that I'd start up my own damn blog. And I did. Like Fire launched in September, and within a couple of months I'd made friends with the fine people over at Open Letters Monthly and agreed to partner up with them. Today marks the official startup of Like Fire 2.0, official blog of Open Letters. And away we go.

It's not even a matter of how successful I was or wasn't with the blog. It's just that I said I was going to do it and I did. Maybe I'm setting the bar low for myself, but so be it. There was a bunch of other stuff: I got in the habit of walking a couple of miles with the dog every day before work; rescued a couple of beautiful cats on my block and found them a happy home, painted the downstairs apartment and got a nice tenant, worked hard at my job, took care of my mom, paid down a large chunk of debt. I ate well. Wrote a lot, read a lot. Didn't do anything particularly regrettable.

I can't even come up with any good resolutions—eat less sugar, call my friends more, sharpen my knives regularly—but that stuff is ongoing. Mostly I just want another year of not being lame, and continuing to have fun. Two-oh-oh-nine was fun. And if I can keep the basic momentum going for two-oh-one-oh, I'll be happy. That and make the extra payment on my mortgage come April. That would be pretty un-lame of me.
These fellows aren't lame either. They're just resting.

A Big Storm Knocked It Over

2009-10-10T15:50:00.011-04:00

Like Fire wasn't the only thing that got its germination at BEA last May. I also, if you remember, picked up a bunch of seed packets—seed packets were popular giveaways in 2009—including these sunflower seeds from, appropriately enough, Columbia University Press.

I did in fact plant them on the weird elevated platform in front of my house, and not only did they grow but they grew HUGE. Every day for the past few weeks I meant to go out and take photos. Seriously, every day. They were monstrous and cheerful—you could see them from a block away. During the last two weeks of September I was vetting new tenants for the downstairs rental unit, and I always got a kick out of telling people who wanted to come see the place "It's the house with the sunflowers."

And then last Wednesday we had a big old windstorm. Tree limbs went down, chunks of the city lost power, and I came home to find my giant sunflowers broken, every one of them, hanging down with their faces to the sidewalk. I wasn't brokenhearted, though. They probably wouldn't have lasted another month, I had found a nice tenant for the apartment, and really—if that's the worst thing that happens to me all week, I'll take it.

The next evening I came home and even from the bottom of the hill I could see they were all gone. We live across the street from the neighborhood community center, and I figured some bored kids messing around after school must have pulled them out. But once inside I saw that Jeff had gotten home early and cut the survivors down to fit in a jar.
So that's it, summer's over. The cats are quite taken with the sunflowers, and every time I look at them (the flowers, that is) I think of Van Gogh. I turned the heat on last week. And off we sail into fall, and whatever the winter holds. Life is good.

Like Fire

2009-09-20T21:49:00.004-04:00

When Readerville closed up shop last June, right away I started thinking about putting together my own literary blog. It had been a great roller coaster ride -- staying on top of every shred of book and publishing news, scrolling through my endless feeds and waiting for that excellent click that happened when I came upon an item I knew I'd have something to say about. Writing every day was good for me, having the opportunity to follow my opinions where they led and whittle them down to something articulate. Mostly it was fun.

So I dug deep into my inner Andy Hardy and spent the summer tinkering in that virtual barn out back. And finally -- Hey Kids! -- I'm putting up my own show.
Like Fire is a collaborative effort with some fellow Readerville alumni which will hopefully go on to amuse and delight and inform all our friends and fans. Another litblog, yes, but hopefully full enough of content and opinion to have its own flavor. We also take submissions, so if you have something related to books or the industry, please send it along to likefire.mail@gmail.com.

I won't abandon Mappa Mundi, though, I promise. I'm way too fond of it -- and where else am I going to post all those pet photos?

Treasure

2009-09-02T23:00:00.011-04:00

I had lunch with Pat, my one and only work friend, yesterday. This week marks three years I've been at the workplace, and that's all I'm going to say about that right now. If I've learned only one thing there -- and I have to wonder sometimes if this might not in fact be the case -- it's that you don't sit up front in Tom's during the first week of school unless you want to eat your sandwich with someone's mom and dad mugging on the other side of the window while their embarrassed kid takes pictures. It's like the most famous landmark in New York City for a week, and the folks are lined up three deep to get their photo snapped on the sidewalk.
Pat and I had a nice lunch as far in the back as we could get seats, and then dawdled along in the sun, looking at books for sale on the street. Right off I gravitated to a hardcover copy of Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings -- I'd seen it on the guy's table before and thought it was something I'd like, but never picked it up. I find I'm a little more adventurous when I'm browsing with someone else, though, especially if we're trying to kill some time. So I opened it and there, on the flyleaf, was this:
"How much?" I asked.

"Four dollars," he said.

I had a pang of guilt. It didn't last long. In 25+ years of buying secondhand books, I've never found any buried treasure, not once. This felt like the universe patting me indulgently on the back of the hand -- "That's nice, dear" -- but right around now I could use a little babying from the powers that be.

I Googled the signature when I got back to the office and yes, it's hers. The book's not a first -- more like a tenth -- and while it might have netted the guy a bit more than $4 it wouldn't have made him rich. On the other hand, it made me very rich indeed. On a day that was hard in need of a ray of sunshine, a $4 copy of One Writer's Beginnings with Eudora Welty's handwriting in the front -- "Jackson, Missippi / March 23, 1984" -- was just fine.

September

2009-09-01T22:11:00.004-04:00

Wow, I really went the whole month of August without blogging once? That's pretty flimsy. I've got some other projects up my sleeve and a lot going on but still, not to the exclusion of everything else in life. I've just been going through a little radio silence phase, I guess, and apologies to everyone I owe email. Let's just think of it as a fallow period, a bit of mental crop rotation so the soil of my psyche can replenish. Or some such compost-worthy shit.

More later. Bed calls ever earlier. But to tide you over, here's a nice picture of three of the four cute furry animals who live here getting cozy on the world's skankiest dog bed.

Thanksgiving in July

2009-07-20T21:31:00.006-04:00

Saturday was one of those really rare stunning New York summer days -- hot and sunny but not sticky or heavy. It's been notably cool for July anyway, but to get true summer that's not disgusting -- that's a thing of beauty around here.

I went into the city to see my friend Heather, with the idea of hitting up some galleries. But they were all closed -- odd for a Saturday, but we guessed everyone was off in the Hamptons. So we did what we would have done anyway, which was walk and talk -- she's someone I can talk to all day and never get tired. We hung out on the 23rd Street pier for a while, which has gotten a nice makeover since I was last over that way. Everyone was out taking the sun, with sailboats tacking across the Hudson and the water sparkling. I could have jumped in.
Then we walked over to Tenth Avenue and climbed up to The High Line, which I've wanted to see since it opened last month. It's a length of elevated freight rail tracks built in the 1930s and abandoned in 1980, reclaimed at the beginning of the '00s as park space and spruced up super nice. It's all concrete and wood and steel in perfect proportion, filled with indigenous, New York State prairie-type plantings, and all sorts of great detailing that fits in with the existing cityscape -- no small feat when you consider the whole crazy pentimento effect of New York City in the 21st century. There are some ridiculously cool sleek highrises towering above it, and crumbly roofs from the century before last with rusty watertowers alongside. My favorite thing was a long stone wall of tall multicolored mullioned windows -- I'm a sucker for colored glass and this was really classy.
After walking and talking and walking and talking, we headed up to the Bronx and had a big grilled feast, salmon and corn and black bean/mango salsa and salad.

And then Sunday night? We had our friends John and Margarita and their dogs over for a big grilled feast, chicken and burgers and corn and summer squash and salad.

That was a lot of feasting in one weekend, a lot of talking and drinking and passing food around the table and pretending we didn't see Mr. Bonkers stick his entire head in the salad bowl, looking for cucumbers. Forget Christmas in July -- this weekend was our Thanksgiving in July. I can go back to my hermit ways for a while, but it was nice doing some extended bread-breaking with friends.
Sunday was the fourth anniversary of Milo's death. I didn't dwell on it much during the day, but this morning around 4 I woke up with a little indigestion, a little of the dreaded Monday hangover, and lay in the dark thinking about him. I'll always miss my boy -- he was a shooting star and his time with me was far too short. You know how when you're a kid you get this vision of how you're going to be as an adult, this very personal archetype that you either ditch or hang on to or some variation thereof? I always wanted to be a cool artist lady in a beat-up pickup truck with a dog in the front seat. Not a mommy, not a businesswoman, not a nurse or a fireman. She was it. And though I lost track of her for a while -- my childrearing years weren't really conducive to keeping that particular vision alive -- I got her back. I got to be the cool artist lady in the beat-up pickup truck, even if I was really a slightly geeky publishing lady in a beat-up Blazer, and Milo was that dog. He was the key that turned in the lock and gave me a second chance to be what I wanted. He was my good dog, sitting in the front seat.

The thing is, though, if Milo were still alive there's a very good chance we would never have adopted Dorrie. And she's my good dog too. It's just one of those things that there's no way to really think about in a straight line.

So I woke her up and pulled her into my arms with her head on my shoulder, and snuggled with my good dog until it got light out and I figured I might as well just get up. Milo always liked being held that same way, and I guess wherever he is he must appreciate the fact that I'm still snuggling in bed with a white spotty dog. Whatever else you can say about me, I sure do pick good ones.

Summertime and The Russian Prize

2009-07-16T21:52:00.008-04:00

Summer's finally come to New York. Look, I'm not complaining -- it's the middle of July, and this is the first really irritatingly hot and sticky day that hasn't cooled off after the sun went down. Cold pasta, cherries, and wine for dinner, and the fans all going full-blast. When I turned on the floor fan in the living room -- first time this year -- a huge dust bunny came skittering out and Francis went crazy. He chased it, then he stalked it, then pounced. It had to have been a hell of a disappointment. The tenure of the other two cats has pretty much assured that this house is rodent-free, so he never gets to catch anything.

So my guest blogger gig at Bookninja is over as of tonight, since George is back. It was a lot of fun, and I hope that everyone who followed me there will keep checking it out on a regular basis. It's a really good joint. My fellow bloggers were awesome too -- they put me to shame, honestly, with all their energy. I see they all kept up with their personal blogs just fine. But hey, we all do what we can do and anyway, I have a few tricks left up my sleeve. Stay tuned.

Earlier this evening I was reading various newsworthy items and got myself worked up into a whole bloggy lather with one of my usual rants, which is how I dearly wish to see the farthest corners of world literature spread around to all readerly consciousnesses -- seriously, it should be as accessible and unscary as world music has gotten, and available in Starbucks as well -- and I came upon Margarita Meklina's account at The Quarterly Conversation of her trip back to Russia after winning the Russkaya Premia literary prize.

It's a good story, dark and touching. The other finalists she mentions, though, just stopped me in my tracks. Not so much the creepy wanking Ossetian, but Boris Khazanov, hoping to be handed a literary prize from the same state that jailed him for six years in the 50s for anti-Soviet propaganda. How in the world could that feel? Literally, how in the world -- a Google search of his name turned up some Russian language books and a Boris Khazanov who lives in New Hampshire and gave money to Obama's campaign. The one I want is a German expat, whose speech focused on "language, which becomes frozen in immigration as though in a fridge."

Or Andrei Nazarov, whose family was killed in the Revolution and who said the award should go to Nabokov and Bunin, who never received such a prize from their own government. The backstorie seems as far from the American literary prize machine as you can get, and I'm hungry to know more. Nazarov shares his name with a pro hockey player, and while I realize it's fully possible to both play hockey and write -- hey, I can -- I doubt they're the same person.

So for all my grand ideas of world literature for the people and how it would make us better citizens of the universe, I end up only being as good as my search engine, and I end up feeling very solidly American. But Meklina's essay is a really wonderful window into a whole different room, and I appreciate that. It's a big internet, and I like it that way.

Did I mention that it's hot? The dog is hot, the cats are hot. We've gotten off easy so far, but I guess summer's here now.

Open Letter

2009-07-05T22:40:00.003-04:00

Dear Teenagers of Kingsbridge,

First of all, we want to give you credit for having gotten hold of all those fireworks. Really, we think it's SO cool you were able to talk your Uncle Sonny into picking up that big bag of them when he was down in West Virginia last month, and we commend you for not having blown off any of your fingers. Seriously.

But can we give you some advice? They don't go bad. You can save whatever you have left over for next year, and they'll still be fine -- you don't HAVE to set them all off tonight. What if you can't get any next year? What if Uncle Sonny gets caught violating his parole and can't make it down to see that guy he knows? You'll be really, really glad to have a few laid away for the Fourth of July, 2010. Just hide them in the back of your sock drawer -- when your mom find them she'll be so happy they're not weed she'll forget she ever saw anything. Really. I'm a mom. I know.

To tide you over until then, check out the Museum of Firecracker Label Art. They're quite beautiful, and they won't scare the dog.

(via Coudal Partners' Museum of Online Museums)

Some Days

2009-06-29T12:58:00.004-04:00

There are some days, Mondays in particular, when halfway down the hill from my house and headed toward the train I find myself in a state of real befuddlement. If I stop and think about it I understand perfectly well what's going on, but otherwise my forebrain, chugging along, remains perplexed: What the hell am I doing here? Why on earth am I leaving my lovely, sunny, comfortable house and the company of my sweet animals to go to work? Wasn't I just there a few days ago?

It's not like this is an unusual situation. I go to work pretty much every weekday of my life, barring a couple weeks of vacation scratched out of the year, and it's not as though I don't like my job. For the most part I do satisfying, interesting work and these days it's rarely unpleasant or boring, and my office is in a stunning library building on a beautiful college campus. My commute is reasonable. Corporate culture does not encourage staying past 5:00. I definitely count myself among the lucky.

But that doesn't always cut it. There are some days when a regular paycheck, health benefits, and the promise of intellectual engagement just aren't enough. When twice the paycheck wouldn't be enough. I'm a nester, and I've feathered myself a seriously nice one -- kind of bowerbird-like, full of shiny crap and odds and ends, but that's how I like it. Some mornings I feel like I'm prying myself out of there with a psychic crowbar.

There have been times in my history when my home life was so lousy it was a relief to get to the office, and I dragged my feet when it was time to leave. I've worked hard to change that, and successfully. But the backlash is that now, if I didn't have to leave my home in order to keep it, I probably wouldn't, ever. Or at least not often. It's the nicest place I know.

If working from home was ever an option I don't doubt I'd eventually end up with cabin fever, but I sure wouldn't mind finding out for myself.
Speaking of working from home, I'm going to be doing a bunch of that in addition to my day job, because thanks to all your love and support I've been voted one of Bookninja's guest bloggers for the first two weeks of July. The whole process reminded me a bit of running for Class President in fourth grade -- not so much the nature of the competition as that it was the only other time I've ever been up for any kind of mass election. And I remember my mom, when I came home glumly announcing that I had withdrawn from the race because nobody really liked me, saying in the way that all card-carrying moms do, "But honey, it's not a popularity contest." And I remember staring at her with incredulity that she could even think of pawning off such bullshit on me, because of COURSE it was a popularity contest. What else could it possibly be? Even though I was nine and still kind of wide-eyed about the world, I remember her credibility suffered for that one.

So this is my revenge on fourth grade. Everyone set your RSS feeds to Bookninja -- the guest blogging commences on July 2, but you should all be reading it now. Thanks for the love, guys.

[And upon careful cross-platform reading, I see one of my fellow guest bloggers, Sarah, has also invoked student council elections. I'm guessing there's a definite pathology at work amongst us all...]

Don't Cry for Me, Mappa Mundi

2009-06-25T10:50:00.003-04:00

Oh goodness, it’s been a while. It really wasn’t my intention to extend my respectful moment of silence for Readerville quite this long, but there have been distractions. Among other things, I’ve been ahhhhh… hiking the Appalachian Trail of the blog world, ifyouknowwhatImean. It’s OK, Mappa Mundi knows about it. We’re cool.

And I actually do have a few things to say, but the middle of the workday isn’t an optimal time for anything involving deep thoughts, literary or otherwise (other than, “No, no, I really think you need a comma here. No, really. Seriously, look…”). However: I realize I’ve been pretty negligent in certain avenues of self-promotion, and need to ask all my faithful readers, if they haven’t already, to vote for me for Bookninja guest blogger. I was doing a good job of playing it cool and detached all week, but with this recent post George has done a good job of whipping me into a competitive frenzy (OK, not that hard to do). So vote for me! Today, if you don’t mind. Thank you, thank you, I love you.
And I'll be back later with some real stuff.

Still Looking Up

2009-06-07T22:00:00.009-04:00

I loved Readerville. Unapologetically, no irony, no reserve of cool to draw on. When I first joined almost exactly six years ago I had friends who read copiously and passed books around, I was adventurous about picking things I'd never heard of off the library shelves, and I had piles of those beautiful little Common Reader catalogs dogeared and marked up with Sharpies. But finding a place where a bunch of smart, snarky people wanted to talk books and pretty much just roll around in them, that was like coming home.

I met a lot of excellent people there, many of them face to face -- really good friends who will be friends for life. I met the man I love and live with on Readerville. And while I suppose it's remotely possible our paths might have crossed otherwise, the chances of a girl from the Bronx and a boy from Texas meeting up randomly, no matter how much they both love reading and old movies and cooking with cast iron, would have been awfully slim otherwise. When I first started posting there I was working a deadly boring office manager job, and as I realized how comfortable I was immersed in a bookish world it also occurred to me that I could possibly scrape a living out of it (this being in the days when you could). And when I got laid off five years ago I decided it was now or never and took the plunge, found a cool job at entry-level wages, nearly starved, but never looked back. And when Karen offered me the gig blogging for Readerville, I thought about it for five minutes and then jumped in. As much work as it turned out to be, dutifully plowing through RSS feeds every night after dinner and through many a lunch hour, I loved it -- loved figuring out what the hell I was doing, working on the craft of it, and finding myself in the middle of a whole litblogging community I hadn't known about. A year ago I would have laughed my head off at the phrase "litblogging community." Now I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to keep the momentum going, because I like doing this.

I'm sure most people read my last blog post on Readerville Friday and rolled their eyes, thinking I was being awfully drama queeny. But I knew that Readerville was closing up shop and I meant it as a bit of an elegy, and also as a reminder -- to myself as much as anyone -- that there's always a next thing, so long as you keep looking up.

I'm posting it again here. Sorry if you've read it - indulge me, OK? It's the best goodbye I could muster to a place that meant a lot to me. Thanks, Karen, and everyone else there who made it feel like my favorite local watering hole -- overindulgence, bar fights, fixed pool games, generous pours, kisses, and all.

