Where I Was

This morning I heard on NPR that it was 15 years ago today that the bombing in Oklahoma City happened. It was the kind of event that demonstrated to Americans that we are not even safe from ourselves. It’s easier to be outraged at a foreign entity bombing something on our soil than it is when one of our own does it. We ask ourselves how something like this could happen, and how one of our own citizens can build a bomb and destroy the lives of other Americans with it.  And we never seem to come up with a good enough answer.

I was 21 when it happened. I hadn’t given much thought to anything in Oklahoma City. I’d never been there. I didn't know anyone who lived there.  It’s one of those cities in a part of the country that I hadn’t spent any time in. It's the kind of place that is far away, and that I'd end up reading about in the paper.

I was in Tasmania on the day that it happened. I had just returned to the city of Hobart after spending a few days at Mt. Field National Park, just outside of Hobart. The night before I’d spent the night in a picnic shelter in the park, on a mattress I’d borrowed from the ranger’s station. I was out of money, and woefully unprepared for the fact that the hostel I’d stayed in the night before didn’t accept Visa. I paid cash for the one night in the hostel, assuming that I’d find an ATM in the morning. The closest ATM was 16 km away, I’d learned the next day. I had $8 in my pocket, precisely enough to get the bus back to Hobart on the day after that.

I decided that I’d rather spend the day exploring the park and figure out my accommodation situation later on, than walking the 16 km to the bank. I’d met the park ranger, who allowed me to borrow the mattress. Just before sunset I made camp in the picnic shelter, and turned down a ride back to Hobart from people who may or may not have been perfectly normal people. I made a fire. I ate some food I had in my pack. I set my travel alarm clock for 7 so that I would have plenty of time to wake up, clean up and catch my bus.  I was woken up in the middle of the night by a wallaby plundering the nearby trash can.  Other than that I slept peacefully. 

When I returned to Hobart the next morning, I wandered into a café for breakfast. It was over a bagel and hot chocolate that I learned the news of the bombing. Another patron had left a copy of a newspaper behind and I read it while I ate. The picture of the Murrah Building stretched over the front page, a cut away view revealing all of the building’s floors. I stared at it in awe, and then read the article. While I was exploring a beautiful park, a bomb had exploded in my country.

Oklahoma City was ten thousand miles away from Hobart. Even though I didn’t know anyone who lived there, I numbly shuffled through the streets anyway with a feeling like my country had just changed for the worse.

Later on, in the hostel, I met a German woman who had asked me what I thought about the bombing. I asked her “Well, what would anyone think? It was a horrible thing that happened.” She nodded and said that it was a silly question, and she apologized for asking it.  Even though it didn’t impact my life directly, I felt very cold-hearted when I thought of it that way.  Almost as if I was thinking "Well, it has nothing to do with me... la de da."  Well, what did I think of it?  A silly, yet loaded question.

To a lot of people I’ve never met, today is the anniversary of the day they lost a loved one in a senseless act of violence and stupidity. To those people it was the end of a life.  But now I look at this event and all I can think is “Now, what the hell was that for?”

All Aboard

I was doing a bit of data entry at work today and stumbled upon the date September 29, 2009.  As I mindlessly typed my mind wandered to the movie "Sliding Doors."

In the movie, Gwyneth Paltrow's character got fired from her job.  As she is going home from the office she missed the subway train by a matter of seconds.  At that point the plot splits into two story lines--what would have happened had she made it onto the train, and what would have happened had she missed it. The Gwyneth who caught the train caught her boyfriend in bed with another woman.  The one who missed it was mugged as she was trying to catch a bus, and none the wiser about the cheating boyfriend.  The one who caught the train threw the boyfriend out and started a brand new happy life.  The one who missed the train slogged along, picking up a job as a waitress, and was miserable.  It's one of my favorite movies, and really made me think of all those little moments at which the plot of my life could have split. 

The date I mentioned above got me thinking of this because on September 29, 1989 my high school boyfriend and I had gotten together.  Had I stayed with that boyfriend, I would have been with him for 20 years.  Our breakup, sometime in the spring of 1991, was probably one of those Sliding Doors moments for me. 

This boyfriend, Leonard, (he looked like Spock so I'll call him Leonard) married the girl that he'd dumped me for back in 91.  We had broken up twice.  The first time was a few months before, and I had learned that he asked out this girl, Olive, (she looked like Olive Oyl, from the Popeye cartoon) but she'd said no.  Rejected, Leonard used his mind meld technique and managed to get me back.  We stayed together for a few months, but his mind was on Olive.  She flashed him a green light, and he dropped me in a second flat.  (Then he posted some lousy thing in the yearbook "Thanks for the memories, Beej, but I am much happier now."  It must have been all the pesto that Olive Oyl served up.  Pfft!  Whatev!)

I've heard from mutual friends that Leonard and Olive are married.  They had gotten engaged when I was in college.  I saw them at the movies one night when I was home for a weekend.  I was about to go up and congratulate them, because I heard the good news.  They spotted me and quickly turned away; at that moment I vowed not to buy them a Misto for a wedding gift. 

They live in the town next to our home town.  They never really left our hometown.  I don't know what he does for a living, but I guess that it's some unimaginative gig.  My friend saw them in Walmart a few years back and said "I saw Leonard, Olive and their monkey child" so I know they have at least one kid.  (And I love that my friend, still loyal years later called their progeny a "monkey child.")

But I caught that train in 1991.  I sat down and stared out the window as it took me to college out of state.  Then it took me overseas to Australia.  It took me to the open mic night where I met the people who led me to Todd.  It took me to get my Masters.  It took me underwater.  It brought me to my sailboat.  Then my dogs boarded somewhere along the line too.  There is no limit to where this train will go.  The track has no end, and the ride has been fabulous.

Thanks for the memories, Leonard.  But you know what?  I am way happier now than you could have ever made me.

The Boobie Dry Cleaner

The way she leaned against the counter, it pushed her boobs into display even more. That’s the thing I never liked about going into that dry cleaner, was this young woman behind the counter. She was pretty enough, but she shoved her big ol hooters up and out of her shirt on display. I wonder if she ever had the chance to know what eye contact looked like.


I went to that dry cleaner every other week while I had the dive shop. It was on the way, and was the last one nearby that I hadn’t yet boycotted for some ridiculous reason. I did that a lot back then. I had a mental list of the dry cleaners I didn’t want to ever set foot in again, and now I cannot remember the reason for any of them. Over the time I’d been going to the “Boobie Dry Cleaner,” as I’d begun calling it, I became friendly with Kayla, the one with the boobs.

I went in one night on my way home from the shop. Kayla didn’t smile. Her boobs stood at attention, but she didn’t smile like she usually did.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked.

“My boyfriend and I just broke up,” she sighed.

“Oh no! How long have you been together?” I asked. She told me it had been a few weeks. I tried to smile sympathetically, but couldn’t seem to muster one up for a 20 year old girl who had broken up with her weeks-long boyfriend.

She went on to tell me that she had such a great time with him. He was older; I gathered that he was at least in his thirties or maybe forties. He took her to all the “right” clubs. He bought her jewelry. And now she’d need to find another guy to do all those things for her. It was catastrophic.

I couldn’t resist. I asked her why she needed all that in her life. What was so great about going to the “right” clubs if she couldn’t get along with the guy who brought her there? She looked at me with a puzzled look on her face.

“The way I see it,” I paused to choose my words carefully. “If you really like a guy then it doesn’t matter where you guys go together. No matter where you go, it will always be fun.”

She considered for a moment while I told her about the dates that Todd and I had been on when we were first together. He was 20, I was 23. We were flat broke and our idea of a date was cooking dinner together in my apartment. There was a supermarket a few blocks away. We’d walk there and spend Saturday afternoon wandering the aisles, picking out the ingredients and laughing. He really knew how to make me laugh, too. I have a very vivid memory of him speaking French to a cantaloupe. I have no idea what he said to it, but it was funny as hell as he tapped the top of it and held it to his ear. It’s those memories that make me smile still, 13 years later.

Kayla raised her eyebrows at me incredulously. “And you married him after that?”

Maybe I Did Have a Weird Childhood

Even though I have four siblings, I spent a lot of time on my own as a child. My brothers are 4 and 8 years older than me, and my sisters are 5 and 14 years older than me. While the age difference is nothing right now, when we were kids, it was a great divide that screamed “You and I have nothing in common!” There were no kids my age in the neighborhood, which contributed to my not-really-an-only-child-but-kinda-an-only-child life back then.

When I was 4 years old, my oldest sister was graduating high school and heading off to college, while my brother Kaz—4 years older than me—was entering the 3rd grade and playing on the “Major League” little league team. I was barely hitting the ball off the tee. (See above, great divide.)

Throughout my childhood we played endless hours of wiffle ball in the summer, and of course Kaz and the boy next door could hit the ball way further than I could. They would round the bases while I scrambled to field the ball and try to tag them out. The games that my siblings played were all too old for me, and I constantly lacked the skill to compete. I was the little sister that tagged along, yipping at the heels of my older siblings. My choices were yipping or staying home. Staying home meant helping Mom with the cleaning or ironing, and who wants to do that?

Then someone, I don’t know who, took pity on me and bought me a set of jacks. I remember the plastic molded jacks were in a plastic-y drawstring bag with a rubber ball. There were no instructions with the game, and I had no idea how to play jacks. I studied the contents of the set with a scientific fascination. The jacks certainly looked interesting. Why were some prongs rounded while the others were pointy? I didn’t know. I twisted them around in my fingertips, and then tried to spin one of the jacks on its end on the surface of the coffee table. I was disappointed that they wouldn’t spin the way a coin would spin. It would have been cool to see how many I could get spinning at the same time. No dice. I couldn’t stack them on top of each other like blocks, or lean them against each other like I would when building a house of cards.

