Our first son is being called to the Torah at the end of September. L'chaim! The good news is our menschy oldest boy is becoming a man. The bad news is his bar mitzvah comes at the beginning of a three day weekend that ends on Yom Kippur, which means we and our guests will be singing, reading, chanting, dancing, eating, rejoicing, fasting and ultimately, repenting for our sins, all in the same weekend.
Pray for us.
This bar mitzvah is, of course, my son's big event, not mine, but let's face it, a 13-year old boy can't become a man without his mother pounding away on her Blackberry.
This means I have spent the last six months picking my oldest boy up at the bus stop on Monday afternoons and racing him to the Temple so he could make his forty-five minute session with the bar mitzvah tutor. His tutor was fantastic---a young mother of two daughters, she is a Barnard grad and a realtor---and by the end of the school year, my son knew his Torah portion (Deuteronomy, Parashash Haazinu, The Song of Moses) and had written his D'var Torah. Yes, we belong to a Reform synagogue so the demands upon him haven't been excessive. Yes, the tutor urged him to review his Haftorah and take his Ipod to sleep-away camp so he could continue to listen to the cantor chant his Torah portion and not forget everything over the summer. And yes, we recently received a letter from the assistant rabbi, gently reminding us that our son still has to hammer out the details of his mitzvah project (which will probably involve some combination of helping to raise money for juvenile diabetes research and feeding homeless families). But other than buying a new suit, my older son doesn't really have all that much more to do to get ready except review his notes, text his friends about the girls who are coming, get his hair cut, throw his shoulders back and show up.
I, on the other hand, have plenty to do. Most of it involves the kind of administrative tasks that my 13-year old could probably take care of himself were he not at sleepaway camp: Typing up the guest list, copying addresses out of various directories, asking his grandmothers for lists of friends and families, affixing stamps to envelopes, sticking directions to the hotel inside the envelopes for the out-of-town guests, talking to the event planner at our tennis club about tablecloths in primary colors and the price of ice (Is it really over the top to have an ice sculpture in the shape of the Stanley Cup?), urging the DJ to bring "motivational dancers" whose belly buttons are covered (my idea---my husband and sons wouldn't mind some skin), begging my son's favorite local restaurant to please save 20 seats for us on the Friday night before the big day, so that our out-of-town guests have someplace other than our house to go for dinner after services.
And so on---the kinds of chores that don't require a high school diploma or any great knowledge of Judaism. Right now, our dining room table is piled high with invitations, envelopes, stamps and hotel information, and I am just waiting for a rainy day so that I can assemble these precious packages and mail them out.
In the midst of organizing all this, I ran into the mother of one of Matthew's hockey buddies. Ths woman's son had a bar mitzvah earlier in the year. I like this woman a lot; she's smart, funny and direct. We started talking about bar mitzvahs and she began to describe the joys of having her dress made for it. This is not a woman who I would normally associate with the words "dress maker." She has three sons who play hockey, and whenever I saw her at the ice rink, she was huddled in a ski parka and sweatpants. I have never seen her in makeup and I'm not sure she even carries a purse. And as far as I know, she doesn't have a babysitter, which means she probably doesn't have much time for beauty rituals. But when she started to describe getting her dress made---"You go there, and she has candles burning and she measures you and holds you and shows you fabrics, and for an hour, it's all about you"---I immediately wrote down the dressmakers's number and called for an appointment.
The dressmaker was lovely. Tall, blonde and slim, she looked like she knew how to dress for a party. But there were no candles burning (when I asked where they were, she said she needed new ones). Instead, she showed me a picture of her dog and told me to look at fabrics and rip out pictures of dresses I liked from the page of Vogue and In Style. I did as I was told and it was all very pleasant and peaceful; she showed me some gorgeous navy blue cabbage rose lace from Paris that would look beautiful over a lavender silk fabric I had chosen. The dressmaker's voice was soothing. "You might not be able to wear this dress to your friend's day events, but you can definitely wear it again to night functions." As I sat there, I realized, I have no visual imagination. Even though she's explaining exactly what this is dress is going to look like, and pointing to the picture in front of me and saying, "We'll do this instead of this, and it will be beautiful," I couldn't see it.
I went home and realized I'm really not the kind of person who wears French lace overlay from Paris anyway. So I called my friend Suzanne. I met Suzanne on a hiking and biking trip in Northern California last summer. We both had then-12 year old boys, and we spent a lot of time in Yosemite eating garp, discussing books and talking about our boys as we biked through the woods and climbed sheets of rock. Suzanne was always the first one to take off her hiking boots and jump in a lake; she is also one of the top saleswomen at Bergdorf Goodman. We had been in touch Christmas time, when I was doing a retail story for The New York Times. I had been looking around for a a retailer that would be willing to talk about how sales were going in the tough economy. Did Bergdorf's want to cooperate? (No, they didn't, and I ended up writing about Best Buy, which is as far from Bergdorf Goodman as you can get.)
I emailed Suzanne and told her I would be in the city for an old friend from Business Week's book party, and wanted to come in early to look for party dresses. I described what I was looking for and told her my budget: I didn't want to spend more than I had spent on my wedding dress, which I had bought at a sample sale in the bridal building in 1993.
"Oh, that's okay, the whole store is 70% off!" Suzanne cried. She said she would collect a few things for me and I should meet her at 3 p.m. on the third floor.
I used to cover retail for Business Week and would occasionally write about Bergdorf's and its parent company, Neiman Marcus. I once saw Cindy Crawford eating lunch there, and a couple of my friends used to go there to get their hair cut. But I had never shopped there for anything more substantial than lipstick or pantyhose; during the years I wrote about department stores, I never walked into one with the goal of shopping for shopping's sake. Instead, I would notice markdowns, traffic flow, the attitudes of salespeople and whether customers were carrying shopping bags or not. I would buttonhole customers, interview them about what they had bought, hand them my business card and ask if I could quote them by name. The result was I ended up doing my recreational shopping in small stores, that weren't owned by institutional investors or publicly traded, and where there was no risk that a pubic relations person who had given me an interview with a CEO but then hadn't liked what I'd written, might see me trying on shoes.
So when I walked into Bergdorf's yesterday, it was if I was walking in for the first time: I had the same heady feeling I used to get when I went to fashion shows. Look at all these gorgeous people, so beautifully dressed! Look at all these chic women! Look at all those platform shoes, and super-flat sandals, still hundreds of dollars even though they're 50% off!
Nobody there looked like Mommy from New Jersey.
I called Suzanne and said I was there. She was talking to her manager so she told me to wait a few minutes, and then come find her. When I did, she was beautifully dressed in a green pants suit and flat sandals; she showed me a few things and then said we should go look together. Off we went, and we found a pile of dresses on sale: A nude, sleeveless, linen pleated Prada; a plum-colored Narcisco Rodridguez; a black-and-beige jersey Donna Karan wrap; a silver Versace sheath; a speckled, green-and-black silk Michael Kors shift; an Alberta Ferretti cranberry silk, which was exquisite and marked down from $1,195 to $359; a green, satin, sleeveless Zac Posen with a gorgeous turquoise lining marked down to $529; a lovely, royal blue sleeveless linen Balenciaga, marked down to $659 from $2,195. The savings were breathtaking; I was giddy.
Then we passed the Prada department, and for fun, Suzanne grabbed a couple of dresses that were not on sale.
"They're tempting," she said.
Uh huh.
I tried all the dresses on. It took about an hour. None looked right. Some made me look fat. Some made me look like I was going to a disco. Some made me look like I worked for a brothel. Some made me look like I worked for Nancy Reagan. I saved the full-price dresses for last. One looked awful, one looked great. It cost more than my wedding dress. It probably cost more than the one the dressmaker would have made me. But it was right in front of me, and I could see it, touch it and try it on. I felt happy in it. Plus, it made me look thin.
I hurried through my rationalizations: How many bar mitzvahs would we throw? Two, because we have two sons. That meant I could amortize the dress and wear the dress twice! But because I went to graduate school and wrote an (as yet unpublished) novel between babies, our boys are four years apart. And even deluded, fantasy-prone moi knows there is no way the dress I wear this year is going to appeal to me during the next Obama administration.
