Category Archives: Aging

A Day in the Country

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I am a city girl.  FOB (father of blogger) doesn’t drive anymore (he is 90, so thank G-d), POB (partner of blogger) doesn’t drive, SOB (sister of blogger) won’t drive (because she doesn’t feel her skills are good enough) and HOSOB (husband of SOB) let his license lapse. Son of POB and blogger is 8 years-old and we don’t let him drive.  Just call us strict parents.

So, I am the one.  Why do they call it a “minivan”?  The back half of the car was still in New York State for a full two seconds after the front half was welcomed to Connecticut on I95.  There is nothing “mini” about it.  Try parking that behemoth on a city street.  The good news is that I buy all the insurance the rental place sells, so I can ram cars forward and back to enlarge an otherwise snug parking space for only a $12.95 per day premium.  You get what you pay for.  (I am REALLY just joking although clearly I have considered the pros and cons.)

So, POB, FOB, SOB, HOSOB, our son and I set out for this place in idyllic Connecticut (that is, unless you have to drive there, using back roads, but I digress) where HOSOB has 3 bird paintings on show.  Lovely paintings.

But before he spoke, there were other bird nerds describing chickadees and their mating habits and such other interesting matters.  It caused me to take to a stone wall outside and try to snooze while knowing that bugs were crawling on me.  It was out in the country after all.  I fail to see anything remotely civilized about nature.  Ok, that is oxymoronic, but really nature is sooooo . . . creepy-crawling; how does one nap during a bird-nerd convention? By listening to them.  (Ok, that was a trick question.)  It was such a small space that it would have been ruder than even I could muster to lie down inside the gallery and snooze while the nerders were nerding.  (Don’t think it wasn’t a reasoned decision not to embarrass HOSOB; I have napped in the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (pre-9/11) because it is sooooo soothing there.)

Then it was HOSOB’s turn to talk about the birds in his paintings.  HOSOB is really smart and his mind moves in many directions at once, but not all roads should be taken (if you understand my drift).  Luckily, he looked at SOB who was making the universal choking motion, as code for “you’re killing me” and he looked at me and I gave the universal “keep the ball in play” signal and he wandered back on the reservation and ended his talk.  Phew.  Of course, my son, Junior Bird Nerd, wanted to comment on the migratory habits of the subject bird.  I have made peace with muzzling my child.

FOB, a lovely man, tries to help me drive and give me directions and short cuts and then says, after I have committed to an exit, “Beats the hell out of me what you do once you get off . . . .”  Pause.  Grip the wheel.  Make sure that I keep everyone safe (including those outside the car) while I re-join the highway traffic.  Did I mention what a lovely man my dad is?

Any way, I have to go to his house tomorrow and fix the fool proof method I set up by which he can access Free Cell and his email account. By fix, I mean, I have to undo the buttons he pushed indiscriminately to fix a perceived problem — the computer took an extra second to re-load.  Oh well.  Did I mention he is a lovely, lovely man?

At various points during the day, I pretended to commit hari-kari and sometimes held out the back of my sweater in a point to show SOB where the sword had gone.

We all survived the trip, saw HOSOB’s beautiful art and, all-in-all, not so epic as, let’s say . . . . the trip to an family unveiling (http://40andoverblog.com/?p=35)

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Our day today

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POB (partner of blogger) had a great idea this morning — go to Governor’s Island for a picnic.  Governor’s Island is a decommissioned military base island in New York harbor (right next to Ellis Island and Liberty Island) that has been turned into a park and fairground.  It is an easy subway ride followed by a ferry ride.  Ok, “easy” refers only to the directness of the route.  When on the subway or in line for the ferry, a person is subject to the sea of surrounding humanity and their insipid conversations.  (For the record, our (i.e., this blogger community) conversations are never insipid — too revealing? Maybe. But insipid? Never.)

First, there was a more-unsteady-than-elderly lady for whom POB gave up her seat.  (I was already standing.) POB asked if she wanted a seat and the woman turned to her friend and said, in a cartoonishly nasal voice, “Oh, see!! A seat opened up!!”  Poof, like, magic.  Really?  No, because a well-mannered person got up (in contradistinction to the mopes and slouches around us).  Her friend started to talk about food processing in a loud, screeching voice.

