Jingle Bell Schlock
When we bought a used (sorry, ‘pre-owned‘ is the word; BMWs are very sensitive little creatures) convertible this year, we inherited Sirius radio.
Now my husband and I have lots of stations to argue about.
He likes the fifties channel and I naturally like the sixties. I think he ought to like the sixties – he was still a young man back then. The Beach Boys were popular during the early sixties. That should be good enough for him.
But NOOOOO! He likes the really early rock’n’roll.
Now some of it is tolerable to me. When Sam Cooke sings “You Send Me” – it really does send me (although I am sure that most young people don’t understand the phrase ‘send me’. I’m not sure what kids say today…’sprung’ maybe? ‘Texted?’).
My husband’s taste, though, runs a little more towards “Running Bear.”
Oh, there was some terrible music in those classic years.
Every time I think I hear the worst song ever…like Pat Boone singing “Tutti Frutti” – I find out I’m wrong – because I hear something like Frankie Avalon’s “Bobby Sox to Stockings.”
Not that there wasn’t any bad sixties music – think “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro (and try not to throw up in your mouth) – the difference is that I KNOW it’s bad. My husband doesn’t seem to have a problem with “I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent.”
This has been a long introduction to my real subject: Christmas Music.
I love Christmas Music. Mostly because I love to sing in the car, and with Christmas Music I know all the lyrics. How can you not, when you have been hearing the same songs for sixty years?
Starting on Thanksgiving, one of the Connecticut stations (my beloved little convertible is hibernating for the winter, so I am reluctantly back to over-the-air), plays nothing but holiday music until Christmas.
And I listen all month. And sing.
Now this station doesn’t play any of the traditional carols until about two days before Christmas. I guess they feel that religious music would be offensive or something to non-Christians, whereas “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” is perfectly secular. But I really wish they would add some of the glorious old tunes a little earlier – “Joy To The World”, “Hark The Herald Angels Sing”, etc – if for no other reason than I’d have a bigger variety of songs I know the lyrics to. After all, it would be okay with me if I sang “Sleigh Ride” only 650 times instead of 700 times.
But no; they stick to nondenominational “Sounds of the Season”, and I don’t get any “Silent Night” until December 23.
But I sing away.
I have my favorites. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” of course, and Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song.” And melancholy Judy Garland singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (although I also love my sweetie-pie James Taylor’s version.)
But Holy Santa, are there ever some terrible Christmas songs out there.
I actually like some dumb songs that most people hate – I think Alvin and the Chipmunks’ “Christmas Don’t Be Late” is adorable. And I belt out “Jingle Bell Rock” with the best of them.
But what the heck is up with “Dominick the Donkey”? And why is it not against the law to play that song?
I guess there must be some four-year-olds who like “Susie Snowflake”, so maybe mothers are relieved when that comes on and little Emily stops whining for a minute.
But compared to the redeeming toddler-quieting qualities of “Susie Snowflake”, there is no excuse for “Wonderful Christmastime.” Paul McCartney is NOT my favorite Beatle, but he wrote some good music way back when. I rock out to “Maybe I’m Amazed” on a regular basis. But somewhere along the line, McCartney must have decided that 12 minutes is all the time he wants to spend now in writing a song. Fourteen minutes tops if he adds in the time he spends on the arrangement. It is estimated, by the way, that Sir Paul makes $400,000 every year on “Wonderful Christmastime”. Just think how much money there might have been in it had he spent a whole twenty minutes writing the song.
Yes, I was sure this was the worst Christmas song every recorded, but just like there is always a worse Pat Boone song, I was wrong.
Two days ago I heard:
Jimmy Durante’s “Frosty The Snowman.”
And then I was sure THAT was it.
But yesterday:
“The Christmas Shoes” by someone or other.
There couldn’t be anything worse than that.
Till today.
Bob Dylan: “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH1S2l4UMNY
Teachers
If you’ve read my blog even once, you probably know that I am never serious.
I excel at silly, and so I’ve stuck to it.
But I cannot – as much as I’d love to – pretend that what happened here in Connecticut last week did not happen. The whole country is heartbroken, including silly me.
I am not eloquent in the face of such serious matters.
There is nothing I can say that has not been already said. I cannot describe the loss of children I love but did not know.
I know many teachers. They are my friends and my family. Some are exceptional. Some are just doing the best they can. But every single one of them would – without hesitation – give up their lives to protect your children.
No, I am not eloquent. But I want to pay some small tribute – somehow – to teachers.
In 2006, I wrote an essay about my sixth grade teacher. My little story was published in Marlo Thomas’ book, The Right Words At The Right Time, Volume II.
I share it with you now, as the best I can do.
