Is Happiness the Same as Success or Do We Have to Choose?

I'm in the all-too-typical position of reading two books at once now (three, if count War and Peace, which is frozen on page 364 where I left off at the end of the summer). The first book is Ned Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap; the second is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. Neither is what I'd call a great read, but I'm slogging through. 

But it didn't occur to me until last night (hair slathered in Cetaphil and covered with a plastic shower cap to "suffocate" those g-d lice is how my friend Sarah put it) how much the books are in opposition to one another. Or are they? 

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell, a former Harvard psychiatrist and ADD expert who Ralph and I recently heard speak, suggests dialing life back a notch or three. In his view, being out-of-control busy has supplanted designer handbags as the new status symbol and the yearning to get organized is just as ubiquitous as the nearly universal desire to shed a few pounds. All it will take, the chronic clutterers among us believe, is the equivalent of the next new diet to clean off our desks and clear out our kids' toy boxes, and come January or June or September, by God, it's going to happen! 

Hallowell's lecture was about the childhood roots of happiness (after his book by the same name), but his theme was much the same as CrazyBusy: don't lose sight of what's important. He stressed to a state-of-the-art private school auditorium full of stressed-out parents that dragging your child from horseback riding to ballet to baseball to math tutoring is not nearly as important as allowing him to find a passion and then letting all the connections that ripple out from that passion grow. I felt calm when I left. Sam loves baseball, and, as I've blogged about before, that obsession has been his window on the world since he was 19 months old. And Julia, I was sure that night, would eventually find something besides dressing up that makes her world spin properly on its axis. 

But Gladwell upset my zen moment. While our national narrative on success is all about pluck and how sturdy one's boot straps are, Gladwell says that success is more a function of luck

--when you're born (January babies are more likely to excel at hockey) and to whom. He describes a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who found not only that parenting styles were "divided almost perfectly along class lines" but that the overachiever parent tends to produce the most successful kids: 

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

Reading that was enough to make me want to pull off my Cetaphil-laced shower cap. That's not crazybusy, I thought. That's insane. 

Lareau calls what I think of as Xtreme parenting "concerted cultivation" and believes that the ability to "customize" your environment is one of the big keys to success. 

And so I was left wondering all over again if trips for Sam to play baseball in the Virginia and Pennsylvania suburbs will one day be necessary for his success, not as a ball player necessarily, but as a person. Should he already be taking saxophone lessons? And what about karate? And am I behind by not already signing Julia up for ballet lessons, even though, at this point for her, it's all about the leotard and the pink slippers? Should we be fanning her interest in music not by playing CDs in the car but by attending music appreciation classes? Is our mellow approach stunting our children's growth before they even get started?

I personally don't know a single parent who says, "I just want my child to be successful."  Like Ralph and me, they say, "I just want to be my child to be happy." But do we really believe that our children will be happy as cashiers or waiters or construction workers? Don't we secretly have some floor that we think they should attain in order to be happy, say waiter/struggling artist? Can you be happy without also being successful? Where do those two intertwined notions of success and happiness go their separate ways? Or do they? 

I need a little wisdom here. And a cure for head lice.

Phoning Home--and Elsewhere

I've always thought the expression "phoning it in" was too glib; too coldly technological, but in the past few weeks I've come to see the advantages of telephone as proxy.

That's because I've recently had the opportunity to play the roles of mother, daughter, wife, worker bee, in-law, and aunt both in person and via cell. The morning I arrived in Atlanta a week before Thanksgiving to spend a few days with my parents without the distraction of kids and siblings, my mom had contracted a stomach flu so severe she was lying in the emergency room of the local hospital on a glucose drip. Out went our plans for ladies' lunches and holiday shopping designed to get my mom, my dad's 24/7 caregiver, out of the house. Instead, while she sipped chicken broth or slept, I took over her nursing duties (albeit far less proficiently than she handles them). My dad, who can do little for himself and requires constant care, is nonetheless the essence of courtesy and consideration. His middle-of-the-night requests for a blanket or cough syrup were invariably blanketed in apologies. And despite the circumstances, I loved spending time with him. But as I was trying to get back to sleep after one of those wee-hour wake up calls, I thought, Being a daughter is the hardest job I have right now. 

How could I think otherwise when, during my five days in Atlanta, all I heard from home were cheery phone messages in which Ralph would say, "We love you," followed by a tiny and distant-sounding echo of "We love you" and then an even tinier and more distant voice, "We love you," like so many stair steps. Separated by hundreds of miles and connected only by speaker phone, even Mavis, our not-quite-housebroken hound with a nose for a crumb, began to seem like a contender for best-behaved dog. As a friend of Ralph's and mine whose job keeps him on the road about 250 days a year, says, "The longer I'm away from home, the less my wife and I have to talk about." It's true for us, too. At least I don't recall Ralph's mentioning any suspicions about Sam and head lice over the phone.

Arriving back in Washington, it was a different story. I returned to D.C. sick with the same bug as my mom, but, as bad luck would have it, had to steer Sam into the school nurse's office for a lice check the very next morning, a trip that, as you know from my last post, resulted in a frenzy of washing--hair, clothes, and, just to be safe, Mavis. Meanwhile, the phone was ringing with grateful--and sympathetic--calls from my parents over what I'd just left behind in Atlanta and what had just greeted me here. Feverish, chilled, and wiped out from all those lice, I found myself thinking, Motherhood is the hardest job I have.

You see where I'm going with this. But it's not because I believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder. In fact I think true love is tucking your daughter into her toddler bed, stroking her soft cheek, and whispering into your sleepy girl's ear how much you love her just as she drifts off--all the while wondering if lice lurk in her halo of hair. 

No. We women with aging parents and children who are just getting started, with a job to hold down and a household to run and a husband to stay connected to can't be in two or four places at once--even though I'd like to. The phone just helps you forget momentarily that you're not.

