Just a Little Off the Top

Originally Published: March 9, 2004

The room was roaring summer, so hot you’d never have guessed it was February outside and dipping into the 30s. Five, six, finally seven faces were seated in front of me, mostly looking at their shoes, rummaging in backpacks, or, in one case, leafing through a bathing suit catalogue. Catalogue girl giggled and flashed a page to her friend four seats down. On the wall, the standard-issue school clock gave us 5 minutes before class was to begin. I rearranged my stack of articles, still warm from the photocopier. Scalding air was blowing down on my head from a vent above, and I felt the first alarming signs of sleepiness, despite my discomfort in being the guest speaker for the evening.  

Marymount University couldn’t be called a top-tier institute of higher learning, though admittedly small and expensive and Catholic about sums up my composite knowledge of the place. My friend Kate, for whom I had agreed to “guest teach” is, however, a top-tier teacher, and I know at least one graduate of the school whom I would unhesitatingly classify as a top-tier person, so it all just proved my long-held theory that it’s really up to the student whether they come out of a school well-educated or not. That was beside the point that night. The faces in front of me waited for my words to enlighten, to entertain, to teach. To keep them awake in the wretched heat.

I sipped at my water bottle, peeking glances at the clock, and tried to feel wise and professorial, hoping top-tier, experienced Kate would pick up the pieces if I tanked. 

She had asked me to come to two of her undergraduate seminars on “Writing for the Social Sciences” and speak on the topic of being edited. I was to tell her students how it felt to have ones writing examined by experts - experts in the subtleties of narrative arc, poised phasing, scrupulous grammar. Yes, I thought, they should hear what it was like to watch as ones words were surgically dissected by the blue pen of death. They should be told about the relentless compacting of ones ego under the bitter jack-boot of disenfranchised, underpaid scholars until it resembles nothing so much as slug innards. They should know what it is to smile and nod as hours, days, weeks of work get excised - like cancerous tumors – leaving the bits oozing into the stained carpet of the editor’s windowless office. 

Or something to that effect. I was hoping to be uplifting. 

My own experience with editors has actually been very good. I admire them, and don’t envy their job of treading on eggshells while simultaneously hacking the bloat off ponderous writing. The inherent problem with editors is that they tell the truth … almost always. And that hurts … almost always. But I for one, love being edited. I do. For example, when my most recent piece was amputated from about 4,000 words to around 1, 600, I realized it was a better piece for it. No matter that a couple of months worth of research and reporting got rubbed out. My editor, a gentle and damnably nice fellow named David, felt that I was making a long story out of what was, at its heart, a short one. A mountain out of a molehill. He was right, bless him, and cut we did. Sure, I bled some, little drops, mostly, but the lesions are healing nicely, thanks.

The students in Kate’s seminars didn’t ask many questions, but listened attentively, blinking at me politely when I tried to inject some humor. Note to self: next time, prepare something. I passed out copies of a couple of articles I’d had in the Post, and then snippets from my first-draft, so they could compare. 

They sat in silence and read the two, which gave me a moment to look over the first drafts, which I hadn’t done since abandoning them for later versions. I then closed my eyes and said a silent thanks. Turns out, editors not only trim the fat, but the redundant, the libelous, the juvenile, and the just plain idiotic.  What were a paltry few drops of blood when you had such a person in your corner, keeping you from looking like a hack?

The seminars went well – mostly thanks to Kate. The students were consistent with my memory of undergrads – not easily engaged or impressed, but occasionally willing to overcome their habitual caution given the right questions. The biggest rise I got out of them all evening had nothing to with writing or editing. It was when I mentioned in passing that I’d gone to Berkeley. One young man stared at me from behind his glasses and breathed, “You went to Berkeley?” I nodded demurely. I didn’t add that in the late 70s, UC was more lax in their acceptance policies. I also didn’t add that I’d not actually graduated from Berkeley.  And I neglected to confess that I’d gotten an “F” on my first English paper. I was not, by any definition, a top-tier student. In truth, it wasn’t until I hit my thirties that I felt ready to receive an education. Timing has never been one of my gifts.

I was glad when the seminars were over. The less time I spent with these students, the less chance there was of exposing how under-qualified I was to lecture them about anything – much less the art of being edited. I suppose I could have told them the truth – that during the editing of my first piece for the Post, I learned more in one session with my editor than I had in all my college English classes combined – but I thought I might be going against school policy on that one. Hey kids! Stay in school! Don’t do drugs!

I am just finishing the final editing rounds of my newest piece for the Post Magazine. David had wanted me to construct a last paragraph, something to finish out the story in its new shortened form. I wrote what I thought was a nice little ending, and sent it off to him confidently. Nailed it, I thought smugly. 

He called to let me know, well, no. Too subtle and random, not tied in. Try again.

I went harrumphing back to the computer and reread what I’d sent him. Well, Ok, it might be a bit of a jump from the story. And what was this…? Oh, wonderful. One of the kids seemed to have switched off spell-check while doing his Spanish homework, meaning I’d sent David a non spell-checked draft. And here I’d just assumed my spelling had miraculously improved… Hesitantly, I re-enabled the tool and sighed as the red squiggly lines crawled all over my text. David had just been subjected to a draft of not only badly conceived, but largely misspelled writing. 

You couldn’t pay me enough to be an editor.

Junior Middle High School

Originally Published: September 4, 2003

On my bare feet, the cold,  delightfully illicit feel of concrete . It is red concrete,  with  hairline cracks and years of waxy build-up. My skirt is long enough to hide my bare feet if I walk with a certain flick of my toes, which I am careful to do.

In the air, the greasy, beefy jet stream from the cafeteria,  the muffled clatter of stainless steel and the hiss of hot water.

 Around the corner, the funk of cigarette smoke from the shadowy bathrooms with their menace of big girls who slump against sinks, nail polish and furious eyes glittering in the dimness.  

My locker  beneath the music room windows shakes to discordant vibrations as wood, metal and gut struggle to unite,  rattling the combination locks like seeds in a gourd.  R26-L38-R42. Push up and swing open. Be ready to catch the things that will slither out – books, sweater, binder, brush. 

Horrid navy-blue one-piece polyester double-knit gym uniform. Horrid, horrid thing. Would make a twig look fat. Would make a black girl look pasty. Would make a slut look sexless. Horrid, horrid horrid.

Lunch behind the cafeteria on the grass. Usually just an apple, then a light mooch off others. Too embarrassed to bring lunch. Too revealing, too mundane. Weird about food. Why is everyone always looking at me? What the hell is going on with all my clothes, anyway? Nothing fits like it used to. I am ugly most of the time, except occasionally  at night in front of my mirror. Why can’t I look like that at school?

I feel like I have a huge tattoo on my forehead that says freak. The jock boys – always in twos and threes – snigger and cough out words like dog or some such pronouncement that indicates I am not in their crowd.  I blush and pretend  not to hear. I feel dog. I feel less. I feel leprous. I feel proud I am not one of them.

Just an average student.  I am in no AP classes,  though most of my friends are.  They all talk endlessly -ruthlessly- about the cool things they do with their happy, motivated teachers. The jovial science teacher I adore gives me a tepid grade of average under the “attitude” column on my report card. Mr. Seitz has no opinion of me, positive or otherwise. Average is what  a teacher gives who can’t quite place you.

Embarrassed all the time. I know I smell bad. I have bad breath. Something must be hanging out. I am short and graceless and insignificant. At least I have long beautiful hair. I can hide behind it, become famous for it. Love my hair, love me.  Just don’t look at my face – I woke up with this huge zit.

Home sick today -“stomach ache”. Haven’t told my Mom my period started and she hasn’t noticed I’ve stayed home once a month for the last three. Maybe she does know.  Maybe I’ll tell her the next time. For now I’ll just keep throwing away underwear secretly.

School is just a day thing. My interests are so much more sophisticated. I want to go away, go to Europe! I want to explore castle ruins and dream about things that are long dead! I want to wander for hours on foggy beaches and stare meaningfully into the sea-green depths letting the water reflect the exact color of my haunting eyes until someone notices! I want to bathe in melodrama and  wallow  in the glory of artistic detachment !

They think we don’t know anything, but we know about so much. Sex and venereal disease and pregnancy. Pot, grass, weed, hash, acid. Alcohol. What parties are for. How to kiss and flirt and hopefully how to extricate ourselves when the flirting gets out of hand, say, with a stranger – a man – who doesn’t know that we are full of shit, that we are just girls on the edge,  hopeless still at all this, playing at being women. 

So years go by. They go by and by, and we know a lot now – though really, we know nothing. When we flirt, we mean it, but we do it far less because we know what we mean and we mean what we say. Usually. We care less about what people think and for the most part we are happier.  None of us passed through unscathed, but then, a person without scars is a person without history.  Those who made it through young adolescence and the experience of middle school feel amazed and humbled because we know – or at least know of -  the ones who didn’t. 

Now my oldest son is beginning middle school .  He’s younger than I was, a year closer to childhood, a year further from innocence. He still plays with toys, still feels good about himself. He is proud of his long hair, but doesn’t hide behind it. He is smarter than I was, or at least able to access more of his brain. I tell myself he is going to do fine, that he will remain himself, that he’ll gain insight and wisdom  and confidence.  That puberty will be kind to him, that all his knowledge of sex, drugs and truancy will be purely theoretical. That he’ll love me even through the mine field to come.  That’s what I tell myself.

Takers of Last Resort

Originally published: April 25, 2003

This wobbling step over the mortal line and into responsible adulthood has been long in coming. Unexpectedly, in setting up our Last Will and Testament and Durable General Power of Attorney, I am overcome not with the depression I feared would smother me while reflecting on my inevitable demise, but by a profound ennui. I imagined I would indulge in days of morbid daydreaming when I finally unsheathed the contents of the envelope that had been gathering dust and dog hair for the last many months. But here I sit, fighting to keep my mind on the task at hand, while wondering why my education has not prepared me to read and understand a mere 40 typed pages. Granted, in those pages are such gassy sentences as these: 

“If my agent determines that using certain assets in a particular manner might discharge the agent’s own legal obligation, then my agent shall be deemed to be an interested agent. The interested agent shall not have authority to use assets in the contemplated manner unless a special agent independently approves the proposed use. Successor agents named in this power of attorney may serve as special agent for such purposes.”

 I am suddenly imagining Maxwell Smart and a rather smarmy James Bond wheeling and dealing in my affairs under the cone of silence. 

“Definitions.  The use of the singular shall include the plural; the plural, the singular: the use of any gender shall include all genders: and the term agent shall include duly appointed substitutes and successors.”

That’s not what they taught us in French class…

“To make, execute, acknowledge, and deliver a good and sufficient deed or deeds of conveyance, or other instrument or instruments, necessary to effect such sales, conveyances, or agreements.”

 I am being borne on a plinth through the town, playing the pipes, and selling cheap knick-knacks for tourists. 

It becomes obvious I need a cup of coffee - or a shot of something that burns as it goes down.

As I read on, flipping the pages when I tire of the arrangement of the text -rather than when I actually understand the content- it begins to dawn on me that the saving grace of legalese is that it declaws the Awful. There are monstrous things out there, but because of the antiseptic, cauterizing nature of this language, the unthinkable is cotton-wooled inside phrasing so opaque it obscures all emotion. There are sentences so long they defy the understanding of even the most dogged reader. These endless run-ons begin a long-winded embalming of deceased loved ones until the dead are no more tear-jerking than an addendum on the definitions page.

One particular sentence I am faced with is a staggering 10 lines long and includes 8 sets of parentheses. Thankfully, our humanistic lawyer has provided us with an opening “Executive Summary” of the subsequent pages, that renders the inelegant language into fairly readable prose. Turns out the 10-line sentence (entitled, interestingly enough, Section 8) is where it is determined who will get our stuff if our children all die before they are old enough to inherit it. It is masterful obfuscation of an occurrence, which is, to most parents, too horrific even to ponder. We cannot deal with the death of our children, however abstract, so the law softens the blow with mercifully numbing inscrutability.

So this is an unexpected perk of wading through this incomprehensible stuff - the narcosis-inducing state it delivers helps us depersonalize a highly personal process. It doesn’t get any more down and dirty than deciding who gets your kids if you die, or who deals out your belongings and to whom. This all-business attitude is a tremendous service. Spouses, children and friends can pocket their grief for a time and busy themselves instead decoding the maze of General Provisions, Fiduciary Powers, Trusts, Legacies, and, when all is done, Residue. 

It took Adolfo and me a long time to do this. Our children are 11 and 8, and we have been without a Will all this time. Friends and family were scandalized. But it is such an easy thing to put off - like a having a mammogram or collecting that stool sample they’ve been asking for. On an average day, you really don’t want to know all that goes on in your body – and certainly not all that goes on within your heart and mind. But you also know, that all days aren’t average, damn it, and that the clock is ticking.

But I guess it is marginally comforting to know I now have a Personal Representative. It’s kind of like having a Personal Trainer, but not quite so narcissistic. A Personal Representative might take control if you have become non compos mentis. A Personal Trainer might get you those six-pack abs you’ve been wanting. It’s a toss up, maybe, but what good is a washboard stomach if you’ve got both oars out of the water? My Personal Representative is Adolfo, and I am his. I guess it remains to be seen which of us will have to follow through with all the things we’ve just agreed to do for each other.  There’s something to be said for just getting hit by the same bus in one go.

A “Proxy IQ Test” is the last part of the packet, stapled separately from the rest. The idea is to answer the 14 questions, then hand it to your “agent”. The agent will then, without looking at your answers, answer his or her own version of the questions. Then you compare and see just how well your agent understands your wishes if you’re… well, if you’re out of the game. 

The questionnaire follows an “imagine that” format. 

Imagine that…

You had Alzheimer’s Disease…

You are now seriously ill…

You have moderate dementia…

You also have circulatory problems, which resulted in one leg being

amputated because it developed gangrene…

You are physically frail…

You are in a permanent coma and you are dependent on a tube inserted

into your stomach for nutrition and hydration, for food and water. 

The next time you get pneumonia, do you want aggressive antibiotic

treatment again or just comfort care until death comes?

Jesus… For all the messiness they stepped around earlier, they’re dragging you  right through it face first now. None of this is legalese - they actually use pronouns in this section – and by the simple use of the second person and the present tense, you are there. You are experiencing it all without any padding, without any coyness. You, not an agent, not a Personal Representative, or a trustee, or an executor, or the party of the first, second or third part. It has gotten very real, very quickly.

That “ennui” I mentioned earlier was just a front. It is impossible to go through this process and not conjure up depressing images of oneself smeared on the highway, talking to the walls in a nursing home, or just bubbling away on life support. If preparing for one’s death isn’t a sign of at least impending adulthood, I cannot imagine what would be. 

