ever-fixed mark

Business travel varies in quality. Sometimes, you’re meeting old friends in Paris to dine by moonlight on a soft September evening. Other times, you’re driving a rented Chevy Malibu in sub-zero temperatures from O’Hare to Warsaw, Indiana, only to spend a week shuttling from the hotel to the office to Bennigan’s, while experiencing a miscarriage.

Don’t tell me that has never happened to you.

This recent trip, while not of the moonlight-in-Paris variety, has been pretty pleasant. The conference presentations have been well above average. There is a terrific full-service gym attached to the hotel. The hotel itself is absolutely beautiful in a very old-fashioned, stately way. I’m sitting here

in the impressive 19th-floor lounge looking through the French doors over the cityscape drinking complimentary champagne as I review my slides for tomorrow. I’m idly wondering why I never ventured into this hotel the entire time I lived in Philadelphia, despite the fact that I worked one block away. I decide to Google a photo of the lounge to send to Husband, who has spent his evening wrangling a cranky toddler.

I Googled, then I smacked my head. Of course. Legionnaire’s Disease. I remember seeing it on the news as a child. The hotel loomed in my memory like the lodge in The Shining. It was closed when I lived here, a ghost structure emblematic of the failure and decay that plagued Center City during the mid-eighties. It wasn’t just a case of an unfortunate outbreak at the wrong time; the source of the bacteria was eventually traced to the hotel’s cooling system.

Still beats the Warsaw Miscarriage Tour.

The first rule about Book Club? You do not talk about Book Club! So I’ll have to tread carefully here, or risk a beating about the head with a hardback. I’ve been thinking about one of our recent selections, The Time Traveler’s Wife.

I was fairly resistent to this book from the first page, because I’ve come to harbor an intense dislike for otherwise realistic stories that feature fantastic elements as plot devices. I don’t mind good straightforward science fiction, and even recommended Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, which is about time travel, to my bookclub. But for some reason I despise magical realism. Magic, or reality: choose one.

The Time Traveler’s Wife quickly won me over, though, with its Chicago setting. The hero lived on North Dearborn near the Newberry Library, where Husband lived where I first met him. He and the heroine hung out at Get Me High, a tiny little lounge under a bridge in Bucktown near the apartment I lived in when Husband and I got engaged. It was nice to see the old neighborhood again, albeit through a book. And the hero wasn’t traveling back and forth through history as much as back, and occasionally forth, through his own life. I found this interesting on a metaphorical level, although it was hard to track the narrative thread, despite helpful captions like “1982. Henry is 33, and 31.”

I am currently traveling back to my own past. A last-minute substitution for a colleague at a conference has landed me in Philadelphia, one block north of the building where I worked in my first real post-college job. I had moved here after graduation to kill time while waiting to complete the lengthy interview process for a job with the CIA. They rejected me. The government never gave me any feedback on that decision, but it might have been due to my incredible ignorance of world affairs, my astounding immaturity, and the fact that I failed the lie-detector test twice. It’s hard to believe they kept me coming back to Langley for six months. Your tax dollars at work.

When I got the bad news, I began looking for a real job. Since I had been an English major, I thought I had to work in advertising. Advertising or teaching: wasn’t that the law? It literally did not occur to me to seek any other kind of position. In the Inquirer that week, two ad agencies were seeking administrative people. Both interviews were downtown by the Academy of Music, a short walk from my apartment. The first was in a beautiful converted townhouse. The interviewer was very kind and respectful as I summarized my qualifications and goals (mostly, “avoid defaulting on student loans”).

“We do very special work here,” he told me. “We handle all the media and advertising for the Reverend Billy Graham. It’s a wonderful place to work. We start with prayers every morning and hold a Bible study group once a week.”

The second interview was in the Academy House, next to the Academy of Music. The agency’s claim to fame was a series of spots for a jewelry store featuring the proprietors singing ’50’s music. The boss collected Art Deco furniture, including a very cool black lacquer kneehole desk. I sat across from him and tried to sell myself, completely unaware that I was nervously tapping my foot on his exposed shoe. I apologized in horror.

“I thought you were doing that on purpose,” he said.

“I like to hire Catholic girls,” he said. “They’re good workers.”

“I have Tourette’s syndrome,” he said. “Sometimes I say things that are inappropriate.”

