the end of an error

Eight days from moving, feeling a little anxious about the amount of space we're downsizing to (I keep telling myself we're gaining the square footage of the Village) and the amount of stuff we still need to get rid of, Bob and I heard some news yesterday that not only encouraged us, it was something of a relief.

Our landlord at our Brooklyn residence has signed a contract with Corcoran (realtors) to sell the building. That's right to sell the whole building that we've lived in for the past 11 years. In the year and a half since he announced that he was doubling the rent, he never once mentioned the idea of selling the whole thing out from under us, even when he thought that he was stringing us along with the offer to buy our apartment from him if he went co-op. (I say he "thought" he was stringing us along because at the same time we were also stringing him along by not letting him know that we had already closed on the place in Manhattan, since we were never sure when the renovations would be completed.)

Had we not found a place on our own and taken the past year to clear out the stuff that we'd accumulated over 11 years, we would now be faced with finding a place quickly and moving with very little time to sort things out. What ever rent or mortgage we would have had to take in the pinch would most likely have been the same or more than the mortgage we now have in the Village for, no doubt, not enough space any way, and probably would have been somewhere out in Bed-Sty or Bensonherst at the end of a subway line and a bus transfer that didn't run on Sundays. I feel lucky! I feel very blessed.

After our initial excitement and gratitude we stopped and thought about our Brooklyn building itself and the many people who lived here over the past 11 years. The building will more than likely be torn down by some developer who will build a cookie-cutter condo high-rise with a Duane-Reade at street level. As much as we are ready to move on, as much as the building itself is structurally questionable, I had the distinct feeling that this was the end of an era.

Of course Bob commented that it was more like the end of an "error," because of how we've felt about living in "Broken" far too long. We both nevertheless feel a little sentimental, even though we are mostly relieved to have dodged a far worse fate than the one we have already found for ourselves.

doctor visit

I took a couple hours from work this morning to see my doctor. I've had a stubborn sty in one eye for the past five days that refuses to go away and so yesterday morning I decided to call for an appointment. Of course my doctor wasn't available at all (I haven't actually seen him in years) and his PA (Physician's Assistant) wasn't available until this morning. I've been to several different PAs at his office over the past few years, each of whom has been a well-meaning, slightly awkward, hyper-professional young person who has instilled very little faith in me. They make me feel old. They look like those really bright junior high school students that get selected to attend advanced college-level summer programs. I had promised myself that I would never take an appointment with one of my doctor's PAs again, but I figured there wasn't much room for harm if I was just having someone look at my sty. My mother could have done that.

I got to the doctor's office and waited almost ten minutes for the elevator. I forget each time I go that I must plan the extra time into my commute. It's the slowest elevator in Manhattan and everyone on it is coughing and sneezing. I have been tempted time and again to walk up all eight flights of stairs to the waiting room. I would if I weren't sick, but then I never go there when I'm well.

Once I was off the elevator and signed in, I took a seat with a dog-eared copy of New York magazine to await my appointment. The office is always packed with patients for several different doctors and a large staff behind an open desk that leaves everyone in the waiting area privy to every phone call, medical insurance discussion and the office gossip. As often happens, a drug company salesman came through and slipped medical samples to every doctor that passed through the waiting room with the kind of covert handoff that one associates with, well, drugs. After a few minutes my actual doctor came through, took a hand off from the drug salesman, grabbed a chart and another patient and headed for his office without so much as a nod hello to me. I've been considering changing doctors and this seemed to clinch it.

And then I heard my name called.

"Jay," a warm young voice came from the far end of the room, "I'm Tony, Dr. Schmoe's PA."

There beaming at me was Tony. Yes, he was another well-meaning, hyper-professional youth, but he was also very handsome and had a nice dark gruff.

In his office he looked deeply into my eyes, whether he was examining the sty or explaining my condition. He told me I was a model patient for how well I had taken care of the eye to that point and how well I described my symptoms to him. He sat with his knees to either side of mine and touched my face a lot. Umm... he was supposed to do all this because he's the doctor and I came to see him about my eye, but Lordy it was sexy. I kept looking for chest hair at his shirt collar. I wanted to ask him if he ever did these consultations in the nude and if Oxford covered the extra charge. Of course, flirting with him was not an option for several reasons, my looking like a cat with one sick eye not being the least of them.

He finished me off with a prescription, should hot compresses not do the trick, and set me off into the waiting room with a slip to pay my co-pay. I all but whistled along with the piped in holiday music as I waited another ten minutes for the down elevator and then headed for the street. Maybe Dr. Shmoe isn't so bad after all, and maybe his PAs aren't so untrustworthy. I'll have to give Tony the opportunity to work on something more complex than a sty in the near future.

moving dates

We now finally have moving dates of December 8th and 9th! The count down begins. Just 10 days away. Painting and floors are being completed by our new contractor for next Monday. We have a lot more packing to do, a truck load of left-overs from our sidewalk sales need to go to some place like Goodwill. A few other things need to go into storage until we drive to Bubba's for Christmas.

My posts may grow spotty over the next few weeks, but I'll keep you posted on the progress.

my first christmas dinner at bubba's

Yesterday, I answered a series of 16 questions from a holiday meme that my friend Dottie tagged me with. But I left one question unanswered because it deserved a longer post. And this is it.

