Back to Back to Back to Back to School

Sam's school hosted its Back to School Night a few evenings ago--that annual event where your name suddenly becomes YOUR CHILD's NAME HERE's Mom and you have to squeeze into tiny chairs at really low tables while focusing on the teachers' every word. Displaying their dizzying energy, Sam's two teachers led us through the morning meeting--songs, date, weather, colors, shapes--all in Spanish, before turning to their power point presentation highlighting things like the importance of good nutrition and the perils of flip flops in school.

One of their topics was consistency, an idea that has been creeping into my consciousness lately. Routine, as you may have heard, is GOOD for children, who need the same breakfast at the same time of day, the same well lighted desk to do their homework at the same time, and the same drill that moves them from the dinner table (you guessed it--served at the same time each night) to bed. 

Our house is full of affection, encouragement--even nutritious food. But as a seat-of-the-pants operation, we're desperately low on routine of any kind. It's always been thus for me: when I worked in New York and was supposed to take the 6:06 train (or whatever) to Greenwich, Conn., each night, I failed utterly at living by a train schedule, not to mention the marriage that accompanied it. Eventually, I moved back to Manhattan--alone. Ralph, who might be roped into habitual behavior more easily than I nonetheless works odd hours--days, nights, and weekends-- the schedule of which is rarely the same twice. So it might be me pouring the Puffins or scrambling the eggs and taking the kids to school or it might not be. Ditto with pickup and dinner. And I like it that way. One of the reasons I married Ralph is that I knew he would never be home for dinner every night and that I could therefore eat Golden Grahams standing over the kitchen sink. The one routine I truly embrace!

I think it was Woody Allen who said that 90 percent of life is just showing up, as though showing up were the easy part. I am here to point out the folly of that idea. For example: getting Sam to school the first day was full of excitement; this morning (day 18), we were all a bit more disheveled and not quite as prompt. God knows what we'll be like by the time June rolls around, but if last year is any indication, it won't be pretty.

Sam, who is something of a child hypochondriac, told my friend Katy a few days ago that he had "atendonitis" in his leg. I heard it as "attend-initis." And I thought, Are you kidding? It must run in the family!

Baby, Come Back!

I share a hair colorist with Jennifer Aniston. That's right. Once a month, Michael Canale treks to D.C. from Beverly Hills with his special formulas in tow to treat the otherwise deprived women of the nation's capital, 99.99 percent of whom prefer to be blond. But far from feeling that I was pampering myself amidst all the iced skinny lattes and salon chit-chat when I was there last week, I was thinking, I can't f------ believe that I am using up 4 1/2 precious hours and not a little money to cover the gray hairs on my head, which, lately, seem as plentiful as the mosquitoes in our backyard. It's no surprise that we live in a youth culture, although you'd think that all the baby boomers might put up a fuss about having to keep up with the Joneses' grandchildren. That night, when I mentioned to my mom that I might have to rethink the whole hide-the-gray concept in order to put my time and money to better use, she, who went salt-and-pepper when she was 39 and has stayed that way since, said, "You'll change your mind."

I was thinking about all this today when I came across Clever Girl Goes Blog by a 27-year-old hairdresser named Tia, who writes that "the idea of turning twenty-seven very nearly caused me to hyperventilate on a daily basis." Clever Girl is referring to her first sighting of middle age--for her a speck on the horizon viewed from a distant, distant shore. 

But as someone who has beached her craft there, I can say that Clever Girl is onto something. Aging isn't about one big thing--it's a thousand tiny injustices like waking up to find that your eyelids have drooped or that the mild salsa at the local Mexican joint is too HOT! For Clever Girl, it's how "it's Tuesday!" is no longer enough motivation to party.

In the land I now inhabit, party is a noun, not a verb, and it's usually associated with sticky children and goody bags containing little sponges that don't open up into pirates the way they're supposed to when they're put in water. 

But Clever Girl is onto something, because just this morning I realized that the desire to be young does not just strike the nearly old. That's when Sam, who turned six last week, said he wished he could be one again and still in the first grade. If he could have articulated it, I think he was trying to say something about dialing back the clock but keeping the hard-won wisdom of his years.

