One year ago today a team of medical professionals took this out of my body. We named it Paige and instantly fell under its spell.
Paige is an incredibly sweet, tremendously happy, delicious loving dumpling of a baby. Her father, sister, and I love love love her silly.
Happy happy birthday, dear Paigey Waigey Wiggle Pop! Happy birthday to you.
I’ve actually gotten to two yoga classes recently. They were rejuvenating, indulgent, and blissful. The three-block walks to and from the studio in the chilly evening air even had a delicious soulfulness.
I know. I need to get out more.
And aside from the discovery that I was expecting (i.e. that I was expecting to discover, that is. No, I’m not pregnant!)–that I do need to find a way to get some form of regular exercise and/or Me Time–I also had an unexpected discovery. Poetry.
Now, I’ve been outspoken and unapologetic for many years about my disdain for poetry. But the handsome used-to-be-a-doctor yoga instructor read a poem at the end of each of the classes. Both were by Billy Collins, who he said used to be the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2002 or so. (Who knew?)
Both poems were wildly imaginative, unexpected, fun. Just brilliant really. Nothing like the crap I remember ruefully slogging through and painfully deconstructing in school.
Made me think I may just like some poetry after all.
So I go to the guy’s website tonight, because sometimes it’s fun to go somewhere other than Amazon for book-related info, and hell if there were some poems right there for the readin’. This was the first one (and only one thus far) I read. It’s quite different from the Cute Yoga Dude’s picks, but it still totally worked for me.
Although I never went to sleepover camp (one of my childhood’s tragic voids, along with not having seen Star Wars), the Mama-ness of it made it seem like a fitting first poem for me to stumble across.
Whaddaya think?
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly–
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift–not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Yesterday was Kate’s first visit to a dentist. And as we sat in the cheesy Hawaiian-themed waiting room, another mother came in with two older kids. Her daughter immediately flounced to the floor to engage with Paigey. And the mom pulled up a tiny surfboard shaped chair, sat, and smiled down at them.
After a few minutes she looked up at me and said, “Please pardon the loud rumblings from my uterus.” A comment which took me a beat to grock, but then totally slayed me.
Me: “Oh God, I hear you. She’s my baby and she has the same effect on me.”
Her: “Here I am, I’m 43, and I already have three kids. When’m I going to get over this?”
Which brings me to the rhetorical question, just how supremely do women rock?
I love that within three minutes of being in each others’ orbits this total stranger and I are revealing our deep down irrational-but-real want-another-baby cravings. It’s the kind of intimacy that some men who were college roommates and have been playing tennis together every Saturday since the first Bush administration still haven’t achieved.
And her remark is timed perfectly to my just-the-other-night musings. Paige refused to nurse, which had me convinced she was harboring a devastating rife-with-hearing-loss ear infection. (I’ve never understood when mother’s say their kids just stopped wanting to nurse one day, since that’s so not been how my boob-junkie kids roll.)
Paigey was back to her old milk-chugging self a few hours later, but the experience got me thinking as I was a-sway on the ugly Dutalier glider. If I were to suddenly stop breastfeeding, it seems like I’d need to put my body to another practical use. Truly. In much of the past four-and-a-half years I’ve either been gestating or breastfeeding, and odd as it is even for me to realize, it’s set me in a kind of groove I’m not sure how to get out of.
Doing neither of those things seems so, uh, kinda lazy. Or maybe it’s not that so much as just not productive enough.
Years ago when Mark (then I) started seriously obsessing over cooking, we read Michael Ruhlman’s excellent The Making of a Chef–a great first person account of a foodie journalist being thrown into the mix at the hardcore Culinary Institute of America. Aside from food chemistry and knife skills, clean-as-you-go, and never serve anything that you know ain’t right, one of the critical things you learn at cooking school is how to be crazy efficient. If the walk-in’s at the end of the kitchen, you think of all the things you’ll need from there so you can make just one trip. And on the way back to your station you grab the Chinoise or mixing bowls or grater that you’ll need from the drying racks. It’s all piled up in front of you so your arms are breaking and you can barely see, but the other thing that you learn in cooking school is cooking is hard work. That is, it’s physically taxing.
In cramped, fast-paced, and (proverbially and literally) hot restaurant kitchens, running around in circles is for rookies. It’s just not done. It confuses your mind, expends unnecessary energy and ultimately puts you in the weeds. In other words, a quick way to find yourself out on the sidewalk, considering getting an office temp job to pay the rent.