---

Christmas of 1989, my first after having moved to New York City, would have been fairly lonely had my then brand-new-beau Bob not invited me home to Beaver Falls outside of Pittsburgh PA to celebrate the holidays with his family, or should I say at "Bubba's." Bob's father's side of the family was Serbian, and even though his mother is a lean, wise-cracking, back-woods Kentucky woman of no particular ethnic background, as soon as her first grandchild was born she was given the nickname "Bubba," a Serbian term of endearment for grandmothers.

Now Bob's family is one of the wildest, most disorganized groups of people that this little son of a lockstep German woman has ever spent the holidays with, but that first Christmas at Bubba's sits in my memory as the wildest. The whole family was there, running from room to room, jabbering and worrying: grandkids with toys, cousins with casseroles, brothers-in-law in front of the football game, and his dad, a good-natured first-generation laborer, recovering from a car accident and a DWI, which of course, had everyone a little more on edge than usual that year. Bob was most nervous of all because, on top of everything else, he hadn't told anyone in the family about "us," and wasn't sure if anyone would figure it out. To me, they were all so distracted, I figured that I was the least of the things they would have trouble figuring out that day. And they seemed to be doing their best to stir up one of their wild, crazy-as-wet-hens celebrations, despite any of their own worries or me, the little redheaded stranger in the forest of giant Serbians.

At one point his three high-strung sisters were cackling in the kitchen, and one of them smelled their Kentucky mamma's dinner rolls cooking. Bubba is a great down-home-Southern-style cook, who makes biscuits and gravy, and hams, and dinner rolls flawlessly without a recipe or a timer.

"Yumm, don't Bubba's rolls smell good," Bob's sister Suzie cooed.

"She'd better watch 'em or she'll burn 'em," his sister Debra Ann remarked.

"Oh, make sure their not burning!" his sister Joy gasped.

"BUBBA YOU'RE BURNING THE ROLLS!" they all screamed as they ran for the stove and threw it open, only to find that the rolls were cooking just fine on their own, no problem at all, a few more minutes of browning still to go. They shut the oven door with another chorus of cackles, the rest of the family, including Bubba, paying no attention at all to the uproar.

Then with dinner still a little while off, his sister Joy clapped her hands together and asked Bob to play some Christmas music. He's the baby of the family, and being the baby and the piano player, he is asked excitedly every year, as if the whirlwind will draw to stillness for a few minutes to allow everyone to enjoy a sing-along. Yet, no matter how cooperative Bob was that year or any year since, no matter how willing he was to pull out the piano bench and find their favorite songs, the crowd was so scattered and disorganized that no one, not even Bubba or Joy who requested it, stopped to sing. It ended up that year and every year since just Bob, me and his one quiet step niece singing softly through the incessant ruckus.

Finally, as Bob, the step-niece and I grew tired of trying to hear each other sing, as the turkey and the ham came out of the oven and started getting carved, as the last of the teenage grandchildren pulled into the driveway and the youngest of them ran a toy truck up Bubba's leg, Bob's older brother Butch called the room not so much to silence, but to a low enough din for Bob's sister Debra Ann to lead us in a very Evangelical-style grace.

"We just wanna' praise you and thank you loving Father God for bringing us together safely again this year...."

I heard "amens" come up softly from above the roaring stadium on the TV and the grandchild who was still "vroom-vrooming" his truck.

"And we just wanna' thank you for the food we're about to eat and for Bubba and Daddy...."

There was another round of more insistent "amens" as the group began to get restless, fanning themselves with their empty paper plates. Aware of the group restlessness, Debra Ann finished off the prayer quickly to one big "amen" and the cacophony took back up where it left off.

Dinner was served buffet style and it was everyone-for-oneself. They all piled in, filled plates, and found a seat wherever they could around the big table or in front of the football game or on the steps or under the tree, all the while jabbering away. The whole group was never seated at the same time throughout the dinner. One person jumped up for seconds as another sat down with firsts. The restless children never asked to be excused as they would not have been heard and there was really nothing to be excuse from anyway. And the babbling continued, no one ever really hearing the other, until desert.

About a half-hour into the meal, all of a sudden, unexpectedly, a hush came over the room as the chocolate cake parted its way through the crowd to the table. The dining room suddenly filled with every single one of the family members. Children left their toys by the tree. Brothers-in-law walked away from the game. And his sisters, who otherwise would have been worrying about the oven or the children's plates, stopped fussing for a moment. They all quietly found their way into the room and gathered around the table, whispering reverently, "The chocolate cake." "Looks like good chocolate cake." "It's from Kretchmar's." "Oh, Kretchmar's." "Kretchmar's chocolate cake."

I half expected Debra Ann to break into "We just wanna' praise you and thank you, Chocolate Cake, for your chocolaty goodness, and for Kretchmar's from whence you came.... Bobby, go out there to the piano and play us one of those songs about the chocolate cake!"

But instead the knife slid into the dense dark frosting and a cheer went up as if it were midnight on New Year's. And the whirlwind continued as before, as everyone grabbed a fresh plate and a fork.

holiday meme

I got tagged by my friend Dottie for the following holiday meme. With the way Bob and I like to celebrate the holidays and the fact that our celebrations will be curtailed this year by our impending move, several of the following 16 questions deserve their own separate post, and in fact I'm giving one of them its own space tomorrow.

And never being one to send chain emails about leukemia patient's last wishes or free cell phones from Bill Gates, I'm cautious about tagging anyone. So anyone who does or doesn't feel free to take up this meme should go with their own instincts. But I think Fat Chick for President and JP of J.P. and Earl would both have a good time with these questions. I'm not sure if any of my Live Journal friends, like chriskomater, dakoopst, poetrytoweasels, and theevilnub leave the safety of their LJ confines and check out my Blogger posts, but you're all welcome to take a stab at these as well.