Okay, how about this one: We have boys, we won't have to pay for their weddings or sweet sixteen parties...after these bar mitzvahs we're done throwing big parties? Well, that was dumb. Who knew if they were going to get married? And who knew in these gender-bending, cross-dressing times, maybe they would want Sweet Sixteen's?
To hell with rationalizations. There were none.
I bought the dress and shipped it to New Jersey so I would save on the tax. Then, I took myself up to Bergdorf's seventh floor cafe, sat near the window and ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc and a cappuccino. I looked around at the pale green walls, with the lovely birds painted on them. I gazed at the Venetian mirrors, the bleached white wood floors, the bamboo shades, and the valances with the discreet brass "BG"s on them. I saw mothers dining with their sons and daughters, and women laughing with other women. The room was peaceful and serene, vaguely European and elegant, with the big picture windows overlooking Central Park. I looked outside. The trees were thick and green; I was looking at the tops of them. The room, the view, the wine. It was heavenly.
Though I don't advocate drinking alone, I did get a nice buzz going. I paid the bill and walked over to my friend's book party. The former editor-in-chief of Business Week was hosting it at CUNY, where he now runs the graduate program in journalism. I walked in and saw people I hadn't seen in at thirteen years. I reintroduced myself to people and used my maiden name; I actually felt young again. Nobody talked about their kids; instead, they talked about where they worked and what they were writing. Since my friend had written a book called, The King of Vodka, Smirnoff vodka was flowing and people were chatty. Everyone looked roughly the way they had back then, except my friend Linda Himelstein, the book's author and party's guest of honor, who actually looks younger. I spent an hour chatting with my old editor, who had given me first byline, and then talked to another editor, who was the first person to kill a story I had worked hard on (It was about Calvin Klein's then-new advertising campaign and I had suggested it was homo-erotic. This editor said that Business Week did not want to make that suggestion.)
I think I was the only there who had left journalism to get an MFA in fiction writing. I am almost positive I was the only one who teaches creative writing. I felt a little sheepish, but fortunately, no one questioned my decision. And, my old editor is a kindred spirit; though he has a big job at The New York Times, he has written short stories, and one of his good friends recently won the Pulitzer price in poetry; another edits the magazine Poets & Writers. I told him that I had the summer off from teaching, my kids were away for a few weeks, and so I finally had time to attempt what my agent has been gently urging me to do: Turn a short story into a novel. But, I was finding it difficult to write long, layered and big, with multiple characters speaking at once; it is easier to be fact bound---just cover the news and write short.
"Writing fiction is hard," my old editor said. "Journalism is much easier."
It's true. Even though business stories can require weeks of research, reporting and fact-checking, in the end, the narrative is straightforward, and you don't have to work that hard to keep your readers' attention. You quote some experts, write about failed strategies, interview consumers and try to predict whether the company's game plan is actually going to work. Writing fiction---with its narrative arc, clever dialogue, scene setting and unexpected plots twists, plus the the tricky balancing act of trying to make the familiar seem new and the unreal sound plausible, not to mention the challenge of trying to decide whether your narrator is reliable or not---is much tougher.
One of the guys I spoke to said that of all the places he's worked, Business Week was the most congenial. Most people behaved themselves and were friendly, and there were only a couple of botched relationships to speak of. One affair had actually produced a baby and was still intact. Almost everyone at the party was still gainfully employed, though not by Business Week.
I had a great time catching up with people, but after the party, I went home and cried. I haven't written a cover story for a news magazine in a very long time, and I haven't published a book. Maybe I will and maybe I won't. I have thrown myself into teaching, blogging, writing short stories, and doing the occasional freelance business story; I have been cooking, running with our dog, driving my younger son to baseball practice and planning my older son's bar mitzvah. One of my husband's professors at business school once told his class that they could do anything they wanted, but not everything, so they should choose wisely.
Here's to wise choices.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Happy July 4th
Such a week it has been. Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson passed away, weirdly, on the same day late in June. I miss Farrah more than I do Michael. The best thing I can say about him is that he morphed into a beautiful monster who sang to us. I love his music but his attitudes towards children--his own and other people's---was creepy, and reeked of someone who just hadn't been told "no" often enough. Farrah was an iconic figure from my childhood---I remember watching "Charlie's Angels" at 10 p.m. on Wednesday nights, when I was twelve, and she was twentysomething. Farrah was so blonde and gorgeous, she seemed happy and perhaps intelligent, and I followed her career. Though I felt sad every time I read that her son had again landed in rehab, I admired that she became intent on becoming more actress than bombshell. She almost succeeded. Farrah and Michael's deaths prompted discussion in our house of the price of fame---do the same qualities (single-mindedness, intense ambition, belief in one's talent), which make a person super-successful as a performer also lead to his or her undoing? Or the undoing of the ones they love? Hard to know.
The other big news in our house is that our kids are off at camp. My husband and I dropped them off on Tuesday, and drove home in the rain. We arrived home mid-day. The hydrangeas were blooming. As if to remind me that I might have left my children in the Pennsylvania mountains for a month, but I am still a mother, my dog started biting me on the breasts. I pushed her away and I realized: I can do anything I want. Anything. I can eat what I want, I can say what I want, I can sleep when I want, write when I want. I grabbed The New Yorker, went onto the patio, lay down on our ripped cushions and devoured a story about Nora Ephron and her new Meryl Streep movie, "Julie and Julia." I read the whole article in one sitting. While I read about Nora Eprhon's success as a writer/director/wife-and-mother, I felt a bit envious (she went to Wellesley, wrote for the Wellesley News, likes to cook and write, has two sons---so do I!) So I ate four skinny, Skinny Cow popsicles. I piled up the wrappers on the table next to me and did not think about making dinner. My dog lay down next to me and waited for my popsicle to fall. It didn't. My husband drank a diet Coke and left the can on the counter for all the world to see. He left his dishes in the sink and I didn't yell at him. Then I left my dishes in the sink and didn't yell at myself. We went upstairs and took a nap, Then, my husband ran on the Treadmill and I took took myself to see "Hangover." The theater was packed with couples. I sat in an aisle seat and laughed alone at all the inappropriate, sexually explicit jokes. It was glorious.
The next day, I went into the city to see my friend Barbara Friedman's gorgeous show of "Overlook Paintings" at the Michael Steinberg Fine Art Gallery on West 26th Street. Barbara is a professor of art at Pace University and a fantastic painter. We own one of her paintings; I wish we could afford a few more. The gallery has no air conditioning and it was very hot when I arrived mid-day, but a couple of people were milling around, staring intently at the paintings, in absolutely no hurry to go anywhere but there. The colors in Barbara's paintings are vivid, mesmerizing and gorgeous, and the scenes she paints depict tiny figures surrounded by large, lovely landscapes. I walked around the show several times and when I left, I felt that I had gone to another part of the universe and returned a calm, peaceful person. It was if I had meditated, without sitting down or chanting the same word over and over. Barbara's show closes today but you can check out her paintings at http://www.barbarafriedmanpaintings.com.) I came home and went to my good friend Susan's house for dinner. She had promised to cook for me. The last time anyone cooked for me and only me was August 1991, when my then-boyfriend, now-husband, was wooing me. Susan had promised to pick up a few things at Whole Foods, and when I arrived, she had prepared a large salad, filled with oranges and hearts of palm, and set about grilling marinated shrimp. While she grilled, I ate about a dozen olives, soaked in lemon juice and garlic. We sat on her patio, drank white wine and talked about everything and nothing. As I drove home, I committed the ultimate crime against humanity: I left the air conditioning on and opened the windows. There was nobody in the car to tell me not to! When I got home, I crawled into bed. At 8:30.
This is the beginning of a long, holiday weekend. Have a great one.