I lined up the jacks end to end on the length of the coffee table and examined them. They didn’t look like they would be that much fun to play with as they uselessly tilted on their axis; I couldn’t get them to balance so that they looked like plus signs. I left them on the table and bounced the rubber ball against the picture window. I left a perfect round smudge on the glass. I wiped it off with the curtain, so Mom wouldn’t see it and then turned my attention back to the jacks in formation on the coffee table.

“What the heck am I supposed to do with these things?” I puzzled. There was no Internet, so it’s not like I could anonymously look it up and learn. I didn’t want to ask anyone how to play for fear of looking stupid. Even I knew that everyone knew how to play jacks. Well, everyone except for me. Was it some sort of childhood instinct that I lacked?

And now it’s an adult instinct I lack. If I understand it correctly, you’re supposed to bounce the ball and see how many jacks you can pick up before the ball hits the table again, right? Where’s the fun in that?? Who thought of that? I’ll bet it was someone who wanted to make cleaning up the toys a game, so the kids would tidy up after themselves. I can picture some misguided and frazzled mom, “OK, kids, I am going to bounce this ball. Let’s see how many things you can pick up before it lands…. Ready??? GO!!!”

Exposed Nerve

On Sunday it’ll be 8 years since Mom’s been gone. The last six weeks of Mom’s life did not at all represent who she was. Her cancer spread, and the tumors compressed her spinal cord and she lost all feeling and ability to move from the waist down. My sisters and I dropped out of our lives for those weeks and took turns taking care of her. I blew off work for most of that time, and only went 1-2 days per week.

I never really let myself fully absorb what was happening at that time. I slipped into denial robot mode and shielded myself from the possibility of losing Mom. Everything I did during those six weeks was done with the sole purpose of making her live. My mind assigned extreme importance to every little mundane task I accomplished every day. My first thought in the morning was how making her favorite breakfast would make her live. The laundry, done just so, would make her live. I concocted protein shakes with fresh fruits blended into them to make her live. I was careful not to get shampoo in her eyes, because one sudsy splash would tip the scales in the wrong direction. Any little thing could make her live, and denial robot had to perfectly execute every chore so not to risk causing her demise.

The denial robot mode fully took over. Nobody could talk about any other fate than Mom surviving around me. There was no other option for the denial robot. Mom dying simply did not compute. Period. It was exhausting. But when you’re a denial robot you never get tired. You push and push because nothing else matters. (My sister and I watched the 9-11 attack on TV, then simply turned the TV off and bathed and dressed Mom so we could get her ready for radiation treatment in Hartford.)

I vividly remember her wake, when my cousin Anna had said to me “It gets easier.” Anna’s dad had died when we were seniors in college. Later on that night my cousin Theresa said, “You just have to live through the pain.” Her dad died when she was in her early 20s and I was only 7 or 8.

And it’s true. They were both absolutely right. I’ve said the same things to other people I know who have lost their parents. “The first 6 months will completely suck. Just get through them and you’ll be OK” I told them. Later on they told me I was right.

But my first six months were riddled with spontaneous sobbing at inopportune times and vivid nightmares. The denial robot’s battery ran down and left me to deal with what actually happened in those six weeks. Mom’s health gradually degraded until we were all with her when she took her last breath. And none of those things I did, that would surely make her live, worked. In those six months I waited for the answer to be revealed to me, but of course it never was. There wasn’t a chore I missed that didn’t make her live. It was the cancer that didn’t make her live.

Now here it is 8 years later. And while the pain of losing her has subsided, there are times when it bubbles to the surface. It's usually something entirely random that triggers it. Today a client at work called me from Bristol, Pennsylvania—where Mom lived when she first came to the United States. I’ve only visited Bristol when I was a kid. It wasn’t a part of my childhood—but I knew the story of Mom taking the train from Montreal, Canada to Bristol when she first arrived on this side of the pond. I spent the rest of the day walking around feeling like I had a stone in my stomach and I randomly burst into tears in the car on the way to dinner at a friends’ house tonight.

And that’s what nobody prepared me for when they were trying to comfort me at her wake. That it never fully goes away.

Hurt

What is it about a song on the radio that brings back the memory of something I hadn’t thought of in years?

I was driving to work the other day when the song “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails came on the radio. I sat there with my elbow propped against the door and tapping on the wheel with my thumbs as I listened.

The first time I heard the song was on a mix tape that my first post-college-just-moved-out-of-home-to-a-new-city boyfriend made for me. I met Marcus at one of my favorite bars, and we clicked right away. Marcus was in a “transitional” phase. He didn’t have a job and was living off the savings account he’d had since he was born. We talked on the phone a lot; we spent a lot of time together. Then he randomly ended it after a few weeks. He claimed to be depressed and wanted to be just friends.

I agreed to be just friends, because having him as a friend was way better than not having him at all. He made me the mix tape in a “Let’s be friends” gesture, and he recorded “Hurt” onto it as the ultimate depiction of his depressed and tortured soul. He told me some bullshit story about how he didn’t want to wreck the person that I am by getting me mixed up in his messed up life. He came to see me play at the open mic, where I played “Untouchable Face” by Ani DiFranco, and bravely stared at him through the whole thing.

At the time I ate the whole “I’m so depressed” thing up. I was convinced that he wasn’t depressed when he was with me, and I was helping him somehow. Until I learned about what was really torturing this guy’s soul. He came over to my apartment one night, and I made stuffed shells for dinner. He was telling me about a woman he’d just started seeing after he dumped me.

“The thing is,” he swallowed his mouthful of ricotta, “I don’t really like her that much.”

“Then why are you hanging out with her, then?” In my mind I asked him, “Yeah, here you are having a conversation about life with me, but you won’t call me your girlfriend? But you call that tramp your girlfriend? What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Because she knows how to please,” he replied in his deadpan honesty that I’d gotten so used to.

I rolled my eyes and said “Oh please, that’s not the only reason you’re hanging out with her.”

And I was right. He was a horrible boyfriend and a lousy friend. He was hanging out with that particular sex goddess because she didn’t challenge him to be a better person like I did. This is what caused Marcus’s “depression” and his acceptance of the song “Hurt” as his anthem—he just didn’t feel like working for something worthwhile.

A few weeks later I broke off our friendship. I couldn’t take his confiding in me about other women. I was liberated as I left his apartment. I barged in and said “I can’t be friends with you. I want to be more than friends and you don’t. This isn’t working for me. Goodbye.” Then I stormed out of his apartment just as fast as I’d barged in. He chased me down the stairs and asked me to talk to me. I silently continued down the narrow stairs, my knees were shaking.

Our paths crossed a few more times here and there in the months and years after that. We’d swap emails now and then, but it was always the same old thing with him and I quickly grew tired of hearing from him.

One night, after Todd and I moved in together I met him out for a beer. We had a very nice conversation that lasted very late into the night. At the end of the night he asked me if he could kiss me and I said, “Well, I live with my boyfriend. I’ve got a good thing going here. No thanks.” He shrugged and said “Fair enough.”

He tried to stay friends, and I made excuses. He’d invite me to parties at his apartment, and I’d write back with a simple “No thanks, we have plans.” It was after Todd and I had gotten engaged that he wrote to me to ask me how I was doing.

“Hi Marcus,” I wrote. “Life is really good. I am engaged, getting my Masters, and restoring a 41’ sailboat. Take care, Beej.”

After that I never heard from him again. I came across a picture of him when I googled him out of curiosity about a year ago. But other than that, I haven’t thought about that soap opera for more than a decade now. The mix tape has long been lost or thrown away.

But it all came flooding back, just from hearing that song. I wonder if he thinks of me when he hears that song by Ani DiFranco.

Fired Like a Clay Pot

It was a strange week at work last week. A co-worker had gotten fired on Wednesday, and management hasn’t said anything more on the topic other than “She doesn’t work here anymore.”

The remaining employees are whispering to each other in the cubicles, speculating about what had happened to my colleague. I gather that the firing occurred at the very end of the day, when the rest of the staff had gone home. Her office is empty, and the feeling at my workplace is sad and strange.

It brought be back to the time I had been fired from a job. At the time that it had happened, 10 years ago, I was completely humiliated by the experience. I didn’t tell my friends I’d been fired. I didn’t tell my family. I didn’t tell anyone, yet here I am telling you on the Internet. It was a horrible experience that took me several years to fully get over. I had nightmares about it, and fantasized about what I would say if I had ever bumped into my former boss.

I was working for one of those “next big thing” dot coms back in the summer of 1999. They just secured a crapload of venture capital money, and were supposed to be all the rage. (They closed their doors a year after I’d been let go.)

I was called into a meeting where I sat across from the VP of my department and the guy from human resources. They told me to bugger off, and I stood up and numbly left the room. I went back to my desk to pack up my belongings. It was an open cubicle setting, so it was rather obvious that I was leaving. I held it together reasonably well, until a co-worker helped me take my things out to my car. (Which I appreciated so very much at the time because I wouldn’t have to make a second trip back to my desk. A humiliating second trip.) At that point I burst into tears in front of a woman I barely knew over a job I’d had for a month or two. She, obviously and understandably uncomfortable, wished me luck and hightailed it back into the office.

I always wondered how my firing was handled on the day after. Did they have a staff meeting to explain my absence? Did they send out an email? Did they take advantage of the space that once was my desk and put the photocopier there? Or an espresso machine?

The day after I was fired I had to go back to the office. I had a personal package Fedexed there, and of course it arrived the day after I’d been fired. I couldn’t stand to go back in there one more time, so I waited in the car while Todd went in to get the package for me.

It felt like it took him an awful long time. I sat behind the wheel, the window down because it was a hot summer day. One of my co-workers came out of the building, spotted me sitting in the car and came up to say hi. I didn’t work too closely with him, he was the VP of Business Motivation, or some other bullshit dot com era job title.

He leaned against my car and expressed his condolences to my boobs. I thanked his face for his concern; he told my boobs that they’d be sure to find another job soon. Pretend Me sat up straighter, lifted the front of her tank top and said, “Do you want me to just show them to you so we can settle the mystery?” Real Me warned, “Don’t even think about it, you’re gonna see this jerk again. It’s a small world, and you are looking for a job.”