Anyone who's spent time in Readerville's Judging A Book thread knows that for the past few years one of the most common book cover tropes has been shoes -- big and little shoes, shoes next to feet, you name it. Shoes have become a standard Readerville snowclone, especially when talking about book design -- for a while there orange was the new shoes, and antique labels, and hand-drawn type.

Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, back in 2005, was an early adapter. The first galley I got my hands on at this year's BEA was also his -- Await Your Reply, out in September from Ballantine. Looking at that expanse of clouds on the cover got me thinking, and then comparing galleys with fellow Book Expo visitors. So it's settled: This year, sky is the new shoes.

In the next six months alone we have Iain Banks' Transition, Kate Braestrup's Marriage, and Other Acts of Charity, Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, Amanda C. Gable's The Confederate General Rides North, Lauren Grodstein's A Friend of the Family, Ha Jin's A Good Fall, Naseem Rakha's The Crying Tree, and Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic. All of them feature low horizons or no horizons, with skies blue or gray, cloudy or clear. Some have birds, some have folks.

But the message maintains: Look up, not down! Publishing, the country, the entire world is unsure and in flux; things are changing, and not always as we wish they would. There is the temptation to stop in our tracks and look stubbornly down to see if in fact the earth isn't shifting under our feet. But we as readers know that books are microcosms of the world, whether in sympathy or as fantasy or fact, and their covers have advice to offer us all, right there out in front. Enough with the shoe-gazing, enough self-absorption. It's time to move past the personal to the universal, to expand our horizons outward, to see what these times want from us. Nearly 100 years ago E.M. Forster advised us to Only Connect, and it's time, again, to remember.

The world is changing. Look up, up and out.

This Tall

2009-06-02T22:27:00.008-04:00

So everyone has been saying to me in pointed fashion, "You're still going to blog, right?" And to one and all I reply, No. Never again. I'm through with this blogging thing forever.

Kidding. However, there is this issue now. For the entire month of May it was understood, sometimes implicitly and sometimes very explicitly, that I was blogging to meet my daily requirement, and if I didn't have anything in particular to say I was damn well going to say it anyway. But now if I put something up, it's because I have a point to make. It's like having a dinner party as opposed to cooking something on a Tuesday night after work so we don't go to bed hungry. Doing the blogathon absolved me of all fear of self-importance. It was like the opposite of irony. (Wait... what? Well, I knew what I meant when I typed it a second ago.)

So just to throw off that yoke of heaviness, I'd like to share something with you, my readers:
I bank at HSBC, and every HSBC branch in the city has this tape mounted to the side of every exit door, with heights from 4'-6" to 6'-6" calibrated on it. Presumably there is a security camera aimed straight at it so as to record any criminals on their way out. And for years and years now, without fail -- probably on the average of twice a month -- I have never walked out of an HSBC bank without saying to myself, "You must be THIS TALL to rob the bank." And, silently, laughing my fool head off for a moment.

So now you know just how deeply dorky I am. I hope you people are satisfied.

More Birthdays, No Seeds

2009-05-31T22:00:00.008-04:00

My goodness, could this really be the last day of the May Blogathon? Why, it's gone by just like that.

Well... no it hasn't. But it's been interesting. Between this and my regular blogging gig for Readerville, the month has felt at times like boot camp for Writing Without the Muse. Which is a book that I in fact own, but have I found time to reference it once in the past 31 days? I have not. Flying, as ever, without the net. There were times when I sat down in front of the computer and the well felt absolutely dry, but it mattered to me that I do this, and it made for an interesting trip. I'm a big believer in pushing things and going on the proverbial journey. It's been a fun one. I'm glad it's over, though.

Today is my birthday. I've now officially missed the window of time for getting that "45" shoulder tattoo, which is probably a good thing.

I'll always regret it a tiny bit, though.

My day was extremely chilled out. We drove out to a little diner I like in Tarrytown, 20 minutes away, so I could get eggs benedict -- not a diner staple in my part of Kingsbridge, sadly. Did the week's grocery shopping, puttered in the yard. I never got around to planting the new seeds, but I weeded, cleaned up the raised beds -- thank you, neighborhood cats of Summit Place! -- and did some needed thinning. That included the lettuce and spinach, which was getting crowded and leggy, and that meant we had the most unbelievably fresh salad with dinner. There's nothing quite like eating something that was alive very recently, and the greens were crisp and melting at the same time.
For my birthday dinner I made spaghetti and meatballs, one of my favorite meals ever, along with the aforementioned world's freshest salad and a nice bottle of red wine. All eaten off the gorgeous placemats my friend Margarita crocheted me, and in good company to boot.
Dorrie got a new collar and a new chewie, and all was well in her world too.
On the way to the grocery store and back I was blasting one of my favorite old cds in the car, Squeeze's Argybargy. There are a lot of albums that rocket me back to my teens, but that one never fails to put me in a state of extreme good cheer. So I drove and sang and drummed on the side of the car out of the open window and exposed the good people of the north Bronx to their dose of early 80s music for the afternoon, and it was all in all a very good birthday.
All in all, it's been a very good month. Thanks for bearing with me.

More Seeds, and a Birthday

2009-05-30T22:30:00.005-04:00

Columbia University Press had seeds too!

They're sunflowers, which is entirely appropriate because then I'll be able to watch the birds when they come to pick all the seeds out of the soil, which is inevitably what happens when I try to plant sunflowers. It could only more apropos if it were an anthology of bird and squirrel poetry.

At any rate, I'm done with BEA for this year, and I have to say I came away with a good feeling about things. Not the publishing industry, obviously -- I am not smoking anything that good (or anything at all, with this pain in the ass cough). But as far as my little place in the universe... understand, I haven't been at this long enough to really feel like I have a place. Rather than travel the whole traditional route of getting an internship at some publishing house or magazine straight out of college and working my way up, this was a midlife crisis career change, one of those if-you-don't-seize-this-moment-to-try-doing-something-you-love-you-will-always-regret-it decisions. A very good decision, and I think I've done fine. But the fact is that haven't been around that long, and I've come at the business from a weird, oblique angle.

In the past couple of days, though, I've had a few good encounters that made me feel like I do, in fact, have something of my own to bring to the table. I don't necessarily have one slottable skill -- and when there were so many jobs and divisions of labor in the publishing world, I think that was definitely out of my favor. But things are shifting so dramatically, nobody knows much more than anyone else as to what the scenery will look like when the dust settles. And I walked out of there today thinking that for all the times my mother said, "But you're so smart! You can do so many things!" and I said, "Mom, you don't understand this business, that's not enough" -- hey, maybe mom was on to something.

And don't tell me that mothers are always right. Tell my son.

Also, I got to hang out with Levi Stahl, of Ivebeenreadinglately, who is very charming and is almost my birthday twin. This is obviously a fine week to have been born in -- two of my best friends in the world, Leslie and Meridith, had a birthday yesterday, I have a dog run friend born on June 2nd and an ex-roommate on the 4th and wait... whose birthday could it be today?
Who might have gotten a new stuffed toy and a treat with dinner? And who also went for run with me this morning? Somebody's had a big day.

Well... we all have. Happy birthday, Dorrie.

Seeds

2009-05-29T22:19:00.007-04:00

Absolutely my favorite BEA loot, bar none, was this wildflower seed packet from NYRB Classics.
Well OK, that and the signed ARC of Dan Chaon's newest.

Margarita gave me some cosmos seeds, and I have some poppies too... I'm thinking if Sunday's nice I'm going to make a little wildflower garden. That odd weedy platform to the right of my front steps might be just the spot, although it's a pain -- and kind of scary -- to constantly shuffle along that narrow ledge with soil and tools and what have you. Still, it's a spot in need of some aesthetic enhancement, and that's a good excuse.
BEA was both fun and tiring. I was tweeting it from my new Blackberry (@lisapeet1), with a definite learning curve involved. But I do like the medium, and tomorrow is another day. Today, I think, is over.

But, one day early for Caturday, I leave you with Francis and Alvy together again:
That Alvy is a tough little fat fur seal.

Graduation

2009-05-28T22:07:00.004-04:00

Today has been an astonishing oscillation of the shitty and the sublime, in such rapid succession as to give me whiplash.
But my first sight of the morning, when I was out for (another!) good run with Dorrie, was a line of flowers and teddy bears in boxes being unloaded across the street from Lehman College for their graduation ceremony. I actually stopped and screwed around with the camera on this new phone for a minute to capture it, and the image stayed in my head all day through good and bad. A little on the rainbowy side, but I needed that, and to think about all those city kids feeling like they accomplished something and psyching themselves up for whatever comes next. I was talking to a friend tonight about inertia, how it just takes the smallest nudge to set a body in motion and how kindly it wants to stay in motion once that happens.

It's been many years since I graduated from anything, but there is motion. And that'll do.

Showing Up

2009-05-27T20:55:00.009-04:00

Usually on weekdays I get up early and walk around the Jerome Park Reservoir with my friend Stephanie and our dogs. It's just under two miles around, and while we don't power-walk it or anything that's still two miles I wouldn't be clocking if we didn't make a daily event of it. It's a good time of the day -- for half an hour or so every morning I can be pretty sure that nothing terrible is going to happen. We'll walk and talk, our dogs will sniff and pee, other walkers and joggers will say hi to us and we'll say hi back. I keep saying I'm going to bring my camera some morning, because there's always something of vague interest: a stretch of grass littered with notes passed in class and then dumped when school was over, a homemade cargo carrier made out of the basket of a shopping cart, lashed with rope to the roof of a dinged-up station wagon. But generally it's not a remarkable time, just a comforting one. Whatever else the day has in store for me can wait.

This morning Stephanie didn't come out, though, so Dorrie and I went alone, and I ran a good half of it. I used to run -- not long distances, but a few miles faithfully three times a week. I always really liked it. I don't enjoy many forms of enforced exercise, but running appealed to me from the start. Most of all, I think because there are so many ways to hurt yourself. You have to be extremely mindful and present in your body the whole time, thinking about the axis you're moving on and your breath and how your legs are extending and how your feet hit the ground, which bones and muscles and in what order. Something like a treadmill or exercise bike, where you could conceivably read at the same time, doesn't cut it in the same way. There's not the same occupation of my body and involvement with what it's doing -- to me it's like eating with a cold or going to a church service without believing.

I never pretended to be any kind of serious runner, and lord knows Haruki Murakami said it all a whole lot better than I ever will. But I liked it. Predictably, I did hurt myself, ending up with something strained on the bottom of my foot. Took it easy, fell out of the good habits, did something to another part of my foot, and so it goes. As soon as it became optional, I lost my discipline.

So it was nice to run a little today. I was just jogging, really, a languid trot that Dorrie could keep up with easily. But I was pleased to see that I had some leftover muscle memory and my body still did the right things, and I still had decent wind even with whatever's been sponging up my lungs for the past couple of weeks. It was a misty cool morning, and I came home sweaty and stretched out. And I got a hint of that old buzz -- because come on, anyone who knows me knows I'm always in it for the buzz.
It was good to remember that the distance between doing a thing and not doing it is actually small and reasonable, and that falling back into good practices isn't that much harder than falling out of them. That mostly it's about showing up.

Right now I'm swilling Nyquil straight from the bottle and trying to make sense of the extraordinary pile of BEA email in my inbox, but I figure I feel better than I would have if I'd slept that extra half hour this morning. I'll be out there again tomorrow, barring rain, walking if not running, but enjoying a half hour of grace before the day has its way with me.

Listen to Me, Dammit!

2009-05-26T16:48:00.006-04:00

It's always tempting to anthropomorphize the animals, some times more than others.
It's hard to imagine there isn't a very intense conversation going on here. And who knows? Maybe there is.

Yashica-Mat

2009-05-25T22:34:00.004-04:00

I spent some time tonight poking around in the attic, and surprised myself by finding my dad's old Yashica-Mat. I'd been half-heartedly wondering where it was ever since I moved here. Presumably it still works -- at least it did ten years ago, when Gideon went through a stage of taking photos with it. I wonder if you can even get that 2x2 format film anymore, or if it's some kind of ridiculous specialty item.

But I wasn't looking for the camera. I was pawing through my insane number of boxes (there's nothing like a lifelong apartment-dweller who suddenly comes into possession of a house with full attic for an example of some seriously random packratism) in search of some slide boxes that had been my father's. I found them, finally -- three steel boxes, about 8 x 11 x 2, surprisingly heavy. Especially the one I was looking for, which was filled with glass slides, presumably taken with the very same Yashika-Mat in Okinawa in the early 50s. My dad, an anthropologist, did field service there during the Korean War studying the effects of the conflict and the influx of servicemen on Okinawan hookers and their families. I realize this is ripe for all sorts of off-color comments, but hey -- we're talking about my father, so as far as I'm concerned I'm not going to go there.

I'd looked at them briefly a few years ago, when I came into possession of a bunch of his stuff, and I'd been meaning to pull them out again. They were as haunting and beautiful as I remembered -- neatly labeled on a piece of oak tag by subject: Material culture, Okinawan wedding, Okinawan bullfight, brothels and whores (nice, dad), children, adults and children, adults, houses and villages, and markets. Each one painstakingly edged in black cloth tape, which made getting them out of their slots a bit of a pain, but the effect was elegant.

I wish they scanned more clearly, but I probably need a better scanner with a setting specifically for slides and transparencies, plus I didn't sit down with the needed damp cloth and clean them. But here are a few, just to give an idea of what's in this box of slides from 55-odd years ago.

Wordle

2009-05-25T00:10:00.006-04:00

Back late from a wonderful day in the country laden with licorice and Jack Daniels and glossy magazines and a big root bundle of lily of the valley and SUCH a tired little dog (who is the Best Guest Ever and should be invited everywhere). I got nothin'.

Well, I got this, a Wordle word picture of my blog (and, by extension, I guess my universe):

Pat Pat Pat

2009-05-24T00:16:00.005-04:00

Usually patting oneself on the back for something that's supposed to be a selfless action -- charity, a gift -- is considered to be a bad thing. I'm not sure why... you can argue yourself blue in the face over whether the altruism gene is really the selfishness gene in disguise, but it's all the same thing: You're making someone else feel better and in return you're making yourself feel good as well. Otherwise it's something else, self-sacrifice or work or another form of exchange.

Today I went down to New York Presbyterian to visit a friend who unexpectedly wound up in the hospital. So aside from the very serious and multilayered concerns, which take a while to sink in and work their way around my mind anyway, my first -- and easiest to handle -- thought was, What do I bring? Given that flowers aren't allowed and she's not the teddy bear/mylar balloon sort?

I love giving presents. Not on cue -- I'm not a fan of Christmas for that reason -- but I love that click when I see just the thing for someone, and tend to stockpile gifts all through the year and hope I can find them when birthdays roll around. So when inspiration struck when I needed it this time around, I was so pleased. On my way down to the east side I stopped by Book Culture, one of the two fine indie bookstores near my office. It used to be Labyrinth Books, for those of you who know the 'hood, and I think the new name is a bit unfortunate -- it makes me think of petri dishes. But regardless, it has the best selection of glossy high-end magazines and literary journals of any place I know uptown. And there I purchased:
All of them fat, fun, and trashy/smart, with interesting articles to read and great pictures to look at if she wasn't up to reading (the links all work, if you're interested). The whole bunch tied up in a green ribbon and delivered in one of the excellent Book Culture tote bags, because eventually all that loot needs to be hauled home...
What can I say? I was just tickled with the gifts I bore, and I had a fine old time picking them out. I love shiny lowbrow/highbrow magazines, but I don't tend to splurge on myself like that. And I know she wouldn't either, which made them extra fun to buy. I hope when she gets to them they cheer her up a little.

If I ever end up in the hospital, faithful readers, I hope you all will take the hint.

Here Comes a Regular

2009-05-22T22:39:00.004-04:00

For someone who's not much of a joiner, I do like the concept of being a regular somewhere. Back in my late teens and 20s, it was at a fine old East Village dive called the Holiday Cocktail Lounge (that's it in the photo above), sadly no longer among the establishments left standing now that Stefan is gone. In my mid-20s to 30s, I was a park mom in the Tompkins Square Park playground -- also apparently no longer extant. It wasn't a glamorous society, but it saved my sanity pretty much every day and I still have good friends from that time.

These days, it's the dog run. I get home from work and feed the cats and change into a t-shirt and sweats, and then I get Dorrie all worked up: "You want to go to the park? You want to go to the PARK?" She is very clear in turn that yes, she does, and off we go through the convivial afterwork urban-suburban streets, saying hi to the neighbors as we pass, to our local: The Fort Independence Park dog run.

It's a nice spot, rolling and leafy, and a good group of people and dogs. We're the hardcores, the ones who were there every night all winter, when it was dark before I even left the house and the wind blew in bitingly off the reservoir. These days it's lush and cool after the heat of the afternoon ends, and we all lounge around on the benches and fall into the rhythms of talking about nothing in particular as the evenings stretch out. Like a bar with no alcohol, like a playground with no children -- there are children in and out all the time, but not ours, which makes all the difference -- and our dogs all know each other and can, for the most part, be trusted.
It's a pleasant part of the day, with work over and dinner not quite a worry yet; a pleasure but also, because of the dogs' needs, a necessity. We stay longer than we need to most of the time, but the concept of exactly how long that might be is up for debate. The dogs play, we talk, and it's all very agreeable and good for the soul. And at the end of the evening the dogs are tired, which was kind of our point all along.

Life in the Digital Age

2009-05-21T22:10:00.005-04:00

Nearly 3/4 through the month, and someone had the good idea to call this a Guest Post day -- give us all the chance to step out of our ~~lives~~ blogs and into someone else's for a few minutes.

My guest blogger is Debi, from The World Without:

In this age of the internet, I sometimes struggle with the definitions of very simple words. What constitutes a 'conversation'? When did I 'meet' a particular person? What makes someone your 'friend'? Because some of those words mean a lot more than they used to. I talk to my mom every day - face to face - over lunch. I talk to my favorite sister-in-law a few times a week by Google Messenger while I'm getting ready for work and she's corralling my youngest niece and nephew into the beginning of their day. I also talk to Lisa every day - through emails, an online group we both belong to, and our respective blogs.

Today I tried to decide when I first 'met' Lisa. In the traditional sense, I suppose I met Lisa in February of 2005, when she traveled to Savannah specifically to see me. But in the truest sense, I'd met her months before, at an on-line book site called Readerville. By the time she hit the road and headed South, she was one of the dearest people in my life. She made that trip to personally deliver a true work-of-art constructed with her own hands and that was spectacularly important to me. Someone she'd never 'met'...but definitely not someone she didn't know. And in the years since since that trip, thanks in large part to the magic that is the Internet, Lisa has become one of my very best friends.