The other big news in our house is that our kids are off at camp. My husband and I dropped them off on Tuesday, and drove home in the rain. We arrived home mid-day. The hydrangeas were blooming. As if to remind me that I might have left my children in the Pennsylvania mountains for a month, but I am still a mother, my dog started biting me on the breasts. I pushed her away and I realized: I can do anything I want. Anything. I can eat what I want, I can say what I want, I can sleep when I want, write when I want. I grabbed The New Yorker, went onto the patio, lay down on our ripped cushions and devoured a story about Nora Ephron and her new Meryl Streep movie, "Julie and Julia." I read the whole article in one sitting. While I read about Nora Eprhon's success as a writer/director/wife-and-mother, I felt a bit envious (she went to Wellesley, wrote for the Wellesley News, likes to cook and write, has two sons---so do I!) So I ate four skinny, Skinny Cow popsicles. I piled up the wrappers on the table next to me and did not think about making dinner. My dog lay down next to me and waited for my popsicle to fall. It didn't. My husband drank a diet Coke and left the can on the counter for all the world to see. He left his dishes in the sink and I didn't yell at him. Then I left my dishes in the sink and didn't yell at myself. We went upstairs and took a nap, Then, my husband ran on the Treadmill and I took took myself to see "Hangover." The theater was packed with couples. I sat in an aisle seat and laughed alone at all the inappropriate, sexually explicit jokes. It was glorious.
The next day, I went into the city to see my friend Barbara Friedman's gorgeous show of "Overlook Paintings" at the Michael Steinberg Fine Art Gallery on West 26th Street. Barbara is a professor of art at Pace University and a fantastic painter. We own one of her paintings; I wish we could afford a few more. The gallery has no air conditioning and it was very hot when I arrived mid-day, but a couple of people were milling around, staring intently at the paintings, in absolutely no hurry to go anywhere but there. The colors in Barbara's paintings are vivid, mesmerizing and gorgeous, and the scenes she paints depict tiny figures surrounded by large, lovely landscapes. I walked around the show several times and when I left, I felt that I had gone to another part of the universe and returned a calm, peaceful person. It was if I had meditated, without sitting down or chanting the same word over and over. Barbara's show closes today but you can check out her paintings at http://www.barbarafriedmanpaintings.com.) I came home and went to my good friend Susan's house for dinner. She had promised to cook for me. The last time anyone cooked for me and only me was August 1991, when my then-boyfriend, now-husband, was wooing me. Susan had promised to pick up a few things at Whole Foods, and when I arrived, she had prepared a large salad, filled with oranges and hearts of palm, and set about grilling marinated shrimp. While she grilled, I ate about a dozen olives, soaked in lemon juice and garlic. We sat on her patio, drank white wine and talked about everything and nothing. As I drove home, I committed the ultimate crime against humanity: I left the air conditioning on and opened the windows. There was nobody in the car to tell me not to! When I got home, I crawled into bed. At 8:30.
This is the beginning of a long, holiday weekend. Have a great one.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Read these books. Please.
A few months ago, my friend Paul, who founded http://www.GreatDad.com, told me that the money I would make from blogging would "barely pay for a latte habit." Oh Paul, how right you were: I just checked my "Ad sense" account, and the money I've made from readers checking out the advertising on this blog comes to...$.80 for the three months ending March 31. Yes, you read that right, eighty cents. Clearly, I'm not getting rich off writing for the blogosphere, so I'm just going to shamelessly shill for my writer friends right now.
Two of my very good, old friends have really good, exciting, new books out. Linda Himelstein, the former San Francisco bureau chief for Business Week, just published The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire. I would like to tell you that if you like to drink vodka, you will love this book, but what is closer to the truth is that if you like a beautifully written, riveting book about a flawed but brilliant liquor-monger who pulled himself up by his boot-straps, then you should read this book. Linda and I worked together at Business Week back in our twenties, when we were both newlyweds and not yet mothers. Linda is brilliant, thoughtful, delightful and funny, and her book is all those things---plus, it's a fascinating look at life among serfs, czars, vodka lovers, liquor salesmen, capitalists, Communists, social climbers, and Russian revolutionaries. What could be better?
My old friend Andy Raskin, who I met back in college, is the author of a new book, The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life. Andy is a commentator for NPR, and has written for The New York Times and Playboy. He is funny, wry and self-deprecating and this book makes me laugh out loud. Somehow, Andy manages to tie the wisdom espoused by Momofuko Ando, the founder of Ramen noodles, to his own romantic and philosophical search for a soul-mate. Yes, noodle knowledge actually helped him reach his goal.
You can get these books on Amazon, and maybe even via Kindle. And you can read about both authors on line: http://lindahimelstein.com, and http://andyraskin.com. Both Andy and Linda hail from Northern California, and they are both touring the country, speaking about and promoting their books, but if you email them via their websites, they are attentive enough and accessible enough that they might actually write back.
Two of my very good, old friends have really good, exciting, new books out. Linda Himelstein, the former San Francisco bureau chief for Business Week, just published The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire. I would like to tell you that if you like to drink vodka, you will love this book, but what is closer to the truth is that if you like a beautifully written, riveting book about a flawed but brilliant liquor-monger who pulled himself up by his boot-straps, then you should read this book. Linda and I worked together at Business Week back in our twenties, when we were both newlyweds and not yet mothers. Linda is brilliant, thoughtful, delightful and funny, and her book is all those things---plus, it's a fascinating look at life among serfs, czars, vodka lovers, liquor salesmen, capitalists, Communists, social climbers, and Russian revolutionaries. What could be better?
My old friend Andy Raskin, who I met back in college, is the author of a new book, The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life. Andy is a commentator for NPR, and has written for The New York Times and Playboy. He is funny, wry and self-deprecating and this book makes me laugh out loud. Somehow, Andy manages to tie the wisdom espoused by Momofuko Ando, the founder of Ramen noodles, to his own romantic and philosophical search for a soul-mate. Yes, noodle knowledge actually helped him reach his goal.
You can get these books on Amazon, and maybe even via Kindle. And you can read about both authors on line: http://lindahimelstein.com, and http://andyraskin.com. Both Andy and Linda hail from Northern California, and they are both touring the country, speaking about and promoting their books, but if you email them via their websites, they are attentive enough and accessible enough that they might actually write back.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Hi, tech
When I was a junior in high school, I took AP art history and loved it. I decided that the best way to get into college was to go to summer school and do even more college work ahead of time. I went to Harvard summer school (there was no real application process--I just filled out a form and my father mailed in a check.) I lived in Holworthy, in Harvard Yard, and signed up for economics. I took macro and microeconomics in seven weeks. I sat in Cabot science center all day long, looking at graphs, solving problem sets, and memorizing vocabulary words that had to do with supply and demand. Occasionally, I took a break and wandered into Store 24 for a granola bar or Mug 'n' Muffin for a buttered bran muffin. If I wanted to take a real break, I smoked a clove cigarette and bellied up to the salad bar at Souper Salad. I worked my butt off, learned to translate the phrase, "caveat emptor" and read Milton Friedman. The laws of supply and demand sailed in and out of my head. I think I got a C+ for the summer. Maybe I got a B-. But the experience earned me two semesters of college credit in economics, and taught me three things: 1) I am not good at economics; 2) 19th century novels about the rich and the poor are easier to read than 20th century textbooks about capitalism; 3) I need to surround myself with people who know more than I do.
My husband knows a lot about economics and finance, and his brothers and his Dad are adept at science and technology. This is a very long way of saying that thanks to my genius of a father-in-law, you can now subscribe directly to my blog.
My husband knows a lot about economics and finance, and his brothers and his Dad are adept at science and technology. This is a very long way of saying that thanks to my genius of a father-in-law, you can now subscribe directly to my blog.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
It's all dental
I know I promised that my next post would be about TI, the Atlanta rapper. But yesterday I found out that I have to lose a tooth. I wrote for a weekly news magazine for too many years to count, and during those years, I had it drummed it into my head that when news hits, you put aside the story you have been fiddling with, and immediately start typing up the news.
I should confess that I wrote most of the following six months ago---when I was in recovery from SCA (sucking candy addiction). The editor of a local New Jersey magazine asked me to write a piece for the issue that was supposed to come out right after New Year's. The theme was "self improvement." I wrote the piece and turned it in. Then the magazine went out of business. Here's the story now, with my teeny, weensy news peg nailed to the bottom.
My dentist and I go way back. We met when I was 16 and he was twentysomething. Dr. Z. played tennis at the same club as my parents; they loved him because when my father had a roaring tooth ache at 2 a.m., Dr. Z rushed to treat it.
I graduated from high school without a single cavity. I never needed braces. My teeth are straight and white. They were so perfect Dr. Z took a model of my teeth. My mother refused to keep soda, cookies or candy in the house. She wouldn't let us chew gum. Those privations may have had something to do with why I never got a cavity.
But maybe I just had a good dentist.
