Tag Archives: Life

Don’t cry for me, Argentina . . .

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No, not “Evita!” the musical sensation of the 1970s about Eva Peron.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is living out loud and proud, trying to patch things up with his girlfriend.  It was all a misunderstanding — when we heard Appalachian trail, he said “Argentinian tail”. [see http://40andoverblog.com/p?120]

But, at least he isn’t lying anymore and he maintains contact with his government on his weekends away.  If only other “family values” candidates would be open about marital issues, gay issues and the tough stuff of life that affects all of us, maybe we can re-calibrate expectations of our politicians and ourselves.  I am not saying that infidelity and lying are ok. I am saying live the truth so you don’t have to lie.  So many less lives get shattered that way.

He behaved like a child but he is trying to live as grown-up now.  It is a good start.

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Some questions actually tell us so much about ourselves

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Poor Solicitor General Elena Kagan.  Just because she is single, unattractive, overweight and intellectual, she must be a lesbian.

Laura Ingraham is single and, to some, intellectual.  So, she isn’t unattractive or overweight.  Is she . . . .?

So, former Secretary of State Condi Rice is single and intellectual.  She is not unattractive or overweight either.  Is she. . . ?

Ok, I get it.  If Elena Kagan were hot — or at least not unattractive and overweight, it wouldn’t be an issue.

If she were a man, like Justice Souter, no one would raise the issue.  How do I know?  Because no one did (loudly, anyway).

Has anyone looked at all of the unattractive and overweight women who are married and heterosexual?  Has anyone looked at all the gorgeous heterosexual women who are single?  And all the gorgeous lesbians who are “married”?

Maybe she is; maybe she isn’t.  But if unattractive and overweight were the markers, there would be only five heterosexuals in middle America.

Who will be the first politician to own up to this attitude?  And this “litmus test” only pertains to women.  Overweight and unattractive men?  Just look at the Congress.

GOP senators don’t have gaydar.  How do I know?   They didn’t figure out about Family Research Council George Rekers, who hired a gay male escort to carry his bags on a trip to Europe.  Or that televangelist.  Or the Senator who sits wide in aiport bathrooms.

Democrats assume that the Republicans will raise the issue, so they — including the White House — are “getting out ahead of it”.  In some publications, the Democrats are being criticized for not getting out ahead of it sooner.

So, even among the enlightened of our generation — including those in the White House — it is still a “smear” to say that someone is gay.   And being gay is deviant but fixable, or so says the Family Research Council.  Maybe it should rethink its view in light of the scandal rocking its founder.

We will allow gays to serve in the military so long as they hide under a rock.  Think of the patriotism of these men and women.  They are willing to shed their blood and give their lives to a country that won’t allow them to live, fight and die in dignity.

Aint that America.

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Mother’s Day

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Mother’s Day is about me as a child and my mother as the celebrated one.  The one day when we muster up $5.00 for a card and still she did the dishes.  Ok, I am living in the past.  The past is easier; ok, only when nostalgia wipes away the discord and the angst.

So, POB (partner of blogger) and I are the moms of our generation (note that I didn’t say “mothers” — the connotations can be so tragic).  And like our mothers before us, we got cards and did the dishes.  This is how you make people feel good about dishes, you call it a “tradition”.  SOB (sister of blogger) tried to convince POB to have take-out.  POB, in tribute and in astonishing similarity to MOPOB (mother z”l of POB), refused take-out.  POB opted for a horrendously, complicated — and delicious — dinner. (Note to self: block the Epicurious app on her iTouch.)

Between POB’s thinking of MOPOB and my thinking about MOB (mother z”l of blogger), we made quite a pair.  Being a mom is the best thing I do; it is just that I want my mom in the world.  Ok, enough self pity (for now; check back later).

So, we had most of the usual complement of family for Sunday night dinner.  Notable exceptions were a Cousin Hockey Player, and Cousin Gentle who visits his mother’s grave (MOCG) on Mother’s Day.  The warning was clear: be there or be talked about.  Email me if you want the minutes of the family meeting.

FOB (father of blogger) is turning 90 this year.  In an effort to have an intimate setting, the guest list was cut off on a generational level.  Grandnephews and nieces are not invited.  However, my father felt bad about certain members of that generation not being invited.  So, I was designated as the most direct and “Larry King”-like child to dispense the news.  FOB had to use the “facilities” as a ruse to find out whether I told his grandniece that he loved her but, in the interests of familial harmony, needed to exclude her from the celebration.  Meanwhile, I wondered why I was escorting FOB to the bathroom because I am not the MD in the family.  Does anyone else have this family or are we just nuts?

