New PD Post - "9/11 No Longer About Fear of Flying"

What to say after my L-O-N-G absence, except to say that I am back, and happy to be so! I would love it if you'd take a look at what I posted today on Politics Daily, where I'm back to blogging after a two-month hiatus following the death of my dad. This one is on the legacy of 9/11, it being that date, though a cold, dreary, rainy one in Washington, nothing like the clear skies we had eight years ago.

Lessons on War We Can't Seem to Learn

On Sunday night, Julia and I went with my lifelong friend Camille to the National Memorial Day Concert held on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, where her husband Robert McDuffie, a world-renowned solo violinist, played with the National Symphony Orchestra. The annual event was celebrating its 20th anniversary, but the last time I went was for Bobby's previous gig there, nine years ago, when he paid tribute to Schindler's List and his music and accompanying slide show moved me--embarrassingly, I have to say--to sobs.

This time, with Julia, who was wearing hand-me-down red patent leather shoes that are at least three sizes too big for her (but suitably fancy in her mind for the occasion), I kept my liquid emotions in check. 

But I found the whole thing wrenching nonetheless. There we were, with a picnic spread out on the baby blankets Julia had on insisted on bringing, on a beautiful night on the Capitol grounds--the same spot where I watched Barack Obama's inauguration. The Capitol dome was lit up behind us. The top of the Washington Monument stretched above the tree line in the distance ahead. It must be where I go for doses of patriotism.

 

Except that what I was feeling wasn't pride in my country. It was sorrow and disappointment. I couldn't help but remember that nearly a decade ago when we were there, the concept of our country at war was neatly tucked away in the past whereas this time, we were honoring the nearly  5,000 soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq and the thousands more who are injured in wars that are ongoing as I write. 

Part of the show was a tribute to the mother and sister of one such infantryman, who, when their son and brother was returned to the States with part of his head blow away, moved into Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Md., giving up their jobs and homes to nurse him back to what, in his case, passes for health.

Then Colin Powell spoke, telling us that there are 10,000 adults who have given up their lives to care for their wounded adult children. And if not for them, he reminded us, they would be in Veterans' Hospitals--"or worse, homeless." Nevermind that Powell seemed an unlikely source for this information. Shouldn't our VA Hospitals be like 5-star hotels after what we've put these men and women and their families through?

Flag-waving and pool openings have long become the substance if not the soul of Memorial Day--an updated version of the men, women, and children who dressed in their finery and went out to picnic at Chancellorsville, Va, spectators to one of the early battles of the Civil War that unfolded in the fields beneath them. Not a lot has changed.

New PD Post - Washington Not Having Food Fights But Fighting Bad Food

I snuck out of a forum on education featuring Education Secretary Arne Duncan today to go to a talk given by New York Times Minimalist columnist Mark Bittman and Washington-based chef Jose Andres about eating better to save not just ourselves but also the planet. It pretty much goes without saying that I wrote a PD post on the food panel ahead of anything I might write later on Duncan (who was compelling) and the allocation of resources in education. In my short life as an education reporter, I have come to understand that most of the statistics are not rosy. And if a nation moves on its belly, as Napolean said, there's no reason why a blogger shouldn't, too. 

The events were put on by the Center for American Progress, and the best part was that Ralph was also working at both, so whenever I got tired of trying to focus my new progressive eyeglasses on the words, "Center for American Progress," I would watch him take pictures. Afterward, he took me to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, Black Salt. 

I'm pleased to say that after listening to Bittman urge the audience to eat less meat, I ordered a crab cake. But I realize that that's only a partial victory, because, as the head of P.R. for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) once told me when I interviewed him for U.S.News, "Fish are not swimming vegetables." 

Next time, I guess it's seaweed salad for me.

Now on Politics Daily - The Last Word on Women's Ability

Please take a look at my latest post on Politics Daily, about negative stereotypes for women. Thanks!

Parenting Advice from Goldie Hawn

Speaking of teachable moments, I'm not one to think that Hollywood stars are the best source of parenting advice. But I told a friend who has worked with a lot of actors that I thought Goldie Hawn, whom I interviewed last week for a PD story on a mindfulness program she started in schools, was wise. She said that she kept running into smart ones--Hawn, Meg Ryan, and someone I can't remember--and marveling, until finally she realized that just because they can act doesn't mean they can't think. Point taken.

I caught up with Hawn on a particularly vulnerable parenting day in our house. After what we thought was incredibly bad behavior on Sam's part, we gave him the maximum sentence: we forbade him from playing in that day's T-ball game--a double-whammy, since (1) Ralph is his coach and (2) Sam's dedication to baseball and the Muckdogs, his team, surpasses his dedication to God and country. But that morning he had grabbed a ball away from Julia, and, when called on it, he walked away, down the hill by himself to school. When Ralph caught up with him, Sam rounded out the episode by hitting his dad. 

When I asked Hawn what she'd learned as a mother, she said:

"If I have the intention to be happy as a mother, then my zest is rubbed off on the children. Being a joyful parent is actually choosing your battles. Be the best of you, and don't let them get the best of you."

She went on to say that getting angry should mean something:

"I would get angry if they weren't kind. If they lied, that was a felony. If they cursed in the house."

After that, I felt better about punishing Sam so strongly. It didn't keep him from misbehaving the next day, or the day after that, but I've come to believe that much of parenting is about conditioning your child so that small mistakes don't become nasty habits and good habits, like doing your homework and sitting down to dinner every night with your family, take root. But the process of parenting--well, that's more about educating me than him. 

Cell Phones: For Talking On, Not About

I have a friend who used to say that conversations about flight delays and last night's dreams were off-limits, because everyone has them, and they're not nearly as interesting to your listener as they are to you. To the list of verboten topics, I would add stories about technological glitches.

Still, I can't resist telling you that I've been in cell-phone hell for the past few days. After my well-worn iPhone fell into the toilet the other day (don't ask), I had to pull my back-up iPhone out of my drawer (don't ask) to reactivate it. This was not as simple as it sounds, because these things never are. But taking a page from the Obamas, as columnist Jill Lawrence points out on PD today, the rep at the AT & T store tried to turn the whole experience into a teachable moment. When I explained how my phone came to be water-logged, she said, "They don't swim."

And I thought they did.

Have You Read Politics Daily Today?

Friends of FTITN,

I'm having a great time covering education for Politics Daily. Please take a look at it, especially my Q & A with DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee and my most recent post on Goldie Hawn and leave a comment!

Book Club Members Need to Read the Fine Print

Fact: I have never had a conversation with anyone about their book club where they've said, "I've just finished reading a fabulous book, and I can't wait to talk about it!"

Nope. It's always some variation on: "I have my book club meeting tomorrow night and I still have 1004 more pages to read of NAME OF BOOK GOES HERE. And I can't believe this is the book they chose."