In college, I drank diet Coke all day long. I started smoking when I was twelve; sophomore year in college, I stopped smoking and started eating peppermint Lifesavers. I got my first cavity.
I’ll say this for Marlboro Lights: They don’t promote tooth decay.
I wrote for the college newspaper, majored in English. My closest friend introduced me to that nifty little writer’s helper: Coffee Nips. The CVS down the road from our dorm stocked them. I started out slow---a pocketful here and there. My tolerance grew and I started carrying them wherever I went. I snuck them into the library, made sure I had a box full whenever I was on deadline or had a paper due, which was basically every day.
I come from candy-suckers. My grandmother was never without a stash of sugar free coffee candies that she kept in a little plastic baggie in her purse. But Coffee Nips were better. Coffee Nips are bigger. They’re filled with real sugar, not that sugar-free crap. Originally, they just came in coffee. Then, those geniuses at Pearson’s came up with butter rum, caramel, chocolate parfait, peanut butter. I chewed them all.
I got more cavities. I went home and saw Dr Z. He said people my age shouldn’t be getting cavities. He questionned my eating habits. I confessed my addiction to diet Coke and Coffee Nips.
“Stop drinking soda,” Dr. Z said. “Stop eating candy.”
I ignored him. At least I wasn't smoking.
I move to New York, write for a magazine. When I’m on deadline, I eat chocolate-covered espresso beans. I bounce off the walls but my teeth are fine. I meet a great guy. We marry, have a baby. I diet to lose the baby weight. I resume my affection for sucking candies. I’m not talking one or two, here or there. I’m talking nothing but jawbreakers all day long. Five months after having our baby, I am a size zero at Banana Republic. Two months later, I need emergency root canal. I get an implant from an endodontist in New York. He is tall and dashing. I keep eating jawbreakers.
I go to graduate school and become addicted to watermelon suckers, Werther’s butterscotches, Blow Pops, and Tootsie Pops. I eat those cheap peppermint suckers, the red-and-white ones no one wants.
We move back to New Jersey. I get more cavities. Dr. Z tells me to stop eating sucking candies. I ignore him. I get pregnant again. We have our second baby. I need to lose weight so I go back to sucking candies. I lose the weight. I get more cavities. I start to chew bubble gum.
The pizza place in town has a gumball machine. Sometimes, I get my kids a pizza just so I can get myself some gumballs. The machine is a little broken so sometimes if you put one quarter in, you get two gumballs out. Or the gumball gets stuck coming down the chute and you have to bang or kick the machine to get it out. And the little silver gutter thing at the bottom of the chute fell off so sometimes the gumballs fly to the floor if you don’t cup your hands around the chute fast enough.
Yes, I have eaten gumballs off the floor.
I know I have a problem so I go to a spa in the Berkshires and see an acupuncturist. I tell him about my addiction to sugar. He suggests---and I am not making this up---that I snort heroin. Then he suggests I come to his African drum class that night. I do neither.
For two weeks, I skip sucking candies and gum. Then I discover Fireballs. I love spicy food. Fireballs are so spicy they practically rip my tongue off. Eventually, my tongue develops sores and goes numb. I buy ten Fireballs at a time from the Station Shop near our house. The owner announces she is going out of business. I buy up all her Fireballs. The pharmacy down the block sells candy. They are my go-to place for butterscotch suckers, Blow Pops, Tootsie Pops and jellybeans. But they don’t sell Fireballs.
I know that James, the man behind the pharmacy counter, is writing a novel. Sometimes we chat about it.
“Can you start stocking Fireballs?” I ask. “I eat them while I write.”
I figure we’ll bond over our bad writing habits.
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What if I buy them in bulk?”
He looks something up in the computer. “You’ll have to take the whole container. I’ll call you when they come in.”
My right lower molar starts to hurt. My tongue discovers a hole in the bottom of it. I’m busy teaching and writing so I do the stupidest thing possible. I ignore the pain and hole in my tooth. Food gets caught there. I stop flossing. My tooth hurts like hell. James calls. The Fireballs have arrived. I ignore his message. Then, I actually have to go to the pharmacy to get my older son allergy medicine. James shows me the Fireballs. A large, hexagonal-shaped, plastic canister, filled with 200 little balls of fire. I take a deep breath.
“Can you keep them for me and just dole them out a few at a time?” I ask.
Sort of like a methadone clinic.
“I guess so,” James says. I keep thinking he must have some weird, self-destructive addiction that keeps him writing too. But his teeth give nothing away.
I go see Dr. Z about my tooth. He shakes his head. “The sad thing is you didn’t have a single cavity when you went to college,” he says. He gives me root canal. I contemplate giving the Fireballs out on Halloween. But they are a choke food. I keep them.
I return to Dr. Z for a crown. “How many fake teeth do I have?”
He counts. “Eight.”
I go to the pizza parlor. I look for the gumball machine. It is gone.
“Where’s the gumball machine?” I ask the guy behind the counter.
“It broke,” he said. “People kept hitting it.”
I flinch. “Are you getting a new one?”
“We’re looking around for one,” he says. “But I don’t know.”
“My kids will be so disappointed.”
He shrugs.
My friends take me out for sushi for my birthday. At the end of the meal, the waitress brings over boxes of fruit-flavored gumballs. Everyone grabs a box but me.
“Come on,” my neighbor says. “You know you want one.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to ruin my teeth.”
“But none of your teeth are real,” she says.
I take a box for my kids.
Six months later, my tongue finds a bump on my lower left gum. I go see Dr. Z. He looks at it, and takes an x-ray. He shakes his head.
“I’m not sure what that is,” he says. "But it's not good."
“What do you mean?”
“You had root canal on that tooth,” he says. “There may be a crack in it. I can’t tell.”
"Should I go see that guy in New York?" I ask.
He nods.
I go see Dr. K, my old endodontist in the city. Before I see him, I meet an old friend for lunch on Madison Avenue. On my way there, I spot Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. She walks by me looking tired but pretty. She is wearing a dress. As she hurries by me, I try to make eye contact with her. She avoids my gaze.
After lunch, I go see the endodontist. He is just as tall and dashing as he was in the Nineties. We talk about the first time he worked on my teeth. It has been fifteen years. We realize this is an anniversary of sorts, though not the kind you celebrate.
He pokes around my gum. He touches my bump. He shoves one of his pointy metal tools into my gums. Then he takes a couple of x-rays.
He smiles. “I can’t tell exactly what’s going on, but I think the tooth has to come out,” he says cheerfully. He points to the x-ray. “You have a post there. There's some bone erosion. And there's a fistula, and a pocket. ” He shows me how far down the “pocket” he has shoved his metal tool. “We could do a lot of digging around the nerve but I think the result will be the same, the tooth has to come out. It’s not a big deal.”
Not for him.
Our whole appointment takes ten minutes. I am scheduled to teach later in the day and am supposed to see a student before class. I had scheduled an hour for the endodentist. Now I have time to kill. Suddenly, I feel depressed. I am losing a tooth. I am losing my youth. I have given up sucking candies, but what does it matter? The damage has been done. I bet Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg has never been to an endodentist.
I am walking to the subway in the rain, but I am suddenly overwhelmed by grief. I hail the first cab I see. It drops me off in front of Crumbs Bake Shop, a tiny bakery across from the JCC on 76th and Amsterdam Ave. One of my students took me there last fall. The first time I went, I tried to be a paragon of virtue, and just ordered a latte so that I could discuss this student's work without being distracted by frosting. Eventually, I started going there every week before class and got into the habit of ordering cupcakes, rationalizing that I need the sugar to teach for two hours. I buy the big cupcakes, which measure 4.25" inches across, and I order a latte and a spoon to go with it. Then I sit for ten minutes, slide the frosting off the cupcake, and get high off of caffeine and sugar. There are usually at least three nursery school kids there with me. Their mothers invariably buy them the small 3" cupcakes; I smile and feel sorry for them. (I once took my older son to Crumbs and he was as smitten as I was. We sat at a little round table, wolfing down our little round cakes, when he spotted some big birthday cakes in the case. He asked in his sweetest voice if instead of baking a cake for his next birthday, I could drive into the city and spend $60 on a 8" Crumbs birthday cake instead? Half of me thought, "Hell no, what a waste of money, time and gas." The other half started salivating over the thought of all those acres of buttercream, prepared by someone else."Remind me in July," I said.)