So Ruhlman. He describes how this hyper-efficient planning and intense economy of movement unsurprisingly slipped over into his out-of-the-kitchen time. (Kind of like when I played so much backgammon in college I’d look at a pub booth packed with people as a cluster of pieces–all safe since there wasn’t one sitting out alone. For my brain at least, that was the result of excessive backgammon. Imagine if I’d used that time to study!) So Ruhlman described how one day he realized he was getting ready in the morning in turbo efficient mode. Get socks and shoes and grab car keys and knife case all in one quick sweep of his apartment. Socks and shoes on mechanically fast, grab keys and knife case, and up and off you go. Or something like that.
And so here I am, just three days away from Paige’s first birthday and realizing how this mother thing has managed to wire me in a similar way. Efficient? Yes. Getting kids bathed, diapered, dressed, fed, snacks packed, car toys grabbed, hats, sweaters, shoes that have been already pulled off put back on. All that glamor that you know every mother–including your own back in the day (call her right now and thank her, please) goes through.
But aside from the machinations of kid tendin’, there’s of course the physical connection us mothers have. And whether we’re precious about it and read non-stop about how it all works or not, it just happens. We’re using our bodies to the fullest of their capabilities, like old-school VCRs that–though baffling and unused to their max by most folks–without even reading the manual we’re instinctively able to do the trickiest things to like updating the clocks, and setting them to advance record.
It’s actually weird how mindlessly one can grow a healthy baby.
There are the glossy hair ‘I am woman hear me roar’ pregnancy highs, and the all-my-friends-are-dumb-when-they’re-drunk-and-I’m-sober resentment. Stuff even outsiders can cotton to. But more discreet, and ultimately more powerful, is the latent accustomedness your body seems to develop for being put to these practical maternal uses. So from where I’m standing, at the precipice of not having such a physical Mama task ever again, one might be left feeling somewhat un-tethered. A bit lost.
It’s the place where some woman, no doubt, feel liberated, set free. Back to one’s skinny jeans for good.
But for me, and it seems for the dental office Mama too, it’s a much harder transition. Bittersweet in all the love and intimacy and care that was associated with all those bodily demands, despite how grueling they could sometimes be. There’s an unaddressed expectation, a void that some of us reckon with, when our bodies are suddenly not called into service any more.
Perhaps I’ll have to take up tennis. My mother always played a wicked doubles game. Maybe I can just try to make that do.
For weeks now I’ve been screaming at the TV, bellowing desperately at Top Chef contestant Melissa to–for the love of sweet Jesus–puleeeease do something about her wretched hair.
My God, Paige could cut better bangs blindfolded with a Swiss Army knife.
I mean, doesn’t that show have any stylists who have a heart? And wouldn’t you think that that woman has a friend or relative–just one–who’d mercifully perform a hair intervention on her? And then there’s the Goddess/Hostess Padma. Can’t she help a sister out? Just someone, anyone please do something about those lifeless, scraggly, dishwater blonde, cut from ear-to-ear like Moe from The Three Stooges bangs.
If not, eventually I’m going to dislocate my vocal chords yelling at the TV. Or worse, wake the children.
Speaking of the offspring, shameful as it is to admit, we’ve been taking Kate to our exorbitant yet fabulous hair salon in SF. Jeneil, the owner/stylist, is an old friend of Mark’s and cuts his meterosexy hair. And after years of my allegience to a reliable-cheap-yet-glamorless salon, she now also does mine. Jeneil and Kate totally dig each other. (Reason #1 why Kate’ll run off and get sleeve tattoos the first chance she gets.) So Mark and I are blasting our way through the kids’ college funds on our own tresses, but for now Kate’s haircuts there are free.
The problem is, as much as it makes me sound all bridge-and-tunnel, it’s a hassle getting the girl to the city for her haircuts. Especially since the kiddie salon that the fancy Oakland set (bet you didn’t know there was such a thing) brings their shorties to is just two blocks from our house.
So, reluctantly, we tried it.
Our first trip there, despite my feeling overwrought with cheating-on-Jeneil guilt, the Rasta owner gave Kate a decent cut. And she flipped over the free balloon and cheap Made in China toy she picked out of their treasure chest. Oh, and did I mention there are TVs at every station to lull the wee ones into not-savagely-thrashing submission? Kate would sell her sister to watch an episode of Sesame Street, so watching TV during a haircut is bliss to her. Sheer bliss.
I know it’s clear where this is going.