Young children go though a phase of obsessing about death and imagining what death looks like, feels like, and how they will die. Then they realize on some level that they can’t figure the thing out because no adult can ever seem to give them satisfactory answers. They move on. I guess part of becoming an adult constitutes turning around and looking at that fear again, and knowing that there are no answers. Death isn’t anything we ever “figure out”, it just is. We deal with it one way or another, or more accurately, it deals with us. We just do what we can to ease it, for ourselves, for each other.

Adolfo may be the one to “deal” some day – I suspect he’s much healthier than I am. There is a loophole, though, and I’m sure he’ll spot it: If he’s dead, the document says, he is excused from acting as my agent, as long as he can produce a notarized death certificate.

Some people will go to any lengths.

The Lie of the Lamb

Originally Published: September 18, 2002 

You know the lines are blurred when your tire and auto store is offering advice about God.

I had my back to the picture windows, sitting in a crackling sun-dried vinyl chair, nursing my Washington Post so it would last me an hour. I was a little over-due for my oil change and feeling guilty about it. I felt the least I could do was wait patiently for the full service, which included a 31 point safety inspection, tire rotation, and, most importantly, the promise of a thorough vacuuming of the front floor area. Full service no longer included vacuuming of the back floor area, I was told.

The chair in front of the window made an angry crunching sound as I leaned back.  There had been a disheartening article in the Health section. My titanic non-profit health insurance provider, CareFirst, was coming under investigation as it tried to merge with ambitious for-profit WellPoint. Seems that the top executives of CareFirst were slated to receive between $14 – 18 million apiece in what was being called “severance” pay. This would amount to $78 million if all ten left. No one seemed really keen on this idea except the executives themselves. The word “reprehensible” was used, as were the phrases “excessive compensation”, “cooking up a scheme”, “disrupting the fragile health care system”, and “starts looking like Enron.”  The CEO appeared stoically impassive in the photo, perhaps busy calculating just what kind of happiness $18.6 million was going to buy him. 

  I looked gloomily around the waiting area, hoping for a distraction. And right there, between Coolant Corner and the Coke machine was a prominent display labeled,

 “Spiritual Resource Center”

One lone pamphlet projected its message across the room:

“Peace with God”

There were more racks, perhaps eight of them. All were empty except for a Styrofoam coffee cup that had been wedged into one. I wondered if the pamphlets were seldom replenished, or if recently there had been a mad run on religious flyers; desperate, spiritually bereft people plucking fistfuls of them, anxious for their own Peace with God to begin. Piled on the shelf below were free Holy Bibles. On closer inspection, I saw it was not merely the Holy Bible, but, as the curious cover graphics conveyed, the Holy, Holy Bible. There were at least twenty, in both English and en Español. Apparently there was not as much call for these books. Time-conscience truth-seekers perhaps judged it was a quicker road to heaven with the pamphlet Cliff’s Notes version.

There was a separate stack of books under the heading, The Shepherd’s Guide. They also turned out to be free for the taking. “The Christian Business Directory: Where Christians go to do business.” On the cover was a pastel drawing of a grinning shepherd, an impassioned gleam in his blue eyes as he held a lamb tightly to his chest. Clearly, Christians, including animal lovers, were encouraged to patronize only the businesses of the eternally saved. They’d be paying retail, of course, but even salvation is not without its down side.

 This was great – I was feeling more blessedly distracted by the minute. Our faltering healthcare system aside, the surreal possibility that people might seek spiritual guidance while awaiting an oil change was a revelation to me. And apparently there was even a sort of holy kickback for participating stores.

With interest I noticed the faded company Mission Statement posted behind the service counter: 

“To please God with the quality of our work.”

From on high, a cutout of the pious, lard-colored Michelin Man, arms out-stretched, looked down from a halo of dark, slick tires.

Considering for a moment the unfortunate name Craven Tire and Auto, I didn’t wonder at their need to seek spiritual restitution through good works. Actually, having the fear of God in my mechanics reassured me – even if the fear was not universal among the Craven employees. A large sign posted a few feet from the Mission Statement made it clear that Craven Tire and Auto was “not responsible for any lost or stolen items left in vehicles or any damage to vehicle beyond our control.”

But I figured my chances for quality, God-pleasing work were good. As a car ignoramus, I am always convinced that I am being duped. “So yeah, we refaced the oil, and wanked the sparks, cranked the points, lubed the rotator cuffs and changed the noise filter. We even revolved the tires, you betcha! That’ll be $175. Have a swell day!”

When the man behind the counter finally called my name, I walked over with confidence.  I remembered that the Mission statement had also instructed the employees to, “love thy customer”. I was finally in a place where I had the Big Guy in my corner, right there in black and white. 

The man smiled, started to ring me up, and then paused. He showed me an old screw he said they’d pulled out of one of the tires. They’d gone ahead and patched the tire for me, ‘cause, well, a few more miles on that baby and, hey, who knows? What with the kids in the car, and the crazy way people drive around here… so, anyway, it’d just be an extra $19.99 for the patch. 

As I drove away, my feet crunching into the unvacuumed floor of the driver’s side, it occurred to me that I really should have taken the screw with me – at least then he’d have to find a different screw to show the next ignoramus. 

Parent Trip

Originally Published: September 9, 2002

And it begins again.

One backpack is ripping. Right there at the straps, the threads unraveling even as I watch it hoisted onto those small shoulders. Overloaded a few too many times with piles of take-it-or-lose-it stuff, hastily torn down from classroom walls by battle-weary teachers at the end of June. I should have gotten him a new backpack. His brother got one, after all, but then, that brother is the proverbial squeaky wheel and so gets more than his due, truth be told. This one never seems to take any notice of the condition of his things, and will in fact wear the most decrepit shirt in his drawer if it happens to be on top of the pile. I should have looked more closely when I stuffed in the new school supplies. Is this a reflection of how I really feel about my kids? Do I in fact love one above the others and therefore unconsciously, adorn him more? Will I be confronted one day by an angry young adult who throws such things in my face, like this ragged backpack in 2nd grade while his brother got the gleaming new Jansport with the infinite number of snappy black zippers and the padded straps? I am pretty sure I like all my children the same, but surely something evil will come of this. I will be responsible for some horrible aberration of character by either withholding or smothering. 

Back to school time tends to dredge up a whole boatload of issues. Not the least of which is the Guilt that comes with kids. It is packaged with them, pre-assembled and ready to eat right out of the package. If there were a recipe for making kids – other than the traditional one - you could substitute any ingredient you wanted to, except Guilt. The recipe would warn, 

“Do not attempt the use of cheap imitations such as self-abnegation, over -compensation, and generalized angst. They are not adequate substitutions and may result in such problems as failure to rise, failure to cook evenly, failure to be palatable… you get the picture. The operative theme here is Failure.” 

Last week the three boys sat around the table eating the last of a gallon of cookie-dough ice cream – an end-of-summer treat. Fears were voiced as they averted their eyes, fishing around in the bland white ice cream for the chunks of cookie dough.

“How will I find my class? I don’t know what my teacher looks like.”

“Everyone always knows what to do except me.”

“I don’t think I know anyone in my class.”

“I hope my new teacher’s not strict, like that tall guy with the fat face who patrols the halls.”

“I never know what line to stand in.”

“I used to really look forward to specials like art and PE, but last year they were boring. Now I hate going.”

“I’m really dreading recess. I never know what to do when the other kids play those chasing games with the girls. I think they’re pretty stupid.”

“I hope they don’t give any homework tomorrow.”

“I hope they don’t give any homework tomorrow.”

“I hope they don’t give any homework tomorrow.”

“Last year they did.”

Groans. 

“I mean it. I don’t know what line to stand in.”

Faces were sinking lower and lower towards their bowls, the slushy contents now being stirred dispiritedly. 

Why do they have to go through this every year? Their faces all anxious, all so vulnerable. All of them intense, not one easy and care free, going off to face the social, nay, political crap-shoot that is school. Perhaps I should be home schooling… One of my dearest friends does that and her kids are turning out fabulously. Couldn’t I do that? Shouldn’t I do that? What’s wrong with me that I would rather eat poison than school my own kids – any kids for that matter? So I just send them off to public school, hope for the best - and let the guilt wash over me.

Couldn’t I be doing more for each child? Do I treat them too much as a unit? I could take them out separately more often, or at all, even. Should each be in a totally separate sport in addition to soccer and tennis to help them develop a sense of self? But what about unstructured time? Time to just be a kid? And what about music? God, what about music!! It isn’t like I forgot, exactly, but I was just kind of afraid to push… should I have pushed? Is it too late? Shouldn’t they already be proficient at an instrument? Will they have lost the ability to learn to read music? If they were gifted, have we lost the window of opportunity because I didn’t act? Have those neural synapses dried up? What have I done??

Parental Panic – bedfellow of Parental Guilt.

All the things we cannot do for our kids. Like deflecting heartache, disappointment and pain. At some point, parents realize that they are not all powerful. They realize it long after the child has come to understand this. Amazingly, they seem to love us anyway.

I finally had to combat the rising level of terror at the table with the only weapon at my disposal. I said solemnly, “ If you’re not sure you’re in the right line, tap the shoulder of the kid in front of you and say, “Excuse me, is this Ms. McConnell’s class?” and the kid will probably turn around, look at you with wild eyes, burst into tears and sob, “I don’t know!!” Here I had put on my best hysterical voice, which had the desired effect. The boys laughed until tears rolled down their faces, imagining one enormous line made up entirely of crying kids. 

In the morning, it was still funny, and when the moment came to board the bus, they looked less dejected and frightened than they had the previous evening. Or the previous year, for that matter.

Should, Would, Could – the vocabulary of Parental Guilt. You do, you don’t. Give and take, up and down, in and out. You pays your money and you takes your chance. 

Sometimes, I think we think too much. 

Or maybe not enough? 

I don’t know!!

The Inurnment of Mr. Clardy

Originally Published: April 22, 2002

It is a huge place, Arlington Cemetery. 

“Marble orchard” would not be an accurate term. These rows of white slabs have fallen from no tree. They seem instead to push up from the earth, emerging from the green, tended grass more like the sun-seeking tops of root vegetables. There are lots of them. Regiments. Squadrons. Fleets. 

The cemetery currently covers 200 acres and has more than 260,000 people buried there, whom almost 4 million people visit annually. 

And to think it all started in Robert E. Lee’s back yard in his beloved Arlington. With an extended middle finger, the Union grimly planted the dead right up to his doorstep. 

I was at the cemetery to attend the memorial service for Warren Davenport Clardy, 1913 – 2002. He and his wife Betty owned our house for 35 years before selling it to us. 

Mr. Clardy had handed his house over to us so gently, so thoughtfully, that it almost seemed we were being willed the thing. “Good vibes” don’t factor into the sale price of a house, but if they had, we would never have been able to afford this place. 

And of course, what was left behind in their house became the basis for my recent flurry of artistic activity, the seeds for Everyday Household Objects. Is it an odd thing that he should pass away on the very day I hung the last piece in the gallery? If I believed in such things, I would get an eerie chill.

But I don’t. 

Instead what I felt was a need to say thank you, and attending his funeral seemed to be my last chance to do that. 

I went with our neighbor. It was he who called me Sunday night to tell me the news. He said that Mr. Clardy had been a superb neighbor, had always been liberal, not “closed off to things and ideas” as he put it. I already knew that from the mail that still comes addressed to him. Pleas for money from human rights, family planning, poverty and disease-fighting groups. A man doesn’t get on all those lists by sitting on his hands. 

Friends and family gathered in one of the waiting rooms at Arlington Cemetery (I was neither friend nor family so what was my role; Beneficiary? Scavenger?). Mr. Clardy’s large, multi-generational family stood and greeted all who entered. There were few tears. He had been 88, and had died peacefully in his sleep having been fully active up to the end, I overheard his wife of 60 years saying.

So many of the family looked familiar to me, though I’d never met any of them. I suppose there is a certain similarity among family members at funerals. There always seem to be lanky young men in ill-fitting dark suits, their hair unnaturally tamed back, and their faces newly shaven. They gratefully attend to the needs of young children in white shirts that have come untucked from pants cinched in at tiny waists. Their flat feet, tripping along in stiff leather shoes, run in and out among the forest of adult legs, the young men trying half-heartedly to corral them.

The family members looked back at me with welcoming smiles and warm handshakes. No one crashes a funeral – she must belong here.

With my neighbor, I went to speak to Mrs. Clardy. She was charming and steadfast. I guess one has to be, at Arlington Cemetery, one of the world’s best-known burial grounds. It is all very upright, very serious there. Outside the door, a uniformed officer stood at attention, his eyes staring off into the distance, into some remote point in space that allowed him to maintain his muscles taut and his mind pure. 

An authoritative woman told us all to line up behind her black Ford Taurus.  In the withering heat we headed back to our cars and slowly tailgated one another along the narrow road, past signs to monuments, memorials, drives, gates and niches. It was a surprisingly long way.

Unbidden, symbolism can be very heavy-handed, with all the subtlety of an Oliver Stone movie. As we crawled centipede-like along a turn in the road, there, rising over the green mounds of the cemetery, was the wounded Pentagon. Poised above it swayed the healing cranes of reconstruction, shining yellow in the noonday sun. Overhead, a plane that had just taken off from the now fully re-opened National airport, hauled itself straight up into the blue. Its steel glinted and its engines roared. And there we were, pulling to the curb to attend one of 20 burials that would be held that day at Arlington Cemetery, 20 of 7,000 that would take place this year. Ok, so life and death go on. And on. I get it. Enough.

Intensely emotional, military funerals have been described, and I would not argue, now that I have witnessed one. I understood little of the symbolism – the number of soldiers in the honor guard, the number of rifles for the salute of the firing party, the body bearers and the horse-drawn cart, the strange, oddly beautiful ritual of flag folding after it has been held aloft and taut over the urn by six guards, their spotless white gloves working independently while their eyes stared straight ahead, their crisp hand movements, like salutes and benedictions mixed into one. 

There is some incongruity in the pizza slice-shaped cardboard box the flag is later placed in for the survivors. Like carry-out. 

Three volleys of “musketry” over the grave made nearly everyone jump, even though we’d been expecting it. 

And then a lone bugler played Taps. Composed one night by a Civil War General seven days before the battle of Richmond, Taps just might be the most moving snippet of music ever written. 

By then, people were no longer thinking how fortunate Mr. Clardy had been to reach the age of 88. He had been much loved. It was impossible not to be moved.

The group then moved into the Columbarium which houses 5,000 spaces for urns. 

Just an aside: Columbarium is not in my dictionary, and is a strange word. It lends itself a little too easily to disrespectful and unholy manipulation. Call ‘em, bury ‘em, or Colonbarium, or other nasty twists. I gather, from web sites I visited, a columbarium is a sleek architectural structure designed for the purpose of housing large numbers of urns. Spiritual lockers, of a sort.

