Anniversaries, Part 1

This post is about my wedding anniversary, which is today. My next post may be about that other anniversary that everyone is thinking about this weekend, though I'm not sure if I'm going to put that day into words.

On September 9, 2000, Jim and I were married in my sister in law Patti's pre-Revolutionary barn in Exton, Pennsylvania. Our wedding was tiny- there were 40 people there- and a decade-plus gone by means that a handful aren't living anymore. Jim's father, his Aunt Dooley and Uncle Tad, and the sister who hosted our wedding in the first place, have all passed on.

So, this Marriage Thing. I was always an independent soul, and have written a lot about growing up with a single mother, and the added responsibilities of co-raising my little brother. Our home was as love-filled as a home ever could be, it was just structured in a different way, without a marriage to watch and learn from day in and day out. However, there were marriages that I witnessed over the years which meant more to me than I realized at the time, particularly my stand-in New Mexico grandparents, Bob and Marylou Mayhew, who used to take us to their Taos cabin when we needed a getaway. When I was 12 years old, Bob taught me how to catch rainbow trout and gut them, a skill that I used to impress Jim during our first dating days. Their names ran together: "Bob and Marylou."

I've heard that marriages that do best happen when one spouse is from a broken home, and the other is from a stable one. I can see why this is the case: the stable home gives you something to model up to when times get rough, and the broken home allows you not to take your stability for granted. Now that we've been together for 15 years, 11 of them married, I have some of my own ideas about marriage that have evolved with our relationship.

The most important epiphany to me has been to understand that you can't expect your husband or wife to give you everything you need to make you happy. That's lazy, and it's not fair. When we planned our wedding, I'd read that you should pick two things that are most important to you to spend your wedding budget on. We wanted to 1) serve a beautiful meal and 2) take a memorable trip together. We did both, and we filled in the other spaces with frugal creativity and other people's unwavering generosity. The dishes we used at our wedding were our family's China sets that we dusted off and put to use; antique pink roses were bought in bulk from a flower market the day before and kept in the cool spring house next door overnight; my mother in law sewed dresses for our flower girls; and a photographer cousin's gift to us was a set of professional photographs.

Over the years, the two things we've come to prioritize, and these developed as our lives and needs changed, are freedom and travel. Our freedom comes by making daily lifestyle decisions, like driving used cars, wearing what we can afford, and living in a small space (the smallest space within both of our families, actually). Who said "More Rooms, More Problems"? I loved working full-time, but when I did I wasn't free. When CosmoGirl folded, my whole world opened up by being able to structure my time differently, and my relationship with Jim and Jamie blossomed in ways that I couldn't have predicted. As far as travel goes, our last two summers in France required frugal creativity (apartment swapping), and I love that I'm married to someone who thinks it's as important as I do to show our kid the world and see new things whenever possible.

We also know better now than we did when we married that life is fragile. Since 2000, we've seen relatives we love die of cancer, and I nearly died when I was pregnant with Jamie. When that happened, all of our little problems fell away and we had to pull together and be strong to get through it. There was some depression, and I rose up to treat it. We forgave each other for not necessarily being our best in those hard times. How could we be? Jim was there to take care of me in ways that I wouldn't have wished upon him on my dying days. That's another story I'll post some day. Those are the times that show you someone's true character, and I'd happily put myself in Jim's hands if my life depended on it, because I already have.

We've now been together long enough to have seen many marriages crumble, many of them couples who met and courted around the same time that we did. These events shake me up more than they do Jim. Jim's parents met when they were teenagers and stayed together till the day he died, but I lived through, first hand, what can happen when they crash and burn. Some were family, some were friends, and all had to go through unimaginable struggles in different ways. But in 100% of those cases, friends and family have seemed healthier and happier cutting themselves free from their chronic unhappiness. I've been surprised to learn how constant the pain had been in those marriages; you never know, after all, what goes on between two people behind closed doors. Those marriages went down in the flames of substance abuse, love affairs, lack of personal growth or room for new challenges, or bitter disagreements that became so infected the marriage had to end before healing could take place. I don't believe people should stay married if they're chronically unhappy. For those who say they "Stay for the kids," how is it good for the kids to see the two people who are raising them be miserable? I've done my best to honor those relationships that have ended by learning something from each and every one of them.

If I were writing this as a formulaic service piece, I'd end it with this "Bottom Line": Keep growing, or perish. I'll try if you try, but as Bruce Springsteen said, "If I should fall behind, will you wait for me?"

A Magic Simile

Tonight Jim and Jamie and I were sitting at Nho Trang, our favorite Vietnamese joint on Baxter Street, when a little girl and her family walked into the restaurant. Said little girl promptly approached a gumball machine at the cashier's bar and cranked the dispenser, taking the candy that it deposited into her hand over to the table where the rest of her family had been seated.

Jamie observed this injustice and stood up to do the same thing, but I stopped him and told him he had to eat his dinner first. We told him that he would probably have a chance to take a piece of candy at the end of the meal, like when he gets a lollipop at the end of a haircut. "I hate that stupid girl," he said in a stage whisper. Since I was apparently already feeling preachy, I launched into some diatribe about how Hate is such a strong word, and it's such a terrible emotion that it can make people sick after they decide to cling to those feelings, so maybe let's not toss around the word Hate about the girl who took the candy before she ate her dinner. I was on a roll. "Let's come up with ten things you could say besides Hate, like maybe she annoyed you, or it didn't seem fair, or" .... Like I said... a real diatribe. And to pile it on, something I'm quite good at, "People have the choice of whether to live out their lives as negative people or positive people" and yada yada yada; could I shut up, already?