1. Name 3 people you absolutely miss right this moment that you haven't seen in some time.

Well, not to be morose, but my Mom (who died in 1995), my Dad (who's in the middle stages of Alzheimer's), and Bob and myself (I don't know who these two guys are who have been renovating and packing for an entire year, but I want our old selves back).

2. Name 3 things you miss about home during the holidays (be it people, smells, foods, whatever).


The Christmas lights coming on in The Plaza in Kansas City on Thanksgiving night. (It's a big deal. The whole town turns out like Time Square on New Years.)

Mom's post-midnight-mass middle-of-the-night brunch, followed by gift opening that would last until 4 a.m.

TV trays. If my mother had the extended family over for dinner, there would be a buffet table and then everyone would get their own folding TV tray table to eat from wherever they found s a seat on the couch, an easy chair or a stool appropriated from the kitchen. Navigating back to the buffet table was an art, finding a path through what looked like a tent city made of TV trays.

3. Name 1 holiday memory that you have from childhood that you will never forget.

I think it was first grade that one of my schoolmates spilled the beans to all of us about Santa's nonexistence. I went home to a house that was full of some kind of preparations for a party, or a dinner, or just our own family celebration. My sisters were all running around busy with things, my dad and brother were making trips to the store for last minute stuff, and I was distraught. My mother, who at those moments could be the classic "old lady who lived in a shoe," did not have the time or wherewithal to deal with me, so my sister Maggie who was five years older than I was stepped in. If you've ever seen the movie "Beaches," and remember the Bette-Midler-as-a-Little-Girl character, you've got my sister Maggie. A wild, dramatic, funny redhead, Maggie loved taking over when there was a chance to perform.

So, Maggie decided to tell me the story of the time she saw Santa with her own eyes. She took me upstairs to her bedroom and took me step-by-step, detail-by-detail through the story of the night that she was awakened from her sleep by a strange sound down in the living room. We tiptoed down the hallway ourselves as she described how she snuck along the hallway wall to the top of the stairs and saw Santa putting gifts under the tree. And then we sat on the top step looking at the current brightly lit tree, until she calmed me down enough to believe for at least one more Christmas.

4. Name at least 1 favorite book or movie that always reminds you of the holidays.

My parents loved White Christmas. I can't watch even the stupidest, throwaway scenes, like the "Choreography" dance number, without getting teary-eyed.

5. Name your top 3 favorite holiday songs that get you in the mood to celebrate.

It's all the melancholy ones:
"Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" - Mel Torme's original or Ella Fitzgerald's version
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" - Judy Garland's original or Ella Fitzgerald's version
"White Christmas" - Bing Crosby's original or Ella Fitzgerald's version

6. If you could go anywhere other than home for the holidays, where would you choose to go and who would you want to bring along?

Bob and I had one of our best Christmases away from home in Austria. It is a country that really does the holidays well. I would go back to Vienna with Bob any year.

7. The Grinch or Rudolph?

"Rudolph or the Grinch?" they ask.
To answer's not so hard a task.
"Which meant the most?" the bloggers pose.
"The nasty-wasty or the big red nose?"
Well, not that Rudolph isn't sweet,
Or touching when the misfits meet,
but halfway through the show I'm bored.
I lose my way. I've even snored.
So, with Max and Whos and roasted beasts,
With crimes in rhymes and stolen feasts,
Choosing just one show's a since.
It's always, always been the Grinch.

8. Formal holiday dinner or casual get-together food?

Every year Bob makes a six- to eight-course tasting menu with a wine pairing designed by a connoisseur friend, for which our friends come dressed formally. And I fold a mean napkin and decorate the table like a 19th Century banquet, with place cards, full china and silver settings.

9. Name the best holiday gift you ever received and why.

The heirloom my sister sent me several years ago.

10. Describe the funniest holiday moment you've ever had.

My first Christmas dinner at Bubba's.
This story is funny enough to deserve its own posting. Read the separate post.

11. Name a holiday memory that truly warmed your heart.

Each year for the past dozen years, Bob and I have put up an eleven-foot Christmas tree filled with antique ornaments. We're not talking Hallmark from the 1960s or Christopher Radko from the 1990s. We collect the real stuff: real antique ornaments from before World War II, going all the way back into the mid 1800s. (For the record, I realize that this is what most people think gay men do in lieu of having children). The tree was always stunning with at least twenty strands of light to make certain the ornaments were illuminated well enough to see the beautiful details of the antiques. We also clipped on real candles to be lit just once each year on the evening of our holiday dinner.

After the last of the main courses had been served and the cheese course was finished, everyone would move from the table to the couch to loosen their belts and have some coffee before the desserts would be served. Then, while the guests relaxed, Bob and I would shut off all the electric lights on the tree and in the rest of the room and one-by-one light only the tiny candles on the tree. No matter how many years we did this, it was always magical. All the guests would come to a hush and stare. Because it was being lit from the outside (as opposed to by strings of lights within the branches), the tree would become as deep and dark and mysterious as the woods it had come from. The oldest of the mercury glass and metal ornaments that sometimes get lost among the "newer" ones would catch the light best of all, because this was how they were meant to be lit. And our guests would look on in quiet wonder, the closest any twenty-first-century city folks can come to a silent night.