Don't get me wrong. I love books so much that when an acquaintance recently said she wanted to line the entrance of her row house with bookshelves, I thought, I wonder if my hallway is wide enough to do that, too? And, Can I rearrange my radiator to make space? We used to have book wallpaper in our old house, but can you imagine how welcoming it would be to be flanked by real books as you walked into your house? It would be a lot better than being pawed at by a dog standing on her hind legs, which is what happens where I live. I've long dreamed of building bookshelves in my dining room so that I'd be surrounded by good friends on all sides. It would be like repairing to the library after dinner for brandy, cigars, and conversation, only you wouldn't have to leave the table. 

Having said all of that, I feel like the bad mother--you know, the woman who wrote an essay in the New York Times about loving her husband (who turns out to be the novelist Michael Chabon) more than her kids. But here's the thing: I don't ever want to be in a book club.

For me, the joy of books comes from the freedom to choose, both what--and when-- to read. Sure it's fun to talk about books, such as recently, when it seemed like everyone I know happened to be reading The Middle Place. And I was touched when my friend Lisel brought me her copy of The Girl I Left Behind because she had read it and thought I would like it, too. (She was right.) But that's different than having to slog through The Moviegoer because someone in your book club is trying to assauge her guilt over never having read it in college. Or willing yourself to stay awake as you inch your way along in some tome about geopolitics when you'd really rather be curled up with a good mystery. The only period in my life that I didn't love reading was in grades 6 to 12, because there was never a time--summers included--that I was without an assignment. Next came the agony of having to analyze the book in class. What is a book club except English Lit. without the tests? On the rare occasions when I leave Ralph and the kids at home and get together with friends, possibly the last thing I want to discuss is the plot of a 19th century novel. 

The reason this is on my mind is that the other day, my sister's friend Pat came up with a brilliant idea: a magazine club. Members would read an agreed-upon piece like the Gisele cover story in Vanity Fair or Orangette's piece on salmon in Bon Appetit, or, hell, the Organizer Doctor's solutions for arranging what's under the sink in Red Book, sift through it, and still leave plenty of time for free-ranging conversation. 

Think about it. After a lively evening with friends, you could go home, climb into bed, and read. The book of your choice. Without the guilt.

Anyone want to join with me to start Magazines Only?

Life at 24,000 Feet - No Place to Run

One of my sisters is a flight attendant, but for a variety of reasons, that is not a job I could ever hold down. One is that I am a spiller of drinks. Another is that I am a bad flier. I'm not neurotic about it, which is to say I've never declined a trip because I don't like to fly. Let's just say I have a reputation. 

Years ago, when I was scheduled to accompany my elderly cousin on a month-long boondoggle to South Africa, the plane we were supposed to take was grounded overnight to have its engine replaced. Maybe it's because I didn't have anything else to do but worry during my unplanned stay in Chantilly, Va., near Dulles Airport--my cousin Abram, 92, had retired to his room, and I hadn't even packed dental floss in my purse to keep me busy. Still, under the best of circumstances it wouldn't sit well with me to fly for 17 hours with an impaired engine and so I calmly phoned the airline and asked why, with its puny fleet of two jets, I should trust them to fix it. Some way into our trip, my cousin told me that our guide had taken him aside and asked why the airline had a record of my being a "nervous traveler." Word had gotten out, I guess. I felt somewhat justified when, mid-trip, South African Airways went bankrupt and we had to fly another carrier home.

Even before that, when I was on a transatlantic flight in my early twenties to visit my then boyfriend in London, the ride was so rough that I grabbed the hand of the man sitting next to me and gripped it for the next four hours. I don't think I ever learned the name of the person who belonged to that hand, but I know that no amount of pleading on his part would have gotten me to release it. I remember his eyes on me when we were waiting for our luggage, but we never spoke. At least that encounter was anonymous.

Despite my history, I was trying to play it cool the other night when the plane from Atlanta, where I'd gone to visit my parents, started to bump around--a lot. I wouldn't be able to save them if thing went down, I thought, looking at Sam and Julia in their pajamas in the seats next to me. Sam was asleep, and Julia seemed oblivious to the roller coaster. Then Julia reached out and took my hand. And by the look she gave me, which made her momentarily more 30 than 3, I could tell it was for me. After all, she had announced just that day that she wants to be a smoke jumper and then a princess when she grows up. In that same conversation, as if to justify her life's ambitions, she told me that she is brave and smart.

I know people say you can learn a lot from kids, but I didn't learn a thing that night at 24,000 feet. I was just glad to have my little girl's pudgy palm in mine. And to know her name.

Announcing My New Gig on Politics Daily

Dear Friends of FTITN,

Many of you have called to check in about my absence from the blog, and I'm so grateful for your concern and loyalty. Everyone in our life is as good as they can be, which, of course, means varying things depending on who we're talking about. 

Partly my radio silence is due to the fact that I've been getting ready to cover education as a columnist for AOL's new venture Politics Daily. Here's how our editor in chief, Melinda Hennenberger, describes the site, which launched two days ago:

"Welcome to Politics.Daily.com, a political news magazine for the general reader updated every day, throughout the day. Instead of leading off with extravagant claims about how we're the best thing since Caller ID, what I really want to promise is that we'll work hard to distinguish ourselves the old-fashioned way, with heavily reported, well-written stories. We'll offer a straight mix of news and opinion -- and a mix of views in our reported commentary. And I can't tell you how grateful we all are that AOL (yes, Alec Baldwin, deal with it!) is willing to take this gamble, and fund a small team of old pros committed to traditional journalistic values..."

People have asked me how we're different from Politico or Slate, and the answer is, I don't know. But I can tell you from a purely personal standpoint, as the mom of one, and soon, two, kids in D.C. public school, I'm thrilled to be covering a core issue that feels to me like it's now or never in terms of making our country's public schools work. And that's what I plan to say to Michelle Rhee, our controversial chancellor, when I go interview her for PD tomorrow. 

And I'm ecstatic (and a more than a little rusty) to be reporting again. So check us out. And while you're at it, please read (AND COMMENT) on my first story about how schools are gearing up to deal with swine flu. I'll also be blogging on Woman Up on the PD site. 

It feels so great to be back on FTITN! 

Recession: Carrot and Stick

Not that it's really affected me, because I've scarfed down more Girl Scout cookies than a whole troop should be allowed to eat in one sitting. But...is it me, or are the Girl Scouts of America skimping on the size of their peanut-butter-creme Do-si-dos these days? 