Later, when we'd found our way back into the car, despite the three pieces of candy he'd managed to snag after his second crank of the dispenser, he began to complain once again about "the stupid" girl. I fell into my half of our bickering cycle. Then, out of his mouth came this:

"I'm not trying be filled with negativity, but it's really hard. I can't stop thinking about things sometimes. Like when I got punched in the stomach two years ago on the playground and I still think about it. It's like a magician's trick when they pull the everlasting scarf from their mouth and it never stops.... But then I tell myself to look at something else, like that beautiful stoplight, and it can go away for a second, but then it comes back."

These moments have the effect of instantaneously shifting something inside of me. Often, what shifts is simply my perspective, realizing that there's a fully formed creature in front of me with his own thoughts and ideas and opinions and we're quite separate and it's changing so quickly and I can't stop the train. Or, in this case, the thing that shifted was my understanding of the depth of his feelings, and the insight that it's important to give him space to discuss his magic scarf similes without being overbearing. Finally, the "magician's everlasting scarf" simile struck me as such an adult way to understand the process of rehashing things, but it was stated with such a child like image. I love this age of eight years old. We're perched on a ledge that drops over into God knows where, but I'm happy to straddle the Child to Tween time as long as we can. I only hope that I can shut my own mouth long enough so that I can hear the other things he's saying to me every day.

A Visit From the Goon Squad + Me + David Byrne

Have you read A Visit From the Goon Squad? I just did, in roughly three sittings, the last one soaking up the second half of the book. Jennifer Egan is new to me, despite the fact that this looks to be her fifth book. Goon Squad is the winner of untold prizes, including the Pulitzer. Having finished it twenty minutes ago, I'm still processing why I loved this book so. I hate to do that Film Treatment thing where you smash together two authors to give people an idea of what something is supposed to be like, "Poltergeist 2 is basically like Cape Fear meets The Night of the Hunter." This book could have been the baby of Mary Gaitskill and Italo Calvino. Hard to imagine, but rings true to me.

The time markers threw me off from time to time. Goon Squad winds its way back and forth through the decades, intertwining lives together, like in some warped rock and roll time machine. You meet characters, and then their children and their children's technology, and then jump back in time to regain a foothold on why it all mattered so much in the first place. Egan's language is so poetic, and each chapter stands alone as a short story. It didn't surprise me to read the acknowledgements and see that many chapters first appeared in Granta, the New Yorker, and other magazines of fictional record.

I know nothing about the music industry. My greatest claim to fame is dating a couple of guys who were in bands that would play at the QE2 bar in Albany in the early 1990s. We wore a lot of black, but I leaned more toward the vintage dress with combat boots combination; a fashion era aptly covered in Goon Squad. That said, I was relatively squeaky clean compared to Egan's characters who smoked pot and downed ecstasy pills like they were Tic-Tacs. I could drink a few watered down rum and cokes at the Palais Royale, but it was generally with my nearest and dearest restaurant pals after a long shift, with Patsy Cline crooning in the background. Not sordid, in other words.

My real musical Brush With History crashed into me one day in 1995 or so due to an acquaintance's out of town emergency. Heather, who worked at Rykodisc (or was it Rhino?), a label David Byrne was affiliated with at the time, was supposed to show up at his home in Chelsea to help him get his equipment to the Supper Club for that evenings' show. I was an Editorial Assistant at American Heritage, which was in the neighborhood at the Forbes Building on 5th Avenue and 12th Street, and since she couldn't be in town she called on me to pinch hit and act as if I was someone who worked for her label. My boss Richard Snow gave me the afternoon off so I could go and be an imposter (yet another reason he was my best boss, hands down, ever). I showed up at Byrne's doorstep on, I believe it was 21st street between 8th and 9th Avenue, rang the doorbell, and he promptly answered. I told him I was sent by Rykodisc to help him get settled at the Supper Club. He asked me to follow him downstairs to his studio, and then he picked up a guitar and played a few chords. "How does that sound to you?" he asked me. ME! I can't remember if/ how I came up with words to answer him. "It sounds great!"? "Wow!"? I'm sure I said something brilliantly articulate like that. I helped him plop some guitars in the trunk of a yellow taxi cab, but he'd inadvertently locked us out of his house before we'd packed everything he needed, and so we had to make our way to his office on 12th street so he could pick up an extra set of his house keys. The whole time we were in the cab, he would say these random things that sounded like Talking Heads lyrics: "Look at that bicycle hanging on that pole!"

Only when he began to ask me about people connected to Rykodisc did I dissolve into a puddle of transparent awkwardness. I'm a terrible liar, and I couldn't figure out how on earth to answer his question, "So, how is John doing?" What if John had been in the hospital? What if he'd moved to Africa? Who the hell was John? In that panic, I told him I had to confess something; I don't work for Rykodisc, but was actually an Editorial Assistant at American Heritage magazine and I'm helping out a friend who was in a bind.... It probably wasn't even a big deal to him. It's not like I was threatening in any way, probably wearing some heinously garish red lipstick and some prairie dress; scary in one way, but not in an I'm Going to Murder You in a Taxi Cab On the Way to the Supper Club Way. Once we got there, I helped him carry a few pieces of light equipment, and he invited me to come back later to hear his rehearsal and see the show for free.

For a few years, I'd see Byrne in small clubs when I'd go out to hear music, like at the Mercury Lounge. When I stopped going out so much I'd still see him, but he'd be riding his bicycle; still handsome, but older, with a beautiful crop of silver hair.

The other night, when we were holed up in Upstate during the hurricane, I showed "True Stories" to Jamie . It held up for me, and got most interesting for Jamie when the laziest woman in the world got to be fed by a robotic fork while she watched infomercials from bed.