There was a chaplain who gave a brief service. It was clear he did not know Mr. Clardy. I heard a woman close to me mutter that a relative of hers had been buried there in 1950, and it had been exactly the same service back then. Her companions chuckled, not derisively, but with a certain resignation. 

Afterwards, the chaplain spoke somberly to Mrs. Clardy at very close range, then left the columbarium, walking sedately past us, head bowed as though deep in thought. I was at the back of the group, and so saw his chin snap up and his step brighten the moment he turned the corner. With 20 burials a day, a chaplain can’t afford to get attached.

I had been fighting to gain control of myself since Taps, not too successfully. I was among the first out of the columbarium to walk back to my car, tearful, turning, of course, in the wrong direction at first – I never did have a sense of direction. Getting lost in Arlington Cemetery and dying of heat stroke in the back forty – now that would be a story. 

Warren Clardy, or perhaps one who knew him well, had chosen Ralph Waldo Emerson to summarize his hopes for what his life had been:

Success

To laugh often and much;

To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, 

A garden patch or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed easier because you lived;

This is to have succeeded.

I’d just like to say thank you, Mr. Clardy. Thank you.

                                                                  Your beneficiary and scavenger,

                                                                                                              Russell

(A last aside: From the Emerson web site: Scholars agree that “Success”, the most famous poem attributed to Emerson, is almost certainly not his work.)

Opening and Disclosing

Originally Published: April 15,  2002

There is always that moment. Just before a risk. A suspended moment before either crossing a threshold – or tumbling into an abyss. Your feet may find a reassuring continuation of ground under them.  Or they may end up pedaling madly in thin air, dragging you into the gaping maw that awaits those brave or witless forays that end in disaster. 

Disaster defined here: sudden or painful death, sudden or painful embarrassment, strained or sympathetic politeness directed toward you, or a very sudden, very pregnant silence. 

I was not really nervous until shortly before we left for the gallery. I had been too busy to get nervous. The show was gestating benignly, scrawled in the April section of my calendar, which, everyone knows, is years away from March. 

First I was too busy working on the pieces themselves, dreaming, forming, stamping, mixing, drying, hemming, hawing, adjusting. Soon I was delightfully swamped by a rotating cast of visitors. I had dutifully hung the show two weeks earlier, and so was free to enjoy Washington DC at the height of cherry blossoming and tourist ooing and ahhing. I even got to feel the wisps of sultry air that sneak into the Mall about this time every year and warm the still frozen concrete facades of the museums. It was an engaging distraction.

But then it was Saturday, April 6, and suddenly it was all about me.

How could it not be, when I was the only name on the walls and floors of the small gallery?  My inky little fingerprints were everywhere- the emails, the invitations, the photography, the writing, the arrangement, and the Work.

Jesus. What if people hated the work? Found it trite, dull, oafish, or incompetent? 

Wide and bottomless it threatened me - this abyss in the shape of a grin.

We arrived at the gallery a half an hour early. I needed to hang two eleventh hour pieces, and Adolfo had to set up the music. He’d secretly been assembling CDs with music he felt was fitting for the mood of the show. I know his talent in this, and so it was the one area in which I felt relaxed.

The reception was from 4:00 – 7:00 PM. My parents were, by sheer coincidence, in town. If it came to it, they would get to witness me plunging into the chasm. Charming thought, but there is only so much protection a parent can offer from this abyss-riddled world. I’ve learned that sorry truth from my own stint as Mom. Sometimes your children fall and all you can do is watch. 

With the twins to arrive later with friends, Sebastian, ten, was content to come with us. Curled up on the groovy back-to-back sectional sofa that faced two walls at once, he was deep into The Fellowship of the Rings, looking up only occasionally to ask if it was time yet to help himself to the chocolate truffles on the lacquered table next to him. It was not. He had to let the guests have first crack at them. 

He’d looked at me curiously, finally asking if I was nervous as I paced around the room like a crated dog. When I told him yes, I was a little, he’d asked why. I’d said it was hard and scary to have other people look at your work and pronounce judgement. He’d looked doubtful, shrugged, and had gone back to his book, which offered more and varied excitement.

Then, at exactly 4:00 –

 nothing happened. 

No one would come. I looked at the magnums of wine and the cheese plates and the hopeful looks on my parent’s faces. There was a tray of little sandwiches that I knew would soon wilt under the baleful, unblinking eye of the track lighting. How soon until the mayonnaise becomes poisonous? Was there mayonnaise on them, or just mustard? That looks like roast beef. Wow, Chas the gallery owner has really gone all out. Don’t recognize the wine he’s chosen, but it looks promising. I’ll definitely get me some of that – not yet, however. Later, and just a glass, maybe two. Don’t want to end up sloppy, or worse, flushed, which is always a give-away. Like a huge neon sign.

Should I rotate the far sculpture a little? Is it too weird to see the penis right as you come up the stairs? … 

No one would come. But that would be Ok, wouldn’t it? I mean, at least I wouldn’t have to stand there and justify all the pieces I’d done to people I didn’t know, or worse yet to people I did know. Maybe we could go home early, skulk past Chas – he, trying to make me feel better  - “Saturday’s are notoriously bad for this sort of thing – I’m sure people just lost the invitation, or couldn’t find parking. This happens sometimes…” And then I could just forget he whole thing and go back to pretending to be… whatever else it is I pretend to be.  I did the work, right? Who cares if no one sees it? That’s not the point, is it? In fact, so much the better – a vacuum can be a very powerful statement in art. 

And then, by 4:20, the place was filling up. The music was going – I heard Nick Drake, Gillian Welch, Chris Isaak, Laurie Anderson, James, Radiohead, wondering distractedly how Adolfo could have so precisely understood the mood of my show having only seen bits and pieces of it strewn chaotically about our house... Familiar faces were rounding the stairs every few minutes and stepping into the space that held the 3 focal pieces of the show, the Everyday Household Objects for which it was named. I talked with them all, laughed, drank  (a little). I watched people looking with interest at my stuff, reading my statement, watched them chatting together, watched them nodding and pointing. Watched some of them writing checks…

And then it was 6:30.

And then it was 7:10.

It was over. 

There were red dots on several pieces – six, if I took the time to count. Which I did. We would even go back the following week, and another would be sold.

The abyss wasn’t grinning after all. At least, not grinning with intent to maim and kill. It wasn’t even an abyss, really. Just a beckoning step forward onto firm yet soft earth. Now I can stumble ahead, feeling like someone just gave me a rough but friendly shove between my shoulder blades, and see where I land.

I.N.S.ufferable

Originally Published: March 14, 2002

From the Washington Post March13, 2002:

“The INS is the Mickey Mouse Club of Federal agencies, but this actually would indicate that’s an insult to Mickey Mouse.”

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) commenting on the arrival of the 

student visas for terrorists Mohamad Atta and Marwan Alshehhi. 

The visas arrived - at the Florida flight school that trained the two 

hijackers - six months after their suicides.

Reading the above article the other morning, I felt an insane, irrepressible laughter welling up in my throat. Or perhaps that was the urge to throw up. 

Any castigation of the I.N.S. has my total support and I will gleefully cast the first, second and third stones, if handed a succession of pointy rocks. My history with that institution is not a happy one. I cannot imagine comparing it to any kind of lovable, woodland creature - spawn of Disney or no. That agency scares the hell out of me because Brutality and incompetence are a terrifying mix.

11 years ago, while living in Bogotá, my Colombian husband Adolfo and I were thrown into the pit of a man named Jim Conner, a foul-tempered Consul General who seemed to get a charge out of ruining our lives. He had implied that Adolfo might never receive a resident visa to the US. He had called Adolfo a liar and a fraud, had shaken his papers at him, had hissed that they were easily falsified. His face apoplectic, his voice quaking with rage, he’d spat at Adolfo that he was to be placed under investigation by the INS. That very day, his papers would be flown to Mexico, he promised. 

In the end, only an expensive immigration lawyer  (paid for by my parents – we were virtually broke) allowed us to discover that Conner was, apparently, yanking our chain for sheer sport.

Over the following months, the man haunted me, darkening my thoughts. I had to exorcise him, and did so by casting him as the main character in a short story. Here, a young couple (the sacrificial lambs), discovers just who the bureaucrat behind the desk really is: 

“Smooth and yellowed like old ivory, horns rutted forth from his crimson forehead, the slack flesh at the base of each pink and raw. His aquiline nose arched slyly over the bearded, half-moon chin. His lips, fresh from his kiss, had thinned and darkened, and his tongue flicked across them. Briskly, the Consul General rubbed the new buds, as if they itched. Then, with a grin, he stretched out his arms to them, beckoning with stained nails.”

  Excerpt from: The Consul General

(Note to self: Considering current disgrace of I.N.S., good idea to send story out again – might have better luck.)

Although it is sadly uncommon that fate allows us closure, in the case of Jim Conner, we were lucky. Surprisingly, we were allowed at least enough to wrestle closed that thick, bitter file. The following is a transcript of a letter written after an outdoor lunch at Oma café.

April 15, 1992

 Bogotá

After a while, a couple sat down behind us, their little dog on a leash behind my chair. I didn’t even look at them, but was mildly annoyed when the woman smashed her chair into mine without a word of apology or even a backward glance. I looked down and the little black dog looked up at me with frightened liquid eyes that shifted uneasily back and forth guiltily as his head slumped slightly. The waiter came up to them, and I heard mumbled responses from the two, and then the rustle of a newspaper. 

Adolfo coughed and I looked up. He was looking pointedly at me, and then mouthed the name. Jim Conner. My eyes must have widened considerably as the information sunk in. Jim Conner. The Jim Conner. The infamous Consul Conner. Jim “you’re under investigation” Conner. Jim you turd, you, Conner. The man himself, sitting behind us in the rather copious flesh.

I didn’t turn around right away, but when I did, pretending to search for a waiter, I saw that the woman was gone, a sandwich waiting at her place, and across from her, a balding stern-faced man almost hidden behind a newspaper. Was this indeed Conner? I looked at Adolfo, questioning with my eyebrows. You see, Conner’s face has dimmed in my 1-year old memory of the event, horns and a pointy tail overshadowing the features. My story, Interview With a Consul General seems more real to me than the day almost exactly a year ago.

Adolfo nodded. Suddenly Conner got up, took hold of the leash and led the mincing, apologetic little dog down the sidewalk and out of view.

The table was now empty. The sandwich still sat and waited for the biggish, blondish woman to return, and the half-empty glass of what looked like soda water bubbled away at Conner’s empty place. 

My eyes rested on the glass a moment. Oh, for a generous supply of an effective, water-soluble, clear laxative! Or even, if my mouth hadn’t gone suddenly dry, a goodly quantity of spit. 

But before I could come up with an alternative plan, Conner came striding back, the little be-leashed dog firmly in tow. I guessed the creature had obediently done its dirty little duty next to one of the sickly stunted trees that line the sidewalk in front of Oma. The limpid eyes looked up at the man, as if sorry that more couldn’t be offered forth. 

They sat again, and soon the woman returned as well. For the rest of our lunch, we heard not a word from the two - just the occasional rustle of the paper, or the sad jingle of the leash as the little dog moved about under the table.

We finished our lunch and exited past Conner’s table. He was still studying his paper and did not look up. The woman had her nose in a novel and was half way through her sandwich. The little dog blinked up at us and rattled his leash softly.

So that was that. No revenge, no contact. It was as if the thick glass wall was still between us. And the appalling thing to realize is that even if the louse had made direct eye contact with us, he wouldn’t have the slightest idea he’d ever seen us before, much less that he ruined our lives for a time. His tiny eyes would probably just run us up and down, register us as “them” and promptly forget our very existence. 

So I close this column in the spirit of forgiveness and forgetness, and in the happy knowledge that I have moved on. And to Jim Conner, wherever he is today, here’s looking at you, Mickey. 

Hey kids! Here’s a fun mix ‘n match game you can play with your friends! It’s easy and educational, too! Simply take one word from each column and see what you can come up with to achieve the initials “I.N.S.”! Try your own dictionary, too! 

Here are just a few to get you started!

I.diotic N.amby-pamby S.aps

I.diosyncratic N.ameless S.calawags

I.dle N.ondescript S.chnooks

I.nactive N.ecrotic S.arcoma

I.ndifferent N.ever-ending S.anctimoniousness

I.n a N.utshell S.atan

I.nsidious   N.olo-contendere  s.cam

I.mmovable N.eolithic S.phincter-people

I.mmigration  N.evermore S.erviceable 

I.gnorant N.eanderthal S.chysters

I.mprobable N.ewfangled S.amaritans

I.mmediate  N.eedof S.anitarium

I.nattention  N.ecessitating S.chemes

I.nnards N.eed S.nipping

Now you try!

Statement On Purpose

Originally Published: March 4, 2002

Father refused to back down on the sculpture, saying they could consider themselves lucky the Weary Soldier had two arms and two legs, not to mention a head, and that if they didn’t watch out he’d go in for bare-naked realism all the way and the statue would be made of rotting body fragments, of which he had stepped on a good many in his day. As for the inscription, there was nothing willing about the sacrifice, as it had not been the intention of the dead to get themselves blown to Kingdom come. He himself favoured “Lest We Forget,” which put the onus where it should be: on our own forgetfulness. 

  Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin

I am faced with the uncomfortable prospect of having to write an Artist’s Statement. It is for my show next month. It’s not strictly required, but I felt it would be cowardly and unprofessional not to take a stab at it. This is where my first meanderings took me:

Artist’s Statement:

I believe that humanity and inhumanity are the brackets surrounding the equation that is life. 

God, no!…  

 Artist’s Statement:

Do not underestimate the power of suggestion: you will agree that these works possess an insight and beauty the likes of which has not been seen since the Italian Renaissance.

Oh right.

Artist’s Statement:

Any statement would, I feel, inhibit the viewer by imposing upon them the Artist’s will.

Copping-out…

Artist’s Statement:

Is it obvious right about now that this is my first show?

Well, at least that’s honest.

I sit and stare. Do artists really do this? Put into a sentence, or a paragraph, (or onto page after page), why it is that they do what they do? I immediately experience bad flashbacks: applications for Grad school with the page known as Statement of Purpose, or the “Please feed me some bullshit about why you plan to attend our school and waste our time for the next 4 years - and you’d be wise to do it in the amount of time it takes me to finish this cup of cheap swill they call coffee in this sink-hole of an admissions office” page. Let’s be honest and agree that less than 1% of these statements have the slightest basis in truth.

