I am not my mother

LIFE

2010-06-04T08:27:00.003-04:00

Sam and I played the Game of LIFE the other day with two of her friends. She has my old game — the Milton Bradley version copyrighted in 1960 and “heartily endorsed” by Art Linkletter (his face graces the white $100,000 bills). You start with $2,000 and a colorful plastic convertible. If you want auto insurance, pay $500.

From there, you spin the “Wheel of Fate” and either go to college or into business. If you skip college, your salary on all the red Pay Days is a meager $5,000 (but $1,000 more than my dad received his first year teaching college English in 1967).

Go to college and you might become a doctor, with a handsome $20,000 per Pay Day.

The game is quaint — houses cost $15,000, and the car you get at the start is free. And it’s funny too (“Inherit shrunken head collection, pay museum $10,000 to accept it”).

But it’s completely outdated. You can get married but not divorced. And in the end you collect, rather than spend, $20,000 for every kid in your car.

For whatever reason, kids love the game. I did. And so does Sam. (Andy, however, always hated it and can’t articulate why.) Sam and I have played it so many times that I often make dumb choices just to see where I’ll end up. I’ve skipped college and forgone purchasing auto insurance. Wahoo, fun times.

Although the game has been updated since 1960 — in one version, the computer guy gets $50,000 every time the spinner comes off the track or gets stuck between numbers — the world has changed markedly. And I think the Game of LIFE should reflect life. So here are my suggested stops on the 2010 game board.

START HERE. With $2,000 and car. If you want health insurance, pay $5,000.

First space: Transmission blows on your “free” car. Pay $2,000 for repairs.

If you choose the college route: Pay $100,000 in tuition. Take out student loan. Repay 10% of the loan at every Pay Day.

These would be the career choices along the college route:

-Doctor – salary $200,000 (but pay $50,000 for malpractice insurance)

-Lawyer – salary $500,000

-Teacher – salary $60,000

-Investment banker – salary $1,000,000, before bonuses (but pay $2 million in attorney’s fees)

-Journalist – collect $10,000 in unemployment

Farther along the board, you might hit: Find uranium deposit! Collect $100,000, but pay $90,000 for groundwater remediation.

At the “Get Married” space, you would spin the “Wheel of Fate” to determine your spouse (not what presents you receive).

Spin a 1, 2, or 3 – You’ve married a struggling entrepreneur. Pay $10,000 to settle bad debt. Collect no additional salary.

Spin 4, 5, or 6 – You’ve married a teacher. Collect $50,000 extra each Pay Day, and $60,000 per Pay Day after retirement.

Spin 7, 8, or 9 – You’ve married a doctor. Pay off med school student loan of $100,000 but collect $200,000 extra each Pay Day.

Spin 10 – You’ve married a software engineer. Collect $100,000 extra each Pay Day. Collect $10,000 from any player who spins a 10.

After marriage, the next required space is “Buy a House. Spin wheel to determine type.” A 1,2, or 3 nets you a small walk-up for $100,000. Spin 4,5, or 6 and you’ll own a split-level ranch for $150,000. Get a 7,8, or 9, and you’ll be living in an old Victorian mansion for $200,000, plus $50,000 additional for repairs. Spin a 10, and you’ll be living in a gated community for $500,000. Too pricey? Well, you can always take out a subprime mortgage. At every Pay Day, the interest rate increases.

Rather than letting fate decide whether or not you have kids, this would be another route choice on the board. You can have up to 4 kids along the family route. But if you reach the end before you have a child, pay $10,000 to the fertility clinic and add a baby boy. The final space in the child route would say: “Pay $20,000 for a decade of piano lessons, ski school, tennis clinics, soccer camps, dance recitals, horseback riding lessons, and French tutoring.”

Choose the child-less route, and pay $10,000 for a Louis XIV sofa upholstered in cream silk and another $10,000 for a Grand Tour of Europe.

To the collection of sweepstakes winning and “if you have stock” spaces, the modern board must also contain the following:

-Divorce. Lose half your wealth.

-Bail eldest child out of jail. Pay $10,000 if you have children.

-Invest in Ponzi scheme. Lose everything.

-House needs new roof. Pay $20,000.

-Dog has hip dysplasia. Pay $2,000 vet fee.

-Youngest child draws on sofa with permanent marker. Pay $500 dry cleaning fee if you have children.

-Child gets cell phone. Pay $5,000 for too many text messages if you have kids.

-Child gets into Harvard. Pay $200,000 tuition if you have children.

-Midlife crisis! Get a tattoo. Pay $10,000 to have it removed.

-Daughter has eating disorder. Pay $20,000 for therapy.

-Eldest crashes car. Pay $30,000 for new one.

-Renovate bathrooms. Pay $50,000.

-Spouse gets face-lift. Pay $5,000.

-Destitute uncle’s wife dies. Pay $5,000 for memorial service.

-Laid off! Lose turn and skip next Pay Day.

But all news isn’t bad, and as in the 1960 game, there are plenty of opportunities to gain money. Such as:

-Sell first novel. Collect $50,000.

-Inherit Louis XIV sofa. Collect $10,000 from Antiques Road Show dealer.

-Apple stock splits. Collect $100,000 if you own stock.

-Investment in college student’s computer project pays off. Collect $5 million.

-Write best-selling iPhone App. Collect $100,000.

-Bonus time at Goldman Sachs. Collect $2 million. Then go to jail.

And if you can survive the game to the end, wouldn’t everyone be a winner? And what other life events am I missing?

Tiger the cat versus Tiger the golfer

2010-05-17T15:16:00.002-04:00

We have a large orange cat named Tiger. Since the day after Thanksgiving, this has caused some confusion among my friends.

One day in December, I complained to a friend that Tiger had walked into my office, sat at my feet, and meowed loudly while I was on a conference call. She looked puzzled and asked, “Are you one of his many paramours?”

NO! Tiger, the cat!

A month later, after a long trip to the vet, I told another friend that Tiger had gotten in a fight, had a festering abscess on his face, and was under house arrest.

And then I started laughing. What fun not to specify which Tiger I was talking about. Although they are two different creatures—different species in fact—they also share a few traits.

So with golf season upon us, I present here a list of similarities and differences: Tiger the cat versus Tiger the golfer.

-Tiger the golfer often hits birdies. Tiger the cat catches them.

-Tiger the golfer has earned many trophies. Tiger the cat leaves his on the doorstep.

-Tiger the cat likes to lie down. Tiger the golfer likes to get laid.

- Tiger the cat is fixed.

-Both like to prowl at night.

-Both like to chase tail.

-Both like to be petted and stroked even though neither deserves this much attention.

-When it comes to hunting, neither has demonstrated restraint.

-Despite his behavior, Tiger is a much-loved cat. Can the same be said of Tiger Woods?

Swim Team

2009-08-05T10:30:00.001-04:00

I called my parents on Sunday night to let them know that their granddaughter helped win the Vermont State 8 & under freestyle relay title—quite an accomplishment for a kid who, until last Monday, jumped into the pool off the starting blocks (while holding her nose) rather than dive. Once in the pool, Samantha just seems to have a natural ability to swim fast.

And her competitors, ages 8 and younger, weren’t a bunch of dog-paddlers. They could really swim, and do things like flip turns.

But rather than gush forth with congratulations, my father asked, “Why are you making her do this?”

“This” being swim team.

“Uh, because swimming is a good activity for kids,” I stammered. “And it’s really helping to improve her strokes.”

“And her friends do it,” I added when he said nothing in return.

After another pause, I said, “And it’s a good group of kids.” Longer pause. “And she can swim far now.” Pause. “So if she fell out of a boat in the middle of a lake, she wouldn’t drown.”

“Safety is a good reason,” my dad finally said.

Yes, safety is a good reason to learn to swim long distances without touching bottom, or clinging to the side. But his question ate at me the rest of the evening. Why were we making her do swim team? He made it sound like a forced march.

My dad is the smartest man I know—Harvard educated and winner of at least one Latin prize. He has read everything written by Shakespeare and can tell Mozart from Beethoven in just three notes.

But to my knowledge, he has never done anything against a stopwatch (unless he had to list all declensions of the demonstrative pronoun hic, haec, hoc in less than a minute). While he’s active and fit for a 76-year-old—and very competitive on an intellectual playing field—he has never seemed to understand why anyone would enter a race, game, or match.

He has called athletes such as Michael Phelps and Roger Federer genetic anomalies and does seem to enjoy watching them compete. But us mortals? There are better things we could be doing. Winning a freestyle relay—or the Leadville 100, or the local tennis club round robin—won’t solve the world’s problems (not that the Latin prize will). Winning—or even participating in sports—doesn’t give us a better understanding of the world, although international competition does give us a small window into other cultures.

But what I’ve realized over the past 30+ years of competing in everything from rowing to alpine skiing (and not terribly well in any of them), is that athletic competition, and the rigors of training for it, gives us a better understanding of ourselves.

Yes, sports make us fit and allow us to eat as many cookies as we want, and they offer a chance to single-mindedly pursue a goal—usually among friends.

But there’s more to it than this. When we push to our physical limits—and beyond—it strips away all the superficial layers of our personalities, all the barriers we have constructed, and exposes who we really are. I’ve learned more about myself—and more about what parts of my character need shoring up—by being dropped by Olympic cyclists Jeanie Longo and Rebecca Twigg than I ever did holed up in the computer lab writing a masters thesis on the bio-denitrification of drinking water.

I learned what hard work really is, because while we can hide our grades behind the veil of confidentiality, we can’t hide crossing the finish line five minutes down on the leaders, or getting “bageled” in a tennis match (losing a set 6-0, the zero being the round bagel). The scores and times are there for all to see.

And when we do win, we can hold our heads high—higher than we can if we win the spelling bee or math tournament … or Latin prize. In face, it’s the opposite reaction. I have vivid memories of hunching my shoulders up to my head, as if I were a turtle trying to hide, after winning spelling bees in grade school. Athletes are heralded. Smart kids are teased. Thick glasses and general lack of hand-eye coordination doesn’t help.

Next time my parents call, I will tell my dad that Samantha did swim team because she’s good at it. And in the future, if kids taunt her because she wins the math quiz bowl, or because she can spell ‘floccinaucinihilipilification,’ or because she drops a pop-fly in a P.E. softball game, she can remember that she is the Vermont State freestyle relay champion, or at least a quarter of it.

And should she pitch over a sailboat’s gunnels or capsize a canoe, chances are, she’ll make it to shore.

Home Theater

2009-06-09T21:38:00.002-04:00

On Mother’s Day, Andy walked into Best Buy to purchase a battery charger and walked out with two Samsung speakers.

“I saved $45,” he stated, as I walked up to him at the cashier’s desk.

“They’re too good a deal to pass up,” echoed the cashier.

“I bought the same ones last week,” chimed in a salesman standing behind the cashier.

I glared at the salesmen, then looked back at Andy. “What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

Since we became parents almost nine years ago, we only seem to listen to music in the car or when we’re at the gym. And the last time Andy purchased speakers — or rather, a “soundbar” — he installed it underneath the gigantic TV, which he purchased two years ago when I was away on business. I found out about it when Samantha squealed into the phone, “Guess what, Mom? I got to ride in the front seat of the car today!” She was 6, and the TV filled the whole back of our Toyota Highlander with the rear seats folded.

“What’s wrong with the TV’s built-in speakers?” I asked Andy when he purchased that soundbar a year ago.

“Nothing,” he said. “This will just improve the audio experience.”

Audio experience? I never thought of TV as offering an “audio experience.”

After installing the center soundbar under the TV, he was intrigued that only the TV voices came out of it, while the rest of the noise emanated from the TV’s built-in speakers. I couldn’t tell the difference. But he seemed happy.

Surround sound is another matter though. I have always been opposed to it. It feels like a home invasion. I don’t want Jon Stewart to sneak up behind me or feel as if I’m in the front row at American Idol. And with one speaker high on the mantelpiece, which happens to be near the stairs leading to our bedrooms, I knew the TV noise might waft upstairs and keep Sam awake.

“You’ll like it,” he kept insisting. Just like I like the 42-inch HD TV, he said. OK, so yes, we can see the tennis ball when we’re watching Wimbledon … and the fact that Maria Sharapova has acne scars on her chin.

Standing at the cashier’s in Best Buy, I let loose with a volley of teasing: “Ah, nice battery charger” … “Happy Mother’s Day to me” … and “I thought we were cutting back on big-ticket items.”

He grew defiant. “I’ve wanted this for years, and I’m buying it,” he declared.

OK, then.

I didn’t speak much at dinner. I was quietly fuming about why I never felt like I could saunter into a furniture store and purchase new sofas — granted $200 speakers are a far cry from the cost of new living room décor.

In our 11 years of marriage, the only furniture I have purchased is a $29.95 ottoman at Bed Bath & Beyond. It sits in front of a musty leather chair from Andy’s Great Uncle Harry.

