ever-fixed mark

I spent some time in Portsmouth, New Hampshire this weekend. Portsmouth is a quaint little town with some great shops. I was very tempted to buy one of these beauties.

I thought it would look swell in my darkroom. Then I could type my blog posts on it! Hey, does anyone know where I can buy a mimeograph machine?

I expected Portsmouth to be inundated with candidates, but there was only one Edwards rally in the morning, which I missed. They did leave behind their detritus.

The coffee shop across the street from these signs was so crowded on Saturday evening that I was forced to share a table. As soon as I sat down, my seatmate asked, “So, are you a Hillary fan?”

“Hmm, why didn’t you ask if I were a Mitt fan? Or a Mike fan?”

He looked alarmed for a minute, and then I saw him take inventory: female, unveiled, alone in a public place without benefit of male escort: probably a Democrat, Independent, or call girl. (And with that coat, definitely not a call girl.) “Well, what do I know?” he said. “I’m from Massachusetts.”

“Me, too,” I said, and then drank to the freedom to cross state lines without written permission from my husband, at least until President Huckabee or President Romney takes office. What, you think it can’t happen here? Let me introduce you to a woman who was wearing a mini-skirt and smoking a cigarette on the streets of Tunis in 1974:

(No, I don’t know what the underwear’s all about, but I can tell you she’s not shopping at Victoria’s Secret.)

I caught a significant chunk of the Republican debates on ABC later that evening. I see that Romney has affected Dear Leader’s smirk, and I thought he could not have looked more condescending if he tried. Even his wife seemed to be slumped in her chair as though thinking, “Honey, wipe that look off your face!” The only one who came off worse than Romney was his attacker-in-chief, McCain. What was with that maniacal laugh every time he cracked a joke at Romney’s expense? I thought McCain definitely appeared deranged. His cackle is going to be the Dean-like “rebel yell” of 2008.

I flew JetBlue to and from Florida. JetBlue has in-flight TV at each seat, and although I had David Copperfield to keep me company (the book, not the magician) I could not resist the siren song of Mindless Entertainment. So I availed myself of cable channels that we do not have at home. This is how I got hooked on “Project Runway.” Bravo was showing back-to-back episodes during both flights.

I’m not all that interested in fashion, but I was on the edge of Seats 2C and 5D waiting to see what the designers would come up with at the end of each episode, and whether my judgment would jibe with that of the judges. As someone who would have failed junior-high Home Ec had my mother not sewn my very hip Diane Keaton-inspired checked vest for me, I am fascinated that someone could choose fabrics, cut, and sew a garment in 24 hours, let alone design one.

And Tim Gunn is totally my new gay celebrity boyfriend. (Sorry, Anderson.) I loved how he gave honest and constructive feedback, yet still managed to be kind. And I adored his matter-of-fact yet encouraging “Make it work!” as he left the designers. I think I learned more about management from six hours of “Project Runway” than from two days of the conference I attended.

Spring break! Whoooo-hooooooo!

What’s that?

It’s not Spring Break?

Then what the HELL am I doing in Fort Lauderdale?

It’s coming back to me now. I may be expected to give a speech or something. I sure hope I wrote one.

At any rate, it will be two nights of uninterrupted sleep, which will be welcome. The resort is nice…ish. The guest rooms are arranged in a bunch of outbuildings that look like cheap condos in a housing development, but the interior is pretty nice. It’s big, with a large marble bathroom that’s divided into three sub-rooms: Toilet, shower, and sink. The shower room features a voyeuristic glass wall between it and the toilet room, a Schrager-ish touch I’ve never quite understood. Believe me, when you’re the mother of small children the last thing you want is (more) people watching you shower. And, there is a bidet!

I would bet a hundred dollars right now that 70% of Americans don’t know what a bidet is for. Let’s say 75%. Go ahead, bet me. Stop what you’re doing right this minute and go out and ask four people the purpose of a bidet. If two or more people know the right answer, I’ll send you one hundred Georges.*

There is also a fancy electronic scale. So I was able to do something I’ve been contemplating for a long time.

I weighed myself.

I have been trying to lose weight for a long time, but frankly I haven’t been trying that hard. I really want to lose weight, but I really haven’t wanted to stop eating.

The issue isn’t fat, per se. Decades after puberty, I’m finally over the fact that I don’t conform to the emaciated patriarchal norm for weight and shape. And I ran ten miles at this weight; I’m not that out-of-shape. But I am concerned about how I feel. Lately, I have felt like utter crap: nauseated, over-full, lethargic, headachey. I am pretty sure that it is due to the vast amounts of bread, pasta, and ice cream I have been consuming.