12. Name your top 3 favorite TV specials that frequent the airwaves during the holiday season.

Charlie Brown's Christmas
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
It's a Wonderful Life

13. Sledding, snowball fight, snow angels or building a snowman?

Sledding down the hill behind our house back home in Kansas City. Building a snowman in Union Square or Washington Square.

14. Eggnog, hot chocolate, or hot cider?

Eggnog, with lot's of nutmeg. Bob calls anything with nutmeg "redhead food."

15. Candy canes or fruit cake?

Fruitcake. My mom made a fruit cake that was more like a dark spice cake full of dried and candied fruit and less like the weird gummy fruitcakes that everyone makes fun of.

16. Favorite holiday cookie: frosted sugar cutout, gingerbread, date-nut, or other?

My mom made a simple buttery sugar cookie with a variety of jimmy toppings. They were small and she made hundreds and hundreds of them. My cousins called them "Aunt Sis's Dinky Cookies," but we all loved them. My siblings and I have all tried following her recipe and making them ourselves over the years, but never very successfully. My mother once told me that the reason we were unsuccessful was because we didn't "use enough Spry."

dust

One looks down several dozen feet into the ground to view ancient Roman ruins under the modern Italian cities we've visited like Rome and Verona. On our last trip, what I found most puzzling, what I was most curious to know was whether the old cities had sunk or if the earth's dust had built up on top of them.

The excavation in progress at our apartment in Brooklyn gives me a giant clue. Yesterday we took down all the drapes in our apartment from the windows and the passageways where we had divided the big endlessly rectangular loft into separate "rooms" with several eleven-foot-tall panels of thick fabric. Years of hanging without a thorough cleaning in a loft next to one of the busiest intersections in all of Brooklyn, finished off by a final year where our attention has been on purchasing and renovating our new place, gave these drapes a thick coating of dust that looked like Morticia Adams (or was it Lily Munster) had been there with her dust-blower. It was embarrassing, even without anyone else seeing it. I went to bed last night with a dry head and dry eyes. I blew black gunk out of my sinuses in the shower this morning.

But yesterday, perched high on the ladder, as I handed each dusty panel carefully down to Bob, who took them from me gingerly and headed for the stairwell, my view down on the ruins of what was our Brooklyn apartment helped me better understand excavation sites. I imagined the same layer of dust that is currently covering everything in our apartment multiplying and getting pressed down over a couple millennia, to the point that, someone in the year 4006 will be standing on top of it, from pretty much the same height as I was on the ladder, looking down in at the petrified versions of the tables, chairs, and utensils that I was seeing from above.

Yesterday, as we continued to unearth our belongings for sorting and packing, I saw back through the layers, back to eleven years ago: I visualized the apartment as it was before we swathed it in fabric, back when I took the first pictures of the vast space and drew a floor plan to take home to show my parents. I remembered where we put the Christmas tree each year and how it grew in size and number of ornaments. I found the tieback hooks for the first curtains we hung in the windows, cheap ass synthetic "lace" that was replaced by real drapes a few years later, the drapes Bob and I took to the roof yesterday and shook and beat until we could breath around them again.

Later in the afternoon, Bob dusted off the piano and sat down to play a little from memory since his sheet music is already packed. Suddenly there he was, the man I fell in love with some sixteen years ago, playing music as he did for Christmas parties and on summer evenings while I painted or wrote so many years ago.

As bitter sweet as this is, it is good to knock off the dust and pull back the drapes from our lives. It is good to excavate what once made our house a home.

brkn, ny

Long ago, Bob and I started referring to Brooklyn as "Broken." Years of dealing with surly customer service, down-graded franchises, and dysfunctional civil service providers that pronounced the borough's name pretty damn close to that gave us reason to believe the moniker applied better than one might think. There's the Broken Postal Service, the Broken Target, the Broken Sears and Broken Blockbuster, the Broken Museum of Art, Broken Dental Group, Broken Department of Motor Vehicles and the Broken Pub'ic Lib'ary, all of which more often than not have left us frustrated and wondering why we've stayed on the Broken side of the Broken Bridge as long as we have.

For the past few days NBC has been hyping next Monday's 3D episode of Medium, announcing that the necessary 3D glasses would be available in TV Guide on newsstands starting yesterday, November 17th. I decided to stop off this morning at the Walgreen's around the corner from our Broken apartment, the Walgreen's a few doors down from the building that only recently was renovated from a rat-infested pigeon-coop shell to what the Corcoran Group is now selling as "luxury apartments." The building's street level is still the local homeless and methadone addicts' favorite Dunkin Donuts, a Muslim bodega with milk that is suspiciously not stamped with "NYC Sell By" dates and a Muslim butcher shop where whole freshly slaughtered and skinned lambs arrive weekly, uncovered in the back of the delivery truck and wheeled legs up from the street to the shop door in an old Key Foods shopping cart with one broken wheel, all the while the shop owner and a delivery man yelling at each other in several broken languages. The building also looks out over one of the largest and loudest intersections in all of Broken, a truck route where Atlantic, Flatbush and Fourth Avenues intersect with one another, but someone at Corcoran wants us to believe this is luxurious living.

A few doors down in the Broken Walgreen's I asked if they carried TV Guide and the surly cashier pointed at the magazine rack as if I should have seen it for myself. I'm not use to the new larger format for what was once an easy-chair-pocket-sized publication, and I was expecting to see Patricia Arquette and Jake Weber on the cover.