What the woman said was important and true — that if you saw how fast food is made, you would never eat it again and that most processing is bad for humans in both nutrition and the environment — but did we need to hear it in outrageous volume with a holier-than-thou tone at 11am on a holiday weekend?  And, just across the aisle, a scary-looking, tattooed dad with a beer gut (who was playing with his child by pretending to strangle him — really) was giving the child huge helpings of Pepperidge Farm flavor-blasted gold fish (hmmm, salt, chemically reconstructed “cheese” and polysorbate 60, anyone?).  Our son loves them, too, and we know we are going to a special place in hell for parents who let their kids eat this junk.  None of the kale or broccoli or grass-fed beef that our son eats will save us from this punishment.

And why DO men need to sit so wide that they take up nearly two seats?  I note that the smaller the shoe size of the man, the wider he sits.  Is this some psychological melodrama playing out?

Fast-forward to the line waiting to get back on the ferry to Manhattan.  A group of women and one man was behind us.  The man, who was overweight, and a bitchy effete garden gnome, was commenting to women passersby, “hey, do you think you could have tighter clothing?” or “do you think you could be any fatter?”  All I wanted to say to him was, “come out of the closet and stop being bitter with baggage”.  But I didn’t.  I could take him down in a minute.  The women, however, would lay me out.  One of the women had a son who was going to grow up to be the bully of his neighborhood.  He dropped a juice carton on the street and someone picked it up and handed it to her and said, “I think your child dropped this.”  I thought it was an elegant way to force the woman to deal with the litter.  She got all huffy, with heavy hip and neck action, saying to her friends, “the baby drops this and he gives it to me?” Ok, who else?  She is his mother for G-d’s sakes.  And the baby?  BABY?  Try 6 years-old, going on 12.  And mean.

Too much humanity.  I wanted to take a private water taxi followed by a cab.  I couldn’t handle any more.  But we did continue on the public transportation route.  On the subway, three 20-somethings were talking and POB and I were transfixed by the car wrecks that were their conversations and their outfits.  One was falling out of her skimpy outfit and had used eyebrow pencil to highlight her auburn eyebrows into a Groucho Marx effect.  I think she thought I was admiring her instead of not being able to take my eyes off this mobile crashing unit, so when she got off, she shimmied at me and smiled.  I was sooooooo grossed out I could barely breathe.

I took to my bed for a nap.  Oh, I forgot, once you get to Governor’s Island, it is perfectly lovely.

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Mother to a boy

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Our 8 year-old boy is still very cuddly, but we know it won’t last for long.  Sometimes, when we are watching cartoons on a weekend morning, he says, “E-Mom!! Stop smothering me!!”

I believe it is my divine right of motherhood to be the quintessential overbearing Jewish mother.   I realize now that my mother, and her mother before her, were just trying to stuff a lifetime worth of love and concern into the few years they actually had control over their children’s lives.  And because, when I look at my child, all I want to do (when I don’t want to throttle him) is hug him and tell him how adorable he is and how much I love him.

So, today, when he said those awful words (“stop smothering me!!”) during our cartoon marathon, I reminded him of my divine right to smother and added, “you can’t spell smother without M-O-T-H-E-R!!”

With my new-found appreciation for the cartoon, “Phineas and Ferb” (today they went on a boat for a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour . . . .), I started imitating the show’s evil doctor, Heinz Doofenschmirtz, who invents “-inators” to do evil things to the entire tri-state area (no joke), and proclaimed myself, the “SMOTHER-inator”.

Yes, yes, yes, I know.  Any sane person would not admit to this.

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Pre-High Holy Days Mayhem

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So, because POB (partner of blogger) reminds me that in “good homes” the carpets and the furniture are cleaned annually, and the windows are cleaned twice, before Passover and before Rosh Ha-Shanah, we have been in a cleaning frenzy.  Also the mice episodes gave the cleaning rituals a bit more fevered pitch this year.  Also the bed bug scare in New York had us getting new mattresses, etc.   In short, we are doing what we can to raise the retail sales numbers nationally.  Now, that is patriotism.