Alone at Crumbs, without a child or a student to see me, I order the most delicious combination in the whole world: A caramel apple cream cheese cupcake and a chai skim latte. (Yes, I had to have skim milk with my cream cheese.) The caramel apple cupcake has about three cubic inches of buttery cream cheese on it. The minute I take a spoonful of frosting, I feel better. Yes, my teeth are rotting. Yes, my addiction to spoonfuls of sugar is exactly what brought on these problems in the first place. No, I will never glide down Madison Avenue the way that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg does, nor contemplate running for Senator of New York. Yes, my problems are all mental.
I mean dental.
I should confess that I wrote most of the following six months ago---when I was in recovery from SCA (sucking candy addiction). The editor of a local New Jersey magazine asked me to write a piece for the issue that was supposed to come out right after New Year's. The theme was "self improvement." I wrote the piece and turned it in. Then the magazine went out of business. Here's the story now, with my teeny, weensy news peg nailed to the bottom.
My dentist and I go way back. We met when I was 16 and he was twentysomething. Dr. Z. played tennis at the same club as my parents; they loved him because when my father had a roaring tooth ache at 2 a.m., Dr. Z rushed to treat it.
I graduated from high school without a single cavity. I never needed braces. My teeth are straight and white. They were so perfect Dr. Z took a model of my teeth. My mother refused to keep soda, cookies or candy in the house. She wouldn't let us chew gum. Those privations may have had something to do with why I never got a cavity.
But maybe I just had a good dentist.
In college, I drank diet Coke all day long. I started smoking when I was twelve; sophomore year in college, I stopped smoking and started eating peppermint Lifesavers. I got my first cavity.
I’ll say this for Marlboro Lights: They don’t promote tooth decay.
I wrote for the college newspaper, majored in English. My closest friend introduced me to that nifty little writer’s helper: Coffee Nips. The CVS down the road from our dorm stocked them. I started out slow---a pocketful here and there. My tolerance grew and I started carrying them wherever I went. I snuck them into the library, made sure I had a box full whenever I was on deadline or had a paper due, which was basically every day.
I come from candy-suckers. My grandmother was never without a stash of sugar free coffee candies that she kept in a little plastic baggie in her purse. But Coffee Nips were better. Coffee Nips are bigger. They’re filled with real sugar, not that sugar-free crap. Originally, they just came in coffee. Then, those geniuses at Pearson’s came up with butter rum, caramel, chocolate parfait, peanut butter. I chewed them all.
I got more cavities. I went home and saw Dr Z. He said people my age shouldn’t be getting cavities. He questionned my eating habits. I confessed my addiction to diet Coke and Coffee Nips.
“Stop drinking soda,” Dr. Z said. “Stop eating candy.”
I ignored him. At least I wasn't smoking.
I move to New York, write for a magazine. When I’m on deadline, I eat chocolate-covered espresso beans. I bounce off the walls but my teeth are fine. I meet a great guy. We marry, have a baby. I diet to lose the baby weight. I resume my affection for sucking candies. I’m not talking one or two, here or there. I’m talking nothing but jawbreakers all day long. Five months after having our baby, I am a size zero at Banana Republic. Two months later, I need emergency root canal. I get an implant from an endodontist in New York. He is tall and dashing. I keep eating jawbreakers.
I go to graduate school and become addicted to watermelon suckers, Werther’s butterscotches, Blow Pops, and Tootsie Pops. I eat those cheap peppermint suckers, the red-and-white ones no one wants.
We move back to New Jersey. I get more cavities. Dr. Z tells me to stop eating sucking candies. I ignore him. I get pregnant again. We have our second baby. I need to lose weight so I go back to sucking candies. I lose the weight. I get more cavities. I start to chew bubble gum.
The pizza place in town has a gumball machine. Sometimes, I get my kids a pizza just so I can get myself some gumballs. The machine is a little broken so sometimes if you put one quarter in, you get two gumballs out. Or the gumball gets stuck coming down the chute and you have to bang or kick the machine to get it out. And the little silver gutter thing at the bottom of the chute fell off so sometimes the gumballs fly to the floor if you don’t cup your hands around the chute fast enough.
Yes, I have eaten gumballs off the floor.
I know I have a problem so I go to a spa in the Berkshires and see an acupuncturist. I tell him about my addiction to sugar. He suggests---and I am not making this up---that I snort heroin. Then he suggests I come to his African drum class that night. I do neither.
For two weeks, I skip sucking candies and gum. Then I discover Fireballs. I love spicy food. Fireballs are so spicy they practically rip my tongue off. Eventually, my tongue develops sores and goes numb. I buy ten Fireballs at a time from the Station Shop near our house. The owner announces she is going out of business. I buy up all her Fireballs. The pharmacy down the block sells candy. They are my go-to place for butterscotch suckers, Blow Pops, Tootsie Pops and jellybeans. But they don’t sell Fireballs.
I know that James, the man behind the pharmacy counter, is writing a novel. Sometimes we chat about it.
“Can you start stocking Fireballs?” I ask. “I eat them while I write.”
I figure we’ll bond over our bad writing habits.
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What if I buy them in bulk?”
He looks something up in the computer. “You’ll have to take the whole container. I’ll call you when they come in.”
My right lower molar starts to hurt. My tongue discovers a hole in the bottom of it. I’m busy teaching and writing so I do the stupidest thing possible. I ignore the pain and hole in my tooth. Food gets caught there. I stop flossing. My tooth hurts like hell. James calls. The Fireballs have arrived. I ignore his message. Then, I actually have to go to the pharmacy to get my older son allergy medicine. James shows me the Fireballs. A large, hexagonal-shaped, plastic canister, filled with 200 little balls of fire. I take a deep breath.
“Can you keep them for me and just dole them out a few at a time?” I ask.
Sort of like a methadone clinic.
“I guess so,” James says. I keep thinking he must have some weird, self-destructive addiction that keeps him writing too. But his teeth give nothing away.
I go see Dr. Z about my tooth. He shakes his head. “The sad thing is you didn’t have a single cavity when you went to college,” he says. He gives me root canal. I contemplate giving the Fireballs out on Halloween. But they are a choke food. I keep them.
I return to Dr. Z for a crown. “How many fake teeth do I have?”
He counts. “Eight.”
I go to the pizza parlor. I look for the gumball machine. It is gone.
“Where’s the gumball machine?” I ask the guy behind the counter.
“It broke,” he said. “People kept hitting it.”
I flinch. “Are you getting a new one?”
“We’re looking around for one,” he says. “But I don’t know.”
“My kids will be so disappointed.”
He shrugs.
My friends take me out for sushi for my birthday. At the end of the meal, the waitress brings over boxes of fruit-flavored gumballs. Everyone grabs a box but me.
“Come on,” my neighbor says. “You know you want one.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to ruin my teeth.”
“But none of your teeth are real,” she says.
I take a box for my kids.
Six months later, my tongue finds a bump on my lower left gum. I go see Dr. Z. He looks at it, and takes an x-ray. He shakes his head.
“I’m not sure what that is,” he says. "But it's not good."
“What do you mean?”
“You had root canal on that tooth,” he says. “There may be a crack in it. I can’t tell.”
"Should I go see that guy in New York?" I ask.
He nods.
I go see Dr. K, my old endodontist in the city. Before I see him, I meet an old friend for lunch on Madison Avenue. On my way there, I spot Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. She walks by me looking tired but pretty. She is wearing a dress. As she hurries by me, I try to make eye contact with her. She avoids my gaze.
After lunch, I go see the endodontist. He is just as tall and dashing as he was in the Nineties. We talk about the first time he worked on my teeth. It has been fifteen years. We realize this is an anniversary of sorts, though not the kind you celebrate.
He pokes around my gum. He touches my bump. He shoves one of his pointy metal tools into my gums. Then he takes a couple of x-rays.
He smiles. “I can’t tell exactly what’s going on, but I think the tooth has to come out,” he says cheerfully. He points to the x-ray. “You have a post there. There's some bone erosion. And there's a fistula, and a pocket. ” He shows me how far down the “pocket” he has shoved his metal tool. “We could do a lot of digging around the nerve but I think the result will be the same, the tooth has to come out. It’s not a big deal.”