 

The 10 Plagues - A Modern-Day Interpretation

Okay, so I haven't had frogs, rivers of blood, hail, boils, or locusts to contend with, but I'm still feeling that I've suffered my share of pestilence, disease, and plain bad Juju. There was that stomach bug that kept me out of the Thanksgiving cooking rotation, the head lice that led to 18 Mt. Everest's worth of wash in hot water (and the accompanying drying, folding, and putting away) without so much as a sherpa to help, a nasty head  cold, and scuffles with my first-born child over his cavalier attitude toward coloring. And that was just in one week.

I probably haven't said this since the period in early adulthood when I would write notations on my calendar like "Wed., 10 P.M. - Brewskies with W at The Pub! YAY!" but here goes: 

T.G.I.F.

   

Middle-Aged Mom Means Well

The friend in my life I've known the longest (since kindergarten), Cary Campbell Umhau, has a wonderful piece in today's Washington Post on being the mother of socially conscious kids. I loved it so much, I thought you should see it, too.

Here's one of my favorite parts:

"One of my children presented me with a handy Pocket Seafood Selector from Oceans Alive that would help me determine which eco-friendly fish I should buy in restaurants or at the grocery store. I truly want to buy fish that are not farmed, that are not caught by methods that kill seabirds, and that are not endangered -- all while being sure to get enough omega-3's. Yet I would need a PhD to decipher the chart on sustainability, and without my reading glasses, I can't handle the fine print." 

There are others...

Entering the New Age of Reason

It's not for nothing that Anne Enright won Britain's most prestigious literary prize last year for her novel The Gathering. Although it's about an Irish family and the reverberations in one sibling's life from the molestation, alcoholism, and, ultimately, suicide of one of her brothers, like all good books, its words extend far beyond their slim 5-inch by 9-inch frame. One line, though I can't find it now despite giving up a entire morning to do so, basically says that money doesn't change people; it just allows them to be who they really are. But I've been wondering in the midst of what is politely called our "economic downturn" if the opposite isn't true. Each time we have to make a decision on how to spend our limited resources, we are making a tiny declaration about what matters most to us. If you can afford to go skiing in Aspen one weekend and to St. Bart's the next, you never have to come down squarely in any camp.

There's one scene in particular that makes the point about the limitations of spending power. Veronica Hegarty, the protagonist, goes into a Dublin department store and realizes that because money is no object, every object holds the same value for her: 

"There is nothing here that I can not buy. I can buy bedlinen, or I can buy a bed. I can buy posh jeans for the girls or a Miu Miu jacket for myself if it doesn't look too boxy. I can buy the plastic Branbantia storage jars that I am now staring at on the third floor..."

Nothing means anything because the one thing she can't buy, of course, is her brother's return. 

I'm not talking in this post about people who have to make untenable choices between buying their blood-pressure pills, say, or buying breakfast. Nor does this observation include those who have lost their jobs or their savings, have nothing to tide them over, and no real prospects for recovery. And this is not a time to be smug, because it feels like that could happen to any of us at any time.

But for most of us, the daily calculus over how to spend our money--whether to get a babysitter for this Wednesday in order to attend a lecture or to save the babysitter up for a weekend night out for a dinner with close friends--is bracingly clarifying. For most of us, these either/or decisions aren't new; they've just come into sharper focus with the economic news of the past few months. The difference is that we no longer have to apologize for denying our kids a Wii or a Princess Barbie. We don't have to apologize for telling our friends that we can go out for a burger but not for a steak. It's as though we have suddenly entering a new Age of Reasonableness, personified by the calm demeanor of our president-elect. Suddenly, values are in vogue. 

Even the very rich who really are different from you and me are trying to act somewhat like the rest of us. A piece in yesterday's New York Times's "SundayStyles" talks about how even for people not particularly affected by the plummeting stock market and the shrinking job market, being in the market for anything conspicuous, be it watches, cars, or fancy vacations, is in bad taste these days. 

"It's now chic to cut back," [says Alexandra Lebenthal, president of a wealth management firm]. "If you ask people if they are going away for the holidays, they say, 'No, we're just spending a very quiet holiday with family'--instead of 'We're going to Anguilla for Thanksgiving.' "

The thing is, spending time with the people we love is what has mattered all along. Everything else is just a distraction.

 

HuffPost Publishes My Three-Mornings-After Election Day Post

HuffPost published my post on the similarities between a second marriage and the election of Barack Obama in his first few days as president-elect called "Obama's Election is the 'Triumph of Hope.'" Please take a look, and let me know what you think. You can comment either here or there.

Thanks so much for being a reader! And thanks to the people at Huffington Post.

The New Yorker Spotlights Friends Talking in the Night Blog

Following Obama's announcement last night that his daughters, Malia and Sasha, will get to take a puppy with them to the White House, The New Yorker quoted me today in my capacity as White House pet historian. Take a look. And if you have any thoughts about what to name the new first pup, feel free to leave a comment here.

Thank you so much, New Yorker! 

My HuffPost Election Day Post

HuffPost published my post on my bizarre immersion in all things George W. Bush just as we're about to get a new president. Please take a look. And please leave a comment either there or here.

BE SURE TO VOTE TODAY!

Thinking Inside the Bun

"The real source of all growth is human ingenuity..."

I don't usually go around quoting Forbes (nor do I usually read it). But when a recent issue was brought to my attention, I had to take note of the above quotation, because suddenly, as if this economically down time has called for people to reassess, I'm seeing/hearing the same idea everywhere about how creativity is THE ingredient that makes someone successful. It's a little different from the well-worn statement "Think Outside the Box"--or Taco Bell's twist, "Think Outside the Bun"--because it's not so much an exhortation as an explanation of what works.