Yesterday at the kiddle salon, the Rasta steps aside and some chick asks Kate to hop in the chair. I was about to protest but within seconds Kate was in a deep unshakeable TV trance. And I figured, how bad can a haircut be?
Well, yes. Payback for all the crap I’ve ever hurled at Melissa with the Short Bus Bangs. Kate is now her wee sorry-headed doppelganger.
At least she doesn’t also have Melissa’s fierce black eyebrows.
Thursday afternoon I got a babysitter for no reason other than the psychological thrill of three hours of Me Time. Sometimes looking forward to it or just knowing it’s approaching supplies more of a feel-good shock therapy jolt to my psyche than the actual kid-free time itself.
So, mere minutes before the nanny arrived, I decided I’d set off for San Francisco for some thrift shopping. There’s something so stupid about paying $20 an hour to pick through two-dollar-ninety-nine-cent clothing alongside hipsters and the homeless that I just couldn’t resist.
Besides, Thrift Town is where I’m closest to God. Or rather, the place where in the acquisition of bargains I feel a rush that’s akin to religious fervor.
My sisters call another Mission bastion, Community Thrift, “church.” I’ve never asked if it’s due to the reverence that they have for it, or that it’s a must on Sundays, when folks unload all their didn’t-sell yard sale items and the place brims with all manner of fresh crap. In the same way Kitchen Confidential taught us not to get fish on Tuesdays at restaurants, Ellen and Judy can direct you to the right crap store on the right day to give you the best shot of unearthing what it is you’re hankerin’ for.
It’s a gift, really.
At any rate, the religious metaphors also show you the effect that a childhood of being pulled by our ears to church every Sunday had on my sisters and I (i.e. we’re quick to reference but not participate in church activities). And it underscores the extent to which we Brunos exalt a good bargain.
So, childless and fancy-free I pushed open the doors to big grungy sweetly-stinky Thrift Town feeling the anticipatory titillation that comes with not knowing what dazzling finds await. And the first thing I see in the shelves of random crap along the entryway wall is a box covered over with Saran Wrap and housing–unused!–all the brightly colored plastic Snow White-branded crap a little girl could ever wish for (or break within moments of adoring ownership). It was $3.99.
Now I’m hardly a super crunchy Waldorf School Mama, but I have discouraged childhood TV-watchin’ nearly in its entirety. I despise kid crap that’s branded with licensed characters, prefer wooden toys to plastic, and have steered Kate clear of anything princess-related as if it were, uh, the Ebola Virus.
But I know not every mother is as fetishistic about avoiding these things as I am. And since my desire to home school the girls in order to maintain their commercial purity is as strong as my desire to pluck each of my not-exactly-lacking Italian-American leg hairs, I’m realistic about the fact that they’ll be exposed to it eventually.
To introduce it myself though just seems like a slippery slope. One viewing of SpongeBob SquarePants leads to excessive begging for crap at Target, and next thing you know she’s using intravenous drugs.
Maybe it was the feel-good high from my break from ass- and nose-wiping, or the alcohol hit I got off the breath of the bum next to me, but I picked up the thing and decided on the spot, what the heck. I’ll buy a little princess crap for Miss Kate.
The thing is, I’m a survivor of a sugar-free childhood. Well, nearly sugar free. There are naturally occurring sugars in fruit, right?
A bottle of soda rarely darkened our door, and sugary cereals were disparaged like the devil’s own drug. But, like me, my mother’s desire to shield me from the things she disliked only went so far. Which is to say, she let me out of the house. So, when visiting friends I perved out over the presence of forbidden foods.
Me: “You have Pop Tarts?! Aren’t you afraid your mother’ll see them in that cupboard?”
My friend: “What do you mean? My mom bought those for me.”
At which point my head exploded.
So, looking through the re-packaged plastic on this treasure trove of princess crap, I made my peace with the thought that maybe this petite offering might be enough to satisfy Kate’s burgeoning princess curiosity for now. Or at least safeguard her from short-circuiting (and ultimately stealing) the next faux-fur Cinderella dress-up cape she comes across at a friend’s house.
Plus, it’s kind of funny watching her teeter around the house on those oh-so-wholesome red plastic mini-heels.
And best of all, it was a great bargain.
Saturday afternoon Mark made his long-awaited return from Vegas.
He entered the house to see the typically-banned-from-TV Kate lying languid on the couch, a Sesame Street-watching zombie, hear Paige wailing miserably from her crib, and find me splayed out in bed with a brain-crushing migraine.
Not exactly the Bree Van de Kamp meets Heidi Klum greeting I’d had in mind.