*********
MY PERFECT MESS
I had a rotten fifth grade. Although I made good grades, worked hard, was quiet and mostly obedient, Sister Saint Therese du Divine Coeur hated messy. And I was so messy.
Sister Saint Therese made us fasten our winter boots together with clothespins, line up our book bags neatly in a row under the windows, and cover our textbooks with brown paper. Plain, blank brown paper. Months into the school year, we still weren’t supposed to have a single doodle on any cover. I was ten. I don’t think I need to elaborate.
I also never remembered to bring a head scarf to wear on confession day. So once a month, I confessed with a Kleenex bobby-pinned to my head.
But in Sister Saint Therese’s eyes, my penmanship was her purgatory. Her handwriting was like the Declaration of Independence. Mine was the way desperate people scrawl on bathroom mirrors when they’ve been kidnapped.
At Saint Anne’s School, composition was the most important subject. That was fine with me. I was a wonderful storyteller, and I knew it. But in fifth grade, our monthly essays became ordeals. Because our stories didn’t only need to be beautifully written, they had to be beautifully written.
Each student would write a first draft on “practice paper” — cheap grayish sheets from the communal tablet. We would bring our essays one at a time to Sister. She’d look them over, correcting our spelling and grammar as she clicked her teeth. Then from her desk drawer, she would hand us our black-and-white-speckled composition book. The paper in the book was stapled to the center, so unlike spiral notebooks, if you tore out a sheet, the composition book tattled on you. Talk about leaving a paper trail.
Once we were handed our books, we were supposed to turn to the next blank page and copy our finished essay. With a fountain pen.
Giving me a fountain pen was like giving a toddler a bowl of spaghetti. No matter how careful I was — how deliberately I formed every letter — something would always go wrong. An a looked more like a d, an m always had one too many humps, the line that crossed through the t in “the” always crossed through the h, too. And don’t get me started on the ink blots and the smears. (I challenge each of you with a ten-year-old to look at your child right now and picture him with an old-fashioned fountain pen in his hand.)
So I’d turn in my story riddled with smears, blobs, shaky letters, and mistakes, all of which I had tried to fix. Sister Saint Therese would be furious.
“Mother Mary would weep!” she’d cry, holding up my open book for all the class to see. Sister Saint Therese du Divine Coeur was a serious humiliator.
That’s when I’d get a Black Ticket. These were small pieces of paper about the size of a Band-Aid, black felt on one side and white on the other. You wrote your name on the white side and deposited the ticket in the Black Box, which sat directly in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin. I think we were supposed to be offering up our sins, but for the life of me I never understood why Mary would want our sins in the first place.
At the end of every month, Sister Therese would open the box and read the names one by one. How we dreaded hearing our names come out of that box. A ten-ticket count was very bad. Once you accumulated that many tickets, you had to write your name in the Black Book. This could be considered the hotel registry for Hell. And I got booked. Repeatedly.
The school year is an eternity when you’re ten. And when most days include at least one moment of mortification, they crawl like Palm Sunday’s high mass. But the Blessed Virgin must have known that no child should be a nervous wreck forever, because when I got to sixth grade, my teacher was Sister Regina Marie.
Like all the nuns at Saint Anne’s, Sister Regina was strict. She looked to be six feet tall. Her habit stopped just short of her ankles, so you could see her thick black stockings and heavy-soled shoes. She had big hands with knuckles like my grandfather’s.
In Sister Regina’s class, we marched like West Point cadets. Slouching was lazy, and laziness was a mortal sin. She had little tolerance for fidgety boys and less for giggly girls. And she liked science way too much for my tastes. But all of this was okay with me, because with Sister Regina there were no Black Tickets, no Black Box, no Black Book — and no black-and-white-speckled composition books.
For our essays, Sister Regina had snow-white paper with the palest of blue lines. And she sold us (at cost, I hope) special ballpoint pens.
“These pens are one hundred percent guaranteed never to leak,” she said. “You will never get a glob of ink at the tip to mess up your papers.” I bought one right away, and when my grandmother gave me 50 cents for running an errand, I bought a spare. I knew a bargain when I saw one. Still, the thought of putting that glob-proof pen to that immaculate sheet of paper was too much to bear.
When Sister Regina announced our first essay assignment of the school year, I was expecting it to be “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” Not so. Instead, we were told to “describe something beautiful.”
On my walk to school each day, I passed a tree that looked like any other for most of the year — except at autumn, when it turned the most brilliant red. So I wrote about the red tree and how it always caught me by surprise. Since I liked telling stories more than describing things, the story was about a tree that decided, quite deliberately, to stay green as long as possible, letting all the other trees go first, the better to startle everyone by turning every single leaf to crimson over the course of one night.
