Sometime in the late eighties, I was invited to a New Year’s Eve party given by my roommate’s new boyfriend’s parents. They lived in a big Society Hill rowhouse, which was utterly fascinating to me; I had never met adults who lived in the city who weren’t poor. (Where I was from, when you made enough money, you always moved to the suburbs.) The boyfriend’s mother was an artist and his father was a partner in a big law firm. “A senator is going to be there!” my roommate told me, to impress upon me how rare would be the air at this shindig.
I may have brushed past the Senator on the staircase, but I had eyes only for my roommate’s boyfriend’s younger brother, who was dreamy. He was tall and thin with thick dark hair and a beard. He quoted poetry and wore a leather jacket. He was an English major. To me, he was like a Jewish Byron. Later that evening we walked down to Penn’s Landing, and he kissed me for the first time at midnight under the fireworks. I was smitten.
We dated for a year or so, hanging out in his parents’ house while they traveled, and in their beach condo when they were at home. He was a lot of fun, and the real estate perks were not unwelcome to a young woman living with two human roommates and a colony of rats. I can’t remember why we broke up. We never fought. We just sort of moved on.
Seven years later, we were both in the same city briefly, and we got back in touch. He had graduated from law school and was working as an assistant district attorney; I was commuting back and forth to a consulting gig in Chicago. We started dating again. He was still fun. Something had changed, though; he had become a Republican, and I, after three years in the Peace Corps, was more or less a Liberal.
I tried to ignore his conservative rantings, but one day he was going on and on about how wonderful Newt Gingrich was, and he went too far. I looked at him and just knew it wasn’t going to work out this time, either. “I can’t believe you’re on their side! Who ever heard of a Jewish Republican, anyway?” I said.
“Arlen Specter,” he shot back, thinking of course of his father’s friend who had been at the New Year’s Eve party where we first met. “He’s Jewish and Republican.”
Port City put on its fourth annual Literary Festival this weekend, and this year I roused myself to attend the opening night “dinner with the authors.” My friend J. was the co-director of the festival this year, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to hobnob with the local literati.
I was especially eager to meet three writers: Julia Glass, because I just finished The Whole World Over on the plane back from Miami, and I really enjoyed it; Elinor Lipman, because The Inn at Lake Devine is one of my favorite books; and Andre Dubus III, not just because of The House of Sand and Fog but also because he is a local luminary, Port City’s unofficial writer-in-residence.
Dubus was not at the dinner, which was disappointing. I spotted Glass and Lipman right away, but felt odd about approaching them. Is there ever any point to having any kind of conversation with a celebrity? He or she has heard it all before and certainly isn’t going to be charmed senseless by meeting YOU; the real point of such an encounter is to gratify the fan, which is so one-sided it feels silly. Still, the whole point of the dinner was to garner such a cheap thrill, and I was really touched when Husband corralled Julia Glass and dragged her over to meet me.
She was quite gracious and asked specifically why I liked the book. I asked her what authors she read and she became a bit flustered and said, “Oh, I always forget what I read when people ask me that.” She waved her hand at another festival author and said, “Margot Livesey is one of my favorites,” and then excused herself. This is why I have carefully pre-selected and memorized a short list of powerful but slightly obscure Literary Influences to rattle off in case I’m ever asked that question during an interview or on a red carpet. Julia, I’m surprised that you, at this point in your career, haven’t done the same.
Although Andre Dubus III was not at the dinner, he did give a reading the next day that I was lucky enough to attend. He spoke in the same white, sun-filled Unitarian church in which I heard Richard Russo a few years ago. Russo had made a few jokes about lecturing from the elevated pulpit, but ended up giving his lecture from the floor. Dubus also joked about it but then said, “Oh, what the hell,” and ran up the stairs.
He read from a memoir-in-progress; the piece he gave started with his move to Port City as a teenager. I have heard stories about how this picturesque vacation spot was on the brink of collapse in the ’70s, but I don’t think I ever really understood how bad it was until I heard listened to his descriptions of weed-choked lots and front yards filled with rusted cars on the same street where my son now attends kindergarten. (As another friend of mine who grew up across the border in New Hampshire tells it, “Port City was where you went for heroin and hookers.”)
What I found fascinating was a theme he didn’t explore in the reading, but which I hope will come out in the book: He stayed. Most people who endure a miserable childhood in a lousy backwater need to get out to find success. But he stayed and prospered, and the town prospered around him.
Dubus was a charming and charismatic speaker, and as I sat there taking in the pulpit and the hair and all the women in attendance, it came to me: My gods! This man is Port City’s very own Gaius Baltar.
We finally got some nice weather this weekend, but in typical New England fashion we went from 40-degree days straight to high summer, bypassing spring entirely. Port City went into shock at the prospect of two sunny 80-degree days in a row and threw itself into Summer-in-April with the zeal of a college sophomore on Spring Break.
