Trust in me when I say

I have been visiting lately with a friend who is in hospice, dying of cancer. And before you for one second think that I am a good person for doing this, let me say that I am doing it entirely for selfish reasons.

My friend is the mom of a large family, six kids, a couple of whom I went to high school with, that she raised largely on her own. That family meant a lot to me growing up - one boy was my best friend, another was one of my first crushes. The oldest girl took me to New York City for the first time. They lived four doors up from us. And the household was full of the usual Eight Is Enough contumaciousness - somebody was always getting married, or living in sin, or getting in trouble, or, whatever, chasing a pet around or something. None of that shit ever happened at my house. At my house, nobody ever even burned the toast.

So their house was, in a way, real life to me. And their mom was always - always - busy.

Now that her children, my contemporaries, are grown, successful, gone away, there has been space there. She joined the garden club and the sewing group, both of which my mom is a member of, so I've gotten occasional news. But still there was rarely time when I was in the neighborhood and not busy with some scheduled thing.

And then she got cancer. Years ago now. It's completely unfair, as cancer always is, but, I don't know, more so in her case. Because she was a nurse, because she cared for other people all her life, because she entered the Peace Corps as a grandmother, because her greatest vice was peanut butter and pickle relish sandwiches. It's just unfair, ok?

She has dealt with her illness in the same way that she dealt with all the everyday catastrophes attendant with having six children - philosophically, with perspective and candor and unusual calm. This summer, she entered a hospice program that allowed her to live at home, get her meds, have a wheelchair. She managed pretty well, but this autumn she began to fail. That's when I started coming around once a week.

During my visits, we just hung out. I had her to myself - left my boys with my parents for the afternoon and evening, which has been wonderful in and of itself. I told her funny stories about the kids and about the library. I knitted a scarf for my mom. She got me up to date on her kids, all of whom I had lost touch with. That perspective of hers was awe-inspiring. When I fretted about a kid, or about anything else, she was sympathetic and always had interesting suggestions, but mostly reminded me that worrying wasn't going to help. I found we thought the same way about a lot of things - we gave people the benefit of the doubt right up until the same point. And then - forget it!

More than once, when we talked about her kids, I expressed my admiration at the way they leapt to each other's aid without hesitation, ditched their jobs and lives to jet home when she needed them. "Six!" I would say, "Six kids, and they all grew up generous and good, and also funny and smart! And good-looking!" She laughed and admitted she had no idea what she'd done right.

I have such anxiety about my kids. They were born perfect, and they are smart and polite and beautiful now. I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since the Apgar score came back. Probably ever since I got pregnant. I told her that one time and she shook her head. She said she couldn't help feeling that all their good luck had finally turned - we had just learned that her youngest daughter's husband had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer himself. I said, "You know that's a fallacy - there's no sum total of misery in our lives and we'll get it sooner or later - right?"

She said she knew that. But it's hard not to believe it sometimes.

I love you, Bobbi. I hope I am half the mother you have been.

SNOWPOCALYPSE 2010

I set up my tripod in the dining room and took pictures of the snow as it fell, though eventually I had to pull back - the entire frame was white! Music is "Hotel Incidental Music" by Usha Khanna.

Yeah, you know her

This coat is too big for The Chairman, too.

Reaching for a grocery bag in the van the other day, I felt a popping in my shoulder. "Crap," I thought. Just one more seam giving way in the ancient cashmere topcoat that is my life. Sigh.

Just kidding. I'm in a pretty good mood, actually. That coat, though. Howza. It's barely even a coat anymore. If that coat went to the Goodwill, they would reject it. If that coat approached you and tried to hand you a flyer, you would hold your breath, avert your eyes, and hurry away.

I inherited it from my grandfather when he died in the 1980's, and he had gotten it as a hand-me-down from his rich brother-in-law. I wore it in high school. I wore it through 6 miserable, icy Cleveland winters during college. I wore it walking to the subway to go to work in Manhattan. It has hung on hooks all across this country, been thrown over beds at hundreds of parties, and it has somehow not gotten lost at the kind of rock and roll shows where there isn't a coatroom so much as just like a pile in the corner.