Andy isn’t bothered by our mismatched, musty furniture. It’s well-built furniture, he insists — better than what we could buy at the local Sofas-N-More. Left to himself — with no wife or child to accommodate — he could live in a cave, as long as it had a big-screen HD TV, cable, one comfortable chair, a refrigerator, the fastest Internet connection available, and a shower the size of a locker room. Oh, and a bed. With a Tempur-Pedic mattress and pillow.

And home theater.

Of all his tech-y purchases, this one just hasn’t worked for me. Watching baseball the other night, I kept thinking I heard a cat fight and hit mute to see where it was coming from. It took three tries before I realized it was the fans at Fenway cheering from the mantelpiece. Then, watching the Grey’s Anatomy season finale, I heard a droning sound that was either a helicopter overhead or the furnace about to explode. Mood music, I realized, the second time I hit mute.

And yes, Sam has asked us to turn down the TV so she can sleep. At that low volume, I can hear the droning and the cat-fight-like sounds, but not any words being spoken.

Mostly though, I’ve kept my complaints to myself. Without Andy’s tech savvy, I would own an unreliable PC infected with viruses, a 10-year-old cell phone with no texting or email capabilities, and a 25-year-old TV with 13 push-button channels and no remote.

Instead, I have a new MacBook, an iPhone, and that HD TV with four remotes.

And home theater.

If sofas came with built-in speakers, would I have new furniture too?

Ex-Palined

2009-03-31T14:19:00.001-04:00

Writing an article today, I mis-typed the word 'explained.' It came out 'expalined.'

I kind of like it. It describes the current state of the GOP.

What a waste

2009-03-19T13:18:00.006-04:00

Taxes are due soon. Should I skip the IRS as middleman and just make a check out to Edward Liddy at AIG? Or maybe Merrill Lynch's ex, John Thain, would like to freshen up his living room using more taxpayer money.

Tell you what, Mr. Thain. I'll send you two lovely sofas, upholstered in what I call a midsummer-night's dream (deer leaping through flowered trees against a dark navy background), and you can send me a couple of those $87,000 guest chairs.

I'm sure you'll love these fine sofas that currently clash with everything else in my living room. For they were purchased 30-odd years ago by the man who once held your job, and who, when times were tough for the company, refused to let his son make copies on the office Xerox machine. It would be a waste of paper and toner, he said, and those cost money.

That same son asked if he could have the sofas when his parents downsized from the house where they raised five kids to a smaller condominium. Why waste them? They're comfortable and well-built. They're just out of style and hideous.

What happened to executives who didn't like to see waste--guys who thought more about the bottom line than buying $1,400 waste cans? Or is fiscal responsibility as outdated as leaping-deer-print upholstery?

A modest proposal: Family Class

2009-03-03T21:56:00.002-05:00

When Samantha was 18 months old, we made the mistake of flying from Albany, New York, to Las Vegas — nonstop. It was like traveling with a chimpanzee. Contained in a metal tube for six hours with no understanding of her personal space, or anyone else’s, she wanted to run up and down the aisle and screamed when we tried to distract her with all the toys we had lugged on board.

When we did walk up and down the aisle with her, she grabbed the other passengers’ drinks off their tray tables before we knew what was happening. She giggled and shrieked and tried to climb into other peoples’ rows. And at one point, she escaped my grasp and beat on the cockpit door. It was only six months after 9/11, and I expected a couple of F-14s to force us down in Wichita. And then I expected Congress to pass a bill forbidding children under the age of 5 who are mobile to fly on commercial aircraft.

S-not such pretty pictures

2009-02-05T17:52:00.003-05:00

I was at Stratton Mountain today for a photo shoot and learned that there's probably a story behind every pretty picture in a magazine.

My story begins on the coldest day of the year (so far) with a very nice Austrian photographer I'll call Klaus. Klaus had called the night before to remind me to “be bright.” So I arrived at Stratton carrying three coats—the brightest I could find in the closet, including a cantaloupe-colored jacket purchased at like 99% off several years ago. But before he had even seen one coat, Klaus tut-tutted my lime green ski boots. They’re 10 years old, and I paid ungodly sums to have them custom fit. They’re hideous, but comfortable.

So off we went to the ski shop, where they "fitted" me with silver Rossignol ladies' boots, complete with fur trim, and some Rossi skis, which turned out to be great skis. If only my feet hadn't been swimming around in the boots.

Then we trotted off to another fancy ski shop to borrow a jacket, because "cantaloupe" and "pool blue" weren't what Klaus had in mind. A Vanna-White-type woman with a German accent took a $500 red Marker coat, complete with rhinestone in the zipper pull, off its hanger and found a hat to match.

"You'll be varm in zat," she announced. But "zat" wasn't exactly the most insulated coat in the store. She also announced that it was "MINUS zhirty-two" at the summit. ;l/......./.;¬¬¬£££££££££££££ (WHOA--cat on the keyboard)

I wanted to wear an insulated coat underneath but wasn't supposed to look fat. I also had to leave the face mask and neck gator behind. Can't make it look cold and unpleasant for the nice readers! Same with mittens. A big thanks to whoever invented those hand-warmer thingees. I should have shoved a couple extra in my underwear. Oh, and I wore big girly earrings with my earlobes showing, so that felt nice in the frigid air.

So we started skiing and Klaus, who's old enough to know what wedelning is, tells me to ski with my feet closer together. Excuse me? On fat skis. On hard pack. He said he doesn't like "za new carving style—it's not pretty."

He wanted me to slide my turns with my feet glued together. I almost fell over five times. Plus, I had to smile every time he pointed the camera in my direction. My teeth froze. I'd duck behind the coat's collar when he wasn't shooting to stay warm, but had to purse my lips so as not to get lip gloss on the collar. And once behind the collar, my breath formed frost on my upper lip, creating a frosty white mustache.

Then my nose started to run, so I sniffed and snuffed to keep it from spoiling the $500 coat's collar. A few minutes later, as we sat on the chairlift, I noticed that when I exhaled, a fine mist of snot sprayed gently down onto the coat.

After a few easy runs, Klaus headed for the moguls. “Turn here,” he said pointing to some huge mounds of snow separated by ice.

“OK, I’ll try,” I said from behind the now wet collar. “I’m not the best mogul skier.”

And I wasn’t. "Should I hike back up and try it again?" I asked.

"Yes," Klaus nodded.

I hiked four times for retakes. Donna Weinbrecht I'm not.

"It vill get you varm," Klaus kept saying in his Austrian accent.

Yeah, and it will also get more snot on the coat.

So I'm not sure if he got any good shots or not. But I somehow survived with no frostbite, and there’s a red Marker coat--infused with phlegm--for sale for half-a-grand at a ski shop in the base village.

YouTube? Or MeTube?

2009-02-04T09:18:00.003-05:00

Skiing the other day, I saw a guy with a video camera strapped to the top of his helmet. I rolled my eyes (behind my goggles). What was this guy filming? His ski day? As seen from his eyes—or rather, from the top of his head? Was he going to use up bandwidth sending it to his buddies? Or post it on YouTube?

Perhaps I was subjected to too many slideshows as a child and an uncle who would take 12 photos of the amaryllis in bloom, each from a different angle. I’ve always found the “how-we-spent-our-summer-vacation” slideshows and home movies not only dull but selfish. If you’d like a trip down memory lane, please wander there yourself. I once dated a guy who would set up a slide projector at parties and show slides of his latest rock climbing adventure. We watched slide after slide of said boyfriend’s backside, as he worked his way up some cliff.

His roommate called it the “Me Projector.”

Now, with cameras in cell phones and digital video camcorders, everyone seems to be recording their every move. In July 2006, YouTube reported that 65,000 new videos were uploaded daily, with viewers watching more than 100 million each day. And that was two years ago.

While it’s hard to determine how many of these uploaded videos are professionally-made—music videos, clips of The Daily Show or Colbert Report, or old footage of Robin Williams doing stand-up on stage—most I would venture to guess are posted by people like helmet-cam guy.

And Dave, the World’s Greatest Chef (it says so on his apron), cooking southern fried chicken in his kitchen (or someone’s kitchen).

And a girl named Zexy, who was filmed making Jell-O.

And the parent who filmed kids playing violin, a video that has mercifully only had 96 hits.

Interestingly, the first video uploaded to YouTube, on April 23, 2005, was titled, “Me at the zoo.”

And there is nary an editor or producer in sight.

I can understand the parents and grandparents of the violinists wanting to see that video. And I’ve had a few good laughs watching Sadie, the farting bunny, which is worth all of its five seconds, and several funny cat videos. But what are the rest of these videographers—and their stars—hoping for? That Steven Spielberg will ask them to direct his next movie? Or that Warren Miller will underwrite their next ski video? Or Rachael Ray will invite them to be their guest host?

Or are they simply saying, “Look at me!”?

Jet decimates flock, only two survivors

2009-01-16T16:46:00.000-05:00

by Branta Fowl

New York, N.Y. -- A flock of geese, bound for the warmer waters of Charlotte, N.C., was almost wiped out by an airliner which flew directly into the V-shaped flock in the air north of New York. Only two geese survived.

Both landed safely on the Hudson River.

Having sustained damage to its engines, the airliner also landed on the Hudson.
"We didn't even see it coming," said Loosey Goosey, who flew on the outer fringes of the V. "Mother Goose took a direct hit and fell immediately. Fred and Gertrude were sucked into one engine, Eggbert was pulled into the other. It was awful." "All I saw were feathers flying," said Canada, who was flying next to Loosey in the formation. "It's so sad. Those planes should honk or something."
Both Loosey and Canada are awaiting another flock before continuing their migration but say they will not return to the waters near the airport.
The International Committee on Safe Migration is planning a full investigation.

How the Bankers Stole Christmas

2008-12-08T14:50:00.002-05:00

Every You down in You-ville

Liked Christmas a lot.

And the Bankers did too--in New York and Charlotte.

The Bankers loved Christmas! The whole Christmas season!

You can ask why. Everyone knows the reason.

It was gift cards and sweaters and HD TVs

American Girl dolls and new shoes and Nintendo Wiis.

But I think that the most likely reason of all

May have been that everyone's credit limit was too tall.

But, no matter the reason, the gift cards or shoes.

Weeks before Christmas, the Bankers began hating the Yous.

Staring down from their offices with nervous wan smiles

At the vacant shop windows and empty store aisles.

But every You down in You-ville couldn't even afford lunch

From debt load and foreclosure and the big credit crunch.

It happened back in September,

If you will remember ...

After years of prosperity, the economy tanked.

And now this austerity, it just really stank.

For 28 years, they'd been on a roll.

Now the Yous one by one were living on the dole.

"They're not filling the stores!" the Bankers snarled with a sneer.

"We'll never stay liquid. That much is clear."

Then they growled as they watched the DOW Jones keep on dropping.

"We must find a way to keep them all shopping!"

But how?

Then the Bankers got an idea!

An awful idea

The Bankers got a wonderful awful idea!

"We know just what to do!" they laughed with great glee.

And they boarded their jets and flew to D.C.

And as they walked into Congress, they knew they'd receive

An unprecedented 700 billion dollar reprieve.

"Help us!" they said in a loud chorus of rings,

"For we are the most awesome of the financial kings!"

They reminded Congress, "to give us free rein!

To regulate us now would be completely insane.

We can bring the DOW back to its previous bubble

It's just those stupid Yous who are in all this trouble."

Then, they loaded their pockets with taxpayer money.

And flew off to where the climate was sunny.

They would eat escargot in the restaurants of Paris

And fly private jets to the beaches of Nevis.

But then as the Bankers sat down and gloated

Their overstuffed egos distended and bloated.

The Yous stood watch as the DOW continued down

And their homes were foreclosed in their very own town.

The Bank had taken their houses and credit.

For 28 years, the government had let it.

Secondary derivatives and subprime mortgage rates.

And credit default swaps had sealed the Yous' fates.

All through the fall, throughout the long days

All the Yous felt robbed of their 401(k)s.

They sold all they could--a stock market unloading.

But as Christmas approached, there was a sense of foreboding.

With no credit to buy and no money to spend

The Yous would be starting a new Christmas trend.

They'd make and they'd bake and they'd learn to buy less

Until the new President could get them out of this mess.

For Christmas would come, just without cash

It would come without packaging that went in the trash.

It would come without presents, without ribbons and wrappings

Without tags and tinsel and trimmings and trappings.

Then the Yous thought of something really quite daring.

Maybe Christmas, they thought, is about more than sharing.

The holidays, perhaps, are more about caring.

As Christmas drew near, the Yous felt in good cheer

And focused their hopes on the New Year.

And hope, the Yous realized, the tall and the small,

Could be the very best Christmas present of all.

I miss Sarah Palin

2008-11-14T14:53:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States. Hooray! I didn't dare believe it until I saw it on TV. Then again, I didn't dare believe that George W. Bush could be president either.

Almost two weeks after the election, there's a sense of hope in the cold November air, a sense that Captain Hazelwood is no longer--or will soon no longer be--at the helm of the S.S. USA, that no matter how strong the storm, Captain Obama will have the wisdom and courage to keep the ship not only afloat but making headway. Assuming he can get the ship off the reef, stop the hemorrhaging, and make repairs.