It was a pretty good story for an eleven-year-old, once you got past the thesaurus overload. (I had a tiny green book called Little Book of Synonyms, and I applied it liberally.) My tree was fiery, ruby, crimson, scarlet, vermillion, blood-drenched like a rose, a beet, an apple, a sunset. I was in vocabulary paradise and delighted with my essay.
But I had to write the finished version on that pristine paper. With a death grip on my special pen, I was overcome with fear. The tears came, and I cried all over my white paper.
Sister Regina came over to my desk. She leaned over me from her great height.
“What in the world is the matter with you?” she asked.
I looked away. I could hardly answer. ‘Tm afraid I will make a mistake,” I whispered.
“So what?” Sister Regina said.
So what?! So what if I made a mistake? I suddenly felt like I was the star of one of those catechism filmstrips, like the one where Saint Paul gets knocked off his horse. Because at that moment, angels began singing and the clouds parted and the sun shone down on my ruby tree. A teacher had actually said “So what!”
Sister Regina leaned in closer, her veil providing a small, private space for the two of us.
“Look,” she said quietly, “we all want everything we do to be perfect, but sometimes it just doesn’t turn out that way, because we aren’t perfect. If you aren’t satisfied when you’re done, and you think you can do it better — not perfect, just better — well, then, just do it again. You can do it as many times as you like.”
I’ve had many wonderful teachers who have guided and inspired me. But Sister Regina Marie’s kind words at that moment have meant as much to me as anything I have heard before or since.
In those few words, I learned one of the most reassuring lessons of life: that you don’t have to be perfect. You only have to satisfy yourself. And there is no limit to the number of chances you get.
I’m still messy. So what?
Thank you, Sister Regina Marie (Sister Anita LeBlanc).
A Celebration of Peeve
This week was my mother’s 89th birthday.
My beautiful mother and me on my first Christmas, 1951
Buying her a present is easy. She likes everything. She likes clothes and jewelry and makeup and getting her hair done and going out to dinner. And books and magazines. And movies and television and free concerts in the park. And McDonald’s McDoubles. And a nice cup of tea. And a danish once in a while.
I bought her two of my current favorite cosmetics: Primer, which we’ve had several discussions about, since she is looking for one that really dissolves 89-year-old wrinkles. And a coral blush, which I rather hated when the saleslady foisted it on me – but it has since become my favorite blush. And to top off my presents, I bought Mom some of my beloved knock-off cologne – which I happen to think smells better than the expensive version. My mother appreciates a good deal.
And although I said that she likes everything – in truth, she does not.
Mom – a born worrier but basically an extremely happy woman (she likes to worry) – has a few pet peeves.
So in celebration of Mom’s birthday, I am celebrating her peeves.
1. Beet greens.
I’m sure you recognize how dangerous it can be to send your husband to the supermarket alone. Just this week I ended up with dried hot wasabi peas. Well, my father was known to bring home beet greens. My mother hates beet greens. I don’t think she cares very much for the taste. But what she really detests is the sand. No matter how thoroughly she rinsed the beet greens, they were still sandy. I’m with her. Eating gritty stuff is wrong.
2. Injustice.
My mother has an extraordinary sense of fair play. She cannot stand to see someone being treated unfairly. Or someone cheating. She can’t even watch a TV show where a guy gets framed. I remember a few years back, I told her that I had been blamed at work for someone else’s mistake. Holy crap. She was incensed. She was ready to go over to the office and give them a piece of her mind. It was all I could do to make her put down her pocketbook and car keys. I felt much better though, knowing Mom would still fight for her little girl.
3. and 4. Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee.
Jo Stafford was a singer in the forties and fifties. Or so I’m told. I never heard of her. But Mom hated her. I don’t think she ever said why. I knew Peggy Lee. And I knew Mom’s reason for detesting her. She was “Hard”. Every time Peggy Lee came on the Ed Sullivan show, Mom would point out how hard she was. Peggy became our standard for hardness – from baseball bats to boiled eggs. I would complain that my homework was hard, and my sisters would say “Is it as hard as Peggy Lee?”
5. Mel Torme.
The Velvet Fog. My mother hated Mel Torme even more than she hated Peggy Lee. He was our other family measurement standard. A standard of how much you couldn’t stand something. “I hate these potatoes,” my brother would say. “I hate them more than Mel Torme.” And we all knew exactly how bad those potatoes were.
6. “Sentimental Journey.”
Mom hated that song. But it was as much of a mystery as Jo Stafford. Perhaps Jo Stafford sang “Sentimental Journey” while she was framing my father for some heinous crime. But my aunt gave us a bunch of old sheet music when she moved away, and so we inherited “Sentimental Journey”. Both my sister Claudia and I like to play that song on the piano. It had a cool rhythmic arrangement for the left hand. My mother must have heard “Sentimental Journey” played both terrifically (Claudia) and terribly (me) a thousand times between 1960 and 1965. Sorry, Mom.