Do You Know Your "Disaster Personality?"

Among the many reasons I married my husband, one of the least talked about is his uncommon ability to take the measure of a situation. Back in the late 90s, he insisted that either we jump into the escalating Washington real-estate market IMMEDIATELY!!! or we would be cast out--far out--to the suburbs. The condo he chose to avert our impending doom, though a bargain, wasn't one I wanted to live in, and I often scoffed that he treated our flimsily constructed four walls and a roof garden in a hip (read seedy) part of town as if it were the last chopper out of Saigon. But it quickly became evident that he'd been right. Within a staggeringly short time entry-level prices went from the $300s to the $800s and if you weren't already in, you were out of luck.

As a Jew--and a person who follows the rules--I long ago decided that I would have ignored the danger signs in prewar Germany that would have sent Ralph packing to safety. And on 9/11/01 I knew that I would have heeded the announcements to stay put in one of the towers where he would have headed for the stairs--and taken five coworkers with him. So I listened with interest to a rebroadcast of The Diane Rehm Show yesterday, where Time reporter Amanda Ripley discussed her book The Unthinkable, which came out this past July.

It turns out that having the confidence to handle whatever comes your way could spell the difference in your success. More than a stockpile of water and duct tape in the basement is mental preparation, i.e., do you know where the exit is on your plane? In your Cineplex 22? I'm not confident yet, but listening to Ripley, I was optimistic for the first time that I could not only "get to know" my disaster personality--how you react in freefall--but to build a better one. 

As for the real-estate market, well...if only Merrill Lynch had listened to Ralph.

Per Chance to Dream

If sleep is the new sex, then an uninterrupted night's sleep has got to be the equivalent of great sex. And in my house, at least, the former seems harder to come by than the latter. For the past three years, despite all the arguments against the family bed, we've had one--and, often, two--children sandwiched between us. Besides the problem of overcrowding, our children spin in their sleep, meaning that I'd often wake to a random foot poking me in the eye. Sometimes we'd sneak off to one of the empty beds on the unoccupied third floor. But we never went a full night without being caught AWOL. 

So when we were on vacation last month in a Cape Cod cottage the size of a fried clam platter, we sent the children packing to their own room. Never mind that we could lay in our bed and practically reach them across the hall, the separation was still a gargantuan step. After years of conditioning, I didn't sleep spread-eagle, but I did occasionally brush against my husband in the middle of the night. 

Still, weaning the kids from our bed hasn't resolved the bigger problem of sleep deprivation. I'm generally such a sound sleeper that an ice-cream truck could park on my mattress and I might not turn over. Years ago, when one of my roommates got locked out of our apartment, she tried for hours to penetrate my personal sound barrier, banging on the door and calling, and I never did wake up. So why are those same deaf ears attuned to the tiniest tot sigh? Several times a night, I respond to the siren call of a scared 37-inch-tall girl in a flowered nightgown, who appears at the top of the stairs needing to be led to bed and patted back to sleep. When I was three and similarly frightened, I would go stand over my mother, saying nothing but simply willing her to wake up--and she always did.

And my daughter's cries aren't the only noise I'm sensitive to. Since Mavis the dog came into our life six weeks ago, her whining at odd moments like 2:32 a.m. or 3:33--to pee, to play, or because she wants company--gets me up again. You see where all this is going: Mavis has ended up occupying the prime real estate abandoned by our children. I'm thinking/hoping that this nocturnal commotion can't last forever. But by the time everyone settles down, will I think of sex as the new sleep? Who knows? It's late, and I'm being summoned.

It's Not My Party

Forgive my rant, but I have to say I don't understand what motivates voters who describe themselves as independents, including some people whom I dearly love. As a journalist, I avoid campaign contributions, marches, petitions, bumper stickers, and waving (and especially wearing) the flag--anything that could compromise my ability to report a story fairly. But what of the millions of adults who say they vote for the person, not the party, as though theirs is somehow the nobler approach? When did the cult of personality get to be the moral high ground? To me, choosing a candidate based on how much you like him or her is not that different than obsessing about Brad and Angelina or Tom and Katie. We can gush over their family photos in Vanity Fair, People, and US, but what we actually know about them is only PhotoShop deep. It's the same, really, with John and Barack, Sarah and Joe. Must the fate of the country come down to a preference for Michelle's pared-down shifts over Cindy's ruffles or vice versa? 