I have blogged this once before, without results. I thought maybe by putting my number out there it would motivate me to do better this time.

We’ll see.

*Not really.

From an e-mail exchange with my friend E in Australia:

ME: Last week I visited the church of saints Ambrogio and Carlo. Allegedly, there was a relic from the heart of St. Charles there.

E: Whose job was it to chop up the saints?

Yesterday, we visited the Keats-Shelley museum at the foot of the Spanish Steps. The museum is housed in the apartment Keats was staying when he died, a room with a really terrific view in which to breathe one’s last tubercular breaths. Shelley really had no connection to the place at all, but like most of the Romantics he spent a lot of time in Italy, and like Keats, he also died there, far too young.

I was reminded of the fascination that Italy held for the English, and I found myself wishing I had brought one of the many English or American novels set in this country, instead of David Copperfield, which doesn’t really set the same mood. The last time I was here, I brought The Marble Faun and really enjoyed it. Wasn’t The Buccaneers set in Rome? Or what about Daisy Miller — doesn’t she catch her death in the Colosseum? I’m positive that half of James’s oeuvre takes place in Italy, because his heroines, like Keats, were forever visiting for their health. There’s always A Room with a View, but I think I need to save that until I get to Florence.

After a brief visit, we had high tea at the Babington English Tea Rooms, which flank the Spanish Steps on the other side. Babington’s has been around since 1893, because as much as the English love Italy, they also love the comforts of home. It was easy to imagine homesick twentieth-century Brits flocking to the place like modern American college students to MacDonald’s.

I’m heading off to Rome tomorrow: part business, part vacation. My mother, who is Italian but has never been to Italy, is coming with me. I am really looking forward to visiting the Old Country and soaking up some of that Eternal City atmosphere.

Weather-wise, it’s the perfect time to visit Rome. Skies will be sunny but there will still be a little fall nip in the air — at least, it will be cooler than here in tropical Boston. But money-wise, it’s the worst time to visit Europe in recent memory. The euro is worth nearly a buck and a half!

I happened to be in Paris on the day that the euro was first introduced as physical currency, way back in ‘ought-two. One day I was calculating HOW MANY francs to the dollar, and the next I was enjoying the ease of a nearly one-to-one ratio of currencies. The euro was worth about 90 cents then, so there was the satisfaction of knowing that everything cost a little less than my rough estimate.

But now the euro is a big, strong currency and he’s thumbing its nose at the little people he climbed over on his meteoric rise to the top. Sure, you’re the big cheese now, €, but currency markets are volatile, and I’ll never forget that I Knew You When.

Back in July, Husband and I took a little trip to Castine, Maine while my parents watched the boys.

Coastal Castine, the picture-perfect site of the Maine Maritime Academy, manages to be both moneyed and authentic. There are few McMansions here; instead, imagine modest but expensively-landscaped and painstakingly maintained Victorian cottages.

If you live in a Victorian, you realize how much money it costs just to keep a house like this attractive. Those windows have been replaced; the wood siding has to be scraped and painted every few years; the roof has been reshingled recently; the stone wall and border take more upkeep than a huge front lawn.

There were lots of opportunities in Castine for Hopper-esque house portraits, but I quickly grew tired of perfect cottages and went looking for some imperfect ones.

I liked to think that this place is owned by a former mobster who long ago pissed off his capo and has come to hide out among the WASPs in Castine, but consequently is afraid to hire a landscaper for fear he will rat out his location. A good thing, too, because can you imagine mowing that vertical lawn?

This guy can. I was afraid that the lawnmower would tumble down on him while I was shooting this picture.

Castine is about as sleepy as these pictures make it look. It’s not really a tourist destination as much as a seasonal place. The locals don’t trouble themselves about anyone they don’t recognize as year-rounders or summer people. The women at the Castine Variety, for example, ostentatiously ignored us until they finished conversing with the known patrons. Then they would turn and not quite make eye contact, as if to say, “Here’s your window of opportunity. If you want to order, you may address me now.” The lobster rolls were pretty good, though.

We awoke to fog on our second day, the day we had planned a six-hour paddling trip. We started off optimistically, convinced it would get better. It didn’t; by early afternoon, it was like kayaking through a dream sequence. We hid out by a little island on one side of the channel while our guide monitored the radio for boat traffic. Enough boats went by without radioing their position to make her nervous about attempting the crossing. We had to paddle up to a narrower crossing, one with a sandbar that usually deterred motorized traffic, and visibility was so low she had to use her compass to set a course. But we made it back in one piece, and even with the pea-soup fog we were able to see porpoises, a seal, ospreys, a blue heron, sea urchins, and starfish.