7. Plot Holes.
Illogical plots drive my mother crazy. (I am proud to say I have inherited this from her.) It was “Barnaby Jones” back in my mother’s day. “No way he could know that,” she’d sneer at the TV. “How convenient that the car was right there.” “Boy, his clothes dried fast.” “Wait! You didn’t pay for that dinner.” And worst of all possible plots: Amnesia.
8. Cats.
When my mother was a little girl, there was a glider-type swing in their backyard. I never understood how this could be: my mother grew up in a cold-water, toilet-down-the-hall six-family tenement. But this was her story. Her sister tried to get the neighborhood cat to sit on her lap in the glider. And the cat panicked and bit my aunt in the face. My mother was traumatized. She hated cats from that moment. But her sister – the actual bite victim – was not traumatized. She had cats all her life – I think they were all named “Mittens.” But my mother never softened in her opinion of cats. She insists they are all evil. I have four cats. I keep waiting for her to like them, or at least sit in the same room. I’ve had cats for twenty-three years, and I am still waiting.
9. Playing Dumb.
I remember sitting in the kitchen having a coke with my first real boyfriend, Kenny. My mother was in the den, watching TV. When Kenny left, my mother came into to kitchen and gave me an intense lecture. She had heard me trying to be flirty and cutesy to impress Kenny. “Don’t you EVER play dumb to attract a boy!” she said. “You are a smart girl. If he is going to be intimidated by your brains, you’ve got the WRONG BOY!” At the time, I interpreted this as her way of saying that my brains was ALL I had going for me. And I despaired of ever finding a boy who wanted someone smart and not pretty. But she was right. Smart IS pretty. And my husband likes my brains almost as much as he likes my ass.
Happy Birthday, Mom. I hate bad plot-lines, and Mel Torme, and Jo Stafford (whoever she is) and playing dumb. Sorry about the cats.
Lashing Out
So this week’s beauty obsession is EYELASHES.
About ten days ago I was watching some interview with some football player and he had EYELASHES. This ridiculously large brute had the eyelashes I have longed for all my life.
They were long, dark, thick, curly – they actually threw shadows on his cheekbones – a la Hedy Lamarr:
Hedy Lamarr, not football player
How I loved Hedy Lamarr. Back in my college days, I spent many evenings at the University’s Film Society screenings. Nothing intrigued me like Hedy’s eyelash shadows.
When I got out of college, and got a job, and finally started dating (well actually I started dating about eight years after college, but who’s counting?), I decided that I would have eyelashes like Hedy’s. I went out and bought some.
Now this was when wigs were in style too. You could get a dynel wig at Sage-Allen for $19.95. And they were cute too,sort of like a cross between Jane Fonda in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
And… well…
Phil Spector
Yessiree…. cheap wigs were adorable. (if you could stand the infernal itchiness).
But I digress.
Eyelashes.
I think I will back up even more. To high school.
I was a junior in high school when Triggy was popular. She was skinny. I was skinny. I drew me some eyelashes right away. As a matter of fact, I became the go-to girl for painted-on eyelash instructions.
Twiggy…but I swear I looked exactly like her.
So let’s fast-forward to the seventies, when I was wearing my Phil Spector/Jame Fonda wig. I had given up on the drawn-on Twiggy lower lashes. But I still wanted the Hedy long top lashes making shadows on my imaginary cheekbones.
I had a little trouble with my $2.99 lashes though.
You may have noticed that eyelids are a little curvy, because you have an eyeball under there. But 1974 drugstore eyelashes were straight,. So they only stayed stuck on for about two hours, and then became odd centipedes hanging on the middle of my eyelids, while trying to escape on the ends.
Although I wasn’t dating much yet (and God only knows WHY) – I distinctly remember one nice man sitting across from me at dinner who didn’t seem to know where to look… at my caterpillar eyes or my real hair peeking out from the corner of my wig.
I gave up on false eyelashes after about six months, when I came home from another rare date wearing only one. (I wonder if my date squealed a bit when he found the other one somewhere on his body…)
Instead I invested heavily in mascara.
Over the years, mascara has greatly improved. Why, there are so many choices you know that one of them will certainly be perfect for you.
But there’s a couple of little problems with this theory:
1. They are all mascara. Except for some very minuscule tint and consistency differences, THEY ARE ALL EXACTLY THE SAME. Drug store brand, $60.00 luxury brand – they are the SAME.
2. They coat your own lashes with quick dry-paint. So the necessary ingredient is: Your Own Lashes. You’ve got to have some.
So if they are all the same, why would I agonize?
Because I need to coat my teeny tiny sparse lashes, and I am determined to coat each and every little hair.