This Jennifer Egan book has sent me on quite the nostalgic spin-out; I'm sure it will do the same for you. Going back to the book, I'd like to add that there is one experimental chapter involving a sister and her brother who has autism that was one of the most moving and spiritual, though sparse, pieces of writing I've come across, ever. I was thinking to myself that the Pulitzer committee must have been taken by the sheer modernity of this novel until I got to that chapter, and at that point for me brilliance settled in and didn't leave. Reading it threw me back in time to yet another place and sensation, predating my David Byrne encounter. I was in college, and I'd read something (what?), when suddenly, everything that I'd been studying came together like a thousand crystals forming into some beautiful lucid object. Everything made sense, and was exciting, and clear; the way moments leading up to poems feel.

Changing the Season Guard

Ms. Irene brought with her a hard-core cleansing of seasons. Leaves ripped off of trees, many losing their birthright foliage. Along with her other random spoils: a crushed child, and other loss of life; ripped off rooftops; countless flooded homes and crushed bridges; toppled trees, millions without power and many of them friends, humming into the void of their Facebook pages for small comfort at 5:45 a.m. while children still sleep, oblivious, their computer batteries on the wane. My family got off lucky in New York, we got off lucky in Lake Kinderhook, and we got off lucky in Philadelphia.

I woke up thinking about the season turning. It turns violently and softly. It's sudden and it seems to takes forever. If you're not watching carefully, it happens at once. The natural markers of the season changing are peeking through, so I'll try to soak up Harvest-y things like boxes of utility tomatoes to haul down to the city and pecks of new apples which have just come in. Time to process the old mealy ones, Golden Farms; your cold storage can only do so much for a year.

It's odd to spend days in grayness and then emerge into a sun spilled morning. At this moment, birds are chirping and everything seems sharper. This summer has been such a gift. I'll never forget it. Part 1, the Paris swap, and part 2, the Upstate meandering to visit friends while Jamie was parked either up at his worm and fishing farm or firmly rooted in the back seat of my car. Jim, on the other hand, came back from Paris to work, work, work. I've missed him on my Taconic travels, but I know it's also healthy to miss him.

The pressing in of Jamie's school schedule will give us some structure beginning next week, and my schedule will largely follow his. With his mainstreaming, there will be some changes from last year. For example, I used to bring him downstairs every day at 7:25 for the bus. Now, we'll hit the pavement on our scooters at 7:30 to have him to school on Bleecker Street by 7:50. While it's fun to zoom along the sidewalks with him past Washington Square Park and into the West Village, walking to school also presents a valuable time to connect. Jamie likes to talk and walk, an insight that could be valuable when he moves into his adolescence.

I'm getting ready to pack it in and hurl us back into the city. I guess one way I can cope with the end of summer is to crash into the minutia that needs tending to: syllabi updated and printed before tomorrow; pick up a new pair of uniform shoes for Jamie; write a random feature about a publisher in Milan who I know virtually nothing about yet.

A bientot, sweet Summer! Till we meet again!

Bodice Rippers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Sounds like a bad joke: What do you get when you put together the vicar, the farmer, and the other hot guy with good prospects that haven't panned out yet? I don't know the punchline, but Miss Fancy Day, the heroine of Thomas Hardy's "Under the Greenwood Tree" (mellow-compared-with-Tess-and-Saint Jude) might be able to answer that question. Whoever produced the BBC adaptation of his most subtle book needs to get slapped upside the head with a handful of, oh, a batch of dewey heather or something.

My guilty pleasure has always been a good bodice ripper, preferably based on 18th or 19th century novels. Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton. My husband, bless his soul, has put up with every predictable romance scrolling across our TV. There's usually long dresses, up-dos, a good ball scene, and cute men overly dressed in foppish peasant/farmer/aristocrat clothing which is wet from the spontaneous rain storm that always hits right before the mid-point conflict. In the happy stories, the smart heroines (Lizzy Bennett, duh) end up with their guy. In the sad ones, they of course end up destitute and without their children, or in other ways dead altogether (Tess).

There's also always one hot sister who's heartbroken, a crumbling house that can't find enough wood to fill its drafty fireplaces, a poor family down the street who makes our heroine seem nobel when she delivers them a meal, a la Jo March in Little Women, or Emma Woodhouse. In the good adaptations, the extras seem natural. In the bad ones, like "Under the Greenwood Tree", they look like they've been plucked from the local watering hole and asked to put on a hat and fake beard. Oh, and speaking of watering holes, there's always a sad drunk character who is beyond repair but for brief bouts of wisdom. And there's also a sickly person, like some sneezing Auntie (like in every Austen novel) or hypochondriac father or neighbor who gets a terrible cold that's revealed in a long letter to loved ones. Letters that were mailed from far away places, like the next county over. A scorned lover who's pathetically homely, and usually a man of humble origins who needs himself a wife, a la Mr. Collins. There's also permission given to marry, because of course woman can't make up their own minds on such matters. Oh, why? Why? Why?

Remembering R.I.F. Day

When I attended Wood Gormley Elementary School in Santa Fe in the late 1970s and early 1980s, every year (or was it bi-annually?), people who ran the R.I.F. (Reading is Fundamental) van would show up to our school library with a box of books nearly four feet wide and as tall as myself (I was the second tallest girl in the class; Martha Cooke was the first tallest). To come to school and find out it was R.I.F. Day... Wow. To reach into the box and pull out a shiny paperback was an event that would have the school yard buzzing at recess.

I grabbed for the usual 3rd and 4th grade fodder like Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary, but one day ended up with an Encyclopedia Brown book. It didn't turn out to be as prized a possession as Harriet the Spy, which I emulated with close detail, often walking around my downtown neighborhood with a little notebook and stubby pencil taking down notes "spying" on people. Oh why couldn't I be blessed with poor vision so that I could wear glasses like Harriet's (which hello, are the same that Harry Potter wears!). Encyclopedia Brown was new, though, it was mine, it was free, and I didn't have to return it.