Not for him.
Our whole appointment takes ten minutes. I am scheduled to teach later in the day and am supposed to see a student before class. I had scheduled an hour for the endodentist. Now I have time to kill. Suddenly, I feel depressed. I am losing a tooth. I am losing my youth. I have given up sucking candies, but what does it matter? The damage has been done. I bet Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg has never been to an endodentist.
I am walking to the subway in the rain, but I am suddenly overwhelmed by grief. I hail the first cab I see. It drops me off in front of Crumbs Bake Shop, a tiny bakery across from the JCC on 76th and Amsterdam Ave. One of my students took me there last fall. The first time I went, I tried to be a paragon of virtue, and just ordered a latte so that I could discuss this student's work without being distracted by frosting. Eventually, I started going there every week before class and got into the habit of ordering cupcakes, rationalizing that I need the sugar to teach for two hours. I buy the big cupcakes, which measure 4.25" inches across, and I order a latte and a spoon to go with it. Then I sit for ten minutes, slide the frosting off the cupcake, and get high off of caffeine and sugar. There are usually at least three nursery school kids there with me. Their mothers invariably buy them the small 3" cupcakes; I smile and feel sorry for them. (I once took my older son to Crumbs and he was as smitten as I was. We sat at a little round table, wolfing down our little round cakes, when he spotted some big birthday cakes in the case. He asked in his sweetest voice if instead of baking a cake for his next birthday, I could drive into the city and spend $60 on a 8" Crumbs birthday cake instead? Half of me thought, "Hell no, what a waste of money, time and gas." The other half started salivating over the thought of all those acres of buttercream, prepared by someone else."Remind me in July," I said.)
Alone at Crumbs, without a child or a student to see me, I order the most delicious combination in the whole world: A caramel apple cream cheese cupcake and a chai skim latte. (Yes, I had to have skim milk with my cream cheese.) The caramel apple cupcake has about three cubic inches of buttery cream cheese on it. The minute I take a spoonful of frosting, I feel better. Yes, my teeth are rotting. Yes, my addiction to spoonfuls of sugar is exactly what brought on these problems in the first place. No, I will never glide down Madison Avenue the way that Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg does, nor contemplate running for Senator of New York. Yes, my problems are all mental.
I mean dental.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Sweet Stuff
At the risk of sounding as if my brain has been soaking in Aunt Jemima syrup, I am posting once more about Candy. She read my last entry, had a few amendments and sent along three more recipes. To be honest, Candy is a pseudonym but I promise, her real name is as sweet as she is.
For those who worry I've lost my suburban edge, the next post will be about a different topic entirely: Why I love TI.
From Candy: "Just the other day, after being together for nine months, Olly just told me that they never told him that I was coming sailing that day. As I was walking on the dock, looking for the boat I saw an elderly man....We looked at each other and I stuck out my hand and said, brightly, you must be Olly. He looked puzzled, but rose to the occasion and escorted me to the boat. The rest is history. We really have fun together. We laugh a lot. We hug a lot. We go the the opera, the Philharmonic, the ballet, to dinner with our friends, walk a lot, sail a lot, talk a lot, had fires in the fire place all winter. One problem - we both have traveled so much we can't find new places to go and don't want to revisit places. I did take him on a five day kayaking trip in Florida. He had never kayaked and I was a novice (I had done it a few times). The trip was rated for experienced kayakers but I thought his comfort level on the water would qualify. And the date of the trip was convenient for us. Welllllllll, we were the last kayak to get to each destination on the river and swamp, but we had a great time and will do it again. Good to hear from you."
Five Minute Chocolate Cake:
One large coffee mug. Into mug add 4 tbsp. flour, 4 tbsp.sugar, 2 tbsp. cocoa. Mix well . Add one egg. 3 tbsp. milk, 3 tbsp. oil, 3 tbsp. chocolate chips, a little vanilla. Put in microwave 3 minutes at 1,000 watts. It will rise over the top. Look before tipping out onto a plate.
Passover Matzoh Butter Crunch.
Line two large pans with alum. foil and parchment paper (very important). Place four or five boards of plain matzoh flat one layer in pans. Melt 1/4 lb. sweet buttter and one cup brown sugar in a pan and stir til it bubbles. Pour over matzoh boards. Put in oven for five minutes, watching that it doesn't burn. Remove and sprinkle with 3/4 cup choc. chips. You can add chopped nuts at this time. Return to oven for five minutes, watching again that it doesn't burn. Remove from oven and spread choc. chips kind of evenly over matzoh. Cool, and cut into serving pieces (kind of messy). refrigerate for a while. Yum Yum.
Another one: Pretzel Kisses.
Get the small square pretzels (like waffles). Lay them flat on a cookie sheet. Place a Hershey's kiss on each one. Put in a 225 oven for a couple of minutes til the kisses are soft but still in their shape. Press one M&M onto each kiss to slightly flatten it. Cool and eat!
These are all fun for the kids to make.
Love, Candy
For those who worry I've lost my suburban edge, the next post will be about a different topic entirely: Why I love TI.
From Candy: "Just the other day, after being together for nine months, Olly just told me that they never told him that I was coming sailing that day. As I was walking on the dock, looking for the boat I saw an elderly man....We looked at each other and I stuck out my hand and said, brightly, you must be Olly. He looked puzzled, but rose to the occasion and escorted me to the boat. The rest is history. We really have fun together. We laugh a lot. We hug a lot. We go the the opera, the Philharmonic, the ballet, to dinner with our friends, walk a lot, sail a lot, talk a lot, had fires in the fire place all winter. One problem - we both have traveled so much we can't find new places to go and don't want to revisit places. I did take him on a five day kayaking trip in Florida. He had never kayaked and I was a novice (I had done it a few times). The trip was rated for experienced kayakers but I thought his comfort level on the water would qualify. And the date of the trip was convenient for us. Welllllllll, we were the last kayak to get to each destination on the river and swamp, but we had a great time and will do it again. Good to hear from you."
Five Minute Chocolate Cake:
One large coffee mug. Into mug add 4 tbsp. flour, 4 tbsp.sugar, 2 tbsp. cocoa. Mix well . Add one egg. 3 tbsp. milk, 3 tbsp. oil, 3 tbsp. chocolate chips, a little vanilla. Put in microwave 3 minutes at 1,000 watts. It will rise over the top. Look before tipping out onto a plate.
Passover Matzoh Butter Crunch.
Line two large pans with alum. foil and parchment paper (very important). Place four or five boards of plain matzoh flat one layer in pans. Melt 1/4 lb. sweet buttter and one cup brown sugar in a pan and stir til it bubbles. Pour over matzoh boards. Put in oven for five minutes, watching that it doesn't burn. Remove and sprinkle with 3/4 cup choc. chips. You can add chopped nuts at this time. Return to oven for five minutes, watching again that it doesn't burn. Remove from oven and spread choc. chips kind of evenly over matzoh. Cool, and cut into serving pieces (kind of messy). refrigerate for a while. Yum Yum.
Another one: Pretzel Kisses.
Get the small square pretzels (like waffles). Lay them flat on a cookie sheet. Place a Hershey's kiss on each one. Put in a 225 oven for a couple of minutes til the kisses are soft but still in their shape. Press one M&M onto each kiss to slightly flatten it. Cool and eat!
These are all fun for the kids to make.
Love, Candy
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Love and Seventysomething
All roads lead to Brooklyn, which is another way of saying that the best thing I have ever done, other than marry my husband, give birth to our sons, and go to graduate school in fiction writing after nine years of writing non-fiction, was to introduce my husband's best friend's mother to her new boyfriend.
Can you follow all that?
My husband, 44, and I were set up on a blind date. When we first met in 1991, we had a couple of mutual acquaintances and worked across the street from each other, but we didn't know anything about each other's friends or families. One of the first things 44 did was to take me out to his best friend's summer share in East Hampton. His best friend, also named 44, was out there with his girlfriend, Abby. The bottom line was that if those two liked me, I was good to go.
Fortunately, Best Friend 44 had graduated from Midwood high school in Brooklyn, the same high school my mother had gone to. He grew up a few blocks from the house on East 10th Street and Avenue J, where my grandparents had lived for 60 years. And he reminded me of my father, another Brooklyn boy. Both men were brusque, direct, funny, and occasionally risqué, with a fondness for smoking cigars and grilling steaks. BF 44 seemed like a brother to me; I felt as if I'd known him my whole life.