But Oh, this was my lucky week, because Self.com has shown me where I have been going wrong. They sent me a fabulous article explaining the mystery of mascara.
It’s not the mascara.
It’s the wand!
The right wand makes ALL the Difference.
Here are just a few of the myriad of choices:
But like choosing the right mascara, there’s a couple of problems with choosing the right wand:
1. They still require your own lashes. (see above)
2. They look different, but THEY ARE ALL THE SAME.
So this week, after forty-seven years of two coats of hundreds of different mascaras applied with hundreds of different wands –
I have returned!
FALSIES!
I went to the drugstore and bought a pair of false eyelashes! Prices have gone up since the seventies. I paid $5.95.
Then I went on youtube.com and watched a young woman apply her false eyelashes. I am not old enough to be this kid’s mother; I am old enough to be her grandmother. But she knew what she was doing and she reminded me of how I taught one of my mother’s friends how to draw on Twiggy lashes in 1968.
So all set!
False eyelashes are now curvy, so fit better. I still had a little trouble getting them on. The right one was a bit easier since my left eye wears the close-vision contact. Two attempts and I had long eyelashes on the right.
The left was tricky. My right contact lens is for far vision. And I couldn’t seem to judge where my real eyelashes really were. So my first attempt glued the lash a little high. I had a daddy-long-legs in my crease. And then when I peeled it off to try again, I twisted it and the glue stuck that way. Yes, indeed, I got my falsies in a twist. I sort of had a DNA helix.
I was able to peel it apart with tweezers. But then the new glue stuck to the old glue and I got glue on my fingertips, and the lash stuck really good on my thumb, which was like a cute little Senor Wences puppet, but I really wanted it on my eye.
I had to do some yoga breathing, and wipe my brow, so that I wasn’t sweating on my target. But I finally got it on. (my eye, not my thumb).
It didn’t quite match the right eye. The left lashes curled up, and the right lashes curled out. But it was close enough to leave the house.
Here’s the result:
Me. With #53 falsies.
Pretty nice, right?
And I got the eyelash shadows I always wanted.
They cast spidery shadows right in my line of vision.
I Love Him. I Love Him Not.
Recently on a friend’s blog, I commented about romance. To those people still hoping to find everlasting love I gave this advice:
“Don’t expect perfection. After many years of marriage, I still love my husband very much – but NOT EVERY MINUTE.”
Friday was our twenty-first wedding anniversary.
And even on that special, happy day, I don’t love him every minute.
I take the day off from work so we can spend time together. We have a leisurely breakfast (we have a leisurely breakfast every morning…we’re not exactly quick to get going).
He presents me with an anniversary card. This does not make me love him more, since I had forgotten to get him one. I’m sure you understand if I admit that I rather resent the person who makes me feel guilty. But then again the card is exceptionally pretty, and I know from many, many minutes of exasperation that he spends an inordinate amount of time picking out a card – (hint: bring a book to the drugstore) – and the verse describes how lucky he is and what a saint I am to put up with him – so okay. I get over the guilt-resentment and I love him again.
After breakfast, time to shower. And he waits for me to get completely ready – hair, makeup, the works – before he gets in the shower. Now he knows I hate to share the bathroom, so maybe this is anniversary love, and not ordinary procrastination. Sweet.
Of course, he’s not one of the guys who takes five minutes in the bathroom. So added to my forty-five minutes is HIS forty-five minutes. And then he finally comes into the den with his coat on, “Are you ready yet?” he asks – like he’s been waiting for ME. Grrr.
I’m not the only one in this house who’s lost weight this year. My husband has dropped a ton, and he really needs new clothes, so I’ve planned a trip to the LL Bean store in Danbury, so I can buy him something decent to wear. Shopping is not his favorite past-time, but he likes it a bit more now that he looks better.
But first there are errands. “Right on the way,” he says. I’ve heard that before. But I agree – unfortunately it is HIS anniversary too, and I didn’t even buy him a card.
After the second errand, we’re a little far from the direction we were heading, so I ask, “How do we get back to the highway from here?” He tells me we’ll pick up the highway by Costco. But then about a half-mile down the road, it seems like we are getting further from where I believe Costco is. “This is the way to Costco?” I ask.
And he answers “Yes, Dear” – emphasis on the ‘dear’. I can’t stand being condescended to, and I can’t stand him.
But about two blocks later, he says “Oh shit” – and he turns around.
I love being right. So I love him again- sort of.
We finally get to the Mall. The parking lot is jammed with crazy Christmas shoppers. (I was crazy myself to get married over Thanksgiving weekend, but I had to plan my wedding around the budget schedule at the office. And I was NOT going to be a forty-one-year-old bride.) If I was alone, I would park way out in the boonies, since I can’t park for shit, but seeing as he is driving, he squeezes into a very tiny space close to the door. He’s my talented hero.