I was curious to see if R.I.F. was still on the radar and it is, despite an ominous guillotine that looms large in the background. The statistic that pops up on their homepage says there is only 1 book for every 300 children in the United States living in poverty. When I clicked through that stat to their action page, I learned that in March, Congress cut federal funding to this program. Is it R.I.P. for R.I.F.?

Studies have come out saying that the "print environment" at home is an accurate predictor of literacy success. I can't imagine that this comes as a surprise to anyone. So to you librarians out there who fight tirelessly to keep R.I.F., the excellent First Book program, and others like it alive, I offer a belated Thank You all these years later. I know you're also fighting for, like, your jobs.

Musee de la Vie Romantique

One place I can't shake from my post-Paris brain is the "Musee de la Vie Romantique", or "The Museum of the Romantic Life", a tiny museum in an old mansion down the street from Pigalle. The museum is the converted home of the accomplished French portrait artist Ary Scheffer, who frequently played host to George Sand and her sickly boyfriend Chopin. Ergot, the heavy and seemingly unbalanced focus on the feisty Ms. George Sand herself (a brilliant watercolor landscape artist in her own right).

Walk into the front parlor and you're greeted by jewelry cases full of historic bibs and bobs. It's like shaking out your glamorous Great Grandmother's junk drawer from the end of the nineteenth century, to find costume jewelry, snippets of hair (how Gothic, no?) and old faces decaying and gazing from lockets. The fading faces always get me. There are these long-gone souls staring out at you from a tarnished locket, whose lives I'm not familiar with, but still it's as if they could leap out and ask for directions. If they were alive, I might buy them a cup of tea at the adjoining Salon de The.

On the last day of my cousin Lori's visit, we meandered down the hill from Monmartre and found our way to the museum an hour before it closed. In the garden, green iron outdoor tables are surrounded by various rose bushes, and tea is served up strong in lovely old China teapots and delicate cups and saucers. Because it's Paris it rained on and off, but overgrown trees protected our buttery crumbles and Earl Grey before the sun opened up again.

I love how the museum is barely visible from the street, and how you have to approach it by walking through a little cobblestone driveway. I also love how the permanent exhibit is free, so I felt able to go and stare at the mold made from Chopin's hand a few times over during different visits (to the left of his hand you can see a curled piece of George Sand's hair in a see-through locket). His hands were small and delicate and quite beautiful, and with his Nocturnes playing on a loop in the background, I could almost imagine holding onto it for a few minutes.

Dividing up Brain Time

A summer epiphany:

Like most other writers I know, I have to do some sort of rudimentary writing for cash. I want to work on more meaningful projects (not that making a living isn't meaningful) and so I'm going to attempt to no longer hand over clear morning energy to that sort of writing. I can save that for long stretches of afternoon lulls or burned-out nighttime hours. Morning should be for essays, my blog, a novel, a poem, and for reading and thinking. Not for describing groovy wedding favors or cool places for kids to go.

So here's a raised cup of coffee to the little ladybugs and slugs and things in Arnold Lobel's "Grasshopper on Road" who carry signs in fields that say "Morning is Tops!" I can be like Grasshopper and agree to like both morning and afternoon, but let's give Morning its due and not clutter it with the formulaic stuff.

Couch Surfing

I have this big birthday coming up next Spring, and in the happy wake of it I've been reflecting on how lucky I am to be inhabited by a free spirit. I love driving around aimlessly while blaring Pete Doherty albums.

Yesterday, I left Jamie at his Geepie and Granddad's place for his annual "camp" week where he sleeps in a tent by Lake Kinderhook, eats ice cream every day from a waffle cone, and digs up as many worms and slugs and centipedes as he can get his grubby hands on. After spending the night I left him to his bliss (which at the moment of our goodbye involved being snug inside of his new 4 person Coleman tent), and hit the road, taking this rare opportunity of unscheduled time to see friends for a few days.

I pulled off the Thruway at exit 20 headed toward Saugerties when my car suddenly smelled like a rotten egg had exploded. After conferring with the sweet Toll Booth minder, I made it to Steyer's Car Repair one mile down the road, and Mr. Steyer himself took a look and informed me I need a new alternator and battery. The alternator overheated (?) and fried my battery, so it's apparently a lucky thing I made it that extra mile.

But no worries! I'm in the land of Old Dear Friends who are each in their own way tucked away happily in the Catskills. I got a lift from a Steyer to Howard Johnson's where I sat at the old bar and had a cup of coffee, waiting for Kait to pick me up. It was so gleaming and empty and quiet, I felt like I was dropped into an old Edward Hopper painting that hadn't quite come to life yet.

Last night I crashed at Kait and Paul's beautiful homestead, which is perched right under a mountain and over a creek. I had a beautiful dinner with her and her Mr. Oh My God He's So Gorgeous 15 year old son, Jesse. Seriously? I remember holding him when he was just days old, and now he's donning cute glasses and talking about different musical genres, including his passing Jazz phase. After dinner he left us to our silliness which dragged on with way too much after dinner Bailey's, but c'est la vie. Bailey's didn't feel too great at 3 a.m., but I woke up next to a giant snoring Rottweiler named Bosco so that was... a comfort?

Car should be on the mend this morning, so more adventures to come.