But I have to say, I miss Sarah Palin. Not as a potential vice presidential candidate but as a daily source of entertainment. In the two months before the election, I awoke every day with a sense of "Oh goodie, what will she do today?!" I couldn't wait to go online, read the news and editorials, watch Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart, and check out huffingtonpost.com and politico.com and any other website that detailed her every misstep--her patronizing winks, folksy "you betchas," and her mangled, usually meaningless sentences, although I can't fault her for not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is. Had you asked me, I would have guessed that Bush couldn't even spell the word doctrine, let alone have one.

With what looks like a responsible, thoughtful, wise administration about to step in, what will we have to titter about over dinner? It's like when the neighbors are all behaving, there's no one to center the conversation around--no "Did you hear what Nancy said to Sue?" or "Jennifer will catch more than a cold if she wears that outfit." With no one's misfortune to gossip about at neighborhood gatherings, we're left to inquire about what's in the stuffed mushrooms and wonder aloud how Joanne makes her azaleas flourish.

As uncharitable as it is to gossip and titter, let's face it: it's fun, especially when we don't like the people we're tittering about. When work is boring me to tears, I can easily become engrossed in the enemy's problems.

So give me a juicy scandal--a Watergate, a Neiman-Marcus-gate, a Wysteria Lane. As long as it's in the GOP. Or at someone else's house. Meow.

Auto relations

2008-10-08T17:02:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, while driving through tourist-filled Manchester, Vermont, the car’s brakes gave out. Pedal to the floor, a guttural noise coming from under the hood, oh sh*t. I didn’t think this happened to 21^st century cars. I shifted into low and steered away from pedestrians.

Fortunately, I was less than a mile from the mechanic’s, the same mechanic who allegedly fixed the worn brakes last week.

I pulled into his lot without rear-ending an Audi wagon, put the car in park, turned off the ignition, and breathed a sigh of relief. I had killed no one, not even myself.

Turns out a caliper screw had come loose, which allowed all the brake fluid to leak out. The mechanic tightened the screw, poured more fluid into the reservoir, and sent me on my way with instructions to call immediately if the brake light came on.

I drove straight to Andy’s office and asked to trade cars.

Yep, I confess. I’m a complete girl when it comes to car trouble, no doubt because my first car was more often broken than not. This is not how it’s supposed to be. Cars, like marriages, are just supposed to work, especially late-model cars. Yes, they both require regular maintenance and upkeep. But given that, they should function without a hitch. Right?

None of this back-stabbing alternator failure on a cold afternoon in the mountains, or a busted U-joint in rush hour traffic. Unlike our spouses, we entrust our lives to our cars. Have a spat with our spouses and we might lose some sleep. But if our cars rebel, we become a menace to ourselves and others.

When my car breaks down, I feel betrayed, and I never entirely regain trust. And once I’ve lost trust in a car, that’s it. I’m done. I once left our VW Passat—with its intermittently flashing “check engine” light and broken rear window control—unlocked on the streets of Boston. But there it stood in the morning, right where I’d left it. Like it had a scarlet B (for broken) on its hood.

It all started after college when I began a 10-year, 100,000-mile abusive relationship with what must be the only lemon ever produced by Toyota—a used 1981 Corolla with sunburned blue paint. In the decade I drove this car, I went through two water pumps (one requiring a tow truck), three batteries (each guaranteed “for life”), two transmissions (one installed the day I started grad school and cost half my student loan), two clutches, and an alternator, which kindly gave out in the driveway.

I also learned what a distributor vacuum pump does and that if it breaks, the car won’t drive faster than 10 mph. This happened in a blizzard outside Salida, Colorado. I spent the night in a cheap motel, wiled away 6 hours the next day at the Toyota dealer while they couldn’t find the problem, limped home (a one-hour drive that took four), and found a love note from the dealer’s mechanic in the glove box the next day.

Another time, the thermostat broke in Phoenix in June. In 100-degree heat, I drove home to Tucson (a 90-minute drive) with the heat on and windows open. It didn’t much care for cold either. If the temperature dipped below 20 degrees, it never started.

Then there was the valve cover that blew over Vail Pass. Fortunately, the oil light didn’t come on until an hour later when I was only 10 minutes from home. Did I immediately stop as my father had always instructed? Nope. But I did make it home.

And all this after I regularly fed it Super Unleaded gas and STP, changed its oil every 3,000 miles, purchased a custom-fit dashmat to protect the vinyl from the harsh western sun, and often vacuumed the interior and polished its dull paint. It was like living with a psychotic person who usually forgot to take his meds.

After 10 years of torment and tears (often beside the road far from home and long before cell phones), I finally sold the psychotic car to a local high school girl who covered the rear bumper with Nine Inch Nails stickers, and I was able to afford a 1991 Subaru wagon from a Christian family in Littleton, Colorado. After Toyota the Terrible, the Blue ‘Ru was as reliable as my father.

Then came the evil Passat. It was the first new car I ever owned, but it compromised my trust almost from our first date. The air conditioning button on the dash got stuck. The dealer replaced it, but I was left to wonder what would go wrong next. Six years later, just about everything had—including the front fairing dropping off from its underbelly as I drove along a dirt road in Vermont. VW should sell all their cars with built-in tool kits.

I finally outright refused to drive it after the STOP, BRAKE FAULT light flashed red beneath the speedometer, and no one could figure out why, not even the dealer who charged us over $500 despite fixing nothing. We traded it for a Toyota Prius, a cute little car that looks like a hamster. It gets the garage now (although this comfortable parking spot never did much for the Passat). A year into the relationship, the Prius still has my trust.

But the Prius has become Andy’s car, given its high mileage and his daily 62-mile commute. And I am left with the seven-year-old Highlander and its suspicious brakes. Maybe what it needs is a name—something like Goldie or Rusty or Bob. Would it feel like part of the family then (and thus less inclined to carry us to our deaths)?

Or is this yet another relationship destined for the junk heap?

Does anybody know what's going on?

2008-09-30T12:34:00.000-04:00

A-hem. Excuse me. Yes, over here. (Furtive look around to see if anyone is eavesdropping.) Could you explain the financial crisis to me?

You see, I’ve done the required reading (New York Times and AP stories), and I’ve even done the bonus reading (editorials, Newsweek analyses), and I’ve also watched the network news analysts. I have investments in both stocks and bonds, and I don’t glaze over or tune out when I meet with our financial planner. I'm well-educated too.

But I don’t get it. And like high school kids in chemistry class who don’t dare admit that the chapter on atomic orbitals is confounding, I’m guessing that I'm not the only one who doesn’t get how it will affect us, the middle-class consumers and taxpayers.

Yes, I understand that there are citizens who bought houses far beyond their means (like the woman interviewed on CNN last week who makes $10/hour yet bought a $495,000 house on Long Island), and I understand that many folks are mired in credit card debt. I understand that real estate has tanked, so pity those who have to sell their houses right now, and I know that, should the market stay the same, I might be able to afford a Winnebago in my retirement but not gas to drive it. And my daughter's education fund? It might cover text books.

I have a slim grasp of what hedge funds and derivatives are, and I get the rudiments of Wall Street—the buying and selling of stock as a way for corporations to raise capital. But the rest of what Wall Street does seems like magic (or dark magic, as it were), where the magician waves his wand and literally pulls money out of a hat.

It hasn’t really hit me yet what the economy’s implosion will do to my daily life. I can still buy food and pay my bills. I still have a few writing assignments. My daughter gets on the school bus each morning and returns each afternoon. I can buy gas for my car and bread at the bakery. So the economic crisis feels like this abstract thing out there—like a hurricane that’s affecting another part of the country. But which part? And what kind of damage is it causing? And will it soon blow up here?

If I knew this, then maybe I would have understood what Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson planned on doing with that $700 billion. Exactly who—and by that, I mean the name of the company and/or entity, and the name of the individual in charge—was going to receive this money? And what were they going to do with it?

I vaguely understand that it would free up credit, so people and companies could borrow money. But at this point, I don’t anticipate needing a loan in the near future. So is my ship still in danger of sinking? Or will I remain afloat, only having to navigate choppy water?

And what exactly is happening to the people who got us into this mess—the well-paid financiers and “creative thinkers” who kept pulling money out of the hat even though they knew there was nothing behind it? Like, a-hem, Mr. Paulson himself, former Goldman Sachs CEO whose net worth has been projected at around $700 million. I don’t see him throwing $10 million into the bailout kitty. If we could round up 7,000 of his Wall Street cohorts, there’s the $700 billion right there.

I wish someone would write, “Economic Crisis for Dummies.” A lot of us might benefit. Maybe the bailout package would have passed Congress. Or maybe we, the well-informed voters, would have insisted that the bill be drafted in a different form in the first place.

But who am I to say? Maybe I’m just the dumb kid sitting in the back of the class.

Hunting

2008-09-18T13:15:00.000-04:00

I hate to shop. Never liked it. Just ask my mother.

Whenever we visited my grandmother in Boston—traveling from our home in the hinterlands of Vermont—my mother would drag me and my sister on day-long shopping expeditions to Filene's or R.H. Stearns, where she would sequester us in a small dressing room while she tried on what seemed like 50 dresses at a time. It was more boring than church.

Worse, she rarely wore the items that she purchased. I remember one particular dress—a dark blue frock that resembled a Naval officer's uniform—that cost $98 (in 1974) at Stearns. She wore it five times (I counted). Or the 100 percent polyester pantsuit in a gray/brown floral print, which belongs in the Worst Dressed section of the Fashion Hall of Fame, along with the patent leather go-go boots to match, all from Filene’s. She might have gotten away with it on the streets of New York. But in Vermont? Only women who had lost their grip on reality wore such costumes.

Yet when I asked if I could have a pair of corduroy pants like my friend Susie's, my father asked, "Do you really need them?"

Not surprisingly, my sense of fashion now tends toward the practical (boring). If a pair of capris and a shirt can’t be worn on a bike as well as to a nice restaurant, they aren’t worth it.

Which makes it hard to explain the allure of TJMaxx, the "fashion-for-less" department store that sits in a corner of downtown Rutland. At least once a season, I find myself wandering the aisles and digging for bargains in not just women's clothing but in housewares, linens, picture frames, and kids' toys. It's my primary stop on the Procrastination Express.

What makes it so enticing? Does it spark the latent hunter-gatherer in me? Is finding a softshell Patagonia jacket for $49.99—hiding amongst the women's pajamas—like coming across a rare Goji berry in the forest?

Or is hunting for bargains just a game? A treasure hunt for grown-ups: Patagonia capris for $19.99, Lole Bermuda shorts buried on the clearance rack for $10, hand-milled lavender soap from Provence for $4.99, a Le Creuset Dutch oven regularly $250 marked down to $49.99, kids' Levis with rhinestone-capped rivets for $14.99, Waterford crystal candleholders for $12.99.

I would never think to buy candleholders at Macy's or Dillard's or wherever people buy such things. But at TJMaxx, they're like plundered booty.

And yes, I’m embarrassed to admit that sometimes I get my booty home, then rarely wear or use it. A Tsunami zip cardigan really did accentuate my pear-shaped physique, and did I really think we would ever use napkin rings?

No. But it’s not about the shopping. It’s about the hunt.

So if Andy asks me what I did today, I won’t admit that I wasted time. Instead, I’ll say I went hunting.

The Olympics

2008-09-17T09:56:00.000-04:00

This summer, I completely ignored my own blog while I was writing one for the U.S. Olympic Committee's new web site, teamusa.org. Here are some of my favorite posts about the 2008 Olympics:

What do you love about the Olympics?

My daughter came home from camp yesterday with a gold medal around her neck and a toilet-paper-roll torch in her backpack.

“How did you win that?” I asked, pointing to the medal, a squashed soda can spray-painted gold.

“In the dog paddle race,” she said proudly. “I won by a mile!”

Seriously. Dog paddle. She’s 7. It’s her best stroke. READ MORE ...

Who is the greatest Olympian?

Since Michael Phelps won his 11^th gold medal in the 4x200 freestyle relay on Wednesday morning, he's been called the greatest Olympian of all time. READ MORE ...

Defying gravity

They looked like average, everyday people. Well, not the type that might waddle out of McDonald's with a Big Mac and fries. But the sort you might see doing free weights at the health club. Sure, the beach volleyball players were exceptionally tall, the distance runners lean, and the divers tan with strong legs. READ MORE ...

Inspiration or intimidation?

Dara Torres is going to the Olympics. Not the oldest Olympian ever - that honor is held by Sweden's Oscar Swahn, who won a silver medal at the 1920 Olympics in shooting at age 72 - the 41-year-old swimmer and mother of a 2-year-old has made headlines in just about every major media outlet. And some of the descriptions have been amusing. READ MORE ...