Real Me won and I kept my shirt on. Real Me seethed about how this man’s 15 year old daughter was a summer intern in the office, yet there he was ogling some 25 year old in the parking lot. Real Me wishes she had the courage to lift her shirt that day and humiliate that guy as badly as he’d done to me.

Petty Vandalism was my MO

I was in high school in the early 90’s, back when MC Hammer was telling us that it was Hammer Time. I was a goody goody in high school, ever drank (except for once), got good grades, participated in school activities, and all that two shoes stuff. But I had a weakness. I was a petty vandal.

I carried a sharpie around with me, and scrawled occasional random bits of graffiti. Most of it didn’t make much sense. I didn’t care to tell anyone when I had visited that particular bathroom stall. Instead my contributions of the graffiti world consisted of things like song lyrics, stick figures in a “Walk like an Egyptian” pose and the like.

I was driving home from school one day, and stopped at a stop sign somewhere in Enfield, Connecticut. I cracked up as I read the sign. First it said STOP, but then somebody scrawled underneath it “Hammer Time.” Brilliant! I had just stumbled upon a new vehicle for my writings. I was thrilled at the prospect of my obscure scribbles being exposed to more people than those who used the bathrooms at school. I grew excited at both genders getting to view my artistic contributions.

I raced home and called my friends, “Guys! This is it! We need to come up with some phrases incorporating the word ‘stop’.” The next night, armed with a fresh sharpie and friends packed into my 85 Olds Calais. We cruised down Newbury Road in East Windsor, an isolated road in the middle of nowhere which would serve as the perfect place to test out an installation of my art. I pulled up to the stop sign, leapt out of the car, and dashed to the stop sign on the side of the road. I scrawled “Polka time” under the word “Stop” on the sign—an homage to my roots.

Soon I became more brazen. Dozens of stop signs in East Windsor were defaced with the words “Polka time.” Worn out sharpies littered the floor of my car. The buzz about the weird “Polka Time” stop signs grew at school, and all fingers pointed at me. My classmates shook their heads and said “I am not at all surprised it was you.”

Tonight I was picking up pizza from Wicked Good Pizza. I stopped at the stop sign before leaving the parking lot and saw that someone else created their own stop sign art installation. The words “Don’t” and “Believing” were written in black sharpie on the sign, so that it read “Don’t Stop Believing.” I applaud this stop sign graffiti artist for taking it to the next level, and actually saying something a more hopeful and meaningful than my asinine “Stop! Polka time!”

Who ever you are, thank you for making my day. Oh and don’t STOP making people smile.

Can I Take That Back?

Recently I saw an article on cnn.com about workplace embarrassments. Luckily, I haven’t had any major embarrassments at work (or if I did, I've blocked them out). I’ve done stupid things like send the wrong document to the wrong client, and stuff like that. But nothing really humiliating that has made me not want to go into the office again, ever.

But I know someone who did. And it was big. And juicy. When I was in my 20s I worked for a variety of dot.coms in the Boston area. It was an interesting environment to work in. The big thing about the late 90’s workplace was that the management was younger and more laid back. People didn’t dress up for work, yet they worked with a cult-like devotion. At more than one of these places I worked I heard the phrase “We’re onto something big here, I can feel it!” uttered about whatever people-will-never-live-without-it service that the company was touting on their site. Ultimately many of the companies I worked for at the time failed. Despite the fact that they were “onto something big,” they lacked a revenue generating business model.

At the dot.com I worked for when I was 24-25, the management went through a radical change. One CEO was told where to go, and another was brought in. The new CEO brought in a devoted group of his followers, and the company that I had liked working for turned into a club for the new CEO’s cronies. The new VP of Sales was the CEO’s best friend, and actually had performed the wedding ceremony when the CEO married his wife. Yeah, they were tight. Meetings with these people left me feeling like I needed to shower afterward, and the people who were not in “the club” were left uninformed and “out of the loop.” And because of my penchant for not wanting to be “one of them,” I had intentionally stuck myself on the outside of this exclusive club.

One day the CEO and his best friend the VP had interviewed a woman for some bullshit VP position. I cannot remember the exact title, but it was something ridiculous like “VP of Business Motivation.” (These were the dot.com days, remember? Job titles were made up in an effort to make one workplace cooler than any other.) The VP of Sales sent around an email to announce that this woman would start in this new position in the coming weeks, and that we were to all make her feel at home.

The CEO replied to the email, intended for his best friend to read it, but stupidly clicked on the “Reply to All” button.

The first thing to arrive in my email inbox was an Outlook request from the CEO that said he wanted to withdraw his email. I deleted that. Then the actual email from the CEO came through a second later. Naturally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I wanted to know what CEO said that he so desperately wanted to withdraw.

Then I heard it. A gasp from a co-worker on the other side of the cube wall. An “Oh my God!” from another down the row from my desk. A giggle from another cube on the other side of the hall after that. I opened the email, which left me with my mouth hanging open:

“Hey Bob,

What a great ass on her! Imagine getting a piece of that!”

The CEO never left his office for the rest of that day. The VP of Business Motivation started her job a few weeks later, and I wonder if anyone ever said to her “Don’t worry if you make a mistake on the job. Just bend over and shake it, and all will be forgiven.”

Beejutante

“Doesn’t he know you at all?” Brent asked me on the phone and laughed. I returned to my dorm room senior year of college, and called my friend to tell him about my dad’s hare-brained request from that morning.

I had gone home for the weekend. I didn’t go to church with my parents, and they returned from 8:00 mass to have breakfast with me. My parents are very religious, and attended a mass said in Polish every Sunday morning at the very same church in which they were married. Dad still sings in the choir, as do my uncles, and over the years he’s made friends with the people he’s sung with since before electricity.

Dad sat across from me at breakfast and said, “I was talking to Mrs. M. this morning after church. She’s organizing the Polonaise Ball this year. She wants you to be in it.” The Polonaise Ball is kind of like a debutante ball for eligible Polish girls. Supposedly being asked to be in it is some big honor. But it was an honor that made me bristle as scooped up scrambled egg and spread it onto my toast.

“A debutante? Me? Are you kidding, Dad? There’s no way…” I sat across from the table and tried to get Dad to recognize me. I am his youngest daughter. I hold my high school record in the unfeminine shot put event. I had stopped shaving my legs in some rebellion against “The Man” and was probably clad in a pair of men’s jeans, a humongous flannel, and faux Doc Martens. I was the daughter who ran a drill press in his shop when I was on breaks from school.

“What the hell was I supposed to say to her?” he asked, as if the concept of saying “My daughter’s not really into that kind of thing” was such a foreign concept. “And now,” he added “I will have to face her every week. How am I supposed to say no to her and see her at church every week?”

“Wow, she must be pretty hard up for girls, if she’s asking for me,” I snorted. “Dad, just tell her I am not interested. Please. There’s no way I am doing this.”

“No, I will not tell her. If you don’t want to do this, you’ll have to do it yourself. But don’t just ignore her request. I don’t want her asking me about it every week,” he growled at me.

I found Mrs. M’s number in my parents’ address book, wrote it down and shoved the piece of paper in my pocket. I drove back to school, an hour and a half away in Rhode Island, and tried to come up with a reasonable excuse as to why I couldn’t possibly be included as a Polish debutante. Most of the excuses that I rehearsed in the car started with “Are you fucking crazy? Have you seen me lately? At the moment my hair is magenta! Surely we can agree I am not Polonaise material.” I knew I had to do better than magenta hair.

I walked into my room, and picked up the phone and dialed. “Mrs. M? Hi, it’s Beej. How are you?”

“Oh, honey, how are you? I haven’t seen you in so long!” she replied, excitedly. I was sure that the last time she’d seen me was at the choir picnic when I was 10. I had skinned knees from playing too hard. As a senior in college I had skinned knees from falling down after partying too hard.

“Listen, I am calling about the Polonaise Ball…” I began. I don’t remember how I worded it. Nothing I rehearsed in the car sounded right. I decided when I dialed the number that I would just wing it. I think the words “painfully shy” came out of my mouth, and the words “couldn’t possibly stand up in front of a room full of people while wearing a gown…” also popped out. At least feigned shyness couldn’t be covered over with hair dye, and couldn’t be shaved off my legs.

“I wish you’d reconsider,” she said, soothingly. “There are so many benefits you’ll miss out on of you don’t go. You won’t be introduced properly to the Polish society as an eligible young woman…” I bit my tongue hard to keep in my disdain. My brain was pounding with ‘You mean I’ll miss out on the chance for my life to revolve around making cabbage-laden food for some Polish guy who wears sandals with black socks? Oh damn!’

“Thank you for the opportunity, but I think I will have to pass. Thanks for thinking of me,” I quickly blurted before hanging up the phone. I stared at it for a few minutes, as if it grew a layer of mold in the time I was talking to Mrs. M.

I dialed Brent’s number and heard him laugh. "Hey, you're lucky I am not doing this. I would probably make you go with me, and you'd have to wear a tux," I laughed back. Then he stopped laughing.

Feed the World

When I was a kid, my Uncle George (the only uncle I have whom I’ve ever addressed with his English name) had the best record collection. He had a stereo in the basement, where my brothers, sisters and cousins would all hang out when we were visiting the great old Victorian that they lived in.

The basement was fully furnished. One side, if you turned left at the bottom of the stairs, was set up with a bar, and he had lighted Tuborg beer signs on the light wood paneled walls. Bench seats were built into both sides along the walls, and the center of the room was left empty—plenty of room for a bunch of kids to bounce around as they danced to George’s Rolling Stones and Beatles records.

The other room, a right from the bottom of the stairs, was the stuff of imagination. The only source of light in the room was recessed into the walls, to illuminate whatever he had displayed on insets in the walls. There was a huge drafting table on the far wall, and that’s where the stereo and the records were stored. We had to stand on a chair to reach the record player to change the record, or to move the needle back so that we could play the same song over and over again.