"Oh, this is it?" I asked; confused by what I saw. "Is this last week's issue?"

"New issue won't come 'til later," she sneared as if I had let rip a great big fart and stunk up her whole check-out counter.

"Oh," I replied trying to smile politely. "It's been all over TV that the new issue would be available yesterday. "

"I said, it don't come 'til later," the Broken cashier repeated with a tone that asked if I was deaf or what? "She don't come 'til Friday's."

"Hmm..." I winced. I gave up getting into sass fights with Broken cashiers several years ago after one ended our heated conversation with "Nobody win, 'cause nobody know they stupid."

This morning I simply replied, "Okay," and walked out of the store.

Just wait, I thought. Just wait until the luxury tenants start shopping at the Broken Waltgreen's. Too bad I won't be around the neighborhood to see what happens then.

a dream

About two weeks after any emotionally stressful event or moment in my life, my psyche loves to clear itself with a good cleansing dream. So right on schedule last night I had a dream that involved my mother, the tenth anniversary of whose death just passed on November 5th.

I dreamt that I was looking over a wall next to a vast, dark, endless body of water, my elbows on the ledge of the wall, and I began to speak to my mother in my head. Crying, I said things like "you left too soon...I wanted to share more of my life with you...I wanted to have you around to get to see my new home and get to know Bob better." Suddenly I was sitting at a large banquet where the tables were full of many people. I was chatting at length with someone across the table from me, vaguely aware that Bob was at another table behind me in the room and would be leaving soon to go on a long trip, one that I would not be joining him on. I turned from my conversation to find him already wearing his coat at the end of my table, ready to leave. He was the most handsome I think I'd ever seen him as, smiling mischievously, he remarked, "I thought you'd just keep talking into our old age." I reached across several people to hug him, which made me have to reach up even more from below than I normally do, much the way my mother had to reach up to hug my father. "You know I love you very much," I whispered into his ear. "You know that right? I love you very much."

it's a cultural thing

I am amazed by the number of New Yorkers who chew gum with their mouths wide open.

As a child in the Midwest I was taught that it was impolite and grotesque. As teenagers we made fun of those who couldn't figure out how to keep their lips together when they chewed. But here in New York, on the subway, in stores and on the streets, I am treated on a daily basis to someone smacking, gurgling and panting their way through a giant wad of gum like a dog with an impossible chunk of gristly beef.

Forget about those who crack and pop their gum with the repetition of a nervous tick, I'm just talking about those who chew there heads off, mouths wide open, teeth, gums and tongue on display, accompanied by more sounds than feeding time at the zoo. It crosses social and economic lines. Yesterday, a handsome, well appointed young man in a suite who got on the train at Wall Street slouched in his subway seat and gnawed his way through his gum wad like Mr. Ed.

Several years ago, I mentioned my disgust in the presence of a coworker at the Upper East Side private elementary school where I use to teach. She ran a program that helped place lower income children in New York private schools, and was particularly sensitive to prejudices against and misunderstandings of the families she aided.

"It's a cultural thing," she commented, with a nonverbal warning that I was treading on disrespect. For a second, I was afraid to comment further, but then I realized I wasn't off base.

"From what I've noticed in Chinatown," I replied politely," so is clearing your sinuses without a handkerchief. But that doesn't make it any more attractive."

colleague?

"Hello, Jay? This is Alyssa? I need a favor from you?"

At the other end of the phone, the vocal pattern of the mouth-breathing "up-speaker" (one who speaks each statement as if it were a question) was disconcerting. I wasn't sure whether or not I needed to reassure the caller with a "yes" or "uhuh" at the end of each statement or just let her continue uninterrupted.

"Can you enter a few dates into the online calendar for me?"

Oh! A real question. Until she paused, I wasn't aware I needed to answer.

"Alyssa," I replied, "I've shown you how to use the database so that you can enter them yourself."

"Well, um, see?" She giggled nervously, "I'm not very good at computers?"

There was no question, actually, about her computer skills but this was not my responsibility. Alyssa is one of those privileged young women with a college degree, who is now in her "first" job just waiting to get married to a wealthy enough young man and get pregnant enough to quit and never have to work again. It is impossible to imagine how she was ever granted a graduate level degree in anything. The job she is currently in is way above her skill level, but in her own opinion way beneath her.

She is one of several twenty-somethings I encounter on a regular basis that fit into this category: privileged, educated, up-speaking, mouth-breathing, waiting to be a wife and a lady who lunches. Their signature trait is their vocal pattern, which mimics that of a junior high school girl with a mouthful of braces and endless insecurities. Each sentence ends with a question mark and is annunciated as if there are wads of cotton and metal in their mouths. It is as if they developed a way of speaking among their friends that never changed after the braces were removed. As hard as I try, it is impossible for me to take them seriously as professional women in conversations.

I don't know where we should start first, but I believe society owes a debt to these young women. I don't know if first they need to get a great big "stop it!" once they get past the age of 16 and then speech therapy. I'm not sure if they should get an "F" on their junior high term paper comparing Eleanor Roosevelt to Lindsay Lohan, or if we should wait until college when they skip the term papers all together because their sorority sister invited them to Turks and Caicos for a week.