And it’s already noon. He wants to eat. I look longingly at the Mall, and agree to lunch first.
At least we pick the nicest restaurant. As I comment on the menu, he comments that the battery in his hearing aid has just quit. Then the other one goes. So for the rest of the meal, we have a conversation where I say something clever and he says, “What?”
An hour later we are finally ready to shop. He hates everything. I hand him stuff to try on and he says, “Yuck.” But I coax him into the dressing room, where I linger outside the door. And linger. He’s not quick at removing his shoes in order to try on pants.
But finally he appears in a nice looking shirt and navy chinos. He looks okay. I show him another shirt, which he does not want to try on. “That plaid offends me,” he says. An offensive plaid? I should have shopped on-line. (which I plan to do for Christmas presents, but I am no longer sure what size to order, so I NEED him to try shit on.)
I find an inoffensive plaid – which looks just like the other one – but he agrees to try it.
When he finally reappears (I’m telling myself that perhaps it had a million pins) he looks pretty good. He checks out his backside in the mirror and says, “Do you think these pants are too girly in the ass?”
This is LL Bean. Not even the women’s pants are girly.
I try to get him to try on parkas. He does, reluctantly. He hates them all.
So we buy the two shirts and one pair of pants. Okay.
We leave LL Bean and he says, “Let’s go home.”
I say, as nicely as I can, “As long as we are here, let’s check out a few of the other stores.”
So we enter the Mall itself. (LL Bean is a separate building – we haven’t even gone in mall yet. It’s 2:00 PM.) We look around to get our bearings. One anchor store is Macy’s; one is Lord & Taylor; one is Sears.
“Let’s go to Sears,” he says. “I could use a torque wrench.”
So we look at torque wrenches for a while. It’s romantic. We stop and buy him some new underwear. He complains that it is too expensive. I sympathize. Heaven knows the underwear at Sears is pricey.
And he says, “Let’s go home.”
And even though I planned this as a shopping excursion for HIM, I thought that he just MIGHT want to buy me a little something too.
So as we walk back to the exit, I linger in front of a few windows. And he FINALLY says, “Do you want to shop for something too?”
We go into Lucky Jeans. He picks out a pair of black skinny jeans. YES! I find what I think might be my size (what the hell is a 30?) and I try them on. They are way too big. YES again! He goes back to the rack for me (Is that unbelievable? How sweet!), and brings me a much smaller pair.
They fit. I model them for him, and he says: “Nice. Do you think they are tight enough?” Now this isn’t my mother being sarcastic back when I was 18. This is my husband wanting me to wear ass-hugging skinny black jeans at 61.
I love him again.
Back at home, we have a couple of hours before our dinner reservation. He starts trying on his coats. He doesn’t need a parka after all. He has saved all his coats from the last twenty years, and he fits into one of the old ones.
Then he tries on his better coats. They are big and baggy now. He goes up to the attic and finds an old topcoat from years ago. Dark gray cashmere; double-breasted.
He stands before me with a big smile. “I look great in this coat.” And he does.
And he brings back a sweet memory. On our honeymoon, he bought himself a black T-shirt emblazoned with a gold Mayan calendar. I remember him putting it on back at the hotel and saying to me – in all seriousness – “I look stunning.” I love him again.
We go to our favorite fancy, elegant (ridiculously expensive) restaurant.
We order wine.
I say, “Happy Anniversary, Honey.”
He says, “What?”
**
Rapunzel – The Mature Version
It was August of 1965, and I was about to start high school.
This called for a significant style change. I was more than ready to leave behind the grammar school uniforms and pick up the makeup.
I remember sitting on a blanket at Burr Pond (a nearby park) with my Aunt Pat. Aunt Pat was quite glamorous in my eyes. She was tall. And blond. And younger than my other old aunts who seemed satisfied with pincurls and red lipstick.
I had a copy of Seventeen magazine. (I was fourteen, but planning ahead.)
This was my favorite picture in that issue:
In case you don’t recognize her, it’s Barbara Bach – who later became a Bond Girl as well as Mrs. Ringo Starr.
I showed Aunt Pat the photo, and told her, “This is how I am going to wear my hair in high school.”
At the time, I looked like this:
(If you squint, I am sure you will agree that I looked just like Barbara Bach – I just needed the hair.)
Well, Aunt Pat smiled. She said, “Nancy, I’ve known you since you were a little girl. You’re hair has always been short and your patience is even shorter. I don’t hold out much hope that you will ever have long hair.”
She was amused. Do you know how irritating it is for an adult to be AMUSED by you when you are fourteen? I was incensed.
“You just wait. I will SO have long hair.”