All these thoughts came together on my dinner plate a few weeks ago, when Ralph took the family to Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, Va., for dinner. Just when I thought I had reached the apotheosis of hamburger-dom with the foothold gained by Five Guys in our part of the country, along came Ray (his real name is Michael Landrum), who doesn't have a line down the sidewalk outside his burger establishment at both lunch and dinner because he's thinking outside the bun, it's because he's thinking inside of it--only better. Comparing what he's done to the humble hamburger is like comparing a Bugatti to a VW Bug. They're both cars, but that's where the similarity stops. His freshly ground, hand-trimmed beef on a brioche roll topped with a choice of artisan cheeses, among other primo condiments, was a revelation to me, because I've been having the "everything under the sun has already been done" debate with Ralph for more than a decade vis a vis writing. Ralph's argument: just do it your way and people will come.

As if to prove that Hell-Burger, and therefore, Ralph's rationale, was not a fluke, along came Surfside, another new eatery, this one in Washington's Glover Park neighborhood. What the chef, David Scribner, has opened is not so much a restaurant as a commissary. You mark down your order on a sheet of paper, find your own table, and pick up your meal when the electronic gizmo they hand you lights up. But what you bite into is not cafeteria fare at all. It's fresh Tex-Mex meets Tahiti, with guacamole that arrives in huge chunks and just the right side of spicy. I didn't actually taste the seafood, but I take the Washington Post's food critic, Tom Sietsema's word that it's great. (Only Sam, who wants to start his own food blog, had a complaint, which is that the chips were too salty.) The taller among us were thrilled with the inexpensive prices, the availability of margaritas, the quality, and the fact that we were in by 5:30, out by 6:15, and on to Max's Best Ice Cream for dessert, which though it's been around for awhile, follows the same concept of doing it the same but better: you won't confuse what's in your cone with a scoop of Ede's. 

I hate it when Ralph is right! But as long as he is, I'm wondering if you've come across any examples of the same-old thing turned out-of-this-world? 

 

  

HuffPost's Halloween Treat

Thought you should know that Huffington Post picked up my Halloween post called "Halloween and Celebration Inflation" on Friday. Please take a look and leave a comment, either there--or here.

Thanks so much, HuffPost! It was better than candy (not that I stinted on that, either).

Family Bed: Taking It Too Far

Here's a update to an earlier post about what sleep--or lack thereof--is like around our house.

When Mavis jumped up on our bed and settled herself as close as she could get into the crook of Ralph's knees at 4:48 this morning I got the brilliant idea that what we need is not a king-size set up like we have, but an accordion mattress--one that expands as the need arises--much like a dining table to which you add more leaves for company. 

That's because when I went to sleep around midnight, it was just Ralph and me, taking up a concentrated amount of space in the middle of the bed--about the size of a double. When Julia joined us around 3:00 a.m., splayed out in the middle, we expanded to a queen. By the time Mavis came along, I was hanging off the edge like Cary Grant clinging precariously to some president's nose on Mt. Rushmore in the great Alfred Hitchcock movie North by Northwest. Maybe we needed a California king at that point.

Like dreams, most ideas you have in the wee hours don't really hold up when daylight comes. But I'm sticking with my accordion bed invention. Anyone up for investing?

Media: Old and New Are in It Together

I'm getting more and more used to reading if not entire newspapers online then at least a handful of key stories every day and surfing around to see what's new with Sarah Palin, so, strictly as a reader, yesterday's announcement that the Christian Science Monitor is shutting down its print publication and going online didn't particularly bother me. As a journalist, of course, it seems like a big deal, especially coupled with the news that Gannett is laying off thousands of people. But David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, explains why it was a bad day for anyone who cares about the news in a way I hadn't previously understood: 

The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for. 

More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day. A single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it.

The difference between print dollars and digital dimes -- or sometimes pennies -- is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood's nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff. And dozens of communities served by Gannett will have fewer reporters and editors overseeing the deeds and misdeeds of local government and businesses.

I'm curious to know where you get your news. And if you'd like to throw in the name of your favorite blog, I'd like to know that, too, since that seems to be the way journalism is heading.  

 

Sarah Palin and the "Post-Palate Era"

With Ralph and the kids out canvassing for Obama, this past Saturday marked the first time since Sam was born in 2002 that I was in the house, alone, without a deadline looming. And since I married a man who not only loves to cook but is also a forceful presence in the kitchen (this is my diplomatic way of saying he's a kitchen fascist), it was one of the few times since Ralph and I met that I was in charge of cooking for a dinner party. 

Is food like music, I wonder. Do we go back to the recipes we relied on when we were starting out on our own in the same way that most of us never really progress past the music we liked in high school and college? My anthem: Earth Wind and Fire's "September." My dish: Chicken Marbella. 

For anyone who doesn't know, Chicken Marbella, distinguished by the colors and flavors of prunes, green olives, and capers, comes from The Silver Palate Cookbook. One of the people who didn't know about the book was our 20-something dinner guest, who was, after all, two or three when it came out in 1982. 

But when I was in my 20s, it was THE go-to cookbook--a bridge between the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook of my mother's heyday and epicurious.com and foodchannel.com now. And for me, it was also a highly personal book, because my first apartment in New York, a furnished one-bedroom on the top floor of a five-story-walkup on West 73rd Street, was kitty-corner across Columbus Ave. from the Silver Palate, a snail's shell-size storefront that sold the same gourmet food as the cookbook set forth. Although there was nothing especially revolutionary about either the store or the book, both were emblematic of America's burgeoning food culture

--and culture, in general--in the '80s. As the authors, Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso write in the intro: 

The Silver Palate was born of two women's personal desperation. Our lives had become increasingly active and it was getting more and more difficult to juggle it all. There were school schedules, business appointments, political activities, art projects, sculpting classes, movie going, exercising, theater, chamber music concerts, tennis, squash, weekends in the country or at the beach, friends, family, fund raisers, books to read, shopping that couldn't be avoided, and, last, but not least, trying to prepare creative, well-balanced meals daily and an occasional dinner party at home. It was much too much. The wonder women we thought and were being told we were, had to acknowledge we might not be.