We have visited in person, in good times and bad, and those visits were wonderful. And I know that, lord willin' and the creek don't rise, we will visit each other in person again. But in the in-between times, one of the best parts of my life is that Lisa, like many people I call 'friend' is always as close as the ends of my fingers. I can talk to her whenever I need her...without waking her up in the middle of the night. I always know where to find her. She encourages all the best things in me: mindfulness and awareness and honesty, because the words I say to her will live forever in the bits and bytes that carry them from here to there. She has helped to redefine not only words, but the life I live each day. Lisa is my friend and I talk to her everyday and I met her on the internet.

What's your Internet Friend story?

(This is where I'd usually post a picture or three...but, sadly, I don't have any pictures of us. How is that possible? I know they exist!)

[This is the work of art Debi spoke of -- the marzipan wedding cake topper I made her.]

Green Day

2009-05-20T21:40:00.006-04:00

Naked

2009-05-19T22:56:00.006-04:00

(yellow submarine journal, animal journal, garden journal)

Stream

2009-05-18T21:57:00.007-04:00

Good lord, is it really 10:30 on a Monday night? I honestly don't understand how this happens... dinner is done and cleaned up and the garbage and recycling are down by the curb and the cats are fed and the pots of little ornamental pepper seedlings that got knocked over by some evil Bronx forest creature and then replanted and that look cold and vulnerable in the 49˚ night are safe and warm in the basement. The bunch of basil I had sitting in a pitcher of water but that was starting to shrivel up anyway and even worse kept making me think I smelled cat pee every time I walked by it -- and in a house with three cats one is verrrry sensitive to the concern that it could smell like cat pee at any given time -- is safely ziplocked (I know there's no "k" in that but it looks worse without) and in the fridge. The Mexican chicken that we are realistically not going to eat this week is wrapped and frozen. I have put up my daily blog post at Readerville, because although I always aspire to more, one a day will stave off generalized blogger's guilt. I broke up a cat fight. I walked the dog two miles around the reservoir at 6:30 this morning and will do it again at 6:30 tomorrow morning. I am finishing the last of the wine because there's nothing sadder than coming home to a bottle with half a glass' worth in it. I did NOT clean the bird poop off the back door, even though I had said I would, but there's part of me that enjoys wondering, every time I go in and out, just how a bird would have to fly extremely close to the house and shit at the same time in order to hit the door so squarely. I answered all my email except one. I had an endless phone conversation with my mom about the teeny tiny minutiae of her life, which since she's 81 years old I don't begrudge her at all. I made chicken tikka marsala for dinner, not completely from scratch because the sauce came premade, but I added my own mushrooms and peas so it wasn't totally lame, and I made rice too. I still don't understand how people say they can't cook rice -- isn't it a step or two up from boiling water? Well, I guess that's a bit presumptuous of me to say, considering I've never changed a flat tire.

I've had a really serious earworm of Neil Young's "For the Turnstiles" going on all day -- I literally woke up with it playing in my head. Usually I have a pretty good handle on my emotional barometer but today I've been unable to tell if I'm in a slightly bad mood or an OK mood. Which in itself can be disconcerting, but for some reason doesn't bother me right now.

Sunday

2009-05-17T21:26:00.006-04:00

I woke up very early and hightailed it down to the upper east side to have breakfast with my friend Nina. She is one of my two best friends from high school, tenth grade, and for the past 4½ years she's been living in Hawaii homesteading a piece of land with her husband and building a house. I'm not getting out to Hawaii anytime soon, so I jumped at the chance to see her for an hour or so before she and her brother headed up to Massachusetts to visit their parents for the week. Sunday morning, no traffic, and I made it down there in close to 20 minutes.

It was a short visit, but a good one. 4½ years is a long time to be missing someone, and it was good to see her face again. We even ducked into a doorway and called the third part of our best-friend triad, Leslie, in Vermont, and talked for a while. Nina had to leave by 10:30, so I drove across town and did my grocery shopping for the week and was home by 12.

Funny to be out so early on a Sunday. That's traditionally my day to move slowly, drink coffee and read recipes and answer email and stay in my pajamas as long as it takes. I've always liked Sundays for that reason. I can remember being a little kid and doing pretty much the same thing, minus the coffee and recipes and email but with big stacks of library books and crayons and markers. I didn't like TV all that much even then.
For all the childhood pictures I've been posting, I don't really think much about that time in my life. A lot of people seem to have very clear memories from when they were little, but most of mine are generalized and blurry, with odd details showing up here and there. I do remember spending a lot of time in the back room in our house, though, sitting on the long burnt orange couch with sunlight coming in the wooden blinds, drawing or reading. Time seemed so weirdly elongated then, and feels so collapsed on itself these days. And my, that's certainly an original thought.

This was a good weekend, if tiring. I did a lot of socializing and none of my own work, but that's how it pans out sometimes and it's all necessary in the mix. I did get my pepper and eggplant seedlings in the ground, although they look awfully puny considering how chilly the nights still are. We'll see how that goes.

I would like to point out, though, that in addition to my other good traits already mentioned I am also a superb parallel parker. Seriously, I can get my Blazer into a spot with 24" leeway on either side in about three steps, none of this sawing back and forth shit. I have the touch. For years and years I was terrible at it and one day something literally clicked, and now I can do it every time. What's funny is that this has been since I've had a garage, and I rarely park on the street -- you'd think it'd be one of those things that needs regular practice, but apparently not.

Family Reunion

2009-05-16T21:36:00.006-04:00

Not a full family reunion today, but close enough for rock'n'roll -- my sister and brother-in-law, who hosted, my aunt and uncle from Yonkers, my cousin and his wife from up in Albany, my cousin and his wife from California, my mom, and me. It's a good family of kind people, your pretty standard east coast Jew story overflowing both ends of the 20th century: Lower East Side → Bronx → Yonkers → Westchester and beyond, less Woody Allen than Neil Simon with an E.L. Doctorow backstory. Some of us, of course, have gotten stuck between the Bronx and Yonkers after lingering way too long on the Lower East Side, but hey -- someone's gotta be the black sheep. Baaa. I love them all dearly.

The afternoon was enhanced by a flat tire half a mile out of my mom's door -- I was driving my her car because it is fun and zippy and mine is a rattly behemoth with wall-eyed headlights and smells like dog. And -- have you guys been waiting this whole month for something confessional? OK, here you go: I have never changed a flat. Not because I'm any kind of shrinking violet -- I've never had a flat. I've seen them changed, I've had it demonstrated for me, I know what page it's on in my owner's manual, but I've never actually done the deed myself. So for a number of reasons that seemed good at the time -- wearing somewhat nice clothes, didn't want to screw it up and have the wheel fall off my mom's car in the middle of Rte. 119 -- I called AAA to come put the donut on so we could limp back to her place and get my car and proceed. Which was all well and good, except it took them a good hour and a half to show up, and time wasted makes me cranky. If I'm not working and I'm not reading and I'm not cooking and I'm not getting some form of exercise and I'm not sleeping, I'd better be doing something fun -- not sitting in an office park in lower Westchester on an overcast, windy day. It was what you might call an Exercise in Letting Go. And hey, extra time with mom, even though the she wanted to talk about picking out the accessories she wore that day and I wanted to pace.

But OK, we were only two hours later than planned, and the party was fun. It's always good to see everyone. And extra time with mom! Who, by the way, outdid herself on the Overprotective Mom Comment of the Day -- I like to privately time it and see how long, from the moment I step into her house, it takes her to say something ridiculously over-the-top motherish. Today was about ten minutes from point of entry. I had helped her transfer the weird bean dip she'd made to a serving bowl and had put the original container, as directed, into the sink, when she told me, "Just fill it up with water. The hot water is the faucet on the left."

And you all wonder why I can't change a tire! I was raised to have servants. Something didn't work out, though.

[The photo is of my mom, my brother, my sister, and me in 1965. If my sister ever sees that I posted this she will disown me immediately and there will be no more family reunions, ever. So don't tell her.]

Bathroom Books

2009-05-15T21:33:00.009-04:00

So yes, I know, there is a whole schism between people who keep bathroom books as a matter of course and people who wouldn't be caught dead with books in their bathroom, and I don't really care what anybody else does. Me, I was brought up with books -- or rather periodicals, the New Yorker and National Geographic and New York Review of Books -- in the bathroom, so as far as I'm concerned that's business as usual. No pun intended.

And really, the main reason to have books in the bathroom is for guests. I mean, I appreciate them now and then, especially for toothbrushing purposes -- bless my Sonicare, which beeps when it's time to switch and enables that much more close reading for two minutes twice a day -- but it's not usually necessary. I tend to carry whatever I'm reading from room to room, like a blankie, or keep upstairs and downstairs reading matter, so it's not often that I'm caught without.

But when people come over, you want to have a little something there for them. Figure that unless they're spending the night, the only time they have that's private and out from under your scrutiny is in the bathroom, with the door closed. That's their chance to bust loose and really have a look around. And let's face it, the best way to siphon their attention away from your medicine cabinet or the dust bunnies behind the toilet is to provide them with some good reading matter and an easy way to make snap judgments about your erudition, or lack thereof.

I'll even go so far as to break this down into Upstairs Bathroom Reading and Downstairs Bathroom Reading. The books upstairs are mainly for overnight guests, and tend to be a little meatier -- stuff people can spirit into the guest room and read before bed. The far and away most popular item has been Vice Do's and Don'ts: Ten Years of Vice Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques, a birthday present from my then-teenage son who knows me better than I know myself.
Also popular are Mario Livio's The Golden Ratio (although I could be fooling myself about that one)
and a wonderful $3 book called Manhattan Kaleidoscope: A Genial, Rambling Account of the New York Scene 1870-1945.
Now the downstairs bathroom books operate under a whole different premise, which is that its occupants are here for the day or evening and will only spend minutes at a time there, so the reading matter needs to be light and accessible in snippets. A quick check of the downstairs bathroom gives us:
National Lampoon's Big Book of ~~Sex~~ Love

What Wendell Wants: Or, How to Tell If You're Obsessed with Your Dog
Writing New York: A Literary Anthology
Strange Red Cow and Other Curious Classified Ads From the Past They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases
Stonehenge
Five Flights Up and Other New York Apartment Stories
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe (OK, that one's neither light nor accessible in snippets. I'm not quite sure how it got there.)

And my very favorite:
Voltaire's Alphabet of Wit, which I got for a buck on Seventh Avenue and 28th Street in 2005. This one is beyond marvelous:

HAPPINESS: Can one man be happier than another? It is clear that a man who has the gout and stone, who has lost his money, his good name, his wife and family, and who is about to be hanged after having been mangled, is less happy than a young, vigorous sultan, or La Fontaine's cobbler. But how are we to determine which is the happier of two men equally healthy, prosperous, and placed in society? Their temperaments must decide it. The most moderate, the least worrisome, the most keenly perceptive is the most happy; but unfortunately the most keenly perceptive is often the least moderate. It is not our position, but our disposition, which renders us happy. Our disposition depends on the functioning of our organs, over which we have no control.

So hey, y'all come on over and read for a bit. Drinks are on the house, and all the toilet paper and hand soap you can use. Don't even bother looking in the medicine cabinet -- all the prescription bottles are for the animals.

Cosmic Lottery

2009-05-14T22:07:00.007-04:00

Tonight I went out with my wonderful friend Meridith, all the way down to Red Hook in Brooklyn. Red Hook is a really fun, up-and-coming neighborhood -- lots of storefront galleries, lots of small restaurants with great wine lists. When I first started hanging out in the city and my mom had just moved to Brooklyn, the understanding was that you just didn't go to Red Hook -- it was where the navy yards were and there were projects, and you just didn't have any reason on earth to walk in that direction. And now, of course, New York and neighborhoods being what they are, I'm not even sure I could afford to live there -- at least not in the style to which I am accustomed. But I can dream -- a neighborhood of artists' studios and waterfront furniture-makers and overpriced antique stores.

We went to a benefit at the Kentler International Drawing Space, of which Meridith is a board member, and then out to dinner at a fine tiny restaurant whose name I cannot remember. I had ragu of lamb over pappardelle with a fabulous glob of lemon ricotta on top, and we shared a kickass bottle of wine. And talked and talked and talked -- she's just back from a three-week fellowship in Rome and glowing with it.

But here's my point: I've known Meridith for, I figured out on my rainy walk home from the train, 24 years this summer. 24 years. My friend Nina, who lives in Hawaii and whom I'm going to see for a few hours on Sunday before she heads up to Boston to see her folks, 31 years. Leslie in Vermont, my sister-in-arms, 31 years come October. Eileen in Colorado, to whom I owe a phone call like nobody's business, 28 years this September. Jane in Brooklyn, 24 years. Dena and Patricia downtown, 23 years. And Sandy, also downtown (hey, call me!), 20.

I totted up all the numbers as I walked home and it made me feel really good. This isn't one of my beloved traits, or anything that I've had any real control over. It's just a blessing from out of the blue: These friends, who have been with me for such a long time. Talking to Meridith over dinner tonight, realizing that no matter how long we go without seeing each other -- and lately it's seemed like I've been dating my girlfriends, we have to take such care allocating time for each other -- we're always still connected by some fine and unbreakable line. And then coming home to my family here, where the ties are newer but still full of promise -- the feeling of being blessed doesn't even begin to cover it. It's like I hit some cosmic lottery.

There are pictures -- good lord, there are SO many pictures. But they're upstairs in boxes and it's late. So let's just say I feel roughly like... this.
And this.

Illness as a Literal Device

2009-05-13T21:48:00.007-04:00

I really enjoyed reading everyone's responses to my post asking about their favorite traits. It did make me wonder if I'm not an incorrigible navel-starer, though, because I can answer questions like that, about the different ways I identify myself, in like ten seconds flat. I guess I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, although I don't know if it's more than other people or if I just admit to it more readily. The whole concept of self-image fascinates me, the ways we think about how we look and act and are perceived in the world and what percentage of that is actually rooted in reality.

Today I'm thinking about health, because I called in sick. I know people do it all the time, but for me it's a huge deal and somewhat fraught. I've worked at this job for a bit over five years, and have called in sick I think three times total, including today.

There are a number of reasons I don't like doing it. For one thing, I'm the sole employee and it's not easy for me to take unplanned time off. I actually thought long and hard about that last night, lying in bed in my scratchy-throated Benadryl haze, and decided that I was going to go ahead and call in because we're between issues and work is light this week. If this had been two weeks ago, when we were just putting one to bed, I would have dragged my sorry-ass self in, coughing and hacking all the way, and probably gotten lynched by the people who wear breather masks on the subway. The same things that make this an interesting job also don't give me much leeway.

But more than that, it's a self-image thing. I just don't get sick. Or rather, I do, but rarely. I'm a healthy person with a kickass immune system, and thinking about myself that way is really key to my identity. Which is mostly a good thing, as I've been blessed with good health and haven't had to look at myself any other way. On the other hand, it can get weird. There's a pocket of my thinking that equates sickness with weakness -- not other people's, but my own -- and I'm also kind of neurotically afraid of it. Just thinking about getting sick is enough to make me anxious.

I can't really trot out the old trope of being a single mom anymore. Not only is my boy out on his own and technically an adult, but let's face it -- he's been able to feed himself and do his own laundry and get around by public transportation since he was 11. But that terrifying feeling of being the sole responsible party for a child... that can leave a body with some serious PTSD. And even though there were all sorts of reasons that the world wouldn't end if I took to my bed for a day or two, the feeling that no one had my back, ever, is still a hard one to get over. And even though things are obviously different now, and better -- I do have the animals to look out for but they're a whole lot easier, and we're a functional two-parent household -- I still have a hard time with the idea that it's OK to just give in.

I don't get sick often. I can go an entire year without a head cold, and I don't get a flu shot -- I've had the flu exactly once in ten years, so those are perfectly fine odds as far as I'm concerned. I don't suffer bad allergies, don't have any chronic illnesses other than slight hypothyroidism -- bless you, Synthroid! -- and am, in general, a tough cookie. But that just adds to my apprehension about any kind of ailment, and means that I will drag myself upright and back to work croaking "I'm fine! I'm fine!" at the first possible moment. It's why I ended up with a bacterial lung infection last March and April, because I took one day off from work instead of, say, three. And then again, this is the first time I've had so much as the sniffles since then, and before that I hadn't had a cold in a year and a half. So averaged out, I don't have much to complain about.

Also I'm looking 46 hard in the eye and I know I can't expect my health to stay this good forever. Even if everything else holds out, I can expect the usual wear and tear on a body that can't take the abuse it used to and I'm going to have to be OK with it. Or rather, get OK with it. I have the feeling that's not going to be so easy. And there's a small superstitious voice in the back of my head that pipes up every so often with the idea that my immune system has been frittering itself away protecting me from head colds and strep throat, and that I'm going to end up with some form of awful cancer that will kill me instantly.

In the meantime, I called in sick today. Took two Benadryl with my breakfast and proceeded to sleep another five hours on the couch -- good sleep, not fuzzy drug sleep or restless couch sleep. And I feel relatively all right -- a bit lungy, but not as full of crappy phlegm and achy-eyeballed as yesterday. Plus I have a date in Brooklyn tomorrow night that I'd like to keep, so I'm telling myself that all is well and all will be well and I can resume my previously scheduled activities tomorrow. Today was a good hiatus. But now I need to go back to kicking the ball around, and I just hope it's that easy.

And because these things are really deadly boring with no photographs, here's one of me at 19. Talk about tough cookies, huh?

Aleatory

2009-05-12T21:16:00.006-04:00

a·le·a·to·ry (l--tôr, -tr) adj.1. Dependent on chance, luck, or an uncertain outcome.

OK, now I've even run out of pretty springtime photographs and I'm still feeling cotton-headed, so I'm going to call in one of my Get Out of Blogathon Jail Free markers. It's an old meme that recently resurrected on one of my favorite bookish blogs, pages turned. I'm not even going to go as far as the bookshelf -- our kitchen table tends to end up being kind of a staging area for books recently purchased, recently read, and recently pulled off the shelf for one reason or another, so I'm just going to pick what's physically closest:

1. Take five (random!) books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph:

One fine evening the no less fine office manager Ivan Dmitrich Cherviakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, watching The Bells of Corneville through opera glasses. Sometimes -- an idle but anguishing sport of the mind -- he told himself he was the victim of some practical joke on the scale of the universe of which everybody and everything, from the stars and the Manger to the pipe-cleaners, tooth-soap and bootlaces fringing his existence, were linked in furtive enjoyment. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but--" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However --" and I think to myself: this is death. I went back to the low-pitchd tent in the shelter of a dune, lay down beside Sergeant Hamano and closed my eyes. Sammy slung in the bag and stepped inside then the door slammed shut and that was him, out of sight.How weird is it that the first two sentences have a manager in them? Totally random, I swear. [Just reread this and realized that's not true -- one is "manager" and one is "Manger." I'd better go home and check that one out.] The story from the Love Stories collection that the last sentence on page 50 comes from is Elizabeth Bowen's "Dead Mabelle."

