Proust Lives

While being unemployed, I continue to bake, perhaps in the hopes that some magical world will come along wherein I can just bake and still manage to live . . . And very very slowly,  I'm going through old crap that got moved with me without my purging (please make your own sound effect here of a barfing sound, thank you) any garbage.  Garbage, is of course, in the eye of the beholder.  Although some things would take a really odd eye (and I don't mean here anything derogatory about my friends with one brown eye and one blue eye, be they people or Australian Blue Shepherds, or Australian actual sheepherders with one brown eye and one blue eye) to see anything but garbage.

On the other hand, I did do service as an undergraduate to a professor who would ask me to sweep the lab and then would go through the dustpan picking out paper clips and tiny screws.  And he was a brilliant man.  Taught me very many things.  Gave me my first HP programmable calculator.  Those were the days.  Check this out!

God, do I love Google Images or what?

Anyhow, I hastily return to the topic at hand, which actually I haven't revealed to you yet.  But here it goes.  Among the stuff I did find before leaving Beautiful Downtown Weehawken, was a bunch of my Mom's old recipes.  I shoved them into my three ring binder recipe collection that was started by Sandman's sister some years ago.  This past two weeks, I've made an extra sour sourdough recipe, an ordinary sourdough recipe, a challah recipe, and several pie and pie variations.  Plus lots of dinners.  Looking through my three ring binder recipe collection, I spotted one of Mom's classics--oatmeal bread.

I remembered immediately the taste of the slightly sweet and sticky bread.  I remembered it toasted, made into grilled cheese sandwiches served with Campbell's Tomato Soup, tuna melts, and especially as eggs in nests.  If you've never had an egg in a nest, you have to try this next time you've time on your hands for breakfast.  You need a good hearty bread--oatmeal, or challah, or sweet wheat, or rye.  Slice it a little on the thick side if you have a choice.  Cut out a square about two inches on each side.  Butter each side and the square.  Set the bread and the square in a non-stick pan and turn up to medium-high heat.  When the butter starts to sizzle, drop an egg in the middle.  When the egg is nearly cooked to your liking, Turn it over and let the other side brown a little.  If you like your eggs cooked through, turn the heat to low and leave it for a few minutes.  Otherwise, flip it out onto your plate and enjoy.

The memories it brought back for me . . .

Pool

It's been a long time since I shot some pool.  When I was a teen, it was a regular activity of mine, along with playing pinball.  I had a terrific advantage as a player: almost everyone I knew who shot pool and played pinball was a boy besides me.  So there was a certain distracting novelty in my presence, yes, and I certainly enjoyed that as an advantage.  And there was an assumption of innocence, naivete, and incompetence that these boys maintained with the girl.  So I could usually manage a small hustle.  Not much, mind you.  I wasn't amazing at either of those activities, but comparable to the average small-minded pre-feminist era boy, I was competitive.

I played through my teen years into college and a little during grad school.  The last time I played, I remember clearly because it was the occasion of a personal epiphany.

I was part of the engineering team at Bloomberg News.  Most of the work the group did was being on round-the-clock duty for the broadcast side of the company--radio locally and television internationally.   We were also responsible for making new studios work, also internationally, and a few other interesting tasks.  My job was mostly administrative--herding the kittens.  I'm not an engineer and never have been one, but I do speak their language, for the most part, and act as translator when the need arises, which, with engineers, is frequently.

The fun of working at Bloomberg News back in the day when Mike was still in charge was that Mike gave free reign to a lot of folks.  Our guys were often stranded in the building taking care of things so we could order food.  My boss could return from a convention with a list of cool new gadgets to play with and Mike thought that was worthwhile.  And it was customary to have a department celebratory activity now and then for morale-building.  I organized one such event at a local pool hall.

We drank, we ate, we laughed, we de-compressed, we played pool.  Although I was well out of practice, I did manage a few beautiful shots now and then and demonstrated that there were skills, if rusty, to the delight of my nearly entirely male team (post-feminist now, you know).