If so, they're not the only ones who have used the recession as an excuse for portion control. It wasn't that long ago that it seemed everywhere I went, people behind counters were trying to upsell me on more popcorn, bigger burgers, and larger fountain drinks. I'm sure that's still going on, but recently I've noticed a few restaurants and gourmet take-out shops around town where they're charging the same but quietly dishing up less--and also piling on the lettuce in place of other, more expensive ingredients. For all the warnings we've heard about obesity, maybe the real cure for the nation's collective weight is a down economy.

I'm going to start a running list on Friends Talking in the Night of good things to come out of the economic turmoil we're in, so please send in your thoughts. I only wish you could also drop in for a cookie! (I just ate another one when I went to the kitchen to check on the correct spelling of Do-si-dos.)

Economics 101: Learning in Life What I Didn't Learn in College

The only reason I did well in Econ in college is that I took the courses with my friend, Bill, who had a mind for all the charts and graphs about guns and butter that I lacked, and he was generous enough to pull me along. 

But even as I've tried to deny the daily damage being inflicted on my retirement account--I've been tossing the unopened statements in the trash for the past several months--the economy has risen to become THE conversation. It pops up in headlines in the daily papers and on my phone. It comes up on walks and over dinner with friends and even during Ralph's and my pillow-talk time at night. We who have Greatest Generation envy are finally to be tested, it seems, by the Great Recession. 

Since history never repeats itself precisely, however, I find myself obsessing about what form the paradigm shifts our lives will take. About the only change I've made so far is to stop acquiring and start whittling: I've made a deal with myself that for every day I don't go to Starbucks, I transfer $5 toward my credit card balance (Last week when I was in bed with the flu and only craved tea, I "made" a whopping $35!) 

This nonetheless represents a big change for me. I have lived my entire adult life by an approach that Calvin Trillin calls "Alice's Law of Compensatory Cash Flow." That's the principal by which if you think you absolutely must buy a fabulous new flat screen TV that cost $5,000 but then remember that if you do there will be no money to pay the mortgage, feed the kids, or train the dog and so you forego it, you have in effect "saved" $5,000 that you can then spend on something else. 

But surely this is only the first of many adjustments, small and large. If few can afford to send their kids to college in the manner to which we upper-middle-class aspirers have planned, will the Harvards and Yales somehow become devalued, replaced by windshield stickers for Georgia State? Will we be blown back a generation, so that we raise our kids the way our parents grew up--living with multi-generations? taking in boarders? We will we start mending the clothes we buy from Target? Will we never be able to retire?

All of this is still in the realm of fantasy right now, and I hope that's where it stays. But in my imagination, what I picture from the turmoil we're in is a more communal life, with greater reliance on and interdependence among friends, family, and neighbors, less waste, and more of a focus on what we really care about because choices have to be made. 

I'd love to hear how the economy has affected you, and where you think we're headed?

Public School? A Private Matter (But It Shouldn't Automatically Be Discounted, Either)

As anyone who's ever read Friends Talking in the Night knows, I struggle mightily with parental guilt--that just-kicked-in-the-gut feeling that comes on unbidden each time you think you might be failing your kids, however temporarily or slightly. I'm agonizing at this particular moment over the fact that Julia is in daycare on what for many kids in Washington is a snow day, while I'm at home blogging and doing research for a speech--never mind that she was happy to be there, kicking about in her boots like the little boy in Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day. So I'm totally sympathetic with a piece in yesterday's New York Times "SundayStyles" about the hard calculus many parents are currently facing over whether or not to keep their kids in private-school education in this grizzly economy. 

Still, as the mother of a child in public school, I took umbrage at the writer's utter failure to question--even in a single throw-away line--the possibility that public-school education has any positives. If we hadn't made different decisions with the money we earn would Sam be in a private school? Maybe. But each morning when I hug him goodbye and give him a good luck pat on his backpack, I also feel that he's in a pretty perfect situation and that our family--and, in some tiny way, our neighborhood--benefits from being a part of the school down the hill. That sense is reinforced at pickup each afternoon by the engaged boy who hurls himself into my arms, talking without a breath about Harriet Tubman or Grandma Moses or his science teacher's voyage on an ice-cutter in Alaska.

I learned all I need to know about feeling that your child may be in the wrong place in the few weeks of kindergarten last year when Sam wailed every day, apparently over the stepped-up demands of academia: I couldn't have lived like that for long without making some changes in one direction or another. It's one thing to be unhappy yourself and altogether another to see your child in distress. It's primal. But I'm also reminded of a lesson I learned as a newlywed back in my twenties that seems so obvious now as to never have needed learning: you can't get everything you need out of one relationship--or one school.

I'm not preaching that public school is for everyone. Obviously, we don't know what, if anything, we're missing. And since we won't ever have a control group, only life will tell. 

Food and the Unintended Consequences of Parenting

When Sam was a toddler, someone told us that the way to cure bad behavior was to put a drop of Tabasco on his tongue. But just at the moment Ralph finally decided to reach for the small bottle with the kick-ass contents, he decided there must be a better way to teach baby Sam a lesson than to mess with his taste buds. He closed the kitchen cabinet, forever leaving Tabasco as a condiment for raw oysters rather than a form of corporal punishment.  

I was thinking about that incident yesterday when I read a story in the New York Times about well-meaning parents who have passed on their obsession with health food to the detriment of their kids. Without meaning to, they have doused the equivalent of Tabasco all over what their children eat:

"We're seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids," said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They go to birthday parties, and if it's not a granola cake they feel like they can't eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme." 

The piece goes on:

 "Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietician . . .  says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed 'bad' by their parents. "It's almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general," she said. "I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats." 

Like most things having to do with parenting, the lessons you teach about food are not as straightforward as you'd wish. Even though there seems to be considerable distance between obesity and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, we're just talking about a difference of pounds in terms of the trouble they bring. One doctor has coined the name "orthorexia" for people obsessed with health-conscious eating, the Times says. What we're trying to do, of course, is lay down patterns that will serve our kids well as they grow up and make their own decisions. But how? In terms of sweets, we swing between operating a Hitler youth camp and Candy Land.

In our house, food is not just what we eat, it's what we do. In first grade this year, when he was asked to write his autobiography, "What activity does your family enjoy together," saying, "We cook." As much as it slows dinner prep down, Sam and Julia snap beans (Julia often throws away the beans and puts the snapped ends in the bowl) and cut vegetables with a dull, ivory-handled fish knife. Each time Ralph picks Sam up from school, his first question is always, "Who's coming for dinner?" (When I pick him up, he asks, "Where are we going for dinner?")

It occurred to me in thinking about all this that maybe putting food in the context of family meals rather than talking about the sugar content in a box of Puffins, say, is the way to go. The people I know who have raised successful children put great stock in the family dinner as if some alchemy happens when you sit around a table together. And certainly in my own experience growing up, the profound lessons of my childhood were delivered not from a podium but from behind a place mat. Now that my father is on a feeding tube, those kitchen table lessons seem all the more poignant to me.