The lining is in pieces. The cuffs are frayed through. The buttons are on with cinnamon dental floss. But it's 100% cashmere, and in cold weather like this it's the only thing I own that is generous enough to wear over a sweater (three sweaters). Its chamois pockets are intact, and the lining, where it exists, is thick satin. It is soft like a blanket, comes down past my knees, and is both light in weight and warm as love.

But I do look homeless in it.

I'm not what you might call a shopper. I keep stuff forever. I don't wear makeup, I wear jeans every day, and if I'm going to buy anything but striped long-sleeve t-shirts, I probably need a second opinion. My goals are:

1. be comfortable
2. don't look stupid

And I have found that the simpler I keep it, the less likely I am to look stupid. Even my rings are plain bands. Used to be worse. Used to be, I wore no things that had buttons or zippers. Seriously. I was like 120 pounds and living in NYC and I was wearing dumpy cotton knits 24/7. Those were my Carrie years, damn it! Why was I not in a sequined mermaid gown and a cowboy hat on the subway drinking coffee from a paper cup at 8am every day?

On the other hand.

On the other hand, I do have needs. They are somewhat unpredictable, extremely specific, and absolutely imperative. That's why I still have that damn coat, for example. Have I tried to replace it? Of course! But there is no coat that fits my specifications for less than A THOUSAND DOLLARS.

And I have been down this road before. It is a tortuous path. One iteration of this story started in Copenhagen, on the pedestrian shopping street Strøget, in a tiny glove shop, Randers Handskefabrik. Gloves? Well, sure, I could use a pair of gloves - a pair that match, for one thing, and which aren't repaired with cinnamon dental floss (my heavy-duty thread of choice for many years).

Well. In that glove shop, I learned what gloves are. Turns out, matching? is just the beginning! They had gloves in all lengths and all colors, and the leather was light as air and soft as something you'd have to pay a lot for in Thailand. The lady brought out a special pillow to prop my elbow on when she slid a pair of long magenta gloves onto my hand. Wow. But, after wrestling a while with long division in my head, I concluded that those gloves cost $175, and I didn't buy them.

But then I went ten years without gloves. I have this idiotic, vaguely worded, quasi-environmentalist mental prohibition against buying a thing when a preferable version of that thing is known to me. It goes like, "Why buy shitty Target gloves that will eventually end up populating the landfills of this great nation, when I could buy those gorgeous magenta gloves that I would love forever and never allow harm to befall and which would be a heirloom for future generations?"

But those gloves were not to be found in the U.S. And similar gloves were similarly expensive. Why buy two gloves when you'll have to sacrifice an arm and a leg to pay for them? That's a little joke. Cough.

So, two years ago, I shook my head, called myself an idiot, went up to New York, and bought a pair of gloves at Sermoneta. They're not magenta, but they're awful soft, and they didn't cost $300, which is what Randers gloves cost now.

Not all such searches are so ridiculous. For many years, I needed a mariachi suit. That's where an eBay saved search comes in handy, because no way was I going to have a gala suit custom made. Every time anything mariachi came up on eBay, I got a little email, and sooner or later...


your neighborhood librarian jingles when she walks

Also, somewhere along the line I concluded that if I were to own rain boots, they would be red knee-high Hunter boots like the Queen wears. Except hers are green, and she probably gets comped them. I, of course, was unwilling to pay full price for them, and so I went, you know, all my life without rain boots. Luckily, the Plow & Hearth outlet eventually had a pair for about a third of what they usually cost, so during my remaining years, I can walk through deep mud with dry feet. Also, they are good for playing ringmaster.

I woke up one day this autumn and decided that, after 8 years of not wearing a watch, I needed a solar powered atomic digital watch. No batteries to fool with, and as long as Fort Collins, Colorado is safe, it will always display the correct time. And I needed a cloth band, not a resin one. But how easy was that? Twenty minutes on Amazon and that was figured out.