Obviously, I took the job, and obviously it was a disaster. Yesterday I visited the deli where I ate miserable lunches for the 8 months I lasted there, and shook my head at my 21-year-old idiot self. I walked past the Academy of Music, where I had an evening job answering the phone for the Pennsylvania Ballet, a job that provided me with free tickets to the ballet, and marveled at my youthful dumb luck. I caught a whiff of the food truck where I used to buy dinner to eat on the train to Villanova, where I had enrolled in grad school because it was cheaper to pay tuition and defer my loans than pay them, and rolled my eyes at my inchoate (yet effective) self-preservation instinct.

Tomorrow, back to the future. It’s a wonder I survived.

Norman Mailer’s mom saved everything: according to the New York Times print edition, Mrs. M “relentlessly squirreled away his notebooks, family photographs…and even his dogs’ identification tags.” The celebrated writer has just sold his collected papers to the University of Texas for $2.5 million.

If Aitch ever becomes famous, Husband and I will have missed out on a significant money-making opportunity. We have already started pitching his pre-school papers.

I realize that, as a mother, this puts me on par with Medea, but I just can’t rouse myself for the effort to organize, catalog and store the truckloads of construction-paper arts and crafts that are being sent home with Aitch on a daily basis. I am a big Flylady fan, and the one principle that has really struck a nerve with me is “declutter every day.” Not that I follow the rest of Flylady to the letter; I have my daily routines, but I have always, even in my darkest, brokest days, left the heavy cleaning to someone else. (One exception: When I was in the Peace Corps, it would have been unseemly for a volunteer to hire a domestic worker. You can jump to here to view the state of my toilets and see how that worked out for me.)

Anyway, I thought Husband, a distinctly unsentimental type, was on board with the whole decluttering thing, but after discussing the Mailer article he surprised me by saying, “Well, of course, when he starts doing crafts for real in school, then we’ll save them.”

“What do you mean, ‘for real’?”

“When he knows what he’s doing. Right now the teachers do most of it, and he spreads a little glue. He doesn’t even know what’s going on. When he creates something purposefully and takes pride in it, then we’ll save it.”

I have noticed this difference in our thinking before. Husband often talks of Aitch as though there is a magic point upcoming in his life where he will change from a baby into a fully sentient being. He often looks forward to the day when Aitch will “really be able to hold a conversation” or “will be able to do fun things.” I think of Aitch’s development as more of a continuum. While I look forward to the day when we can hold different kinds of talks with Aitch, and do different activities with him, I think I will miss the baby discourse and play we engage in now. Consequently I don’t see much difference, intent-wise, between a paper kite he glues in play school, a diorama he makes in elementary school, or a full-scale model of the Parthenon he does in high school — but it doesn’t mean I’m going to clutter up my house with it.

Husband noted that practically the only souvenirs he has of his own childhood are a few school pictures and Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia. He wishes he had more of his school papers. Husband was number five of seven, however, and Aitch is the first child to be assimilated into our collective, so his life is much better documented. He has a video baby book, this blog, and millions of bytes of photos.

Perhaps electronic storage is the answer. It’s cheap and compact. I’ll start scanning all his play school progress notes and art projects. The University of Texas will appreciate it some day.

Today, we received a wedding invitation in the mail…from people we had never heard of. Could not place them at all.

Husband and I tried to figure out from whose friend/family pool this missive might have been sent. The bride’s last name was Italian (more likely, mine); the groom’s, Irish (more likely, his). The state was his birthplace, but I had recently received an invitation from another friend living there. Could the printer have mixed up the mailing lists?

I desperately wanted to 411 their phone number and clear up the mystery, because wouldn’t that have been a fun conversation: “Hi, you invited me to your wedding! Who are you?” But with my finely honed forensic skills, I noted that the bride’s first name was the same name as my kayak — that is, a family name that Husband’s family, being Irish, is wont to recycle. One call to my sister-in-law later, and we ascertained that the bride was indeed Husband’s first cousin, once removed. Check here for an excellent explanation of cousin terminology.

Husband had never met this woman, nor could recall ever hearing of her existence despite the fact that she was named after his twin sister. Based on what he remembered of her mother, he estimated that she was in her early twenties. Poor girl — I imagine she was strong-armed into inviting every last leaf on the family tree. “But Ma, we have four hundred guests! Can’t we leave off Whosit and his wife — I never even heard of them!” She’s probably saying novenas that we and three hundred other little-known invitees will decline so her parents can afford to serve steak instead of elbow macaroni at the reception.

Sweetie, here’s the answer to your prayers. We will not attend.

For those of you not living entirely in the blogosphere, an iPod Random Ten is a listing of the next ten songs on your iPod set on Shuffle mode — a microcosm of your musical tastes. (See a recent example here.) As far as I can tell, it’s meant to be a Rorschach test of your cool quotient.