OK, that's all for tonight. Someone else post some.

And all right, one cat photo because I never tire of how cute these little bastards are.

Some Days

2009-05-11T21:27:00.005-04:00

Some days I'm full of good ideas and deep thoughts, and some days by 9:00 it feels like my brains are bleeding out of my ears. This day being one of the latter. However, in lieu of my having anything whatsoever to say, things are growing.

The pole beans are getting ready to make their big climb into eternity,
and we have almost enough baby lettuce to make a bed for tuna salad, or something equally delicious.
And there is wisteria! Which I'm well aware is an invasive and destructive vine that will someday kill all my trees, but that won't be for a while. In the meantime they are a beautiful, glowing shade of purple against the evening sky, carpeting everything with slightly annoying but still beautiful lavender petals that can be tracked into the house and played with by small bored cats.

Moms, Kids

2009-05-10T21:10:00.006-04:00

Me and my mom, Venice, 1967
Gideon, Walton, NY, 1992
My mom and Gideon, New York, NY, 2005

A Question

2009-05-09T21:58:00.006-04:00

OK. Since it's late and I'm a little drunk and have had a long, cranky, slightly anxious day and am in no mood at all to think deep thoughts, I have a question for my readers: What's your favorite trait? Of yours, that is, not one you like to see in other people. And an actual one, not a quality you wish you had or would like to cultivate. Something that, when you've had a shitty day and can't say anything particularly good about yourself, there's that one thing you can come up with and repeat to yourself in the dark so you can go to sleep.

I'll even go first: I'm brave. Not always discerning or wise or considerate -- although I hope I'm all of those things at least some of the time -- but without question brave. I will take on scary things and I am willing to fall on my ass. I will jump out of the metaphorical airplane. And may I point out that bravery is not the same thing as being unafraid -- I'm afraid of all sorts of things all the time. As far as I'm concerned, that's the challenge. I live to say Fuck You to my fear, and it has always, without fail, served me well. I have never regretted an act of bravery in my life.
So, dear readers. What is it about yourselves that you hold most dear? Tell me.

Back Yard

2009-05-08T23:34:00.008-04:00

I've lived in this house for 5 1/2 years and tonight for the very first time it occurred to me that it would be really fun to pitch a tent in the back yard and sleep out there some night. I have no idea why I never thought of that before... I am obviously too estranged from my inner ten-year-old. Just because I'm about to be 46 doesn't mean that a night in the tent with a sleeping bag and a flashlight and a book and a couple of chocolate bars and the dog wouldn't totally rock.

The fact of having a back yard at all is a weirdly grownup thing to begin with. I still think of myself as a bit of a fuckup, even though I'm not, really. But you know how it is... once you fit your self-image into a niche you're comfortable with, it's hard to shift. I've always seen myself as kind of a gifted underachiever and been good with that. All these accouterments of adulthood -- house and garage and kid in college -- still strike me as incongruous sometimes, even if I did come by them honestly.

However: I do have a back yard. And a tent, I think, unless I lent it to someone and forgot to get it back. And a sleeping bag, and a flashlight. I have a couple of books. And the best dog in the world, to keep me safe from marauding raccoons looking for chocolate bars.
One night this summer, I will do this. You all can hold me to it.

(The photo is worth clicking on.)

PSA

2009-05-07T20:48:00.005-04:00

There has been a lot of attention paid to swine flu lately... some might even say excessive attention. I certainly might say that, and will tell you so if you give me half an opening. It's excessive in general, but especially in light of the fact that this whole media deluge only serves to deflect attention from other serious problems, issues that the public should be equally aware of.

Case in point: the Van Cortlandt Cat Cluster Phenomenon. Similar to the flu virus, it infects northwestern Bronx households that are predisposed to cat accumulation. It can take several forms as it progresses, but at maturation the affected household will find itself in possession of one orange cat, one black cat, and one tabby cat at minimum. Surrounding households will then tend toward infection as well. Noted VCCCP epidemiologist and neighbor Margarita also notes: "The Cat Cluster Phenomenon does not result in immunity to further outbreaks by collecting a complete set. The virus mutates quickly and renders the host susceptible to adding black-and-white, calico, tortoiseshell, or other felines to the cluster."

Exhibit A: Our cats.
Exhibit B: John's and Margarita's cats (around the corner from our house).
Note that both households were infected independently, without prior knowledge of each other or their cats. Also note the advanced state of John and Margarita's infestation, with the addition of a grey cat.

At present there is no known cure for VCCCP. Any donations readers may want to make will go toward catfood, kitty litter, and little felt catnip mice, and can be forwarded to the VCCCP Foundation through this blog. Paypal is fine, although cash works too.

This has been a public service announcement. Thank you for your time.

(And thank you Margarita for pretty much writing this whole post for me. Is it really only Day 7?)

Only Six Days Into This Blogathon Thing and Already I'm Resorting to Posting Topless Photos of Myself

2009-05-06T21:56:00.008-04:00

In fact we're all topless here: me, my dad, and Gumby, who for some reason I named Rajah. It's May, 1967, which makes me not quite four. We were in either Jerusalem and Tel Aviv -- we spent a year in each place but I'm sketchy as to order. I guess it was hot.

My father died ten and a half years ago. Strangely, I've missed him more these past couple of years than in the preceding ones. Rather, the first stretch was your basic mixed bag of grief, guilt, loss, lightening, sadness, relief, acceptance, guilt again, and this is different. Lately I've been struck more by a sense of shrieking unfairness.

If he were alive now we'd be close in a way that we weren't when I was a child or sullen teenager or self-absorbed young adult. There were a number of years when I had finally achieved some kind of rough maturity but he was already an invalid, edging back into perpetual childhood. We never did find common ground. If he were around now, with all his wits about him, he'd be so proud of me. He'd love what I do for a living, and he'd want to talk to me about what I was working on, what I was reading, what I was listening to. He'd be endlessly amused at the fact that my boss turned out to have been a boyhood friend and neighbor of his. He'd like Jeff very much -- finally, a man he would have approved of, whom he never got to meet. And he'd be so incredibly proud of Gideon, his one and only grandson.

We'd be close; I know this. I can see just how it would be. He'd call a couple of times a week, always while we were eating dinner, and want to talk to me about some review he read or something in the news. And I'd roll my eyes and put my plate up where the dog couldn't reach it, and go out to pace in the yard while I talked, and I'd tell him everything. And after a while I'd come back in with my ears ringing, since I really kind of hate talking on the phone, and I'd say, "Jeez, my dad."

That eye-rolling -- it's a child's prerogative and best defense and endless link to those who gave her life, and I miss the option. I had to call my son tonight and say something dopey, just so I could hear him on the other end, rolling his.

... And Not Just Books, Either

2009-05-05T21:06:00.003-04:00

I Look Like a Farmer Baby, But I'm a Lover

2009-05-04T21:29:00.007-04:00

I was reading this cheerful post from the Chronicle Books Blog about sorting through boxes of used books (and wishing for the millionth time I worked at Chronicle Books, even though it would involve living on the wrong coast), and that got me to thinking about the books I've bought for their cover alone (although mostly they also looked like good reads, at least the ones in English). So since nothing of note happened today that I could possibly write about (it rained, I walked around the reservoir, I went to work, I had dinner, it was Monday all day), here are some of my favorite pretty faces, none of which ran me more than a few bucks:

Spots and Stripes

2009-05-03T22:05:00.004-04:00

The promised rain arrived and stayed, and all the members of this household have spent the day muddy or sleepy or both. In a sad bit of irony, my kitchen floor is immaculate -- which means I can spend every spare moment of the next week following the animals around with a mop, because our five-day forecast looks something like this:

Makes me doubly glad I spent so much time yesterday indolently lounging outdoors. Indolently lounging indoors doesn't have quite the same feeling of satisfaction to it.

The Fecundity Begins

2009-05-02T22:00:00.007-04:00

The initial forecast was for rain all weekend, but today turned out to be sunny and temperate and really lovely. I woke up kind of slow-moving and figured I'd just roll with it. What the hell, I spend enough time making this little slice of property habitable -- I might as well relax and enjoy it once in a while. So I dragged out the green plastic chairs and spent most of the day buried in the NYRB Spring Books issue -- I for sure need Zoe Heller's new one -- and Cutting for Stone, which at 2/3 of the way through is still a rollicking exotic yarn with lots of good gory medical details, perfect for a leafy green afternoon in the north Bronx.

Toward evening I got industrious, though, and noodled around the garden a bit. Everything I've planted, including what went in just a week ago, is popping. We have lettuce,
spinach,
snap peas,
broccoli,
the barest hint of pole beans,
and a host of other sprouts that weren't quite as photogenic. Soon it'll be time to start thinning, which is hands down my least favorite part of gardening. I'm such a softie.

I decided to put a variegated mint plant from the farmer's market in next to my lemon balm, which came from the same grower a couple of years ago and is fat and thriving -- never mind that I've never actually used it for anything. I dug a perfectly adequate hole for it, but my enthusiastic assistants were very clear on the fact that I was not going to be able to do it without help.
Plenty of help. When they were done I could have planted a tree.
Never let it be said I'm not a lucky woman.

May is the King of Months

2009-05-01T22:11:00.008-04:00

So a couple of my favorite people, Sue of A Life Divided and Debi at The World Without, are making noises about May being Blogathon Month. And while anyone who knows me knows I'm not a mindless trend follower -- more like a mindless trend denouncer and general snob -- it kind of sounds like fun.

In the first place it would be good for me, and I'm all in favor of things that I think are going to be Good For Me. I do well when presented with a challenge, and while my litblogging habits are pretty steadfast, if I can't figure out how to do my own stuff at the same time then that's just no good at all. In the second place, if my friends are providing me with a solid month's worth of content and insight into their lives, then it would be rude to just wolf it all down without even making the motions of reciprocity. In the third place, since I've developed a fairly heavy delicious habit, this would be a good chance to get rid of all those random links tagged "blog." And in the fourth place, I just have way too much time on my hands and no idea how to spend it.

Well, OK, that last one isn't remotely true. In fact I have not a whole lot of free time at all and a million projects lined up in my head. But the only way I can ever possibly get to them is to keep figuring out how to pull more time out of thin air, and the only way to do that is by taking things on and worrying about how to budget for them later. Necessity having been the mother of invention more times than I could tell you.

In the fifth place, May is my very favorite month. What's not to love about May, wherever you live? May is the King of months.

I also promise to take more pictures.

Francis says: "Give me the damn camera! I'll take some pictures!"

Ponzi Scheming

2009-04-17T21:25:00.013-04:00

Charles Ponzi

Well, it ain't high art, but it's not the worst way in the world to scratch out that paycheck either. Oy, this was a long week.

Cold Spring

2009-04-15T20:09:00.007-04:00

Why yes, it has been a cold spring. It even snowed last week for about half an hour. The daffodils and crocuses have come up, but everything else is resolutely brown and nothing's really budding yet.

Oh, wait... we're talking about that Cold Spring. As in the town upstate on the Hudson where my friends Jane and Heather and Dorrie and I went hiking a couple of weekends ago, which if I'd been any kind of good blogger I would have written about immediately, and I would have taken more than four pictures. Well, yes.
Seriously, it was a sublime day. The occasion was roughly Jane's birthday, and there were presents, but mostly it was a good excuse to spend time together and go somewhere outside of our regular orbits. It was an easy drive, just over an hour and almost all of it pretty, and Dorrie didn't throw up. While it was overcast and windy - we ended up turning back before hitting the trail summit because it actually felt dangerous, and it crossed my mind that Dorrie, at 50 pounds, could conceivably blow away - the day was still a beautiful and dramatic one, and we got a lot of hiking and bushwacking in at lower altitudes.
When I was little I watched Lassie obsessively. I'll never be able to hear "Greensleaves" without picturing that gorgeous dog launching herself neatly over the fence like a heat-seeking missile in her mission to reach Timmy. Probably all he'd done was call, "Here, Lassie! Here, girl!" and off she went.

I wanted a dog like Lassie more than anything else in the universe, a companion and protector who would trot at my heel and from time to time look up to see what I might want of her, the way Lassie looked at Timmy. We had a dog, a beautiful and unruly longhaired German Shepherd named Princess. But she was neither a companion nor a protector and she certainly couldn't care less what anyone wanted. She had done a week at obedience school as a puppy and my parents figured that was that - discipline and setting limits wasn't really their strong suit, as I would happily prove to them a few years later. So unless we were in our fenced back yard, Princess and I weren't going anywhere together. No one could walk her except my father - she once dragged my mother half a block and cracked two of her ribs - and she had to be sequestered when anyone came to the house for any reason. She was a sweet girl in her way, but Princess was not the dog I hungered for.
Dorrie is, though. Thirty-odd years later and I've finally got my loyal companion, and nothing feeds the fantasy fulfilled better than hiking through the woods together. My sweet little Milo was the most charismatic dog on earth, but I’m not sure I would have ever let him off-leash. He could go like a streak, and - granted, he was young - I never got that dependable vibe from him. Dorrie is faithful with every cell of her body. Off-leash she’s blissful, trotting one way and another, exploring, following scents but never straying far, and always popping up and bounding back if I call or clap. There’s something deeply peaceful about walking through the woods with friends, talking and poking at things with sticks, with a good dog ambling along beside us.
After we’d finished with Breakneck Ridge (seriously - that’s what it’s called) we noodled around for a while in the town of Cold Spring. Main Street’s main industry seems to be a series of cavernous antique/junk stores, rooms upon rooms of all sorts of cool knick-knacks. The places all seem to be struggling right now - this has to have been a long, cold winter for anyone dependent on a tourist trade. We did our bit to shore up the local economy - every place we went to was refreshingly dog-friendly, and Dorrie really seemed to enjoy sniffing all the old stuff - and walked around. I even ran into someone I knew, a guy I used to work with who departed for greener pastures, so we had a dog-patting and business-card-exchanging moment.

At the end of the day Dorrie was so exhausted she actually climbed in the car of her own volition, which as far as I know has never happened before, and curled up on her dog bed in the back. We took a bit of a scenic route home inadvertently, but it was all good, more time to talk and we got to see some of the less glamorous Rockland County waterfront. OK, a lot of the less glamorous Rockland County waterfront. But it’s good to know these things. Dorrie slept the whole way home.

So yes, that Cold Spring was as good as it gets. The rest of this cold spring I could do without, honestly.

But my tomato seedlings are sprouting! The cherry tomatoes first, followed by their Early Girl sisters.
And last weekend I planted a romaine mix, a greens mix, and snap peas - they’re under a bunch of bird netting, which is not so much to keep birds out as to discourage Shakey, who thinks he’s got the world’s best litter boxes there. I’ve even planted a $12.99 rosebush from Home Depot - as with the weather, so far it’s all thorns and no blooms. But even in a cold spring, hope springs eternal.
And here’s a gratuitous shot of Francis’ very handsome whiskers.

First Caturday in Spring

2009-03-21T19:44:00.007-04:00

So yesterday was the Vernal Equinox, first day of spring. I was out in the back yard early in the morning, staring up at the top of our big tree -- a little black and white cat has been hanging out in our yard lately, and the night before Dorrie had chased it all the way up and it hadn't come down by bedtime. It was gone by that morning, but as I looked up I couldn't help wondering -- wasn't it just a bit early for pollen to be coming down?

Heh. Not pollen, snow. Happy first day of spring indeed. Francis thought it was very exciting.
(Yes, I do clean my windowsills. The little shits just mess them right up again with their dirty paws.)

After that he was all worn out and had to take a nap with Alvy.
Is that cute enough for you people?

Today Chester the beagle came over for a visit. Alvy didn't particularly approve but Mr. Bonkers definitely did.
P.S. Whenever I see "Caturday" I think of Mick Jagger singing it to the tune of "Melody." I don't know why.

Subliminally Seduced

2009-03-18T21:56:00.018-04:00

So I guess you all like me better when I post cute cat pictures than smelly old used books? Well, I don't care. I'll post some more fuzzy critter photos soon, but first some more rambling thoughts on the book habit.

You know, anytime you buy something above and beyond the level of necessity, you’re indulging in at least the smallest bit of magical thinking. Whether we’ve all been hopelessly acculturated by Western mass media or it’s just the human condition, we’re all suckers for that little synaptic burst of seeing ourselves as we want to be when we make a consumer choice. Noticeably hip in those shoes, a domestic goddess on that couch, suave and speedy and listen, completely different from all those other midlife crisis guys in that low-slung red convertible.

It’s OK. It’s just how we’re wired. Even if the fantasy you’re buying is just a flash too quick for your brain to register – remember that book Subliminal Seduction? I spent hours with the illuminated magnifying glass I was supposed to use for stamp collecting – yes I WAS that much of a geeky kid – squinting at my parents’ Newsweeks, looking for the teeny tiny penises in the ice cubes of the drink ads. I don’t think I ever found one, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.

So I got a flash the other day while looking at a table of used books out in the sunshine: The secret vision I’m buying into when I buy these books isn’t of being part of some floating intelligentsia, or how much I’m going to learn. It’s all about having the time to read them.

I work a regular day job, commute an hour each way. I blog for the good folks over at Readerville. I cook dinner most nights; I walk the dog; I keep a large-ish house full of pets reasonably decent; and when the weather turns nice I try to do things in the garden. I have a partner at home, I have a kid in college, I have a mom the next town over whom I visit at least every other weekend, I have a lot of friends I keep up with. I do my best to keep up some momentum of a creative life.

But time? I have so, SO little time. I always thought when my son left home I’d have so much more time than I did before, but things just swept in to fill the vortex – things I love, things I treasure. And I find I can’t do it on five or six hours’ sleep anymore. Ironically, not only is time speeding up, but I need to spend that much more of it unconscious.

I don’t think I manage my time particularly poorly. It’s just like money – I’m good with it, and reasonable about it, but there’s just never enough.

And all of a sudden I was able to catch that small spark as it snaked past my lizard-brain: The little flash of a dream I’m dreaming when I dreamily browse through books is of myself reading them. That’s all. By spending my $2 and $3 on dinged-up, yellowing oddities, I’m giving myself a wishful gift. I will have the time to read all these books I buy. I will have a comfortable, quiet place and downtime and no emergencies. It will be like summer vacations, stretched out on my stomach working my way through a pile of library books, or hunched over Newsweek looking for altered pixels in a whiskey ad with no agenda other than having to go down to dinner in a while. It’s a hopeful promise I’m making myself.