Only time will tell whether the right lessons take with Sam and Julia. When I was young, my parents forbade us from going to McDonald's and listening to the Beatles (Burger King and "Winchester Cathedral" were their fast-food and music of choice.) 

All of parenting seems arbitrary, fraught with unintended consequences. My parents were prescient about McDonald's (though not Burger King). As for the Beatles, well, maybe we'll learn one day that they're hazardous to your health.

The End of Journalism--and Civilization

While I'm on the subject of caregivers (see yesterday's post), I'd like to rant for a moment about journalism. I didn't get to see Barack Obama's State of the Union address last night--I was too busy putting Julia to bed again and again, she having decided that she would stay up until Ralph got home at 11 p.m. 

Nonetheless, I'm almost certain from reading today's papers that while the president talked about Wall Street and the Big Three in Detroit, he failed to mention the demise of journalism. We are small potatoes compared to other industries, and we will never get a bail-out. But we are dying all the same. On Monday, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News declared bankruptcy. They join the Seattle-Post Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, which are for sale, and scores of other papers and magazines that have had lay-offs and/or involuntary furloughs. The Christian Science Monitor, of course, has already moved its operations to the Web. Ditto with U.S. News & World Report, where I used to work, which now puts out a magazine only once a month.

But it's not just a question of where we will read our news: we can all get used to reading the newspaper on a computer. It's what will be lost in the translation. I have one very good friend who's a devotee of the obituaries in the local paper, not because she's morose but because of the tidbits of humanity they reveal about the people who died. 

That's exactly what I've been thinking about that New York Times piece on child caregivers that I cited yesterday. If I were reading the paper online, I would scan the headlines about the economy and Iraq and Afghanistan and probably not take the time to read anything I don't have to. And having read the caregiving story, it's not as if I--or anyone else--can do anything to change the grim circumstances it lays out. Those kids will go on giving up their lives for their parents whether it becomes public knowledge or not. 

But journalism is about more than headlines; it's about more than keeping the government honest or being the whistle-blowers for big business. Its equally important role is to hold up a mirror to society; to tell us who we are. It's about the texture of our daily lives.

Few, besides my fellow journalists, seem to think that much will be lost by losing this. Journalists are reviled--lower, I'd bet, than lawyers on the food chain. Sarah Palin spoke for many Americans when she said during the campaign and afterward that we got in the way of telling the story.

But I can't help but think that what's being lost is of larger moment than a Saturn minivan, say. I think it's more a cornerstone of civilization that is crumbling.  

Caregivers Are Too Young for the Job

Yesterday's New York Times has a story about children taking care of their ailing parents. It's not about the sandwich generation; not about people in mid-life like me and my sisters caring for our mom and dad. It's tweens and teens who have to give up soccer practice and seeing friends and, in some cases, school, to dispense insulin and migraine meds and take their charges to doctor's appointments--people, in other words, who should still be receiving the care, not doing the heavy lifting, sometimes literally.

The newspapers are not filled with the cheeriest stories right now, it being a critical time for us both at home and abroad. But of all I've read lately, this was surely the most depressing. 

I felt bad enough last week when I read about Bristol Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren on FoxNews in which she explains that the mom thing is unexpectedly hard: 

"Well it's not just the baby that's hard. It's just, like, I'm not living for myself anymore. It's, like, for another person, so it's different." 

But at least her situation is the result of a hormonal romp (although based on who the father is there must be mighty slim pickin's up there in Alaska). And at least that baby will grow more independent, not less, as time passes. 

That's why, even though Julia woke up whining this morning and never stopped until she walked out the door except to cry "I'm done being in a bad mood!," it is easier for me to deal with the details of motherhood than those of daughter-hood right now. At least it feels like I'm operating in the light of day.

From my experience, illness is a long, black tunnel. And even though I'm so lucky that I still have both of my parents, I have also lost them to the tunnel.  

Facebook and My Bookshelves: A Shaky Comparison

Yesterday I got a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built in my office (actually, they're Ikea shelves nailed to the wall so they don't fall on my head) so that I can at last unpack the forty cartons of books that have been stored away from three moves ago, in 2001. This morning, as I spent a couple of hours unpacking them, I was hit with so many rushes of memory that it was like attending my own, personal reunion.

In fact, I can't help being struck by the similarities of my dusty piles of books and my new Facebook "friends," though the last time I saw my copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book I read in college and detested because of the way the professor abused the one African-American in the class, and my inscribed copy of Stefan Kanfer's The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World, written by someone with whom I'm no longer in touch, Facebook didn't exist. 

Having carted around some books for decades that I have never read and likely never will, I'm now wondering, Do I toss Don DeLillo's Underworld in the give-away bin at the Cleveland Park Library or put it on my shelf to take up space of which I now MIRACULOUSLY have too much in order to pretend that I'm more erudite than I really am? Is the point of putting books on a bookshelf to keep the ones you've actually read and treasure, for whatever reason? (I can't part with my Kanfer book, for example, because it reads: "For Linda A lovely lady of talent, true grit, and talent from her secular rabbah," and I'm sure it's the only time my name will ever be in the same sentence with talent x two. Not to mention that when I was just getting started in journalism, I met him in a used bookstore in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and he was incredibly generous to me.) Is it to stockpile the un-reads for the future, which, in my case means I won't need to borrow or buy another book until 3001?

My list of Facebook friends is much the same. There are the friends I talk to every day, anyway, but there's a much longer list of "friends" whom I've spoken to rarely--if ever. And may never. Don't get me wrong: I love being able to be touch with people from high school I didn't get to know back in the day. And as one "friend" of a friend who from elementary school said, we're recreating our Brownie troop on Facebook one person at a time. It's pretty incredible that these people, once lost in time, are now a click away. 

Facebook makes me feel that the world is small and manageable and, as I've blogged about before, I think that there's a kind of circling of the wagons from our youth as our parents age and get sick. It means something to hear from someone who knew my mom and dad when they were in their forties. It's valuable to have the same references to the same stupid songs from 1977. Who else but those in my senior class from The Lovett School in Atlanta would know the significance of "Build Me Up Buttercup" and be able to sing it word for word?

Still, I have to wonder, as with my books, is the point of Facebook to amass sheer numbers? Is the person with 6,035 "friends" a lot cooler than the person with 7 "friends," even if they're both only really in touch with 5 of those people? And like the books I know I'll never read, what's the protocol about un-friending people, though unlike a book, they take up no room in cyber-space.

These are the questions I'm pondering as I put the Anne Tyler books from my twenties on the shelf alongside a copy of a Dorothy Parker book that belonged to my grandmother, Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. The lesson I'm taking from all this is that I'm used to my life being organized in neat categories. Books are arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. Friends are from college or my first marriage or Sam's daycare class. But now I realize that the old categories don't hold. My shelves are a mish-mash and now, because of Facebook, so are my friends. And I like it that way.