Disoriented in New York

I woke up at 3 a.m., because my body thinks it's 10 a.m. When I went to the bathroom, I thought I'd flush by pressing the silver push button thing on the top of the toilette, but in my sleepy state didn't find it where I'd grown used to it. When we landed in New York last night, we'd been awake for nearly 24 hours. Jamie was a trooper like I'd never seen, until the very end when he was furious that I'd left a water bottle on the plane and there was no fountain to be found-- or kiosk to purchase a new one--anywhere within a mile of Customs at J.F.K. Where were the Evian vending machines that dotted the platforms of every Metro stop in Paris? Or the 100+ green "Wallace" fountains that rise up from the landscape of Paris parks, medial strips, and sidewalks, that were donated by the English philanthropist Richard Wallace back in 1870-something because so many Parisians were dying of nasty water-borne diseases like Cholera?

I new I'd be extremely sad to leave Paris, and I was, but there was honestly too much packing and cleaning to do to allow myself to wallow. That process wasn't exactly helped my our deciding to ditch Paris on the last two of three blue-skied days for the beach in Normandy. Leaving a foreign city after a beautiful trip used to feel final, somehow. I think my progression of not wallowing too much in the leaving part This Year is a sign of a healthy progression into Next Year thinking. I probably would have benefited from a good cry. Maybe I just haven't had it yet.*

Last year I had to come home in August, leave NYC again, and return once more, to find its edges not too abrasive. This year, my antidote to these rough edges of returning to New York may be to pick up a hearty history of the city, a la Luc Sante, to grease the wheels back home that had gotten me so fired up in Paris. I think I'll shoot my old buddy Richard Snow an email and ask him for a recommendation. For starters, I could pull down from my bookshelves "Here is New York" by E.B. White, a little treatise on my storied hometown that's always described as "elegant" or "succinct". I could also ditch my coffee maker and pick up one of those whistling stovetop espresso makers that I used every morning.

(*Postscript: Good cry nearly happens at our Key Food, where every vegetable is mysteriously wrapped individually in plastic.)

Sans TV

Take away cable, television, Netflix, and video games, and at first what I had on my hands was a cranky and complaining little beggar in withdrawal, much to my chagrin. I'd like to think I don't lean heavily on electronic conveniences to pacify my kid while I get stuff done or take a moment to myself (or an hour, or an hour and a half). Alas, not the case. This wasn't an act in parental piety, but rather the reality of what it meant to land in a Parisian's apartment filled with not much more than 20 bookshelves filled with Marx en Francais. There have been a few exceptions, for example watching soccer in Arabic on Al Jazeera and a matinee- priced 3-D showing of Pirates of the Caribbean on the "MacDoe"-filled Champs Elysees.

Here's the fast working miracle of it all, a no-brainer to you strong-willed Waldorf, Rudolph Steiner adhering parents out there. He's reading now with a fervor that I've not yet seen before. It's hard to drag him away from a book now, as hard as it was to make him turn off the computer from the Marvel superhero games he'd somehow wormed his way into like a stunning Grand Slam that took everyone by surprise. The books have elevated from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series to Roald Dahl snatched up in huge bites. "Hey, Mom, Look. Chapter 21. Goodbye, Violet!" The type size on the Dahl books is quite smaller than the script font of the Diary series, but you're still rewarded with illustrations on every page.

We have a few left to move through: James and the Giant Peach, the Bridge of Terabithia, and Charlotte's Web. At the rate of one book every few days, we might be headed toward Galignani before long.

Into the Mainstream

I'm humbled and touched by the comments my last essay on the New York Times' Motherlode blog received from last week about Jamie mainstreaming. Only one person felt that they had to teach me that I wasn't a "special needs mom" and that Jamie wasn't a "special needs child." That's all well and good, but the truth is-- or should I say, my truth is-- adapting to this label and assimilating into that culture to meet my son's needs as a first time parent many years ago was overwhelmingly an identity-changing phase in my life. I like to think that it will forever offer me a sense of understanding into the particulars of every child's challenges, whether deemed "typical" or "special."

I don't offer any particular value to any title or diagnosis that labels a child, but what I have learned is that living as an advocate for mine has been an active choice that at times has required the support of those categories in order to push forward. I feel privileged that I was led, circumstantially, into the understanding that there was another way. Jamie didn't have to be ostracized in school. He's brilliant and sensitive, and most of all, valued in a school environment that recognized and gave him what he needed.

If you haven't had a chance to read my essay, check it out here: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/into-the-main-stream/.

The Swapping Part of the House Swap

I don't care that there are near-strangers in my home for six weeks, because we're in theirs. I know what it means, because we're also rummaging through drawers looking for things, stumbling upon the surprising and sudden ant infestation in our new jar of honey, downloading a washing machine manual in English so I can figure out how to keep it from banging too loudly. Oops, there's not a stove after all.

In our New York apartment there is "a" mouse, and most certainly a few baby cucarachas. It's summer, after all. There is also a desk piled (neatly) with personal papers that I couldn't bother to put up, up and away, just like they didn't put away theirs. We swapped our good for their good. Our good is a bathtub after long days of walking around New York; their good is a kitchen window overlooking the entire city of lights, from the Eiffel Tower to the archway at Champs Elysses to the crazy and outdated colored pipes that wrap themselves so brazenly around the Pompidou. Our good is a large-for-New-York children's room complete with cozy comforter and toys; theirs is a child's bedroom complete with cozy comforter and toys. It's just that her toys speak French. "A bientot! A bientot!"