I will read them, I will. Maybe not all of them. I guess it depends on how long I live, or at least how long I can see the pages in front of me. But as far as strange little bargains with my fantasy self go, I guess that one isn’t so terrible.

Cheaper than a red convertible, anyway.

Yesterday's find: Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92. Oh, I love Griel Marcus -- he's so old school. He reminds me of when I used to read the new music reviews in the Village Voice religiously, back when the Voice cost money. He always erred on the side of inappropriately highbrow, so what's not to love? The Voice blurb on the back of this book, in fact, says: "Like Adorno, and before him Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, Marcus's forte is the aphorism." Considering he's writing about people who spat on you from the stage being incorporated into the AOR mainstream, I think that definitely qualifies as covering all your bases. The best part? Is that whoever had this book before me underlined and highlighted. Somebody took their history of pop music verrry seriously. How geeky!

Just looking at this book makes me feel younger. It has the promise of a good solid wayback machine, filled with band names that will have the power to transport me back to heady college concert-going days and bad hair and uncomfortable boots. I can't wait.

Homeschooling

2009-03-13T23:31:00.008-04:00

So -- I'm never going to go to grad school. There were many years after my original college graduation when I felt you couldn't pay me enough to go back to school. And now that I'm old and contemplative and hungry for knowledge, I've also got a full-time job (knock wood), a mortgage, and a kid with one more year of college left himself. That's just a few loans too many, and not enough time to do a quarter of the things I want in the first place, and that all adds up to a great big No Way.

It makes me a bit sad, but not because I think an MFA would be such hot stuff -- I have no idea what I'd even do with another degree at this point. I just think it would be a lot of fun to take classes, read shit, talk about it. Get some new ideas tossed my way, have to stretch my mind a bit, and do it among people who are interested in the same thing.

Yeah, I know. What am I THINKING? The grass is always, always greener. If I've learned anything in all this time, that's definitely a big one.

So what's a girl to do? At best I guess I can try to set myself on some kind of autodidactic course of acquired knowledge, in hopes that persistence and serendipity and an open mind will point me in the right direction, and at worst I'll end up a weird chick with a lot of useless esoteric knowledge and a radar for finding similarly geeky types at parties, where we'll huddle in the corner like Trekkies. But it seems like something I need to do -- there's a lot out there that I'm never going to discover if I'm not paying attention.

For instance: James Purdy has died. And James Purdy wasn't even on my radar -- I'd never even heard of him. But the Times obit says his "dark, often savagely comic fiction evoked a psychic American landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation" -- so damn, that's a semester's reading right there, if only out of respect for the man.

And the thing is, I know there are hundreds and hundreds of James Purdys out there, so many writers and books and art and topics that haven't yet hove into my view. I don't even feel bad about it -- why should I? But I'd feel bad if I ignored the weird syllabus that the universe throws at me on an almost daily basis.
Today's street find: Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, by Seymour Krim, Excelsior Press, (c) 1961. What the hell is this? And who is Seymour Krim? According to the back, he was

born May 11, 1922, in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge in New York City. He was the last of four children born to Abraham and Ida Goldberg Krim. His father died when he was 8 and his mother killed herself when he was barely 10. Krim was left psychologically homeless, living first with his immigrant grandparents in Newark, N.J. and then with his older sister and her husband in Manhattan. An erratic student, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1939 and entered the University of North Carolina in the fall of that year, inspired by the figure of Thomas Wolfe. Krim lasted barely a year at the southern university, then returned to New York and began a series of forays into the uptown editorial world. These included editing a western pulp magazine, working as a reporter for the New Yorker, writing war news for the Office of War Information, hacking out the commentary for a newsreel, writing publicity for Paramount Pictures, and living off the advance for a novel which he never completed.

In 1960 he put together the anthology The Beats, which I own! In several pieces -- I think it was my mom's -- but still. And he wrote for everyone, including New Directions, the New Republic, Commentary, Partisan Review, the Village Voice, Commonweal, the Times Book Review, you name it. The end of the blurb says:

Seymour Krim was given a Longview Award for Literature in 1960. His comparatively limited output has been extensively reprinted in anthologies and collections. Krim is presently at work on another book and is editing a "swinging section" for Swank magazine.

And dig that crazy list on the front!
SEX
SUICIDE
HOMOSEXUALITY
SPORTSWRITING
JEWS
NEGROES
JAZZ
GENIUS
INSANITY
NEW YORK: THE LITERARY LOWER DEPTHS

Not only was that the last $4 I had in my pocket this afternoon, but I had to cob together a dollar of it in change. No matter. This is part of my education, and I refuse to let any of it get away.

More later.

$6.00

2009-03-12T21:31:00.005-04:00

I am not really a clothes person, or a shoe person, or a cosmetics person -- my idea of fancy is MAC lipstick -- or a home furnishings person. I don't collect china figurines, don't wear much in the way of jewelry, drive a decrepit (but paid-for) car, and the fanciest electronics I own are an iPod (a gift), an iMac (a gift), and a decent digital camera (not, technically speaking, mine). I do have a lot of nice kitchenware, but it's all functional and I'd just as soon not replace or add to any of it if I don't have to.

But I understand the passion, the unquenchable raging desire, to acquire such things. I totally know what that moment feels like when you suddenly realize how terribly much you NEED something that you didn't even know existed five minutes ago. I get it. Fortunately, since I don't have all that much liquidity to work with, I don't feel that special way about consumer electronics or pricey footwear -- just books (oh OK, and cats). And more specifically, although I love browsing in a nice bookstore and my Amazon wish list is bloated like a tick, used books.

I love the thrill of the hunt. I love finding gems among the dross. And I love a bargain -- I am, as my mother's cousin Phyllis would say, a shoppah. But whereas our family has traditionally spawned shoppahs of the Loehmann's variety, I'm all about the used bookstore, the library sale, the castoff publishers' galleys, the sandwich shop with the $1 paperback shelf, the I-don't-keep-books-so-you-can-have-this friend, and my favorite of all, the street vendor. Luckily, or unluckily -- no, no, it's luckily -- there are a number of these within a five-block radius of my workplace on any given day with halfway decent weather. I rack up the bargains on my lunch hour, piling them on my desk to admire for a week or two and gradually decanting them homeward to read.

Mostly I keep my little triumphs to myself -- I'm pretty sure they would make for a dead boring conversation, and I never really thought of them as something I could or should write about.

However. Recently I've been blogging for Readerville, which is fun and has seriously stepped up my trolling of book news and RSS feeds. Anything that's interesting enough goes over there, but every once in a while I find something to keep for myself. For instance: Some random surfing the other day brought me to The Wisdom of the Discount Rack, a very amiable meditation by Phyllis Orrick about the 25-cent rack at the Berkeley Public Library. It's a bit nostalgic, a bit aleatory, generally pleasant. Which is what's good about blogging in the first place -- for every person you bore silly, there's another you'll unexpectedly engage.

So hey, I got bragging rights if I want them. The week before last was a very good shoppah week. For a grand total of $6.00 over three different days, I walked away with:
Because I live in the Bronx, I like noir -- that's enough.
Aside from being blurbed by Hayden Carruth, there is this on the back:

Jim Harrison writes about the austerities of growing up in Michigan during the Depression and World War II, his literary coming-of-age among fellow writers he deeply admired -- including Tom McGuane, Philip Caputo, W.H. Auden, and Allen Ginsberg -- and the cognitive dissonance of "making it" in Hollywood. He gives free rein to his "seven obsessions" -- alcohol, food, stripping, hunting and fishing (and the dogs who have accompanied him in both), religion, the road, and our place in the natural world.

Religion and stripping and dogs? I'm there.
Dude, it's Wendell Berry. How can he not be worth $2?

THE FIRST

The first man who whistled
thought he had a wren in his mouth.
He went around all day
with his lips puckered,
afraid to swallow.

I guess it might be a little more interesting to blog about these books after I've actually read them. But I haven't yet, so for now the getting of them is the thing.

(Right now I'm reading this behemoth:
Which is about the size of the New York phone book, although oddly lighter, and didn't cost me a thing.)

Big Love

2009-02-14T08:40:00.003-05:00

Turbine

2009-02-13T23:04:00.005-05:00

Yesterday morning I walked out of the house and said, out loud because I've obviously lived in New York too long, "This is a fucking great-looking day."

I'm not sure exactly what I meant by that -- it just popped out. It was a very blustery day, with fat puffy white clouds getting blown around so hard they cast moving shadows on the sidewalk. Dramatic weather. And I live at the top of a long hill, so when I go out my front door I get a big-sky urban panorama -- not something you see just everywhere. I've learned to pay attention to the first things I think when I'm walking down that hill in the morning, having finally pried myself out of my warm safe house and pushed myself forcibly into the world. It's a combination of taking my psychic temperature and reading emotional tea leaves about the day to come -- not always precise, but accurate enough to give me at least the illusion that I have a handle on things.

Seeing big wind blowing like that always makes me wish I had some kind of windmill turbine on my roof and a generator in the basement so I could harness some of it and live a tiny bit more off the grid, give up a little less money into the greedy clutches of Con Edison.

I'm feeling a certain amount of good energy coming from within me as well, and the same urge to harness it -- although that requires a lot less hardware and a lot more attention. The weather inside and out don't always match up, but when they do it does, in fact, make for a fucking great-looking day.

Rolling in Ecstasy

2009-02-11T16:19:00.004-05:00

My 20s were all about sensation, diving into everything I did headfirst without a whole lot of thought beforehand. I made art and heard bands and took drugs and ran around with boys and read everything I could get my hands on and stayed up all night drinking and talking, and then abruptly flipped all that over halfway through the decade and had a baby. Which was every bit as intense and immersive, just without the bands and drugs and boys.

My 30s were about synthesis, figuring out how to take all that raw input and reconcile it with who I was – and figuring out who that might, in fact, be. A little slower, a little more thoughtful, although not a whole lot.

My 40s are turning out to be about scholarship. I think I’m as much myself as I’m going to be, but at some point I noticed how much there is in the world I don’t know, and fell a little in love with the idea of trying to learn some of it. Part of that is just the realization that I don’t have all the time I used to, and in fact it seems to be contracting on me, speeding up in direct proportion to how much I want to do. Which is a lot. Lately I’ve been waking up in the morning dazzled by the sheer potential, every day, for putting something new in my head, or making something, or connecting with someone. Not to say that I’m necessarily more productive. Just that the universe lately is oddly bright and shiny. Maybe it’s just latent ADD, unmedicated and coming back to bite me on the ass. Maybe I’m moving in on the age my father was when he had the first of his mini-strokes, and I’m getting all Use It Or Lose It.

Whatever the case, these days I’m feeling some kind of imperative to take those hours when I’m not at work, or on the train, or walking the dog, or cooking dinner, or sleeping, and own the hell out of them. Even if I don’t end up with something to show for it. Even if that involves sitting at my table and listening. I want the world to roll in ecstasy at my feet.

(I already have cats doing that.)

Dorrie 2012

2009-01-19T20:50:00.002-05:00

His Name is Francis

2009-01-12T22:43:00.004-05:00

Sometimes he's very good and sweet, and sometimes he's horrible.
He loves loves loves Alvy, and he hates Mr. Bonkers. He's very sweet to me as long as I don't interrupt him when he's being fierce and mean, and when he's fierce and mean he growls like a mad dog and hisses and spits. And when he's sweet he purrs and rolls around on his back to get his belly scratched and plays with his tail in a most charming manner.
He just got fixed last week, so hopefully a little less kitty testosterone will chill him out a bit. If not, we'll have to sell him on eBay or something. Alvy's so happy to have a friend, though, so I hope the two alpha boys work their shit out.
(Yes, they have totally trashed my desk chair.)

This is a Nice House and Everything, But People -- Your Mice Are All Dead

2008-12-03T13:09:00.008-05:00

He's probably never seen a non-living mouse before.

Up until a week and a half ago, he was living the high life over in Kitty Calcutta -- same place we picked Alvy up. As recently as early fall he was still a kitten, and too wild to even pet. But many many cans of cat food later, he became our buddy. And then it turned cold enough that we just couldn't stand to think of him out there, so Jeff grabbed him in a bear hug and brought him home.

So: Cat #3. Yeah, I know. He is stunningly beautiful, soft as a dandelion puff, and has an outsized personality. He reminds me of a blue jay, actually -- hyper-alert, head held high, glittery eyes, lots of noisy bluster to make himself look tough. He's busy working things out with #1 and #2 -- he and Alvy seem to be dwelling in that weird cat grey zone between aggression and play, whereas Mr. Bonkers has made it very clear he will brook no shit whatsoever, and tends to walk away from confrontations after fixing the new guy with a long, hard stare. At any rate, there has been no blood spilled -- a few dandelion puffs of fur floating around, but with no skin attached. And Dorrie is the consummate cat dog. She wishes he would play with her, but otherwise neither one has any interspecies issues.

Still, it'll be a little while before the household settles back to its former level of tranquility.
But not forever. Really, guys, I promise.
No name just yet. For now he's just New Kitty.

Happy Halloween!

2008-10-31T09:42:00.001-04:00

She's An Angel

2008-10-26T15:09:00.013-04:00

I met someone at the dog show
She was holding my left arm
But everyone was acting normal so I tried to look nonchalant.
We both said, "I really love you,"
The Shriners loaned us cars
We raced up and down the sidewalk twenty thousand million times
Why did they send her over anyone else?
How should I react?
These things happen to other people
They don't happen at all, in fact
When you're following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they're meeting on a pinhead
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest things
I heard they had a space program
When they sing you can't hear, there's no air
Sometimes I think I kind of like that and
Other times I think I'm already there

-- They Might Be Giants
Photos are from the Van Cortlandt Park Howl-O-Ween dog costume party. Which was more fun than it had any right to be.
Dorrie's friend Sabine was Buffalo Bill's horse.

Even a Blind Man Can Tell When He's Walking in the Sun

2008-10-17T23:01:00.006-04:00

So… jeez. I’ve been a shitty blogger.

There are reasons, of course. You want reasons? I’ve been… hmm, let’s just say Under the Weather for a while. Bad allergic reaction to some stuff, nasty horrible skin issues. Supposedly on the mend, but not fast enough, and I’ve been keeping well-medicated in the name of sleeping at night and not clawing myself to ribbons. I look like a kid who’s just had chicken pox, or like someone Mother Teresa might have prayed over.

So my brain’s been mush, and since work has demanded that I be mostly ON, that’s where much of my mental energy’s been going.

But beyond that, I was just getting sick of the sound of my own voice. That last series of cute animal posts was kind of a flailing about on my part in order not to spew what I really wanted the world to know. I even had a graphic picked out:
It was the end of summer and we had not left the city ONCE, I had not been in more water at one time than my bathtub, the garden had kind of tanked, and I was in the middle of taking a week and a half’s vacation at home just to use up personal days and get away from the office for a while. One day while I was hanging around surfing I found a contest on someone’s blog to win something or other, the kind of thing where you leave a comment in response to a question and they pick one at random. I can’t remember whose blog or what the prize was, but the question brought me up short: What fun thing have YOU done this summer?

And I couldn’t think of a single solitary fucking thing. I was broke and unmotivated, my house was hot, J and I both such slaves to our jobs that we couldn’t even arrange to take a week off at the same time. I had a bright neon sign across my forehead that blinked all day long: LOSER. LOSER. LOSER.

Let’s just say you all are lucky I wasn’t blogging. It takes a bigger talent than mine to make that much self-pity entertaining.

So… what happened to all that? You may well ask, but I’m not exactly sure. In the past few weeks the world, which was already in strange and scary shape, has gotten stranger and scarier by large degrees. But because I seem to always be slightly out of synch with the world, as events unspooled and the economy slid into the toilet and the runup to the election took on the proportions of a National Lampoon parody, I’ve found myself feeling strangely reassured.

Because there’s nothing like freaky times to make you sit back and take stock. And whereas counting blessings is always a good exercise, promoting deep breaths and some psychic gear-shifting, it’s still a matter of imposing gratitude on yourself from the outside in. It’s certainly better than wallowing.

But what I’ve found myself feeling lately is working its way out from the inside, like crossing over to the sunny side of the street on a cool day. Nothing like a change in perspective to illuminate the same tired shit in a whole new way. What I’m thinking, the worse things get, is that I’ve made some really good choices in my life.

First, most important, I’ve surrounded myself with love, our sweet little cobbled-together family. That most of them are four-legged in no way diminishes the returns I get, the degree to which they make me feel protected and warmed all the way through. Things may well get evil out there, but we can circle the wagons. I am enormously blessed.

Some fortuitous timing: I made a big career change five years ago, one of those last ditch do-what-you-love-and-the-money-will-follow leaps. The money part – eh, it’s taken its sweet time. But the point is, I did it when times were better – I saw my chance and I took it. I’d never dare do something like that now. And whereas nothing, it seems, is secure anymore, at least I’m on the ladder. I’m finally starting to feel like I have some chops professionally – I’ve earned a little confidence.

I did take a hard financial hit, and I’m still pulling myself up out of that hole. But I’ve been colossally disciplined about it. Which means I have kickass credit, and it means that I have no real lifestyle to lose, if things come to that. I know how to cook beans and make soup out of bones, and the belt still has a few notches left. Tight times don’t scare me.

I bought a house when a good opportunity presented itself, and put a lot of money down. It’s one of the reasons I have very little liquidity – at the time I was mostly thinking about not having to pay mortgage insurance. But whatever my reasons, I had a little windfall – a settlement from a bad landlord who tried to screw me, and some life insurance money from my dad, and instead of blowing through it some other way I put a fat down payment on my house.

So we have a roof over our heads and the mortgage is low. If we end up needing to cut some corners here and there, we can do that. For some reason London after the Blitz comes to mind – we could be that nice couple who takes in boarders, if it came to that.

And with that thought comes the really important one, the one that’s been generating some warmth:
It’s a big house. There’s an attic, two extra bedrooms – Gideon’s room and the one J uses as an office – and storage space in the basement. If things get really bad and funky, I will take people in. I’ll build a shed in the back yard. I’ll put them on the sofa bed in the living room. I’ll pitch a tent.

Understand, I’m not saying I want things to come to such a head, not by a long shot. I don’t imagine it would be a big old party and I don’t think it would be romantic like making brownies after hours in the Vassar dorms with Mary McCarthy. But the thing is, I have this resource to make sure that on my watch, no one I love will fall through the cracks. That is huge for me. HUGE. People have been so unremittingly generous and kind to me over the years, and the thought that I could find myself in a position to help someone else out – the thought that I have something real and necessary to offer – means a whole lot. I’m not even sure if I’m explaining it well.