Our housekeeper comes on Fridays.  Our housekeeper is a wonderful and robust woman in her 60s who comes from Poland and, as she says, “knows hard vork”.   But since she is in her 60s we try to get others to the hard vork.  In this case, POB and I wanted to lay the cleaned rug down in the dining room (we had already done the heavy lifting in the living room).  This endeavor also involved cutting the mat underneath so that the rug laid properly. 

Here are the many dramas that came into play:  Our housekeeper said, “[Blogger], you are educated; I know hard vork.  Step avay from the mat and I vill cut!”  Ok, POB and I were raised to respect our elders and never to let someone older do work we could do ourselves.  We are also the “employers”, adding another level.  Also, POB is strong like you-can’t-imagine strong. 

So we are all on the floor playing out our social, economic and cultural dynamics.  The window cleaner walks in (we had left the door open for him after the doorman announced him) and sees three woman on the floor with scissors and box cutters arguing over who is cutting the mat that goes under the rug.  He asks, “where do I start?”  Really?  Really?  Is this a usual scene for the window cleaner?

We all stop.  I agree to cede the fight to POB and our housekeeper in order to get the window cleaner guy started as long as I get to move the dining room table.  Pause.  I seeing nodding and I retreat.  A little victory of sorts.

Of course, I should have known that even though I was allowed to move the dining room table, everyone would have an opinion on its precise location.  POB was the most forceful in her opinions.  “A little to the right.”  “Closer to the windows.”  “No, too much.” 

“Are you listening??” 

NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, I scream in my head, but all that comes out is “Yes, dear.” 

Back in my head, I am thinking you thought we should get our windows cleaned before a hurricane.  This is not like wearing good underwear in case you are taken to an emergency room.  The hurricane won’t treat us any better.  But then the hurricane passes us and POB is right — again.

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Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

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Long time passing.  Long time ago.

On our way to the beach last week, we listened to 70s music on Sirius radio.  “Afternoon Delight”, “Handy Man”, “Monster Mash”, “Young Hearts, Run Free” and all those other long ago summer time songs had POB (partner of blogger) and me screaming the words as our son looked on in horror and embarrassment.  (He also said, “E-mom, you should blog about this.”  I love my son.)

At camp, we used to sing “Anticipation”, “Circle Game” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Cruel War” at Saturday night campfires.  These and other songs made us both melancholy and grateful for each other in ways I didn’t understand then.

Since those days, we have all lived with not knowing about the days to come, the (stupid, stinking) painted ponies going ’round and ’round the carousel of time, and war and its cruel endings.  Life has, as it inevitably does, lifted us up, let us down and gave us a few battle scars along the way.  And, sometimes, songs sung when I was so young resonate with me now as, with each passing year, I spend more and more on an ounce of (alleged) skin rejuvenation cream.

I firmly believe that, if I slathered olive oil all over my body (instead of throwing gobs of money away on creams and potions), it would give me a more youthful (and, ok, smarmy) glow.  People might also like to brush up against me with chunks of bread.  Maybe if I used extra, extra, virgin (as in the driven snow) olive oil, I would look even younger.  I would do it, but for fear of the inevitable question from a colleague, “did you have salad for breakfast?” or, after a meeting, someone sitting next to me saying, “you know, I have a strange hankering for Greek food.”

Oops, there I go digressing again.  About camp.  Sometimes those memories make me laugh out loud or just give me a wonderful feeling and a lift to my step.  And it has been a gift to reconnect with old friends on Facebook about batik, peach pit rings, the Leoj, Plaque Night, etc.

Make new friends, but keep the old.  One is silver and the other’s gold.  Ok, campers, repeat in rounds (with Lodges 1 and 2 starting, followed by Lodges 4 and 5) and Lodge 3 please add the harmony.

Better than gold.  Really.

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Summer is for kids

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Memorial Day Weekend makes me giddy with expectation of a long summer of fun.  Labor Day Weekend fills me with a mournfulness about the summer-that-wasn’t, the kind of mournfulness that is rightly reserved for more weighty matters.

So this past week I was an interloper in my son’s summer.  We spent days in the pool or at the beach or on play dates.  Except he was the one who wanted to stay in the pool, dive into the waves, and had friends out at the beach.  I wanted to nap.  POB (partner of blogger) and I were relegated to the roles of adults and rule-enforcers.