Pictures of other people’s perfect musical tastes make me sick and wicked. I’m hopelessly musically uncool. I’ve never even heard anything by Sleater-Kinney, and I didn’t even know Rilo Kiley existed until he…she…they started popping up on all these lists. I’m bitter about these hip, well-rounded catalogs. I suspect you cheat. That’s right. I just know you’re skipping “Uptown Girl” to get to Belle and Sebastian.

Let’s take the subjectivity out of this. I propose a scoring system that will allow us to quantify just how hip and eclectic we are. How about this:

+1 point for each distinct genre in the list

+1 point for each decade represented

+1 point for each song in a language other than English

+1 point for each instrumental, up to 3 (after 3, begin taking away 1 point for each instrumental)

+1 point if the solo artists on the list are equally balanced between male and female

-1 point for each genre represented by three or more songs

-1 point for each artist represented more than once

-1 point for each “top ten” song in any genre

-1 point for any song with a video in which a wind or fog machine features prominently

How did I do? Here’s my top ten from my most recent run:

1. “Old Macdonald Had a Band” - Raffi. Okay, so I haven’t figured out how to exclude Aitch’s music from my iPod.
2. “Miracles” - Jefferson Airplane. Whenever I hear this song, I picture the band members (who, in my memory, look something like Hall and Oates, plus Grace Slick) in flowing robes, perched at the top of a cliff, singing earnestly. The song is beyond cheesy, but its key changes and volume progression make it a really great running song.
3. “Wedding Bell Blues” - 5th Dimension. I have always loved this song, especially the heartfelt “Bill!” at the beginning. Unfortunately, Husband’s name is not Bill. (I do have a children’s book by Rudy Giuliani, though, autographed from him to “William” — the name Husband’s family mistakenly thought we chose for Aitch.)
4. “If I Were a Cup” - Steve Weeks. Another children’s song, but one that is so cool you might mistake it for the latest Josh Whoever (or other hip acoustical artist). Great lyrics - “Being unfriendly’s not for me/So a clam with charisma is what I’d be…”.
5. “So Like Candy” - Elvis Costello. Love Elvis.
6. “Do They Know It’s Christmas Time” - Bono et al. I haven’t figured out how to exclude my Christmas songs, either.
7. “I Don’t Like Mondays” - Boomtown Rats. Wasn’t Geldof involved in #6 as well?
8. “Danny Don’t” - Steve Weeks. More kids’ stuff, but catchy.
9. “Faded Love” - Asleep at the Wheel. I have no idea what this is or why I have it.
10. “Boots Are Made for Walking” - Nancy Sinatra. This song has the perfect beat for running. I also love Nancy Sinatra, because her singing voice is exactly like mine — flat and tuneless. And you can’t beat the lyrics: “You keep lyin’ when you oughta be truthin’… You keep samin’ when you oughta be changin’….” Nance, buy a verb!

So, let’s tote up the cool:

Genres: Roughly six, so +6.
Decades: I’m too lazy to Google it all - let’s say 3, so +3 = 9.
No instrumentals, no languages other than English (unless you count Boots).
Five solo artists, but only one female: no points there.
Genre of children’s music represented by 3 songs: -1 = 8.
One artist represented more than once: -1 = 7.
Top ten songs: let’s say -5 = 2.
Video with wind/fog machine: “Miracles,” most likely, so -1 = 1.

Total cool quotient: 1. I’m so proud.

Did I ever mention that Husband and I belong to a little-known religious sect? We believe that dogs are the reincarnated souls of humans, and to gain a cushy spot in the next life, you should pamper your dog as much as possible in this one.

As one of the pillars of our faith, we tithe 10% of our daily meals to Dog. To generate the best karma possible, we now deliver these meals (on my new Pantone dishes, no less — check them out) to him wherever he happens to be reclining.

We also practice attachment parenting with Dog, but alas, not with Aitch. Not enough room in the bed for four of us, and Dog was there first.

Last week, our homestudy for a second child was approved and sent to Korea. We are now officially waiting for a girl. With wait times for girls at our agency nine months and pushing outwards, it’s highly probable that our future daughter has not yet been conceived.

Our agency has just changed its Korea program policy on allowing prospective adoptive parents to specify the sex of the child. (Most of the literature refers to this as “specifying gender,” but since my on-line Webster’s defines gender as “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex,” I think “sex” is the more precise word for an infant.) Previously, they allowed parents who already had one child to request a child of the opposite sex. Starting February 1, there are no special requests permitted.