Maybe it takes shaking shit up a bit to clear my vision, I don’t know. But I really have rethought this No Fun issue and I’ve realized that honestly, I have a pretty damn good time just about every day. It’s all right if it gets cold and the wind blows; I think I have a handle right now on what I need.

Caturday

2008-08-30T23:34:00.003-04:00

Inspired by Cara, I am putting up pictures of my cats. Because really, there just aren't enough pictures of people's cats on the internet.
This is Alvy getting groomed by Mr. Bonkers. It's a combination of dominance and affection, as far as I can tell.
Alvy puts up with it for a while and then he'll start to fuss and kick, or else Bonkers will be very gentle for a while and then start chewing on Alvy's legs like they were chicken bones, at which point Alvy starts to fuss and kick. At any rate, it always ends kind of badly, but it's fun to watch.

Driving Miss Dorrie

2008-08-29T21:34:00.008-04:00

Dorrie hates the car. Never mind that we only ever take her fun places, doggie daycare or to people's houses where she gets to run around in the countryside or the vet -- Dorrie actually seems to like the vet, probably because he has two great big handsome dogs who hang out in the waiting room. And once she's actually in the car she's OK -- she rarely gets carsick and she doesn't really do the helpless drooling thing anymore. But the process of getting in there is just miserable. You'd think she was about to get beaten with sticks, or a bath, or something along those lines the way she balks and cowers.

So when we're driving I talk to her a lot, tell her she's a good girl, skritch her on the head. Often I'll sing to her. It's a good distraction, mostly because it seems to puzzle the hell out of her -- what exactly am I doing? But it takes her mind off the fact that we're in the car, and that's a good thing.

I just discovered Mixwit, a mix tape site (via bricolagelife, an art/design blog I like a lot). And one of the things I've been doing with my time off is just giving myself permission to mess around with stuff, play a bit, whatever. Tonight that's what I've been messing with. (And eating cheese!)

So in honor of my good little dog, here's a mix of songs I like to sing to her in the car.

Cheers

2008-08-25T08:22:00.004-04:00

OK, enough with the sad little dog pictures. I'm taking a little time off from work, and while there will be more about that later, in the meantime I am trying to work my way through the Seven Deadly sins in their entirety. And since most of my days are already filled with Wrath, Pride, and Envy, it seems only fitting that a vacation should consist of Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, and Greed. I haven't gotten to the Greed part -- I'm headed downtown to have lunch with a friend so maybe I can do a little shopping and get that out of the way, but that tends to be my least favorite Deadly Sin. On the other hand, I've been very assiduous about the other three. We are in possession of a large amount of incredibly good cheese sent out of the blue by a dear friend, for one thing, and I think we've got every single one of Thomas Aquinas' Gluttony categories --

* Praepropere, eating too soon;
* Laute (washedly), eating finely;
* Nimis, eating too much;
* Ardenter, eating burningly;
* Studiose (keenly), eating daintily;
* Forente (boringly), eating wildly.

(thank you, Marta!)

-- pretty well covered. Can I just say: Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam with blueberries? Holy shit.

(The bartending bear was a commission for a friend's husband's birthday.)

Another Year

2008-07-19T19:25:00.002-04:00

One of the reasons I take so ridiculously many pictures of Dorrie, Mr. Bonkers, and Alvy is that I really took so few of Milo.
Another year gone by. I still think of him a lot.
I bet Bonkers misses him too.

Right up there with Goodnight Moon except for all the profanity

2008-06-23T21:33:00.001-04:00

Proud

2008-06-20T23:25:00.006-04:00

OK, so I’ve been an iconoclast pretty much all my sentient life, everybody knows that about me. I like a little tilting at windmills, enjoy subverting the closely held and disproportionately revered paradigms where I find them.

And since armchair subversion pretty much involves making fun of stuff, I mostly like to do that. The closer to home the better. That way if I can poke a little fun at myself or my roots, I won’t come off as at least a little self-deprecating and not quite such a bitter snarky crank.

There’s plenty of good stuff to make fun of when it comes to parenting. Because it’s such a hideously intimidating prospect to begin with, people latch on to all sorts of assumptions and ideologies, which in turn have to be shot down because the rest of us are all secretly terrified that we’re doing it wrong.

If you’re Jewish, or were raised Jewish, even if your family was completely non-observant, you get to make fun of Jewish mothers – otherwise I think they’re a bit too easy of a target to really be a paradigm worth subverting. But if your family is like mine, you have all these high achievers: Professors, rabbis. And doctors! My son the doctah! Even if no one has ever actually used that phrase within earshot, it’s worth ridiculing as a state of mind. My son the doctah, he bought me a condo in Flaaaahrida! What a good boy!

But see, that’s where I’m actually kind of a jerk. All my life I’ve taken that particular cliché and distilled it down to its absolute lowest-brow common denominator, figuring it was all about status and competition and living vicariously through your offspring’s success. I never for a second bothered to think about the actual facts of it, not until this year.

My son’s not a doctah. He’s a college student, formerly a Physics major and as of this coming fall a Political Science major. But in between his sophomore and junior years he took a year off and did a Paramedic certification program at an upstate community college. He passed the last part of the exam yesterday, and he’s now a New York State Certified Paramedic. He was an EMT, riding with an ambulance company there, and now they’ll bump him up. He also has a part-time job with the county as an ambulance dispatcher, the final part of the phone chain when someone calls 911.

And you know, I finally got it. When someone says My son the doctah, sure, sometimes she means he makes a lot of money or drives a nice car or can take care of her in her old age. But there’s also this: My son saves lives. My kid, he’s not even 21 and he saves people’s lives on a regular basis. He’s doing a job that means something to him, that makes a difference in the world pretty much every time he shows up for work. And whereas sure, some folks’ sense of parental self-worth will hinge on how much money their kids make or what kind of cars they drive or how nice a nursing home he's reserved rooms in, mine is that my son saves lives.
So much for the paradigm. Every time I think about this, I am blown away. And, in case it’s not clear enough, very very very proud.

P.S. That's him when he was about 14, in his first suit. He's big now.

Early Summer Optimism

2008-06-19T09:49:00.009-04:00

The weather's been almost tropical, although this week without the heat -- beautiful sunny days, then violent short rainstorms in the evening. Everything we planted is very happy. and the yard itself is ridiculously lush.

We have Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, yellow and purple sweet peppers, jalapeños, habañeros, white eggplant, and basil:
Corn, Savoy and purple cabbage, broccoli, and okra:
Cantaloupe, watermelon, yellow squash, snap peas, black-eyed peas, and cucumbers:
Lots of herbs and catnip:
And one very beautiful dog:

Happy Birthday Readerville

2008-06-12T12:12:00.005-04:00

So I'm thinking about the word "posthumous." Not in reference to Readerville, heaven forbid, but in terms of being a reader. It's one of those words that – I don't care how smart you are or how many times you've seen it in print, you will never in a million years pronounce it right until you hear someone else say it first. Or, if you were a certain kind of bookwormy kid who read a lot beyond your grade level, the first time you use it in conversation and are corrected, either gently or humiliatingly, doesn't matter. The point is that you can get far as a reader on your own, but there are times when nothing can replace an exchange.

Granted, a discussion online isn't going to teach you how to pronounce "posthumous" correctly. But a discussion online about words you've read all your life but never said out loud until the moment you realized you didn't know how to actually say them? It's just one of those small things that become points of solidarity in a community, that make you feel you're not just floating around untethered.

I don’t even know where to start. Usually I like to keep a bit of an impermeable membrane between my real life and my public one. I’m not a confessional blogger or forum poster – I do it more because I like the sound of my own voice than anything else. Just because I have this chattery need to express myself doesn’t mean that I like, or desire, life in a fishbowl. I aim for discretion in general, both as far as my own details go and especially when it comes to other people. True, I posted photos of my son as a little kid without running them by him first, but at least I didn’t include the one of him at age two, standing on the kitchen table naked, wrapped in lit Christmas lights, even though it’s possibly my favorite photo taken of him ever. I do have some self-restraint.

But it’s Readerville’s eighth birthday, and anniversaries of all kinds bring out a sentimental streak in me. Readerville is presently made up of two parts: an online forum for people who love books and reading, and an online journal organized along similar themes. You can find more details on the particulars here.

In the five years I’ve been hanging around the Readerville Forum, it’s influenced my life in ways both small and enormous, and the idea of sitting down and itemizing them is a bit intimidating. Aside from the basic stuff – finding a cool and often smart community of readers from all over, all the books I’d have never found on my own, and all the conversations both inspiring and maddening – I made friends for life there, met the man I love and live with, made a crazy midlife career change so I could work in publishing because I realized that’s where my heart was, became a more critical and conscientious reader, became a better writer, got published, and just… figured out how to embrace my own weird autodidacticism. And that’s just off the top of my head.

I don’t want to enumerate every friendship I’ve made there or what it means to me, or the unexpected ways people have propped me up and encouraged me, or my absolute stokedness about finding a career that I love and am good at, no matter how shittily it pays, or the really wonderful love story that I am – sorry, kids – not going to tell here. That’s all a little more personal than I want to get. What I do want, though, is to publicly thank Karen Templer for creating Readerville. All of us touch other people’s lives in ways we can’t possibly know, and I believe that taking the time to acknowledge that – the fan mail, the love letter – is a mitzvah, a good deed, a karma prop, no matter how ingenuous or effusive it comes out. Especially now, in this age of irony where perceived effortlessness is all, I think it’s an odd and beautiful thing to catch someone trying.

So thanks, Karen, for the cool playground. It has been appreciated in ways you probably never imagined.

At Last

2008-06-09T15:35:00.011-04:00

I had such great plans for my garden over the winter. I was going to order all sorts of cool heirloom-type seeds, and start them up in my attic studio, under the skylights, using my pot maker (which I've had since my days of gardening upstate -- it's a nifty little gadget). I was going to build a bevy of raised beds à la Square Foot Gardening as soon as the weather got even vaguely warm enough to work outside. I was going to have my garden rocking by the time we were out of frost danger.

But then I got sick in the middle of March and stayed sick through the beginning of May, and there went all my big ideas. I could barely get dressed every morning and take the dog for a walk every evening, much less get my gardening shit together.

I did eventually haul my sorry and still-coughing ass up to Home Depot with a shopping list of materials and lumber, and I bought what I'd need to build. And then there were a couple of rainy weekends, and then a trip up to Boston, and then when we finally pulled the tarp off everything over the Memorial Day weekend, my 30-year-old drill died.

BUT. We persevered, J got me a new drill for my birthday (as if I hadn't hinted enough), we managed to get together enough soil mix to fill the beds -- surprisingly hard to estimate, even though the book is very explicit -- and we got out to the garden center in Yonkers and bought a bunch of little plants. Not quite the same as starting my own babies from seeds, but good enough. Saturday was the hottest day of the year hands down, but I didn't care -- it was good honest sweaty work, and when it was done we ended up with three raised beds full of all sorts of good stuff. It may or may not survive the birds and squirrels and raccoons and impulsive big-footed hound dogs, may or may not thrive in 6" of soil (and I do think I need to supplement even what we have there -- I've spent more on dirt this spring than on food, I do believe), may or may not work in the conditions we have there. But it's in there, and success or failure aside, I'm very proud of my garden. (The one with the bricks underneath that looks totally crooked is actually level -- it's the pitch of the ground that's totally crooked, and it only looks weird in the photo.)
We have corn and cabbage and broccoli and okra from seed.
We have Roma and cherry tomatoes, a purple and yellow sweet peppers and banana peppers and jalapeños and habañeros and white globe eggplants.
We have sweet peas, even though it's a bit late in the season for them, watermelon, cantaloupe, yellow squash, and cucumbers and black-eyed peas from seed. Probably some other stuff I've forgotten about, and I'm going to throw some lettuce in as soon as the temperatures get out of the 90s. I already had a bunch of herbs going in planters, so that's a done deal.
But it's done. At Last. I'm a garden loser no more. And if you don't think I'm sitting back in one of those green chairs with my feet up and a sweaty cold Heineken, admiring my handiwork and blasting Etta James out the kitchen windows, you'd better think again.

Flickr Meme Thing with Pictures

2008-06-06T21:37:00.010-04:00

OK, so I saw this on two blogs I like a lot, Two Pointy Sticks and Alecto's Ophelia. Now, sometimes I like these meme things because they're good prompts and I tend to do well with motivators -- deadlines, assignments, telling people I'll do something and then having to do it so I don't completely humiliate myself. Then again, I'm also a cranky aging punk rocker (I was about to say "ex-punk rocker," but then realized that after all those years of saying "It's not about the FASHION, man," this would be a reasonable opportunity to take that to heart -- it's not about the lifestyle, right? Right?) and you know. No meme is the fuckin' boss of me.

This one appealed, though, probably for the most part because I like looking at pictures on the internet so much. I know it's all a big old time suck -- but still, there's so much cool stuff out there to feast the eyes on, BibliOdyssey and the Nonist and Strange Maps and Things to Look At and Decocentric (even though I can't read Russian, really, just enough to sound out the words) and I check out Ffffound! every single day, even though they're in snotty beta stage forever and I can't actually join. Which I suppose is part of my problem, having a million RSS feeds and wanting to look at every single one of them. I'd probably get a lot more done if I never turned on my Google Reader. But I don't know, I like having visual stimulation, and I do think it's good for me as an artist and even as a writer to have a lot of shiny input. You know the saying Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out? (Or, in Latin: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.) Well, I say, Look at all the pictures on the internets, let my brain sift through 'em when I'm asleep or something. Hey, I don't watch TV -- I've gotta have some kind of guilty pleasure.

So this meme is all about found pictures and shiny objects so I liked it, plus since there's some kind of evolved internet etiquette wherein picking up a meme from someone else's blog is a sign of love and respect (not that Alecto and Ms. Pointy Sticks don't already know that I love and respect them, or if they don't then they should), so I get to do that twice with one blog post.

So, the concept:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:

What is your first name? Lisa
What is your favorite food? Pasta
What high school did you go to? The Putney School
What is your favorite color? Bottle green
Who is your celebrity crush? Steve McQueen
Favorite drink? Red wine
Dream vacation? Morocco
Favorite dessert? Licorice
What you want to be when you grow up? A Dog Whisperer
What do you love most in life? The family
One Word to describe you. Try
Your Flickr name lisapeet

1. Lisa's little paws, 2. 3 Types of Pasta, 3. The Putney School, 4. Ten green bottles....., 5. Steve McQueen and wife Neile in Palm Springs 1963, 6. Red wine, 7. Chefchouen, Morocco, 8. Old Finnish liquorice tin from the 50s, 9. dog whisperer, 10. Bear Family, 11. try, 12. lisapeet age 8

(I cheated a bit on the last one by uploading a photo of myself and naming it accordingly. But it's a cute picture, and I haven't really changed much other than the hair color.)

So that's my little photo mosaic, and I encourage everyone to make one of their own because it's a really fun way to kill a Friday evening, and there's something oddly aesthetically satisfying about it as well.

I still owe Alecto a whole nother meme, one of those that fit into the category of Interesting Prompts That Will Probably Make Me Think in a Good Way and Something Interesting is Sure to Come of It. I just haven't gotten to it yet. Too busy looking at shiny pictures and stuff. But this'll do for now.

45

2008-06-01T11:13:00.003-04:00

Yeesh. In my mind I'm still 33 1/3.

Maybe it is time for that tattoo...

On a Sunny Afternoon

2008-05-26T22:15:00.010-04:00

Everyone was hanging around outside all day. I cleaned the basement. Shakey climbed into the planter full of catnip and had himself a long stoned nap.
He certainly does like it in our yard.

Dorrie sat around looking pretty and completely innocent of doing a thing like digging that big hole under the tree roots to the right of the picture.
All these nice photos were taken by Jeff.

Because

2008-05-16T16:27:00.004-04:00

Part of my job – a larger and larger part lately – is editing. I’m usually the second line of defense, sometimes the third if we farm something particularly gnarly out. A good part of that is reviews – books, film, poetry, theater, TV. And because it’s my job, and because I’m cranky at least 75% of the time I’m there just because it’s my job and I’d rather be home reading on the couch with furry animals on my feet, I’m constantly susceptible to hubris: the secret sneer, the roll of the eyes, that silent arrogant whisper: Jesus, this is awful – I could do this better.

So: Because hubris is a tragic flaw, and tragic flaws are bad for both digestion and karma, and because it’s always good to stretch and be humbled at the same time – because in fact it’s hard to write a review, to strike the right tone somewhere in between chattiness and pedantry and to say something that hasn’t been said a hundred times before without sounding completely pompous or silly – because being snotty, even in secret, is basically bad, and putting yourself out there in all good faith and honest effort is basically good, I submit to you my first-ever film review: Reprise, a film by Joachim Trier.

And also, because I haven't posted one in awhile, a bear cartoon.

My Motto for the Month of May

2008-05-15T22:32:00.002-04:00

If not longer. Like preferably forever.
From a haiku by Professor John Maeda, as interpreted by the Public Design Center.

Animalia

2008-05-14T21:36:00.007-04:00

The small cat has discovered the raptures of running water. He learned from sitting on the floor and watching the big cat in the bathroom sink, which is what he still has to do every day while he waits his turn. This is because the big cat is the alpha around our house, and because he had the idea first, and because the little cat can’t jump all the way to the sink without using the toilet lid as a staging area, so not only does he have to wait for the big cat to finish but he has to wait for me to finish, if you get my drift, since that’s usually what we’re all doing in the bathroom together in the first place.

But boy, as soon as I’m done and the big cat’s done? The small one will squash my fingers while I’m putting the lid down because he can’t wait.