For Renewable Energy, Tap a Mother's Guilt

I was listening to a segment on the Obama administration's plans to create renewable energy sources on The Diane Rehm Show as I was driving downtown this morning when it hit me: if you could bottle up all the mother guilt in the United States, you would never need to drill for oil again. You'd have all the renewable energy you could ever use.

The reason I was stuck in traffic, looking for a parking place near the Verizon Center, instead of (a) walking Mavis with a friend, as scheduled, and (b) getting ready for a doctor's appointment is that Julia's daycare class had a field trip to see "Disney on Ice" and suddenly I was going. 

Back when I was dating, the etiquette was clear about who came first: you did not bail out on a girlfriend to make plans with a guy. Even the doctor/patient relationship leaves no gray. Cancelling an appointment at the last minute as I did means that I will have to pay for it. But child/friend etiquette has never been spelled out to me. Was it okay to leave my walking buddy in the lurch for Julia? 

My guilt about not accompanying Julia on the field trip was fueled by a couple of things. If I had been in town last week, I would have signed up to chaperone and there never would have been any question about where I belonged. But as I watched Julia walk away toward the Metro holding the hand of one of her teachers, I felt horrible, not least because she wanted me to go and if we're lucky enough to win the public school lottery next month, Julia will be in real school next year. How much time I spend with her won't be my decision, it will be strictly regulated by the District of Columbia. 

Also, I find that with my dad sick and every phone call to or from Atlanta one that turns up another unsettling health condition for me to process, I am walking around brimming with tears at all times. I need my mother, but the best I can get right now is the satisfaction of being present for my children. So when the teacher called from the subway platform to say that they found an extra ticket, I hesitated less than half a nano-second. Even that pause seemed too long in response to Miss La Juan's plea, "Julia really wants you to come."

At the show, Julia sat on my lap and we shared a big box of popcorn and there was no question for me about where I should be. But when it ended and I had to go find my car, I again had to leave her. This time, she was bound up in Miss La Juan's arms, crying.

A few days ago when I was about to go to the airport and I was telling my mother goodbye, she hugged me hard and said, "I love you more than you can know." 

"I'm a mother, too," I said, "and so I do have some idea." 

In preparation for Valentine's Day, each child in Julia's class was asked to say how much they love their mothers (maybe the dads get the cards??). Borrowing from one of our favorite picture books, Guess How Much I Love You, Julia answered, "I love my mama to the moon." 

I'm not sure why a mother's love is tinged with guilt, but I know that I've got enough of both to get Julia and me to the moon--and back.

Intensivist Care

In the intermediate intensive care unit of the hospital in Atlanta where my dad is, there's a doctor on call 24/7 known as an intensivist. But I've decided that whether we deal with sick people or not, we're all intensivists. Think about it: when's the last time you went at a project in a relaxed way? Did anything at a leisurely pace? Took something lightly?

When I landed in Washington after an emotional week spent at my dad's bedside, I was, for the briefest time, Sam and Julia's fantasy mom. They were happy to see me and clung to me in baggage claim, full of news about what they'd been doing in my absence: a birthday party at a real fire house, a dinner date with their friend Benjamin and his parents, ballet class that ended with Julia's getting bear stamps on her hands (still visible), breakfast with Ralph, including hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. Time slowed while I took in the sight and substance of my beautiful, healthy family.

It didn't take more than about 1 1/2 hours, though, before I was back in intensivist mode, which is to say back in the trenches of mom-dom. Sam hadn't done his homework while I was away and wasn't in the mood to hear that he still had to, late or not. A skirmish ensued. But the truth is, life has moved on, because there's this week's homework to attend to. Last week is over.

The intensity at which we live is not just about parenting. A friend who is writing a book and trying to finish said she worked so hard yesterday that she didn't have time to eat until she looked up from her computer and it was dinner-time. Why do I do this to myself, she opined. Why do I wait until the last minute?

But we all do. The way our full lives are organized--or disorganized--we can't help but do things on deadline. As one of my sisters said recently, our lives are so based on a 24/7 time clock, we don't ask what day something is due anymore, we ask what time. She was referring to her son, who punched the send button on a college application related something at 11:59 p.m. before it had to be in at midnight.

And even though I bought Valentine's Day cards at the CVS across the street from the hospital days ago in an effort to relieve the tedium of the waiting room, it's not like I also mailed them in advance. No, I will scramble to do that today so that they'll arrive on Feb. 14, if the postal service cooperates. It's not the first instance I've been late. I have solved my latent tardiness before by spending $48 at FedEx on a $2.49 father's day card.

All this rushing makes it hard to stop and put things in context. To enjoy. It wasn't until I was looking at photos of Sam and Julia at my mom and dad's house last week and saw one of Julia at 1, standing diaper-less and defiant in her patent-leather party shoes in the front yard, that I realized I don't even remember that moment--don't remember Julia at 1--which was just 2 years ago. It had the effect of slamming on my interior brakes, just briefly, to luxuriate in the fact that I have a still-small child--in fact, two--to swaddle myself in. And then I had to turn my attention elsewhere.

I'm not sure there's a solution. I'm just musing--intensively. 

Getting By With a Lot of Help From Our Friends

Ralph and I (and Sam and Julia) are incredibly fortunate to have such great friends. On Monday when I had to fly to Atlanta unexpectedly and without telling S and J, and Ralph had to work, our next-of-kin, Katy Kelly, subbed for us. Here's a report that made me laugh. Maybe it will amuse you, too. (Pop is my dad, who probably hasn't eaten a Dunkin Donut in 38 years--if ever.)

"Sam and Julia were excellento. I picked up Sam about 5:15. We got Julia. Drove home. Walked to Arucola for supper. Came back. Took a bath. Julia got a princess hairdo. Made Valentines. Julia made one for Pop. There are many letters on it. Mostly Ps and Bs and Os. She says it says Dunkin Donuts. Perhaps it is a coupon. She says he likes them. Ralph came. Helped Steve re-hang the Fap Anis picture (LR got painted today). Lost socks. Meltdown. Found socks. Home."

Love, Linda

I hadn't planned to be in Atlanta this week, but here I am, having gotten a phone call on Monday that my dad, already in the hospital after his second leg amputation, was having trouble breathing. Now he is on a ventilator in ICU and my mom and two sisters and I are going in two-by-two every few minutes to squeeze his hand. It's like Noah's Ark, but we are not going to save our species--or anyone, for that matter.  

The prognosis is that he will likely be on a feeding tube when he comes home, which the doctor and his ICU nurse are very high on because it will eliminate the pesky step of trying to stuff him with nutrients, which he needs badly in order to heal, via food. 