And NOW… look here Aunt Pat! Take that!
I finally did it. I had the patience to grow out my hair. Just goes to show you how much patience I have! (since it took forty-seven years.)
I’ve grown it out. It’s long enough to warm my neck. And I can even put it up in a very cute casual updo when I feel like it. (Since my hair is still very fine, I need lots of goop to make it stay, but they make great goop nowadays.)
This is the longest my hair has been in my whole life. I’m sixty-one and experiencing long hair for the first time in my life.
But now what happens?
Should I let it grow even longer? Should I really go for it?
When I google “Older women with long hair” I get a lot of images of Jane Seymour.
She looks great. And she was a Bond Girl too. It’s a good omen, I think, that harkens back to Barbara Bach. AND… she is exactly my age. Okay, so I am six days older, but I have taken very good care of myself.
But I see a lot of criticism too. Articles that say that long hair ages you, and makes you look haggard. And worse – that men seeing you from behind think you are hot, but then you turn around and they are grossed out. Grossed out!
And to top it off, lately all over the internet I see criticism for Hillary Clinton’s long hair. ‘She’s too old’, they say. It makes her look ‘unkempt’.
Well, I have to admit that I don’t think it’s Hillary’s best look. But I can spend umpteen hours making sure I am kempt. Whereas Hillary is a little busy right now saving the world. If she looked too kempt, folks would complain that she must have a hairdresser with her, and that she cares more about her appearance than about world peace.
Here’s my theory (and probably Hillary’s too): I have the rest of my life to look old. But I have only a few years left to look young.
I’m going for it.
Just before I turn around……
Dimples
Last night’s waitress brought back a memory from over 50 years ago.
She had a wondrous set.
Of Dimples.
I was around ten years old when it finally dawned on me that I might not actually be the most beautiful child that had ever appeared on the planet.
I had an inkling of that reality a few years before, when I was in a play at the Girls’ Club where the little girls were divided into two groups – dolls and orphans (“Orphan Envy”). And I was an orphan.
But that was only the drama teacher’s opinion. Perhaps I was just not her type.
But I thought about it a lot over the next two years. I thought especially about the little girl (I think her name was Gloria) who had played the lead doll. She looked sort of like this:
Not the actual Gloria. Just a photo I found on a grandmother’s brag blog. But exactly what I remember.
Where as you may recall, I looked like this:
Not from Grandma’s brag blog.
But the more I looked at the grown-ups around me, the less worried I became.
I knew from “Father Knows Best”, for example, that people got prettier as they got older. After all, Kathy Anderson looked like this:
No offense, Kathy, but you won’t get to play a doll at the Bristol Girl’s Club.
Whereas, her sister Betty – who shared all the same genes, and I’m sure looked just like Kathy when she was a little kid – looked like this:
Betty Anderson, my 1960 beauty icon.
And I knew from watching my mother how that happened. I knew that as soon as I was old enough, and possessed some money, I could have blond curls just like Gloria – and I had every intention of having them. And I could have well-shaped eyebrows (instead of fuzzy-wuzzy caterpillars) as soon as I could figure out the tweezers. And I was already working on that.
And I was confident that the dark long eyelashes would come from the same place that pink cheeks and red lips came from.
Makeup is God’s gift to homely girls.
With lipstick and rouge (that’s what they called blusher back then) and mascara and tweezers and hair dye and perms and hairspray being the great equalizers, I knew I was just a few years away from being just as pretty as Gloria.
So that left Gloria with only one trait that I coveted.
Dimples.
I could acquire everything that Gloria had, except dimples.
But I was determined to get me some.
So every night for four months I went to bed with my fingers in my cheeks.
And it would have worked, I’m sure, if only I could have stayed awake longer. Or learned to sleep with my fingers in place.
Now that I am older and have gotten a good look at my husbands tool box, I see that what I really needed was a good set of calipers.
Just as well, though, because I have a feeling that when you get older those dimples can get pretty droopy.
Gloria, 2012.
Too bad, Gloria, that you now look a little like a basset hound, whereas my cheeks are still nice and smooth (and round).
Omniscience Explained
This is a little essay that takes a very serious,thoughtful topic and makes it silly and trivial. Some folks think I excel at this.
I am not a very religious person, but when I was a little girl, I tried to be. I liked the idea of religion because I liked ceremonies. Sacred music and processions and candles were all right by me. Not to mention vestments. I loved the priest best in white and gold. The green poncho did not flatter him at all.
As much as I liked rituals, however, I couldn’t grasp many religious concepts.
Especially troubling to me was Omniscience.
How could God know everything going on? Could he really watch all the fish in the Pacific Ocean, and then the other guys in the Atlantic Ocean? Could he know what each little fish was doing, and all the little birds too, and the ants in South America and the elephants in Africa, and still know whether I was doing my homework or not?