If we focus on what the candidates do instead of just what they say, then the party they've chosen is a pretty big hint as to how they think about the future makeup of the Supreme Court or how proactive the Environmental Protection Agency should be. The lines between Republicans and Democrats, so blurred in the 1990s, have become neon bright in the past few years. And for all the talk about being a maverick or an agent of change, the presidential candidates are only going to drive so far outside their proscribed lane. This is not NASCAR people, this is politics.

Tell Me a Story

With two jobs, two kids, one marriage, and a teething puppy, life is hectic enough in our own family to have to worry about the jobs, marriage, and kids of another--particularly someone I'm unlikely ever to meet. But like many people I know, I've become obsessed with all things Sarah Palin. Partly, my impulse is the same that Southern writer Walker Percy described when he said we watch airplanes land just in case they crash. So I'm attuned to YouTube, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. etc. to learn the latest on Bristol's pregnancy, Sarah's rumored extramarital affair with Todd's ex-business partner, Troopergate--even Levi's makeover from grunge hockey player to Greenwich prepster--in case any of these makes Palin crash and burn, whisking her off the national stage that she was so recently air-dropped onto.

Deliciously scandalous possibilities aside,  we're still susceptible to people's stories, real or not. It's how we categorize people and file them away; it becomes shorthand for how we think. So Palin is reduced to the hockey mom who married her high-school "guy;" McCain, the ex-POW who spent five years in a box; Obama, the candidate raised by a single mom striving to give her son the tools to get ahead in life; and Biden, just a regular Joe. 

The stories that captivate aren't all political, of course. Consider my previously mentioned puppy. During the weeks this summer that I spent searching petfinder.com and other sites online for a pup, the only thing worse for me than a dog with a stupid name like Chewey and a boring story was a dog with no name and no story at all. Our pet's tale involves a dramatic West Virginia rescue, a doting mom, a dead-beat dad, hearty mixed-breed stock, and a litter of dumpling-like, playful, curious, innocents "who know only good in the world." 

Once we got her home, we changed her name from Biscuit to Mavis to reflect her country-girl roots. It turns out, though, that while Mavis is extremely sweet, she's probably not too different from the dozens of other puppies I bypassed. I'll bet they like to contemplate a butterfly just as Mavis was billed to do. 

Let Mavis's story be a cautionary one. In politics, as with house pets, the winning candidate should not be the one whose story tugs at the heartstrings. It should be based on the issues. Which presidential candidate do you think would learn to be house-trained first?      

 

This One's for You

I owe a lot to my late friend Philip Hamburger, who encouraged me to become a journalist and who inspired this blog, which comes directly from the title of his 1998 book of essays by the same name. It's ironic, because had blogging been more prevalent before Phil died in 2004, he might have been the anti-blogger. A New Yorker writer for sixty-five years, he was 89 before he toyed with getting a computer and, in the end, he stuck with his typewriter. Like his contemporary Joseph Mitchell (Up in the Old Hotel), Phil used simple language that belied the depth and nuance of his words. And no matter what the subject, the subtext was his great belief in humanity. I hope for some shred of the same. 

His mode of writing aside, Phil was determinedly current. One did not show up to the dining table--whether at the cozy Upper East Side apartment that he shared with his wife, Anna, or their gnome of a house in Wellfleet, Mass.--without having read the New York Times from back to front. An evening at the Hamburgers' began around the TV for the 6:30 news (they preferred CBS) before dinner, where the conversation moved fast and always far outlasted dessert. 

It was at their table on Cape Cod that Phil gave me a valued piece of advice. "I'd be happy to have lunch with you some time and talk about writing," Phil said, "but I can tell you everything I know right now: ass on chair." It was his version of Nike's "Just do it."

Phil and Anna always stood in the doorway under a cheery yellow lamp, which had the effect, even as they waved good-bye, of beckoning guests to return. I hope my blog captures something of the same currency and warmth that those dinners did. And Phil, I'm taking your advice--with love.