Although we managed to sneak in just under the deadline, albeit unknowingly, I’m glad that the policy has changed. Like many adoptive parents, I’m uncomfortable with the concept of pre-selecting a baby’s sex. We are all too aware of the sex discrimination practiced in certain countries that leads to infant girls being placed for adoption. A preference for one sex over the other seems undemocratic.

Some adoptive parents think that choosing the sex of one’s child is tantamount to interfering with Fate, and that it is bound to end tragically. This is patently silly, but I still feel it at a gut level. Movies are pretty clear on what happens to scientists who try their hand at genetic engineering, and we associate specifying “girl” or “boy” on the adoption application with drastic measures to guarantee a girl or boy in the womb, including selective abortion. Most of us (I think) would not interfere with a pregnancy to achieve the desired sex. But neither would we monkey with our embryos’ genes to ensure brown hair or blue eyes — yet we have no problem choosing the Korea program or the Russia program or the China program based on our preference for certain physical traits. The application process simply doesn’t permit much randomness, so we don’t feel that by making choices we’re forced to make, we’re tinkering with Fate. It’s only the optional choices that leave us uneasy.

This Fate stuff is problematic when you start to parse it, anyway. Where do you draw the line between acting for yourself and letting the universe act for you? Isn’t applying for adoption trumping fate? What about having sex? If God wanted you to have a child, wouldn’t He impregnate your Himself, or arrange for you to find a baby floating among the bulrushes? Let me Google that–there might be a precedent.

That said, I approve of the change in policy because it will eliminate the double list, uneven wait times, and near-certainty that adoptive families with Korean children will all be structured the same way (elder boy, younger girl). Part of me wishes that we had not applied until after the change. I would prefer to have chance decide for me. I would be perfectly happy with a second boy, but Husband and I were compelled to specify a girl anyway. Because so many more people want to adopt girls than boys, and because there may be fewer girls available for international adoption, by not choosing a girl we would almost certainly be choosing a boy, and we did not want, by our non-choice, to close the door on the possibility of a girl.

So in the words of the inimitable Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” And speaking of Rush in the news…in weird bit of synchronity, when I Googled Rush just now to find that link, I came up with this item from today’s Edmonton Sun, detailing a plea agreement for Rush lead guitarist Alex Lifeson and his son for charges of resisting arrest in Naples, Florida, where I lived for two years after grad school. What would Ayn Rand say?

$79.95 later, we have a working dishwasher. A nice repairman came out and spent two minutes re-connecting some wires — wires that no doubt became loose when Husband was poking around trying to discover the source of the stench. Oh, well. We’re yuppies — we can’t be expected to know our way around large kitchen appliances.

Oh, you thought they had retired the word “yuppie”? Well, I heard it used just the other day as I was hanging around the coffee shop at the marina. Port City, like the Simpsons’ Springfield, encompasses a vast array of topographical features — ocean, river, mountain, marsh, and so on — so we do indeed have a marina. I heard a man complaining about “some yuppie who wanted to buy my boat.” From the man’s local accent and the tone of his voice I surmised that by “yuppie” he meant, “non-native Port City dweller who is stupid enough to buy real estate at these prices” — in other words, someone just like me. This from a man who had a yacht in a marina where boat slips cost more than my mortgage.

Going back to the origin of the word “yuppie,” I could see that we no longer fit the profile anyway. “Yuppie” stems from an acronym that stands for “Young Urban Professional.” Husband and I are no longer young, no longer urban, and we work (from home) in our pajamas. Aging, Suburban, Semi-Professional– yup, we’re “Assies.”

To underscore how non-urban we are, look what wandered into our driveway as we were waiting for the repairman! Their little brains must have been addled by the freakishly warm weather: 86 degrees this afternoon, after snowing just last week.

Our dishwasher gave up the ghost yesterday. A few weeks ago, we first noticed an odd, garlicky-plasticky-pesticidy smell rising from it. The smell was so noxious that I had to leave the house one afternoon while Husband ran a few cycles of bleach and vinegar. It was the kind of smell that lives in memory, sickening you as you think, “Don’t remember the smell. Don’t remember the smell.” Yesterday, when we opened the dishwasher after a cycle, we realized that it had failed to draw any water. I’m not sure if the smell is related to the mechanical failure, but the upshot is that I’ve been washing dishes by hand.

Hand-washing reminds me of my stint in the Peace Corps, where there were no dishwashers. Sometimes, there were no hot water heaters in the kitchen, so you had to heat up water on the stove to do dishes. Two of the four apartments I lived in did have kitchen water heaters, and during the winter it was a luxury to run that heater at full blast and wash the dishes in hot, hot water, immersing your arms up to the elbow in an effort to keep warm.