We did have fun as a family and we giggled a lot.  And POB sent me off to the gym and for runs so that she didn’t have TWO kids to keep in line.  But those are not summer activities, as I remember summer.  We didn’t hop on anyone’s bike and ride on untrafficked roads to an old musty bookstore and then eat ice cream on the lawn of the town church or library.  We didn’t play tennis and then go to the lake for an instructional swim or make peach-pit rings in the art studio.  Those were the days of my childhood summers.

Even if my son were amenable to recreating those days, I can’t quite imagine how one navigates the busy roads and fast cars that are everywhere in sea-side communities.  Maybe I am looking for a time that is just lost.  And maybe, like some things, those memories are sweeter in the rear view mirror.

My son had his own magical summer doing his activities.  I am grateful and happy that he did.  He looks and acts older.  He is tanned (even though he was slathered in sun block many times a day) and looks rested and ready for school.

Me, I have a sunburn.

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In Memoriam — Yvette

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Yvette died peacefully today at age 94. She was born in Paris, France in 1916.

I met Yvette many, many years ago, as a friend of my mom from their days at Revlon in the 1960s.  Rudy and Yvette were stalwart friends to my father and my mother when my mother was dying and then died.  They were a necessary part of every family celebration (except for Thanksgiving). 

Even though she had been in this country for over sixty years, she would still say things like, “let’s get together for — how you say? — lunch!”  As she was losing her beloved Rudy to renal failure, she would say, “this is le end, ne c’est pas?”  “Oui,” we would say, our hearts’ breaking.

Rudy was Jewish; Yvette, as she got older and more forgetful, gravitated to her religion of origin — Catholicism.  At the end of Rudy’s life, when he wanted them to be cremated and their ashes joined and thrown to sea where they met (see below), her response was, “pas catholique!”  I said, “Yvette, you’re Jewish!”  A family friend motioned me over and said that she had been taking Yvette to Christmas and Easter mass for years, because as her memory was fading she didn’t remember she had been Jewish.  I had been noticing she was making signs of the cross every now and again and more frequently over the years.

Their lives could fill adventure novels.  She was a nurse on the war front for France during WWII and then worked for the Resistance.  She was awarded two medals (or commendations) for valor.  Rudy’s family had fled their native Austria when the Nazi took hold and found their way to Palestine (pre-Israel).  They met on a boat taking Jewish Holocaust survivors to Palestine; she, the ship’s nurse, and he, the commander of the boat.  They fell in love.  These boats were being strafed by British bomber pilots because the international community didn’t want Jews to populate Palestine.  Yvette did what she did because her nature compelled her to help people in need.  She and her beloved Rudy were heroes in cowardly times.  Their wishes were that their ashes be mingled and cast out to sea where their love began so many years ago.

And she lived life with humor, perseverance and strength of character that kept her going 94 years. 

May her memory be for a blessing.

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The Clan

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POB (partner of blogger) thinks that my extended family is more properly called a “clan”.  She means that in the best of ways, I am sure.  [Pause.] My family is an odd bunch.  POB didn’t meet many of the older generation, but she feels as if she did because of the way we imitate them.  Memory is very important in Jewish tradition.  And, well, how best to evoke memories than by imitating the idiosyncrasies that made each of them — as shall we say — “special.”

My father was one of five boys and they all had children and most of them had children (and so on).  But we are still not the close-knit, ever-fighting group as existed when all the brothers were alive.  That is probably because in their early years, their survivals were all interdependent.  They were the generation of firsts:  first to go to college, graduate school, move to the suburbs, Florida, buy a Cadillac.  They survived poverty, the Depression, the War and immigrant parents who knew even less than they about their adopted homeland.