Before reality TV

Although hundreds of sports and their various disciplines have been added to the Olympic program since the first modern Olympiad in 1896, some of my favorites are the discontinued events. Club throwing anyone? A triathlon that combined gymnastics and track & field perhaps? Or running deer shooting, which hopefully did not involve actual galloping deer? READ MORE ...

The tourist halts!

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a friend with "Is China Ready for the 2008 Olympics?" written in the subject line. The message contained a series of photos showing amusing Chinese-to-English translations - or rather, mistranslations - on signs in public places: "Handbasin for child only do not beat" over what looks like a bathroom sink, "Toilets of Man" indicating what I assume is a men's restroom, and "The Tourist Halts" on a door that most likely leads to someone's home or office. READ MORE ...

Olympic Training Center: Like college for athletes

At 5'7" tall, I have never thought of myself as short. But standing in the lunch line at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs behind the Brazilian women's volleyball team, I am child-size. READ MORE ...

Handbags and windbreakers

2008-09-17T09:19:00.000-04:00

My friend Nigel, who lives in New Zealand, always enjoys pointing out the amusing differences between American English and the King's English (or is it now the Queen's?). In England and its former colonies, a bathroom is a place where people bathe, while a toilet (water closet, loo ...) is where we perform necessary anatomical eliminations.

He has also reminded me that what I refer to as a sweater is in fact called a jumper.

Then, on a blustery day, when I announced that I had forgotten my windbreaker, he chuckled and said that a windbreaker in Britain is someone who suffers from flatulence (and thus might require the loo?), while my nylon jacket is called a windcheater.

Most recently, he responded to my purse blog posting with a more ominous tale of linguistic misinterpretation. "In the English-speaking world, what you call a purse, we call a handbag," he wrote via email.

"A purse is a wallet-like thing in which notes (bills), credit cards, and (more rarely these days) coins are kept," he continued. "Women keep their purses in their handbags."

He then recounted a story about a New Zealand woman who was held-up at gunpoint in Gotham by a man who demanded that she hand over her purse. She opened her handbag and frantically rummaged around in it for her purse.

"Gimme your f**n purse!" the mugger screamed.

"I'm looking for it," she screamed back.

The thief then snatched her handbag and ran off with it, "leaving it to observers and later the cops to explain to the woman that she was very lucky that this linguistic misunderstanding hadn't got her shot," wrote Nigel, "for it's likely that the thief would have thought she was rummaging in her purse for a gun and not that she was searching for her purse in her handbag!"

Imagine if the thief had demanded her windbreaker.

Purses

2008-09-10T15:22:00.001-04:00

I need a new purse. My current bag is an over-the-shoulder or strap-in-your-hand hybrid, and it doesn’t do either well. So I tend to leave it flopped on the floor wherever I go, and something invariably falls out of its outside pocket. Like the car keys. But to buy a new purse is to condone this particular accessory. And I don’t. I don’t even like the name. Never have. You can’t say purse without squinching up your lips. Purse. It rhymes with terse. A purse is what a crotchety old woman carries looped over her arm and held tight. Like a weapon. Or a suitcase-sized satchel hauled about by a harried mother who needs to have at her immediate disposal any number of items: tissues, pens, a sweater, mirror and comb, three shades of lipstick, a daily planner from 2005, a dented half-drunk water bottle, and a three-course meal complete with silverware. I do not want to be either of these women. I want to be footloose and purse-free, able to shove my driver’s license, credit card, and $20 in one pocket and chapstick in the other and walk out the door. To carry more implies that others depend on me. “Don’t look at me! Carry your own damn Kleenex.” And to carry a handbag looped over one arm ties up that arm from useful activity. Ever tried steering a bike with a bag dangling from your arm? Alas, I slowly gave in to carrying a purse. In my 30s, I purchased a fanny pack and stuffed it with my wallet, chapstick, and a checkbook, Post-It notepad and a pen. Then I found a cute canvas over-the-shoulder carpet-bag-looking tote at a funky store in Ouray, Colorado, and decided it looked more dignified. I put in it the contents of my fanny pack, plus a newly acquired cell phone and Palm Pilot. And then I had a child. My purse became an Eagle Creek backpack-slash-diaper-bag. We could have survived for a week on a deserted island with what was stored in that bag, and probably for two weeks if you didn’t mind pinching cracker crumbs from the seams. Now that said child is almost 8, I’m back down to a normal-sized purse. I bought a leather Coach backpack-style version a few years ago, thinking that the leather and the name would give the illusion of respectability. But it soon became spattered with milk (from baby bottles smuggled into movie theaters and restaurants) and required too much maneuvering in winter to get it over both shoulders while wearing a Parka. So I ditched it for the over-the-shoulder, strap-in-your-hand model, purchased for too much money from Title IX Sports, the athletic-mom outfitter, which in my mind made it less of a purse and more of a “lifestyle accessory.” But it too is proving annoying. And I am forced to realize that I am the dispenser of Kleenex and Purell, money and gum, chapstick and cough drops. And when my cell phone rings, I need to be able to find it. What if it’s the school nurse calling? Or the police? Perhaps I just need to give my handbag a new name. Like Seinfeld, I’m not carrying a purse. I’ve got a “European Carry-All.” And with it slung over my shoulder, I’ll pretend I’m walking the Champs Elysees in Paris. “Vous faire a besoin d’un tissue, ma petite enfant?”

Murderer in the basement

2008-04-08T22:01:00.000-04:00

If and when I get skin cancer, I should remember today skiing at Pico. It was one of those classic spring days, the kind that feel like winter’s ransom. The sky was blue with a few swaths of cirrus; the sun and a south breeze warmed the air just enough that the snow’s surface softened, but not to the point of turning the snow to gloppy mashed potatoes; and the turns we made in the snow after the hour-plus hike up reminded me of why I love to ski. When I need a mental trip to my happy place, skiing Pico today could be it.

The only downside to the day—besides the hike up with skins stuck on our skis (which in my book isn’t a downside at all; the exercise is the reason we’re there)—was that I forgot to wear a baseball hat. I had slathered my face with SPF 45, but after five months of keeping almost all skin under wraps (hats, scarves, neck gators, jacket collars), it’s hard to think of the sun as a bad thing. As we started hiking at 12:30 p.m.—melanoma’s cocktail hour—I realized that we would be staring straight into the sun for the next hour and 15 minutes, never mind the rays reflecting off the bright snow. Well, I reasoned, it’s too nice to head home. But at least if I do get skin cancer—and I very much hope I don’t—I can look back over the past 40-plus years and remember days like today. Or the eight winters spent in Colorado where every weekend was spent skiing at a different resort. Or 12 years racing my bike in the west, sometimes spending up to six hours in the saddle as we rode across the desert, our sweat long ago having washed away whatever sunscreen we remembered to apply at dawn. Or even childhood summers spent in the town pool or swamping metal canoes in the lake at summer camp. Like a really bad hangover, at least it will have been fun that led me to that state. If only we earned all our illnesses, rather than just contracting them for no good reason other than the fact that we were unlucky enough to be sneezed on at the bus stop. We could rationally weigh the costs and benefits of our actions. Certainly some habits predispose us to illnesses. My weird Aunt Anne smoked eight packs a day and died of lung cancer. Duh. But what about my friend Wendy? She contracted thyroid cancer several years ago, but as far as I know, she doesn’t eat pounds of bacon, spend her days on the couch, or sniff glue. She eats well and exercises regularly. She’s smart, funny and just weird enough to be an interesting person. So it’s not like I can say, “Well, duh, if you didn’t luxuriate in those radium hot springs, then maybe you wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

Despite regular tests, her doctors, so far, have been unable to find the source of her cancer. So in a sense, she and her family—her husband and two kids—are living with the equivalent of a murderer in the basement. They know he’s there, but they just can’t find him, nor do they know how he got there. So they go about their daily lives trying not to think about him but wanting to blame someone or something for his presence. “Well, you left the door unlocked, of course someone broke in.”

Maybe we all have murderers in our basements. And maybe I let mine in on a nice sunny day when my skis cut through the corn snow like butter. But I try not to think about it. Why ruin a beautiful sunny spring day? Or even a dreary one for that matter. And next time, I’ll remember my hat.

Psychotic Boyfriends

2008-04-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

Spring is finally showing signs of arriving in Vermont. The crocuses are poking up their brave little heads, and the snow banks are melting, leaving behind their glacial loads of road grit and grime on the lawn. Yesterday, it was almost 60 degrees—the first time it has been that warm since ... since I can't remember when. Last October, maybe?

But no sooner have I washed and put away my winter parka and folded up my scarf, it’s back to blustery and cold today, with a north wind beating back any warmth from the sun's rays. And what’s this? Snow in the forecast for Friday? It makes me feel as if I'm dating a psychotic boyfriend. For no apparent reason, he's suddenly friendly and warm, making me forget completely about the dark days of winter when he was sullen and mean. He even gives flowers on these days. When perfect spring days arrive, I feel like dancing in the street. Throw open the windows! Let’s have a party!

But Psychotic Boyfriend throws these days at us just often enough (which isn’t anywhere near often enough) to allow us to weather (pun intended) the bad days—the days when it snows in May or the rain blows sideways and the furnace can’t possibly take the chill out of the air. These are the days that Psychotic Boyfriend has not taken his medication. It’s a wonder anyone puts up with his behavior.

But just as I'm threatening to walk out—to move south or west or to remote Pacific atolls where the sun always shines—Psychotic Boyfriend softens his blows, turns sunny and warm again, and cons me into sticking around. The earth radiates warmth, the grass turns green, the daffodils finally bloom (despite the fact that psychotic boyfriend has tried to lock them in a deep freeze), the air smells like spring. Now this is more like it. I even feel like inviting the neighbors over for a beer.

For over a decade, I lived out west, where the weather was much more even-tempered (excluding the occasional tornado). I didn’t have to drop everything on a nice day just to get outdoors. There was always the weekend, when the sun would almost always continue to shine. But while living out there, I dated an actual psychotic boyfriend, who on a perfectly sunny day would attack me for something—that I didn’t make enough money, that I wasn’t ambitious enough, that I didn’t cook enough. I stuck with him for over three years, living for those really good days when we would climb three 14,000-foot peaks in a day, or mountain bike Moab’s White Rim trail.

I finally dumped the real psychotic boyfriend and realized that I could still climb 14-ners and do long mountain bike rides without the mental anguish. I traded him in for a place where the weather is psychotic and the boyfriend (now husband) is not. Although I would dearly love to live where the sun shines more days than not, we are (I’m slowly realizing) not moving. But if this is the sacrifice I must make--a balanced man for unbalanced weather--then I guess I can’t put the parka away quite yet.

-----

In 1876, Mark Twain gave a speech entitled “The Weather.” In it, he said, “I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.”

I’m so excited! ... (not)

2008-01-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

I was cashing a check at my bank today and noticed that a recent merger had brought not only a new name to the institution, but a new slogan as well. Last fall, my old Factory Point Bank—a name that implied proletariat values and good honest labor—was purchased by the regional-sounding Berkshire Bank. Now, on the wall over the tellers’ windows, it says in big gold letters: “Welcome to Berkshire Bank, America’s Most Exciting Bank.”

I stood there feeling somewhat alarmed. I don’t want my money in an exciting bank. I want my bank to be staffed by staid, suit-wearing executives who view the slightest hundredth-of-a-point change in interest rates with great concern. I want my money cared for by men and women whose major form of entertainment is attending Kiwanis meetings and who view bowling as sport.

“America’s Most Exciting Bank” makes it sound as if the Berkshire Bank employs rollercoaster fanatics who want to take my money on a similar ride, who thought Enron was an excellent investment opportunity, and who speculate on real estate in volatile Mideast countries. Excitement in banking gives off a whiff of embezzlement, the savings and loan debacle, and the stock market crashing. It’s like your dentist promising “dental thrills.” Some institutions and occupations should simply not be exciting.

Standing at the teller’s window, I had to fight the impulse to withdraw all my money and run from the bank yelling, “Stop the ride! I want to get off!”

But raised by a thrifty Scot and a mother whose own father lost what was left of the family fortune in a dress factory purchased in 1928, I am prone to seeing the financial glass as half-empty—with several impending leaks. The glass is never ever half-full. Perhaps if I took a little fiscal risk—say, investing my entire IRA in Apple stock—I might get somewhere.

Still, I think I’d prefer having my money in a bank that promises “A Passion to Perform” (Deutsch Bank), or that it’s the “Bank of Opportunity” (Bank of America), or even one that tells me “You’re Richer Than You Think” (Canada’s Scotiabank), which I would be had I converted my American dollars to Canadian a few months back. Or even “America’s Most Boring Bank.” At least then it wouldn’t sound as if I need Dramamine—or Valium—every time I deposit a paycheck.

Up up and away

2008-01-18T16:15:00.000-05:00

I hate to fly. Which is a problem given that part of my income comes from travel writing. It’s not a fear of flying. I actually do love to fly. It’s the way that traveling via commercial airline has become torture.