My husband and BF 44 were roommates in college and share the same name. They are both first-born males with younger brothers, but other than that, they are yin and yang. 44 is reserved and diplomatic; BF 44 is bold and outgoing. We were all married within a few months of each other, so I guess you could say that opposites atract and that in choosing me, my husband married his best friend in drag.
After BF 44 graduated college, his parents sold their Brooklyn house and bought a house with a pool in Greenwich. When I first met them, Abby and BF 44 were living together in a white brick building on the Upper West side; a year after we met, 44 and I moved into an apartment in the same building. Almost every summer weekend, we would pile into a rental car and head up to Greenwich, where we would spend Saturday afternoons sitting by BF 44's parents' pool. We would eat dinner, sleep over and then head back into the city. It was delightful, and not just because the pool was big and the parking was free.
Those weekends were lazy and glorious because of BF 44's mother Candy. Candy would stand in her white kitchen and greet us with platters of fruit and vegetables. "Come in, come in," she would say as we pulled up, as if she had been waiting all week for us to arrive. Candy is petite and pretty. She is one of those incredibly loving and intelligent women who has taken care of people her whole life, and doesn't seem to have resented a minute of it. She grew up in Minnesota, and had her mother come live with her so she could help raise her four sons. For years, my husband, BF 44, Abby and I would sit on our butts by the pool, first by ourselves and eventually with our babies, while Candy and her mother prepared plates of food and brought them out to us. Those two gray-haired Minnesota ladies seemed thrilled to have a patio full of "kids" again (Really, they did!). Sometimes, Candy would make us meatloaf for dinner; occasionally she would bake a cake. It all tasted wonderful. Candy and her mother seemed very happy to hang with Abby and me---I think they were psyched to finally have some girls around.
Candy's husband Don was a gruff obstretrician with a dry sense of humor. By the time I met him, he had retired and seemed perfectly content watering his flowers with a garden hose, pulling leaves out of the pool and occasionally wandering into the kitchen to see his wife. He always seemed mildly happy to see us but didn't dote on us the way Candy did, and occasionally he seemed to regard my husband and me as the freeloaders we were.
Abby and I had our babies nine months apart (She had her first child at the end of October; I got pregnant in early November. Coincidence? I think not.) We echoed each other as our lives moved in tandem. They named their daughter after me; we took BF 44's middle name and made it our oldest son's first.
One afternoon, Abby and I were sitting by the pool, nursing our babies, when Don walked over to us.
"You two girls still look a little post-partum," he said.
I had eaten too much of Don's food over the years to tell him to go f--k off, and the truth was, he was right. At that point, both our babies were under one and we did look exhausted, with a few extra pounds. I restrained myself from telling Don to go back to tending his garden.
The years passed. We bought a house in New Jersey; Best Friend 44 and Abby moved to Westchester. They had a second child, and we did too; we started seeing them just twice a year and stopped going to Greenwich altogether. I didn't even realize it when Candy's mother passed away. We did know that Don was ill, and when he died in 2005, my husband and I went to the funeral. Don's grandchildren delivered the eulogies, and then his children gave theirs. It was a beautiful service, and the first time I had seen children participate. My Dad was dying at the time so I took some mental notes. After the service, I wondered what Candy was going to do with her time, now that everyone was out of her house, but I have to admit that other than exchanging annual holiday cards with her for a couple more years, I didn't communicate with her much except for the occasional email.
Fast forward three years. My husband and I take our kids on a sailing vacation to Virgin Gorda. On our plane are a Mom and Dad roughly our age; they are travelling with their two pre-teen kids and a grandfather. We are all headed to the same resort, so we end up spending a lot of time together, sitting on the docks, reading on the beach and circling the buffet in the restaurant. The grandfather, Olly, is a radiologist (like my Dad). His wife had just died of lymphoma (like my Dad). Olly is looking for company and conversation and we chat almost every day. He wants to know what books I am reading; he watches my kids sail. He is a pleasure to be with, but it is clear that he is at loose ends and still grieving for his wife.
His daughter-in-law confides that Olly doesn't know how to cook, write a check or buy a sweater. He teaches at Columbia, and is a published academic who is brilliant and well-regarded, but his late wife had taken care of everything domestic and he is lost without her. It was clear he needed female company but it had been a while since I had seen Candy, so it didn't occur to me to mention her. Besides, Olly hardly seemed ready to date.
But then last summer, Abby, BF 44 and their two kids drove out to our swim club. We swam, ate, drank, gossiped and watched the kids. Abby mentioned that Candy was busy going to museums and hiking with her girlfriends. She was dating but some of the guys were jerks and she hadn't found "the one." I immediately emailed Olly's daughter-in-law. I think I have someone for Olly, I typed. After several rounds of emails, we made a date to get Olly and Candy together, with us "kids" as chaperones.
A few weeks later, my husband and and I took our boys and went sailing on the Long Island Sound with Candy, Olly and Olly's family. Candy brought two bottles of wine; true to form, I think we came empty-handed. In any case, it was a beautiful August day. The sun was strong, the sky was clear, and there was enough wind that the men and children easily sailed the boat while we three women stared out at the water and chatted. Olly and Candy seemed interested in each other, but not fascinated, and I couldn't tell if they liked each other or not.
At the end of the afternoon, I pulled Candy aside and asked her what she thought. She allowed that she would go for a walk with Olly if he called, take him for a walk around the sculpture garden at Pepsico. Then she shrugged and said, "Maybe."
After we docked, Candy drove herself home and I sat down with Olly on a bench while Olly's son and my husband put the boat away. I asked him if he wanted to see Candy again.
"I'll get her number from my daughter-in-law," he said.
I wasn't going to wait for that to happen.
"I have Candy's email address and phone number right here if you want it," I said.
"Okay, I'll take it," Olly said.
I pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper.
Nine months later, Olly and Candy are an "item." She watches what he eats and makes him go on walks; he takes her sailing almost every day. Together, they go to lectures up at Columbia and then out for dinner. They are 78 and they are so busy that Candy's kids complain she doesn't have time for them anymore.
Yesterday, we went up to Abby and BF 44's house in Westchester. They just built a pool, so we did what we have always done: We sat around the water for hours, huddling in our sweatshirts, drinking wine, grilling steaks, eating shrimp, munching on fruit and vegetables, and watching the kids swim. We talked about our kids' bar mitzvahs, their friendships, their flirtations and their camps; we griped about hockey, baseball and swim teams. We discussed the tradeoffs of work versus parenting, and then we circled back to our parents and our grandparents. I was waiting all day for Olly and Candy to visit. They were supposed to come by for ten minutes and I so wanted to see them together so that I could do a little victory lap and see in person the good deed I had done! But at the end of the day, they decided the timing wasn't good and they were just too busy to stop by.
We should all be so lucky.
Below are two of Candy's recipes. She gave them to me in 1991.
Candy's Meatloaf
Preheat oven at 350 degrees.
2 pounds chopped sirloin (85% lean)
1 Portuguese role
1 onion
1 bottle Heinz chilli sauce
Salt and pepper
Soak roll in water until it's mushy.
Mix the roll with the meat.
Add salt, pepper and a little garlic (fresh or powder).
Press meatloaf into a 8X8 square pan.
Pour half bottle of chili sauce on loaf.
Slice onion and lay slices on top of sauce.
Bake for 35 minutes.
Candy's Cake
Preheat oven at 350 degrees.
1/4 pound butter, softened
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 can Hershey's syrup
1 cup self-rising flour
1 teaspoon vanilila
Jar of peach preserves
Grease and flour a 3 quart yrex dish.
Cream butter, gradually add sugar.
Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition.
Add Hershey's chocolate syrup.
Add self-rising flour.
Add vanilla.
Mix.
Pour into Pyrex dish and bake for 40 minutes.
Serve with peach preserves.
Can you follow all that?
My husband, 44, and I were set up on a blind date. When we first met in 1991, we had a couple of mutual acquaintances and worked across the street from each other, but we didn't know anything about each other's friends or families. One of the first things 44 did was to take me out to his best friend's summer share in East Hampton. His best friend, also named 44, was out there with his girlfriend, Abby. The bottom line was that if those two liked me, I was good to go.