However it happens, I believe society owes these chickpeas the truth: that they cannot be the junior high school princesses their entire lives? That they aren't as deserving as they think they are? And for heavens sake, if you want to be taken seriously by your colleagues, do something about that voice!

fragile

Bob and I spent another weekend packing. We're coming down to about three weeks from the actual move date and are now picking up our pace with the preparations. We're also coming to realize that, in the long run, we probably needed the extra months of struggles with a bad contractor at the new apartment in order to unearth ourselves from 11 sedentary years in Brooklyn (emotional and monetary strains of the renovations aside).

Now, boxes are beginning to stack up in the spare room, marked with "Fragile" labels and a color-coded system indicating which room they should land in when they arrive at the new apartment. We already went through much of the difficult, sentimental sorting of memories as we prepared for the two previous side-walk sales and trips to Bob's sister's home for storage, and are now packing things that we care most about, use regularly and look forward to having in the new apartment, like our china, books, photographs, DVDs, the few choice decorative pieces and Christmas Ornaments. The process is now less about letting go and more about preparing to move forward.

Still, here and there, we find a box that has yet to be sorted through. Yesterday I found the box of stuff from the 13 years I spent in the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order of priests. There were notes from seminary classes, Jesuit publications, letters from my former students, the pewter chalice, plate and candlesticks I had made when I was ordained, and even some fortune cookie fortunes that were too good to throw away at the time. This stuff took up three 24-by-18-inch boxes when I moved from Berkeley to New York to begin art school and my first assignment as a priest at Francis Xavier parish in Chelsea. Three boxes were whittled down to two when I took my leave of absence from the Jesuits and moved in with Bob, then one box when he and I moved from the East Village to Brooklyn.

Last evening I sifted through that box of stuff once again. I tossed out some matchbooks and magazine clippings that no longer had any significance for me and recycled a stack of my ordination invitations (keeping only one or two). I then repacked into one shoe box the letters from former students and only the seminary notes that had great doodles in the margins. Then I took the chalice, plate, candlesticks, and the accompanying liturgical linens and accessories, and packed them carefully into a separate box. Being a little superstitious about throwing away good fortune, I stuffed the fortune cookie fortunes between the sheets of bubble wrap, before sealing the box and writing the address of Francis Xavier Church on the outside.

And then, even though everything inside was made of pewter, cloth or paper, I put a "fragile" sticker on one side of the box, ready to send it off like a basket down the Nile for someone else to find it among the reeds.

fur on film

Last evening I saw a TV advertisement that followed a trend that is mostly annoying, but mildly disturbing for me. I didn't catch what the ad was selling, but in it a young man pulls off his shirt to have a beautiful young woman apply suntan lotion, and not only is his front side covered with thick fur, but so is his back side. It was not his actual body hair of course. It was comically applied fake fur à la the werewolf movies of the 1950s and designed to make viewers go "eeuuwww" right along with the beautiful young woman recoiling on screen.

Body hair has taken a blow in the media recently. Movies like Hitch and 40-Year-Old Virgin have made comic clippings of body hair, getting audiences to roar at the inevitable slapstick of quick painful hair removal, while preaching the subtle message that a man will be more appealing if he is completely smooth skinned. Both movies portray a nerdy, chubby, complexly stunted simpleton as unable to get a date with the right woman, and waxing is presented as a big part of the solution. It is great material for comedy, but it sends a lousy message. Body hair is now automatically up there at the top of the list of unlovable traits for men, right behind halitosis, flatulence, and prison records.

This is, of course, old news. Clipping, waxing and plucking have been trends in men's fashion for the past decade, starting, as every trend does, with the gay leading edge and moving through the metros to the suburban heteros. Now even the Long Island and Bay Ridge boys on the streets of Brooklyn look like morning-after drag queens, with eyebrows plucked down to perfect Joan Crawford arches. As with any trend there is some hope when it works its way down to the plebes, but I fear this one won't let go too quickly.

On a regular basis I get photo submissions from guys wishing to model for me, who have trimmed their body hair down to one even length, top to bottom, like zosia grass. When I suggest that they let it grow out for the photo session, some get nervous and ask if they can trim during the photo session; some get down right defensive. They believe clipping shows off their muscle definition better (though nice natural body hair can often accentuate the lines of a well defined torso). They even believe trimming their pubic hair down to stubble will make their dicks look bigger (but, um, unfortunately they simply look like guys with a little Velcro mustache above their small dicks). The same guys would wince if I suggested that they shave their heads bald, wear black army boots with biking shorts and turn the brim of their baseball cap backward, the Chelsea uniform that they conformed to religiously circa 1995, but they can’t recognize today’s waxing and clipping trend as just that, a trend.

Now I’m not a total wolf-man fetishist. I can take or leave back hair, and I’m not a strict adherent to "the-more-the-better" beliefs of some fur fans. But I do think nice natural body hair is sexy. I grew up in the 1960s and '70s with the furry likes of Sean Connery, Robert Redford, and Burt Reynolds whipping their shirts off gratuitously in every film they made. Advertising, from the Marlborough Man to RC Cola to Johnson's Baby Oil, relied heavily on hairy-chested models back in the day. And, as nature would have it, at least half of the men I saw shirtless around me had some nice frosting on their cakes.