I used to love air travel. I loved airplanes and airports and anything related to aviation. I even wrote a high school term paper on the history of aviation. When we flew to England in 1972—October 4, to be exact—on a BOAC 747 from Montreal, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was nine, and this was the biggest adventure I had ever had, after a car camping trip to Minnesota the previous year. I didn’t care where we were going. We could have flown in circles and landed back in Montreal (something I did last year, in fact, but was far less giddy about). I was just so excited to be flying in an airplane. Finally. And a jet no less! The biggest jet they had ever made.

I remember how it felt as the 747 rumbled down the runway, my back pushed into the seat from the acceleration of those four big engines. I remember the cabin gently pitching up and the feeling of weightlessness as the plane’s wheels lifted off the tarmac. I remember the disappointment that we were stuck in the four middle seats too far from a window to really see the world grow small beneath us. But it was night, so it didn’t really matter anyway.

It was glamorous to fly. Exotic. Adventurous. There was enough security to know that we were special—that with whom and on what we were traveling was important enough to protect, not that we were the potential threat.

I didn’t fly again until spring break 1983—sophomore year in college. I flew People Express to Norfolk, Virginia, to a friend’s house in a more southerly clime. But I became stranded in Newark, the airline’s hub. A helpful gate agent found me and several of my fellow travelers a flight from LaGuardia instead—a cab ride away. Adding to the drama, the cab rear-ended another vehicle on the ride over, but somehow we made it. This was, apparently, what low-cost deregulated travel was all about.

And so it has become, even on legacy airlines. Flying back from Canada last winter, my flight was canceled due to weather. After much tapping on her keyboard, the gate agent presented me with my new itinerary: the same flight but two days later. Had I not rushed back to the house that I had rented with some friends (who still happened to be there), logged onto the Internet, Skyped Air Canada’s 800 number, waited on hold for one hour and 58 minutes, and listened to the same on-hold soundtrack set on a continuous cycle for the entire duration, I might still be there. Instead, I found flights routed through two different airports and actual free seats on those flights, making it home an entire day before I would have even taken off had I followed the gate agent’s plan.

Then there’s the issue of seating. It used to be a random surprise where we would end up (and on Southwest Airlines, still is). Front or back of the plane, aisle or hopefully window, as I still haven’t gotten over that windowless flight in 1972. But now, for the pleasure of sitting near the front—thereby giving us a shred of hope of making our connection in the likely event that the flight is delayed—it costs extra.

When I booked a $215 roundtrip ticket on Northwest to Dallas last May, I was only given the option of reserving a middle seat. “Must already be a full flight,” I thought. But when I checked in at the airport, I optimistically hit “change seat” on the self-service kiosk’s monitor. Hark! There were aisle and window seats available, and near the front! But not unless I forked over another $15 per flight. I upgraded on the first leg so that I had a better chance of making the 40-minute connection in Detroit, which turned out to be a sprint.

And what’s with these short layovers? When flying to/from more remote airports, say Boise or Burlington, it’s either four hours or 40 minutes. And the connecting flight is almost guaranteed two concourses away. How do non-athletic people travel by air? How would my 84-year-old mother make it from United’s gate C31 at O’Hare to gate F4 in the allotted 40 minutes, which becomes more like 20 after unloading from the back of the plane?

I had to make this exact gate change last week, but with only 10 minutes to spare. I work-out regularly. But by the time I reached F4 and my flight to Calgary—heart pounding, lungs gasping for air, ski boot bag and computer-laden briefcase swinging wildly from my shoulders, sweat soaking my shirt (the same shirt I would have to wear for the next 48 hours in the likely event that my luggage hadn’t made the flight)—I looked so bedraggled that the flight attendant parted with a bottle of water. For free.

When I did arrive in Calgary and found my luggage sitting innocently on the baggage carousel, I exclaimed, “Hey! My suitcase! What a surprise!”

This has become an all-too-common expression, even when connections aren’t tight. On at least a quarter of the flights I take, I am relieved of the convenience of my luggage.

This time, it was my friend Hilary’s turn, and she was not amused. Her luggage had not arrived despite the fact that her connecting flight had come into O’Hare’s gate F3 (immediately adjacent to the Calgary flight at F4). “Your bag is in Denver,” is what the customer service person told her when she filed a claim, as if this statement would reassure her.

It’s as if we’re flying Aeroflot, without the option of bribing baggage handlers. I have skied in other people’s jackets, used their toothpaste and contact lens solution, worn the same outfit to meetings and dinners, dried my socks with the hotel hair dryer, and tried to style my hair using my fingers and hotel conditioner.

At what point will we shout, “Enough!” If a restaurant treated us this badly, we would never patronize it again. “Ah, madam, we have a lovely table for you here,” the host would say, showing us to a table squashed in the corner near the dishwasher with nothing but a stale roll offered and canned pasta salad (yes, canned, like tuna). Then the bill would come: $300. Bon appetite!

But in this case, we can always try another restaurant. Or make our own pasta salad. We can’t fly—or even move quickly—to another part of the world without colluding with the airlines that insist on torturing us. Deregulation has fueled our wanderlust, and it’s tough to be grounded, even if it’s self-imposed.

Not that any of this is new. In 1984, again on People Express, my backpack went missing. I was en route back to college after a wonderful summer working in Glacier National Park. Inside my pack were waterlogged hiking boots, sodden during one last hike the day before I left, and a bag of dirty laundry, including my entire collection of underwear, save the pair I was wearing. I filed a claim, then hitched a ride to school with a roommate. I had a few clothes in storage that I could wear.

A month later, someone at the local bus stop called. My backpack had arrived (and mysteriously been delivered there). Inside were moldy boots and musty clothes, and on the outside hung a baggage tag written in what looked like Dutch. My backpack had apparently had more of an adventure than I had.

If this is where airlines are headed—to bankruptcy along with People Express—perhaps next time I’ll fly cargo.

Give me an H! Give me an O!

2007-10-10T11:15:00.000-04:00

In September, we finally relented and let Samantha sign up for cheerleading. Or rather, Andy relented. I was OK with it from the time she expressed interest in it two years ago. We were reading off a newspaper flyer about all the kids’ activities offered by the city rec department: soccer (spoken with a hopeful voice), rock climbing, T-ball, gymnastics, cheerleading, ... . Samantha jumped at the word as if she had known what cheerleading was since birth. She was five at the time, and Andy said absolutely, positively, unequivocally no.

In truth, Samantha is a born cheerleader. She’s naturally loud—voted “loudest camper” at summer day camp this year—prone to spells of jumping around with arms flailing, and attracted to skimpy, sparkly outfits.

But the very idea of the sport, if I can call it that, has given Andy fits. He seems to think that eight weeks of cheerleading will start our 7-year-old down a career path to waitressing at Hooters. Or on the payroll of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

I, on the other hand, see the rec center program as an avenue to get cheerleading out of her system before an age where wearing tight outfits and cheering on the sidelines for boys to score a T-O-U-C-H-D-O-W-N really is loaded with sexual innuendo—women as inferior objects to men. Primary school cheerleaders aren’t sexual objects. They’re cute. Sort of. And why not let her see what it’s all about? To say no now could lead to her harboring the urge for a decade, then dropping out of college to pursue her unfulfilled cheerleading dream.

When I was a kid, cheerleading was the only activity available for girls, at least until high school, when field hockey and cross-country running were added to the menu. We didn’t even have to ask. Our moms signed us up, and every Saturday in the fall, in their dresses and high-heel shoes, they drove us to the flood plain that served as an elementary school football field.

We thought our cheers actually helped the boys and that they would look over and see how cute we were in our pigtails and short skirts. We weren’t destined for careers at Hooters. We knew one day we were supposed to date those boys, but only if they asked first. We were housewives in training—attractive and supportive, cheering on the boys in their endeavors, without anyone—except our parents—cheering our own.

By the time we were in high school, only the cool girls were picked to be cheerleaders. And the squad was as much a dating pool for the football team as it was a cheerleading group. With thick glasses, good grades, and no boobs, I was far from cool and way off the cheerleader radar. Not that I wouldn’t have jumped at the chance if asked.

Then my sophomore year, I went to prep school. Exeter had been all boys until 1970, and it never seemed to occur to anyone to start a cheerleading squad once girls were a part of campus life—probably because girls who win the math prize in public school aren’t typically the type to swoon after the quarterback. (And if we do swoon, we do so privately. No sense in setting ourselves up for public humiliation.)

At football games, a couple of potential theater majors with bull horns led the whole student body—or at least the students who attended the games—in loud intellectually elitist cheers such as “Pursue them, pursue them, make them relinquish the ball,” or the more low-brow “What do we do? Screw the blue,” for the end-of-season big game against rival Andover with its blue-and-white team colors.

Cheerleading wasn’t an option, and somehow this made us equal to the boys in those early Title-IX days. We could play volleyball, soccer, do crew, swim, even play ice hockey. We weren’t housewives in training. We were expected to attend college at the very least, get a job and make our way in the world. I wasn’t going to stand around and cheer for some boy. Unless he cheered for me too.

Fortunately, Samantha’s cheerleading career is over after only four weeks. Too much standing around, she says. “I want to play soccer next year,” she announced the other night. She had discovered it in gym class and liked all the running around. I know our days of skimpy outfits and sparkly eye shadow are far from over. But at least she’s learning that it’s more fun to participate than watch, and to be cheered rather than to cheer.

And if she does end up schlepping cocktails at Hooters, at least she’ll be on someone’s payroll.

First law of thermodynamics

2007-08-07T12:36:00.000-04:00

My friend Nigel called the other day. He was in the San Francisco airport en route home to New Zealand after having climbed Mt. Rainier outside Seattle. “I crested the rim of the summit crater,” he recounted, “and I felt I couldn’t go on.”

A 15-year-old memory that had been buried deep in my cortex—beneath memories of child birth, mothering panic, and hellacious airplane trips with an active toddler—came back in pieces, as if I were an amnesiac. I suddenly remembered that view from the crater rim over to the actual summit—the highest part of the crater rim—of Rainier, a 14,410-foot dormant volcano. I remember it seemed infinitely far away across the snow-filled crater floor beneath a deep blue sky.

Nigel made it, he said, just as I had, slogging behind my then-boyfriend. As I sat on our screen porch, phone in hand, I was transported back briefly to that summit with the glorious view of Seattle, Puget Sound, the Olympic Range, Mt. Baker, the stump of Mt. St. Helens ... I sat there on the phone, feeling self-satisfied for just a minute.

“So do you have any adventures planned?” asked Nigel, a globe-trotting political science professor whom I met in 1994 while climbing 18,510-foot Mt. Elbrus, also a dormant volcano, in southern Russia. I looked down at the small roll of fat bulging over the waistband of my shorts and suddenly felt like a drop-out—the math prodigy who dropped out of Harvard and now worked as a mechanic changing oil at Jiffy Lube. Where once I would have replied, “Yes! I’m entered in the Leadville 100 mountain bike race in a month,” or “We’re trying to climb all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks this summer,” I said: “Uh, we’re going to Maine next week; I might play a little tennis.”

There was a detectable pause on the other end of the phone. Nigel once told me that I was one of the fittest people he knew. I didn’t just enter the Leadville 100. I won it. I once climbed five of Colorado’s 14-ners in a weekend. And when Nigel and I climbed Elbrus, I didn’t just summit it. I was the first one in our group of five—all men—to make it, and then, with time to spare that afternoon, I skipped up its 18,442-foot sub-peak.

Now here I sat 13 years later with a goal of playing a little tennis, maybe walking on the beach or doing a 20-mile bike ride. And I felt like two people: the Previous Peg who knew what blood tasted like in her lungs, and the current version—“Samantha’s mom”—who would like nothing more than eight solid hours of sleep and an afternoon reading a good book without hearing the word, “MOM!” shouted every five minutes.

As Nigel talked about his climb up the snowfields and glaciers of Rainier, I started wondering if Previous Peg would ever return, even for just a brief visit. Will I ever find the motivation—or desire—to push physical limits again? Or am I destined to watch my tummy roll grow larger, like tree rings building out each year?

I’d like to think that version one will return, once Samantha is older. If for no other reason than to still fit into my clothes. For now, I have slid into the role of Samantha’s mom, and I don’t have the energy to be both people. It seems as if the first law of thermodynamics applies to parenting—that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form. While some days it feels as if all our energy has been utterly destroyed, I realize it has simply been used to create a stubborn, strong-willed, six-year-old whose current life goal is to become a horse rider.

Although I always thought I would pine for adventure, I don’t. At least most of the time. Friends no longer call inviting us on bike rides or backpacking trips. I still enjoy riding for a couple of hours or going for a short hike with only adults; I have to in order to remain sane. But to go out for too long feels selfish, as if I’m disrupting the family equilibrium—sucking up all the energy for my own personal good, when it’s Samantha who needs it so she won’t wither.

In truth, Andy and I have both withered. But I like to think of it as lying dormant.

Camping

2007-05-25T22:40:00.000-04:00

As a kid, I hated camping. Camping meant bugs. Camping meant no TV. Camping meant we weren’t cool enough to stay at Howard Johnson’s.