To the right, just as you walked into the room was a small work bench with shelves above it. On the shelves were numerous beakers, a Bunsen burner lighter (you know, one of those squeeze-y things with the flint in the metal cup), test tubes, and a vial with litmus papers in it. I still have no idea what Uncle George was doing with all this stuff; I suspect that these items were just a part of his eclectic collection. At the time I pictured Uncle George wearing a lab coat and swirling some unknown liquid in a beaker on the days when we weren’t visiting. He’d take the rubber stopper off a test tube and sniff the contents of the test tube, then dip a piece of litmus paper in it and examine the paper under the short fluorescent light that hung over the bench. Then he’d frustratedly pour something else into the beaker and swirl it around again. Then, disgusted, he’d put it all away and go upstairs for dinner.

He also had old army stuff on display in the room—old helmets, a gas mask, and a huge military radio system in the middle of the room about which we used to fight over who got to be Radar when we were playing M*A*S*H. Next to George’s vinyl collection, the military radio--complete with headphones, and numerous cords, switches, and plugs—was the coolest thing in the basement.

But his record collection still held the number 1 spot for coolest thing in Uncle George’s basement. On one visit Uncle George held up a record for me and explained that all the better songs were on side A, while all the other songs that the band didn’t like as much were on side B. I recited all the Rolling Stones songs that I liked, and he concurred with me on most them. He wasn’t entirely convinced that “Ruby Tuesday” was the world’s best song, but said he understood why I thought so.

When I was 10, I saw the video to Band Aid’s “Feed the World” which was the British pop singers equivalent to the “We Are the World” that the American pop stars put out sometime around 1984-1985. I declared “Feed the World” way cooler than “We Are the World,” and found vindication when the record showed up in George’s collection. I was visiting one afternoon when my cousin Joanna put the song on. Then we listened to it a dozen times more, and tried to identify the names of the singers. We easily picked out Boy George and Simon LeBon, and we tolerated Bono as he sang. (I wonder if now Joanna, just like me, tolerates Boy George and Simon LeBon and smiles when she hears Bono’s voice.)

Every year I look forward to hearing “Feed the World” on the radio at Christmas time. It brings back the excitement when I saw it in Uncle George’s collection and the afternoon I spent with Joanna listening to the song. But it also makes me a bit sad every time I hear it. The song is actually quite a sad song, designed to make the listener feel guilty and donate to the cause of feeding the world. The first time I hear the song every year, without fail, I start to cry. I call myself a big dork, and laugh as I brush the tears off my cheeks.

Today I was in my car doing the last bits of Christmas shopping. I endlessly pressed the scan button, looking for “Feed the World.” I lamented hearing the “War is Over” John Lennon Christmas song, I rolled my eyes at “Santa Baby” and I gritted my teeth against that piece of crap “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” and once again wonder how nobody has yet gotten around to destroying every copy of that song in circulation.

Just as I got back into my car, I heard the familiar chimes . I squealed in delight and cranked the volume up, and was instantly transported to Uncle George’s basement.

Tis The Season to Hoark Your Guts Out

Picture it. Christmas 1997.

Todd and I had been going out for six months. For the holiday I went home to Connecticut to see my family for Christmas Eve. During the day I babysat my niece Maggie (then three years old) and nephew Krystian (then 1.5 years old) during the day while my brother and sister-in-law ran a few last minute Christmas errands. They dropped off Maggie and Krys at my parents house and I watched them while Mom cooked the Christmas Eve dinner. I changed a few diapers on Krys in that time, wiped a nose or two, and of course hugged, kissed and cuddled the stuffing out of my niece and nephew. I was thrilled to be an aunt at Christmas. I was also thrilled to be going to Vermont the next morning to see my boyfriend for Christmas. The plan was to do Christmas day with his family, and then we’d ski for another day of the long weekend. Life was good.

I left for Vermont from my Uncle Joe’s house, where my insanely huge Polish family congregated for Christmas breakfast after church that morning. “Merry Christmas!” I called out as I put my jacket on before leaving Joe’s house. “I am going to Vermont to see my boyfriend now!” I cranked up the radio and headed north up interstate 91 as fast as the snowy conditions would allow. I arrived in Vermont, and was greeted with hugs, kisses, an “I really really missed you” and a beautiful ruby ring from my boyfriend. We sat down to a lovely Christmas dinner that his mom made. I was still a vegetarian then, and I sampled the non-meat options from the table. We sat around and spoke about what we are all thankful for, we toasted, and we began to dig in to dinner.

Then I felt it.

The quease in my stomach.

The sour taste in my mouth.

The sudden loss of appetite.

The need to just lie down flat for a moment.

I excused myself from the table with barely two words and made my way through the house to Todd’s old bedroom. Instead of the bedroom I stumbled into the bathroom, kicked the door shut, planted my face into the toilet and proceeded to get violently ill. I remained in the bathroom for the duration of Christmas dinner and I am sure that hearing me hoark my guts out completely killed everyone’s appetite at the table.

Puke Fest ‘97 continued well into the night. Of course the bathroom is right off the living room at my in-laws house. Of course they could hear every retch clear as day as they sat in the living room trying to watch a movie. Todd wiped my face and brushed the hair off my forehead. The room spun around me. I was sweaty and peeling off my clothes, only to shiver and blindly pull them back on again. I held onto the bathroom floor with all my remaining strength, praying that the house would stop moving for just a damn minute.

Around midnight Todd drove me to the emergency room. He patiently waited while I answered the barrage of questions from the nurse. Then I was checked into a small room and given something to settle my stomach, which I promptly threw up, so I was given it again, just to throw it up again. Finally I managed to feel the drowsy side effect of the drug. The nurses turned off the light in the room so I could rest. But then I’d deliriously scream Todd’s name. He came into the room and sat with me until I dozed off again, just to have to come in again when I started to scream his name again. My boyfriend sat in a pitch dark room for hours on end and held my hand as I slept. I have no recollection of any of this happening.

I was discharged from the hospital at an hour I can only describe as a million o’clock. Todd drove me home, and followed the doctor’s instructions to the letter. I was forbidden from drinking anything more than a sip of fluid, for fear that I would just throw it up again. I begged for the whole glass of water, but he only fed me a spoonful at a time. I swore at him, and probably called him a Nazi, yet he spoon fed me water despite my insults.

I managed to sleep, and to hold in more and more water. Todd ventured out the next day to rent a movie and to get me some Gatorade. He made some toast for me, and set me up on the couch. He left the toast on the ottoman. I dozed off without eating it. When Todd came home the toast was gone, and he asked me if I managed to keep it down. When I told him that I didn’t eat any of the toast, the dog began to lazily thump her tail on the floor.

By the end of the day, I was able to form a more coherent thought. I called home to see if any of my other family members were sick. It turned out that a stomach bug plowed its way through my family. My brother Kaz and his family were driving to Rochester, NY and both kids ended up sick in the car on the way. My brother Walter’s infant twins got it too, first one and then the other.

And somehow, after our glorious first Christmas, Todd still wanted to spend another eleven Christmases with me.

A Trip Down Amnesia Lane

There is a woman I work with, a part-time temp who is in college and has an internship in Providence. She’s in her early 20s and can only be described as vivacious and spectacular. She came into work wearing a suit and learned that she had a job interview that day. I asked her where she interviewed, and I was brought back to a job interview I had gone on when I was in my early 20s.

I was fresh out of college and trying to start up my career. I was trying like hell to move to the Boston area, and several times per week I drove to Boston from my home state of Connecticut for interviews. Talking to this woman at work about her interview yesterday brought me back to the summer of 1996 when I went on an interview that sounded exactly like what she had described.

I was 22. I drove to Woburn, MA, just north of Boston, to meet with a prospective employer about a marketing position. I must have struck a chord with the hiring manager, because I was invited back that Friday for an “Observation Day.” On Friday morning I donned my periwinkle blue silk suit, purchased on the cheap from the Chadwick’s catalog. I put on an off-white shirt underneath it, and threw on a pair of off-white heels that matched the shirt perfectly. I examined my reflection, ran my hands through my hair, removed the small silver hoop I still wear near the top of my left ear that my mother warned me about. “They’re going to think you’re weird if you show up there with that thing. They’ll never hire you with that on. Take it out, please.” I pulled the car out of the driveway and headed east until I arrived in Woburn.

I looked around the reception area at all the eager faces attached to bodies in suits. I assessed the competition as I sat down. I was called into an office and introduced to Manny. Manny had been with the company for several months, and was promoted to a training supervisor position. Also in the room was a shy looking girl named Jen who wore a long, floral print skirt and sensible shoes. Jen was already hired to work for the company and would spend the day getting trained by Manny while I would observe.

We piled into Manny’s car and rode to Lowell, Massachusetts, about 20 miles northwest of Woburn. On the way to Lowell, Manny briefly explained how the company conducts its “grassroots marketing” campaigns. He was careful not to divulge any details as we drove to Lowell.

He parked the car on a street, and pulled a stack of brochures out of his trunk. Jen and I walked behind him; at that point I don’t think I’d yet heard her utter a syllable. We followed as Manny walked to the front door of a house and knocked. A woman answered the door wearing a loose fitting tube top, a faded tattoo on her arm that may have been a picture of an anchor, fried hair that had been bleached several months before, and a silver tooth in her mouth. It was then that I learned precisely what “grassroots marketing” was. Apparently grassroots marketing is a fancy way of saying “door-to-door” sales. Manny finished his pitch for the pager service he was selling. The customer at the door raised her eyebrows, and then reached down the front of her tube top to retrieve her own pager. They compared pager plans, and she signed up for the one that Manny was selling.

We went on to the next house. Then the next. The sun began to climb in the sky, and the August heat began to settle in. I felt the sweat drip down my back, and down my legs. My feet began to swell in my high heels that I’d begun to regret wearing. After half an eternity we ended up at Subway for lunch. Jen still barely spoke, and I began to seethe at the idea that I had been duped into following Manny around as he sold beepers door to door. I decided that I would just keep my mouth shut and blow off the company at the end of the day as Manny was my only escape at that point.