Between showing off, however, I hit a really amazing shot that I still remember as if it were yesterday, which it certainly isn't.  More like 15 years past, if I remember right.  The table was fairly full--it was early in the game.  I hit the cue ball very hard, trying for a tight corner shot at the opposite end of the table which I should totally have made, at least in my more practiced days.

The cue ball missed the target corner ball and with the huge force of energy, ran all over the table for a good five or six seconds before it wound to a stop.  But somehow it didn't hit anything.  It didn't sink itself, it didn't sink another ball, it didn't even tap a single ball.  It just bounced fiercely all over the table and then stopped.

The boys who were around the table howled with laughter at my incompetent shot.  And then I said something like, "Hey, it's just like working at Bloomberg!  A lot of energy and no results!"  And we all laughed some more.  It was, for me, the first times I saw a metaphor in my life--not studied one, but it saw it in front of me.  It was an epiphany.

So last night around 1 am, Peter Parker shuffled into my room with The Little Tramp and handed him to me.  He was running in circles in her room.  The room has no rug on the floor as we removed it after he made a huge mess shortly after his return from the hospital (see previous posts).  So his little paws were clicking on the hardwood floor as he ran in circles and it was keeping her awake.  I took him, pushed sleepy Peter back to bed, and closed my door.

For two hours, he ran in circles in my room.  But I have a rug.  And I was reading, not sleeping, or attempting sleep.  He went from running in a very tight circle by the door--about three feet in diameter to a larger circle around the rug--about six feet in diameter--and back again.  And then finally he settled down to sleep and after half an hour or so, I returned him to Peter Parker's room, where I knew he would be happier.  I listened for a few minutes at her door to be sure he wasn't running and clicking and then went to bed myself.

I'm seeing so much of life as a metaphor these days: hitting a pool ball super hard without any results; running in circles for hours at a time; checking the web for jobs; applying; doing it again.  Lots of energy but no success.

Billionaires I Once Knew

I'm put in mind lately of a certain NYC mayor for whom I used to work.  Perhaps you'd like to know why.  So read on . . .

Peter Parker, as you may or may not know, has a great love of a little sad puppy mill rescue stud we've had in the family for three years now.  She named him after her idol, a certain Little Tramp from the silent film era.  If you're not familiar with the whole puppy mill situation, do look up some news items and what the ASPCA is trying to do in that area.  Suffice to say, our little guy spent his first five or six years of life in an open cage without normal socialization, love, hygiene, grooming, or any appropriate treatment.  When the farmer was done with his services, he was to be shot and left for trash, but was rescued by an intrepid volunteer.  A few months later, he was family.  We love him in spite of his quirks, including his inability to fully grasp house-breaking rules.  We especially adore his 100% attachment to Peter Parker.  Whither she goes, so goes The Little Tramp.

Soon after we moved down here to the family farm, the pup was in a little accident wherein he tried very hard to head-butt the tire of a moving car.  His twelve pounds didn't fare well against the car's 4000.  After a harrowing 30 hours in the doggie emergency room, it was determined that he would not die of a brain bleed, that no bones were broken, and that waiting to see what would happen next was the proper course of action so we took him home.  He's taking a few medications that make him a little sleepy--anti-nausea medication, a pain killer, and also a steroid to help his appetite and healing.  I can't tell you how amusing it is to think of our little poof-y Schipperke former stud on steroids, but there you go.  Look out A-Rod.

But I digress (anyone keeping a count on how often I say and/or do that in my blog?).  The main issues for our little guy ten days after the contest with the auto are that his he has no eardrum in one ear so his hearing is off and he has some form of vertigo.  To compensate he has his head tilted at a ninety degree angle almost all of the time, and especially if he's walking anywhere.  Even so, he's still a bit wobbly and sometimes flops over altogether.  As a result of his head tilt, he seems to have a perpetual attitude of intense curiosity combined with a few too many cocktails.