Statement of Purpose:

I want to attend your school because, as an artist, I don’t have a snowballs chance in hell of ever being able to afford my own place. At least this way, when my friends find out I live at home, I can say I’m in Art School, and they’ll think I’m cool instead of an antisocial poser, which is what I think I might actually be. And by the way. my medium is spackling compound, snot, and collage elements taken from TV Guides published between 1978 and 1985 – the years of my tactile awakening on my Mom’s couch while I smoked her Kents and pondered the post-modern irony of One Life to Live.  I can find most of these materials in her shed, so it’s real economical. I think I would be really great at your school and I’m sure I could teach you stuff, too. Let me know when I should show up. August is ok, but September would be better for me.

Lucky for me an Artist’s Statement differs from a Statement of Purpose in several respects: 

1) It is usually shorter. 

2) It is designed for Art teachers, and so can legitimately use words such as

    “texture”, “pithy” and  “whizzbang”. 

3) It is not necessary for all the words to be spelled correctly. 

4) It does not need to be coherent- in fact, this is a detriment. 

My show opens on April 6. By my count, that is 4 weeks from this coming Saturday. This week I am supposed to send the gallery proprietor, a patient and benevolent man named Chas. Carron, my Bio and Statement. The Bio is no problem: just put in the good stuff and gloss over those 6 years it took me to make it through college. The Statement is more problematic. It forces one to analyze impulses one would rather just blindly act upon. I don’t know why the hell I do this! Perhaps Artist’s Statement should be Psychiatrist’s Statement, instead. I am deeply concerned I will sound like a ninny. 

I can say that the 3 figures that are to be the focus of my show are sculptures of human figures that I have integrated with objects I found in our house when we moved in. They were things that had been abandoned by the previous elderly owners. They had raised their children here, kept the garden in much better shape than we are able to, and were active members of the community. I had liked them. It had taken me a long time to feel like the house was no longer theirs. It was so steeped in their history I felt oddly beholden.

We’re getting somewhere, I think. This may lead me down the road towards the Statement. Let’s play a little association, throw in a few words I connect with these pieces and see where they land: 

discard, cast off, left behind, abandoned, story telling, history, connection, significance, choices, acquisition, dismissal, owner, adoption, rebirth, inner life, shadows, echoes, traces, fingerprints…

…self-indulge, self –conscious, self-doubt, self-abuse. Yecch. I need to sleep on this – for 14 or 15 hours.

(Two Days Later)

Having scrawled out a few rough drafts (no, you may not see them) here is my Statement:

Artist’s Statement:

The abandonment of things is as significant as the acquisition of them. I have always felt that cast-off objects, especially common things used for common purposes, retain some imprint of their owners. 

The items in "Everyday Household Objects" had been left in our basement by the elderly couple who owned the house for 35 years. The house was empty and well-kept, yet these things remained behind, clean and carefully placed. I found the lone items oddly inviting. It was as if the couple hadn’t had the heart to actually discard the things, but hoped we might somehow find a use for them. 

I joined – or conjoined - the abandoned objects with human figures, giving them arms and legs, the power of thought - even sexuality. The figures themselves are made from powdered newsprint that once held headlines, personal ads, obituaries. As I worked, I felt most often like a biographer, interpreting someone’s past of which I wasn’t even a part- merely the archivist who comes after.

Scenes From an Event

Originally Published: March 1, 2002

The walkie talkie is heavy in my hand and weighs on my mind. Press-talk? Talk-press? Evelyn? Can you hear me, Evelyn? Where are you? Evelyn? 

Silence. 

Oh what the hell… I end up never finding the Vice Principal on its frequency, but instead race up and down the stairs to monitor the evenings progress. It’s too loud here anyway. I rely on visual confirmation and the occasional yelling into my ear canal.

I pass by the five 1st grade classes who are being shepherded into the hallway to await their turn. The high, tiny voices of the Montessori preschoolers now on stage are competing with the constant din of parents and children in the audience.

“Excuse me – where is little Billy supposed to be? Is his class meeting somewhere?” A frazzled woman has grabbed my forearm. “We really don’t know where he’s supposed to be.” Little Billy looks forlorn and on the verge of tears. I ask him who his teacher is. He mumbles something I cannot hear. His shorn head swivels this way and that, looking for anyone who might resemble a classmate. I motion them confidently in the direction of the multi-purpose room, though in truth, I have no idea where they should be. I glance at my watch – the cafeteria clock has been covered by children’s artwork – and see that we have been going now for 48 minutes.

“We have a situation.” My arm gets tugged over to the wall. A teacher has gone AWOL. Kids are scattered. We decide to jump ahead in the program to the Kindergarteners, who are waiting in our Greenroom – normally the Art Room. They will be performing a Bolivian dance, festooned in heartbreakingly charming costumes.

 1st grade still waits in the hallway, chatting excitedly, wearing paper bag vests and holding large papier maché masks to their faces. They have already been lined up for 20 minutes. The teachers patrol the line like anxious border collies.

A few hours earlier we had been putting the finishing touches on the Visual Arts Gallery upstairs in the library. Last minute entries had us installing art work at 5:00. But Children’s art, in its simplicity and honesty invariably eclipses all the administrative and logistical snafus surrounding Events such as this. Tonight it was the performances that were the unknown. 

Just an hour ago, we’d left the Music Room - which was now the Recital Hall - where young performers would soon be valiantly trying to get their fingers around Bach, the Star Spangled Banner, and Here Comes the Sun. We’d transformed the 1st grade Blue Pod into the “Bistro”, setting up chairs facing the makeshift stage, leaving it poised and ready for kids who would wrestle with their stage fright to perform skits, dances and readings. 

The line of 1st graders has now become restless. There are some signs of hands definitely not being kept to themselves. The teachers shush and reassure and glance toward the stage hopefully. The Kindergarteners are on.

A parent sprints by: “I’ve lost little Billy! He just vanished!” She disappears off into the crowd before I can offer to help.   

I rocket down the stairs to tell the parents that if they want to see their 1st graders perform, they’d better get upstairs. I take over in the Recital Hall and introduce a pretty, giggling 5th grader who performs Vivaldi on the violin. A friend, also giggling, is holding up the two trembling sheets of music, as a stand cannot be located. I miss my own 1st graders performance.

I stride through the school, calling out that all 2nd graders should report to the Art Room. I cannot locate a single one. It later turns out that the teachers have everything under control, with all the kids waiting in the hallway.  Through one of many glitches in the program – our proof reading was inexpert – the 2nd graders were not mentioned. I feel sick and guilty each time a look at these teachers, who seem to be avoiding my glance… 

It’s just after 8:00. The Rhythmic Choir Dance and Choral Ensemble are not where I left them. They are up next and their gold lamé and turquoise robes are nowhere to be seen. I tell a rather panicky-looking 2nd grade teacher that perhaps we can put her class up next. She looks hopeful. Then I spot the tell-tale flash of gold across the room and have to inform the 2nd grade that they will have to wait perhaps 10 - no probably 15 minutes. “Oh God, no!” the now pale teacher stammers as the mob of exhausted kids behind her roil and bubble like an angry sea. In the back of the room I can just make out her co-teacher being engulfed, glasses askew, admonishing and pleading and trying to smile through it all. 

“Do you know when the 3rd graders will be performing?” asks a flushed parent, grabbing my arm a little more tightly than is strictly necessary.  I have to tell him that 3rd grade was scheduled near the end of the evening. I had observed them practicing while I hung the visual arts in the library over the last few days – holding up hand-drawn portraits of American heroes, talking about them in Spanish and English, and finishing with a rousing chorus of God Bless America. 

My watch now says 8:20. The Bistro and Music rooms are almost done with their performances. The Main Stage is going slower than we’d expected.

Little Billy ricochets through the hallways with a bunch of stray kids who have been dropped off at the school by parents unable or unwilling to attend the festivities.

“The kids are tired!” hisses a parent, glaring at me owlishly from her slouched position near the wall. She taps sharply on her watch. I turn away so my impatience doesn’t show, and resist the urge to say, “Well, duh!”  It is late.

The husband of one of the organizing parents is shifting from one foot to the other in the standing room only space. He is roasting in his overcoat that protected him from the 25º weather outside. The sheer number of bodies packed into the small space of the cafeteria has raised the temperature to mid-summer conditions. A parent he does not know, by way of making conversation, asks loudly over the noise if he has a kid that goes to the school. The husband stares at the man and laughs good-naturedly. He would stand in this airless sauna after a long day at work and no dinner for anyone other than his own child? 

Finally, after some ruffled feathers about who gets to be on stage next, the last group plays an instrumental piece that sounds quite beautiful – aided certainly by the fact that many families have left and oxygen is again flowing. 

Just after 9:00 it is all over. Parents are filtering out into the cold night, sucking in the air gratefully. Kids are punchy and still find the energy to play tag on the way to their cars. Those of us left inside - parents, Principal, teachers, a few kids - put away chairs. 

Some parents congratulate us on the Event. I stare back at them in blank amazement. But then I think, it’s true – no matter how many details were imperfect, no matter how many noses got put out of joint, no matter how hot or stuffy the place, it is, in the end, the kids that justify the means.  It’s the kids who have the ability to cut through all the static and just love every moment of their opportunity to bask in the glow of their parent’s admiration. And it’s also true that in a few weeks, that is all any of us will remember.

Memoir: El Negrito y la Niña Part 3

Originally published: February 21,  2002 

This is the last in a 3 part series.

During my time at the jewelry store, the climate of violence in and around the city of Bogotá dissuaded people from leaving their homes except for essentials. Rumors flew. One terrified woman, who had come into the store to pick up her jewelry, whispered that the narco traffickers were going to poison the water supply. She hurried out of the store, glancing right and left lest Pablo Escobar be lurking in the mall. 

There was talk of bombings: some based on legitimate evidence, some on wild speculation. Each threat sounded as credible as the next, leading to a generalized brewing panic. One Saturday afternoon, we closed up the store and fled after a well-connected client tipped us off that the bomb squad was at that moment trying to defuse a car bomb right outside our mall. This was true, a haggard looking Eldest confirmed when we opened for business on Monday. Still another time, as we stood in the store with a few customers, a bomb exploded three blocks away. It rocked the center, sucking at the plate glass windows, bowing them into the mall, the glass arching outward into the vacuum before the force released them to wobble- miraculously unbroken- back inward.

Business suffered terribly. The Sons could be seen taping the inside of the windows – to minimize the shrapnel should they shatter inward. They fitted removable steel shutters to the outside, to deter thieves and vandals if a bomb hit the center in the dead of night. Those of us inside the store watched and waited and had yet another tiny cup of coffee while the afternoons wore on into early evenings. As there were very few customers, there was not much for the niñas to do. Now we turned our eyes nervously to the door at the once common sounds of the city - backfires and jackhammers, the shuddering passing of a huge truck and the airy shriek of bus brakes.  

When at last Pablo Escobar was captured, the country could finally relax, at least temporarily. The devil was finally behind bars, which was a great improvement to daily life. We didn’t yet know that “bars” was just a figure of speech. Escobar was housed in a luxuriously equipped compound, from where the infamous drug lord would conduct his business without much interference. Later, of course, he would escape, and soon thereafter, he would be gunned down on a rooftop, his chubby hide riddled with police bullets.

 But that was yet to come. For the time, people were celebrating his capture and thinking about life returning to normal. Business picked up and the spring was back in the steps of the Sons. 

 I began to grow impatient and bored as the months wore on. The days were endless and I felt under utilized. I began to feel like a niña. After a rather heated exchange with Eldest – which resulted in a chagrined apology on my part – it was decided I would supervise the outfitting of the new in-house casting studio. I would also create new designs for the ever-popular (ever-dull) Equestrian line. The Brothers warned me that with this new responsibility, I would be required to spend much time in the workshop, with the common laborers, the Indios, who, they informed me, were a rough and dishonest crowd. Yes, I would need to watch my back, nodded Youngest, with satisfaction. 

And so it was that I came to work with Francisco, the stone setter, in his separate space in the glass cage, adrift in the sea of lathes, work benches, compressed gas cylinders, bent backs and busy hands smudged and blackened by polishing compound and gold filings.

Day after day, the store had smelled clean and pampered: lingering blends of cigarette smoke, coffee- old and new - and an ever-changing wind of aggressive perfumes that accompanied each new customer, male or female. In the workshop, I felt content with the consistently utilitarian smell I associated with my time as a goldsmith: a pungent brew of sweat, heated chemicals, oil of wintergreen, and simmering discontent. 

Francisco had endless patience with my Spanish, correcting my errors simply and without condescension. The depths of his black eyes, which I studied as often as I could when I looked up from my work, were steady and alert, yet full of dreams. His hands, I often thought, were too small for the tools he was required to use. The battered pliers stretched his fingertips so far from his callused thumb it utterly flattened his palm. I imagined he must have tremendous strength in those hands – that, or he was a very haphazard stone setter. Both were true, I think. Francisco had never been properly trained – that is to say, he’d never had a European apprenticeship. Where he’d learned his craft, I never asked. We rarely spoke about jewelry, even as out fingers worked obediently away on the stuff as we spoke. 

One afternoon, as we worked, Francisco told me he had something for me, and withdrew from his stained backpack a flyer, rolled up and slightly flattened in his bag, damp from the perpetual Bogotá drizzle of that October. It was an invitation to a poetry reading he had organized: “Fue la Palabra – lectura de poesia”. It was taking place that evening at the bar, Buscando America. The address was so far south in the city, I didn’t even recognize it – the north of Bogotá is where the wealthier, whiter people collect, and the south - the south held the sprawl of poorer neighborhoods, beyond which lay the outer edges of the ever-growing city. I vaguely knew these were areas where taxi drivers would charge you extra to go, neighborhoods with names like Ciudad Bolívar, and Minuto de Dios – Minute of God- where the inhabitants went without water or power because they were not recognized neighborhoods of Bogotá. Instead, they were disorganized clusters of desperate squatters with no where else to go. 

The beautiful, sepia-tone graphic on Francisco’s invitation showed God, as seen on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but rather than reaching out his right finger to Adam, he was instead grasping a quill and writing in a large book. I stammered my thanks to Francisco and awkwardly put the flyer in my bag.

But I did not go. I told myself it was too late, too far away, too daunting to find the place in this huge city. I told myself I was intimidated, that I wouldn’t have understood most of it anyway, that poetry wasn’t my thing. He’d just invited me to be polite and would be embarrassed if I actually showed up. I told myself that after work I was just too tired, that I was busy, that the cat needed to be fed. 

Next day, as he worked sleepily at his bench, Francisco accepted my apology with a smile and looked at me without criticism. Graciously, he did not tell me if he’d been disappointed, and work went on as usual. But I sensed something had changed – not on Francisco’s part, but in me. I sat next to him for the rest of the day and felt ashamed at my cowardice – for that’s what it had been. 