We walked up and down the streets of Lowell. Lowell has some scary looking streets with a variety of riff raff lounging on the porches, staring uninterested at Manny as he recited his pitch over and over. Finally we made it back to the car, Manny had managed to sell a half dozen pagers. Jen tried her hand at a sale or two, but her pitch was barely audible as she uncomfortably mumbled it to her prospective customers. We piled into Manny’s car, and headed back toward Woburn.

“So, what do you think of what you saw today? Are you ready to hop aboard?” Manny asked, eagerly.

“Um, no,” I said politely.

“Are you sure? Once you pay your dues you’ll get promoted to management and you’ll make six figures in about a year,” he pressed.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Beej, with every job you have to pay your dues. You might as well pay your dues at one where you’ll get something out of it. You will get promoted to management after a year,” his eyes glazed as I wondered how much Koolaid he’d been drinking.

“And what will you do when you’re a manager? Send other people to Lowell to sell pagers? And while you are waiting to be made a manager, what are you doing for money? How much could you possibly be making doing this?” I asked.

“Hey, do you mind if we pull over. I know that Jen wanted to run an errand on the way back,” he pulled the car off the street. Jen got out of the car and stood at the side of the road as we pulled away. “I’ll come back and get her. No sense in keeping you when you know that you don’t want the job.” I looked back at Jen, who stood on the side of the road and watched Manny’s car pull away.

We didn’t speak as we drove back to Woburn. He left me in the parking lot, smugly wished me luck in my job search, and then pulled out of the parking lot on his way back to where he’d left Jen.

Today the woman at work had her “shadowing day” for the company she interviewed. I am 99% sure that it’s the same sort of scenario that I had encountered back when I was 22. Since then I’ve honed my crap filter and learned what questions to ask when seeking a job. Yes, I did once end up in the back row at a hotel ball room listening to some clown convince me and a room full of people to sell water filters—but I stood up and walked out after listening for five minutes.

I imagine that the girl at work is honing her crap filter tonight as I write. And I imagine that Manny is probably living off the grid with a group of “brothers and sisters” that have re-named him “Moon Shadow.”

Who Was that Woman?

Just today at work I was walking out to go to the ladies room in the hallway. We keep the doors at work locked at all times, and we all have the swipe card things that we use to get in. I was walking out at the same time as a co-worker, and a woman walked in as we were walking out. I looked at the woman as she passed me, and watched her wander over to a cube. I assumed she belonged there, but it kind of bothered me that she didn’t look at me and say hello, and my spidey senses began to tingle.

“Hey, who was that woman?” I asked my co-worker in the hallway.

“I don’t know. But she looked familiar,” co-worker replied.

Instantly I was reminded of the time when I worked for a dot.com in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The building where I worked was an 18 story building, but nine of them were for parking. I worked on the tenth floor, which was the first floor that contained offices. We had the same set up, where the bathrooms were outside of the locked doors of the offices, and we all had swipe cards that we used to get in. We were strongly discouraged from propping the doors open for any reason, just as we are at my current office.

One afternoon an email circulated from HR which said that a number of my co-workers had their wallets stolen from their bags at their desks that day. Their credit cards were used on Newbury Street in Boston, which is kind of like the Rodeo Drive of Boston and houses expensive boutiques like Versace. I opened my backpack and saw that not only my wallet was still there, but my debit card was still in there as well. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued to read the email.

The Boston Police department had apprehended a woman who had stolen the wallets of my co-workers on the same day. The email, again, warned us about letting strangers into the building. I listened to my co-workers rumble about not having recalled letting anyone in. But I had to laugh when the Boston PD described the woman, and the description was relayed in the email.

Ahem.

She was a black woman who stood six feet tall.

She wore yellow, turquoise and orange clothes.

Yet nobody in my office recalled letting her in. That’s what happens when geeks don’t look up from their computers, or look beyond their pocket protectors.

I’m New Here

Over the course of my career I’ve worked for many different companies. All of these companies were different, but there’s one thing each of these companies has in common. Everyone sitting in the cubicles and offices has a first day. First days are great in that you can claim ignorance about any question you are asked “I am not sure about that, you see, it’s my first day working here…”

It constantly amazes me how first days differ from company to company. I remember when I started my first job out of college. On my first day I was taken out to lunch by my co-workers, I was shown around all day long, and I got to know the people that I ended up working with for the next year and a half. It was such a welcoming atmosphere and in my mind it set the expectation for how first days in the corporate world are supposed to go. At my second job I didn’t pack a lunch because I was 23 and I assumed that I’d have the same sort of reception as I’d had at my first job. Boy was I wrong; in fact I don’t recall ever being taken to lunch again on my first day at any other job I’ve held.

But it’s not just the social interaction that takes place on first days that is different from company to company. It’s the actual orchestration of the first day. Will I go on a new hire orientation on my first day? Will my office supplies be laid out on my desk when I get there, next to the stack of paperwork I need to fill in as a new hire? Will I be handed an overstuffed file folder with all the relevant information of my first project and be told “have at it”? Will I be left alone while everyone else rushes through their day because they don’t have time to say hello to me, let alone train me? Everywhere I have worked has done it a bit differently, and I am always thankful to see that some thought had been put into my arrival on my first day.

In the late 90’s I worked for a series of dot.coms in the Boston area and I vividly remember my first day at an online technology news magazine where I worked for two years. I was the first person to be hired in that department by a man who clearly did not put any thought to the fact that he’d have a new hire starting. My boss said “Here’s your office, there’s the ladies room, have a good day.” Then he turned and headed for his own office. That was it. There was no “Hey, why don’t you go to this file on the server and familiarize yourself with this project I am going to have you work on.” There was no “Hey, take a look at this site and let me know what you would propose to make the user experience work better.” All I got was “Here’s your office, have a good day.” At least he showed me my desk and didn’t just leave me in the lobby—I mean, really, can I complain?

I sat in my office for an hour or so, thinking he’d come back to talk to me about my job. So I surfed the company’s web site and got more familiar with it. I roamed the hallways and introduced myself to people who weren’t so engrossed in their day that they looked up to say hello to me. I lurked outside my boss’s office while he endlessly droned on the phone, never beckoning me to come in and wait or never holding his hand over the receiver to say “I’ll come to your office in a bit and we’ll talk.”

I called Todd, to give him my new work phone number and he asked, “How’s your first day going?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s weird. My boss just kinda left me in here with nothing to do. I am looking at the train schedule in my purse trying to decide if I should leave here right at 5 to catch the 5:40 train, or should I wait and catch the 6:15? I am so bored!”

“I think you should wait for the later train, it will make a better impression,” he suggested. I stared longingly at the pencil on my desk, wanting to stab myself in the eye with it rather than stay for a minute longer than I had to.

I waited around the office, and my boss finally came and talked to me at 5:30 or so. He didn’t mention leaving me alone for the entire day. He didn’t mention any plans for working with me the next day. He asked me how my day was.

“Well, I think that tomorrow I would like to sit with you so I can get my hands on my first project,” I replied with what I hoped would be a display of my motivation. Instead it probably came out like “I am bored out of my fricken skull, will you please give me something to do or I am going to break the window and jump out of it merely for something that would occupy my time for a few hours.”

The next day came and went just like the first. Before I knew it a month went by, then another. I was given a project, but it was so slow going I didn’t have enough work to occupy me. The boss hired another employee to work in the same capacity I’d been hired for, but he worked on different projects. At the time I had no idea that this guy was as bored as I was. We both took great efforts to look busy, probably afraid that the other would pull the job out from under us. After working there for about six months, our department was being disbanded and we needed to find jobs in other departments. The company was big enough that this was possible. Finally this co-worker and I had lunch one day, before we both went our separate ways in the company, and we laughed about how bored we’d been, how ignored by the boss we’d felt, and how pressured we’d felt to maintain this semblance of being busy. At least he had an office where his back wasn’t to the door so he could look busy on his computer when he was really surfing and shopping online. I sat in a cube, and constantly checked my back when I was surfing for non-work-related items online.

Most of my days spent at that company were spent like my first day there—bored and trying not to look bored. I’ve since learned that how I spend my first day on a job will set the tone for how the rest of my tenure there will go. At my first day I socialized, and I spend my time there socializing with some of the nicest people I’d ever met and some first days had been spent going over the company's systems and policies, which sets the tone for how my work will be completed.

So, it is true—first impressions are almost always the correct ones.

Little Debbie Can Suck It

My blog pal, the Taoist Biker, got me thinking about childhood. His wife brought home some Little Debbie snack cakes, and TB was instantly returned to the time when he was young and his mom used to bring Little Debbie home to play. Then I got to thinking about the things my mom used to make or bring home when I was a kid. It really is amazing how the taste, the smells, the textures bring me back to being a little kid.

My Mom, as I may have mentioned, emigrated to the US from Poland in 1961. She used to tell me stories about growing up on a farm in post-war Poland. She told me stories about how she and her classmates at school would line up to get a daily dose of fish oil when meat was scarce. She milked the cows, she chopped the wood (and subsequently took the butt end of the axe to her own forehead at age 9), and she harvested the crops with her brothers and sisters. My grandfather would store meat in snowmen in the winter because there was no refrigeration in their home.

Usually she would tell these stories when I complained about the lack of Hostess, Little Debbie and Oscar Meyer products in the house. My cousins had these foods, but we didn’t often have them in our house. The boys who lived next door snacked on Slim Jims while we snacked on homemade kielbasa that was smoked in my Grandfather’s basement smokehouse. Hot dogs were bought from the deli case, burgers were made of ground beef and contained hunks of onion instead of the preformed burger patties, and we didn’t eat Oscar Meyer bologna, we ate Gem Polish Loaf from the deli case instead. Of course Mom would tell me how they didn’t have a deli in Poland, and how I should be glad I wasn’t slaughtering the cow, roasting it and cutting it up myself just to have a sandwich.