But in the glamorous, fast-paced, take-no-prisoners Domestic Engineer life I lead, reality often misaligns with expectations.
When I was in high school my friend’s little sister was crazy fired-up to have been asked to prom by a guy she’d been moony over for months. As mature oh-so-over-it-all seniors, my friend and I marveled from the sidelines as her sister dragged her mom dress shopping to every mall in Rhode Island (which I think was a staggering three shopping centers at the time, maybe four). She obsessed over limo rental, where they’d eat, and whether she could trust her best friend and her boyfriend to be sufficiently un-dorky double dates.
When the big day arrived–much to our collective relief–she bathed herself silly for hours (ah, those bygone epic soaks with Cosmo and Glamour), then got her nails done and her hair up-doed. A couple hours before the event she decided to bleach her moustache, left the stuff on too long, and burned the shit out of her upper lip.
Which just goes to show it’s sometimes the home stretch that screws you.
As for me on Saturday, I eventually managed to drag my sorry ass out of bed and wince into dim light without recoiling in agony. And a couple hours after that I even combed the sleep-induced rat’s nest snarl out of my hair. I’m not sure I ever got around to brushing my teeth, but the way things unfurled that day I think Mark planted our long-anticpated welcome home kiss atop my aching noggin anyway.
Thankfully by yesterday I was back in the pink. We romped with the girls at the beach in Alameda, drank beers at a kid-friendly burger joint for lunch, and rolled our eyes at each other over Kate’s intermittent three-year-old no-I-won’t-ever-put-that-jacket-on fits. I got to sleep in, had what I’d humbly report was a fabulous hair day, and managed to perform myriad other maternal and wifely, uh, ‘duties’ with a little that’s-what-I’m-talkin’-about spring in my step.
Mark’s back. I’m back. Yay.
…until Mark gets home.
Not that I’m counting or anything.
Last night The McClusky Sisters besieged my sleep with a brutal one-two punch. With Mark gone to wait in endless taxi lines at CES in Vegas, I’m running solo on the ‘renting. And hanging on by a thread to tell the tale.
So, is it just me, or is waking from a deep sleep to find a small child silently standing inches from your face scary as shit? I mean, maybe I’ve watched The Shining a few too many times in college, but I can’t begin to fathom how parents of twins survive seeing two kids standing in a hallway in the middle of the night. Horrific on so many levels.
The suddenly-standing-right-there kid is one thing, but the plaintive cry of, “I don’t waaaaaaanna sleep!” called across the albeit small house–and a look at the digital clock revealing it’s 1:32AM–is quite another. Even if you know every other time you’ve heard this lament The Whiner has successfully been marched back to bed with some threat like, “It’s the middle of the night and yes, you WILL sleep!” hissed into her ear–even knowing that’s probably how it’ll go down, the vision of what your night could turn into if the little beastie did refuse to sleep is just unspeakably ugly.
Waking up this way is less than ideal, but half of what I’m all pissy about is that Kate’s sleep issues are something I realized–how to say this?–I blame totally on Mark. Since he still can’t lactate (damn it) the natural division of nighttime labor has been Mark serving as Kate’s night nurse and me tending to Paige’s milk-swillin’ needs. Mark’s just such a softie. He ambles out of bed and gently ushers Kate to her
room instead of blowing a whistle loudly in her face as I might do in
order to, you know, break the cycle.
With sleep being my Super Power (along with parallel parking), I’m usually able to snooze through most of Kate’s creepy suddenly-standing-there late-night visits to our room. And I drown out her vocal requests with the patented pillow-over-the-head approach.
So while Mark’s slumming in a luxury hotel, getting buttered up by every hi-tech trade show gadget pimp, and eating out at Bouchon, Craft, and the best Thai restaurant this side of Chiang Mai, I’m home wrangling with the wretched nighttime duet that he and Kate sometimes dance.
I mean, I don’t mean to sound bitter.
But maybe my lack of REM is actually mustering in me a wee bit of co-parenting empathy on this subject. In the past, when I’ve stretched, smiled and offered up a well-rested morning greeting to Mark, commenting on how Paigey “slept through, God bless her,” he’s often looked back at me through bloodshot eyes muttering slack-jawed that Kate “was up four–or mabye it was five–times.” It’s not that I don’t feel bad for the guy, but when he adds that from 1:30 to 3:00 he “couldn’t sleep at all,” he loses me.
As a professional sleeper I know there’s some good shut-eye to be gotten between those 30-second back-in-your-beddie-bye jaunts. It’s always baffled me that between these quick promenades Mark’s often in bed wired and wild-eyed.