So what does all this have to do with the soon-to-be-former Mayor?  Back in the day, I worked at a desk relatively near his on the broadcast floor of his old offices on Park Avenue.  There were two cubicles separating us one from the other and our paths often crossed in front of one of the famed fish tanks--the one nearest his desk, by the open kitchen.  He would make small talk with me, especially whenever the tanks changed from one collection to another . . . he explained that the violence in the shark tank proved unsuitable for tender hearts, as much as he liked the carnage for inspiring his market guys; he confessed that the seahorses had to go when he felt he was personally decimating their fragile population by the demands of the one tank; and he schooled me about the little crab in the tank who was known as a "decorator crab" because his camouflage technique was to have a sticky shell that would attract tiny stones and shells to hide him from predators.  I thought the decorator crab looked like something you might find in a cheesy tourist shop in Florida, but I started to watch the guy.  One day I told Hizzoner that I had begun to watch the crab each time I arrived for work for what kind of day I would have.  If the crab was under a big rock, I would have some overwhelming task to manage; if he was frolicking around, it would be a good day.  The boss was highly amused.

One morning I got to the tank first thing in the day and I couldn't find him.  Oh god, I thought, he's dead and the fish guru has taken him away like so many seahorses.  I stood, dumbstruck, in front of the tank for a long time, searching for him.  And then I marched slowly to my desk and sat down, unable to work.  

About five minutes later I hear the big guy (who is actually a little guy) shouting across the broadcast floor, "He's okay! He's in the corner! Don't worry!" In four years working there, I only heard him shout like that when the Dow crossed 11,000 for the first time.

So back to the little dog.  As I watch him cope with all this, I feel his journey to be a metaphor for my recent life.  I feel as if, in some way, I've thrown my head against a moving vehicle 333 times my weight and lost.  Now I have to hold myself in an awkward position all day long to avoid the room spinning, and still I can't seem to keep myself from occasionally doing a 360 degree twist in a completely hopeless attempt to regain my sense of balance.  Get it?

Oh the liberal media

As some of you know, I've recently located myself, Peter Parker (the youngest), and our various animals to my in-laws' place in Middleburg, Virginia.  Sandman will follow when our house sells.  I've already made the local paper and I'm feeling pretty darned smug about it too.  After all, Weehawken New Jersey's local paper wrote several articles about me in my twenty years living there, but to think that in no time at all, I would be recognized here is quite impressive, no?  I haven't gotten a new drivers' license, registered to vote, or changed my address for most of my mail, but already my activities are being followed.  And without the Twitter presence of, say, the aptly named Anthony Weiner.  Who knew how famous I was?

I know you all want to know what was said about me, so I'm going to tell you.  "A cow was reported [by me] causing a traffic hazard on Sam Fred [yes, that's really the name] Road.  Animal control was sent to look into the matter but did not find the cow."

And let me tell you how I found myself on Sam Fred Road with a cow.  Here's the hair-raising tale: I dropped Peter Parker off at school and thought I would take the "back way" to our dirt road, otherwise known as Route 629, which I have to say is a bit of an over-statement in any world in which I've lived in the past.  It's just an unpaved road, barely wide enough for some of the pick-up trucks and school buses that navigate its gravel/dirt/washboard texture.  So I thought to go the back way in order to retrieve the paper and the mail, which arrive inexplicably in two mailboxes, spaced liberally apart by about a third of a mile.  They are on the driver's side only when approached from the "back end" of the road so if I want to retrieve the contents and I'm alone, that's the way to go.

But on this gorgeous morning in paradise, a road crew was blocking off one lane of the "Turnpike" that approaches the back end of the road (again, something of an over-statement).  Now, one lane is more than half the road.  Although it is paved, it doesn't have a line down the middle as that would force both directions to the very perimeters of the paving.  On the other hand, most drivers seem blissfully unaware of the limitations they face and drive at a breakneck speed, unapproachable in other dangerous driving locales like, say, Manhattan, where it's hard to make it past 20 mph without hitting a light or a taxicab.  So I was pushed to my highest country levels of anxiety when the one lane was blocked off altogether by some tree-trimmers.  I stopped well ahead of the flag man.  I waved gratefully at all elements of the road crew as I inched past them, and completely missed the turn into the back end of "Route" 629.