When I was in kindergarten Mom brought in paczki (pronounced PUNCH-key) for my birthday. Paczki are the Polish equivalent to the donut, only it’s spherical, is filled with marmalade, and weighs about a metric ton when ingested and mixed with saliva. Most of the other moms at Warehouse Point School would bring in clever looking cupcakes baked into an ice cream cone, or sugar cookies cut into this shape or that depending on the season. Of course, kindergarten me was completely mortified at the mound of paczki she brought in. She carried them in a gigantic white enamel bowl that she would use to kneed dough. This bowl was something you’d see on the set of M*A*S*H and the enamel was faded from overuse. The pile of paczki was barely contained by this bowl, so she covered the pile with a dish towel to keep any paczki with ideas of escape from hopping out, rolling down the hall and out the doors to the freedom of the playground. Just the week before Mom brought in the paczki, Mrs. Sheldon brought in her sugar cookies, in the shape of letters of the first name of every kid in the class. I ate my “B” shaped sugar cookies, which were brought in on a platter covered in saran wrap and not in a stainless steel bowl covered in a towel. Yet, my Mom proudly held out this bowl, proclaiming that the paczki would be the best thing Mrs. Burg’s kindergarten class would ever eat.

There are certain things that instantly bring back memories of my Mom when I was a little kid. The smell of cinnamon bread brings me back to when Mom would bake it from scratch, and the loaves cooled lined up on the counter. Her cinnamon bread was such a treat, and she would even make it for me when I’d go home from college for the weekend. I’ve since made cinnamon bread, and am instantly reminded of Mom kneeding dough, and giving me little lumps of it to play with.

A few summers ago one of my customers at the dive shop, a Polish man, brought me some blueberry pierogi (pyeh-RUG-ee), which are kind of like ravioli, but are half-moon shaped. That night I ate them and tears streamed down my cheeks as I remembered Mom making my favorite, blueberry pierogi, on a summer day. The chewiness of the dough, the tartness and sweetness of the blueberry, the sour cream and sugar I mixed and put on top melting in the warmth of the pierogi, stained purple from the hot blueberry filling oozing out from where I just cut into the dough with the side of my fork. Blueberry pierogi aren’t just a food, they are an experience to be had—especially when your mom makes them because she knows they are your favorite. I ate the pierogi that some other Polish mother made and I was instantly transported to childhood, when Mom said “If you go outside and pick the blueberries, I will make you pierogi tonight.” And I grabbed the colander and raced out to our bushes and sat in the sun frantically plucking the berries off the bush, an equal number of berries landing on the bowl as were stuffed into my mouth.

Little Debbie and Oscar Meyer still are not staples in my home. I tried a Little Debbie snack cake not long ago and was largely unsatisfied with it as I felt like all I could taste were the chemicals that Debbie uses to make her cakes last for years on the shelves. But I have blueberry bushes that I cannot wait to pick this summer, and my sisters have Mom’s pierogi recipe.

And now that I think about it, now I would give up all the “B” shaped sugar cookies in the world for one of Mom’s paczki.

Bullet Dodged

I am a Google stalker. I admit it. I look up the names of people I know, people I used to know, co-workers, relatives and anyone I have come into contact with to see what they’re up to online. Occasionally an old boyfriend will cross my mind, so I’ll Google him to see if there’s anything interesting about him (interesting meaning that his life took a serious downturn since he dumped me oh so many years ago.)

This morning I was eating breakfast and goofing around on Google, trying to come up with a name of someone to Google stalk. The name of a guy I dated for a few weeks when I first moved to Boston crossed my mind. I met him at a bar when I’d lived in the Boston area for all of five minutes. I was 22; he was 23 and impossibly handsome. We quickly began to spend all of our free time together, and I was instantly head over heels. After a few weeks of having a great time together, he broke up with me claiming that he needs some space to work out some issues in his life. We decided to be friends, which of course was agony for me because I wanted to be more than friends. But I was a good sport, and I went along with this “just friends” nonsense. One night he came over to my apartment and we cooked dinner together. Over the meal he proceeded to tell me, in excruciating detail about a woman he’d begun to sleep with—you know, because that’s what friends do to people who want to be more than friends over dinner. I decided at that moment that he could be more of a casual acquaintance than friend, after I’d grinned through dinner. I didn’t call him all week, and felt this heaviness descend on me. I couldn’t function as his friend, and my co-workers were so sick of hearing about it.

The following Saturday morning I got a box that he’d mailed me that contained a CD that he bought for me and book he’d been dying for me to read. I looked around my apartment and saw similar gifts and a few articles of clothing he’d left at my place. I scooped all of them up, tossed them into my car and high-tailed it to his apartment. I burst into the front door, didn’t bother with pleasantries with the roommates, barreled into his bedroom and dumped the armload of stuff onto his bed with a disgruntled “I can’t be friends with you. I want to be more than friends, and you want me to be your friend. This isn’t working for me,” and I turned on my heel and walked out.

He chased me down the stairs, as I carefully navigated them because my knees were shaking so hard I thought for sure I’d fall down the stairs and make a complete fool of myself—which didn’t make for a quick and dramatic getaway in which I could look cool.

“Beej, wait! Would you please just talk to me?” he called after me. I ignored him and focused all my attention to the bottom of the stairs and ran through the front door of his apartment building, trying hard not to cry and to control my rubbery knees. He managed to catch me by the shoulder, spun me around and he hugged me. He told me how much he valued our friendship, while I held up my hands between us and told him that I didn’t want to be just friends. I wriggled free of his grasp and headed for my car.

I got into my car and drove off toward home, taking deep breaths to calm my racing heart and still shaking knees. I thought for sure I’d feel entirely heartbroken and unable to continue existing. But no, actually a sense of relief came over me, with a surge of confidence. I knew my life would be great without him; after all it was great before I knew him so it only stands to reason that it would continue to be great after I knew him. And I was right. My life has been great without him; even greater than I imagined as I drove home that Saturday afternoon. I have an awesome husband, whose hair glows red in the sun and who makes sure that everything I could possibly want out of life is brought to me. He makes me laugh every single day, and makes sure I know I am loved.

It’s been almost 12 years since that fateful Saturday when I went to this guy’s apartment to return his things, and it’s been 10 years since I’ve actually seen him. He tried to remain friends with me for a few years, and would occasionally invite me to a party over email. I politely declined every invitation and asked “So, how are you?” He would write back about some “meaningless” relationship he was in (his word, not mine) and basically how he wasn’t really doing much with his life. He stopped emailing me invitations once when he’d asked me “Enough about me, how are you?” I wrote back, “Let’s see, I am engaged, just started graduate school and am restoring a 41’ sailboat. Life is awesome.”

I haven’t thought about him in ages, except for this morning when I Googled him and saw a picture of him on a web page. In the last 12 years this impossibly handsome guy has taken on a John Belushi on the morning after kind of a look.

I cannot imagine how different life would be had that relationship worked out so many years ago. As much as I hated hearing “Everything happens for a reason,” from my friends at the time, it really is true. Everything does happen for a reason.

I consider it a bullet dodged.

Two More Days

We move into the new house in two more days, this coming Friday, and then we close on the old house on Monday. We’re almost done packing and now we need to do things like replace the smoke detectors, and get the house inspected by the fire inspector tomorrow.

We’re excited, but it’s also a bit emotional for us, as we’ve spent the last few days reminiscing about living here.

The day we moved in here, early December 2001, was a weirdly warm day for December. I think it was close to the 70’s for that week, which is very rare for December in Rhode Island, and I was walking around in a short sleeve shirt that whole time.

At the home inspection the inspector had pointed out that the latch on the guest bedroom door was installed backwards. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, and instantly forgot he pointed it out the moment he said it. The night we closed on the house we bought an air mattress and set it up in the vacant living room. We opened up every window in the house, because it was so warm out, and listened to the ducks and geese honking and quacking in the cove as we blissfully fell asleep.

Then in the middle of the night a door opened. We opened our eyes, and sat there silently listening.

“Are they back? Did they forget something?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Todd answered.

WHAM! The open door slammed shut. We sat bolt upright in bed, pulling the covers to our necks.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, go check it out!” I nudged him out of bed.

“Me?”

“Yes you! You’re the boy! It’s your job to check these things out!”

“Some feminist you turned out to be…”

“Just GO!”

We got up and turned on the lights, we walked through the house. Of course the prior owners didn’t come back to get something they’d forgotten. Nobody had entered the house. We wandered the house trying to figure out which of the locked external doors had opened, of course none of them had.

Then my mind wandered back to the home inspector, pointing out the latch on the guest bedroom door.

“Oh! I know what it is! Look!” I pointed to the latch on the door and remembered that the home inspector said that the door wouldn’t close properly because the latch was on backwards. Because we had every window open in the house, a draft must have come through the house and pushed the door open, then sucked it shut again.

I wonder what weird noises the new house will make. I can’t wait to find out.

El Bano Esta Aqui*

*The bathroom is over here

Speaking of South Padre Island... Augs’s comment on my “Surf’s Up” post reminded me of a story from when Todd and I went to South Padre Island. South Padre is located at the southern most end of the Texas coast, almost in Mexico. We spent half a week there on the Texas leg of our honeymoon, and drove there from San Antonio.

The first evening in South Padre we went horse back riding on the beach. This is something he and I had never done together—we both had been a few times in the past. But it’s not something we did very often. I think we can each count on one hand the number of times we ever went horse back riding. It’s safe to say that we are novice horse riders. So, when we had the chance to ride horses on a beach in Texas, we jumped at the opportunity.

We arrived at the hotel close to 5 o’clock, and on a whim called a horse barn on the island. They were leaving on the sunset ride in 15 minutes or so, we raced to the barn and were saddled into the last two horses they had available. My horse was great; he was very responsive and good natured. Todd’s horse, however, was a barely broken in stallion. The moment Todd sat on this horse, the horse turned his head and bared his teeth at Todd. At that point Todd knew he was in for a memorable ride. We had just begun the ride when his horse harassed the matriarchal horse that was leading the pack. The matriarch ended up kicking Todd’s horse square in the chest, and Todd and the horse went down. They were both lying on the sand when his horse turned and looked at Todd as if to say “What the hell was that all about? You believe that chick?” Todd said to him “Don’t look at me, pal, you’re the one who bugged the momma horse. You’re on your own.”