But now, like some Scrooge who grew a heart overnight, I’ve come to understand Mark’s plight. The thing is, after the girl cons you into thinking she’s ready to doze off at the first tuck-in, you foolishly climb back into bed, and just when your body temp’s returned to duvet-level warmth and you’re drifting off into a dream about having had a really popular prom date, SHE’S BACK. This time wailing loudly near the baby’s bedroom door. “MAMA!!! I. Can’t. SLEEEEEEP!”
Suffice it to say, it’s jarring.
If it weren’t for fear that she’d disturb The One That Insists On Drinking Milk From Your Boobies If Awoken, you wouldn’t be springing out of bed in a flash to hush hush hush her and direct her back toward her room whispering a strained aren’t-your-blankets-so-cozy-honey pep talk in her ear.
If it’s not already clear, we’re quite religious about not solving this problem by inviting her into our Child-Free Zone, I mean bed.
So, more soporific promises from Kate and another walk back to my own bed, but this time I can’t help but be wary. Why get cozy when the other shoe could drop at any moment? She could be back again before I even have time to lament the oh-so-wretched hour. And when the rattle of the heater cranks up I find myself straining to listen, thinking I’m hearing her door crack open again. It’s like that one ring on the Motorola RAZR phone that always had you thinking it was ringing when it wasn’t. (Admit it. You always fell for that too.)
So, not one to be rooked into nodding off again, this time I’m on ambush alert. I’m almost wanting her to get up and just get it the hell over with. Will she do the spooky silent child by the bed move, or the bellow from down the hall? What’s it gonna be, Kate?! BRING IT ON, SISTER.
But eventually enough time passes, and I let go, roll over, and well, you can guess what happens when I just drift off. “MOMMY!!”
Digital clock now says 2:53AM.
To anyone who may have seen me carrying a child fireman-style over my shoulder while growling “No more getting up, and I MEAN IT!” threats under my breath, thanks a bunch for not calling Child Protective Services.
I think this process took place five times last night. Or maybe four. I lost count some time after losing my will to live.
And once Kate lost interest in seeing how far she could push me before I’d put her up for bid on eBay, her World Wrestling Federation partner, Paige, tagged in.
It was like Paige was perched in the corner of the ring waiting for the bell to sound so she could pounce on my last 3 hours of sleep like a rabid monkey. (I know this is mixing a metaphor, but on such limited sleep this is the best I can muster, people.)
And what a show Miss Paige put on! The baby who generally gets up once at night–if that–squawked first at midnight, prior to Kate’s onsalught, then came at me with two additional awake-itudes spaced out for maximum snoozing interference at 4:00 and 5:30.
At 5:45 I crawled to bed. Cold. Tapped dry of milk. Frantic for sleep but gun-shy about giving into it. And desperately, miserably missing my partner in parenting, our family’s fearless father, my dear sweet Mark.
He who was alseep in some hotel bed. Likely a bit boozed up after some work party or dinner. Stretched out solo in a huge king bed, maybe with another one like it nearby just for throwing his books and clothes and cell phone on.
Hopefully getting a deep restful night’s sleep to fortify him for the family life awaiting his return. At which point I will never again doubt, question, or criticize any of his middle of the night sleep shenanigans, because I’ll be so damn happy happy happy to just have him back.
Today part-way through an article in Us Weekly about how celebrities lost their postpartum weight—or maybe it was the story about George Clooney and his ex-girlfriend having recently “kept in touch” via email—I set the magazine down in my lap and ran my mind though a voluntary exercise of abject terror.
I was at the chiropractor. Sitting on the table in a blue hospital gown and an absurd little triangular lead apron, a grossly inadequate-seeming shield for my baby-makin’ parts from the x-rays I’d just had taken. X-rays of my lower back and neck–standard stuff the new doc figured would confirm his garden variety “baby trauma, computer hunch, yadda yadda” diagnosis about my bag of bones.
At some point in the middle of whatever article it was, I suddenly realized just how long I’d been sitting there reading that crappy magazine. Long enough to envision a scenario whereby the doctors were all in the other room, leaning with concern into the light box of my x-rays and discussing just how they’d break the news to me about the wretched thing they saw–long enough to make that terrible image suddenly seem as though it was without a doubt what had to be happening and why I was waiting so damn long.