Although the owners of the jewelry store thought well enough of Francisco – when they gave him any thought at all - they certainly had no interest in the poetry of a black stone setter. The Negrito was a comical, if mysterious little man who, to their gratification, seemed a little better behaved than the rest of his sort. He spoke well and quietly, they noted, even dressed a little better than those others. He was remarkably clean, too, they said, this little Bohemian. They never knew and never asked if he preferred the name Francisco to the common nickname of Pacho. He confided to me that he did. It would not have occurred to the family to use anything but a diminutive when speaking to him. Francisco didn’t look angry when he told me – he went about his business of setting a small emerald, gently cutting away at the seat under the prongs with a sharp graver. I never saw him angry in the short time I knew him. He’d just get quiet. Looking at his proud, small profile, I saw absolutely no hope for him in his situation. His quick mind and spirit would languish forever in this glass prison, and he might even forget who he was and, in the end, become the negrito they all thought he was. 

 ***

Back in the US a little more than a year later, I gathered up and sent Francisco an admissions packet, including financial aid information, from Stanford University. I knew at the time it was probably a useless gesture, but I did it anyway. I didn’t know his home address, so I sent it to the jewelry store. I wish I could have seen the expressions of surprise on their faces as they examined the weighty envelope. I wonder if they bothered to give it to him.

That was all ten years ago now. I visited Bogotá once in that time, but did not go the store. I meant to, but somehow never found myself at its familiar doors. Part of me was afraid I’d still find Francisco there in his glass cage. If he was, I didn’t want to know.

 Wherever he is now, I hope he is still Francisco and not Pacho. We had a strange friendship, a delicate one that existed for a short time in the small confines of the stone setting room, where he sat with his gravers and pliers, and I with my beeswax and needle files. I was the niña, and he the Negrito, though we were neither. 

Memoir: El Negrito y la Niña Part 2

Originally published: February 13, 2002

This is the second in a 3 part series.

Weeks went by. My Spanish was improving daily, thanks largely to a co-worker named Gertie, who not only showed endless patience with me, but who did me the honor of teaching me the current Bogotáno slang, as well as many rather off-color words and phrases. Squinting behind the smoke from her cigarettes, she would correct my use and pronunciation of these and nod in satisfaction when it all came together correctly. 

But I still stumbled in my comprehension, especially when trying to understand fast-speaking clients, and I would blush with shame each time I brought out something from the back they had not asked to see. More than once, having caught the word “watch” in a rapid-fire sentence, I had dutifully trudged back out to the sales floor with a weighty tray of new Concords, Rolexes and Diors from the safe, only to be greeted by a puzzled stare, often turning to thinly disguised amusement from the customer as I realized they’d come not to purchase, but simply to pick up their watch that was in for repair. If Gertie was on the floor, she would try to preempt such moments, but she was often smoking in the back, and so I was left to squirm. 

Saturdays were my best days, when, for a change, I worked harder than any of the others. That’s when groups from the US Embassy would make their pilgrimage to the store. They earned additional hazard pay in dangerous, war-torn Colombia, and often came on the weekend to spend their dollars in a place they trusted and where there was always good coffee, someone to listen to their gossip, and an armed guard at the door. Some of them were calm, adventurous souls who made an attempt at the language, appreciated the culture, and took good advantage of their two year stint. But there were others – the brazen ones who showed up in their casual weekend warm-up suits that they never sweated in, who gripped their dollars fiercely and wheedled extra discounts and sat in the soft leather chairs as if they owned the place. I enjoyed taking their money – all of them – but I particularly savored making a sale to the most objectionable of their kind as they shrewdly scanned the trays of jewelry. Somehow, extracting their money helped me convince myself of my separateness from them. 

But most of the time I didn’t know where I belonged, either culturally or professionally. I felt the owners of the store had little idea of what to do with me. I was foreign, I was trained and educated, I had strong opinions about what I would and would not do, which was outside the realm of their experience with their niñas – their girls, their saleswomen. When I expressed bafflement to Gertie about the use of the word “niña” to refer to all their female employees, she exhaled a long column of smoke, and shrugged at me with a non-comprehending smile – “niña” was fine with her, as long as she was paid and well treated. I had hit a cultural rift. 

I refused outright to wear the uniforms. These had been designed by the Matriarch of the family. Matriarch was a severe woman with dyed, crisply helmeted hair. When she strode into the store, the powerful wake that veed out behind the tailored suit unnerved us. Even her Sons, all of whom towered over her, would bend and scrape in her presence. She had seen to it a few years earlier that her niñas all had sensible, sexless, and identical clothing while representing her family. She had even bought extra bolts of the fabric with which to have replacement items made should the old ones wear out. Mondays it was a brown skirt and a flowered blouse. Tuesdays, an olive-drab skirt and an off-white blouse with a flaccid yet asphyxiating bow at the neck. On Wednesdays, a black skirt and a polka-dot blouse. On Thursdays, it was back to the brown skirt, this time matched with a jaundiced yellow blouse. And so on. The Sons eventually accepted my refusal of the uniform – I was different after all, a little exotic with my accent and my navy blue passport. Matriarch could never swallow my little rebellion, and would occasionally announce it was high time I got fitted. I took to wearing clothes that were similar to the daily uniform, but different– thus camouflaged, I maintained – or pretended I maintained - my obstinate singularity. 

One of the few non-niñas who worked on the sales floor – aside from the Brothers themselves when a client would show up and demand to see one them - was a tiny, shriveled almost entirely deaf old gentleman. He wore an ancient brown suit that clung to his bent spine and fell limply off his rib cage. My only memory of him – he retired soon after I began working there - was watching him hunched at his desk, coughing weakly into the cloud of insecticide he was spraying into an antique wooden clock. “To kill the worms!” he wheezed at me with a gummy smile, before his gnarled finger depressed the aerosol nozzle again, propelling more spray into the corners of the sodden clock. He didn’t seem to have any regular customers at all, and spent his days tinkering at his desk, or gazing with pale, watery eyes out the window into the deserted mall. The Brothers never spoke ill of him, and always treated him with respect.

Afternoons were endless. While sipping our third or fourth cup of afternoon coffee - brought to us at regular intervals by a careworn beauty named Laura, who also emptied our wastebaskets and ashtrays, and scrubbed the bathroom - the conversation turned one day from the problems of Colombia to the problems of the US. As I worked on some sketches a little way down the counter, I heard it to be generally agreed in that small circle, that racism was terrible in North America, and that thank God, with all Colombia’s other problems, at least that wasn’t one of them.  There were no race riots, no uprisings, no talk of bigotry and inequality. No talk at all, as far as they knew, among the non-white population.

This lead to discussion on the non-white population in general. A squat woman with a tenacious lisp and squinting, rheumy eyes muttered that she preferred the Indios to the Blacks. Blinking at the group of identical flowered blouses - it was a Monday - she confided that she did not like the way los Negros smelled, there was an odor about their skin, she said, shuddering, that she couldn’t abide. Didn’t know just what it was, she mused as she stirred her coffee demurely, her pinky cocked like a dog’s hind leg, but it was intolerable. Her heavy, jutting jaw with it’s ruined teeth allowed a delicate smile and she put her cup down, saying she must get back to her stone sorting. She stumped up the stairs on her swollen legs, clutching the rickety handrail and belching softly.

I found that her views were not exceptional. The Patriarch of the family had, I assumed by his name, his accent, and his age, grown up in pre-war Germany. At what age he had come to South America, and fleeing what demons or retributions or trials, I did not know. He had initially been very kind and welcoming to me, as I struggled to improve my Spanish, speaking to me in a booming, lightly accented English. He was the embodiment of Old World charm, I thought, and I was glad on the rare occasion he would come into the store. 

But I began to notice things about Patriarch. In one conversation, he appeared shocked and amused to discover I was a Democrat, and he had looked at me strangely, as though considering me for the first time. Several times after that, he engaged me in increasingly uncomfortable discussions, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to ferret out my opinions. I began to notice how very fat he was.

One morning, I was cornered again in conversation by him, his cerulean eyes glittering like shattered glass. A comb-full of hair clung obediently to his head, as did the six pre-cancerous moles, which, like foot prints, tiptoed up to its shiny summit. I was backed up against the wrap desk, as he spoke, all the while smiling and confiding. His wool vest puckered under the stress of trying to stay buttoned. He told me about the Blacks, about the Indios, how they were incorrigible, how there were fundamental differences between us - the whites - and them. He told me how it was with the Jews. 

I looked back at him with my blond hair, my blue eyes, and knew that my Jewish heritage was not obvious in me. 

So I decided to tell him, as his deep voice bore down upon me, as that retaining wall of a vest came nearer and nearer, that I was Jewish. 

It was a lie, really. I am only half a Jew, if that phrase has any meaning at all. My father is Jewish, and although his mother Matilda continued to attend her Synagogue until her death, she and her husband Henry had never exactly followed through on their only son’s religious studies. In fact years later, we discovered he’d been confirmed but had never had his Bar Mitzvah.  My parents are atheists – although I suspect my father harbors his own secret doubts about the non-existence of God. My upbringing was schizophrenic in that regard. Shelves lined with books on the history of the Jews, Jewish lore, Yiddish dictionaries, and jokes. As a family, we revered Jewish comedians and humor, incorporating into our very souls the wit of the Marx Brothers, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Allan Sherman. Several times a week, my father would come home from the hospital, where he was a physician, with fresh jokes. These he’d learn from his contemporaries, several of them part of a dying breed who still spoke fluent Yiddish.

So yes, technically I lied to Patriarch when I said I was Jewish. Half doesn’t count, especially from the paternal side. But I was in the odd position of being able to shock this man whose father or uncle might, under different circumstances, have shoveled my grandparents into the ovens without a second thought. I felt I had the right at that moment to borrow a part of my buried identity and bring forth my inner Jew.  

I said the words. I said, “That’s interesting, you know, because I’m Jewish.” There was a moments pause – just the barest moment – then the immense vest pushed away from me, the buttons slightly askew, the material creased and frowning. His conversation seamlessly veered away elsewhere, and soon he turned to exit the store, passing the armed security guard at a very brisk pace for such a very fat man.

End of part 2. 

Memoir: El Negrito y la Niña Part 1

Originally Published: February 7, 2002

This is the first in a 3 part series.

Francisco was a small man with a ticking restlessness, whose state of poverty rarely affected his affability. He remained intact, even while being reprimanded by the white men who employed him. When called into their presence, his soul would seem to politely absent his dark eyes. His voice, a soft, ranging woodwind, became prudently atonal. I can picture his ironed shirt angling off his narrow outline as they berated him, the starched cotton exuding a mutinous nudge of sassiness.

I knew him for less than a year starting in the summer of 1989 while living in Bogotá. Sitting side by side in the cramped workshop, he a stone setter and I a goldsmith, Francisco and I labored on the same side of the thick glass that separated us from the others. There were 8 or so furtive, muttering jewelers, who slid occasional glances at us - the odd couple. But Francisco and I spoke about art and music, film, literature and the world, and I got to listen to his gentle laugh. His light hammer tapped against the steel punch, coaxing a bezel over the curve of a stone. I always looked forward to my afternoons with Francisco, the anticipation of which made my workday bearable.

He was a delicate young man – even the owners of the business saw that. They’d set him apart from the rest of the workshop lest the hooligans abuse him. Truth was, they all got along fine, the workers saving their bitterness for their employers. The owners, in turn, constantly feared thievery, and it was a fact that Francisco worked with expensive gems. By separating their stone setter from the general riff-raff that handled the less elite aspects of jewelry making, they’d know who to blame if a gem went missing. Blame was an important thing – with blame went punishment, and that was always an effective deterrent to other would-be thieves. It was important, the owners often said, to know how to handle these people - the Indios and the Blacks.

The business, a retail jewelry store, was situated on the upper level of a decaying indoor mall, part of a bleak perimeter surrounding an escalator that operated fitfully, and then, never with both sides working simultaneously. Sullen clerks haunted the shops, slouching against doorways, arms supporting elbows as they inspected the smoke from their cigarettes. Their eyes would wander to the only thing in view that was likely to be moving – the bent and toothless old women whose job it was to polish the pocked marble floors. Back and forth the battered machine would sweep over footprints left by the clerks themselves - no customer had passed that way in days. The floors were littered with smashed cigarettes and the old woman with the polisher simply swept the butts off to the side, no longer bothering to pick them up.

“Se Arrienda”-for rent- signs were taped to many of the windows that had once looked in on thriving businesses. The bomb that went off the previous week just around the corner, taking with it a prominent emerald dealer and several innocent bystanders, had finally compelled the mall administration to seal off all but one of the double glass doors that opened into the lower level. Inside and out, all benches and trash cans had been removed, to lessen the temptation to hide explosives in or near them, and the public rest rooms were closed until further notice. It was not an inviting place to shop.

The finicky escalator deposited its passengers where the jewelry store and its affiliated unmarked workshop were situated. The sales people and other higher-eschelon employees would turn left, go past the armed doorman and into the store. The obreros – workers like Francisco – would turn right, and knock on the door of the workshop. The two were separated by a narrow, now gutted travel agency. 

The retail store itself was an elegant place where tourists, braving the cavernous mall, came to choose their emeralds and 18k gold reproductions of ancient indigenous designs. These shiny replicas originated from the excavations of cultures with exotic names like Tiarona, Guimbaya, Tumaco, Sinu. The local population of non-Indian Bogotanos - the established upper crust and nouveau riche alike - preferred the equestrian baubles that targeted the country club set, while the occasional Mafioso with time on his hands, might stop by to ogle the Rolexes.

Through an odd set of circumstances I found myself an employee of this family owned business. Since my arrival in Bogotá, my stint teaching English at the language institute Interlingua had proven unsatisfactory – the paltry salary did not seem equal to the amount of work that went into preparing the classes, nor did I enjoy the teaching. I found that maneuvering myself around the city to get to the on-site classes more of a risk than I was prepared to take, given the cannibalistic nature of the drivers. Most of them were unsympathetic to the natural frailty of pedestrians and their plight in a city where sidewalks, at least in those days, were the exception.

There was also the issue of my permanent visa and work permit – neither of which I yet possessed. Some employers were particular – others were not. Interlingua proved to be of the second variety, and was thrilled to have a native English speaker, regardless of her legal status.

But within a few weeks, I wanted out. The students were rich and whiny, or fawning and overly chummy, or simply careless - all too smug in the knowledge that their employer was paying for the classes and giving them time off to attend. Whether they studied or not was immaterial. Worst of all, when confronted with the occasional earnest student, I found myself too transparently unlearned to explain why the duplicitous English language was the way it was.