My horse behaved perfectly. Todd’s horse didn’t respond to any of Todd’s commands. I enjoyed the sunset over the beach. Todd fumbled on the horse’s back, barely holding on as he pestered the other horses, refused to move, went too fast and all around wasn’t paying the slightest attention to Todd’s commands.

After the ride we went to a Mexican joint for dinner. (Augs, I don’t know if this is the place you mentioned in your comment, I cannot remember the name. If it’s off South Padre Island, then we definitely didn’t go there.) We ordered our drinks, and decided to head to the bathrooms to wash our hands. I headed for the door labeled “Banos” while Todd headed for the door labeled “Restrooms.” At the time I wasn’t sure why these two doors that were leading to the bathrooms were close to each other, and didn’t think anything of it. I opened my door, and jumped as Todd opened his. The door to the “Restrooms” was a fake door. There was a brick wall behind the door, and a loud alarm rang out as soon as he opened the door. The lamp above the door flickered on and off, and the patrons in the bar began to hoot, holler and cheer loudly. We laughed at how Todd was suckered into going to the restroom instead of the bano, and walked into the door leading to the Banos.

We had a wonderful time on South Padre—the water was heavenly warm, we saw a naked fisherman in the water wielding his… um… pole, we rode jet skis and saw dolphins splashing in our wake. But the look of surprise on Todd’s face, and the jump and screech that escaped my lips when he opened the door to the restroom definitely made South Padre Island memorable.

About a Boy

I had a crush on a boy named Mike during my freshman year of high school. It was a very embarrassing crush, as everyone in my small high school knew about it. (To give you an idea of how small my school was, I graduated with 71 people. Everyone knew every one at East Windsor High.) During this crush on Mike I channeled my inner puppy-dog and hung on his every word. Mike, understandably, avoided me like the plague and eventually I got over my crush.

I began to date one of Mike’s friends, Karl, my sophomore year. We hung out with Mike on occasion, and he became a friend who hovered on the edge of my circle of friends. My perception of Mike changed from object of affection to a cool guy to hang out with. He was intelligent, funny, and had this insanely high level of energy that he could just barely contain.

Half way through junior year Karl and I broke up. The summer after junior year I began to hang out with Mike’s older brother Leon. I ended up dating Leon for my entire senior year, and I hung out with Mike again just because I was Leon’s girlfriend. I went off to college and my relationship with Leon disintegrated with my wanting to explore my life on campus without having a boyfriend at home. I didn’t think about Mike or Leon very much for the years I was in college. Occasionally in the summer I’d bump into either of them when I was home for breaks, but that was just about it.

I graduated college, and Leon and I started up again while I was living at home that summer. I moved to the Boston area, and our boyfriend/girlfriend relationship became that of distant friends. Every now and then we’d call or email to say hi, but that’s it. I think the last time I ever saw Mike was in 1996. I think. At one point Leon had told me that Mike was diagnosed with cancer, but that his energy was carrying him through the grueling chemotherapy, and he ended up in remission. At another point he told me how Mike had moved to the Fort Lauderdale area, and had gotten into kite-boarding.

There was a period of several years where Leon and I didn’t talk. I admit I didn’t think of him or of Mike very much at all in those years. Then last year I heard that Mike had died of cancer. I looked up Leon’s address and sent him a card, and put my phone number in the card in case he wanted to talk about it. He called a few days later, just before Thanksgiving, and we got caught up and talked about Mike.

Since then I haven’t really thought about Mike at all. In March Todd and I went to dive in Fort Lauderdale and we watched the kite boarders from the dive boat, and I wondered if any of them knew Mike. But it’s not like I am sitting here missing Mike. How could I possibly miss him when I haven’t seen him in over 10 years?

Every so often Leon will shoot me an email, and I’ll respond. Last week, the day before Thanksgiving Leon sent me a link for a blog on which one of Mike’s friends wrote in memory of Mike. It was a beautiful entry, and featured pictures of Mike goofing around. The kind of pictures that you look at and wonder how someone with that level of energy could be gone. It was nice to see his face, and I can only imagine how bittersweet it was for Leon to see that entry. To see the wonderful words written about his brother, yet the heartbreak he must be feeling over missing him especially at this time of year. I wrote back, and still didn’t think all that much about Mike.

I woke up at 4 this morning from a dream. I dreamt I was having Thanksgiving dinner with Leon and his parents at their house in our home town. In the dream Mrs. Q, Leon’s mom, asked me to get something from Mike’s room, which they’d left untouched in the dream. I walked into Mike’s room and it smelled like him. I looked around at the room, at his clothes strewn all over the place and smelled the smell of Mike. I haven’t ever really been that close to Mike that I would know what he smelled like. I think I only ever hugged him once or twice. But in that dream I could smell Mike. How could I possibly remember how he smelled when I haven’t seen him in over 10 years and never really stuck my nose next to him and smelled him? It was probably one of those things where in the dream it’s understood that something is one way, but it really doesn’t look that way. Maybe it was understood that it smelled like Mike but it really didn’t. I went back to the dining room table and saw that Mrs. Q was using the bass drum from Mike’s drum set as a side table to hold some of the food, as a way to include Mike in the meal, I guess. How weird is it to have someone I haven’t thought about in over a decade permeate my dream like that?

I woke up from the dream and was lying awake thinking about Leon. This time of year is so hard when you lose a family member. The first Christmas after my mom died I was a sobbing mess straining myself not to cry all day. Each year I am less and less the sobbing mess, and have gotten to the point where I won’t cry at Christmas anymore. I can only hope that Leon and his family will get to that point too.

Magenta on George Street

I just finished an online creative writing class. I've never taken an online class, and it was interesting to get my work reviewed without actually speaking to the professor in person, and not get a paper handed back to me with writing in the margins and a grade on it. The class was interesting, and it forced me to be aware of certain things about my writing as well.

I am posting my final essay here for you all to see. Enjoy.

:::

I walked to Circular Quay to pick up a milk crate from behind the snack kiosk. Wearing my flannel shirt, torn jeans, and my magenta dyed hair, and my guitar in a cardboard box tucked under my arm. My straw bag slung over my left shoulder, with a canvas hat inside along with the only key I needed that year I lived outside of Sydney, Australia.

I set the crate down in front of the Duty Free shop on George Street, under an overhang that not only kept out the rain but also amplified my voice. I set up shop by tossing the hat onto the sidewalk, and and dropping a handful of change into it. I took the guitar out, tuned it and began to play. My voice carried up George Street, and people came out of the bars and tossed coins into my hat as they walked from one bar to the next. Some of the people passing by gathered around to listen to me play. For those times I saved Australian classics like “Beds are Burning" by Midnight Oil, or popular songs by bands like U2, so that the crowd could sing along. As the night wore on, the people wandering along George Street were more and more drunk, and looser with the change in their pockets. A man walked up and set a fifty dollar bill in among the change.

I stopped playing, mid-strum, “That is way too much money, I cannot accept that.” I bent down to hand it back to him.

“He’s a millionaire, it means nothing to him,” another man whispered into my ear. I agreed to accept the money in exchange for a song; they listened then walked back the way they came. I tucked the fifty into my pocket, smiling at my luck when not even a half hour later, the millionaire came back.

“I have a fifty dollar bet with my friends that you won’t come out with us,” he said, smiling.

“Look pal, I don’t even know you. Buzz off,” I shot back, prepared to give the fifty back, wondering what expectation was attached to fifty dollars.

“Come on, go to Jackson’s with us,” he cajoled. “You can always leave if it gets weird.”

I shrugged my shoulders and thought, “What have I got to lose. He’s right. If it gets weird I can leave. It’s a public place.” I scooped up my hat, which was half filled with change by now. There's even a key in there that some drunk probably didn't realize they'd tossed in. We walked to the snack kiosk to put the crate away, then we walked to Jackson’s which was a block away from Circular Quay. We walked into the bar, and a group of men cheered for him. One of them opened his wallet and handed the millionaire a $50 bill.

The millionaire tried to give me the fifty, and I refused it. He tried to stuff it into my bag, and I told him I didn’t want it. If I was wondering what his expectation was for $50, now what would it be for $100. I refused the other fifty, and he finally relented and shoved it into his pocket.

“Are you hungry?” he asked me after I’d finished my beer. Across George Street was the Regency Hotel, with its five star restaurant just off the lobby. We walked through the lobby toward the restaurant; the concierge looked me up and down and visibly grimaced at my attire. We sat down at a table by the window, and the millionaire ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir. We spent the next few hours eating, drinking the wine, talking. It turns out the millionaire is chairman of the board on a few banks in Australia and New Zealand. Just that day he’d closed a deal with the government of China that he seemed to be very happy about. I figured it wasn’t polite to ask specific questions about the deal, but I was under the impression that the deal would make him an even richer man.

We finished dinner, and drank the whole bottle of wine. I hate wine, but I politely drank a glass while he drank the rest, downing several glasses of water to kill the taste of wine in my mouth.

“So, wanna go to a club?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said checking my watch. The last bus for home left the QVB at 3:30 am. It was just after 1 AM.

“Great, let’s ditch that guitar, my room’s upstairs.” The thought of going to his room didn’t bother me, though I spotted the fire stairs when the elevator landed on his floor. The only thing remotely resembling a weapon was the key in my bag, which I decided I could slip between my fingers and puncture his skin with it if I needed to punch him.

We went into the room; he sat on his bed and I stayed between him and the door. He asked me to play for him. I finger-picked a Suzanne Vega song, and sang softly so I wouldn’t wake up the neighbors. He dozed off. I looked at my watch, it was nearing 2, and I would have to walk several blocks to the QVB the 2:20 bus, or else I’d be stuck sitting at the stop until 3:30. I began to write him a note, thanking him for dinner, and then I decided that a note wasn’t going to suffice.