Back to dinner.  Dear Cousin Gentle: HOSOB (husband of SOB) is winning the race for who can eat the most.  He had two helpings on two different place mats (I won’t delve into that):

And there was your plate, sad and empty:

And did we mention the wine and the dessert?

Because you had a good reason for not coming (you were visiting MOCG), we didn’t talk about you — too much. But where were you for the bird walk lead by HOSOB?  Two family gatherings missed.  I understand through the family grapevine that you are alive and well (mother and father of Cousin Hockey Player), so HOSOB promises to let you even the score next time in the food eating contest.  You know that I need to know you’ve had at least one home-cooked meal a week.

Oh, and Cousin Hockey Player, I talked to your mother today.  Yes, I did.  But since you weren’t here last night, you’ll just never know about our conversation. Be there or be afraid.  Very afraid. (Ok, don’t be afraid; I didn’t rat you out as the incredibly hung-over Cousin in an earlier blog.   Ooooops.)

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Another typical day on the road to Utopia

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I went out to lunch again with a colleague — one who indulges my need to document life around me.

These photos don’t really need a narrative.  A tender moment (?) on not-so-tender 6th Avenue and 50th Street.  Is this where you want to tell your children that daddy proposed and mommy said yes?  I guess that I’ll leave up to you to decide who is crazier.  I think it is the girl for saying yes. And the outfit requires a 911 make-over.

As if that weren’t enough, I read the Radio City Musical Hall promos and juxtaposed were:

Ok, Chelsea Handler shares billing with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  And we wonder why our civilization is rounding the drain.

Hey, I just show what I see.

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I love the camera on my blackberry

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Today, I was walking with a colleague to catch a bite at lunch when I saw two ladies, somewhere between the ages of older and ancient, crossing against the light with their backs to a truck that fast approaching.  I wanted to take a picture of this insane scene (after I made sure the truck stopped).  I took out my blackberry although the ladies were going slow enough that (after I made sure the truck stopped) I could have gone to a camera shop, bought a camera and come back in time to catch a live “action” shot, as it were. 

My colleague looked at me as if I had three heads (I only have two).  Then I started showing him the pictures I have on my blackberry — a colleague standing in front of a life-sized Catholic icon for sale, urbanites eating outdoors next to the garbage and the vagrants, a sign about septic danger, a scary food store somewhere on Cross Bronx Boulevard in Scarytown, NY where another colleague and I looked for Advil on the way home from a business trip. 

Lunch was quick and awkward.  I think he was scared I would take a picture of him with food falling out of his mouth.  So, in an effort to try to calm what I thought were his concerns, I talked with food coming out of my mouth.  I think I just grossed him out.  And made him more afraid.

I’ll let you know if he asks me to lunch again.

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My birthday weekend

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So, it started in an annoyingly jaded New York way, “I was rushing to my acupuncturist and simply had to stop to take these photos”.

Here are the photos.  As POB (partner of blogger) says, in New York, the rich live cheek by jowl with the homeless, and projects exist side by side with luxury condo buildings.  So, on one of the first beautiful days of the year, restauranteurs put tables outside and voilá, amid the downtrodden and the garbage:

So, trite but still so unbelievable.

I wonder if the needles hurt more because I was late.  Also, my acupuncturist is now a black-belt in karate.  Ok, a little Jekyll-Hyde drama unfolding.  But I digress.  Ok, maybe I won’t digress.  Now that I think of it, what am I doing having a black-belt shove needles into my nerve endings?   I did have a particularly prickly acupuncturist session.  More thought must be given and a full review is necessary (in another entry).

Dinner followed with my “adopted” daughter and her partner.  My daughter went to law school against my better judgment and sounder opinion.  Still, she seems to love it and, watch out, she will be a formidable adversary.  Still she makes a fabulous chocolate birthday cake.  Look and weep:

On the bright side, if you are her adversary and she cleans up the courtroom floor with your argument, she might bake you a consolation confection.  Just a thought.

So, my brother came in for the weekend to see my dad.  BOB (brother of blogger) had not been in town for over a year.  He had planned to come in during the September High Holy Days, but contracted swine flu.  So, we gave him a pass on that trip, without asking for the lab results (if you’re family, we don’t ask for proof of illness).

I was not looking forward to re-ordering my birthday weekend, but in the end it was fabulous.

BOB came solo — without wife and kids.  While we missed the full family complement, I think he was able to relax more.  BOB was dream uncle for my son.  They played ball and watched sun bathers (my son’s idea) [see prior blog about his MoMA visit] and just did that male bonding thing that is not always so possible if you have two moms.