I kept going on the "Turnpike."  For about ten minutes.  And then it occurred to me that there was no way that I was going to find my way home heading in that direction without circumnavigating the globe in a west-bound direction.  On the other hand, I was too embarrassed to admit my mistake to the road crew I had so flamboyantly waved to only moments before.  I had no choice but to carry on and hope to find, eventually, a familiar landmark.  After another few minutes and miles, I was sent a sign from navigational heaven.

Oh wait.  I know you urban smarty-pantses are thinking, "Why didn't she just use her cell phone GPS, the silly girl?" and I'll tell you: the road was too wind-y (not breezy, curvy) for me to glance away from my driving even for a second to set the darned thing, and also there were no places where it was wide enough to pull over, and when I finally found a driveway-like affair going into a field of grazing cows, my GPS just spent the next half hour "searching for satellite" uselessly.  So there, you technology wonks.

But I digress . . . The sign was "Sam Fred Road"--the first intersection I had come to.  And I know that Sam Fred Road comes out just before the actual town of Middleburg is reached by the "highway" that constitutes the front access to Route 629.  I know that because when I met Sandman and his family and they were exploring the Middleburg area for a possible move to their current location, we all thought "Sam Fred" was a really stupid funny name for a road and promptly dubbed one of the barn cats, "Sam Fred" in honor of the stupid name.

I turned left onto Sam Fred Road immediately.  And about five minutes later, I found myself following a cow.  Again, there was no center line and the road wasn't very wide, but it was paved.  The cow was strolling like a Labor Day tourist through Times Square exactly down the center of the road.  I couldn't get around it.  I just decided the best course of action was to follow it at the pace it had set--slow.  Almost immediately a huge pickup truck came up behind me and I thought to myself, "oh crap, this pickup is going to honk at me for joining the cow in a slow stroll down the middle of Sam Fred Road."  But it didn't.  It just joined my little cow conga line.  And I thought to myself, "I'm certainly not in Kansas anymore" which is an expression I use ironically these days because the Virginia countryside more sharply resembles Kansas than any place I've ever lived before and certainly a whole lot more than my native New York City by miles and miles.  Just then, another pickup truck came at us head on, around a bend, going somewhat too fast, saw the cow, slammed on its breaks, and made a super loud squealing sound with its tires, which scared the cow off to the side of the road, unharmed.  And we could all pass.  And then I found my way back home, got the Middleburg police department non-emergency number on my now-revived cell phone, and reported my cow.

I have to say that the questions asked by the gal who answered the phone were a little strange to me.  But I'm used to calling the police because of someone blocking my driveway or to report someone's party being too loud.  Not because a thousand pound hunk of beef is blocking traffic.  So when she asked, "Did it have a tag?" and I reported that it did (proudly knowing that the metal earring on its ear was an identifier that indicated its ownership), I was a little unsettled when she asked me what it said.  Like I would jump out of my citified car and run up to the cow and read its earring.  Right.  But anyway, she offered to send someone to check it out, even though I couldn't explain exactly where I was, besides that I was on Sam Fred Road somewhere between the Turnpike and the Highway and the paper dutifully reported that the cow was not found.  I'm such a country girl!

That's What He Said

I don't remember exactly when it was, but I was directing an Off-Broadway production of Shakespeare's Life of Henry V (which really should be called Henry V's Wars and Courtship since it doesn't have much to do with any part of his life other than those) at the time.  I was puzzling over modern figures who would be analogous to Henry and was summarizing his personality and achievements in my head.  I thought this process might help lead me to a production approach that would bring the audience closer to the play in performance.  So Henry was a young leader, thrust into the limelight when his father died relatively early in his reign.  His father was beloved by some and derided by others and a great warrior.  Henry was a bit of a dark horse as Prince--he hung out with low-life drinkers and thieves and other entertaining figures who are prominent in the Henry IV plays and whose lives diminish in Henry V in ways that are engaging but less funny as time goes by.  Henry also has this strange speech in Henry IV where as Prince Hal, he explains to the audience that the reason he is behaving so badly is that when he does take over as King, he will be that much more impressive for having come such a long way in his journey toward leadership.  Kind of Machiavellian, if you ask me, and I don't mean that in a good way.  Sadly, we can't ask Shakespeare if he thought that was a positive or a negative trait in Henry, all we have to go on is what portrayal we get in Henry V.