He doesn’t have the action down very well yet. The big cat is practically a tool user – he puts his paw in the stream and laps up the water that sluices off. He barely gets his whiskers wet. The small one puts his whole face in the water and then sneezes, slips and slides around the sink trying to get just the right angle to put his flat little face in so that he doesn’t get any up his nose, and somehow, even though the big one is the outside cat and he stays in the house, he gets the sink absolutely filthy.
It’s fun to watch, though. And nice to think he learned a trick from the big cat, who is the coolest creature on earth and could give lessons in just about anything that involves cat behavior. The small one also, it turns out, is a hell of a mouser. It’s baby mouse season around here and I’ve been finding lots of surprises when I come home in the evening. Surprises that look just like all the cats’ furry mouse toys and you go to nudge them out of the way with your foot and wish you hadn’t, or half mice stuck to the floor with their guts so that their little hind feet and tails are pointing ceilingwards and they look like some weird art student made a little sculpture of a mouse diving through the floor.
No mind, though. My boys are earning their keep and I’m proud of ‘em.
Not only is it baby mouse season, it’s baby raccoon season. The mama in our hollow tree has four little kits, and they’re criminally cute. They’re just starting to want to explore, usually all at the same time, and she’s constantly having to collect them, licking their heads roughly and stuffing them back in the hole. There’s sort of a porthole below the main entrance of their lair, just big enough for a baby head to peek out every once in a while. More often I look during the day, when they’re asleep, and there’s a little tail hanging out, like a teeny tiny Davey Crockett cap.
Then to supply the necessary interface between wildlife and domestic animals, there’s Shakey. He’s a sweet orange and white cat who comes around and begs for food, having figured out around the end of the winter that he could play us like a couple of violins. We feed him twice a day at this point, and he hangs around the back porch longingly. At some point we’ll probably end up taking him to the vet to have him fixed and wormed and treated for the ear mites that he scratches till he bleeds, but we’re not so sure about taking him in. He’s a big cat, and I think he and our big cat would clash in the house. Out in the yard everyone gets along pretty well, although he’ll take a swipe at the dog if she goes for the food we put out. The two cats will stare at each other and wave their paws in the air a little bit, but then everyone relaxes and goes to separate corners. But I get the feeling those separate corners are kind of crucial to their getting along. And we wouldn’t rock our big cat’s world for anything. He’s our main man.
But Shakey comes around pretty regularly, yowling loudly if no one sees him. I can be upstairs and know when Shakey’s around, looking for a meal. And really, it’s not like I can say no. He’s a nice guy, and there’s obviously some secret hobo cat signal in the neighborhood indicating that we are the biggest suckers in the world for a pair of big eyes and a head butt. We’ll see how this one plays out.

The mama raccoon is very pleased that Shakey is around, because once he’s done eating the food we put out for him she’s right there, doing her grocery run. She’ll even come out in the morning, when she’s supposed to be sleeping – hey, she’s got four hungry mouths to feed. I don’t blame her. This morning, though, I walked outside with the dog and there was the mama raccoon, standing in the middle of our back patio eating catfood. And that was scary. The dog is half coonhound and I swear she has this deep-seated animosity in her blood – squirrels don’t really bother her, or birds, and in terms of interest even Shakey rates below his food. But that raccoon, all the raccoons that come around, drive the dog absolutely fucking NUTS. Which is fine when she’s up in that tree, not so great when she’s in the middle of the yard. The dog got to her, she turned around and put her claws up, but then took off and somehow outran the dog and made it to a tree. That big lumbering girl could move, and that was a good thing, because the dog was inches away from taking a big bite out of her back. And aside from not wanting the raccoon to get hurt, I don’t want my sweet dog running up against a hurt mama raccoon with a nest full of kits she intends to get home to. Those are big claws and those are big teeth.

So that was our excitement for the day. I swear, it’s like a freaking circus around here. But I do love them all, and even if not a single soul reads this far because your eyeballs have rolled up in your heads, I’m all pleased to have a little slice of critter life all written down so I can read it when I’m old and gray and my grandchildren don’t want to hear one more story about the damn animals, Grandma, please, can’t you tell us another story about the ladies’ room in CBGBs?

Speaking of Mothers...

2008-05-13T14:52:00.002-04:00

Me and my mom, Venice, 1966.

Because once upon a time, we were both fabulous.

Happy Mother's Day

2008-05-11T16:52:00.002-04:00

To all you mothers, non-mothers, and badass motherfuckers.

That should cover just about everyone.

On Being Sick

2008-04-29T22:34:00.008-04:00

I’m a healthy girl. Robust, I’d say, if that didn’t conjure up stout apple-cheeked fräuleins yodeling as they toted buckets of water or something. I’m reasonably strong, have good endurance and a tough immune system – I went all last winter without so much as a head cold, and the one before that as well. I don’t get migraines or have back problems or debilitating period cramps.

And, like any other kind of privilege, it’s not something I think about much. It took getting sick in the middle of March and then staying sick for an unreasonably long time – not flat-on-my-back-in-bed sick, but exhausted-and-draggy-like-someone-let-all-the-sawdust-
out-of-me sick – to really point up to me how predicated my life is on being healthy.

I won’t trot out a laundry list. Suffice it to say that we ate badly, the dog got fat, and the house was adrift in pet hair almost instantly. I’m not talking about who does what around here and why. Just that what I expect to get done in the course of a day depends, really heavily it turns out, on my being able-bodied and having a certain amount of energy that I just… didn’t have for a while there. It was weird, and to a certain extent even scary.

The weekend before St. Patrick's Day I came down with a bad chills-and-fever-and-aches cold – I’m loathe to use the F-word, since I refuse to get an F-shot –which progressed to the hacking cough everyone was getting after their bad chills-and-fever-and-aches cold. Mine refused to fade away, though, and morphed into some form of ugly pulmonary crunk. I felt like something was squeezing my lungs with two fat invisible hands, some malevolent creature sitting heavily on my chest at night. For every morning I woke up feeling like I was actually getting better, by the time I went to bed I’d be coughing and winded. And tired. Tired every fucking moment of every fucking day. And another assumption about the eternal state of my health I’d made was that I didn’t have a doctor. I don’t like doctors, as a rule. I’m actually kind of scared of them. It’s a combination of bad childhood experiences and bad adolescent experiences and just plain neurosis, I guess, but I’d rather sit in the dentist’s chair every day for a week than sit on the table in a paper smock. I do it every so often, just enough to act like an adult, but I don’t like it.

This time I knew I was whupped. I went and found myself a doctor.

My place of employment offers a number of different health plans, from straight-up disaster insurance, health savings accounts, HMOs, private physician plans. I had picked one that lay in between the last two, a point-of-service plan, I believe it was called. Kind of like carrying only liability on my crappy old car – I wanted to be protected in case of dire emergency, but didn’t need anything too fancy for the good times. Which means, basically, that when I found myself up against the wall and needing to pick a personal care physician, I didn’t have a hell of a lot of choices. There were a few out in Queens, Brooklyn, lower Manhattan. One in the Bronx, but the south Bronx out by Yankee Stadium, and I didn’t really feel like dragging my sick self all the way out there on the bus. And one on the Upper West side who took walk-ins, a woman with a nice Jewish name. I’m big on names – that’s how I picked my dentist, Dr. Ivylynn Davis-Bell, for instance, and I love her.

The doctor’s office was on Central Park West and 65th Street – a classy address. But it was an odd little hole in the wall, slightly dingy but not dirty, with drab linoleum and heavy wood furniture. Behind the receptionist’s desk was a wall of wooden pigeonholes, like the kind you got your mail in at summer camp, crammed to the ceiling with yellowish, dog-eared records. The place was clean but seriously dowdy – nothing white, nothing gleaming.

The doctor herself was a little old lady, wearing not a lab coat or a smock but the kind of outfit your aunt would wear to tea with her best friend – a blouse, silk or rayon, and slacks. Not pants – slacks. She was tiny, slightly distracted, but she asked the correct doctor questions and took my blood pressure and looked in my ears and mouth with her doctor gadgets. The examining room was cluttered and the table had giant metal stirrups which I sat between, thinking that even if she did do OB-GYN work I would never in a million million years get a pap smear there.

“I’m going to prescribe you a Z-pack,” she said. Fortunately I’d had a friend mention that last winter, so I knew it was Zithromax – otherwise I’d have had no idea.

“I’m allergic to that,” I told her. Wasn’t she supposed to ask me that first? But no problem – instead she wrote me up a week’s worth of Avelox, which is specifically for lung and respiratory infections.

The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes. I walked out with my paper in hand and thought, Man, she looks like the kind of doctor people would hit up for bottles of Oxycontin – an easy touch with the prescription pad.

Never let it be said I don’t know how to call ‘em. I Googled her when I got home and found, among other things, a New York Times article from ten years ago reporting her arrest for selling controlled substance prescriptions to an undercover cop outside her office. Not only that, but at the time she was 76.

Soooo… OK. My new doctor is an octogenarian pusher. I guess I could have done worse.

I took the Avelox for a week and still felt crappy, so Dr. Feelgood sent me to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt for a chest x-ray. When I showed up there and presented the referral slip, the receptionist asked me if I knew why I was there. I wondered if that were some kind of trick question, if maybe I was dying of some kind of horrible wasting disease and Dr. Feelgood hadn’t wanted to tell me. “Chest x-ray,” I said. “Why?”

“Because your doctor didn’t write down what you were here for,” she said, and laughed her head off. I guess that kind of thing is funny when you work in a radiology clinic.

The x-ray came out negative, which is good, because in addition to being doctor-phobic I’m also a bit of a hypochondriac and had spent the day mentally practicing how I would react to the news that I had lung cancer. “I’ve seen a lot of this lately,” Dr. Feelgood told me, “a viral infection that turns into a bacterial infection and it lasts forever.” And then she wrote me out another prescription, this time for cough syrup with codeine. “Take a teaspoon of this four times a day,” she told me. “Don’t take it at work.”

I couldn’t quite figure out how that math was supposed to come out, so I just took it all day long and sailed through the next week. Then stopped taking it except to sleep, because it helped. A lot. And gave me the coolest, most vivid dreams. I dreamed about body-surfing an enormous tsunami, plotting a novel in a writing class in Sharpie marker on a game of Twister, having a big party where everyone I knew showed up and got enormously drunk and planted a rose arbor on my garage roof deck.

And I got better, slowly.

And now I think I’m cured. I can think straight again, take deep breaths, walk up the hill to my house without having to stop with my hands on my knees halfway up. Got off the codeine, checked back in with the usual boring dreams, and have no plans to visit Dr. Feelgood any time soon, for anything.

But man, that was a long haul.

What really went out the window? Was my creative life. Before I got sick I had this really good creative momentum going, drawing and writing and all that. And now I feel like I’m starting again from scratch, which sounds way more dramatic than I’d like and also just sounds lame. But I feel like I had my feet kicked out from under me in a strange and intangible way, and I have to clamber back up on the horse. So much for the apple-cheeked fräulein. On to the next manifestation of self-regard. And hopefully I can stay healthy for long enough to figure out what exactly that might be.

Even the Sun Shines on a Dog's Ass Some Days

2008-03-08T19:47:00.007-05:00

Rainy, blowy, generally cruddy out today. If it had been colder we'd have gotten two feet of snow like our friends in Ohio, but here it was just nonstop wet and wind -- a good day to stay in and eat oatmeal and read.
I read J.R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, not the pretty NYRB edition linked to but the plain-Jane, oddly sized Poseidon Press book pictured here, bought on the street a few months ago for the grand sum of $3. It's a slim book, easy to get through in a day.

I can see how it would put some people off, consumed as it is with Tulip's bathroom and sexual habits, flowing from this borderline-obsessive relationship to the dog in question. But that's why I liked it so much -- it spoke to that very consuming aspect of love for an animal -- a dog in particular -- and that narrow focus that comes of taking your responsibility for another creature so very seriously. Which I relate to, and others' mileage may vary.

Earlier in the year Pia Jane Bijkerk, in her blog enhance the everyday, came up with a project called my heart wanders: a collection of subtle hearts in special spaces. The idea was to submit heart images taken from life, presumably the more beautiful the better.

Right away, I knew what I wanted to send her. And right away, I knew I couldn't, for all sorts of reasons. It would be interpreted as crude, or smart-assy, or derogatory, or trying for shock value. Probably if I were a bit more militant about the whole concept of What Art Is, I would have gone ahead. As it was I said Eh, skip it, and didn't think about it again until now, after reading Ackerley's sweet hymn to all the parts and byproducts of the dog he loved.

Anyone who knows me or reads this blog is aware of how much I love Dorrie. Nearly every evening after a long workday, I drag my sorry self out for a walk with her no matter how unmotivated I am, and she never fails to infect me with her energy and joy at our being out together. She trots along, often slightly ahead of me -- I love The Dog Whisperer but don't subscribe to absolutely everything he preaches, and if she wants to forge ahead a little I have no problem with that, so long as she doesn't pull -- nose in the air, tail held high and happy. And although I don't seek it out, or focus on it in particular, neither do I take great pains to avert my eyes from what presents itself: my dog's pink, very heart-shaped, um... asshole.

OK, so you're wincing, and thinking HOW DISGUSTING. Fine. So let me ask, do you or do you not appreciate your lover's penis, testicles, vagina, less-than-perky breasts, because they're a part of someone you care about? Even though perhaps they're not about to win any beauty contests, or they're wrinkly, or icky stuff comes out of them? Do you love the parts because they're attached to the whole?

So I love the parts of my sweet Dorrie. I've blogged about her soft speckled ears, commented on her sweet brown eyes and damp black button nose and strong, delicate, deerlike legs. She's beautiful all over. And in fact a good friend, at whose house Dorrie was a guest last year, commented: "She has such pretty girlie parts." It's true. Her fur is white and she keeps herself very clean, and hey, I'm the one picking up her fresh shit in a little plastic bag -- if I want to admire my dog's asshole, I will.

The fact is, it's pink and perfectly heart-shaped and as dear to me as all the rest of her.

And no, don't worry, I haven't taken a photo. It looks like you think it looks. It would have been perfectly appropriate for subtle hearts in special spaces, but propriety won out -- and then lost out again for a moment, as long as it took to post this, thanks to J.R. Ackerley's celebration of all the bits and pieces and effluvia that were part of a good dog.

I promise not to mention it again.

Two Things I Made This Week

2008-02-28T22:14:00.005-05:00

1) A cake for my mother’s 80th birthday party, which – trust me – tasted better than it looks here. In fact, it looked a whole lot better than it looks here – the fine art of food photography continues to elude me. This one was taken with no flash, in broad daylight, and it still has the cheesy gleam of bad porn. (Not that I’ve ever seen bad porn, mind you, but I’ve heard things.)

It was a Chocolate Mandarin cake, just one dense layer of good-quality semisweet chocolate with lots of orange zest – and also ground toasted almonds and candied ginger, which made for a really great complex taste – covered with a glaze made up of nothing besides more good chocolate, heavy cream, and Cointreau. It was a hit.
2) A little (5x7) watercolor for a fine young man whose age can still be reasonably calculated in weeks.

Which, all things considered, makes this a good week.

Yes, Those Ears Are as Soft as They Look.

2008-02-23T22:55:00.005-05:00

Especially the slightly spikey part where her ears meet her head. That's my favorite part of her to touch when we're out walking together.

Cheeta

2008-02-22T10:44:00.003-05:00

I’m taking a snow day today. It’s coming down fast and furious, soon to be replaced by sleet and ice, so better to shovel and salt now, when I’m fresh and pleased at playing hooky, than in the evening when I’m tired and cranky and the snow weighs several hundred pounds per square foot. Plus I have a few freelance art jobs to take care of this weekend, and my mom’s birthday cake to bake, and a baby present to finish for someone who’s leaving town… it’s a good day to be home.

So quiet up here – you’d never know you were four blocks from the #1 train. Just snow, snow, more snow, annoyed birds at the feeder wondering where breakfast is, and one little dead sparrow on the back porch because Mr. Bonkers has had a very good hunting morning. I have a small fat black cat on my lap, purring like crazy with his paws around my neck, and a whole day to noodle around and bake and make things – a whole day to feel like Cheeta.

After I shovel.

Mr. Bonkers Smiles in His Sleep

2008-02-02T21:55:00.000-05:00

Bear Dreams

2008-01-29T22:38:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the bear in the hat is dreaming of
her?

Consumption

2008-01-24T16:31:00.000-05:00

No no no, I don’t have TB.

It’s just that it occurred to me that although I blog semi-irregularly about the very fascinating contents of my own head and various animal life in and around the North Bronx, I don’t often mention what I’m reading or looking at. Which is partly that deeply ingrained but pathetically disingenuous-for-someone-who-blogs ethos of “who in the world would care what I’m reading/watching?” And then there’s the fact that I’m a very lucky girl and have many people in my life who I talk to about this stuff. So by the time it occurs to me to blog about some item of interest, I’ve already had the discussion a couple-few times, up to and including late-night conversations in bed with the light off and a passel of warm animals snoring softly around us – sometimes the idea of blogging about it on top of all the personal talk feels a bit redundant.

But hey, I have a readership, it seems. And I do get my hands on some interesting and fun stuff . Three things from the past week:

Every Last Cuckoo, by Kate Maloy

Full disclosure: Kate is a dear friend of mine, but I don’t automatically shill for my friends’ books – and was a little hesitant to mention it in the first place because I’m not in fact shilling. This is a lovely novel, very sentimental without being in any way mawkish or pat. It’s about a lot of what interests me on a sort of cellular level these days, as I creep toward the birthday that in my mind heralds middle age: family and coming to terms with all the permutations thereof, the way ties of friendship endure, how loss is synthesized and incorporated, how I connect to the physical landscape I live in, how creativity keeps evolving, and – important lately – how I relate to my age and my aging self. This is a soulful book, accessible and warm, but not simplistic. And it makes me want to move back to Vermont.

Plus – how gorgeous is this cover? I really think it’ll help sell the book, which can only be a good thing. What I’m really hoping is that it does so well that Algonquin is forced to do some kind of marketing tie-in and finds someone to make those mugs with the birds on them. To go with that big pile of Fiestaware that I don’t yet own, y’know.

The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge

I’m reading this now, and not just because it has a great bear on the cover – it’s a recommendation from Jeff. This is some very male stuff, farmers and ranchers from the West Coast, hunters and field workers and crop dusters. I’m enjoying the voyeuristic aspect of it – this is not company I generally keep, not guys like that nor is it my side of the continent, and I like the picture he paints me of a world that has nothing to do with mine. His language is beautiful as well. The contrast between the spare, often hard-edged narrative and the real delicacy of his words is pretty indeed. There’s a precision that I like and that I appreciate from my stranger’s viewpoint.

The quality varies, as short stories tend to do, and I’m not quite halfway through, but some of these are really pure and affecting. I’m definitely moved to keep reading.

And a movie from just last night: Nights of Cabiria.

Oh my goodness. This has to be up in my lifetime top five, I think. What a very female movie – not feminine, not feminist, but so reflective of the complex mindset that I’m pretty sure is mostly women’s territory, without getting into too much generalization. (I won’t say “painting with a broad brush,” promise.) Say what you want to about the convention of the crass-yet-beautiful, marginalized-yet-proud, brokenhearted-but-hopeful hooker, but I’m sorry – she lives in all of us to some extent. I haven’t seen a whole lot of Fellini films so I couldn’t say if this is any overriding sensitivity on his part or perceptiveness or just good observation, but it really resonated. And I’m not generally one to interpret stuff along gender lines above any other way of looking at it – a lot of that strikes me as superficial much of the time, an easy referent. Yes, I know I just called the Kittredge stories “very male,” but this is different. Cabiria spoke to the deepest x-chromosome part of me, I don’t know how to put it in any less hokey way.