There was a family barbeque today that we, the Blogger family pod, had to miss because we are at the beach.  SOB (sister of blogger) sent pictures that captured some of the clan members perfectly.  One picture captures a cousin, the member of our generation who most holds to the standards of conspicuous consumption aspired to by his parents, eating a doughnut while holding forth on an issue.  His father  — my uncle — looms large in my memory and in my imitations.  “Uncle of Blogger” is not descriptive enough.  Hmmm.  Uncle Loud. Yes that is it.  Uncle Loud had a pinky ring that shimmered when he waved his hand.  He had a pencil mustache hidden under a huge nose.  I have a image of Uncle Loud eating a plum, with the juice dripping down to his chin, making politically incorrect pronouncements about everything and anything, mostly about things for which he had no basis or fact.  He also described everything about his life as if we were visiting from a remote island and had never experienced modern conveniences.  In order to evoke the memories of Uncle Loud, I wave my hand with the imaginary pinky ring talking about something (it could be mundane or indeed a previously unknown wonderment), adding, “the likes of which you HAVE NEVEH seen.”  Yes, “neveh”.  The use of Rs in spoken English was an evolutionary advance seen only in my generation — the second generation of Americans (and not all of us received this species-enhancing genetic mutation).

We remain a clan for so long as we, in my generation, retain the vivid memories of the Five Brothers in their primes.  After us, the clan ends because the ensuing generations are scattered and never saw the small apartment on Pelham Parkway where Grandma and Grandpa raised five boys in a two bedroom apartment with one bathroom. Or heard the raised voices that were inevitable when everyone got together for family occasions or religious holidays.  Sometimes it was so loud that more distantly related people would run for cover.

On Sunday nights, at dinner, we try to share these memories with our younger cousins so the bonds stay tight.  But it is a haphazard and ultimately fruitless effort because, like all formerly immigrant families, my children and my cousin’s children and grandchildren are Americans, not children or grandchildren of immigrants.  And, over time, the tie that binds gets frayed and loosens too much.

All the cousins of my generation, save a few, are gathering together for my dad’s 90th birthday in October.  In New York City.  Alert the police and the media.  The Clan of the (Mostly) Civilized Cave Bear will celebrate the Five Brothers and the one who remains and the tie that still binds us (if not our children).

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Just because he’s crazy, does that invalidate his compliment?

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Maybe at 46 years-old, I am scraping the barrel for any compliment that comes my way.  I need my blog community to rule on whether a compliment received this morning can be counted as such. 

(I wish WordPress had those voting buttons so you can click “yes” “no” or “maybe“.)

I have a lunch meeting later with a client, so I am wearing make-up, earrings and a necklace.  No, that is not all.  I am wearing clothes.  (Nice) t-shirt under a bespoke blazer (so it really fits well) and bespoke pants (which would fit better had I not gotten the peri-menopause tummy paunch).  Shoes and bag work with the ensemble.  A true outfit. 

Many of you may be shocked; as sometimes I wear nice clothes but ruin the look with a pair of clogs.  But, I digress (comme d’habitude).

A man, who was dressed well enough not to be homeless, entered the subway car with a cart.  I know what you are thinking.  But, really, the cart had perfectly reasonable looking things in it.  Not like he was carrying his worldly possessions or anything.  Look, he didn’t SMELL.  And some homeless people are down on their luck.  Not all of them are crazy.  And we should help them off the streets because it is as good a litmus test as any for how civilized is our society really.  But, I digress (comme d’habitude).

The train clears out at the next stop.  It is an express station — not because he smelled.  I sit down in a seat next to the doors.  Then I realize I could move down and he could sit in that seat and be closer to his stuff.  So I offer to move down. 

He thanked me but declined.  Then, he said that I looked beautiful and my outfit was just right.  I thanked him.

Then he started talking to himself and doing a little tap-dance, foot shuffle, whatever.  This continued until he got off the train.

Valid compliment or no?  That is the question.

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Post-Script to The Kids Are All Right

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I recently ranted (what else is new) about the movie, “The Kids Are All Right,” the first film about a lesbian family to come out of a major movie producer (http://40andoverblog.com/?p=2559).

Apparently, for the under-30 crowd (and maybe my own age-group), the lesbian sex scene is not so bizarre.

Ok.  I get it, in every marriage, sometimes you need to change things up to keep it interesting, but I still stand by my lament: for the first major motion picture about lesbians and their kids, there couldn’t be a little romance?  It IS Hollywood, after all.  And it isn’t like the movie didn’t push the outer edge of the believability envelope in other ways.

How about throwing a bone to the hopeless romantics in the crowd who still love and adore their spouses?

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