I have often said that I think the role of Henry is the most challenging of all of Shakespeare's leading man, in that we see so many aspects of his psychology as the play goes on.  Besides that the role is epic in the sheer amount of words he speaks, Henry's called upon to handle such a variety of situations in the play--private and public, as a diplomat and a warrior, and even a fairly broadly comic scene at the end of the play where he courts his future Queen in spite of a severe language barrier between them.  But one of the most notable traits of Henry's is not that he won a war over insane odds on foreign turf, but that he was the first English King to bring together forces from all of the British nations to do so.  Shakespeare makes caricatures of the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish soldiers who join in with Henry for comic purposes, but he also shows how valuable these forces were to Henry, and Henry's gratitude for their presence.  In point of fact, Henry must be quite a diplomat back in the homeland, to have those soldiers go with him against the French, rather than have them take over England while he's gone, as his predecessors experienced.

I was thinking about the diplomatic side of Henry when I walked through Central Park one day to hear the Dalai Llama speak in public.  In perfect Buddhist fashion, he said something that addressed my Henry conversation quite directly.  I'm going to paraphrase, since I wasn't taking notes at the time, but he said something like, "Our enemy is our best teacher; from him we learn the most difficult lessons: patience and understanding."

This Saturday I was invited along with Bruce Wayne to a football game and due to my love of the sport, I jumped at the chance.  The challenge presented to me was that our hosts and most of their guests, none of whom I knew, were all politically about as far from me as they could have been.  From them I learned patience and understanding, at least for the day.  I didn't succumb to their views, but I did try very hard to understand their perspective.  I don't agree with the premise, nor the conclusion, but I continued to find common ground with them throughout the long day, and I came away with an appreciation of a branch of humankind of which I have had little contact in my sheltered academic left-wing socialist Jewish intellectual life.  But now I live in Virginia, where people love guns and cigarettes and tractors and Jesus in a way that feels to me more like a cudgel than a helping hand.  I'm sure they think of me as a radical Communist Jew lesbian-loving minority-supporting nut trying to take over this great nation which they think was founded for them and not for me.  But we cheered the home team, ate super tasty onion dip together, and talked about our memories of music from our youth and hopes for our grown children and for large blocks of time, you never would have known that I was a fly in their ointment, or they one in mine.

Thug Life

So what's it like here?  Beautiful.  Quiet.  Slow.  Nice.  All of which are kind of weird to me.  It's summer so it should be super crowded and smell a little rotten and be really noisy and fast-paced and a bit rude, in a happy urban way.  The Virginia dialect is more like molasses than the mustard I'm accustomed to.  It did take about five times longer than I'm used to checking out of the grocery store, but they greeted me multiple times in the store, made sure I found what I was looking for, and offered to carry the two little bags to the car for me.  The library put Bruce Wayne to work as a volunteer right away--no background check or suspicion or training or trial period.  The gas station that inspected my car charged sixteen dollars, for which I can't think of any service and not even too many meals I could have gotten back in Metro NY.  But it's all really disorienting.  I have to have a fan running at all times, not to circulate air, but to cut the alarming silence.  Weehawken was never silent.  Never.  Although here I guess there are tree frogs and stuff which can be pretty noisy, but the quiet is really really really quiet.  Really.  Quiet.  Last night I made a last visit to the bathroom before sleep and although I could hear the tree frogs through the window, there was a deafening silence in the room.  It made my ears feel like when a plane is landing and I need to swallow to clear my ears.  And the politeness makes me suspicious.  Are these people really nice? or do they want something from me? People wave when I drive down the road, even though they don't know me.  People say hello, have a nice day, but not like they have to, but because they seem to actually mean it.  It will take some getting used to. 