This is hard stuff, which I have generally avoided blogging about, but now it has filled so much space in my mind that I find I can no longer side-step it. One promise I made to myself when I started Friends Talking in the Night is that I wouldn't necessarily have to say everything, but that everything I do say must be 100 percent honest.

So back to my dad. I am trying to come to terms with his diminishing state. We are not talking here about the abstract problems of diabetes or a Parkinson's-like tremor or our aging population. This is my once 6' 1" father, who, until just a few years ago when his illness got markedly worse, was my very best pal. Before I got married the first time, we sat together in a restaurant and cried. And when that marriage was coming apart, he's the one who came to me and said that he knew something wasn't right and that he would love me no matter what.

We share a sense of humor and a love of history, not to mention a great appreciation for Southern biscuits. Our bond formed when I was in high school--we went to breakfast together every Saturday at a diner called Melvin's. And when I lived in New York, he made sure that I always had at least a dozen Melvin's (by then called Maria's) biscuits in my freezer. Thomas Wolfe was wrong: you can go home again when your favorite childhood foods are involved.

Now I see that what I am really writing is a love letter to my father. Because squeezing his hand and saying I love you covers a lot of territory but not all that is in my breaking heart. 

Tainted Peanut Butter An Extreme of Corporate Greed

Just before she finally gave into sleep a few nights ago, Julia and I had a lengthy recap of her day, which included a circle-time conversation at school about what to do if a stranger approaches you. I was quizzing her on various situations: if someone you don't know says he/she has candy in the car, what do you do? Puppies? Kittens? Trained by her powerhouse teacher Miss Brenda Julia dutifully answered no to each question, though I suspect she would waver if chocolate, a fistful of sugar, or a stick of butter--her three favorite food groups--was the lure.

As a mom, sometimes I feel that these early lessons--how to look before crossing a street and what red, yellow, and green mean--are among the most important I can impart to my kids. Certainly there are more nuanced values about lying, for instance, to pass on as well as other things down the road about drugs and sex (they'll have to teach me about rock 'n' roll). But these first conversations--all bright lines--are like an old-fashioned orange life-preserver: you can't get in the boat without them.

I know that even as a diligent parent I can't protect my kids from everything. When Sam had just turned 1, we were in a car accident caused when a woman too old to be driving ran a red light (she had perhaps forgotten that red means STOP!) and broad-sided me. The car was totaled, but Sam, our family friend/babysitter, Marguerite, and I emerged unbruised. Sam thought the crash was great fun. It was hard to accept that bad things could happen on my watch, but it did make me slightly more forgiving when bad things happened on other people's watch. (Bad is a relative term here, because I'm not talking about anything more major than rug burn or a cut over an eye, thank goodness.)

But even knowing that my ability to shield my kids from danger is limited, I am enraged by the Peanut Corp. of America's behavior. It has been a bad few weeks for Corporate America. 

John Thain's $1.2 million redecorating job came to light as did Wall Street bonuses and news that Citibank, the recipient of federal bailout dollars, is buying a new jet. All of that is inexcusable, but it's not as irresponsible as the peanut people, who knowingly distributed salmonella-laden products, killing at least eight people and sickening 550. That puts them down on a par with kidnappers and pedophiles. Worse, really, because I can't drill my kids on a threat we can't see. 

I had been thinking last week when Barack Obama rapped Wall Street's knuckles that if his plate weren't so full, he should also do the same to the peanut folks, and yesterday on the Today show, he did, suggesting that the Food and Drug Administration needs to do a better job: 

"That's what Sasha eats for lunch probably three times a week. And you know, I don't want to have to worry about whether she's going to get sick as a consequence to having her lunch." 

I have no illusions that the President wakes up and makes the sandwiches every morning, despite the Obamas' exertions to normalize the White House with Pottery Barn furniture and J. Crew clothing, according to the cover of this week's US Weekly. Nonetheless, I am glad to have a dad (a mom would be okay, too!) running the country. Perhaps our everyday concerns might get a little more attention. And though neither I nor anyone else I know personally will ever have the President's secret Blackberry address, it does make me feel that we and the Obamas are having pretty much the same conversations, if not also the same food, come dinner time. 

Republicans Against Stimulus Package Take Note

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed Barack Obama's $819 billion stimulus package without the support of a single Republican, who worried that once states got used to a temporary infusion of federal money into education and Medicaid, it would be difficult to pull back. 

I don't know enough about the bill on its merits to say one way or the other whether it's good, although on the surface it makes sense to me to put money into the economy where it's needed most, and certainly education and health care are two top candidates for that. And I certainly feel better about my tax dollars going toward Pell Grants and rebuilding decrepit schools than to John Thain (formerly of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America), say, who saw fit to use $1.2 million of our money to redesign his office (including a $1,405 waste basket). Or to Wall Street, more generally, which used it to pay out bonuses many multiples larger than my annual earnings.

On the point of an addiction to federal funds, I can say this: there's a really simple and effective tool against making the federal government's temporary expansion permanent. As a parent, I use the same tool all the time. It's the word "no." And I know all about addiction. Over the winter break when we were visiting my family in Atlanta, Sam experienced a similar expansion of TV-watching hours, and it's been a bear of a habit to break since, at home, we're stricter than the 18-hour maximum he enjoys in the face of an ailing relative at his grandparents' house (no TV on school nights and 2 hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). Sometimes we have to spell out "N-O!." Sometimes we have to resort to "No, no, no!" (The glitch in my argument, I realize, is that at home we enjoy a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy, and our two parental votes carry more weight than the Republicans' votes in Congress these days.)

Still, it goes without saying that if the country had said no sooner and more often, we wouldn't be in quite this deep of a predicament.

John Updike and Me

Much has been written about John Updike since his death yesterday, but I'm prompted to write still more to tell about an interaction I had with him when I was a New Yorker fact checker 15 years ago. As part of the magazine's special issue devoted to the movies in 1994, Updike penned a piece on dancer/actor Gene Kelly. It was my job to watch all the movies he mentioned and make sure that nothing was out of place. 

But something was. In his discussion of the 1949 movie On the Town, about three sailors on 24-hour shore-leave in New York, Updike followed Kelly (plus Frank Sinatra, Jules Munchin, and their gal pals) around the city, driving past, among other notable spots, the literary lions on the front steps of the New York Public Library. With Updike a literary lion more imposing than any statue, who was I to contradict him. But, having watched the movie a dozen times, re-winding and re-winding the scenes where they go around town in a taxi the size of your couch and had another fact checker double-check me, I finally, reluctantly, concluded that Updike had erred. Or else I was about to be made to feel really stupid.