How foggy was it? Well, this is actually a color photograph.

Oh, the immediacy of film! I snap a photo and then two weeks and two continents later, here they are: Gidget und Mondhündchen.

Incidentally, I am taking my first surfing lesson ever this Sunday (on an ocean, not on a creek). I expect to spend the afternoon plastered prone to the board, too terrified to move. I’ll keep you posted.

Currently, there are large plastic bins placed at strategic points throughout the house, and periodically when I spot some item I deem necessary to sustain life, I pull it off a shelf and throw it into a bin. I am packing to take the boys “camping” this weekend, although when you transport more than 80% of your household goods across the state line, I believe technically that is called “moving.”

The local mothers’ club (those snooty bitches!) is hosting a camping weekend in Maine, and I signed up on impulse. I’m not sure what made me do it, as I’ve never been an enthusiastic camper. I’m outdoorsy enough in the daytime, I guess, but at night when the dew point is around 60 I don’t even want to sleep indoors without the life-giving properties of humidity-filtering air conditioning. (However, I did sleep in a sleeping bag with only an airline pillow for my head for three years in the Peace Corps, so if that doesn’t give me camping cred, I don’t know what will.)

Still, the boys are growing up in prime camping country, and I thought they should have the same chance to enjoy summer nights under the Maine sky as I did, vicariously, through all those WASPy books I enjoyed so much as a kid. Except, you know, for real. Camping seems like their kind of thing — they love looking at bugs and playing in dirt and swimming and running around for hours with the other kids — but I am just a tiny bit worried about the sleeping, for different reasons. Aitch is Pavlovian in his attachment to his bedtime routine. If he doesn’t get the signal that it’s bedtime, he doesn’t shut down. In hotel rooms he’s never asleep until after we are. Minor is much better about being able to nod off under different circumstances. I can see him falling asleep on my shoulder in front of the campfire while the older kids run around. But he does not sleep well in the company of others, and once he’s awake, we all will be.

It’s a good thing this is nearby and open 24 hours.

Husband is away this weekend for his high school reunion, leaving me alone with the haughty triumvirate, otherwise known as the Three Who Do Not Hesitate to Inform Me When Everything Isn’t Going Exactly Their Way.

Husband and I graduated from high school the same year, and five years ago we both attended both reunions. That was in 2002, and it boggles my mind that we were telling people then that we were pursuing adoption, but Aitch was still a year away from being born. When I think about traveling for those parties, it feels like yesterday, but when I divide the time up into homestudies and waiting for referral and waiting for travel, times two, it feels like it has dragged.

Like most people, I was apprehensive about attending my reunion, because like most people I felt like a freak and an outcast in high school. It was not because I came from the wrong side of the tracks or anything like that. Our social scene did not operate according to the conventions of a typical John Hughes movie; there were plenty of poor kids who were very popular. It was more of a meritocracy, and all you really needed was a little bit of social skill, something I sorely lacked. I mean, I was a baton twirler and a cheerleader and I drove a very cool 1964 Triumph Spitfire convertible, and I was pretty much despised by the other baton twirlers and ignored by the other cheerleaders and generally Not Liked. I don’t think I was a terrible person, but I was introverted and socially awkward, which came off as stuck-up, and the more I was teased for that behavior the more awkward I became.

So the last reunion was not a big showdown between the Socs and the freaks. It was a pretty casual DJ-and-buffet kind of thing at the Lierderkranz, which is the Pennsylvania Dutch version of an ethnic social club, like the Victor Emmanuel or the Knights of Hibernia. It was sort of fun, and I talked to a number of people I would have been too shy to speak to during high school.

At one point in the evening, I was accosted by a man I did not recognize. “Denise!” he yelled, and gave me a huge hug. I looked at him. I have a pretty good memory for faces, an even better one for names, and I had no idea who this man was. “Don’t you remember me? I’m Jürgen, the exchange student from Denmark!”

Holy crap. We had an exchange student from Denmark? And he flew all the way back to attend an event at the Liederkranz?

Even armed with that information, I was pretty sure I had never spoken a word to him in high school. So how did he come to remember me so fondly? Well, it turns out that during his entire year abroad, he had pined from afar after…my car. My 1964 white convertible Triumph Spitfire with the blue interior. He had been in love with it, and he had never gotten over it.

That’s a lesson for you high school boys and girls out there. Don’t worry so much about your grades, your extracurricular activities, your college applications, your boyfriend or girlfriend. What really counts is a cool car. In twenty years, you’re most likely to be remembered for your ride.