This trip we're not traveling up and down the country, which essentially doubles our length of time in Paris since last year we spent three weeks moving our way from Normandy to Marseilles to Anzio to Rome and back again. This year, we're recovering from the end of the semester (Jamie's and mine) slowly with lots of walks and cooking and climbing the stairs in Monmartre. It stays light here until 11 p.m., so the days are long. We work. Jim continues to steer jobs from far away ("you can find that color of paint at the Janovic"), and I already have a new pile of copy writing to hit. Somehow the work makes the idea of living here more real. The structure of it seems to be good for everyone, and I love the quiet mornings when I can wake up before anyone else and work for a few hours. Jamie loves visiting different playgrounds not once but twice a day, his scooter or soccer ball close at hand. We found mini frogs in a playground yesterday! Stick around somewhere long enough, and you'll spot some too.

Northern Dispensary, Founded 1827

My favorite thing about not working full-time for one person or company is that I can work where ever I want to. This means picking which cafe I want to work from in the East Village or West Village, the truth being that with a couple of rare exceptions I always head west. Coffee shops that cater to freelancers are like pop-up art exhibits: here one day, gone tomorrow. I've fallen for, and lost, a small handful of little communities who would gather to work outside of their apartments, usually because the rents are too high for these generous spirited cafe owners to support themselves from cups of coffee sold.

My latest find is a bakery called Corrado Bakery, on Stonewall Place where Christopher Street meets Waverly Place. In other words, I find myself smack in front of a giant picture window that overlooks the Northern Dispensary building, an old clinic that was founded to serve the poor in 1827, but which stands empty and neglected today, its future quite uncertain despite the sounding of drums from the Greenwich Village Historical Society. I've walked past this building for years and years, and always marvel at what a rarity it is to stumble into such a diminutive corner building, made from red brick. The streets that it finds itself woven in between create one of the more confusing parts of the Village, in large part because of this triangular plot of land which intersects three different streets into a cacophony of traffic patterns, the like of which I'm sure gave a few Urban Engineers quite a headache.

The lore of this building can't be underestimated: young doctors cut their chops by healing impoverished factory workers, most of them women who worked in the nearby factories. In fact, I just read and learned that Waverly Place used to be called Factory Street, which you can see in the old illustration above. Edgar Allen Poe was allegedly treated here while he was living on the block with his 13 year old wife. Click [here] to read more history about the building.

If I could close my eyes and go back in time, I'm sure I'd be astonished at how different the edges of the streets are now from what they were then, but also how very much the same they are with the tenement style apartment buildings surrounding the still-standing Dispensary. Most different would be the way the people look, milling about among horses and buggies and unpaved and squalid streets. It's possible that life was much simpler back then; maybe the factory workers wore optimistic expressions as they kissed their kids goodbye and left for their long shifts, leaving them to play in the streets and fend for themselves. There was certainly no PS 41 around the corner, the public school with the largest PTA coffers in the city. I think I'll come back to this window often, and hopefully not to the shock of large cranes and bulldozers, a site not uncommon under Bloomberg.

Welcome To My World

I just got out of my last therapy session until September. My therapist, who shares my name, has steered me through anxious waters for over a decade. One "theme" is that the expectations I have for myself are ridiculously high. I think most moms feel this way-- I'm trying to soften the conversational floggings I give to myself.

In getting ready for this trip to Paris, I've realized that being organized and being a perfectionist are not the same thing-- and yet being organized seems to alleviate my unrealistic perfectionist self-flogging. When I'm not organized, I feel like everything is getting away from me (which it is), and so the pressure mounts and I can't see things task for task. I bubble over into overwhelmed and unrealistic visions of what I'm capable of doing. Joan of Arc only without the helpful God voices? On the other hand, when I can plan far in advance and steadily chip away at trip planning, research and stories, not write a syllabus at the last minute but pull it out from time to time, organize a closet here and a drawer there, I'm much happier. So in the spirit of Holy BeJeezus there's just one week till we leave for six weeks, I'm going to acknowledge a few things I've taken care of far, far in advance. I still have a full week! Except for Saturday, which has sacredly been turned over to a wedding which is being held one day before we depart. Mail will be stowed at my post office for two weeks over the maximum time limit because Jimmy, the mailman, will have his palm greased when I see him next. The bank account that doesn't charge extra fees for every transaction abroad has been open since last summer. Housecleaners are coming on Thursday so I can focus on writing this feature for Parents before I go instead of... scrub the grout. Our house swapping French family is coming over tonight and we shall meet and have a glass of vin rouge (or rose? it's hot again). Did I lose twenty pounds and become fluent in French before this summer? No. Did I complete a semester of teaching three courses, publish a couple of handfuls of stories, get my orange belt in karate, work on starting a business with a colleague for the last six months (check out our beta site, a work in progress wordcitystudio.com), deal with my emotional misgivings and gently help Jamie embrace his cultural Catholicism to feel at one with his class in their year of First Communion? Yes, and I also found an Episcopalian Church with the same mass, practically verbatim, some booming Bach on their new organ, a priest named "Mother Shelley", and a diverse population who's "25% gay, at least-- we even hand out water bottles on Pride day!" (or so the coffee server Michael explained to me before I got a chance to ask). All the stodgy formal hymns from my childhood are coming back to me and Jamie can feel like he's doing his Catholic thing. A book may be born from this experience, and it's stewing. Oh, I even treated myself to my favorite cute summer dresses by finding a wholesale clearance sale at a Casino in the Poconos. I took a Casino bus from Port Authority, got $30 in gambling money, gambled away the $30, shopped, ate a crappy sandwich, and came home again. The quiet! It was lovely!

I have so much work to do, but it will get done because it always does.

On a bright note, I have an essay that's coming out in an anthology this July called Welcome to My World. It's written by moms who write. Some are working moms, some stay at home moms, some (like me) are work from home moms. Should be an interesting look at how women are finding balance (or not finding it). I can't wait to link to the book once it's out. It's an eBook; odd, since I don't have, nor do I want, a Kindle or nook. But that iPad... there's the rub...