I mustered my courage which, in those days, was pretty much lacking, called him up and said in my most polite, fact checkery voice that I hadn't been able to find the New York Public Library in the movie and that maybe he could point me toward it. 

"Oh, I'm sure you're right," Updike said, the wave of his hand almost visible over the phone. "I haven't watched that movie in years. I was just relying on memory." 

Only later did I find out that on the rare occasion a fact checker did have a quibble with the master, they were never to call him directly but were to go through his editor. 

I had the honor of writing about Updike a couple of years ago when we were featuring his 2007 reading of Terrorist on NPR's Book Tour, but I never spoke with him again. And I'd say it's a sure bet I've never again watched a movie as many times as I sat down with On the Town.

Obama's Day 4 and How I'm Feeling

Tuesday's inaugural events were just as uplifting as they promised to be. Never mind that I snagged a ticket for an honest-to-God SEAT, of all things, at 2 the morning of, what I loved best was looking not ahead of me (Obama was 2 inches tall from my vantage point) but looking behind at the shimmering sea (and I really do mean a sea) of people standing in the sunlight with flags that stretched as far as the eye would allow, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. I also loved that it was a day without cynicism. Beautiful people with really white teeth from L.A., (including Sheryl Crowe, whom I met but failed to alert that Julia wants to adopt her) were asking to have their pictures snapped with cell phones alongside overweight men from Greece and Upper Eastsiders wearing "W New York" baseball caps. 

It was also a day without irony. When Obama mentioned patriotism as one of our country's bedrock values in his inaugural speech, it's the first time I'd heard the word in seven years without some internal eye-rolling. How luxurious, I thought, to be able to feel patriotic without all the fear and ideology that has loaded it down for so long.

On Day 4 of his presidency, Obama is busy being tough with terrorists and tough-minded about the economy. On Day 4, I am busy too, but, as you might expect, my sights are set closer to home. What to do, I wondered, upon coming downstairs to fix breakfast and finding that Mavis had pooped all over the rug pad (the rug was already removed due to same last Friday)? What to do about my own economics (no money in checking account) and my own weighty issues (ate too much on inauguration day and realized today why the pedi-cab driver was peddling so slow). In short, I'm feeling overweight and overdrawn. 

It's bad when in answer to your six-year-old son's begging to go out for a fancy sushi dinner you say that it's too expensive and he offers to chip in the $20 his grandparents gave him for Christmas.

(Sam has, incidentally, hypothetically spent that $20 four times already: once on the game Apples to Apples Jr.; once on taking his mother to the movie Hotel for Dogs (with popcorn); once on a portion of a video game for him and his little sister that he vows they won't play until they're both 20; and once in the form of a donation to help prevent polar bears from becoming extinct).

It's a hard lesson to learn that you can only spend the money once. 

Friends Talking in the Night Welcomes New Friends

Friends Talking in the Night has recently gotten comments from new readers. Welcome! Blogger isn't set up for me to respond to you individually, but I'm so glad you've joined the conversation! If you ever do want a personal response, please include your email address in your comment. Thanks--and keep reading. Suggestions are appreciated, too.

Publish Post

My Inaugural "Ball" is Already Famous

Here's an update to the post I wrote a few days ago about our little inaugural party. Our so-called Blue Ball might be Pluto in the Washington solar system, but we still made Politico! We're already having fun, and the open bar's not even open yet!

 

Notes from the Field of Momdom

This morning I was driving Julia to daycare and, as usual, we were listening to The Very Best of Sheryl Crow cranked way up. 

"Mom," Julia asked, looking sheepish: "Does Sheryl Crow have any kids?" 

"Yes," I said, "she has a baby girl," astonished that I've read enough issues of People to know. I figured J. would be pleased since she loves babies, especially of the female variety. But no. J. just wanted to establish Sheryl's bona fides because next she said: 

"I want her to be my mom." Pause. "But Sam likes you."

Where does that leave me, I wondered. Still, I had to know what's so special about Sheryl. 

Julia: "She can sing."

All I have to say is: my life ain't no disco.

Princess for a Decade; Queen for Life?

Anyone who's ever spent more than nine seconds with a three-year-old girl will know that I speak the truth when I say that in her world, everything is coming up princesses. Let's use Julia as Exhibit A. She wants to grow her hair "as long as Cinderella's." She can reel off the names of all the Disney princesses with the same facility (and sometimes more accurately) than Sam can spout Bo-Sox stats. Her movie choices run the gamut from Princess Diaries I to Princess Dairies II. For Christmas, she got a Cinderella plastic paper doll set, a Playmobil Cinderella set, a rhinestone-studded princess jewelry box, a set of tiny princess story board books, a princess dress, sparkly silver princess shoes and, since everyone knows that ballerinas are princesses in training, a leotard, tights, and ballet slippers. Mainly, she plainly states that her goal is to marry a prince (by which it is assumed she means a wealthy, handsome one).

As I write this, I think, What are her parents thinking that they would allow this toddler's values to lurch so dangerously off track? Instead of the dance class that she's starting this weekend, maybe we should hustle her off to auto mechanics class.

Thus far, her sensibility has led us the other way. Because of Julia's predilection for pink (and purple, but I can't go there), I find myself gravitating toward all things rosy hued. It was a small but, to me, noticeable act when, instead of buying black (always my default color) gloves on sale at J. Crew a few weeks ago, I went for fuschia. It reminds me of a story my friend Katy once told me about an off-the-charts sparkly pair of shoes that she once bought herself and wore relentlessly simply because they delighted her small daughter so. She says she still thinks it's one of the best investments she ever made.

I understand. Perhaps I would have settled for a sensible heel yesterday when I purchased my inaugural ball shoes. Instead, I went for a pair of towering sandles that, when I brought them home, Julia could walk in far better than I. If having a son has dredged up my love of baseball and kindled a passing interest in Star Wars, it's as if having a daughter has given me permission to unleash my feminine side. It turns out it's ferocious.

I'm confident that Julia's pink period will pass just as it did for Sam (who, when we moved into our house three years ago when he was three, was disappointed that his new baby sister got the pink room and not him). But here's the but (every blog post has one, right?) After writing about Sam as a husband in training, or H.I.T., the other day, I have to set the record straight on Julia, too: I don't want to raise a princess any more than I do a prince. And I'm wondering if the ultimate expression of the sensitive man is being able to bring home the tampons for the woman in his life, what is the equivalent for raising a strong woman? Because while it's totally fun to indulge in the princess fantasy now, it would be wrong to send a daughter who still believes off to college.

Let me know what you think makes for strong, independent daughters. I'd love to hear from you.

Tuesday Night Fever

Washington, as anyone over the age of 16 minutes can sense, is suffering from a collective anxiety these days. You'd think that our nervousness might be over the deficit that's 12 zeroes long or the full-out war in the Gaza Strip, and of course good people are fretting over both. But neither the debate over the economic stimulus nor the need for a cease fire in the Middle East is the No. 1 preoccupation in town.