We went along for the ride, and in the short space of two days experienced a town festival (more on that later), a long run in the country (me), bike riding, basketball, Frisbee by the river, ice cream on the town square, lunch al fresco at the hot-dog cart, a trip to the beach, kayaking on the lake, beer and lemonade on the porch, an afternoon at the playground, and Sauvignon Blanc before dinner on the waterfront. We gorged ourselves on summer; we went on a summer binge.
Last night at dinner we were remarking how quiet Minor was and looked up to see him nodding off right there in his chair. Husband rushed over just in time to stop him from slipping to the floor. By 9:30 I was as tired as I can ever remember being. Today, with the temperature in the more seasonal ’60s, I still feel exhausted from my summer adventure, but it was worth it.
Happy Patriots’ Day to my fellow Massachussettsians!
Patriots’ Day is another completely serious, totally non-made-up holiday that commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord. The Boston Marathon just happens to be scheduled for Patriots’ Day each year. Draw what conclusions you will.
While a select few of my friends and colleagues were running up Heartbreak Hill, I was taking a leisurely jog around downtown Miami. I ran around Brickell Island, a triangular spit of land that houses very Miami-ish high-rises. I am pretty sure that in “CSI: Miami” someone traced a bullet trajectory from a victim on the ground to one of those high-rise windows. Or maybe not; it all looks pretty much the same.
Do you heart the wonderful cheesiness that is “CSI: Miami”? Even if you do, you probably can’t watch all 7 minutes of the following, but it’s good for a few laughs:
Anyway, when I learned I was coming to Miami, I had hoped to connect with an old Peace Corps friend who’s been here for a few years, someone who’s been out of touch with her old friends for awhile. I Googled her e-mail address and sent off a challenge to respond (”Ignore me at your peril!”), and what happened next reminded me of that Michelle Shocked song:
I took time to write to my old friend
I walked across that burning bridge
I mailed the letter off to Dallas
But the reply came from Anchorage, Alaska
Well, she wasn’t quite in Anchorage; she had moved several hours away, but within an hour of my parents’ house; I could have seen her when I went there in February. So now I’m sitting with hours to kill in Miami, a storm looming, and nothing much to do, which isn’t a bad way to spend an evening, but could be more fun.
So my friend and I exchanged e-mails over the course of several days, and at the end of a lengthy meditation on the political characteristics of her new town she added, “Did you hear I got married?”
I wrote back, “No, I did not hear you got married. WAY TO BURY THE LEDE.”
Of course I had not heard that she got married, because I was obviously the first person she had told. It was a piece of news that would interest people on four continents (five if my friend E. had not just moved back from Australia), and I was its sole possessor. The trouble is, I could not be sure it was true. My friend is an unusual person, and I could not picture her doing something so prosaic as marrying and moving to the suburbs. If I had learned that she murdered this man and sank his body in the Intracoastal so she could usurp his house and money by masquerading as his wife, I may have been less surprised. If I had learned that this “husband” was a figment of her imagination who lived only in her diary, I could have handled it. But this? She had to be pulling my leg.
Husband went on a business trip this week, and Aitch promptly fell sick. Normally when he’s sick he wakes up with a little fever and mopes around the house a bit until the ibuprofen kicks in, at which time he reverts to his normal self, and then I I take him out for lunch and call it a day at work. This time, thought, the drugs didn’t work. His fever was really high — as high as 98.8 according to the assortment of completely crap thermometers that he will tolerate, but he was burning up — and for hours he lay in bed, shivering, halfway between sleep and consciousness. And thus I endured a rite of passage that most mothers with two children would have experienced long ago: Home alone with one well child and one child who was too sick to move comfortably.
At first, this didn’t seem like it would present many logistical problems. It was raining, anyway; we would just hole up at home, and I would entertain Minor while Aitch rested. That worked the first night, but the next morning, I realized, holy cow, I still have to get Minor to school! And Dog to day care…and then both of them home from school…and, ideally, to the grocery store at some point.
The stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood have set up a kind of informal baby-sitting cooperative that allows them to trade kids and favors as the need arises. I have never really developed that kind of network. I have friends, but I don’t usually ask them to take the kids. When you work, the kids are in day care or school during the day, so it’s not really necessary. Also, if you pawn your kids off some Wednesday afternoon, then you may be expected to return the favor next Tuesday morning, when you were due to give an important presentation for work via teleconference. Mostly, I just don’t like asking for help. I feel that I’m lucky enough to make enough money that I don’t have to impose on my friends to do for free what I typically pay someone else to do. But in this case, I just needed twenty minutes here and there, so over the last few days I called on two friends and my housekeeper for some short-term free babysitting and dog wrangling (well, the housekeeper at least was getting paid, although it wasn’t in her job description).
I feel lucky to live in a place where, even if all the phone lines were down, I could shout out my window and have three or four neighbors available and willing to help me out in this way. With phone service, there are perhaps twenty or thirty people within a mile radius I could call on. Home alone is not that isolated.
What do you all do out there when you’re home alone and you need an assist?
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