My chance to leave came, strangely, from one of the Interlingua administrators, a middle-aged Dutch woman with brightly aggressive English, who seemed to begin every sentence with a perky, “Let’s do saaamething…” before dishing out her orders - as if anyone had a say in the outcome after that broad “a” neutered any hope of negotiations. She told me that a friend of hers had married into the ruling family of one of the finest jewelry stores in the city. She’d known from my resume that I was a goldsmith, and suggested, with a curt, business-like smile, that I call one of the sons for an interview. It was clearly a delicate way of severing our relationship by getting me hired elsewhere. I had the feeling that she, as an Interlingua lifer, was jealous I was getting out while still young.

***

I was trying desperately not to spill my tiny cup of strong, black coffee all over my blouse and skirt as I faced the three smiling yet bemused faces of the Sons. The Eldest spoke to me in English, sizing me up with polite, intelligent suspicion, his shrewd eyes glinting behind his glasses. Middle son, handsome, flirtatious, and in charge of the financial end of the business, was grinning roguishly across the conference table, like a pirate about to board a captured vessel. Youngest son, my age exactly and who walked with the spoiled swagger of one who is confident of his place in Mother’s favor, fired questions at me in rapid, lazy Spanish. He drawled in a way that forced me to ask him to repeat himself several times, which he did with mock patience. He, too, wore glasses, but kept his head tilted back, looking, quite literally, down his nose at me, asking finally why my nails weren’t shorter and my hands dirtier if I was a goldsmith. My explanation that I had not done any goldsmithing in the 6 months I’d been in Colombia, appeared barely to satisfy him. He seemed to object to me on principal, his blue eyes narrowing at my responses in both Spanish and English. He had recently married and his tight shirt collar hinted that he had lately added some newlywed poundage about which he was both proud and embarrassed. All three men smoked, but only Eldest constantly had a cigarette going, his thick fingers tapping it thoughtfully into the crystal ashtray as he spoke.

They hired me. I was to begin immediately. They would use me both on the sales floor and as a designer. Eldest and Middle shook me firmly by the hand, smiling warmly, looking still as if they weren’t sure what they’d do with this gringa who dropped into their laps, but hopeful they’d just stumbled onto something that might prove lucrative. Youngest told me he and I would be working closely together and did not smile as he shook my hand.

 End of part 1.

Dressing for the Theater

Originally Published: January 30, 2002

Let’s just say there is no less fuss about what to wear to a show nowadays than there used to be. Satin, velvet, theater-length gloves and opera glasses are rare, but the statement one’s going-out clothes and accessories make about one’s place in society is equally vital. It’s just that now the language is coarser and there is much less fabric involved.

I don’t go to a lot of theater these days – have seen almost nothing since moving to the DC area. This is not a reflection on the quality of theater in the nation’s capital; it’s a reality of having three kids and a budget that may have a modest column for Legos, but not, sadly, for the lively arts.

My friend Nancy had invited me to my first adult theater experience since leaving the west. It was so adult in fact that Ticketmaster warned ABSOLUTELY NO CHILDREN were allowed. An obvious caution, really, when one is buying tickets for The Vagina Monologues. But then, some parents are more permissive than others, I guess.

How does one dress for The Vagina Monologues, I wondered? Jeans, flannel, and work boots perhaps being a tad obvious - and more West Coast in flavor. A skirt was too… femmy. No make-up was a given, and I could pretty much leave my hair as it was. My uncertainty lay in the deceptive simplicity – how easy it would be to underestimate the task and show up looking either like a lesbian wanna-be or a tourist. Alas, it was unseasonably warm, so just hiding under a black overcoat would not bail me out.

Ridiculous, perhaps, to dress so carefully for an event at which I will know no one. The problem is my unsatisfied theatrical aspirations. I get a kind of backstage mentality. I secretly want to be on the other side of the proscenium arch, with the great and powerful wizard. I long to be part of that marvelous family. The illusion, if it is successful, becomes its own kind of reality with the audience, which leaves an actor with a feeling of indescribable power. I had my chance, but left acting behind in college because I determined finally that I did not like actors – whining, self-serving, soul-sucking flakes, I told myself. That as may be, the truth is, I chickened out.

But back to the question of what to wear to an historically significant theatrical event at which I would be invisible.

I wanted to costume myself in a way befitting the mood of the show. The problem was, I didn’t know much about The Vagina Monologues. I knew its author, Eve Ensler, the 1999 Guggenheim fellow in playwriting, was performing them herself, and that it was hugely successful around the country. I knew that HBO had recently filmed it. And that was the extent of my knowledge.

I settled on black wool pants, dark gray zip-up shirt-jacket, chunky mid-size heels, and a wool scarf. Simple, unadorned, confident, sexually ambiguous. Just right.

It was as if I’d bought the uniform. At the National Theater there must have been hundreds of women dressed like me. But delightfully, there were just as many dressed differently. There were older male-female couples in their Washington work-day suits, multiply-pierced young women in low rise pants with midriff exposing T-shirts, lesbian couples in chic professional wear, male and female students from GW, with their backpacks, lip studs and their respectably punked-out hair, there were wo/men, there were mothers and daughters and aunts and cousins. It was an enthusiastic crowd.

The show was wickedly funny, intermittently tragic, and surprisingly educational. “Empowering” is a ghastly word, which I write here only because I am sure some have used it to describe the piece – I would say simply “encouraging”. If you have not seen it, and the various euphemisms for women’s sexual organs do not appall you (the nomenclature “vagina” is just the tip of the iceberg, my friend) I urge you to do so, either on stage, or on Valentine’s Day when it will air on HBO.

The playbill states, “The world tour of The Vagina Monologues initiated V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women.” Ensler has raised millions of dollars nationally and internationally in this cause. There was something fiendishly rewarding about ducking out of Bush’s state of the union address in order to participate in this kind of war on terrorism (Eve Ensler has her own vaginally-inspired ideas about how to ferret out the Taliban).

Today I am back to wearing my usual jeans and shirt, and notice, sheepishly, that I would have been just as welcome at the Vagina Monologues dressed as I am, that I wasted a considerable about of energy fretting about a costume I didn’t need in order to fit in. Eve Ensler, after all, wore no costume at all, only a plain black slip and black polish on the toes of her bare feet. Sometimes, I realize, costumes can hide all the wrong things.

Dust to Dust

Originally Published: January 23, 2002

Dust is the weirdest thing.

Even the word is weird if you look at it too long. Truncated and dry, like a cough.

I’ve heard it’s largely made up of the dead skin cells we slough off. As if thinking of it as just dirt wasn’t appetizing enough. 

I’m ruminating on dust right now because these last few days I’ve been trying to eradicate it from my house. In preparation for a party we’re having on Saturday. Somewhere it is written than one is supposed to dust before having guests over. And vacuum and wash and oil and scrub and disinfect.

Then we are supposed to pretend that we live like this all the time.

Strange, I think, as I wipe over a lampshade, that having a party can shame me into doing what my son’s asthma cannot.

His wheezing used to get pretty bad, and he’d crawl for his inhaler, pumping it into his lungs to open up the tiny bronchioles the dust had infiltrated. I used to wish I could do something to help him. Something besides dusting, I mean.

I’m supposed to be on top of the whole dust thing because it is one of his strongest triggers. His pediatrician, a gullible but otherwise brilliant woman, believes me to be the kind of reliable asthmatic’s mother with whom she can collaborate in order to effectively treat his chronic disease. She believes I dust and vacuum his room daily and that I wash the mattress and pillow casings weekly in hot water to kill the nasty dust mites whose excreta causes his histamine to go haywire. She believes I long ago threw away all his stuffed animals – the furry ones that are built-in dust magnets. She believes I love my child enough to do these things. It isn’t that I don’t love him enough to take these steps – not exactly. Yes, I dust, vacuum, and wash. It’s just the “daily” and “weekly” pieces I tend to dismiss as “overkill”. Leaving aside the minor inconvenience of his not being able to breathe, I know he will love me despite the dust.

Can the same claim be made of my guests? Would dust preclude their affection? Doubt urges me on, and I stab the duster through the gaps in the stair rails and swipe it over the molding.

I remind myself that my son’s asthma is much improved. I like to think that had I followed doctor’s orders and battled with the dust each day, he never would have “toughened up”. I imagine cloudy little Pig-Pen antibodies coursing through his veins. “Mother does know best,” I mutter, breathing a deep sigh of relief – and coughing delicately in the billowing dust cloud from the sofa I am vacuuming.

Personally, dust doesn’t bother me much. It’s embarrassing how much it fails to bother me, actually. I grew up in a dusty house. This is no criticism of my mother – in fact, I am grateful she demonstrated to me just how easy it was, not just to ignore dust, but to appreciate it. Dust can provide a protective coating on fine china. It can serve as thrifty sound absorption for improved domestic acoustics. It can let a child know if a sibling has disturbed a valued yet long- stationary toy. It can provide loads of atmosphere.

Come to think of it, I may have done my first sketches in the dust around my home. You might say it was my medium. That is very advanced, very conceptual stuff: Dust as history, cloaking random canvasses, into which the artist delves with an idle finger, interpreting the past, present and future in the cast off remnants our flesh. Look out MFA, here I come!

Thinking now in an artistic vein, it occurs to me, as I knock my head on the underside of a table I am running a damp cloth over, that I have been throwing away money needlessly. Why should I fork over more than $20 each time I need a 5lb bag of the gray, powdered papier maché I use for my sculptures? Why should I be supporting the hoity-toity art store fascists - who snatch the very bread from the mouths of artists - when I can use good old household dust? Mix in a little water – or perhaps some other liquid by-product that might otherwise go to waste! – and presto! Perhaps I could even harvest dust! Open the windows, get a menagerie of hairy pets, remove the filters from the furnace and let it blow, let it blow, let it blow! I could display all the thousands of useless little knick-knacks I possess and let them do what they do best – gather dust! Ah for the days of the dust bowl! The poor shortsighted Okies had no idea the riches they left behind when they trundled off to California and to ruin.

Isn’t it strange where one’s thoughts take one while dusting, and with whom one will share them…

Well, what’s the point anyway. The dust in my house never really cooperates when I try to give it the old heave-ho. It just flies into the air like a ghostly swarm of gnats and alights again on some new surface. The futility of it is maddening - or could be - if one didn’t admit from the start that the term “dusting” implies redistribution, rather than removal.

I, for one, am going to put away my rags and call it a day. I think it is time we made peace with dust. Anyone at the party – bosses, co-workers, relatives - will just have to get into the spirit of things. After all, what are a few dead skin cells between friends? 

Indignation: Righteous or Wrong

Originally Published: January 16, 2002

It’s the bathroom one no one else knows is there because it’s so well hidden. One has to go through a glass door, down a narrow hallway, through a sort of lounge area, and find it on the right, past the tidy kitchenette. The tennis teachers tell the kids to use this bathroom because it’s faster and safer than asking a kid to go all the way down 4 floors to the locker rooms by him or herself.

Apart from paranoid adult concerns about letting a child wander around a locker room unattended, it is an awful lot to ask a child to carry a full bladder so far, especially when he or she has probably waited until the last possible second to empty it. So the logical solution was the one the teachers chose: use the closest bathroom.

Which is just what Sebastian did last weekend, dutifully, right before his tennis class was to start.

The portion of the tennis area behind that glass door is devoted to Court Tennis. When I say, “devoted to” I really mean “obsessed with”. For those of you who are under 100, Court Tennis, or Real Tennis as it is called, is a recently revived form of antiquated tennis. It dates back to the Greeks and Romans, and was mentioned by Chaucer, Erasmus, Shakespeare, and a slew of other overly educated sports fans. It is a strange, often unfathomable game that is played indoors on a closed court that has a roof, or “penthouse” off of which one rolls the ball when serving. The balls are hand-made, and much heavier and harder than modern tennis balls. The rackets, or “bats” are kidney bean shaped, and of heavy wood - there is only one manufacturer worldwide. The net dips down in the middle, and there is a gutter under it for collecting balls. The scoring is incomprehensible, involving yard-lines, chases and lots of math. The court itself is 1 1/2 times longer than a regular tennis court, and as wide as a doubles court. There are only10 courts in the US, 2 of them on the East Coast. Only one of the ten courts is open to the public. It is not exactly a game of the people.

I know just a little about it because Adolfo and I were invited to play a few months ago by an avid enthusiast of the game. He was thrilled to include us, and was adorable. He’d even invited Sebastian to play. He told us candidly that he was not trying to get us to join the Court Tennis club – he just wanted to initiate more players into the sport. He was like an enthusiastic puppy. We felt favorably disposed toward any game that would garner such a plucky emissary.

We figured out quickly, though, that he was the exception. The next “emissary” we met was a stiff, platinum-haired man in spotless tennis whites with the immediately detestable name of “Haven”. I remember his eyes quickly flickering over our grubby non-whites. He had shaken hands and smiled with dazzlingly white teeth, but I had the impression he knew we weren’t about to spring for a double membership. Our puppy friend eyed Haven as he walked off and growled that he was a colossal snob. He was also president of the club. We left the court, feeling we’d enjoyed our little foray into the past, but would in future be content playing unreal tennis with the plebes.

So back to Sebastian and his immediate need. He pulled open the glass door and tried to enter the sanctity of the Court Tennis area.

“Young man, can’t you read?” came a gruff adult voice. A man in tennis whites (who in my imagination is Haven, though it’s really just an educated guess) was blocking Sebastian’s path. “Why don’t you try reading that sign posted on the outside of the door?” he’d said, coldly, not moving an inch.

Sebastian, embarrassed, retreated through the door and dutifully read the sign. It stated that use of the Court Tennis lounge and bathroom, was strictly “for Members only”.

Humiliated and fuming, he stalked down 4 flights of stairs to the locker rooms. He was therefore late for his class, which he sulked through, angrily wiping away the tears of the betrayed.

Later this lead to a discussion on the nature of fairness and the taking of the ever elusive High Road. Adolfo and I agreed calmly that certainly, this guy was a rude, snobbish bully. That understood, Sebastian could then dismiss him from his mind. He was simply not worth ruining his tennis class or his day over. But in a kid’s world, fairness is non-negotiable. It is hard to explain to a child, especially a child who generally plays by the rules, that sometimes you have to let injustice go unpunished: sometimes the bad guy wins a hand or two. The old cliché “pick your battles” came out more than once. Sebastian was somewhat mollified, but he was not really satisfied. The righteous are never wrong.

But as if on cue, three days later, I found a shining example of true injustice, an incident that embodied the battle that should be picked and fought.

In Marc Fisher’s Washington Post column of Tuesday, Feb. 15, he told the story of an 8 year-old boy, a good student and avid reader, who had accidentally grabbed his mother’s house keys before dashing to the bus. In the bathroom at school, while digging in his pocket for a tissue, the keys had fallen out. Two boys in the bathroom with him looked at the keys, to which was attached a pair of nail clippers and said, “You brought a pocket knife!” The boy said no, they were just his mom’s nail clippers. Nevertheless, the boys told the teacher, who then told the principal. The principal send a letter home to the boy's mom saying her son was, “ found in possession of a dangerous object. The most dangerous object being a 2 inch blade.”