It certainly sounds tough! I can't imagine trying to fit squash and a sculpting class into the same day, either. Or the same month, for that matter. What does resonate is the part about being "wonder women," because I remember so well thinking then, as most of my friends did, "I'm going to have it all." I even remember writing an essay about it to get into graduate school, and whether or not it was based on the weakness of my argument, I was turned down. As time passed, but still before I had children, the phrase shifted to being, "You can't have it all at once, but you can still have it," and I thought that made a lot more sense.

But life has proved both ideals wrong for me and everyone I know--I suspect even for Sarah Palin, who has revived, and become the poster mom for, the debate. In the first case, if you have a fulfilling career, a wonderful husband, well-adjusted, well-groomed children, and Chicken Marbella on the table when you come home at night, chances are great that you are weighed down by the guilt of feeling that you're not spending enough time with your kids, who, it turns out, grow up fast and do not become well-adjusted and well-groomed on their own. In the second case, if you step out of your career or slow it down to raise your children in a more hands-on fashion, you have the nagging dread that (a) you're missing out on important work and (b) you'll never get back on track. I'm not saying anything new here, I'm just saying the dilemma has never been satisfactorily resolved.

When I told my friend Sarah (the other Sarah, that is) on Sunday that our dinner guest had never heard of The Silver Palate, she joked, "I guess it's not the post-racial era we're living in, it's the post-Palate era." 

So here's my question for the women in what I'm calling the epicurious generation--women who haven't had to make decisions yet about balancing work and family. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of The Silver Palate, but does "having it all" mean anything to you? Is there another paradigm?

Unscrambling the Eggs

I've previously confessed my downhill slide from perfectionism but this is how far toward degradation I've gone. 

Yesterday, Sam had a friend over, and once they had finished the light saber fight that's in the play date rule book for 6-to-8-year-old-boys, their rising boredom threatened to thwart the afternoon. "What if we make brownies?" I asked brightly. 

"I'd rather just skip right to eating them," Sam's friend replied. 

With that, I jumped on my laptop, googled "easy brownies," and was soon melting butter and cocoa powder in a pot on the stove. The kids took turns measuring out the sugar and vanilla and beating the eggs. We were all into it, PLUS, we were going to be rewarded for our labors--handsomely, I thought. I poured the eggs into the pot . . . and realized that I had made a mistake. A big one, unless you happen to be a fan of chocolate scrambled eggs, which I am not. 

The old me would have thrown out the curdled-looking molten chocolate and started over. But the old me did not have three young children watching expectantly. And the me standing over the stove had just used up the last grain of sugar and the only two eggs in the house.  

The new me shoved the pan away from the heat, stirred vigorously, and poured the lumpen mixture into the 9 x 9 pan. After all, Julia Child once exhorted her TV audience: "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you." Well, at least the kids were too short to see what had happened. 

Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled the not-quite-cooked brownies out of the oven, cut them while they were still hot, put them on plates, and served with a glass of milk and a smile. And you know, even I didn't really notice the eggy bits. 

But it made me wonder, not for the first time: is the key to motherhood--and life, generally--faking it? Is this what Hemingway meant by "grace under pressure?"

HuffPost Said "Yes" to My Post on Saying No

My new post "Notes From a Yes Girl" just went up on HuffPost. Please take a look and please leave a comment--I'd love to know what you think. Thanks to you--and thanks to HuffPost!

Why You Shouldn't Make a Llama Nervous

So Ralph just read my previous post on spitting. He says that ballplayers spit because they get nervous. "If you watch them," he said, "they start to pace. It's very animalistic."

"Dogs don't spit," I said, looking at Mavis.

"Yeah," he said, "but llamas do."

You May Find Portions of This Offensive

You know how when you're thinking about buying a new car and suddenly start to notice the make of every car that's parked on the street? Or how when you're hoping to get pregnant and all you see are babies everywhere? 

This is not that. 

The other night, when I stayed up late with Sam to watch one of the playoff games between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, every time the camera panned to another player or coach, he was spitting. It was like a contagion. Except it was behavior as usual. Just in case you don't get the full picture of what I'm talking about, Terry Francona, the manager of the Sox, took a sip of something from a cup--Gatorade, Sam said--and then he spit it out. 

"Why'd he do that?" I asked Sam.

Sam: "He's rinsing his mouth out."

Me (to myself): Isn't that what the bathroom sink of for?

I chew gum, drink drinks, play catch, but do I ever spit? NO! And it's not just ballplayers who do it--it's men! I can honestly say that unless a woman is trying to expel an errant insect that flew into her mouth, I have never seen the fairer sex spit. 

Maybe dads take their sons aside and tell them that spitting is a good idea, but then why does the mom message, Don't do it!, hold no sway? 

So here's my question: WHY DO MEN THINK SPITTING IS A MUST?

I'm Not Company; I Live Here

Last night, I was reading The Trumpet of the Swan (about a swan who, like another famous trumpeter, is named Louis) to Sam and Julia, and it said that with so much stuff hanging around his neck--a trumpet, a chalk board and chalk pencil, a bag for his money, and a Lifesaving medal--Louis felt like a hippie. In the same chapter, a little boy commented, "That's groovy" (all this is from memory because the book has gone off to school for the day). I thought, How do I explain "hippie" and "groovy" to a six- and three-year-old who have never heard "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In," let alone have a context for it. Fortunately, it was late, they didn't ask, and I was spared. Besides, I thought, That pile of necklaces seems more Coco Chanel than Jerry Garcia to me.