Other kids got to spend their vacations swimming in HoJo’s indoor pools and eating hot fudge sundaes in the restaurant chain’s turquoise green booths. We spent ours under the roof of a green canvas L.L. Bean tent, the design of which hadn’t changed since George Washington’s encampment at Valley Forge. And we ate whatever my mother could cook on the two-burner Coleman stove, set up on a picnic table at whatever campground was the site of that summer’s vacation. Mostly, we ate spaghetti.

Once it was pitched, which took the better part of an afternoon, the tent was spacious enough for four to sleep side-by-side, but that was about it. My parents each slept on air mattresses with matching flannel L.L. Bean sleeping bags, while my sister and I made do with cotton mattresses dug from the musty alcoves of my grandparent’s attic. These were covered with old muslin sheets and scratchy, moth-eaten, wool Navy blankets once used by my grandfather during the Great War (the first one).

But our vacation home was not entirely without luxury. In an uncharacteristic moment, my father—a man who takes his Scottish heritage seriously—splurged on the tent’s matching green awning that made it look as if it had a porch. If it rained during our camping expeditions—which it invariably did—my father would don a dark blue wool balaclava, sit in a lawn chair under the awning, and read Chekhov. Or worse, he would fish. We were expected to do the same.

My mother would shut herself in the car and read The New Yorker while my sister and I threw ourselves in despair onto our itchy wool beds. “I hate camping,” my sister said over and over again.

But by far the worst part of the whole experience was the fly-infested outhouses from which emanated the worst smell I had ever encountered. While our parents read, my sister and I would see how close we could get to the offending structure before the odor overpowered us, then scurry away. The very thought of setting foot inside it induced constipation. Only once, when I was eight and we were driving cross-country to see friends in Minnesota, did we ever stay at a campground with flush toilets. It also boasted a swimming pool, tether-ball, and four-square court, plus a bunch of other kids to play with. It was in Indiana, and I didn’t want to leave.

By our teenage years, we would have sooner done time in prison than gone camping. Camping was boring. Camping was for kids. Camping was barbaric. Camping was beneath us. We required daily showers and regular changes of freshly laundered clothing.

Sometime during college, though, camping became cool. On Friday afternoons in the early fall, we would load a friend’s Ford Bronco with sleeping bags (mine was a North Face bag purchased at EMS my sophomore year), foam pads, and a two-person tent into which four of us would squeeze. We would head north, where someone always knew someone who owned land in Vermont, although it was never easy to find. I liked it out here, despite the fact that most of the time I was cold, hungry, and not well rested. But we were different than the loafer-wearing, pearl-earring set back on campus.

I liked camping so much that I changed majors—from art history to geology, which I naively assumed was like Camping for Credit. One summer, the geology department unwisely gave eight of us the keys to a van and a week to reach the required summer field camp, 2,000 miles away in Red Lodge, Montana. The goal was to see as much of the country as we could—from Niagara Falls to the Corn Palace in South Dakota to the Grand Tetons—on the $75 our parents had paid the department for gas and whatever other money we had squeezed from their wallets. On that five day odyssey, we drove west, discovering places most of us had only read about, and pulled over when we were tired—in corn fields and state parks, in town parks and beside the road. It wasn’t exactly camping in the strict sense, more like a cheap way to sleep.

I continued camping even after I was gainfully employed. Yes, it was a cheap way to sleep, but it was the sense of promised adventure that was camping’s allure in early adulthood. A night sleeping in a tent was almost always followed by a hike up one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, an all-day mountain bike ride around Utah’s Canyonlands, a raft trip down Class V rapids in West Virginia, or a day spring skiing in New Hampshire’s Tuckerman Ravine.

My camping excursions stopped when Samantha was born. It seemed natural to stop when she was a baby. Who wants to dig for diapers by headlamp? Find the bottle in a cooler at 2 a.m.? Or make a convincing argument that the Big Bad Wolf doesn’t like to live in riparian forests like the one outside the tent’s walls but instead prefers darker evergreen forests in hills where no one in their right mind would never camp ...

But Samantha is almost seven now, and we haven’t incorporated camping back into our summer routine. The bugs have something to do with it. Black flies sense that I am a giant feast, and no level of DEET keeps them at bay. But it’s not like the bugs didn’t swarm me before she was born. It’s just that I’m not willing to put up with the discomfort of camping with no reward. And there’s not much promise for adventure when Samantha asks, “When can we go home?”

Last summer, we tested the waters with a modified backpacking trip to a hut on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range—modified because we attempted to mitigate whining by driving to the summit, then hiking the 1.5 miles down to the hut. And hut is a misnomer. More like a lodge with remarkably odor-free pit toilets. (This should not have come as a surprise, however, given that one night for three cost over $200.) The place slept 90 in bunk rooms, and Andy, Samantha and I were assigned a triple-decker bunk in a room with five other people. Once the novelty of the bunks wore off, Samantha was too scared to sleep alone and ended up sharing the two-foot-wide mattress with Andy, who had been trying to sleep on the bunk above her. We were all grumpy the next morning, and the only adventure was hiking back s-l-o-w-l-y to the car.

Do we try a bona fide camping trip this year? My enthusiasm is low. But I do want to instill the sense that we are a family that camps, that enjoys the outdoors, and that seeks adventure. Not a family that watches TV. But I don’t want her to hate camping either—to associate it with bugs and bad bathrooms, or think we’re doing it because we’re too cheap to book a room at the Sheraton (which would have cost less than our night in the “hut”). If we could camp at Disney World, would she have fonder memories of this summer-time ritual? Or would she just remember that her parents were both very grumpy?

Maybe we should start by camping in the backyard. At least then a clean, odor-free bathroom is only a few steps away.

House guests

2007-05-09T14:40:00.000-04:00

After my sister got married, she moved overseas with her husband. With the prospect of free lodging in an exotic land, my mother announced that she and my father would soon visit. For three weeks. My new brother-in-law went pale. In the end, they stayed for two. And my mother has been the subject of significant ribbing ever since. Now my parents generally keep their visits to a polite three days. Not that my mother wouldn’t stay longer if she could. My father knows that fish and guests stink after three days ... except when the purchase of plane tickets is involved.

My mother would live with us if we hinted at an invitation. She refers to our guest room as “her” room and seems deeply offended if we tell her that she can’t visit, as if we’ve put her out in the street without a warm coat.

This happened last fall. We were renovating our master bedroom and moved—for six months—into “her” room. She called to announce an impending visit (there is no asking, just announcing), and I told her that there was no vacancy—that we were living in the guest room. There was a pause, as if she were waiting for me to say, “Oh never mind, you can come. Andy and I will sleep on the futon in the office.”

But horrible daughter that I am, I did not capitulate. They stayed at the local Comfort Inn. I felt guilty. Andy did not.

But there have been other times when saying “I’m afraid that’s an inconvenient time to come,” or simply “No,” hasn’t stopped her. Three years ago, she and my father made plans to fly to England from an airport near our house, not theirs. Yet they failed to advise us of their plans. A friend from Colorado had plans to visit us at the exact time.

Put off by their presumption that mi casa es su casa, I said firmly no, that I would not ask my friend to sleep on the couch (or futon) so they could roost here. I thought that was that. My friend arrived, and when we returned from a day trip, there was my mother sitting at our kitchen table.

“We were too tired to drive home,” she said in her wet-puppy voice.

Andy was outraged. I was mad. My friend felt awkward. I asked them to sleep on the futon, then felt guilty all night.

It’s not that I don’t love my parents. I do. Very much. And I know the sacrifices they made when my sister and I were young—eating fried clams at HoJo’s rather than at a nicer place with table cloths, driving us through freezing rain to reach the orthodontist, listening to us whine and complain through the drudgery of prep school, and fetching our tired selves from college, not to mention paying for it.

It’s just that their visits make me feel as if I’m being drawn and quartered. My parents like to think that they just blend into our lives when they visit. But in truth, it only works best when we—or specifically I—become part of theirs again. I feel torn between my former role as child under their care and my current role as adult with a child now under my care—a child who wants my attention as much as they want it too.

“She certainly runs the house, doesn’t she?” my mother will say in the middle of one of Samantha’s “Grandma-is-visiting” meltdowns.

“She does live here,” I say in Samantha’s defense. I want to have a meltdown too.

Then there’s the fact that we lead a different lifestyle than my parents did when they were in the trenches of raising children. I choose to work, and to exercise, as often as I can. My parents firmly believe that dinner should involve silverware and don’t always agree with where I cut corners. My father once announced that he doesn’t consider pizza an adequate dinner entrée.

“What are you planning for dinner tonight?” my mother always asks between bites of cereal. When she was raising children, she always had a dinner plan, and she seems to feel that starvation is imminent if something isn't defrosting by mid-morning, or a grocery list isn't prepared. I usually regard dinner as something that can be pulled together in the 20 minutes before the appointed hour, and sometimes it involves the same cereal she was munching on for breakfast. But I have to say, she has never gone hungry in my home.

When either Andy or I dash off in the evening for a bike ride or game of tennis, my mother gets a worried look and asks, “When will you eat? “When I get back.”

“It’s not good for you to eat so late,” she replies, still worried.

“It’s not good for me to not exercise.”

Then there are the comments about parenting style. “You act like you’re running a restaurant,” she chastises when I ask Samantha what she would like for dinner, macaroni and cheese or cous cous and chicken. “Just make her eat what you’re eating.”

Except I don’t know many 6-year-olds who eat take-out Thai food or spinach lasagna. And I refuse to subsist on mac & cheese.

In the hope that she might broaden her view, I point out to my mother that Andy, Samantha and I are reasonably happy and well-nourished. That Andy and I make a decent living and aren’t on the gov’ment dole. That we help the neighbors and the community when we can. And that Samantha doesn’t swing from the chandeliers, play loud violent video games, or yell obscenities out the window.

But perhaps if she did, my parents wouldn’t visit as often.

Large prey

2007-04-25T15:55:00.000-04:00

The day after Christmas, Andy announced that he wanted to buy a new TV. Not just any TV but one of those giant flatscreen high-definition TVs that become the focal point of whatever room they lord over.

We didn’t need a new TV. We had two smaller flatscreen TVs in our kitchen and bedroom, and the “main” TV—the one inhabiting the so-called TV room—was a perfectly good Sony given to us by my in-laws nine years ago. It measured 27 inches on the diagonal and had a clearer picture than the other two newer TVs, which either make people look short and fat or, in zoom mode, chop off part of their heads. While we were visiting my family in Atlanta over the Holidays, Andy, my father, and my brother-in-law were left unattended long enough that they set off on a trip to a local electronics store. In our small Vermont city (which would be considered a large town in more populous states), the largest electronics store sells more back-porch-type top-loading freezers (to hold that season’s deer meat) than it does TVs. And it’s name—Rex—seems more appropriate for a pet shop.

In this big-city electronics store, Andy admitted to being captivated by the rows of gigundus televisions with such clear pictures that he could see if Peyton Manning was suffering from nasal drip and whether his teammates had been circumcised or not.

“It would be nice to see the ball,” Andy told me after announcing his desire to purchase one of these TVs. And not only the TV, but also home theater too, so he could hear the fans cheering all around as if our couch were in a private box at Lambeau Field. And by ball, he meant any ball—football, baseball, tennis ball.

“You can even see the individual blades of grass,” he claimed, referring to the turf under whatever football game he had been watching while in the store.

“Oh?” I replied. “Why is that important?”

“It’s just such a clear picture.” He was almost giddy, and he isn’t the type to succumb to giddiness.

The conversation then turned to money. When I asked the price, he hedged: “Um, more than we should spend right now.”

With that, I figured we had put the topic to bed. But he was not ready to concede. “It would improve our Super-Bowl-watching experience,” he stated, as if I cared about that annual rite. “And I’ve been waiting for these TVs to come down in price.”

Not long enough, I thought. I just couldn’t understand his desire. Not that I’m immune to shopping impulses. But they normally involve shoes or sweaters at TJ Maxx, items that cost generally less than $50. We’re outdoorsy types, not barca-loungers. For the price of this much-sought-after piece of electronic equipment, we could ski in the Alps for a week.

Then there’s the issue of practicality, and Andy is normally the pinnacle of practicality. We haven’t replaced the toaster oven that he purchased in 1985 because it still works, and he wears shirts he’s owned since college because they still fit and aren’t threadbare. And we drive our cars until the engines are about to blow. Which is about to happen on our VW. At least in my opinion. Andy says that the car is merely temperamental. Fine, but $3,000 would be a nice down payment on a less fickle car.

What was driving my typically budget-conscious husband to drop most of month’s pay on an audio/visual toy? Is it the 21^st century way of bagging large prey? “Look what I brought home, honey! This should last us through the winter.”

Or is it his need to master something? To put it together, adding its remote control to the flock already roosting on the coffee table, and make it work despite the inherent complexity?