Jeff told me that Giulietta Massina consciously channeled Charlie Chaplin in her characterization of Cabiria, and it’s there, in a non-caricaturish way that really does echo his sweetness. We saw City Lights at Film Forum on New Year’s Day – presumably a good omen for a year of movie-watching – and I was surprised at how completely charming it was. I’d never watched an entire Chaplin movie, only knew him from the Little Tramp archetype, and only then understood why he was, and is, so loved. Cabiria carried a lot of that with her. I really did fall in love with her. There’s a scene where a famous movie star takes her to a fancy nightclub, and in the middle of what’s supposed to be a reserved mambo she breaks out into this goofy, wonderful dance by herself. I could watch that a hundred times. (And thanks to YouTube, I guess I can.)

I really missed out on a lot of great movies during most of my formative years – not having a TV will do that, I guess – but I'm kind of glad I'm getting to see these now, in my 40s, with a certain amount of life experience, humility, and sentimentality in place. I think I react to art much more emotionally now than I would have in my 20s and 30s, and I rather like that. There's always time afterward to intellectualize something, to mentally turn it over and look at the workings. But it's nice to take things in viscerally on first viewing – that first reaction, you can never do that over.

Gideon's First Fish

2008-01-19T16:05:00.001-05:00

On the back it says July, 1993, which puts him a couple of months shy of his sixth birthday.

Why yes, I have spent my day doing a whole lot of nothing, which includes poking around up in the attic. Given all the events I usually try to cram into my weekends, this was a necessary and very appreciated day of total R&R.

I am not a scrapbook person, I don't have a baby book for Gideon, and none of my photos are in albums -- they are stuffed haphazardly into boxes. And while there's a kind of aleatory charm in pulling out a handful of pictures and seeing what I get, I'm sure someday when my memory is starting to go I'll really wish I had organized them better. But I don't really foresee having big chunks of free time to do this... oh, ever, honestly.

What's very touching is that I see Gideon's been through some of them and labeled the backs. I have no idea when he did it. The handwriting is on the young side -- he can't have been in his teens, I don't think. But it's sweet -- I'll have to remember to thank him.

The Readerville Journal

2008-01-18T19:59:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite places on the internets is Readerville.com, an online forum for likeminded bookwormy hard-reading opinionated chatty folks like myself. For years there was also the Readerville Journal, a smart and handsome full-color magazine along similar lines. It ceased printing soon after I started hanging out there, going on four years ago, which was a sad thing – not least because someone had just given me a year’s gift subscription.
But now the Readerville Journal is back in digital form, and you don’t need no stinkin’ gift subscriptions. It’s up there for everyone, and it’s still smart and handsome. There’s neat content that changes daily, good links, and some really excellent book recommendations that you probably won’t find anywhere else.

The Surprise

2008-01-13T22:00:00.000-05:00

Well, yes, not only am I a Master Baker but I am a really shitty blogger, and yes, I am aware of that. But these days I actually have a little bit more reason than usual. I've been trying to get back to drawing every day, or something close to that, in my sketchbook.

What many people don't know about me is that I was an Illustration major in college -- I have a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, which is a fine institution of some renown. I was one of those kids who was always drawing, and I think I did have some promise, but I think I was also lazy and largely squandered it. No matter -- I have no desire to take up illustration on a professional level again. But what I would like to do is get back to the point where it was fun. Once upon a time I always had a sketchbook, and the doodles flowed out of me naturally and pleasurably. Over the years sitting down to draw or paint has felt more like work, like something I feel like I should be doing. And that really kind of sucks.

Here's what I think happened:

Back when my husband and I split up in 1996 I suddenly found myself solely responsible for keeping body and soul together for both myself and an 8-year-old. Not that my ex had ever been much on co-parenting, but at least he was a second warm body and I had some mobility.

When it became just me and Gideon, I had to plan everything out, plan everything ahead. If there was going to be food on the table and clean laundry and garbage bags and school lunch, I had to plan and plot and think ten steps ahead all the time. Never a break. Before I got my own washer, laundry night meant that we had to have some kind of dinner prepared that we could come up and eat while the dryer was running and Gideon would need to be set up to bring his homework to the laundromat, and whatever needed to be bought would have had to be bought on my way home from work or better yet on my lunch hour so as to save those precious 15 minutes.

And yes, I know, lots of people's lives are like that all the time, and probably worse. Eventually he got older and I could leave him alone for little chunks of time, and he started spending more time with his dad, and I acquired a little more flexibility. But that endless planning never quite let up. There was always something that needed to be accounted for, foamcore boards for science projects and sneakers suddenly grown out of and lunch money lost... all that stuff that almost feels like nostalgia now.

The thing is, I'm still in the habit. Kid's gone from home a few years now and the only creatures really dependent on me are a dog and two cats. But I'm still always thinking thinking thinking ahead, thinking about what I'm going to wear while I'm in the shower and thinking about what I'm going to cook for dinner while I'm at work, and if I walk the dog all the way around the reservoir when I get home then what order do I make the food in so we can eat at a decent hour and I can put a load of wash in when I get home if I do it right away and Monday is recycling night and oh we're going to need more soap in the bathroom in a couple of days...

So OK, I'm a bit compulsive and on a certain level it works for me. We're fed and the animals are fed and the house is in order and the bills are paid, and I rarely get that fucked up behind-the-eight-ball feeling.

But what I've also divorced myself from is a level of spontaneity, of letting happy accidents happen, and that is fucking me up artistically.

It's one of the reasons I like writing -- I can write in my head at odd moments during the day and there it is. I can put it down on paper later. I had this particular thought sequence about 15 hours ago, and I've been looking forward all weekend to getting it down. And in fact with my writing, having something planned out gives me a framework to get started and propel myself forward in order for a little serendipity to happen.

But making art, for me, is different. For most of my life I just liked putting pen to paper to see what happened, starting in one corner of the page and doodling across it until the space was filled. Or not. It didn't matter what happened -- the joy was in the surprise.

That's what I want to get back to: The Surprise.

So I've been taking the time to just draw, draw anything, copy pictures I like, or write things down by hand and make some pretty letterforms. Whatever catches my fancy. Just to get my hand moving.
This week I've been drawing trained bears. Not to flog a really tired cliché, but -- it's all good.

In totally unrelated news, it's 38˚ and pouring rain and there are two raccoons having hot raccoon sex up in the big tree in our yard. On Thursday we had the goshawk hanging around. This place is turning into Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. Kinda cool for the Bronx, though.
Oh, and I updated all the links on my sidebar to reflect what blogs I'm reading these days with any regularity and with a whole section for food links. Enjoy! Or not.

I am a Master Baker

2007-12-20T22:28:00.000-05:00

So I put off making my Christmas cookies until the last minute yet again. I like to lay claim to the theory that the closer to Christmas and their shipping dates I bake them, the fresher they'll be -- you can't work too far ahead with cookies. But really, I was just doing other stuff. I did get them all baked off over the weekend, which was a start.

But the gingerbread cookie contest over at Baking Bites lit a bit of a fire under my ass. The deadline was the 18th, so Tuesday night I dutifully left a boringish work party early and came home to frost cookies. Frosting cookies... it's both rewarding, creative work and a deeply onerous, endless slog that hurts my back, dries out my fingers, and puts me off sugar for days. But: rewarding and creative, yes, and people do love them. They're a very personal gift that takes a lot of the guesswork and frivolity (not to mention the spending of money) out of the holidays.

And whereas production-lining anything gets old after the first ten or so, the dancing dog cookies modeled after my sweet little Milo somehow never get tiring in the same way. There's a devotional aspect to them, certainly, and watching the cheerful little guys take form, and -- sorry, this is corny -- their personalities come out, never seems to get boring.
But damn they do take forever. I finished up and the cookies were dry enough to photograph at 15 minutes to midnight. Talk about cutting it close.
And... I won! A copy of The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, which yes I have coveted, and a groovy t-shirt. But also, you know, the recognition and the props and that happy feeling that no matter how minor an achievement it is in the greater scheme of things, it's still my achievement. It was a blip on my radar, not to mention an excellent compliment from Nicole, who is a hell of a baker in her own right. I've gotten many fine recipes and ideas off Baking Bites.

So, because I know y'alls are going to ask me -- yes it's my own recipe and no it's not a secret and here you go:

GINGERBREAD COOKIES
(amounts for doubling (red) and quadrupling (green) are in parentheses -- I have to color-code them because I'm easily distracted and tend to screw up. I usually use a double recipe, but sometimes a smaller or larger batch is appropriate)

1-1/3 cup all-purpose white flour (2-2/3) (5-1/3)
2/3 cup whole wheat flour (1-1/3) (2-2/3)
1 tsp. baking soda (2) (4)
½ tsp. baking powder (1) (2)
4 oz. unsalted butter, room temperature (8) (16)
1 cup packed brown sugar (2) (4)
2 tsps. ginger (4) (8)
1 tsp. cinnamon (2) (4)
¼ tsp. cloves or allspice (½) (1)
½ tsp. salt (1) (2)
chopped zest of 1 lemon (2) (4)
1 egg, room temperature (2) (4)
3/8 cup molasses (¾) (1½)

1. Sift together white flour, whole wheat flour, baking soda, & baking powder.
2. Cream together butter, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, cloves or allspice, salt, & lemon zest.
3. Add egg & beat well.
4. Add molasses & beat well.
5. Add dry ingredients in 3 batches, mixing thoroughly after each addition.
6. Refrigerate dough at least 1 hour.
7. Bake cookies at 325° 5-7 minutes (check after 5).

ROYAL ICING
2 egg whites (4) (8)
2 cups sifted confectioner’s sugar (4) (8)
1/8 tsp. cream of tartar (¼) (½)
½ tsp. vanilla extract (1) (2)
food coloring or paste colors
lemon juice for diluting

1. Beat egg white to soft peak consistency – use copper or stainless steel bowl, glass if you have to, but not plastic!
2. Add sugar, cream of tartar, & vanilla. Beat to stiff peak consistency.
3. Add coloring in small amounts. Dilute, if necessary, with small amounts of lemon juice to achieve flowing consistency.

Alvy Settles In

2007-12-17T09:35:00.001-05:00

I wonder if Alvy remembers anything about his former life on the streets. It's only been five months. But as it gets colder and meaner out there, I can't help imagining that has something to do with the fact that he's getting affectionate lately, discovering that he enjoys being handled and held (and cradled like a baby with his hind legs sticking straight out, but we don't need to embarrass the poor guy). I've also noticed at night, when I can't move my legs, that he's been sleeping curled up against Mr. Bonkers.
He's a fat and happy boy these days.

Eight Random Things

2007-12-16T04:02:00.000-05:00

This is a meme that Maia tagged me with oh, ages ago. And I’ve been thinking about it on and off. Mostly thinking that anything people don’t generally know about me is probably either unsavory or illegal or both, and that there’s probably a reason it’s not common knowledge.

Still, I am nothing if not a good sport, so here for your edification are eight random things about me.

1. Between the ages of about seven and eight, I was obsessed with wolves. Being a bookish kind of girl, I read everything I could get my hands on about them -- Julie of the Wolves, yes, and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (and I actually had the wonderful fortune to meet Joan Aiken later in life, but that’s another story), but the one that really got to me was Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. It was the story of his going to live peacefully with a wolf pack – I believe he used the word “community” – in the Arctic, back in the early ’60s. It’s one of those first-person wildlife sagas that has since been accused of all sorts of embellishment and poked full of holes, but at the time I bought into it almost religiously. I wanted to go live with the wolves, painfully so. I’d have dreams where I’d look out the back upstairs window of our house and see a wolf pack trotting down the street, coming to rescue me.

What that says about the “raised by wolves” nature of my childhood I will leave to the reader to decide. But it was a very real yearning for a couple of years there.
2. My first published illustration was in the New York Times when I was 12. That was early 1976, and my dad was taking some time off and staying home with me while my mom went back to school, and back then it was noteworthy in that smarmy way the Times still has of discovering some crazy little trend way way on the wrong side of the curve. We knew someone there who decided it would make a good fluff piece, and when the editor found out I was a budding artist he asked me to do a drawing for it. I was SO excited.
Up until the moment, anyway, when I saw the article with my drawing and it was captioned: Lisa drew this cartoon of her father “househusbanding.” Even at 12, I knew enough to realize how utterly condescending that was. Here I thought I was being contracted as an actual illustrator to create a piece of artwork that would accompany an article in the New York Times with my byline underneath it, dammit, and instead I got a pat on the head.

And you know, the Times wouldn’t do that today. Now, toward the end of the article, it would say something only slightly dopey like Lisa, who is looking forward to her own career in the arts, keeps a keen eye on the family goings-on, above. Or something like that. Somewhere in the past 30-odd years, that aren’t-these-darn-kids-cute tone has mostly disappeared from the mainstream media. But that’s 30-odd years too late for my indignant, insulted 12-year-old self.

3. I have a fat scar going down my midsection from between my breasts to my navel. It’s from a benign stomach tumor I developed when I was 18, successfully removed with a maximum of drama and a long hospital stay, and from which I emerged weighing 99 pounds and addicted to Demerol. Neither of those lasted. I was asked several times afterward if it was a Caesarian scar, which mostly demonstrated a gross lack of anatomical understanding in the guys I went to bed with, and a few times people have wondered if it wasn’t one of those unborn twins with hair and teeth. Which is an awful but very entertaining concept, and over the years I’ve always considered adopting that story and embellishing it. I may yet.

4. During my sophomore year of college I worked for a man who ran a scam gay date-by-mail service, which turned out to be a front for a drug ring. I had no idea of this going in – at first he explained some of my weirder duties, like pasting labels over the old name of the company on their promotional materials, as the result of a lost trademark case. I figured it out soon enough when the angry phone calls started trickling in – “Hey, isn’t this the same as the last gay date-by-mail service that took all my money?” Which it was. In the meantime, there were large amounts of drugs floating around the office – my boss would often nod out mid-sentence – and all sorts of strange seedy characters wandering in and out: hangers-on, whiny druggies, drag queens, credit card scammers.

The boss was one of those magnetic sociopath types who could talk his way out of anything. He was a mail-order reverend, and ran a somewhat unsuccessful male escort service on the side. His brother hung around the office and freebased so much that every so often he’d get monstrously paranoid and pile furniture against the door, and I’d end up being late for class. Eventually it all got too weird for me and I started feeling really guilty for being associated with an organization that took money from closeted men living in the Midwest in their parents’ houses. “These people are not exactly going to call the Better Business Bureau on us,” my boss told me, and in a spasm of conscience I quit the next day. But I have material to last a lifetime, believe you me.

5. When Gideon was somewhere between two and three, he fell down in the playground and chipped one of his front teeth. Not down to the nerve, but it was sharp and it bothered him. So I got a teeny tiny file from one of his dad’s model airplane kits, tucked Gideon under my arm, told him that if he’d just hold still for a couple of minutes I’d fix it, and filed that broken little tooth right down. It didn’t even look that bad when I was done, and he replaced it with a nice big one in a few more years anyway. But for a while I had the redoubtable reputation as the cold-blooded mommy who filed her own kid’s tooth. People came up to me for a month or two afterward, some of them total strangers, to ask if it were true.

If I’d had any sense I would have said “Yep, an’ I worm him myself too, with the stuff from the Agway.” But I wasn’t as funny back in those days.

6. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 28. Eh, I was a city girl.

7. I have two tattoos, both of my own design. One is on my left inside ankle, a leaping brook trout, which I got when I was 33 and I split up with my husband – ’nuff said. The other, which I got when I was 18, is on my right hip. It’s from a 17th-century drawing of the skeleton of a dragon that was said to live outside Rome. I riffed on it a bit, left out the base and instead gave it a rose clutched in its claws, which is the only color on the entire tattoo. I still remember sitting in the library on Second Avenue and Ninth Street at one of those long tables, paging through some reference book – back in the day when I used to do such thing, rather than surfing airily over the internets – and finding this picture. It sparked me right away, some indefinable shock of recognition, and I wanted a tattoo of it immediately. I’d wanted one since I was 14, but hadn’t known what it would be – only that I’d know when I found it.
Both of them are kind of old and faded now. At 18 I wasn’t thinking much about the possibility of getting pregnant and ending up with stretch marks running through it, and even though the guy who gave me the second warned me that ankle tattoos don’t age well, that’s where I wanted it.

I don’t regret either of them. I toyed with the idea of getting a third for a long time – I was thinking one of these
on my shoulder, in black – but I think the window may have passed for that. I guess you never know, though.

8. I have never gotten a manicure. A pedicure once, and I really liked it because I have a bit of a foot thing going on, but I have too many cosmetic feet problems to feel good about ever going again. My nails are generally short and kind of scrubby-looking – when they posted the rules for hand and nail care back in junior high or whenever it was we were supposed to learn that kind of thing, I must have been elsewhere. I push my cuticles down, don’t bite my nails down to the ragged bloody quick, file them when I remember to, and moisturize a lot – although I also wash my hands a lot, which kind of cancels that out on a regular basis. But my nails never look good. I also cook, garden, type, and generally use my hands hard – but other people do these things and have attractive nails. Once again, an item of adult cosmetic hygiene that has managed to totally escape me.

Again With the Hawks

2007-12-05T16:44:00.000-05:00

So I went out for lunch around noon and I was thinking of my friend Leah out in California, who was having cataract surgery – sending her those positive vibes and looking around for some kind of good sign. Not that I'm so crunchy as to go by signs and omens or anything, but it was something to do.

And what could be a better omen for someone's eyes than... a hawk? There was this hawk sitting in the middle of campus, hidden by a hedge so no one could really see it, eating a dead squirrel.

An immature redtail, I think -- my cell phone photos aren't great but it looked just like this one.
But really, wow -- it was gorgeous and incongruous here in the city. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve seen them around where I live, but that’s about six miles further up – practically the country, by NYC standards. I stood out in the cold for about 15 minutes, just watching it. As omens go, that one kicked ass.

That was about the high point of my whole day. Came home and walked the dog, brrr! And made some kale-prosciutto-noodle soup when I got home. This time of year makes me really militant about eating well... I always feel like there's only a bunch of leafy greens and a few cloves of garlic between me and certain pneumonia.

Thankful for:

2007-11-24T22:17:00.001-05:00

Gideon and Ivan, November 1989
Gideon and Ivan, November 2007
Ingredients: TurkeyAnd friends, and love, and food, and all that good stuff.
(I can haz turkey NOW???)
(I haz had LOTS of turkey.)