Go to your bedside table and get out your $ 0.99 nail clippers. By no stretch of the imagination does that file measure 2”. Amazingly, the principal recommended expulsion from Montgomery County Public Schools. The mother had never even met the principle until the day she received the expulsion notice. In the end, the confused county decided to allow the boy to return to school. The column ends with the mother, Teshina, saying, “‘How it got this far and this out of control is beyond me,’…her son looked up silently at her, holding her hand for dear life.”

I summarized the story for the Sebastian and his brothers, who were eating their breakfasts. They were duly outraged. I reminded Sebastian about our conversation regarding when to stand up for your rights, and when to let a wrong pass. This, we agreed, was a time where it was important to stand up. Sebastian stewed awhile, obviously indignant on behalf of the boy, and swirled his milk with his spoon. “You’d think,” he said finally, “that principal probably has a Ph.D. or something. How is it that she couldn’t tell the difference between a knife and a nail clipper? She must be really stupid.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that that wasn’t the worst of her stupidity. Spinelessness, mindless cleaving to the letter of the law and simple brute prejudice. These are far worse traits. But he’s got enough to digest for now. Those lessons can wait for another day.

Dog Gone

Originally Published: Dec. 26, 2001

The stores have it all wrong.

They design their ad campaigns around cheer and joy and the kind of inner peace that can only come from tearing the wrapping paper off the latest model geegaw. They show families crooning toothily over the roast beef and passing the endless sides that pepper the perfectly set table. They show a couple insuring marital bliss when the man smoothly garrotes the wife’s flawless neck with a timeless (now 50% off!) diamond necklace. Marital bliss, maybe, but one is left with the definite impression, by her sly smile and his smug leer, that there is sure to be lots of Yuletide cheer in the bedroom that night.

 Am I wrong in thinking that this Christmas should have been different?

Sure, every holiday season the stores – which count on about 33% of their yearly sales to transpire in those few weeks – pull out the stops and try anything to get our dollars into their coffers. Most of us tend to look at it all with a mixture of horror and resignation, although I confess to finding more sympathy with Ebenezer each year I revisit him in this or that production of A Christmas Carol. I find myself thinking, “Now wait, guys. Let’s hear him out this time.” There are certainly some retailers who ought to be buried with a stake of holly through their miserable hearts…

I am not suggesting that this year, we should have spent less. When the economy started flagging and we were asked to go out and spend, spend, spend, our family took up the challenge and went forth and multiplied our debt substantially. The very computer I am writing on might as well be a blazing red, white and blue, rather than the more tasteful gray shimmering translucence it is. This year I didn’t mess around with price comparison– I went straight to Lego direct, spending most of the boys allotted share over the phone to operator # 15. Sure lots of the money’s going straight to Denmark, but everyone keeps telling us it’s a global economy now  - no country is an island anymore, they say.

But if so… please, what about Argentina? The once proud Euro-centric country is teetering on the brink of collapse, its people holding their breath and dodging the rocks already shattering bakery windows. Bank accounts are frozen. Travel agencies are only accepting cash – only a limited amount can be withdrawn at a time, not nearly enough for a plane ticket. Perhaps we are all connected now, yet this December, Christmas was cancelled in Buenos Aires, once considered the most wealthy, cosmopolitan city in Latin America. It is home of the Tango, for God sake – how can they be slipping down the drain of economic and civil collapse?

 And what about all the families in all the countries affected by the violence of 9/11? The ever widening ripples from ground zero, the sucking undertow still displacing the sand from under our feet.  Global connection clearly has its dark side. But then, there was that moment of silence – that truly Global moment of silence – a week after the awful day. Scenes from … everywhere, of people mourning the dead, showing support, sending the message of strength in numbers previously unimaginable. Global grief is a powerfully unifying force. Thank you, Osama. Didn’t know we had it in us.

And what about those of us who feel so helpless in all this? Sure we can bolster the economy by buying new stuff, sending our money to the causes of our choice, reading the newspaper while shaking our heads over our dark roast, telling our kids how lucky they are, that they should stop complaining about this and that because look how many kids don’t even have food on the table at Christmastime. We remind them that there are kids in their own school who don’t have winter coats. And we fret about all the rest – Argentina, Africa, Afghanistan, Annacostia…

Then we get a horrible wave of homesickness when we call our families who are far away, gathered together for the holidays. We hear the kids in the background shriek and giggle, and miss seeing them growing up…

And in the midst of all this, still the damn ad companies have the temerity to try to get me excited about a shiny new electric grill, guaranteed to drain away fat, and a load of products aiming to keep the dirt in my home at bay? I may be Home for the Holidays, but I sure as hell don’t intend to spend my time cleaning up.

 Boy, have they missed the boat.

They should have poured all their advertising dollars into gut-wrenching, guilt-inducing fund-raising campaigns. That, and ads for booze. And I don’t mean Korbel; I’m talking about the real mind-numbing stuff, the cheap swill that can ease the pain for a week at a time between de-toxes. They could make a killing on that right about now. Maybe even start up the old cigarette commercials again– I’d bet a lot of people are ready to give smoking another chance.

It must be obvious that this year will never be remembered by any of us as having contained the greatest holiday season. There’s just too much back-story.

But to be honest, I have an additional problem coloring my feelings about these last few days. I am feeling guilty, saddened, and oddly bereft - for a pair of puppies I never even met.

Until yesterday, we were in the market for a puppy. It seemed the perfect time. We paid almost $1,000 to finish fencing in the yard in preparation. We had decided to adopt a rescued animal, feeling it was important to teach the kids about the wonderful chance to give a needy animal a good home and lots of love. We looked around the local shelters with no immediate luck – the dogs all too big, too old, or too… odd.

I started checking the websites of different ASPCA affiliates. Then, a few days ago, I read about 2 10-week-old female beagle-mix puppies at a hound rescue organization in a far-away, unattractively named place called Bivalve, MD. Sight unseen, I applied, as one couldn’t even get much information until approved for adoption (the paperwork was more involved than taking out a mortgage). Next day, I got this response:

“Dear Russell,

Your application has been approved for the most part. I apologize for taking so long. We have been swamped with applications. Either or both of the beagle mix pups are ready to go to their loving forever home…Do you have a vet in mind for their health maintenance?

CONGRATULATIONS!

In hopes of hearing from you,

Marth

There followed directions to the farmhouse. It would probably take us 4 hours.

Shocked at the suddenness of it all, I wrote back that I was nervous and excited. I said we’d probably visit on Wednesday and then asked a few more questions about how they came to be up for adoption. I also relayed my own sketchy memories of our ravenous beagle we’d had when I was very young.

“Dear Russell,

I was raised with the adage:"when in doubt...do nothing". We look forward to your visit on Wednesday. Please bring the family.

Both pups have come all the way from Point Pleasant, W VA. They are some of the few lucky pups that made the relay North to this rescue. The stray population is so great out in the boonies that this shelter still routinely gases their animals. We are working with Mason City Animal shelter to have this practice abolished. As we are a hound rescue, we take in most of the hounds large and small and make every effort to adopt them out. Little if anything is known about her parents.

You description of eating everything in sight made me laugh. Many's the adopter that has become a food slave to a beagle! HA!

Take care,

Marth

That was Christmas Eve. I slept badly that night, and took note that when I did sleep, visions of needy beagle pups danced in my head. They were not happy visions. I had to admit to myself that being responsible for twin puppies suddenly terrified me. But now that I knew something of their story, I felt connected, at least emotionally. I cared, damn it.

Christmas morning, after the carnage of dismembering the presents, I surveyed the floor, and tried to imagine the horror that would be brought upon us all if, thrown into the mix, there were two chewing puppies who would not only destroy precious new toys, but probably perforate their own intestines in the process.

As a family, we talked. We agonized. We decided. We weren’t ready. Not yet. Not now. The kids ran off to play, and I slunk upstairs to the shiny new computer, and told “Marth” that I was backing out. The pups would not find a home with us after all. I said it very nicely and all, but the end result was the same – we rejected the puppies that had known nothing but rejection since birth. Talk about your stake of holly through the heart.

So here I am, missing a pair of mutts I’ve never even met and who, until a couple of days ago, were not even on my radar.

But then, Christmas can be a time of surprises. This year, Sebastian, for the first time, went into a store alone and, using his own money and judgement, bought me a present. He was so proud when, with shaking hands he gave it to me Christmas morning. It was a single wineglass. It’s as heavy as a brick and has an odd multi-colored rim that manages to dribble liquid no matter how one tries to curl ones lip to prevent it. It is the most precious glass I’ve ever had, and I mean to drink out of it every night, whether I’m having wine or not.

And then there was Gabriel’s surprise. A week ago, he’d secretly kneeled at the living room table and written a note, cut around it with scissors, and asked for an envelope. Into it he slid the letter and a quarter. He addressed it to Sebastian and slid it into the branches of the tree. I leave you with what it said, verbatim. Happy Holidays to you all. We made it, didn’t we?

            Thans for being a nice big brother,

I know some-tims you’v bin rouhg with me but

            the rest you’v bin good for all these years

            you disrve the qorter.

                        Sensearly

                                    Gabriel.

Vignettes

Originally Published: Dec. 14, 2001

He walked right in front of the car. His arms were raised and he strode into the crosswalk, turning his body to stop traffic in both directions of the busy intersection. I had the impression he was commanding us all to wake up. His white beard was trim, his turban neat over his sienna face, the loose clothing looking inadequate against the cold. His deep-set eyes never wavered as he kept his hands raised to all of us, the drivers behind the wheels.

Granted I was fragile and distracted that morning. I’d just learned that George Harrison had died the previous night. Our bombs were falling in a country of which I had only the most cartoonish, 17 square-inch mental picture – turbans and robes, rocks and caves, US issued weaponry, muffled snatches of a guttural language that falls harsh and fearsome on western ears. I had Abby Road turned up loud in the empty car, and had been fighting tears, unsuccessfully, since Here Comes the Sun. So it was through a watery blur, I’d first seen this man with his raised arms and his turban.   

Four lanes came to a halt in front of him, nothing stopping us but his very presence, his body between our thousands of pounds of steel and fiberglass and an empty stretch of pavement. Waiting on the curb, looking to the man in the crosswalk for a sign was a lone, redheaded schoolboy clutching the handle of a rolling backpack.

Only when all the cars were fully stopped, and others coming up or down the hill behind and in front of us had slowed to a crawl, did the man signal the boy with a gentle motion of his gnarled hand. Then his bright eyes returned to us, blocking our bumpers with his small, erect body until the boy was half way across. The man then turned his attention on the row of oncoming cars waiting across the broad intersection. He strode to face them, standing now between them and the boy wheeling his backpack. I knew at that moment all of us were watching this man who, with his life, was protecting a young American child who could have belonged to any one of us.

Only when the redheaded boy had stepped onto the curb and hauled his backpack up behind him, did the old man walk back across the street. He signaled with a wave of his arm, first to the oncoming traffic, and then to us – continue on your way and go back to sleep! I watched the old man reach the far curb, and saw him wait patiently for his next charge to arrive. The traffic moved off, sweeping my car along with it, crisscrossing the intersection, drivers pushing their feet to the floor once again.

***

It was a slow day at the Apple Store at Tyson’s Corner mall. Even though Christmas was right around the corner, it was a Wednesday morning, and the serious customers hadn’t started arriving yet. The big geeky guy behind the counter seemed delighted to have something to do. I’m convinced guys like that will do anything to talk shop. For them, landing a job at the Apple Store must seem like manna from heaven, the paycheck just a nice perk for what they’d be doing anyway – talking about, messing with, and tirelessly fondling Macs.

I’d gone into the vast savanna-like store with a question – a couple of questions, actually, and the Mac guy had ushered me over to a spiffy little iMac to show me a thing or two. I had the impression he didn’t often get to show women a thing, let alone two. He was tall and spectacled and pudgy, bright, and had definitely found his niche at the Apple Store, a true Mecca for such man-boys. His fingers flew nimbly over the keyboard while the rapidly changing screen reflected brilliantly in his black-framed glasses.

“See? All you need to do is (click click) log on and it’ll find your play list for you. Just go (click click) to Preferences, then download before you put it in your library (click). C’mon, c’mon!” he whined impatiently to the computer as it delayed two nanoseconds before complying. He made a big show of pretending to whack it on its side, knowing full well, as I knew that Macs have the fastest processors around. I chuckled dutifully.  I was betting not too many women chuckled at his special brand of Macgeek humor. I sure as hell didn’t understand much of what he said, but he had a rumpled charm about him, an almost adorable fanaticism, like all Mac enthusiasts. I enjoyed watching him speed through the menus and commands, hip-checking error messages along the way, and arriving, fully composed – if a little breathless - at his destination. Which would be, of course, the resolution of my query. If he’d had a cigarette, he would have smoked it.

Suddenly, from a floor below, down the mall, as if on cue, came a huge swell of applause and cheering. The Mac guy straightened up, and, punching the return key deftly, said rather cockily, “Sounds like Santa’s just arrived.” He then turned to me, smiling with a surprising suaveness, and handed me his card.

***

I am about to wire my kids in an attempt to get them to stay dry at night. It sounds pretty easy, really. You see, you just attach the little electrodes to their underwear, right in front of where the penis is (StarChild/Labs, inventors of the SleepDry Program, promise your child won’t be electrocuted, although I notice they do warn against too much in the way of liquids at bedtime). StarChild also strongly recommends that your child wear 2 pairs of underwear so the electrode (they have the sensitivity to call it a “sensor”) won’t rest on sensitive skin and cause a rash. They point out that; “…some children are VERY sensitive to metal against the skin.” Manacles, nipple clips, shackles and such, I assume they mean.

Anyway, you have to snap the elec-, uh, sensor onto the outer underpants, then thread the wire under the pjs and up to the shoulder. There, you snap on “Starry”, their cute little stay-dry winking star mascot. Starry is actually a horrid little alarm that narcs on your child with a loud, mind-searing buzzing the moment it senses wetness. The multi-decibel buzzing does not stop until the parent either unsnaps the elec- uh, sensor from in front of the now moistened penis area, or throws the child out the window.

I foresee a few problems with this program.

In the first place, I just spent $110 to wire my two 7 year-olds to battery packs. After perusing the instructions, I feel I might have acted rashly and that this program might be somewhat extreme. You’d really have to hear the buzzing of little “Starry” to understand just how brain-cleaving it is. Now, I understand that the point here is to wake the child, to get them to recognize their body’s own signals when their bladder is full, to gain control and attend to their needs in the appropriate place, in this case, in the bathroom, hopefully in the toilet.