I say “luxury” because the fuel that heated the running water was propane, fed from a tank that had to be hauled to the kitchen from the closest local shop. Tanks were heavy and cost money, money that was better spent on transportation to seaside resort towns and formaldehyde-flavored beer, so washing dishes with hot, freely-flowing water was something you did only when feeling particularly flush.

Those hot-water heaters were dangerous. They were mounted directly on the wall of the kitchen, with a rubber hose running from the propane tank to the heater. The propane could leak from the heater jets, through the hose, or at the junction of the hose and the tank. We learned to rub dish soap on the hose periodically to look for bubbles that indicated leaks. I was able to dig up some old video of my kitchen and bathroom with a nice lingering shot of the hot water heater, as well as a good view of the double toilet.

But functioning heaters were even more dangerous than leaky ones. Big units had powerful jets that could quickly consume the oxygen in an unventilated room. You always had to crack a window while washing dishes or showering.

This is incontrovertible proof that housework is not only bad for you, but is potentially fatal.

Last weekend, the humans from my dog’s play group threw a baby shower for one of the (human) members who is expecting. Yes, I realize “my dog’s play group” sounds ridiculous, but here in Port City we take our canine responsibilities very seriously. My dog also goes to day care (but it is “unaffiliated”–neither gay nor straight, nor funded by Head Start). I have also been to more than one dog birthday party.

Anyway, the shower was lovely — great food, good conversation, attractive gifts. It was a small crowd, just the play group members, two spouses, and three dogs. By the end of the evening, we were all saying, “We should do this more often,” which is not something you often hear at a baby shower. The next day, one of the attendees even told my husband (who had been babysitting so I could go) that he missed a good time.

Too often, rite-of-passage parties (weddings, showers, birthdays, graduations and the like) are horribly dull. I think that people tend to focus on the ritual aspect entirely at the expense of the party. There are too many toasts at a rehearsal dinner, for example, or it takes hours to open bridal shower presents. Sometimes too many of the guests don’t know anyone else and have nothing in common, leading to knots of couples standing uncomfortably around the perimeter of the function hall. A few years ago, Husband and I attended a spate of weddings that seemed to follow the same formula: a long Mass at a church in the city, followed by a reception at a suburban hotel an hour’s drive away, but with a two-hour delay in between so that the wedding party could take pictures– not enough time to do anything productive, but too much time to sit around a hotel in the middle of nowhere. You can’t eliminate all traditions during these kinds of events, but if most of the guests are wishing themselves dead, it might be good to cut back on the shower games or the chicken dance.

So, this delightful shower, along with a recent posts on Chez Miscarriage and The Naked Ovary, have got me thinking about what it means to be the non-fertile Myrtle at the fertility rite. These bloggers and so many people commenting on their posts wrote so eloquently of how painful it can be for those experiencing infertility to deal with other people’s pregnancies — even “recovering infertiles” like some adoptive moms. I had commented that I was one of the weird few who was not bothered at all.

I’m not sure why this is. It may be because we jumped off the fertility treatment merry-go-round the minute it looked like things were getting tough. It may be because I got pregnant pretty easily, and didn’t “feel” infertile, even though I couldn’t sustain the pregnancy. It may be because you can’t swing a used pregnancy test stick in this town without hitting someone experiencing one type of fertility issue or another–mid-life’s grand infertility pageant, right here. It may be because so many of our friends who did get pregnant suffered so many frightening complications, that just as they were eyeing the expense and hassle of our adoption preparations and thinking, “Wow, I’m glad this last IVF worked or we’d be in their shoes,” we were looking on in horror at their bed rest orders and hospitalizations and NICU stays and telling each other,”Wow, I’m really glad we’re adopting!”

As I read the new comments on getupgrrl’s follow-up, though, especially Tira’s post about needing to be there for your friends, I remembered a baptism party about two years ago where I felt like the bad fairy at Aurora’s christening. It wasn’t that I was upset about my friend’s successful pregnancy, but I felt that my own bad luck and unhappiness was almost palpable, poisoning the goodwill of the assembly and cursing the baby in question to a Sleeping Beauty fate. “You will prick your finger on a spindle and suffer unexplained recurrent miscarriage until you suddenly wake up and discover you are almost too old to adopt!” It was not a pretty feeling.

It’s wonderful when you can really, fully celebrate with an expectant mother, and the shower host facilitates that by providing delicious food and lots of alcohol and does not insist on making a hat out of the bows and a paper plate. Congratulations to our friends who are awaiting the birth of their child. The dogs can’t wait to have another playmate.