But the idea of hippies popped into my head again this morning when I read a recent post on the blog Woulda Coulda Shoulda about a visit from the grandparents: 

If you'd asked me before they got here what my favorite part of these visits is, I would've responded without hesitation that it's watching my parents interact with my kids . . . This morning, though, I realized that there's another thing I absolutely love on these trips: Having coffee and grown-up chat in the morning.

Woulda Coulda is written by a mom of two named Mir, and I believe she's right on both counts. Wearing a pink cashmere sweater from J. Crew today, I also look far more Coco than Jerry, too. But I firmly believe that apart from Haight-Ashbury and a few other pockets of hippiedom in the 1960s, communes were a brilliant idea that never got off the ground as they should have. When my sister Betsy was making a transition away from Atlanta to live in this part of the country a couple of years ago, she stayed with us for nearly two years; before that, we spent six weeks with our friends Katy and Steve while I was pregnant and our house was being sanded and painted. 

As with everything, there's a downside to communal living: you have to be highly strategic about when you walk around in your underwear or less. But overall, those experiences taught me that a woman should always have another woman in the house to take pressure off the marriage. Imagine how sparing your husband the question, "Honey, do these shoes look OK with this skirt?" would lift the relationship. (I hasten to add that having recently seen the movie The Duchess, in which Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire and ancestor to Diana, was forced to dine at the same table each day with her husband and his mistress and to hear their love-making, I'm talking here about a strictly platonic arrangement.) Betsy and I have put on our makeup side-by-side in front of a mirror since she was 17 and I was 14, she telling me I look better and vice versa. Who among us can't use that kind of boost in the morning, before the run to Starbucks?

Besides allowing for mutual admiration, the set up provides for instant community, including a wider audience for our children's moment-to-moment triumphs and tribulations. It's amazing to watch Betsy with Sam and Julia knowing that her love for them is only infinitesimally less intense than Ralph's and mine--if it's different at all. 

No matter what your age, everybody needs the kind of safety net that a long-ago acquaintance described as a "take-me-to-the-hospital-if-I'm-sick-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-feed-me-

J-ello" kind of friend. Besides the need for food, shelter, and the money to pay for both, feeling that you're not alone in this big world is perhaps our most elemental need. And perhaps that's why Sam asks every day, "Who else is coming for dinner?"

If I remember correctly, even though Louis the Swan gained fame as a trumpet player and stayed in a fancy room at the Ritz in Boston, what he craved most was to be in the company of his family and the other swans back on Upper Red Rock Lake in Montana.

There's Always This Year

There was never a Curse of the Bambino for Sam. He fell in love with baseball one hot afternoon at Camden Yard when he was 19 months old, and even though we live in Washington, Sam and the Red Sox were a natural fit. We listened to games on the radio up on Cape Cod that summer. We joked with Sox fans standing in line at Moby Dick's for lobster. Sam had long, golden-brown curls back then. Johnny Damon had long brown locks back then. (Unlike Damon, Sam did not--and promises he never will--cut his toenails on national TV.) By the time Sam had been a fan for four months, the Red Sox captured their first World Series title in 86 years.

Sam comes from baseball stock. His dad is a Yankees fan. I ardently followed the Atlanta Braves in the years when Hank Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth's home run record. But Sam came to the game on his own, and even when he was tiny, it was his portal on the world. He picked up geography by reciting the city where each team played; he learned his colors (at least red, white, and blue) based on the uniforms; he was introduced to math by the daily box scores in the newspaper. Still, for him, those gray months between November and March, when baseball is just a memory, were dreary. Shuffling and re-shuffling through stacks of baseball cards (most of which were mine from the 1970s), Sam reminded me of a gardener gazing at pictures in a seed catalog. At least when you're older, you know that spring will come again. 

Baseball, of course, did return, and with each new season, Sam drew the rest of the family in a little more. The Nationals came to D.C. and we bought tickets. We started going to the Cape a little earlier so we could take in Cape League baseball. 

This past summer, on the Cape, we went to a whole, new level. Ralph, the hardened Yankee fan, who used to go to games with his father, began to cheer on the Sox. We drove into Boston to see an As-Sox game at Fenway. We turned over a portion of each evening to the Sox on TV. Mornings brought a re-broadcast of the highlights, which, naturally, Sam watched. We played games in the yard and catch on the beach. 

One morning, not long after daybreak, when Sam and I took our puppy to the beach to play, we ran into a fellow dog owner and Red Sox fan who began quizzing Sam on the previous night's game. I stood by as they chatted about who got picked off on first (what's a pick off, I wondered) and discussed the merits of the new pitcher from Cleveland. That's when I realized that although I have 42 years on Sam, he has a deeper knowledge of baseball than I'll ever have and an ability to see the whole field at once, which I can't do. It must come from playing, watching, or dreaming about baseball all the time.

You'd think that his single-mindedness where the Red Sox are concerned would make Sam despondent over their loss last night to the Rays. But strangely he's not. Maybe as baseball is his conduit to the world the Red Sox are merely his conduit to the game. Maybe it's because we've Tivoed enough Sox games to see Sam through the winter. Or maybe it's because a good season is good enough. And in Sam's experience, there really is a future tense where the Red Sox are concerned.

 

The Stuff of Life

Please read what Washington-area food stylist and writer Lisa Cherkasky has to say about family on her excellent blog, Lunch Encounter, about sandwiches and life. Thanks for the shout out, Lisa!

My Advice for John McCain Picked Up by HuffPost

HuffPost picked up my latest submission on John McCain's condescending language. The gist is that he should avoid phrases like "I'm proud of her" when referring to Sarah Palin and to stop calling us "my friends!"

Please take a look, and please leave a comment. It will help me as I try to make a go of life as a blogger.

Thanks so much, HuffPost! 