We gathered the extended family who lives in Manhattan for dinner.  True to form, HOSOB (husband of sister of blogger) and one of our dear cousins got into a food eating contest.  At one point, one of our younger cousins took away the plates and forks but still there was salmon left uneaten.  Not wanting to dirty another fork (cleaning that fork expands our carbon footprint), I told HOSOB to use the serving implement.  Others thought I was joking.  HOSOB knew I was serious and, such a sweet and wonderful guy, he listens to me even though I am not his wife, SOB (sister of blogger):

Of course, I had to take a picture for the family archives.

I am not so sure what BOB thinks of the odd antics of the evening.  I would like to think that it was just like riding a bike — that he felt at home with the volume and the rhythm of an evening with the ganza mishpocheh (the extended family).

My birthday wish?  To have my brother, my sister-in-law and their boys laughing around my dinner table at Sunday night dinners (with pictures), so that, years from now, we can say, “remember when we used to have dinner together on Sunday nights?”

Ok, maybe it’ll be fifteen years from now, when my nephews (by then, young men) move to NY and drag their parents, kicking and screaming, in tow.  (A new agenda item at our weekly family meetings.)  Wishes take time, I know.

But it was so great to be together again, if only for 36 hours.  Mom z”l was happy.

And because up until that moment the evening lacked a (bloggable) weird twist, SOB handed me a copy of her Last Will and Testament, so I would have it for safe-keeping.  So, I signed up for the Hemlock Society because it seemed a natural progression.

We ARE weird.

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The Downside of Exposing Your Child to “Culture”

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My son went to the Museum of Modern Art today with his second grade class and loved it.  Why am I shaking my head and wondering how the world gets so skewed?

My son saw Jackson Pollacks and figured he could do that, too.  Check, he understands that no one knows why art is art.  So far so good.

He noted that you can get the Picasso effect if you spin around and around and then look at someone sideways.  Check, he already understands cubism.  He is a prodigy.

He loved some of the Picassos and he thought Matisse’s dancers were fabulous.  Ok, why?  Because they were girls, and they were naked.  He is a boy (with a heightened sense of the opposite sex for a nearly 8 year-old).

It sounds like the set up for my standing riddle:  What do two lesbians moms produce?  A hyper-heterosexual son.

Still, some of his aunts, uncles, cousins and grandfathers might think he is a prodigy.  I won’t tell them that he stares at Victoria Secret ads with probably more zeal than he showed for the not-so-representational works of Picasso and Matisse.

I thought the prevailing wisdom was that boys get easier as they age . . .

I think my mother would giggle at this problem.  And that makes me smile.  But then I get back to reality and just shake my head.

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My Gynecologist, Dr. Jew

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No joke.  My doctor’s last name is Jew.

If only his first initial were A., it would be “A. Jew, M.D.”  That would be the culmination of two generations of Jewish humor.

Except that Dr. Jew is Asian.

Actually, that makes it a satirical culmination of two generations of Jewish humor.

The whole point of the visit was to talk about hormone replacement therapy.  I am not loving some of the effects of aging and since, in this day and age where we think we can cherry-pick out the good from the bad and have it all, I think why not ask?   And besides I read about it in the New York Times Magazine.  The article says it is safer now.  Ahhhh, the Times.  The word from on High.  I know, I know, I know.  Think Valerie Plame scandal.  Think slanted reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War.  Ok, so the Times is almost as reliable as a comic book.

Dr. Jew was so very gentle and courteous when he suggested to me that doctors tend not to base their medical judgments on New York Times Magazine articles.  They like to rely on clinical tests and multi-year studies, like the kind you find in the New England Journal of Medicine.  “That rag mag?” I thought, but did not say aloud.

Look, I get my news from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  So, it isn’t a stretch for me to get my medical information from comic books.  Thank G-d I am not a doctor.

And Dr. Jew?  He is a good (Jew) doctor.

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Synagogue Retreat at the Norman Bates Motel

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Ok, this is a long, random recounting, so bear with me.

My sister thinks that her trip on a Greyhound bus to a casino — where, no joke, a medical conference and training were being held — brought her very close to the common denominator of humanity. She emailed me that when she got to the bus gate at Port Authority, the woman in front of her on line just started talking to her.  The woman was traveling back from Florida to Providence. She had to go to Florida to get her mother’s ashes, which were in the shopping bag that she showed to my sister in case she wanted to see. (I wish my sister knew how to use the camera feature on her cell phone. A picture would have really made the moment.)  The woman had spent 3 days on a bus and needed to smoke a cigarette, had trouble in her childhood but has now straightened out, etc.