Sleep

My sleep schedule has been severely whacked by my coffee intake.

It started with a messy apartment. I kept looking up from my computer in between copy writing bursts, thinking about the gazillion things I have to do. Piles of paperwork to file; clips to scan so I can stow my piles of magazines away; mice to escort out of my apartment; sorry geraniums to water (or do yellow leaves mean I'm watering them too much?); and piles of laundry.

So after much procrastination and frustration about not having enough hours in the day, I decided to pack it in every morning after the school bus pulls away to hit a cafe for a few hours. It helps me concentrate, and I've found several places that I seem to be welcome to hang out in for more than one cup of coffee, not to mention an endless stream of free electricity and Wi Fi, if I'm lucky.

My psychiatrist reminds me that I do better with half-caff. He's right, of course. After moving back in that direction, I found in just two days that I was able to sleep straight for 6 hours, rather than wake up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning, unable to get back to sleep for an hour or two. Just a few cups a day and it seems I wake myself up with caffeine withdrawal; most coffee drinkers underestimate the withdrawal and don't realize that it's not morning coffee that wakes you up and makes you feel better; it's the fact that you're not in withdrawal anymore. I learned that 40 mg of caffeine has the same benefit to those symptoms as 100 mg, so it's okay to cut in half. I won't feel better from drinking more caffeine; it's the same as half.

In the wee hours of the morning, I'm worried about a lot of things that add up to feel big. Packing for another summer away, going once again to a place where I don't speak the language, having a kid who's growing up so quickly, stories that needs to be written, including a huge feature that I need a solid chunk of time to devote to. Leaving my apartment in the hands of a family who I've yet to meet. In the daytime, these worries become tiny microcosms of themselves, and everything is solvable. I can chip away at work. I'm raising the white flag and getting some help around the apartment. I know Paris now so much better than I did last year, and we're going to the same neighborhood. We're choosing to keep things far more simple this time around by doing much less traveling, and far more exploring the strange-to-us urban backdrop.

I'll be blogging about our trip for several different places, wearing several different hats. My teacher hat will blog on occasion for Parsons. My creative and entrepreneur hat will blog at WordCityStudio.com, a new blog I've begun with my New School colleague Kathleen Sweeney about creativity, using New York City as a creative backdrop (and Paris, of course). I'll probably be picking up where I left off for PublishingPerspectives, and blogging about fun bookstores and book-themed ephemera. Finally, dear handful of readers, I'll be blogging here. Somewhere I'll find time to sleep, but whether I'll stick to half caff in Paris remains to be seen.

Frazier and Meacham's Conversation Spans a Century or Two

I'm playing catch-up in my life after attending the BookExpo all week. A couple of days ago, I attended the Charles Frazier interview at BEA’s Uptown Stage. He was interviewed by Jon Meacham, Executive Vice President and Executive Editor of Random House, author, TV host, and (who knew?), stand up comic. The audience was probably one third the size as it would have been were it a bit later, but as it was, the atmosphere was quite intimate and I got to sit in the second row—a good thing because Frazier brought with him a soft spoken Southern voice.

Frazier’s latest book, Nightwoods (pub date October 4, Random House) is set in the 1960s, a far cry from the 19^th century where he was parked for his two first books, Cold Mountain, and his second less hugely received novel, Thirteen Moons.

“Did you know you wanted to roar into the 20^th Century?” asked Meacham.

“I knew I wanted to get out of the 19^th century. I wanted people to drive cars, have radio and music.” The conversation turned very quickly toward the themes of his new book.

Meacham: “To what extent do you feel you have to bring things to a redemptive end?”

Frazier: “I tend to think of it more in terms of hope and despair. Cold Mountain [SPOILER ALERT] ends with the main character dead in the snow, but I wanted it to end with a sense of hope and damage….The role of hope in fiction… well, to me it seems like part of the job requirement. There needs to be some hope there … the enlargement of life needs to shine through, even if it’s a very weak glimmer.”

Meacham asks Frazier if he’s ever tackled non-fiction. “Well, I spent two years writing a book about Peru.”

Meacham: “Random House has just left to reprint the book. They’ll call it… Warm Mountain.”

The two shared more banter about how you move through writing problems in fiction that’s based in the present day as opposed to historical fiction.

Frazier: “It’s easier to go to a library for if you get stuck for a day or a week and do research and come out with new ideas than it is to sit down and make something up everyday that’s based in the present day.”

Meacham concurs: “If you want to know about February 1803, that’s where I was last night. Try not to rush the stage.”

At BEA, Book Expo of America

For about a year I've been writing features and blogging for the international publishing trade, Publishing Perspectives. So it was very exciting when my editor Edward Nawotka asked me and my Word City Studio compadre Kathleen Sweeney to cover the BEA for him. Free press passes, in exchange for a blog entry or two per day-- a bit like walking into an all you can eat buffet in Lancaster, PA, laid out by the Amish on their famous Groaning Boards, only... it's not gross like that. It's books, and actually more totebags seem to given away than books. People kept handing me totebags (and a beach ball of the Earth from the Lonely Planet crew) , but one woman stopped me and said:

"You need ChapStick." She pushed a red Chapstick tube toward me.

"I do?"

"Yes, trust me, you'll need this."

I looked at her booth's offerings, and it clicked. Ahhh, so this is how an erotic line with a focus on gay male offerings tries to get people interested in their table. Really? ChapStick? That, and candy strewn around the titles that sported illustrated '70s guys flirting on subway cars. So cute! Even cuter was the fact that there were four women snuggled into the booth, editors who were happy to let me in on a few Editing Tricks such as asking their friends and writers whether or not something was anatomically feasible. Oh my. Nice to meet you, and next!