A Change in the World as We Know It

I'm always fascinated by signs of the times, so it was with great interest that I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times reporting that a growing number of Americans are turning to the tap for their drinking water. This back-to-the-future move, a result of consumers' efforts to cut costs and become better environmental stewards, has so affected PepsiCo's profits, that the company announced thousands of lay-offs. Is this what's meant by trickle-down economics now that we live in the post bailout world? The same day the Environmental Working Group issued a report citing contaminants in 10 brands of bottled water. So much for paying for quality.

Even this morning, as Sam and I talked over what snacks to take his class when it's our turn next week, he reminded me: "No juice, Mom. We drink water from the fountain."

I'm not a huge fan of what flows out of Washington's taps--it has too much of a chlorine aftertaste for me. And at our last house, the lead level in the water was so high that it caught Sam's pediatrician's notice well before revelations surfaced about lead pipes in several of the District's neighborhoods, including ours. 

Nonetheless I can happily imagine an evening when Ralph and I go out to dinner and our waiter assumes that we'd like regular water rather than offering us a range of slickly bottled choices in reverential tones usually reserved for the most expensive wines. 

Maybe I crave this simplicity because I grew up in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola was also born. In my world, Coke was the generic term for soda just as Kleenex stands for tissue and Xerox for photocopying. The polite host would invariably offer you a "Coke" if you dropped by, by which he or she meant anything non-alcoholic to drink, including, I believe, water. You could answer something like, "That'd be great! I'd love some ginger-ale."

At the World of Coca-Cola, yet another marketing tool for the company's soft drinks, this one slightly disguised as a museum, a number of the exhibits suggest that Coke was at least partly responsible for many of the gains our society has made in the past century, including such landmarks as civil rights. At the end of your "tour," you have the opportunity to hold out a cup into which the bubbly soda sprays from a fountain. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or delighted, but I put my cynicism aside and drank the hypothetical Kool-aid.

The only other time I've seen anything like that was when Ralph and I went to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Ken., several years ago. After the horses ran and we had the requisite experience of losing at the betting window, we went to a party thrown at the home of a local whiskey scion. On the wide back lawn they had set up a white-cloth-draped table on top of which sat a sterling-silver fountain of cascading mint juleps. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet people would use fewer plastic water bottles if that's what came out of their kitchen tap.  

 

Mom Wars Need a Cease Fire

Each time I hear the morning traffic report, I thank the real-estate gods that I wound up living in the middle of Washington, D.C., and don't have to navigate what's known locally as the Mixing Bowl, one of the country's most heavily congested crossroads and a gantlet required of thousands who commute into town each day from the surrounding suburbs. What's especially baffling to me are those people who have chosen to own a mega-square-foot, high-ceilinged McMansion but then, because they're so far away from EVERYTHING, wind up living in their car. It might be a really nice, luxury SUV, but it's still a car. They eat there. They email there. They raise their kids there. And last week Sam noticed a driver shaving, a spectacle that he, at 6, pronounced "pathetic." But even living a few walkable blocks from the Metro, I could relate to this post on Burbia.com called "Mommy Wars Redux: How Simone De Beauvior Rescued Me in the Suburbs," by a friend of a friend named Delia Lloyd. 

Lloyd, who lives in London, writes that the dichotomy is not so much between women who work and those who don't but rather between those two types she dubs "Prissy mom" and "earthy-crunchy mom."

One of my favorite parts is this:

"I'm not nearly put together enough for the Women's Club set (my tennis game could easily qualify me for Special Needs). Nor do I fit in with the wholesome crowd (when asked to draw my ideal birth scene in my La Maze class, I drew an epidural)." 

She could be describing me. But actually, I see the mom kingdom (queendom?) divided slightly differently into those who pack a napkin in their child's lunch, those who forget the napkin, and those who forget everything and rely on the stuff that passes for food in the school cafeteria (i.e., hyper-organized, moderately organized, and a mess). Needless to say, I fall into the latter category, and I can add that I also forget to pay for the school lunches most of thetime.

But however you categorize us, we can be pretty nasty to each other--and equally hard on ourselves, like my friend in Atlanta who says she feels constant pressure to participate more in her kids' school activities but between three children and a sick father, she's maxed out. Last year when I was Sam's room parent, I could see the guilt and relief on the other parents' faces that someone else was making the royal icing for gingerbread houses, collecting money for teacher gifts, or arranging chaperones for a field trip. I recognized the look from how I felt the year before.

Who hasn't had an eyebrow raised about her deadbeat behavior by a fellow mom or raised her own harried brow? But I say that we should stop comparing ourselves to the overachievers; in fact, let's stop comparing ourselves altogether. "What's important,"says Lloyd, "is to engage with the world in ways that matter to you, regardless of what the others are saying or doing." Mothering, after all, is not meant to be a blood sport.  

"Taking the Long Way": Take 2

When I told my father a couple of weeks ago that I was planning to go to my 30th high school reunion, he asked me why. Always a succinct and insightful man, he had put his pinky on the right question. And though he's also kind enough to say, "That makes sense" when I answered, "I think I'll have a horrible time, but I'll regret it if I don't go," my response did not persuade even me that this was a good idea. At the least I thought an appearance, however brief, would yield rich anecdotes, much like a bad blind date--the difference being that this promised to be a bad date in a hall of mirrors.

Here's the back story: When I transferred to The Lovett School in eighth grade where many of my classmates had gone since kindergarten, I was a social misfit. My above-the-collar haircut was short enough to be regulation--for the boys. I was petrified of the opposite sex. The school I had gone to before was so poor academically that I was two years behind in almost every subject. Hell, I even said the Lord's Prayer with the wrong ending given that I had come from the Christ the King, a Catholic school where I was the only Jew, before I went Episcopalian. And while I caught up academically, that only widened the gap in my popularity. I spent Saturday nights writing English papers with my grandmother. I hoped that underneath my nerdly exterior there was a normal person, and I couldn't wait to get out of that suffocating environment to find out. The last time I was on the Lovett campus, Jimmy Carter was president and the No. 1 hit single was "Shadow Dancing" by Andy Gibb (the Bee Gees' "Night Fever" was No. 2).