It's not that I think everyone should be hairy, but I do think there's room for variety. Let the trends swing toward depilatories for a while, but don't send a message that body hair is unlovable. The variety in tastes out there is what makes the world go around. Just as Kate-Moss-style emaciation isn't everyone's preference in women, neither is Aaron Carter the ultimate man. I'll take Jason Lee or Patrick Warburton over Justin Timberlake any day, as long as no one convinces them to shave it all off to make themselves more lovable.

click it or ticket

On recent drives through surrounding states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, we have taken note of local customs of the road. For example, New Jersey gas stations are not allowed to offer self-service on any of its pumps, which amounts to always paying more to wait longer for someone else to pump your gas and nothing more. Apparently the window squeegee is still self-service. Pennsylvania has installed EZ Pass (our electronic toll collection system) on some but not all of its major toll roads and yet hasn't staffed the toll plazas that require exact change. So EZ Pass card holders are never quite sure when they will need not just real money but exact change to proceed to the next stretch of road beyond the tollbooth gate.

But most recently I've been taken with the new advertising campaigns to remind drivers that not wearing their seatbelts is now punishable by law. All of our surrounding states have adopted the nerdy "Click It or Ticket" slogan that I presume several other states across the country are using.

Is it me or does that slogan remind you of something your junior high school schoolmarm would have come up with to instill some ridiculous classroom dictum? I can hear Sister Helen Louise, pointer in hand, repeating a slogan like that completely unaware of the variety of naively naughty variations pre-adolescent boys would come up with when she was out of the room. I can here the classroom clowns and bullies mimicking here voice and hissing maniacally "Pick at your dick-et" or "Lick it or stick it" --phrases that meant more in our heads than in any reality.

When I see "Click it or Ticket" along the highways, I can only imagine some bookish civil servant or some Nancy "Just-Say-No" Reagan-ish socialite springing into action behind the campaign with the same fervor he or she gave to tree plantings and ribbon cuttings, completely oblivious to the rolling eyes or middle fingers of the drivers passing by in the left lane.

Anyway, on these driving trips, each time I have crossed the border back into New York State, I have been proud to be a New Yorker. Big yellow and black LED signs that read "Buckle Up New York. It's the Law" reminded me that New Yorkers can be fairly direct and no-nonsense when they want to be. I can hear someone in Albany or on Chambers Street shaming the "Click It" slogan right out of the room and saying, "Jus' tell 'em it's 'da fuckin' law, and 'dat they're gonna' get a fuckin' ticket if they don't follow it."

Works for me.

the monster that eats my brain

It takes a hold of the sides of my scull and jolts me awake, growling into my ears, "The day is mine." I am instantly nauseous and dizzy from the throbbing in my temple. I am helpless until it decides to let go. It may take an hour; it may take the whole day before it loosens its grip on my head and leaves me weak and woozy.

It is a sinus migraine.

Not one to have a lot of health complications or complain profusely about minor inflictions, I am overwhelmed when these sinus migraines sneak in unexpectedly maybe once every two or three months and steal my day. This is a condition that has afflicted my whole family. Often associated with a change in the weather, it's like a tornado brewing behind our eyes.

I am back to work today feeling a little wiped out, as I sort through the mess that collected while I was out sick all day yesterday.

I'll should be back to being my old self my tomorrow.

working-class heirlooms

Saturday will be the tenth anniversary of my mother's death. With that in mind, I share the following story.

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My sister Sally's return address stuck out on the corner of the padded parcel envelope that someone had crammed into my mail cubby in the faculty lounge. I removed my gloves and carefully extracted the package from its tight squeeze, fearing that Christmas cookies, or what have you, might have been crushed. It was that time of year again. From Thanksgiving to New Years, my large family sent small gifts and packages to my work address in the City (the postal service in Brooklyn was not to be trusted), and most times the people at the elementary school knew better than to cram a package of cookies into a five-by-five-inch cubby.

As I freed the last corner of the envelope from the metal rim of the mailbox, I could tell that the contents were not crumbly at all. Rather, whatever was inside felt soft and pliable, like a small quilt or pillow. I secreted the package under my arm and headed for my classroom knowing that the content was something that had belonged to my mother. Sally had just spent the week of Thanksgiving cleaning my father’s house. She and my eldest sister, Emma, had decided they would surprise Dad when he returned from visiting my brother in Chicago, by clearing away the piles of sweepstakes offers, Readers Digests and grocery store circulars that tend to gather in the home of an 82-year-old widower.

Most importantly, they had also sorted through Mom's things. Three years had passed since her death and Dad was finally willing to rearrange the townhouse, the bedrooms and the closet space, which had to that point remained unchanged exactly as mom had left them. He was finally willing to consider not keeping her tiny blouses, slacks, and ironing smock hanging exactly as she had hung them in the closet. He even expressed interest in turning her little makeshift infirmary bedroom back into his office once again. And these faint concessions were enough for Sally and Em to plow ahead and make it happen before he could change his mind.

I sat the package on my desk and eyed it pensively as I removed my coat. Sally had described the clean up by phone the week before. She and Em had sorted through Mom's things, dividing, storing and giving them away. Most of it was nothing more than working-class stuff, with a singular Hummel here or a turn-of-the-century photo of hardworking grandparents there, a Seth-Thomas mantle clock that sat atop the prefab entertainment unit, a faux-French deviled-egg platter from the '50s, mom's wheelchair where her favorite sweater still hung across the back.

I never imagined there was much there to be handed down to me. As the second-youngest of eight siblings, the only one without children of my own to pass things down to, the one living farthest from home each time Mom and Dad had already divided things and given them away, I had long since accepted my bequest. I had inherited Dad’s sense of humor and Mom’s hands, and they would both remind me of each of them until my last days of consciousness. And those would be it. Em would get the Hummel, Sally would get the mantle clock, and everyone else already had the bits and pieces of furniture and silver that Mom had meted out from her death bed.