I heard Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain) get interviewed by Jon Meacham (Random House Excecutive Editor and history geek), and the crowd was surprisingly tiny. I've blogged about that for Publishing Perspectives, and will link to it here if it goes up today.

I also attended a party for Harper Collins last night and saw my old boss Kate White, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan and author extraordinaire of the sexy girl detective Bailey Wiggins (or something like that). I got a nice "You were once my fact checker" wink from her and she went on to speak to the guy with the VIP tag, his title being COO or something. John Lithgow, who's just published a memoir, was there and is very tall! I saw him once at Carnegie Hall read Peter and the Wolf aside an orchestra, and from that angle didn't realize that he's probably 6' 7".

I also met two lovely children's authors, one, Rita Williams-Garcia, who's just won a Newbery Honor for her YA title "One Crazy Summer", and one of her student proteges, who's also going to be signing a book at BEA today.

I'm sneezing and beat, but it's been worth it. Today the fun continues with plenty of coffee and tissues, I'm sure.

Charlie, the Super Star Chelsea Girl

I call this blog New York Lost and Found because I love finding old things- stories, places, objects- especially when they're related to NYC. On Sunday, I lost my cat, Charlie, who I brought home back in February of 1994 after experiencing my first string of deaths. Don't deaths all come in a bunch? That February, mine did: my father figure of aeons had his neck broken in a car accident, my kitty Arthur Rimbaud slipped out of my fire escape window never to return, and my beloved Granddad died. His name was Chuck, but when he was little people called him Charlie. So when I went to the ASPCA and found the black domestic shorthair Siamese mix who wrapped herself around my neck when I took her out of the cage, I took her home and named her Charlie. I was 22 years old, and despite the fact that I'd been in my first job in publishing for two years, I was still an unmoored 20-something, and found life with Charlie not exactly grounding; rather, she was a great companion who greeted me after long nights out with friends, and who made me get out of bed at a decent hour. She slept by my head, and flicked my face with her tail, for years.

Writing the story of Charlie would sidetrack me into writing a memoir of being in my 20s in NYC- not a bad idea, actually, but ever since I became a mother my memory is terrible, and I'm too tired to tackle it in the right way, not the James Frey way. The one thing I'll say is that she was originally a He. When I found "him" at the ASPCA, the employee said, "Oh, he's such a Romeo." For a few years, my roommates and I took that literally, until she was back at a vet and officially became a She. I went back to look at the adoption card, and there it was: female Siamese mix. As shocking as it was- we'd always thought she was a particularly feminine Chelsea Boy- she took to her new gender with an ease that I can only wish for others going through the difficult process.

When I had Jamie in 2002, I thought I'd had a juicy sick baby who got one cold after another; turns out he was allergic to Miss Charlie. The pediatrician had assumed that he was the typical nursery school Kid Who Caught Everything petri-dish. After a tearful conversation whereby the allergist told us that we could keep her, but we'd have to give Jamie steroids twice a day indefinitely, my brother took her in and gave her a beautiful life in her last few years. You can read that full story [here], on the New York Times' Motherlode blog (Charlie was so classy she found her way into the Times). She was like a salmon swimming home; my brother lives in the old apartment that I brought her home to so many years ago, and once again she got to prance up and down the spiral staircase and sit on the bed in the sunny upstairs bedroom that had been mine (and hers) for so long.

Like me, Charlie had a long string of roommates over the years. Many loved her dearly, and the ones who I'm still in touch with have left lovely condolences on Facebook, including this one from one of her nearest and dearest, Amy Weaver, who now lives in San Francisco with her family: "I loved that cat so much for the two years I lived with you and will never forget her--the way she took a poop everytime one of us was in the bathtub, the way she'd join me downstairs for my 2nd cup of coffee (not first). I can only hope my black cat Bugsy has as long and rich of a cat life."

Finding Charlie on Sunday was very difficult. She had just died. She'd become a shell of herself, but it was still her, and it's honestly too sad for me to continue writing this part of the story. She was showing signs of late-stage kidney failure, and the plan was to have a vet make a house call at 6 p.m. to end her misery. Thankfully, that wasn't necessary, and I didn't have to go through that. I'm having her cremated and will put her under the ornamental cherry tree in my mom's backyard that overlooks Lake Kinderhook. She'll get to rest next to our other lost family members: Edna, the part Chihuahua, part Terrier Mix who I brought home in Santa Fe when I was 12 years old, running along side me as I rode my brown Huffy bicycle (and who died at 22 or something crazy like that), and Alley and Tulouse, my brother's longtime kitties. Rest in peace, sweet Charlie!

Picasso and His Guitars

I’m blogging from MOMA on a beautiful spring day. Today I played hooky with my four Parsons fashion students who bothered to show up to class. On our way from the classroom on 40th Street to 53rd Street, we found random, disconnected pieces of inspiration on the way to, and at MOMA. Our angle is always to see things through a prism of fashion, and following our jaunt around the museum we reconnected to have a discussion about form and function. We saw three people donning those odd “foot shoes” that seem to be a throwback to a time when cavemen hunted for their pray without shoes. We saw a metal hammock that looked like rope; Grace Jones videos; Starry Night; Picasso’s guitars. I was struck mostly by how simple Picasso made it all look, again. It’s 1913 and the guy’s locking himself up in Paris to make 3-D guitars out of toilet paper tubes.

Okay, maybe not toilet paper tubes, but he found himself carving out guitars from cardboard, paper, and twine. He worked out these sculptures first from sketches, then hung them on walls, invited photographer friends to come and photograph his process. Today I welcome the randomness of process, and am grateful for the creative sprawl of this city that so lends itself to spontaneity. I’m also grateful to my small handful of students who so willingly up and go on my whim.