To say that Lovett did not "light up my life" (that year's No. 3 hit by Debby Boone) is a tremendous understatement. When I thought about the upcoming reunion, my mind kept replaying that Dixie Chicks' song "The Long Way Around" about bucking the system while everyone else stays in the same zip code where their parents live. I haven't lived in Atlanta since I went off to college. But 30 years is a long time. So having had a conversation with myself that I would just find the people who had been my friends back in the day and not bother with the others, I went . . . and had the best time! One of my favorite conversations was with the class of '78's football star, a guy--now a man--with whom I had never before exchanged a vowel. Never mind that as one of my friends emailed me today, XX "used to have PROMINENT hair" and now he is bald. What stood out for me was his kindness. There was my friend Clare, who I also haven't seen in three decades. She was wearing the same wry expression and the same Oxford cloth shirt that I left her in. And there was the woman who said I seemed really comfortable with myself. To my surprise, there are some moments when I think she might be right.

There are a lot of downsides to aging, but, depending on where you start out, I think you either gain confidence (me) or humility (nearly everyone else in my class). Miraculously it seems that the see-saw balances. 

Just in the past couple of years I've wondered how one can arrive in middle-age and still make the same mistakes. My mistake this time was to assume the worst when, in reality, we were just a tiny band of well-wishers that gathered in a lush backyard a block from my parents' house, listened to Earth, Wind and Fire, leafed through the high-school yearbook, and went home at 11:00 p.m.

A Little Pick-Me-Up from HuffPost: Town Hall Debate

The Huffington Post picked up my second submission last week. Check it out: 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-kulman/one-man-will-win-the-pres_b_132938.html

Please tell your friends. Just don't tell my mother!

After the Greed Is Gone

My friend David R. Anderson, the rector of St. Luke's Parish in Darien, Conn., was quoted in a New York Times piece yesterday about how recent events on Wall Street are affecting "the community said to have the nation's highest percentage of residents working in financial industries." David said:

"We're all greedy. If you can acknowledge that in yourself, you can make some progress. If you want to find someone else to blame, you're probably not going to make much progress yourself."

David's eloquence aside, most of us measure progress not in how accepting we are of our sins but in terms of the money we make and how many houses, cars, private school educations, etc. we can pay for along the way. We've aimed for nobility a few times. Remember after 9/11 when we were ready to sacrifice for our country and in a move that was more Zsa Zsa Gabor than Greatest Generation, the president instead implored us to shop? 

Over the past several years it hasn't just been Congress and the White House that have encouraged us to spend. Somewhere along the way Wall Street allowed crucial social compacts to be broken and truisms like you can't get something for nothing and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is to be ignored. It used to be that if after due diligence, mortgage lenders thought a prospective borrower wasn’t up to a loan, they said no. They didn't say, We’ll look the other way while you take on more debt than you could possibly repay. Some of these borrowers should have known better. But who could blame them--us--for trying when housing seemed to be a foolproof investment, providing us with even more of those things we were hell-bent on acquiring? 

Over the past few weeks and months, we've moved from greed to something else though what, exactly, it's too soon to say. One clue is that the president went on national TV recently and instead of addressing us as consumers he spoke to us as "taxpayers," asking Americans to spare some of our "hard-earned money" for Wall Street. In my small way at home (which we bought in 2005, just before the market crested), I'm on a new kick to make do with what we have. We have too much. It was a telling moment when I threw away three contractor bags full of puzzles and games missing too many pieces to salvage and my children didn't notice that a single toy was gone. Yesterday Sam went to a fellow 6-year-old's birthday party not with the customary Star Wars Lego set but a gift certificate for a Kiva micro-loan so that a farmer in Nicaragua can buy a pig. Sam and Julia will probably have a lot to say about how weird their mom and dad are when they get a little older. And the pig farmer is just the start.

Please Stop Distracting Me, I'm Trying to Read

Back in the pre-convention calm of August, I sat on the beach on Cape Cod, my head buried not just in sand but in a suitcase-size volume* of War and Peace. Since Labor Day Tolstoy's fictional account of 19th-century Russia, though a soap opera the likes of which HBO has never approximated, has not captivated me nearly as much as the daily--and sometimes, hourly--news. Between the presidential race and what's happening on Wall Street and Capitol Hill there's no doubt that we live in an eye-popping time. And whether or not there really is an ancient Chinese proverb to that effect, it feels like we're under a curse.

So cursed, in fact, that watching the presidential debate last week--you know, the pedantic one that felt like we were back in Al Gore's graduate class, An Inconvenient Truth--I couldn't help but wonder why anyone would want to be president right now. Between the country's money troubles, the energy crisis, our involvement in two wars, and whether or not we should talk to Iran with or without preconditions--we've made a mess of things. God bless McCain and Obama--those candidates with egos the size of California and Texas put together--is all I have to say. Someone has to have K-P duty. 

In a month this race that will have lasted 658 days will be over (unless we again find ourselves wrangling over hanging chads) and perhaps the national sport of watching Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric or otherwise proving Tina Fey to be the more prepared candidate will be over (and perhaps not). I will turn away from the 2008 version of the femme fatale that has so obsessed my friends and me (one even declared herself a member of the wholly fictitious Palin Anonymous just so she could stop watching YouTube and get on with her work) and go back to reading about Tolstoy's femme fatale, Natasha Rostov. 

But I think I won't be as wholly absorbed in my novel as before. I can't recall a single president who's had a calamity-free term so maybe we'll come out of the fix we're in just fine. I can't help but believe, though, that it's going to take all of us this time. If we'd just been paying more attention when promises like "shock and awe" and "Wall Street can regulate itself" were made, we wouldn't find ourselves living in times that are quite so riveting. 