What the hell would I do if nobody had invented the Internet? I'd be barefoot and cold and naked and I wouldn't know what time it is, that's what.

Some things I learn about by chance. I had no idea I needed a pea coat until I saw one hanging on a fence at a stoop sale in Brooklyn, and it suddenly became obvious that the perfect pea coat was an official New York Fire Department dress coat, made in 1953 for, possibly, the skinniest firefighter ever. But you can't wear a sweater under it.

I know the perfect mid-height round-toed biker boots, but they're discontinued, and my last pair was ruined by our cats.



Damned cats.

I know the puffy coat I want - Bodie wears it in Season Two of The Wire. Now all I have to do is find it. You know, I love the costumers for that series. The clothes they picked for the drug dealers telegraph status and situation so precisely, and are exactly what the Baltimore corner boys were wearing at the time - with one exception. My sisters on The Wire just could not bring themselves to put their actors in pants that sagged past the waist. They just wouldn't go there, and I don't blame them. WHY is that a trend that will not disappear? And WHERE can I get Bodie's coat?

Because this cashmere bitch is really just a rag.

I am crushing your head

Zhou, New Year's Eve, 2009, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

This weekend my friend Psychic Friend announced "How was your Christmas (holiday, New Year's)? is no longer a greeting I will acknowledge." Shit man, if I'd'a known that was all it took, I'd'a gotten a t-shirt made.

I swear, I have been living under a cloud since early December. Not the same cloud the entire time - hoo boy, that's when I go into therapy. Different clouds. Clouds of various sizes and shapes and degrees of ominousness. Ominosity.

And. How about I don't write about them? I'm being all unexpected-y, it's a new thing I'm trying. Because usually I am so predictable, right?

But yes. No. I am not going to list off all the crap that has been hanging over my head for two months. I like it. This is working for me. Nothing says "I'm over it" like forgetting all about it. I MAY list the successful resolutions of the things that have worried me.

Like this:

I run a Circus Arts Club at the elementary school. Hula hooping and slapstick routines, a little juggling. I have a unicycle that nobody's tall enough to ride without jeopardizing their future offspring. We try a little stilt-walking. We do a performance in front of the whole school at the end of the club season. Did that worry me? It did! Did I have nothing to worry about because the kids are funny and remembered what to do! I did!

Let's go to the video.

Circus Arts Fall 09 All-School on Vimeo.

You can't see me cringing in the wings every time someone takes a slapstick punch or does a fall, but you can hear all the kids in the auditorium cracking up. I take credit for none of it except the music. Those kids are a riot.

And then it snowed. And the snow caused me no dread whatsoever. In fact, we spent that day hanging ornaments on the tree and listening to holiday music, also sledding, and drinking eggnog with rum in it. That was a break in the battle.



The snow, of course, caused the children to never go back to school ever. Two weeks of winter break! Getting presents wrapped was a challenge, and I also fretted that I'd been so occupied with Circus Arts that I'd neglected to buy them anything of consequence. T-shirts and coloring books. Until Auntie Lo (who is neither my auntie nor the auntie of my kids but who is in a figurative sense everybody's auntie) told me that I fret about this every year.



They like coloring books and t-shirts.

I mean, what the hell have I been complaining about? My parents even took the boys overnight one night so that Bob and I could go see The Allmighty Senators, who hadn't played in like a year, and as a result played just about every song they knew.

After we picked up the kids, we ate many delicious things at Cross Street Market, and then hit the mall to stand in the returns line. Even that was not so dreadful. We bought Mao a pair of orange Vans, and I found jeans at Lucky for half price. Our children sat through me trying on five different pairs of jeans, and were complimentary about every pair. They treat me like a queen, and I should try harder to deserve it. I hope that when they grow up, they do not give me cause to wonder what I have done to piss them off.