The very idea of keeping track of millions of things at the same time, and paying attention to all of them was incomprehensible to me.
But I think now I understand how it could be done.
Because of the Internet.
There are millions of people out there, maybe as many as the ants in South America, and they are all clicking on different sites all at the same time. Shopping sites, news, games, blogs, recipes, jokes, sports. Videos of symphonies and of cats playing ping-pong.
And everything that everyone does is tracked. All at the same time.
And what you have done in the past leads to what you will do in the future. And the Internet becomes omniscient.
I get it!
Omniscience.
I watch videos of President Kennedy; I read reviews of Donna Karan cologne; I listen to James Taylor.
And It knows.
I get an email offering me concert tickets and Sweet Baby James CDs. On Facebook, there’s a perfume ad with ‘free’ shipping. And Amazon not only offers me books on Kennedy, It knows that I am an assassination conspiracy nut, and offers me all kinds of interesting conspiracy nut books. Did you know that there is a secret underground city beneath the Denver airport?
Which leads to another part of omniscience. It not only knows what I like, but what I might like. If I like Cashmere Mist, I might like Eau de Chloe. And I do! I do!
And It knows this for everybody. While It is offering me skinny jeans, It is simultaneously showing organically-dyed wool to my best friend, while my brother-in-law is seeing an ad for beagle treats. (Treats for beagles, that is–not treats made of beagle. Although there is certainly some dude in Indonesia being offered the other kind of beagle treats.)
Why, I am certain that if those fish in the Pacific had computers, they’d be seeing banners on the Fish page of the Huffington Post for L’Oreal Scale Conditioner. And the blue fishies are getting a special kind of blue scale conditioner while the red fishies are getting ‘Just For Redheads’.
But there is another facet of Omniscience that confounded me as a kid. If God knows everything we do, and everything we are going to do, why does God let bad things happen? If God cares about everyone, why doesn’t He fix stuff?
(Some would resent that I say He and not She… but as I have said before. I am sure that if there is a God, He is male. No female God would invent menstrual cycles. Every month for forty years? Come on.)
Anyway, How can God allow tragedy?
And – not to be blasphemous (although I guess I already have been) – the Internet has cleared this up for me too.
Free will.
The Internet may know that I always want to see James Taylor, but I passed on the concert tickets for his Italy tour. Because I don’t HAVE to take every single offer. (Although 50% off on cardigans from J.Jill is a different story.)
I have Free Will. (except for cardigans.)
Of course, God and the Internet both know the future (despite the appearance of free will). God lets me choose, even though He secretly knows what I will choose. Cardigans, in this case, and not Italy.
Knowing the future, it only goes to follow that God doesn’t always believe me. Like the promises I made while taking that geography test in fifth grade. Or that last really bumpy flight from D.C.
And I guess the Internet doesn’t always believe me either. Even though I have been bragging about my weight loss and how I am getting younger instead of older, it keeps presenting me with offers for plus-sized clothes. What does the Internet God know about my future that I do not?
And worse! Last week this ad showed up – TWICE!
Formal Invitation
This weekend my husband and I attended a dinner party.
The occasion was the 91st birthday of my husband’s Aunt Clara.
They adore each other.
It was just a family party, but it was special too.
We dressed up – in new clothes, thanks to our weight loss. (I love shopping for little clothes.)
Clara had said she didn’t want a party, protested that she didn’t even feel well, and insisted that she was just going to stay home. But her son-in-law packed her up anyway, and, since he is one fabulous hairdresser, gave her a great hairdo for the evening. She felt much better. There’s nothing that boosts your mood like good hair. That’s my motto.
Clara’s daughter prepared a fabulous meal (as always). She set the dining room table with her best china and crystal.
It was lovely.
We had good wine and a zillion delicious courses, and polite conversation.
With only a couple of days until the election, discussions have recently become a little heated, even among loving family members. I am a born-that-way liberal, and my husband was required to convert to it during the marriage ceremony. And like many converts, he has become quite fervent. So I had warned Hubby during the ride over that given the proximity to the election, he should avoid political discussion.
And he did!
I was proud of him. He was so civilized.
Clara’s grandson is a smart funny guy in his early thirties. He and my husband get along great, but don’t get a chance to see each other too often, so they caught up on the significant life events since they last saw each other – cars, roofing materials, and the all-important chain saws.
James’s girlfriend Tracy has never been to our house, and she remarked that everyone has been telling her how beautiful our home is.
And so my husband, always delighted at the prospect of showing off the spectacular home he built, and maintaining the excellent manners he had thus far exhibited, graciously said,
“We’d love to have you both come and visit. Come any time, Tracy. James — bring your gun.”
notquiteold 