“JJ,” I said shaking his shoulder, “I have to go now. I have to catch my bus. Thank you for a lovely evening.” I kissed him on the cheek.

“Huh?” he said groggily, “Wait, let me call my driver, he’ll take you.”

“No, that’s OK. I always find my own way home. Thank you.” I closed the door to his room, pushed the button labeled “Lobby” in the elevator. I walked past the sneering concierge, and onto George Street.

...Take One Down, Pass it Around, 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall...

Saturday night I went to McKinley’s pub for their Halloween party. I dressed as Marge Simpson, and made my costume myself. I have pictures on my digital camera, but do not have a way to get them off the camera so I can show you all. We packed our card reader when we packed up the house to get it ready to sell, so I need to figure out how to get the pictures off. I think the Walgreens on the corner has some system that will help me out with that, or I’ll send the card with Todd to work tomorrow, and maybe he’ll have something there that can help me out. I can’t wait to show you the costume that won me second prize at the bar. (Though the jokers who won first didn’t really have costumes. He was wearing a wife beater, suspenders and a hat, she was wearing a low cut top, a short skirt. I asked them what they were supposed to be and they said that they were dressed like 1930’s people. I don’t think I’ve seen pictures of anyone dressed as Britney in the 1930’s. Yeah, I was robbed. Robbed!!)

While I was at the bar I made a new friend and we hung out all night watching the game and talking about life, relationships, marriage, kids, etc. He’s in our circle of friends but I’ve never spent an entire evening talking to him before, and it was so much fun.

We were talking about past drinking experiences, and I told him about the time when I was 15 and I got busted for drinking. I didn’t drink during high school, only this one time. I was an athlete and I was on the whole my-body-is-my-temple thing. My brothers and sisters drank in high school, and I remember seeing them come home after parties and sneaking to their rooms so my parents wouldn’t notice. I never got drunk in high school, and think I was a pretty good kid--other than the random acts of petty vandalism I committed.

This one time I drank in high school was with my boyfriend, Karl. Karl had a few friends named Charlie and Brian, and the 4 of us used to hang out often. One night Charlie had scored a bottle of vodka and we all decided we’d go into the woods to drink it. I grew up in a small town in Connecticut located between Hartford, CT and Springfield, MA. It was common for teens to go out into the woods or into the tobacco fields to party.

On that Saturday night Charlie told his parents we were going to Brian’s. I told my parents we were going to Charlie’s. Brian told his dad we were going to Charlie’s, and Karl told his parents we were going bowling. Instead Charlie drove us to a secluded spot in the woods he knew, and the boys lit a campfire. We mixed the vodka with some juice, and I think I had maybe a cup and a half, and then Karl and I just hung out by the fire. Charlie barely had any because he was driving, and Brian had the most and was trashed. We left the spot in the woods and drove around town before I had to be home for my 10 o’clock curfew. The boys dropped me off, and Brian was out of his gourd by then.

Fast forward to Sunday night, the phone rang and it was Brian’s dad asking for my mom. I called out to Mom, and waited for her to pick up the phone. Before I got the chance to hang up, I heard Brian’s dad ask my mom if I hung up. She said that she thought I did, so at that point it would have been too obvious if I hung up. I stayed on the line and listened to Brian's dad tell Mom all about our wild Saturday night. Apparently when he got home from being away for the weekend Brian was still sick from Saturday night. He was about to take Brian to the emergency room because he was afraid that Brian had food poisoning. It was at that point that Brian confessed about the night before. Brian’s dad felt it was his duty to call my parents, Karl’s parents and Charlie’s parents to fill them in.

I can’t remember how I was ever punished for that. My parents weren’t big on grounding as a punishment because I think that they were too busy to keep track of what 5 children were grounded for at any given moment. The part of the punishment I do remember was having to talk about why I went into the woods with 3 boys and a bottle of vodka. I think that they were more concerned about me being in a secluded spot with 3 boys and alcohol and them getting me drunk and having their way with me. But they were my friends, and they were all skinny cross-country runners. I could have taken them.

But how do you answer that question as a 15 year old? “Why did you go into the woods and drink with 3 boys?” I think I answered the question by asking my parents why they drank, and they told me that wasn’t the point. They were old enough, and I wasn’t. They persisted with the why question, and I didn’t really have an answer. “For fun” wasn’t a good enough answer either, because they pointed out that there are a zillion things that we could have done for fun.

After that night, drinking in high school didn’t interest me too much. I guess I didn’t really see the point, and I wanted to be healthier because I loved to play sports. I didn’t have another drink until I was 20 and in college. Charlie, Brian and Karl would still drink on occasion, and I passed and stuck with something non-alcoholic.

So, now I open up the floor to my commenters. Tell me about the first time you went out drinking.

Field Hockey Dreams

I used to play field hockey when I was in junior high, high school and for 2 years in college. I was a goalie, and like to think I was good at it. In seventh grade my team was not only undefeated but also un-scored upon. In high school my team went to the state tournament 3 times, 2 of which I was the only goalie for the whole season.

I remember when I agreed to be the goalie. Coach Lap, who was my coach in sixth grade, asked who wanted to be the goalie. I raised my hand, and she tossed me the gear. I went home, excited, to tell my Mom.

“Guess what? I’m the goalie!”

“What?” Mom asked. “Don’t you think that’s kind of dangerous?”

“Come on, Mom, I am covered head to toe in padding. I’ll be fine.”

I was covered head to toe in padding, but the thinnest part was on my thighs, which were always covered in bruises from taking shots against them every fall. My senior year of college was the worst, when I didn’t have adequate thigh protection. I wore my bruises proudly, as I was the bad-ass goalie.

I loved the sport when I played in high school, but actually hated my teammates and coach. My love for the sport kept me playing, but my hate for most of the girls on the team kept me sitting alone on the bus to away games without talking all that much.

My sophomore year of college I decided to play again. My freshman year I had backed out at the last minute because I was concerned with having enough time to study—I had just become a DJ on the campus radio station and I had a boyfriend too. Sophomore year I joined the team, and met some of the nicest women I’d ever met. They weren’t at all like the girls I played with in high school, who were also those mean cool girls that you hear about in high schools. My love for the sport extended to actually enjoying spending time with my teammates as well, as we partied all over campus after games. The sport was fun for me again and I wish I could find a league in Rhode Island and play again.

Ever since that first fall with I was in sixth grade, I have had dreams about playing field hockey. The dream is always the same. I am standing in the goal cage, and the ball is coming at my non-stick side—my left. In the dream I kick my left leg out to stop the ball against my shin-guard. In my bed my left leg actually kicks one frantic time, to stop the ball in my dreams. Whoever happens to be in bed with me inevitably ends up with a bruise in his shin as a result of this dream.

I had the dream the other night. I haven’t had it in a few years, because the last time I actually played was 1995. It was a beautiful dream, and I woke up smiling. Now off to scour the Internet to see if I can find a local league to play on.

CT Canoe Trip, Part 9

Just to recap: dog capsized canoe, snow warning in the mountains, we decided to end the trip because our clothing was still wet, and there was frost on the ground in the morning when we woke up.

We pulled the canoe out in Newbury, VT, which is 5 miles as the crow flies from our starting point.

“Looks like we’re about 5 miles from the car, how are we going to get to there?” Todd asked.

“Well, I am the jogger of the family, I can walk there. It should take me about an hour to get there.”

“Sounds good,” said Todd. I made myself a sandwich, packed a water bottle, and Todd handed me a knife in case somebody tried to pick me up and get fresh with me.

I was about to leave when a man came walking up the boat ramp, “That your canoe?” We said it was.

“Well, then you’re gonna have to move it, because I need to get my boat up the ramp.” We went back down the ramp, and moved the canoe aside. The man backed his truck down the ramp, and we had recognized the truck. This was the man who was trying to get his boat up the bank, unsuccessfully.

“Hey, we know you! You were back there trying to get your boat up the bank,” Todd said.

“Oh, were you guys in the canoe? Yeah, thanks for stopping to see if I needed any help,” the man barked back.

“Sorry, we didn’t realize you needed help. You had 2 other people with you, it looked like you had it under control,” I protested.

“Those two people were elderly, they weren’t any help to me at all,” the man grumbled.

Todd and I walked back up the ramp, and I said to him “So, now I guess asking him for a ride to the car would be a bad idea, huh?”

CT River Canoe Trip Part 8

We woke up to frost on the grass, and fog in the air. We went back to sleep.

When we woke up again, the fog had burned off a bit, and the sun came out. I rearranged the clothes on the line, to get them to dry in the sun for the morning. Todd made breakfast.

We listened to the radio, read, hung out and watched the clothes dry. After a few hours we were able to pack everything up into the canoe, and get back on the water again.

This day closely mirrored my idyllic vision of canoeing with the dogs. Nemo dozed at my feet, and Griffen napped at Todd’s. The sun was out. The river at this point is one oxbow after another, so we spent the day zigzagging down the river. Birds chirped, water lapped the canoe, Todd and I talked and joked. Beautiful. Perfect.

We had figured out later that with all the oxbows in the river we’d canoed 20 miles that way. But if we drove that distance on the nearby highway, it was actually about 5 highway miles.

Todd and I had decided that we were nervous about the snow forecast, as we didn’t bring any winter gear. We would need to end the trip that day. Never mind the fact that our clothing was still damp. Todd had seen in the guidebook a place to pull out that was about 5 miles away from Wells River, by the road, not by the river.

We canoed on. We saw a pair of kayakers on the river. We saw a river guide trying to get his boat up the bank, on to the trailer. We watched from the river as the guide and 2 other people were working to pull this boat out.

We trudged on to Newbury, where we would be pulling out. We beached the canoe on the boat launch, leashed the dogs and walked up the hill to access the situation.

Looking at the map, Todd said "OK, we're 5 miles away, and one of us is going to have to get the car on foot."

"OK, I'll go," I said.

To be continued.