Quite frankly, if little Starry went off in my ear in the dead of night, I would be much more likely, in that moment, to lose control over my bladder.

Could it be that I will forever damage my children’s fairly healthy relationship with their bladders? Might it not come to pass that, years from now, sitting with tightly cross-legs and red-eyes in front of their analysts, they will be jumpy, jittery nervous wrecks, afraid to go to sleep lest the Big Bad Buzzer return to haunt their dreams?

Here’s another worry - the instructions clearly state that, for the first few weeks, a parent must get up with the child when the buzzer goes off.

“Let the alarm keep sounding until the child looks fully awake. This may take up to 5 to 10 minutes! – Hang-in-there! Turn on the lights, and nudge the child’s shoulder if necessary. Repeat in a calm voice “Wake up, you wet the bed.””

Uh, right. They also recommend keeping a bowl of ice water near the bed, so you can dab the child’s face with a damp cloth. They urge you walk the child around the room until they look fully awake. Then comes the most frightening part of the manual:

           “We now come to the issue that sometimes makes or breaks the success of a bedwetting program – child grumpiness! It is normal for a child awakened suddenly in the night to complain some! It is the parents that will just kindly persist at this point that really get the results. Be creative, you know what your child responds to best. Assure them you will be right up to help them when the alarm rings, and help them to the bathroom.”

OK. Here’s how I imagine things could work out in the real world:

I am asleep. Deeply. My dream is very good indeed. I am warm. A bomb goes off in my head. No, it isn’t a bomb. It’s Starry. Again. Little Starry. Stupid little Starry. Againagainagain. StarryStarryStarryarryarryarryzzzzzzzzzzz. God! Stop the buzzing! Stop it!! Must stop! Must stomp!! StompCrush! StompCrushStarry!!! (Sound of bare feet stumbling down the stairs, of wet sheets being flung back, of a child crying in fright, of plastic being smashed and pounded into a hardwood floor, of a buzz weakening, fading, and finally, stopping. Ringing silence. The boy stops crying as his mother flings him a clean pull-up. Her bare feet ascend, and there is only the muffled sound of a still-warm comforter being replaced.

My plan is to begin the experi- uh, treatment, on the first day of winter break. Within a few weeks, we should be trained, in jail, or institutionalized. Progress reports to follow as applicable.

Meanwhile, best not to sneak up behind any of us – we might be a little on edge.

Econ 1,000,001

Originally Published: Dec.6, 2001

Recently I attended the second ever International Monetary Fund’s Annual Research Conference. My husband Adolfo was presenting a paper, and had invited me to attend. It would be my first foreign language conference – that language being Economics.

Let me preface this by admitting that I somehow managed to skirt my way through public school without ever taking an Econ course. I also shied away from any form of math that was not strictly required for graduation. Math always gave me a stomachache. That I married an Economist, who engages in mathematical formulae as easily as I pull on my socks, is a very strange, if not slightly wicked providence.

It is beneficial, once in awhile, to be the foreigner, the slack-jawed chump who doesn’t speak the language and who goes about with a Day-Glo “Huh?” scribbled across a sloped, bemused brow. If nothing else, the experience can serve to remind us all that in a world blessed with thousands of languages, there is much that will forever dangle out of our reach.

So I entered the snazzy auditorium on the lower level of the IMF with the full knowledge I’d be winging it. I attempted to at least look the part of an Economist – thank God for those years of acting – abandoning my usual hi! -I’m-an-arts-major attire and buttoning on my one navy blue suit, hoping to blend in. I was gratified to discover that Adolfo’s colleague, Mercedes, was also wearing a navy blue suit. Blend I would.            

To my surprise, the slender helmet-haired moderator, Eliana Cardoso opened the conference with a joke. Her voice was soft, almost fragile, but held the promise of lightening-quick surgical evisceration should anyone cross her. Her joke to the standing room only auditorium was this:

A woman goes to her gynecologist. She is pregnant with her fifth child and wants an abortion. When the doctor asks her why, she says that she recently learned that every fifth baby born in the world was Chinese. She was afraid her husband wouldn’t understand.

Gynecology jokes? This I could understand! I laughed along with the Economists and sat back to enjoy the first presentation: “Why Are Inflation Rates So Low After Large Devaluations?” by Ariel Burstein and Martin Eisenbaum. A large photographer with a formidable camera began clicking away. Mr. Burstein, a fast-talking ivy-league sort who looked quite comfortable in front of the darkened room full of quotable notables, began to speak - and I was completely at sea.

Sequence of synthetic CPI calculations … Some guy named Runzheimer… Impose PPP for tradable goods. Flight from quality - something about Godiva chocolates versus a Russian substitute. Apologizes for a typo, which read that the Korean Won fell by 3% when actually it rose by 3% - a pretty big deal if you happen to be Korean, I’m guessing. Then, like Zeus’ own doodles, angular and mysterious equations filled the next projection. People around me nodded, as though receiving the credible evidence they required. Next, jagged graphs titled Sweden, Finland, Mexico, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brazil filled the overhead, each looking like an unfortunate patient on a fast track to room temperature. 

Part way through the run down of countries, Mr. Burstein looked momentarily panic-stricken when slipped a note by a thinly smiling Mrs. Cardoso. Apparently he was down to two minutes. He shook his head irritably, flipped through his notes, and was obliged to blow entirely through Mexico. He finished, looking somewhat flustered.

After Mr. Burstein sat down, the discussant, a Mr. Ilan Goldfajn, strode to the microphone. A quick check on the word “discussant” in my trusty thesaurus yielded some unhappy synonyms: critic, adversary, disputant, enemy. Misters Burstein and Eisenbaum looked fully aware of this as they watched Mr. Goldfajn nervously. Standing impressively, the light from the overhead reflecting off his glasses and making his ID badge gleam, Mr. Goldfajn proved himself neither a disputant nor an enemy with the simple words, “A nicely done paper.” The room relaxed. He went on to give some constructive criticism, and the authors sat behind their water glasses, scribbling notes, their body language all but screaming, “Whew!”

Listening to Mr. Goldfajn, it amazed me, as it often does, how people with such thick accents – and that included most of the people in the room – can speak such perfect English. The level of education in the auditorium was staggering. I slumped down in my seat a little.

Now from the audience, the sea of black, gray and navy fabric – subverted by the occasional sweater or traditional dress such as a sari or turban – came the comments. Every seat had a tiny microphone to its left, a red button to activate it. I was later told it was a veritable who’s who of Economists that spoke up. Toledo University, Federal Reserve of New York, the IMF, Federal Reserve Board, Claremont, Oxford, Geneva, Italy, Bank of Mexico. For his response, Eisenbaum at first forgot to switch on his own microphone next to his water glass. Some bigwig unabashedly hollered out, “Microphone!” from the back of the room. Eisenbaum blushed slightly, but gamely got in his 2 minutes.

Adolfo had been next to me the entire time. I could feel his distraction, and was pretty sure he had not heard much of the presentation. It was his turn. His co-author, Roberto Steiner sat down at the table while Adolfo headed for the podium. There were a few moments of technical insecurity while he fiddled with the computer. Mrs. Cardoso then introduced the paper, “Credit Stagnation in Latin America”, and he began. His voice showed nerves, but he was direct and clear. The photographer started clicking away again.

It’s quite disconcerting when even your spouse is speaking a foreign language you cannot grasp. I tried, hopelessly. “We also define a credit “bust” symmetrically as an observation in which the credit-GDP ratio lies more than 5 percentage points below trend.” Isn’t one’s “bust” naturally symmetrical, in the normal scope of things, I mused? I then heard that his id was performing better than his ig, that the dummy for the slowdown period was not significant. Um, he wasn’t talking about me, was he? He referred to the famous Tequila Crisis of 1994, and I wondered, did undergrads of that year across this great nation of ours understand the seriousness of this?

He was speaking fast, but not fast enough, I thought. Sure enough, the two-minute note came as a shock to him. He made a dash to the finish. When it was done, I heard a muttering of, “Very good!” from the row in front of me. I preened slightly, my “bust” very symmetrical indeed. Praise by association.

Adolfo and Roberto listened respectfully to the discussant, Alberto Werner (Bank of Mexico), who liked the paper (collective sigh of relief) and spoke very favorably. Adolfo now looked at ease, and Roberto, an energetic, sociable man who seems to have grown up rubbing shoulders with the great and powerful, was completely relaxed, even pausing to put on chapstick while listening. The comments from the audience were good, and mostly seemed to be urging the authors to take the paper further. In his two minutes at the end, Adolfo thanked the audience and said the comments had all been very useful.

Afterwards for lunch, Adolfo, Mercedes and I went Japanese, speaking Spanish throughout the meal. It might not be my native language, but, I thought grimly as I sipped my tea soup with salted plum, at least now I had a chance of understanding what the hell was being said. 

The Versatility of the Color Black

Originally Published: November 5, 2001

The 8 AM Metroliner from Washington DC to New York City trundles along. Somehow, I expect a train with a name like Metroliner to dash gazelle-like along its tracks between two of the most influential cities in the world. But today is Sunday, and on Sundays apparently, we trundle. The train will still arrive at Penn Station at its appointed time of 11:04, but the atmosphere is distinctly weekendish. For one thing, the train is less than half full, and no one except my husband appears to be wearing a suit. These passengers are going to the city to shop, to visit, perhaps to gawk, or, like us, to attend a special event. A wedding, in our case. Dan and Liz’ wedding.

The late October day is stunning. This morning the unctuous weatherman announced - with all the toothy urging of a salesman nearing the end of the quarter – that the fall colors are at their peak – better hurry! And it is beautiful out my window. I’m sure it’s a poor man’s palate compared to, say, New England, but still dazzling to a transplant from California, where the fall doesn’t so much explode in riotous color, as taps demurely at the door, swathed tastefully in muted earth tones.

I had wrestled with what I should wear today. Initially, I didn’t want to wear black. There is so much worn these days in sorrow and this was certainly not a sorrowful occasion. But my closet gazed back at me darkly - all my best clothes were black. Basic black. Good old black.

Two and a half years ago, wearing all black, I also took the 8 AM Metroliner to New York. That time it was to attend a funeral. Jody had died of esophageal cancer. We had been friends since we were five, despite living our lives on different coasts most of those years. I had taken the train to see her twice since I’d moved east – once when she was newly diagnosed, once when she was dying. The funeral is hard for me to visualize now. I remember reading a piece I’d written about her to the room full of parched faces floating above yards and yards of black cloth. I remember her boyfriend, Dan, pale, exhausted. I remember my friend Janet singing a song she’d written for Jody, her dark hair falling forward over her face and almost into the strings of her guitar. As she sang, I stared at my black lap, my black shoes.

A year later, I took the Metroliner again, this time to attend the gallery opening of a friend’s first New York art show. Again I wore black – default chic this time - counting on black’s universal fashion parlance to cover the fact that I don’t own any clothing suitable for a hip soho event. Black can make us cooler than we are, can hide the fact that we are not au courant. Black has no season, no sell-by date. Black, like no existing color, can mask our deficiencies. And our excesses, it seems - everyone knows black is a thinning color.

And here I am again - wearing black, even to a wedding. To Dan’s wedding. It just went so nicely with the gold shantung silk pants. From the hips up and the ankles down, black. Black again.

I would have expected to have mixed feelings about Dan getting married. I don’t. I know, with  pre-ordained certainty – if I believed in such things - that I’m going to like Liz. Because she loves Dan. Like Jody loved Dan. Like I loved Jody and Dan loved and loves them both. It makes us all part of the same clan, those of us who were first friends with Jody, then with Dan and now, with Liz. We are connected through years of emotional floundering and messing around with our lives. We have coped with tragedy and are finally moving on. Jody would have been exasperated with us all for taking so long.

We are almost there. Trains are always bumpier than I remember. There is no way I can put on make-up here. I’ll have to do it at Penn Station.

I wonder if New York will look different – feel different. We’ll be far from the WTC, at Madison and 51^st. Will the city shows its wounds? Until September 11, New York had always seemed such a distant place from my world.

***

Amazingly, it is still light. Still an October Sunday tilting toward November. The train, now full to capacity, no longer ambles but rockets purposefully back to Washington DC.

New York was as beautiful as I’ve ever seen it. In the past, I’ve felt out of step with that city, feeling not strong enough, not quick enough to occupy space there - whatever deficiency I had seemed amplified in the shadow of all that was talent, power and success. But on this trip the city meant more to me than a reflection of my suburban insecurities. It no longer intimidated me, but inspired a sisterly camaraderie. The playground bully had picked on each of our cities, and we’d both gotten up and given him the finger.

The wedding was lovely, the dinner afterwards very elegant, with more forks and knives saluting either side of the place plates than I’d ever imagined possible. We had been seated at a table with several of Jody’s old friends. Jody had been so bi-coastal, we had rarely, if ever, met each other. I’d met the bride in a moment of wild abandon on the dance floor. She was warm and delightful, and Dan was obviously entranced. They danced with all the joy of two people who had survived not only their wedding, but the dismal weeks that had lead up to it. Both wore white.

Jody’s mother was at the wedding – in black, I noticed, but accented with bright jewelry. She said, several times in the few minutes I had with her, that she was so pleased Dan was getting married, that he couldn’t be a hermit all his life, that he deserved to be happy. Her smile was just as I remembered from my childhood –that buck-up-under-any-circumstances smile that now seemed brave and vulnerable after the deaths of first her husband and then her daughter. I never imagined my life like this, her smile said, but I’m fine, really. I keep myself busy – this is New York, after all …

There was a moment after the plates were cleared away when the bride, jovially reminding everyone that it was her day, asked the two guitarists to repeat the recessional they’d played after the ceremony. The song was the Beatles’ On My Way Home. Jody had been a huge Beatles fan. I looked at the three other women at our table, all long-time friends of Jody’s, and saw that we were all crying. I only knew one of the three, but we stood, gravitating together, our arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling and crying while the bride and groom and everyone in the room listened happily to the song, facing away from us.

As the cake was cut, my husband and I had to depart. Our train would leave at 6:00, and Metroliner waits for no one. I had been unable to say a last good-bye to the bride and groom - my puffy eyes would have been impossible to explain amid all this joy. A wonderful thing was beginning, and yet, for Jody’s friends, it was also the end of something. I hugged Jody’s mother good-bye. Yes, she smiled, I was thinking of her, too.

The train bumps and sways again. The couple across the aisle from us was in our car this morning, sipping lattes. Four large shopping bags occupy two over-head bins as the woman converses loudly on her cell phone in a language I can’t catch. I notice my gold shantung pants have a grease mark and a few shimmery outlines from splashed champagne. The black shell and jacket still look impeccable. Another tally mark on black’s side of the board - one can be a slob less obviously wearing black. Now it’s dark finally, and the train rips along, on our way home.