Dear SOB (sister of blogger), welcome to my world.  It is good that you experience your birthright — i.e., Mom’s magnetism for the strange, creepy and absurd.

Well, I am at a synagogue retreat. It was a rustic experience. Lots of rules — you need to observe the Sabbath and subscribe to the Jewish dietary restrictions — not on the quantity but on the depth to which the culinary arts must sink in order to conform to Kosher laws. Alcohol is Kosher, for which many people gave thanks to G-d. Also, no coffee Saturday morning because it is the Sabbath and one cannot use electricity or fire. Really? Really? Does anyone want really want to deal with me de-caffeinated? Also tonight someone by accident started making coffee before the end of the Sabbath.  Before we could descend on the heavenly libation, the moshkiach (the Kosher police) told the kitchen workers that they had to dump out the coffee. Wastefulness CAN’T be kosher.

There are many blessings that are new to me. The place has helpful plaques to assist in mastering them. I took a picture of the blessing after one eliminates in the bathroom, thanking G-d for the creation of certain cavities in the body. Really? My orthodox grandmother said this prayer? Even when she had indigestion? This must be an invention of those “too cool for shul” types. I am not kidding. Look at the picture.

Ever trying to make lemonade out of lemons, I have decided that we would learn this prayer and recite it every time our father discusses his irregularity.  Maybe we could teach it to him.  Clearly, I am going on the slow boat the Hell.

The place was kind of like that.  As you enter, there is a sign saying, “We are blessed by your presence”.  Ok, someone should be holding judgment until we leave.  There should even be a sign flashed for a specific few (like me), “We are blessed by your leaving.”

“Blessed by your presence”?  Trying to create holy, kumbaya, religious space and energy at crash-landing impact, after braving hellish Friday night traffic.  I thought to sing, “someone’s kumbaya-ing my Lord,” but I didn’t want to say kumbaya to that.  This is getting to crazy, with the aggressive, reverse Kumbaya on the Sabbath.  Slow boat.  Nah, I am taking the express train to Hell.

As you may have surmised, we couldn’t do much documentation on the Sabbath because that required use of electricity or batteries, so I had to take pictures in secret and I couldn’t blog.  Now that was harsh.  As my own little rage against the machine, I turned on my iPod just BEFORE I left the premises to go on my run.  Ah, the little subversities. But, as usual I digress.

Friday night, after blessing the group with our presence (or so the sign said), we proceeded to our promised charming two bedroom cabin.  The advertising was so wrong it should be a felony.  So one civil crime justifies a religious crime — desecration of the Sabbath — to take these pictures:

Is this a charming two-bedroom cabin? Type that into wikipedia and I bet that you won’t see a picture of this.  Really??  This is a three-bed cabin.  Ooops, there must have been a mistake.  No?  No mistake, this is the very finest that the camp has to offer?  In the county in Connecticut with the highest per capita income?  Really?  Really?  I am in a mood most foul and approach the rabbis about the relative merits of, say, a Ritz Carlton.  Not so my friends can get business, but it is a base level that to which we should become accustomed.

But at least the turn-down service left conflict-free chocolate on the beds:

But the real kicker is that in the light of day on Saturday, I realized that I had parked my rented super-huge, gas-guzzling monstrosity here:

Ok, I am a convert:  There, but for the Grace of G-d, go I.

~ the Blogger

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Wall Street Cab Driver

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It was too beautiful this morning to get into the subway (and, surprise, I was running late), so I hopped a cab and asked the driver to drive through Central Park, so that I could enjoy the beauty that the car exhaust was destroying.  But I digress.

The cab driver mentioned how New York has changed since the 1970s even though he believes that there is more crime than the official statistics would suggest.  I asked him if he had always driven a cab, knowing in the back of my mind that anyone who didn’t know that you could get the Park Drive going south at 100th Street and Central Park West hasn’t been a cab driver for too long.

No, he was a bond trader and was laid off in 2000 when the bond markets were rocked by one thing or another.  He was a golf caddy for a while and he turned down a job back on Wall Street in 2001 because the pay package was too low.  Yup, you guessed it — at a firm in the World Trade Center.  Ok, Gordon Gekko, in this case, greed saved his life.  Actually, he isn’t really Gekko-esque.  After all, he is driving a cab.  He said the pay package was too low because bond traders were a dime a dozen and people were scrambling to get work.  But he had paid off his mortgage and cashed out of equities as soon as he was laid off, so he was ok.  Not rich, but ok.  Clearly, because he is driving a cab.

A serene cab driver who would rather compete for fares in New York City than go back to Wall Street.  Now that is saying something.

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