And here I’d been. Haplessly reading a magazine. Ignorant and blissful. Expecting that after scanning the pictures showing celebrities doing things ‘just like us’ (putting money in the parking meter!) the doctor would come back, inform me the x-rays were just fine, tell me to get dressed, direct me to another room for a heat pack and a few righteous neck crunches, then send me on my way home to collect Mark and the girls for a rainy-day visit to the wildlife sanctuary.
But really what would-could-might be about to go down would make these few page-flipping minutes seem like the happiest carefree bored would-that-I-could-go-back-there time ever. What if the doctors came in, stern and serious? And after our talk I had to dig out my cell phone, call Mark, tell him he needed to come meet me there, or maybe even at the hospital? What if something suddenly on this otherwise nondescript day sent me into a mother-love panic about my fragile and about-to-crumble mortality jeopardizing my happy-go-lucky magazine-reading life and my heretofore inadequately appreciated days and months and years with my beloved husband and those blessed beautiful girls?
It could happen.
But in some deep deep place I think I somehow knew that this whole mental spiral was only meant to act itself out in my mind. Based in part on the odds. But also because if I thought it might really be happening I don’t think I could even bear to conjure it up. To take it all the way though to the sickening horrible thought that I can barely force myself to return to now—my sweet small children, motherless.
Who knows what triggered this sudden ardent need for a heroin-heavy dose of life perspective. Maybe, God willing, the doctor’d come back in, all in a flurry with some double-booked back-up of neck-wringing to wrangle with, and like some hairdresser who’s gotten behind on one appointment that’ll screw her for the whole day, apologize as he hastily loaded a heating pad on my back to move me through the rotation and out the door—one more down.
And thankfully, blessedly, thank you thank you thank you Mr. Universe, Sir, some version of that did happen.
But still in my relief the thought lingered that maybe one room over there was another woman who wasn’t so lucky. And if not in this doctor’s office surely somewhere nearby someone was getting crappy news. Someone’s plans to go home and heat up leftover chicken soup for lunch were about to be shot to shit.
I had a professor in London my junior year of college. A rapid-fire-talking layered-clothing-wearing kindly woman whose voice was as high-pitched as it was shrill. Truth be told I don’t even remember what genre of lit she taught, though it seems like it should be 19th Century.
Anyway, one day I went to her office for our tutorial—the one-on-one sessions that comprised the Brit’s collegiate learning structure. (“Here’s the syllabus. Read the books. Meet with me every other week–maybe over a pint–to chat. And turn in five papers by the end of the term.”) So I walk into her office. She’s all in a tizzy–much more so than her usual state. Wisps of gray hair flying out of her bun and glasses low on her nose. Standing up behind her desk slapping together teetering piles of books and papers and folders and a tea cup or two while clucking to herself, “Oh, Margorie. Come on now! Come on.”
Then, having done nothing to acknowledge my presence at her door, she lets out a sudden shriek, “Oh yes! Yes, yes, yes!” And clutching a little ratty brown leather billfold to her chest and exhaling deeply closes her eyes for a moment then flaps them open wide cackling, “Kristen! Dear! I am so very happy to have you be the first person to know that my wallet is now found! Hiding right here in plain view! And you know really, it’s such a thrill. Sometimes,” she said leaning closer to me, and I can still picture her grinning giddily on the verge of this, “when you think something is lost—you’ve utterly and uncompromisingly convinced yourself of it, and then—behold!—why it’s suddenly right there! Right back there for you! Do you know how sometimes it’s really such a wonderful delight to have it back that it sort of makes having lost in the first place actually quite worthwhile?”
Yes, Margorie. Yes, I do.
A couple days ago my new chiropractor informed me I have a mild scoliosis of the spine. Something, he said, that likely developed when I was 13 or 14.
And here I’ve been all this time with a crooked back and totally unaware of it. Which is distressing.
I mean, I can’t even fathom the cool factor this information could have granted me had I know it in my teendom. My ability to dramatically align any teen-caliber life shortcomings with Judy Blume’s Deenie character might have been utterly transformative.
Sure, at this point I won’t be required to wear a back brace for four years like Deenie had to. Nor will my aspirations to become a model be dashed by the diagnosis. My goals during my Deenie-reading era were more about getting attention from cute Junior Instructors at my rundown town yacht club and less about walking runways in Milan anyway.
Regardless, it still feels like not knowing this then represents some kind of missed opportunity. And the second I realize how I can capitalize on it, I’m riding my bike straight over to Amelia’s house where–if I screw up enough courage, that is–I’ll call Phil Kinder, or maybe one of the other JIs, and make sure they’re the first to know.