Treat your parents decently, or tell them why you do not.

On New Year's Day, our neighborhood roasted a pig. I made barbecue sauce and tried my hand at glogg, a delicious blend of port and cardamom and orange, heated until it turns into an alcohol 8-ball. It was a wonderful wonderful day and I snatched pieces of that pig right out of the roaster all afternoon.



All this time, though, like a lingering metaphor in a Cheever story, the bathtub in the upstairs bathroom has been backed up. Every time the mad whirl slows, every time I have a morning off, there it is, with 2 inches of rusty water in it, and the self-adhesive grippy goldfish we stuck to the bottom when the kids were tiny gradually curling up. I poured Drano and Liquid Plumber down that drain. I plunged. I used baking soda and vinegar, and I used lye. I broke the snake OFF in that fucker. I asked Facebook for advice. I despaired, and meanwhile we all carried our clothes and our shampoo down two flights to the basement, and got kind of lax about toothbrushing.

That clog got stuck in my brain. I saw it, deep in the pipes under the tub, at least 8 feet away from the drain, because I paid out at least that much cable from the drum auger. In my mind it was slimy and black, and made of my hair, and possibly hid a tiny Matchbox car, which accounted for its failure to dissolve when I hit it with life-threatening chemicals.

Bob took several whacks at it. His brother Joe did too. I borrowed tools, broke them, replaced them, bought new ones.

And this Saturday, the same day that My Psychic Friend declared the holidays officially frickin OVER, I came home from work to find the upstairs bathroom clean. Tranquil. Not even a plunger to be seen that might have hinted the filthy battle zone that bathroom has been for the past several weeks. All is well.

Hey Henrietta!

Do I rant? I try not to rant too much. But... I went to the mall today. Mmm-hmm. You smell what I'm sellin'.

It might not have been such a good idea to go to the mall... today. I have been battling our suckass Microsoft network server for a solid week - it is riddled with malicious, suppurating garbage processes spawned by a violent pederast of a Trojan introduced by, I suspect, some lice-ridden neighborhood wifi skeever with the handle "HAIDEEZ something something".

The novelty spelling of "Hades" just screams "thug" to me. I bet it's one of those young people at the church behind us. You can hide a lot under a choir robe. Trust me. Of course, if "HAIDEEZ whatever whatever" is you, and your computer appeared on my thinger just because you brought your laptop by one day to show me something or work at my house... well. Then I guess I would assume you were being all LOLcatty about your machine name. Uh, that's cute! Ahem.

So yeah, I've been in a somewhat combative mood. Also, I hadn't eaten. But I wanted to go to the Apple store, because I think I'm going to pitch that Microsoft piece of shit and plug in a Mac mini and a Mac router and sit back and let that proprietary software do the stuff it's supposed to do.

It's not my ideal solution. Ideally, I'd love to have an all-Linux house. I don't like the sort of... Masonic vibe of the Apple multiverse. And I've been very happy with my Ubuntu laptop. But I am forced to admit that I no longer have the mental flexibility to learn enough Linux to set all that up myself. For example, the laptop hasn't had sound for months, and I just can't figure out how to fix that. It's for the best, I tell myself. Keeps me from wasting time watching Woodentops videos on YouTube.

But back to the Apple store. Have you ever been to an Apple store? If what you need to do is to buy a lizard green iPod nano for The Best Babysitter Everr, their model of ACCOST UPON ENTRY SO THAT NOBODY WANDERS FREE works pretty well. You say, "Why yes, you can sell me a lizard green iPod nano," and that's just super. But if you just need to count the number of USB ports on the back of the Mac mini, you would like the tiny headsetted iDoorman with the skater boi haircut and the idiotic jeans to pretty much just BACK HIS SHIT UP.

And then when you DO have a question, and spot somebody in a shirt, and say, "Hey..?" you would not like that person to say, "Um? If you could just speak to Micah at the front? He's managing my floor today, and he'll set you up with someone." Because Um? I do not know about your floor. And I am not looking for a setup, I just want to know if there's a version of the one-terabyte router that doesn't crap out after 18 months.