At the moment Washington is not about politics with a capital P but rather a form of office politics, the central question being how far away your personal planet is from the center of the solar system--a.k.a. the president. This distance determines not just your career but also your social life, where your kids go to school, and soon, I'm sure, which rescue league your dog comes from. 

All this is to say that whether you're a Bush person or an Obama person, what you're most likely thinking about right now is how best to position yourself. After all, what Republican wants to be the one to turn out the lights as the Bushes decamp for Texas? And what Democrat wants to be left behind at the non-profit that's been a holding tank for the past eight years when there's an actual country to run instead of merely to theorize about? The anxiety is so high among some of these government wannabees that they need a stunt double* to perform the extreme and, in a few cases, extremely embarrassing, maneuvers they're trying to secure a job in the new administration. There's also a secondary mania over snagging a ticket (or two, because who really wants to go alone?) to the inauguration itself. 

Our family is so outside the outer loop of the Beltway that we're just thinking about the same things we always dwell on: what garbage bag, doll's head, potpourri pouch, Star Wars Lego has Mavis chewed up and has she peed and/or pooped in Sam or Julia's room or simply thrown up?

Still, we're all excited about January 20th, when we may get to see the 44th president sworn-in on a Jumbo-tron somewhere down on the Mall--or, more likely, on a little TV in the warmth of the Five Guys Burgers and Fries at DuPont Circle if walking to the Mall turns out to be more Sissyphean than pleasurable. (The we here means my sister, Betsy, not Ralph, who's working.)

But come Inauguration Night, hey, we're (Betsy and me again) grabbing the sequined ring and going to a ball! It's being thrown by a friend of ours, and we're dressing up to go spend an evening in high heels with our closest buddies. It might not be celebrity-studded, but it will definitely be fun. 

"It's a lesser ball," I've told those who're interested. "Truthfully," I say, "it's probably your least ball." At least that's what I thought until I was set straight today by a friend, who explained that a ball is an official event, meaning that's it's being hosted by Barack Obama or Joe Biden, while a gala is an unofficial one. 

"In that case, I guess that makes my event a gala," I said. "

"Your event is nothing," she answered.

I'm not sure, but I think what she was saying was that if I were a planet, I'd be Pluto. And yes, I think she knows that Pluto has been demoted.

*My niece recently told Sam and Julia that actors use stunt doubles for kissing in movies because, you know, they might otherwise get germs--or they might already be married.

Revenge--Even Hypothetical--Is the Best Medicine

Even though the bra-burning part of the 1960s turns out to be a myth, suffice it to say that the modern women's movement happened a long time ago, long enough, it seemed to me yesterday, that I was surprised to be treated like a woman who didn't know a nut from a bolt when I dropped off my car at the VW dealership for its 30,000-mile check-up. I shouldn't have been particularly surprised because ours is still a sexist society, starting with the way journalists sometimes wrote about Hillary Clinton during her campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee. I mean would Mr. Hillary Clinton ever have been described in newspapers as "shrill"?

The car experience was still galling me today when I went to the doctor for my 30,000-mile check-up. Why I told my GP that in Ralph's absence Sam carried my purse onto the plane when we flew to Atlanta for the holidays to free up my arms for Julia and two carry-ons, I'm not sure. But he easily topped my story by revealing that he was 1 of 20 kids in his family and that his 5' 3" mother, who was just as formidable as she was short, called each of her 13 boys "HITs," or husbands in training. She insisted that each one learn to cook, iron, and sew. On top of that, his seven older sisters trained their baby bro to buy their tampons, right down to the embarrassing price check screamed from the back of the store to the front. It made me realize that I have a lot of fundamentals to teach Sam before he gets sucked into some kind of macho force field. (After all, at six, he still kisses his mama goodbye in public.) 

But more than that, my doc inadvertently gave me just the right salve for my anger. I can take the car somewhere else for repairs, of course, but it won't ever satisfy me as much as imagining my Martens' VW man standing in line at the CVS with an armload of tampons, waiting for a price check.

Ring in the Old

As usual, the start of the new year was accompanied by a look back, including an entertaining interview with the Bush twins in People, on Malia and Sasha Obama. But one wrap-up that utterly baffled me was the In/Out List published last week by the Washington Post. It's not only that I hadn't heard of most of the things on the "in" list, I was also clueless about most of the "out" list, proving that I'm not just out, I'm out in the standing room section of the upper bleachers. I mean "LOLcats"? "Competitive cup-stacking"? "Gourmet Toast"? "Emphasizing. Things. With. Periods."? Please. The bafflement goes on. And on.

Just when I thought I hadn't been invited to the party at all, along came the ultra-hip SundayStyles section of the New York Times, which made me feel at least somewhat vindicated. For while the Post had declared absinthe--that sickly green liquid that made everyone in Toulouse-Lautrec's day feel so sickly green--soooo last year, the Times had a front-page story on its current popularity:

There are a number of bars in New York City these days that make cocktails with absinthe, mixing it with rum or tequila or gin to, um, complement the taste. A significant portion of them are on the Lower East Side and are the kind of bars that don't have a sign or a listed phone number...

I am declaring a moratorium on in/out lists. It's not just because of my incredible investigative work revealing a Styles war. It's because I'm fatigued by the idea that everything is disposable. It's definitely a lesson that Ralph and I are trying to un-teach Sam and Julia, who, up to now, have had the same toys bought and re-bought for them. And I think we're not alone. Most people I know aren't just thinking three times before spending money, they're also thinking a time or two before throwing anything away that could possibly prove to be useful later on. This includes good ideas. And it extends to the loaf of bread on the top of the fridge, gourmet or not. (Check out the food Web site Loulies, which recently had a post on not wasting food.) 

Recycling extends to fashion, too. The same SundayStyles section, in fact, had a photo feature on pulling one's vintage designer wear out of mothballs. While I don't have a Balenciaga coat hanging in the back of my closet or anything else designer save Isaac Mizrahi for Target, I did rummage through to find a J.Crew cardigan I bought 10 years ago. (Okay, not everything weathers well.)

Along with in/out lists, I'm also putting new year's resolutions on ice. While I'm all for striving to be better, I've come to think that most resolutions aren't so new as they are another example of recycling from last year--or last decade. Lose weight. Check. Get more exercise. Check. Spend more time with the kids. Check. It's just a compilation of all the things that make us feel less than good about ourselves--or even downright guilty. 

Last night when I was flipping through the January issue of Real Simple, I came across a resolution that I could actually buy into. It's "controlling the controllables." And, while they didn't come out and say it, I will: Try not to worry--or feel guilty--about the rest.