Return of the Son of the Sequel

Well, I'm back.  It's been just over a year of nothing pleasant to report.  That's a bit of an exaggeration.  But I thought that I would start by reviewing the good stuff as an exercise in remembering in the hard times that it wasn't always like this and that therefore it won't always be like this in the future.  So I have bonded with some old friends and new friends, including the fabulous guy who is pulling the old oil tank out of my driveway in my house while we're selling it.  I probably would never have predicted that he and I, out of the universe of humanity, would have so much to talk about, but there you are.  So he's doing that, and we have a buyer and a few backup offers just in case, and we are 90% out of the house and in the process of settling in with my in-laws at their gorgeous little gentleman's farm in the Virginia countryside near Washington, DC.  Clark Kent is staying where she is, of course, since she is all grown and has a life (and a secret identity) of her own.  I'm sure I will miss her considerably more than she, me.  Peter Parker is going to enroll in school here where schools have fields and separate rooms for different teachers and parking lots and finish out her final two years of indentured servitude to the public school system.  She sees it as an adventure and I'm truly grateful for that.  Bruce Wayne is about to go off to college (yikes) and we are all thrilled, as long as we can pay for it, which is definitely the first semester and probably the first year and then, who knows?  Sandman is staying with the house until the closing date.  I have no idea what he is doing there, besides petting the cat, but whatever it is, I'm sure it's delightfully stress-free and good for him.  The doggies are with me and for that I am truly grateful as they are happy and sleepy and dopey just like always and that makes me feel like things may one day be normal, whatever that means.  The farm is beautiful.  The house is beautiful.  My life and things are not so much and I'm having a little trouble finding a balance between my things that make me feel at home and the farm's beauty which I have no interest in disturbing.  Luckily the outdoors is something I cannot tackle whatsoever.  I have the opposite of a green thumb.  So on that score, I just enjoy.  My bedroom, which Sandman and I will eventually share, when he gets here, is in process--I've claimed my side of the bed, closet, and dresser.  I'm trying to, for the most part, hide my things in the room.  I did move a mirror that feng shui says is in the wrong place (on the wall past the foot of the bed so when I sit up, I look at myself) and replaced it with a photograph of the lighthouse by which my mother's ashes are scattered.  She took the photograph herself from the spot where she wanted us to leave her, I think to make sure we stuck with her plan, but it's beautiful too.  Beauty, beauty, beauty.  I'm also creating an office/living room/study/game room for Peter and I to use as our own work space.  I even put a bunch of musical instruments around and hope that within a few days, I'll make some music.  I'm thinking that I need to move my desk.  I thought that facing the lovely view of the Japanese garden and the pool would be ideal but my computer screen perfectly and completely blocks the view from my line of sight which seems silly.  So perhaps I will make some adjustments and see the beauty instead of just knowing it's there.  I do though, in the process, want to make note of a particular strange disorienting thing that has been happening this week.  I have been blurting out things we have to do in New York where we no longer live.  I don't mean to suggest that I will never visit or move back there; I have no idea what the future holds in that regard.  But I definitely have caught myself referencing things to do, places to go now, in a way that reminds me just a little of how I see something that makes me think of my first husband or my mother.  As in, "I should get those cookies for Mom as they are her favorite," forgetting briefly that she isn't with me anymore; or "That's a concert I should go to with Zippy as he is the only one I know who would appreciate that band" even though I'm no longer responsible for buying him birthday presents.  So I thought I would share some of those things here that I'm already missing about NYC: Little Miss Matched at 565 Fifth Avenue where all the socks come in threes; fruit vendors every few blocks with cherries, 2 pounds for $5; Katz's stuffed derma and pastrami on rye with mustard, even though I did eat exactly that just last Thursday; seeing people and pets I know while walking down the street both in Weehawken and in Manhattan; my synagogue community.  More soon.