That is not to say I had been forgotten, just overlooked in years past while the local family members had been there to help clean and move. And, having been gone for so many years, during which time Mom and Dad had moved several addresses beyond the house where I had grown up, I already wasn't much wedded to anything that they still had.

Furthermore, in her final years, my mother gave me a priceless gift of a different sort that I have cherished more than anything from their tiny townhouse. A feisty little creature with a curiosity that was never matched by her education, who kept her sense of humor and dignity while she took in laundry and ironed for people for a living, my mother instead learned a great deal about life and the world from the children she produced. On my first visit home after I had come out of the closet and told her about Bob, she and I sat in the kitchen and, as I folded and she ironed the laundry, she asked me a series of mundane questions about my relationship with Bob: how did we divide the chores, how did we resolve arguments, what did we do for entertainment? The conversation was punctuated sometimes by gentle laughter, sometimes by a nod or simply the sound of the steam iron as she sat it up on its end. Then at one point she paused to frame her next question very carefully.

"Now, don't take this the wrong way," she asked as only my mother could, "but I hear that, in these kinds of relationships, one takes the role of the man and the other takes the role of the woman."

I had never imagined having to answer such a question, especially not for my mother. "Well," I began equally as carefully, "for starters, I've never liked the idea that there is a male role or a female role even in straight couples."

"Well, that's true," she replied, producing the ever-ready Kleenex from the pocket of her little gold ironing smock to wipe her nose. "Just look at my girls." I didn't explore that comment further, but I am aware that my sisters can be as much the bread-winners and decision-makers as the housekeepers and child-bearers. So, I presumed that's what she meant.

"But also," I continued, "Bob and I both wanted to be with a man. If either of us had wanted to be with a woman, we would have chosen a woman."

She remained quiet long enough to run the iron along a shirt sleeve. "Well, that's a very good answer," she concluded. "I hope you don't mind all these questions. I just want to understand my children."

Of course I didn't mind. She had just packed every kind of conversations she had had with each of my sisters into one afternoon of ironing. She had just given me one of the fondest memories of my life.

So several years later, sitting at my desk at the school, I took a deep breath before opening the padded envelop with my sister's return address on it. As I tore open a corner and saw a flash of gold fabric, I knew exactly what she had sent me. It was mom's ironing smock, folded neatly, no Kleenex in the pocket, but her careful press along the creases of the sleeves.

french vanilla cinnamon spice maple hazelnut

This morning in line at Starbucks my olfactories were accosted by a scent I usually associate with Midwest homes and shopping malls, but definitely not with Starbucks. It was one of those pungent, artificial French vanilla, artificial cinnamon, unidentifiable spice, artificial maple hazelnut concoctions that every small town candle, card and coffee shop reeks of these days. It's the scent that has permeated all of my sisters' and Bob's sisters' homes for the past several years now, not just in the bathroom, but in the living room, and even in the kitchen where the natural spice smells should be, though no one seems to catch the irony.

I don't know when the revolution started. Maybe it was when Martha first came to K-Mart or when the Gourmet Bean set up shop along the Jersey turnpike, but they've taken over the middle of America so completely that no one knows any better. More than once, at so-called specialty coffee stores, I've been handed French Vanilla when I've asked for French Roast. More than once, someone I care about has lit one of these candles and then asked me in shear wide-eyed amazement, "Doesn't it smell like I'm baking cookies," leaving me wondering when it was that they last baked real cookies.

So, I looked around the Starbucks to see if I could find the source of the unwelcome smell, and low-and-behold, there was a young woman pacing the parameter of the order line carrying a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup. She had obviously been dragged unwillingly into the Starbucks by her friend whose coffee preference was different from hers.

I know. I know. I'm well aware of the whole corporate menace thing that friends beat me with each time I mention Starbucks. And I am willing to admit that it's a little ridiculousness that there are eight, yes eight, different Starbucks within a five-minute walk from my new place in the Village. But I keep going back there. I can't help but want my maple, cinnamon, vanilla and hazelnut to be real and in my desserts, and my coffee untainted by candle fragrances.

all saints...in limbo

Last night I stopped by the new apartment to check in with the construction crew before heading home to organize the remnants of Sunday's sidewalk sale. Standing on 8th Street in front of the building, with a swarm of tramps and mass murders coming toward me heading for the Village Halloween parade, a wave of sadness came over me. No it wasn't because I would have to miss seeing the parade this year. Nor was it because of the enormous lack of creativity in the costumes. (I swear every woman was dressed as some form of slut and every guy was dressed as a character from a horror flick, like some dreadful junior high school Halloween dance, exaggerated gender rolls, insecurities and all.)

No, the wave of sadness was because last year on the very same night, Bob and I stood on the very same apartment steps amidst last year's swarm of tramps and mass murders and looked up at the same dark window on the third floor, thinking "Next year at this time, we'll be living there." We had already signed on the new apartment by October of last year and were just waiting for the mortgage and the lawyers and the paperwork to finish up so we could close on the place. And we thought that process took forever!

After I met with the construction crew, I grabbed the mail and headed for the subway back to Brooklyn. When I came up above ground a block from our current apartment, I saw two women in ghostly make up with exaggerated eye make up and lip stick. I thought they were in costume until I recognized them as two of the regulars at the methadone clinic across the street from our building. And that, indeed, was their usual daytime make up.

I am still in limbo.