I would like to make a comparison now. I walk up to perfect strangers and ask if I can help them probably 50 times during the course of a typical 4-hour shift at work, and I do not think I have ever once done it in such a way as to have made a person want to stab me. You never know, of course. Maybe that lady who said, "Found it myself, thanks!" was really fingering the icepick in her pocket and counting down from ten.

Have I avoided injury because I am unusually talented at public relations? Hm. According to every supervisor I have ever ever had? NO. Have I stayed safe because I do not automatically adopt a patronizing demeanor? MOTHERFUCKING BINGO.

So I learned the thing I needed to learn and then got the hell out of the Apple store before I kicked someone with my big boots. I saw The Gap and remembered that I need a long-sleeved striped t-shirt (because, er, there's one that I don't have?), and I figured it might calm me down to buy one. I swear, striped t-shirts are for me like Catcher in the Rye was for Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. I just have to buy them.

The Gap was packed with crap. I mean I have never seen a retail establishment so overloaded with stock. The regular fixtures were stacked to the ceiling. Wheeled scaffolds holding towers of t-shirts blocked the aisles. Even the mannequins were supersaturated, wearing four and five t-shirts under two sweaters and a jacket, with two scarves. But they had no heads. Maybe their heads boiled off from wearing all that overflow stock.

So I had a little trouble finding exactly the long-sleeved striped t-shirt I wanted, and I asked a perfectly nice, non-intrusive headsetted teen for assistance. She knew exactly where it was, and showed me. When people are impressed that librarians know the Dewey Decimal System, I kind of internally snort. It's not that much to remember: resumes always come after cookbooks. But have you ever worked retail? Knowing where this v-neck brown sweater is stocked, versus that v-neck brown sweater, that doesn't have the ribbing? Those kids are not just sweater-folders.

I rummaged on the shelf for a Medium - I'll say this about mall shopping, the inflated sizing does make me feel petite - and turned back, thanking her. And found I was thanking a headless mannequin. It sat there, severed neck gleaming, elbows resting jauntily on its thighs as I looked quickly around to see if anyone had heard my little shriek.

Completely unsettled, I abandoned the shirt and decided maybe I should eat something, pronto. Headed for the food court. But between me and it were the Level 3 kiosk ambush people. "Hey! I really like your hair!" "Can I show you something?"

GOD no.

Here is where I wished I'd taken my hallucinogens before coming to the mall. I am not too good at faking freakouts, and I've really really always wanted to respond to a kiosk ambush person by screaming, "WHAT??! OH MY GOD YOUR HEAD! SNAKES! GET YOUR DINGO AWAY FROM ME YOU COCKSUCKING ZOMBIE! NO! NOOOOOOO! DON'T LET HIM TOUCH ME! SNAAAAKES!!"

I made it to the food court though. And turned around and left it immediately. The noise, the smell, the garbage food, what the FUCK? But eventually I found myself in line at a nominally deli-themed food court tenant, where an energetic lady with orange-red hair gossiped with her sisters in an elaborately unintelligible language and made me a tuna on rye garnished with a handful of potato chips so broken as to suggest a profound, possibly culturally based, misunderstanding of how potato chips are meant to work. Paid seven bucks for that sandwich, too. I reflected that for the same seven dollars I could be trading terrible jokes and wistful anecdotes with the North Indian man at the sub shop down the street, and get an amazing 12" Italian cold cut sandwich (with extra hots) to boot, but I didn't have the time. You know, I think she was speaking Romany. That would be cool - gypsies at the mall!

On my way back down and out, I came to central juncture: a staircase and an elevator linking Level Three and Level Four. I remember that elevator from my days as a stroller pilot. It's pretty small, and I always kind of resented the able-bodied non-strollered folk who used that elevator rather than taking the stairs. As I approached it today, I swerved toward the stairs, just behind a pregnant woman who did not give the elevator a second glance. And when I say pregnant, she was pregnant. PRAG. NUTT. As I descended, I caught up with her.