  *Additional baggage charges may apply

My Debut as a Pundit!

My Sarah Palin post was picked up by the Huffington Post on Sept. 26!!! Please check it out at: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-kulman/my-gal-pal-sarah-and-me_b_129512.html

Thanks HuffPost!

My Gal Pal Sarah and Me

You might be surprised to find out how much Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin and I have in common. 

She's in her 40s and I'm in my 40s. 

She's a hockey mom and I'm a mom who's been to a hockey game. 

Asked by ABC's Charlie Gibson whether she agrees with the Bush Doctrine, she answered without blinking, "In what respect, Charlie?" Asked by my 11th-grade American history teacher (also named Charlie) to explain the Monroe Doctrine, I wrote on my test, "Why do I need to know this? It's not like I'm trying to run for vice president or anything." 

But like Palin I held elective office. During my junior year in college I was sitting in an auditorium filled with university bigwigs and parents (including my own) not paying much attention to the induction ceremony at hand when I heard my friend Bill nominating me to be the secretary of that academic honorary society Phi Beta Kappa that's a lot older than Alaska. I then had to leave the building and sit on a car bumper in the parking lot outside with my opponent (the editor of the school paper) while the yeas and nays were counted. It was so embarrassing, but I won! Yay! And so the whole next year I got to carry out my awesome responsibility of signing my name on the certificates for new inductees on a line above the word "Secretary," and most of the time I spelled my name right but occasionally I got confused and did not.

Until recently, Palin got her hair color done at a salon in Wasilla called the Beehive. I get my hair colored, too. Only I get mine done at a Washington salon called Roche, which, if you say it with sort of a French accent, can sound almost like Roach. And for the record, I did have a bee hive outside my office recently, except that I thought it was a hornets' nest. As those stinkers were swarming around my desk (no screen on the window), I used all the artillery at my disposal and killed them with my Synonym Finder (OK, so I'm not the head of the Alaska National Guard). Only later, when my husband came home and said, "Honey, why did you kill those bees? They are our friends, not our foes," did I realize what I had done. 

Mrs. Palin can practically see Russia from her house and, in an amazing coincidence, I can practically see the Swiss Embassy from mine. 

She says things like "the economy needs fixin'," as though there were no g on the end of the word. (Maybe Palin is really short for PalinG.) I say things to my husband like, "Honey, dinner needs fixin'."

But despite these many similarities, I think that the governor and I will never be friends. That's because, as a working mom, I try to understand what she was thinking when she struck the house chef from her government payroll, but I cannot. What I want to know is, How does she get dinner on the table every night for that big family of hers after workin' all day, especially those weeks when Todd's away? Has she convinced her children, as I have, that breakfast for dinner is a huge treat? Or does she just pull a moose pot pie out of the freezer and nuke it for six minutes before serving?

Here's another thing I wonder. Does she ever worry that she's short-changin' her constituents by spendin' too much time in the kitchen preparin' dinner or that she's short-changin' her kids by spendin' too much time workin'? The reason I ask is that in my circle of friends, I don't know a single woman who does not constantly do the calculus in her head about balancing family and work. If they don't work, they feel that they're missing out. If, like me, they do, every day feels like a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul situation--Peter, in this case, is standing in for the kids. 

It goes without saying that Gov. Palin had to appointment her old school friends to help her out runnin' Alaska and that she includes Todd in so many of her meetin's. How else would she ever get to see her "guy" and gal pals?

 

Inconsistency 2.0

A few more thoughts to my last post on routine--or lack thereof.

Years ago, when I was in my formative 20s and living in New York, I was an acolyte to Anna Quindlen's column in the New York Times called "Life in the 30s." I was surprised today when I just found out that Quindlen wrote it for only two years ('86 to '88), because it had such a huge influence on me. And even though I've passed by my 30s altogether, it still does. For instance: I remember her column admitting that once when she was unable to find a pair of stockings for a luncheon, she resorted to wearing her husband's socks inside her boots. No one was the wiser, of course, and that was the point. 

But at 26 or 27, I was somewhat taken aback by Quindlen's small act of defiance. In Atlanta where I grew up--and particularly in my parents' house--propriety was one of the core values. We were drilled on how to make a bed (hospital corners and tucked in tightly enough that you could bounce a quarter off the mattress à la Air Force in which my dad was a colonel); we were schooled in setting a proper table (only put the forks on top of the napkin if you're at a picnic and the napkin would otherwise blow away); we were expected to thank-you notes in writing for birthday wishes merely delivered over the phone. 

Somehow I carried those lessons intact through my first marriage, (gasp) my divorce (the neighbors weren't happy), and on to Washington, where, as a divorceé I moved in with my boyfriend to my parents' utter horror (again, there were the neighbors to consider). That boyfriend, Ralph, is the one who really challenged these age-old notions. When I said I couldn't, wouldn't put pots on the table at a dinner party, he reminded me that the point was to gather friends around the table, not what the table looked like. And once those properly scrubbed Calphalon pans made their debut in the dining room, the rest of the edifice began to crumble, too.

Things really fell apart when we had children. Mismatched socks (not hidden by boots) are routine in our house. We're lucky if we can find matching shoes--or any shoes at all (sometimes we have to resort to mismatched flip-flops). 

All this improvisation bothers me a bit--I wonder if my children will ever know how to make a bed or if Julia will think that a flowered shirt and plaid pants actually match instead of being the only two clean pieces of clothing available. I did make Sam write thank-you notes for his presents--at least to his grandparents.

Mainly though, I've come to think the means justify the ends in this case: get out the door and get on with living. My take-away point from Quindlen two decades ago was that even the perfect life is imperfect.

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.