Or is it that Andy, and his male brethren, have—for the most part—been able to hang on to their childhoods more easily than women? And giant HD TVs—and home theater, ATVs, and even fancy lawn tractors—are simply the best toys around. They can get together on Super Bowl Sunday to show off their new toys the way they once gathered in the neighborhood to check out Ralphie’s new Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot, Range Model Air Rifle.

We women, we’re the ones poo-pooing their grand schemes and telling them, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Our childhoods feel like a lifetime ago, and now our days are consumed by keeping the nest in order, not adorned with expensive electronic accoutrements. Three grand could go toward a season’s worth of groceries, a car that starts on demand, even Ralphie’s college fund. We kill the joy and feel self-righteous doing it.

When I returned from a business trip in mid-January to find a 46-inch Samsung LCD TV commanding the north wall of the TV room, I realized that I felt more jealousy than anger at the money “thrown away.” Andy’s inner child is alive and well enough to not only conceive of buying such big-ticket toys but then enjoying them with no remorse. My inner child moved out around the time our real child “moved in,” leaving behind a surly grouch who only owns an iPod because it was given to her.

As I stood watching Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel’s HD Theater—the neon tropical fish swimming by as if we were on the reef with them—I realized that I miss my inner child. Should I go looking for her? Or will I find her somewhere on the screen of that big TV?

Beauty or a beast?

2006-11-09T16:10:00.000-05:00

Tasked with outfitting myself for a Halloween party, and wishing to build my costume around a pair of rotten teeth purchased a few years ago for just such an occasion, I headed to WalMart.

Half-an-hour later, I had a complete trashy teenager ensemble—purple crushed velvet camisole with copious bust (size XL in junior department), push-up bra with molded foam cups and itchy lace trim, fishnet pantyhose on sale for $1, big hoop earrings, matching skull-and-crossbones leather-ette armbands, a red wig, and plastic high-heel sandals (la piece de résistance for $5.88). To all this I added a denim mini-skirt that I had fashioned from a pair of Levis in 1980. The total fiscal outlay: $40.

It’s cheap to look cheap.

Samantha declared that I looked beautiful. I looked in the mirror and could only see one of those women who strut through the midway at the county fair on a Saturday night. Is this who my daughter, age 6, aspires to be? I find myself hoping that conservative and preppy comes back into vogue before she reaches an age when what she wears will really matters. To her, and to us. Or will she always have a natural attraction to styles that make her parents wince?

When I was young, my mother’s college friend—a woman we knew only as Olga—would send us boxes of clothes that her daughter had outgrown. Olga lived in New York City and was obviously a member of a socioeconomic group that could afford to dress its offspring in miniature versions of the same clothes that the adults wore to the country club and PTA meetings. My mother would open each shipment and ogle over the Pendleton wool plaid pants and camels hair coats.

My older sister and I would cringe, denouncing each garment as ugly, hideous, something only old ladies would wear. We would sooner wear our pajamas to school than be caught dressed in any of Olga’s daughter’s cast-offs.

Instead, my favorite outfit was a leather-look vinyl mini-skirt, complete with fetching fringe along the hem, and a matching brown vinyl vest, also rimmed with fringe. I remember wearing this get-up as many days in a row as I could, and my mother didn’t seem to mind, probably because the skirt and vest didn’t require much maintenance other than an occasional sponging. My sister owned a similar outfit, except hers had longer fringe on her vest.

But when our appearance was required at a family event in a civilized part of the world, my mother would intervene in our clothing selections. At least until I was 12, when one fateful day, she threw in the towel. She had taken me to Hovey’s Department Store to purchase “something decent to wear” to my Aunt Ann’s funeral. The funeral was scheduled for Trinity Church in Boston, and my mother must have thought a Vanderbilt or Rockefeller might wander in off the street. But we were never close to Aunt Ann, my father’s older sister, and her passing was not an event that I thought warranted a fashion makeover. She had smoked eight packs of cigarettes a day and, little wonder, fell victim to lung cancer. She had also once had a frontal lobotomy back when that was the fashionable treatment for the mentally unhinged, and my sister and I were as emotionally close to her as we were to a floor lamp. Except for the floor lamp in my grandmother’s bedroom that turned on and off with a clap of the hands. We preferred its company to just about everyone on my father’s side of the family.

From the racks at Hovey's, my mother thought the perfect outfit for a spring funeral was a skirt and matching shirt with giant pink roses set against a light teal background. She insisted (insisted) that we buy it. I looked in the dressing room mirror and felt like one of Maria Von Trapp’s stepchildren dressed in a frock fashioned from the villa’s drapes. With hands defiantly on hips and snarly expression on my face, I insisted I would not wear it. Yet my mother bought it anyway. I felt completely and utterly defeated.

Then on the way home, we stopped at Zayre’s (like Ames, only lower quality, if that’s possible). There, I found a beige gauze skirt with matching t-shirt and brown “leather” belt. Now this was me! Wearing this, I could hold my head high, smile at my fellow funeral goers, even chat up a Rockefeller, should one walk into the church vestibule. I'd like to think my enthusiasm convinced my mother to buy this outfit and return the other. In truth, the fact that it cost under $10 (to Hovey's $30) sealed the deal.

After that, my mother rarely forced her tastes upon me, probably because I had shown that, except for accessories (that leather belt), I had grown beyond the vinyl look and outfits more appropriate for Halloween.

I choose not to fight clothing battles with Samantha. As long as her outfits are climatically correct and not too whore-ish, she can wear stripes and flowers, glitter and leopard print. Not that I don’t wince or make comments. But I don’t put up a fight. I’m confident that, thanks to peer pressure, her tastes will mature ... as long as her peers aren't the ladies at the county fair.

Meow

2006-10-19T14:18:00.000-04:00

When I entered high school in 1978, a girl could choose from three varsity sports, two of which—field hockey and cheerleading—required skirts during team play. I chose cross-country running, a sport for which I had, and still have, zero talent. But at least I could wear shorts.

On our team, the good runners were cool, and membership in this elite set required a podium placing. Or having a cute older brother whom they all wanted to meet. Those of us who filled out the pack farther down in results—and who had no brothers, cute or otherwise—formed our own group by default. On the bus to races, we sat in the back and tittered uncharitably about how Jen, the school’s best runner, might wake up one day and find that her face was permanently stuck in a grimace, the expression she wore in every race. Or how Lori sure could run fast for someone with that much cellulite on her thighs.

This we considered their price for having self-confidence and cute boyfriends. How dare they?

Thanks to Title IX, girls at many schools can now pick from a host of non-skirt-wearing sports, even rugby. They lift weights, saturate their team uniforms with sweat, and care not when drool or snot encrusts their chins. And no one ever tells them not to exert themselves for fear of damaging delicate internal organs.

But are they learning to really be teammates? To be proud of someone else because they are proud of themselves too? Or will cat fighting always remain a women’s-only sport?

Men, for all their faults, would never sit courtside making catty comments to each other about the guy playing tennis in a “wife-beater.” Instead, they would call out, “Nice shirt, dude.”

Women are far more cruel. Most of us consider ourselves too polite to tell another woman to her face that her outfit could stand further consideration. Instead, we look each other up and down, then make snide remarks to our friends about the new girl’s shoes/jeans/jewelry/hair. Women don’t dress for men. We dress for other women.

Why do we care? And why do we pounce so brutally on a woman who dares show herself above the rest—in sports, in fashion, on the job? Must we compete in every venue? Do we fear our husbands, boyfriends, mates will look at us in comparison and flee, hoping instead to find the big-haired, big-boobed woman who once ran a successful Mary Kay franchise and now lives to decorate her home in color-coordinated basket arrangements? Does spinsterhood loom unless we have pot pourri in every bathroom and can run 100 meters in under 15 seconds?

Men seem to have the competition thing figured out. They compete on the field, against the clock, in the gym, and in the boardroom. They trash talk and tease with an innate sense of where the line is, or so a male friend tells me (cross that line and they know an upper cut to the jaw is the likely outcome). Should a really good soccer player, cyclist, runner, lawyer, doctor, you name it, move to town, they step up to the plate, try to keep up, devise ways to excel themselves. For them, a rising tide raises all boats.

Women seem to view the rising tide as a sign of imminent drowning. Rather than learn to swim, we stand there, water rising, making nasty comments about the tide-raiser in hopes that she’ll back off and return to mediocrity like the rest of us. We create cruel nicknames for tide-raisers—Thunder Thighs, the Ice Queen, Slut—and hope to witness failure on any front (“Is she hoping to turn tricks with those shoes?”). If we can’t be the best, we snipe at those who are.

But words can often cause more damage than a punch to the jaw. And frankly, I’d rather take a punch than have my eyes scratched out. Nasty comments not only hurt, they erode what little self-confidence women, at least of my generation, are allowed to have.

As Samantha grows, she is showing signs of being top dog in many regards, except her Brittany-Spears-inspired sense of fashion. Her pride and self-confidence are palpable; she announces almost daily that she reads better than anyone in her class or that she can run faster than boys two years older. My first reaction is to squelch it, to tell her that bragging is unseemly and that polite girls don’t boast. If she persists, I not-so-nicely point out that there will always be someone who can do something better than she can.

But I can’t help but feel that she has every right to be proud, as long as she doesn’t pick on people for their weaknesses. I fear I am eroding her confidence for the sake of politeness. When faced with a rising tide, I want her to know she is capable of swimming and to welcome the challenge. Drowning should not be an option.

But should someone make a comment about her choice of clothes, well, I’m afraid I’d welcome that too. As long as they do it to her face and not make references to Paris Hilton behind her back. If they do, I hope she inherited her father’s thick skin and not my paper-thin dermis. Easily bruised, I can be the most vicious of women.

And if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go sharpen my claws on the furniture.

Mothballs

2006-10-03T16:39:00.000-04:00

For as long as I can remember, my mother has poisoned the air inside her home with mothballs. She buys boxes of the vile white balls and puts them in closets and in the attic in an attempt to keep unseen moth larvae from eating holes in our woolens. Never mind the fact that once poisoned with dichlorobenzene fumes (the primary ingredient in mothballs), sweaters and coats were too aromatic to wear ever again. Except by my mother.

In my parents' current home, my mother stores the moth buffet in an upstairs closet off a room reserved for guests. But the fumes are evident to sensitive noses from the front door. My daughter, being six and offended by the slightest odor, covers her mouth and nose as she walks into my parents' home. I have suggested to my mother that could could instead use more environmentally friendly cedar blocks to keep the moths at bay. I have even given her packages of cedar blocks. But she can’t seem to part with the fumy balls, no matter that they may be a possible carcinogen.

Distilled from coal tar, mothballs, I’m convinced, must be the source of any number of maladies, few of them curable. Oddly, my mother, who thinks a sneeze is the onset of death and that a sprain will surely lead to amputation, doesn't see the correlation between fumy petrochemicals in stale air and the possibility that my father might sprout a large goiter on his neck. Still haunted by the Depression, when her father lost his dress factory, my mother keeps everything. Should the bottom fall out of the market again and take my father's pension with it, she would still have her Austrian boiled wool jacket, circa 1985, and a navy blue dress with brass buttons purchased at R.H. Stearns in 1973, to name just a few items in her extensive, mothball-infused wardrobe.

But why the insistence on mothballs? I can only blame it on her firm grip on tradition, the need to do things exactly as her forebears, continuing their recipes and ways. If Great-Great-Grandma Wiswell preserved her wool knickers and winter dresses in a pine box full of mothballs, then that’s how it should be done. Of course back in the late-1800s, people were more likely to die of diarrhea or flu long before cancer ever caught up with them.

But Great-Great Grandma probably wore the same woolen outfit for years, so there was need to preserve it. Until she died in 1919 at the ripe old age of 86, she probably owned over her lifetime fewer outfits than my mother currently has stored in that one stinky closet.

I for one welcome the moths. Not that I’ve ever seen one. Part of my mother's (and father's) thriftiness has worn off on me, and without holes or other blemishes, my sweater supply is perfectly adequate, if dated. It’s hard to justify, at least in terms of need, replacing a sweater, even if that sweater was made by Northern Isles in 1977 and features a pastel patterned yoke. When I was 8, I remember asking my father for a new pair of navy blue corduroy pants. “Do you need them?” he asked. I didn’t know what to say. Of course I didn’t need them. But I wanted them. Wasn’t that enough? Now, I am lucky that I can buy a sweater and navy blue corduroys if I want them. I can even buy shoes to match. Not that I would ... OK, so maybe I would. But what sign does this give Samantha, who has never wanted for anything, except fewer vegetables at dinner? She asks—at least weekly—if she can p-l-e-a-s-e get something—a pink t-shirt with a horse, an actual horse, a house for her bobbly-head cats, a leopard-print skirt, a leopard-print anything.