"Dude!" I said in a low voice. "You totally shamed all those people off the elevator!" It was true. We both glanced back at the five or six people who had abandoned their wait for the elevator in favor of the stairs after seeing Ms. LooksLikeTwins charge past them.

"Look at that - you're right!" she giggled. "But I'm just trying to get this baby to come!"

Used to be, trapped under the squirming beanbag weight of two children born twenty months apart, the mall was an attractive option every now and then. Smooth floors, no weather - the double stroller and I could windowshop and daydream our way to the kids' play area, where the boys could crawl on the play structures that today would be guaranteed to give them swine flu while I read Vanity Fair and drank a coffee. That's some potent relaxation for a stay-at-home mom with kids that young. Then we'd eat pizza in the food court.

But the state of having very small children is quite a bit like senility. You are underslept and understimulated, and probably unwashed. You spend quite a bit of time feeling pithed. Like a frog. In that state, the institutions of the mall can be soothing and safe.

But I think the rest of us should be careful to take our Xanax, as my friend Kristen recommends, first.

Fetish

I try not to fetishize books. I work in a library, right? Surrounded by books. And by the third time you've helped shift the entire nonfiction collection, books have come to look and feel a lot like bricks. Heavy. Oblong. Kind of filthy.

When I was in library school, I had already worked in several libraries. And when I heard some of my MLS classmates pipe up with, "I want to be a librarian because I love books!" I would look at my feet and make a sympathetic little face. I already knew that the books are only part of the job. Most of the job is (oh my god you sweet little bookworm you are in for an extremely unpleasant shock on your first day of work) people. Brr.




On the other hand, it's not like I became a librarian because I am indifferent to books. Books, after all, are neither demanding nor rude. They don't usually smell. If a book is not interesting, you can close it and put it down. You try that with an uninteresting person, and now it's you being rude.

So, it's a significant daily pleasure for me to scan the New Books cart that we keep in the office at work. I get to browse, flip through, and in some cases, I admit, caress the big fabulous fancy things that I could never afford to buy. Art books. Big gorgeous bird books. Images of eternity.

I've been blurbing the most interesting of these on Facebook, and recently added them all to Goodreads, under the category "your neighborhood librarian's fetish books". You can see the entire list here.




I'm not saying, "GO! Marvel at my taste!" I'm actually saying "The holidays are coming! These are good gift ideas!" I already recommended that my friend Josh buy Renaissance Secrets: Recipes and Formulas for his wife, so that she can make anti-poison potions and glass. I myself am likely to snare New York City Museum of Complaint for my husband, who misses NYC like he would miss a limb. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is an orgy of pleasure for aficionados of crime, mysteries, and/or dollhouses.




There's a wide range of nonfiction on this list, from classics like In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made by my late favorite professor Norm Cantor (old man, I hope your afterlife finds you on a balcony outside Tel Aviv, watching the sea and eating oranges) to seriously trashy skeeve like High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Pageants or The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll. I cannot look away from either of those books, even though I know they're wrong.




And in case you question my deployment of the word "fetish" (and hi, Japanese porn sites! You're already leaving unwelcome comments courtesy a previous post's use of the phrase "hairless teen," so I might as well give you more of what you're looking for!) (Thanks are due to Token Boy, for identifying the offending term. Kind of more quickly than his new bride might be comfortable with), there really is plenty of porn on this list. Travel porn. Design porn. Food porn. Porn porn (Lotsa naked models in that one. Just because they're shot all arty doesn't mean they're not sexy).

Books. Sexy. Fetishy. Kind of expensive. "Hairless teen". "Orgy of pleasure"! I should really go back to writing about the garden, shouldn't I? I am just asking for perverts and trolls. Hi, trolls! Enjoy my parentheses! Read good books!

books I crave

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