Fortunately, Best Friend 44 had graduated from Midwood high school in Brooklyn, the same high school my mother had gone to. He grew up a few blocks from the house on East 10th Street and Avenue J, where my grandparents had lived for 60 years. And he reminded me of my father, another Brooklyn boy. Both men were brusque, direct, funny, and occasionally risqué, with a fondness for smoking cigars and grilling steaks. BF 44 seemed like a brother to me; I felt as if I'd known him my whole life.
My husband and BF 44 were roommates in college and share the same name. They are both first-born males with younger brothers, but other than that, they are yin and yang. 44 is reserved and diplomatic; BF 44 is bold and outgoing. We were all married within a few months of each other, so I guess you could say that opposites atract and that in choosing me, my husband married his best friend in drag.
After BF 44 graduated college, his parents sold their Brooklyn house and bought a house with a pool in Greenwich. When I first met them, Abby and BF 44 were living together in a white brick building on the Upper West side; a year after we met, 44 and I moved into an apartment in the same building. Almost every summer weekend, we would pile into a rental car and head up to Greenwich, where we would spend Saturday afternoons sitting by BF 44's parents' pool. We would eat dinner, sleep over and then head back into the city. It was delightful, and not just because the pool was big and the parking was free.
Those weekends were lazy and glorious because of BF 44's mother Candy. Candy would stand in her white kitchen and greet us with platters of fruit and vegetables. "Come in, come in," she would say as we pulled up, as if she had been waiting all week for us to arrive. Candy is petite and pretty. She is one of those incredibly loving and intelligent women who has taken care of people her whole life, and doesn't seem to have resented a minute of it. She grew up in Minnesota, and had her mother come live with her so she could help raise her four sons. For years, my husband, BF 44, Abby and I would sit on our butts by the pool, first by ourselves and eventually with our babies, while Candy and her mother prepared plates of food and brought them out to us. Those two gray-haired Minnesota ladies seemed thrilled to have a patio full of "kids" again (Really, they did!). Sometimes, Candy would make us meatloaf for dinner; occasionally she would bake a cake. It all tasted wonderful. Candy and her mother seemed very happy to hang with Abby and me---I think they were psyched to finally have some girls around.
Candy's husband Don was a gruff obstretrician with a dry sense of humor. By the time I met him, he had retired and seemed perfectly content watering his flowers with a garden hose, pulling leaves out of the pool and occasionally wandering into the kitchen to see his wife. He always seemed mildly happy to see us but didn't dote on us the way Candy did, and occasionally he seemed to regard my husband and me as the freeloaders we were.
Abby and I had our babies nine months apart (She had her first child at the end of October; I got pregnant in early November. Coincidence? I think not.) We echoed each other as our lives moved in tandem. They named their daughter after me; we took BF 44's middle name and made it our oldest son's first.
One afternoon, Abby and I were sitting by the pool, nursing our babies, when Don walked over to us.
"You two girls still look a little post-partum," he said.
I had eaten too much of Don's food over the years to tell him to go f--k off, and the truth was, he was right. At that point, both our babies were under one and we did look exhausted, with a few extra pounds. I restrained myself from telling Don to go back to tending his garden.
The years passed. We bought a house in New Jersey; Best Friend 44 and Abby moved to Westchester. They had a second child, and we did too; we started seeing them just twice a year and stopped going to Greenwich altogether. I didn't even realize it when Candy's mother passed away. We did know that Don was ill, and when he died in 2005, my husband and I went to the funeral. Don's grandchildren delivered the eulogies, and then his children gave theirs. It was a beautiful service, and the first time I had seen children participate. My Dad was dying at the time so I took some mental notes. After the service, I wondered what Candy was going to do with her time, now that everyone was out of her house, but I have to admit that other than exchanging annual holiday cards with her for a couple more years, I didn't communicate with her much except for the occasional email.
Fast forward three years. My husband and I take our kids on a sailing vacation to Virgin Gorda. On our plane are a Mom and Dad roughly our age; they are travelling with their two pre-teen kids and a grandfather. We are all headed to the same resort, so we end up spending a lot of time together, sitting on the docks, reading on the beach and circling the buffet in the restaurant. The grandfather, Olly, is a radiologist (like my Dad). His wife had just died of lymphoma (like my Dad). Olly is looking for company and conversation and we chat almost every day. He wants to know what books I am reading; he watches my kids sail. He is a pleasure to be with, but it is clear that he is at loose ends and still grieving for his wife.
His daughter-in-law confides that Olly doesn't know how to cook, write a check or buy a sweater. He teaches at Columbia, and is a published academic who is brilliant and well-regarded, but his late wife had taken care of everything domestic and he is lost without her. It was clear he needed female company but it had been a while since I had seen Candy, so it didn't occur to me to mention her. Besides, Olly hardly seemed ready to date.
But then last summer, Abby, BF 44 and their two kids drove out to our swim club. We swam, ate, drank, gossiped and watched the kids. Abby mentioned that Candy was busy going to museums and hiking with her girlfriends. She was dating but some of the guys were jerks and she hadn't found "the one." I immediately emailed Olly's daughter-in-law. I think I have someone for Olly, I typed. After several rounds of emails, we made a date to get Olly and Candy together, with us "kids" as chaperones.
A few weeks later, my husband and and I took our boys and went sailing on the Long Island Sound with Candy, Olly and Olly's family. Candy brought two bottles of wine; true to form, I think we came empty-handed. In any case, it was a beautiful August day. The sun was strong, the sky was clear, and there was enough wind that the men and children easily sailed the boat while we three women stared out at the water and chatted. Olly and Candy seemed interested in each other, but not fascinated, and I couldn't tell if they liked each other or not.
At the end of the afternoon, I pulled Candy aside and asked her what she thought. She allowed that she would go for a walk with Olly if he called, take him for a walk around the sculpture garden at Pepsico. Then she shrugged and said, "Maybe."
After we docked, Candy drove herself home and I sat down with Olly on a bench while Olly's son and my husband put the boat away. I asked him if he wanted to see Candy again.
"I'll get her number from my daughter-in-law," he said.
I wasn't going to wait for that to happen.
"I have Candy's email address and phone number right here if you want it," I said.
"Okay, I'll take it," Olly said.
I pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper.
Nine months later, Olly and Candy are an "item." She watches what he eats and makes him go on walks; he takes her sailing almost every day. Together, they go to lectures up at Columbia and then out for dinner. They are 78 and they are so busy that Candy's kids complain she doesn't have time for them anymore.
Yesterday, we went up to Abby and BF 44's house in Westchester. They just built a pool, so we did what we have always done: We sat around the water for hours, huddling in our sweatshirts, drinking wine, grilling steaks, eating shrimp, munching on fruit and vegetables, and watching the kids swim. We talked about our kids' bar mitzvahs, their friendships, their flirtations and their camps; we griped about hockey, baseball and swim teams. We discussed the tradeoffs of work versus parenting, and then we circled back to our parents and our grandparents. I was waiting all day for Olly and Candy to visit. They were supposed to come by for ten minutes and I so wanted to see them together so that I could do a little victory lap and see in person the good deed I had done! But at the end of the day, they decided the timing wasn't good and they were just too busy to stop by.
We should all be so lucky.
Below are two of Candy's recipes. She gave them to me in 1991.
Candy's Meatloaf
Preheat oven at 350 degrees.
2 pounds chopped sirloin (85% lean)
1 Portuguese role
1 onion
1 bottle Heinz chilli sauce
Salt and pepper
Soak roll in water until it's mushy.
Mix the roll with the meat.
Add salt, pepper and a little garlic (fresh or powder).
Press meatloaf into a 8X8 square pan.
Pour half bottle of chili sauce on loaf.
Slice onion and lay slices on top of sauce.
Bake for 35 minutes.
Candy's Cake
Preheat oven at 350 degrees.
1/4 pound butter, softened
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 can Hershey's syrup
1 cup self-rising flour
1 teaspoon vanilila
Jar of peach preserves
Grease and flour a 3 quart yrex dish.
Cream butter, gradually add sugar.
Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition.
Add Hershey's chocolate syrup.
Add self-rising flour.
Add vanilla.
Mix.
Pour into Pyrex dish and bake for 40 minutes.
Serve with peach preserves.
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