It’s hard to say no (except to the horse). How can I tell her that we can’t afford a $5 toy when we spend hundreds of dollars on iPods, a Nintendo DS, and two flat-screen TVs? From allowance alone, her wallet contains enough money to perpetually fill our home with plastic, made-by-slave-labor-in-China toys, all things she loses interest in within minutes of bringing them home (and she asks me, "Mom, why do you call all my toys junk?"). If I told her she had to wear the same Old Navy pants through the entire winter, she would look at me as if I were telling her that she had to wear a tutu to school. Not that Old Navy’s pants would last that long. Protecting her clothing in mothballs for the following season would be as sensible as spraying it with skunk. They would end up in the garbage either way.

Instilling a sense of value, of buying only what we really want, is hard in this impulsive age. When she wants to buy junk, we remind her that she should save for something more valuable, like a Breyer wooden horse barn or Playmobile zoo. But occasionally we slip, and the plastic toys pile up.

Perhaps I should take a cue from my mother and sprinkle mothballs amidst these toys, telling Samantha that I'm preserving them should we stumble into financial ruin. But long before that would happen, she would no doubt carry each and every toy to the dumpster, sensibly holding her nose with every step. Besides, I choose not to poison my family. At least not with mothballs.

New math: when 70-30 is 50-50

2006-09-28T12:01:00.001-04:00

I married Andy for many reasons, but mostly because he’s not a typical guy. He finds hunting stories loathsomely dull and wouldn’t set foot in a Hooters even if the food was good. Or so he claims.

I’m not exactly a Cosmo girl myself. I have never had a manicure or pedicure, don’t pluck my eyebrows, and think Martha Stewart deserves her own special ring in Hell – a ring decorated with mismatched hand-me-down sofas (I have the perfect set!), wooden tables with water stains, and a floor covered in orphan Legos.

In our newlywed days, Andy and I did almost everything together, from pedaling away the miles on long bike rides, to watching movies (except those starring Julia Roberts). We even shopped together, sharing the same disdain of malls. Planning was easy. Whatever one of us wanted to do, the other did too. Mostly. For a couple of years, I wore the pants in the family, if the pant-wearer is the one pulling in more money.

So when Samantha was born six years ago, it came as quite a shock that our roles suddenly and sharply differed. Yes, I had some inkling over the nine-month gestation (actually, ten) that things would be different. For starters, I grew huge, topping out 20 pounds under my six-foot-four-inch, 200-pound husband. I no longer walked, I lumbered. While Andy went on long bike rides, I sat on the couch and sulked, only managing a short walk (waddle) in the hours he was gone and thinking surely when the baby was born, our roles would equalize again. Ironically, my wedding ring no longer fit.

Five days after Sam was born, Andy left for work, his paternity leave over. Or so he declared. I stood at the door in a baggy t-shirt, two wet spots growing on the front, my rear-end filling out the elasticized-waist pants of the type sold in the coupon section of the Sunday paper, Sam wide awake in my arms. What would this little baby and I do all day? We sat on the couch for hours, Samantha sipping slowly as if my breast were her own personal cocktail party while I stared into space (reading a magazine was anatomically impossible). When Sam wasn’t bellied up to the bar, we walked. I felt like Forest Gump, not so much walking away from something as trying to walk back into it.

I soon became insanely jealous of Andy’s 45-minute commute to work. He could listen to NPR uninterrupted, spend eight hours at work conversing with fellow adults, and use his brain as if it hadn’t been blown to bits by hormones, anxiety and tedium. His body hadn’t changed. He could still ride his bike at the same speed he always had. He even joined a tennis league.

That had been my life too. Now who was I? An overweight, overwrought, overtired woman incapable of speaking in complete sentences and who broke out into tears at the slightest provocation, like not being able to find the right sippy cup valves at the supermarket. Work for Andy must have been a relief, a step back into what life had been, a break from this creature who had taken over his wife, this creature who looked at him, jealousy brewing behind a pathetic mask that had a passive aggressive look of, “Why won’t you help me?”

No wonder he took up tennis.

Since those first months, we have taken many steps, collectively and separately, and just as many missteps. It has taken several years to understand and control my jealousy, trying to come to terms with the root causes—the misguided or unfilled expectations that led to it and the fact that, despite my feminist insistence that men and women are alike, we’re not. What I see as 70-30, Andy sees as 50-50.

Jealousy still rears its ugly head, and Andy calls me on it. I am not so quick to call him on his missteps, for confrontation upsets the domestic apple cart. And rather than dealing with it, I scurry about picking up the apples as I fume and ruminate. And then I write, first disparaging Andy, then realizing that I should disparage myself in equal share.

I must confess that I’m selfishly jealous of his tennis because it doesn’t include me, and that despite my occasional threats of getting a real job, I’m happy to work from home. Were it the other way around, our house might resemble a cross between Circuit City and Toys-R-Us, a complicated mix of plastic children’s toys, high-definition TVs in every room, and a remote control that works every appliance, except the washing machine. In the fridge? Milk and beer.

Instead, the refrigerator is mostly full of vegetables (some home to colonies of slime mold), as well as milk and beer. The washer runs perhaps too regularly, and I sit here writing blog entries. It’s cheaper than couples counseling.

Settling Down

2006-09-26T16:03:00.000-04:00

When my mother discovered that Andy and I were getting married, the first words out of her mouth were, “Good, maybe now you’ll settle down.”

Settle down? I thought. Like throw out my mountain bike, backpack, and passport in exchange for an apron and flowery house dress? She seemed to think that I rode my bike every day to impress someone, that I traveled because I was looking for something, or that I only scrambled up steep couloirs because I was chasing some boy. OK, maybe a little. But I genuinely love being outdoors--skiing, hiking, cycling, even just walking. I spent my 20s and early-30s bicycle racing in the West, climbing almost every 14,000-foot peak in Colorado, slogging up the snowfields and glaciers of Mt. Rainier in Washington State and Mt. Elbrus, Europe’s highest peak. I skied every winter weekend and not on the bunny slope. Giving all this up and “settling down” would be as difficult as cutting off a limb.

But this is what my mother had done in the 1950s when she finally met my father. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1946 and spent the following decade teaching elementary school. On weekends, she skied, hiked, and rode her bike, among other pursuits no doubt considered too vigorous for her gender. One summer, she traveled to Europe alone, studying in Oslo, Norway, and traveling the continent. On one expedition that summer, she hitchhiked on a freighter from Italy back to Norway.

She rarely recounts episodes from this decade, as if this time of her life happened to someone else, someone with whom she wasn't very close. For her mission was to find a husband and after 10 years, it must have felt a bit desperate. Most of her contemporaries had met their mates in college. My mother had missed the boat and was adrift at sea, not really enjoying the voyage and doing everything she could to find a friendly port in which to anchor. The word "spinster" was probably uttered by mean-spirited relatives.

When she met my father in 1956--ironically in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and even more ironically, he had been a Harvard student, abeit almost nine years her junior--her wanderlust faded. She had found her port. They married in 1959, and my sister was born two years later. I followed two years after that. She shelved her blackboard chalk and threw herself into mothering. As far as I can tell, she was never happy again.

My sister and I were lucky to be born into the generation that believed it could do whatever it wanted. My Barbie dolls were doctors, not nurses, and Ken was there to keep house along with Barbie. He never sat in their Lego-house living room demanding a beer. Although I always assumed I'd have children--two girls two years apart like me and my sister--I didn't particularly want to be a mother. Mothers did boring things like cook vegetables, hang laundry in the dark basement, darn socks, and nag.

Fathers, on the other hand, left the house every day, had offices with windows overlooking the world, and made money. They talked to interesting people, told dirty jokes, and laughed. They were happy. I wanted to be like my father, without much consideration for who would actually cook vegetables, wash clothes, and do the mending for those two girls I would be having. My sister and I both attended the same prep school as my father, then went to Amherst College. Our classmates talked of law school, med school, and jobs in New York. No one ever talked of having children.

When Andy and I married in 1998, nothing changed in my life. I raced my bicycle up New Hampshire's Mt. Washington, I rafted Class V rapids on West Virginia's Gauley River, and I backcountry skied at night in a foot of fresh snow. We bicycled around Mallorca, skied in Zermatt, and mountain biked in Moab, Utah. No way would I settle down.

Now that we've had a child though--a girl, but only one--I wonder if my mother's unquestioning acceptance of her role wasn't easier than balking against its demands. I constantly juggle too many balls, and one invariably hits the floor with a thud. But is letting a ball drop and having to pick it up better than being bored to tears tediously tossing only one ball in the air over and over, year after year until I forget that I actually am capable of more?

I have settled down to a degree. My bike rides rarely leave the county, and when we ski, we stick to the easy trails, trailing behind our daughter. We still travel, but we stay in places with swimming pools and eat in restaurants that sell more kid food than cocktails. Although I neither work full-time nor wear the Mommy hat 24/7, I have to keep a few balls in the air, even if I no longer toss them as high. It's the only way I know who I am.

Humiliation and disparagement

2006-09-25T15:09:00.000-04:00

I emailed Andy the other day to tell him that I’m starting my own blog. “A blog. Finally!” he emailed back, adding, “Although I suppose I put myself at risk of humiliation and disparagement.”

Hmmmm. Who in her right mind would humiliate and disparage her husband if she wanted to continue sharing the same bed? Even the same roof? But I have humiliated and disparaged him already, once writing that tennis was his mistress, another time that a wave of testosterone forced him to abandon me in the Mallorcan countryside at the mercy of an older French cyclist clad in denim-print lycra. Such is the peril of marrying a writer, particularly one who wears her heart on her sleeve.

When I emailed back, asking for ideas about my blog (just because I decide to have a blog doesn’t necessarily mean I know what to write about), he responded, “Where’s your angst? What’s your struggle?”

Well, for one, navigating through a healthy relationship once a kid wiggles herself into the picture. But writing about one’s relationship outside the privacy of a Laura-Ashley-print-covered journal is like having friends sit in on couple’s counseling, friends who nod with understanding when I say that it is not all right to play in a tennis tournament on the day of your daughter’s ballet recital, while the opposing team’s cheering squad retorts, “He made it by curtain time. What’s your problem?” And then there’s my mother, the woman for whom I have more understanding now that I’m responsible for bringing up someone whom we hope will be a decent human being, although the jury is still out about whether or not we’re harboring Fidel Castro’s successor. ... “MOM! I want WHITE toast!” demands the five-year-old from the TV room ... “MOM! You have to wash my SpongeBob shirt TODAY!” – foot stomping, arms crossed, defiant glare at me, the washer woman.

Not that I want to humiliate or disparage my mother either, although it might discourage her threats to visit for three straight weeks or move into the cute little cape down the street. I do love my parents, but their visits require that we not only sit down for dinner, but that we also use silverware. I don’t mind doing this a few days a week. In fact, guilt forces me into dragging out the pots and pans at least three times a week in an attempt to prepare a home-cooked meal for my husband and daughter. And unlike the small blonde dictator who shares the table with us, we do usually use knives, forks, and spoons.

But my mother views any woman who does not prepare her family three squares a day as derelict in duty. From this, one might assume that I was raised on beef stroganoff and spinach soufflé. But I remember my childhood as one where we ate stew, flavored with only one bay leaf, every night, except the nights we had meatloaf, tuna casserole if we were lucky. I remember my mother either in the kitchen, in bed, or on her way to bed. While my sister and I watched too much TV or fought over which Barbie got to wear the wedding dress, she cooked, drank scotch, and hollered repeatedly for us to set the table. She once helped me memorize the state capitols as she lay in the bath. I was in the sixth grade, and I had to sit on the toilet.

Recently, I asked my mother why she never played with my sister and me, why it was always my father who got down on the floor to play Trouble or the Game of Life or to make Lego creations with us. "Because I was always cooking for you," she replied. "I wanted you to eat good food, you know." Granted, we usually did have at least three vegetables on our plates each night, only one of which I would like. The others would only be eaten after much whining, and to this day, I steer clear of Brussel sprouts and beet greens.

Despite the fact that my mother "collects" cookbooks (need I mention that these books are never opened?), she hates to cook. She no doubt acted the part because it was expected of her, never questioning it, at least outwardly. Sadly, I do not recall my mother as a happy person. And this is the reason I cite when feeling as if I must defend my choice of mothering – that I would rather ride my bike 50 miles, or spend the day writing, than boil up a beef tongue and stewed carrots for the evening repast.

When my daughter is not pontificating to the masses, she will no doubt remember her childhood as one where she ate macaroni & cheese (Annie's at least, not Kraft) and precooked ham almost every night. But I also hope she remembers the bike rides we took with her, and the hours on the tennis court spent with Daddy giving her snacks if she could hit him with the ball three times. Or hiking to Deers Leap and having a picnic, and riding the chairlift – sitting between Mommy and Daddy – with the snow under the lift sparkling like diamonds. I also hope she remembers that Mommy built her horse barns with blocks and purposely lost games of Go Fish.

As if. What she’ll really remember is how Daddy played tennis one night a week, while Mommy rode her bike every free moment. And all too frequently – as far as she’s concerned – her selfish parents left her with various babysitters so they could eat sushi in peace or watch a movie that didn’t star creatures animated by Pixar. Or go on a bike ride without her. Who needs scotch?

OK, maybe some nights...