ever-fixed mark

A few weeks ago, I was buying cheese at one of Port City’s two cheese emporia, and the proprietor (the better to assist me with my selection) asked, “What’s the occasion?”

“A few friends of mine get together every week to watch Masterpiece Theatre-type shows on TV,” I said, “and we always have wine and cheese.”

“Oh,” he said, “how long have you been doing that?”

“About eight years,” I said.

Then I thought: wow. Eight years. Nearly a decade of Masterpiece Theatre. How ancient does that make me sound? “The girls and I never miss our stories!” I’ll always remember that as the moment I took a right turn at Middle-Age and landed squarely in Elderly. “And we know it’s naughty, but we like our nip of sherry and wheel of Brie!” (Although we’re actually much more adventurous than that. It would shock you, the things we get up to in the cheese department.)

The spouse of one of our founding members recently christened us the Newburyport Period Piece Society, inspired by our preferred viewing material, mostly historical dramas and BBC adaptations of Victorian novels. We’ve permitted the occasional contemporary series, but we’re largely at home in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As is the BBC — surprisingly, in eight years we have not run out of viewing material. They just keep churning it out. The latest is “The Hour,” which we’re very excited about, and which we will (I hope) review on our sadly-neglected blog.

Yes, one day blogging will be a quaint habit restricted to little old ladies. In the 22nd century, the BBC will probably make a period piece about it.

Do you think maybe it’s time for me to go back to work?

I took the boys to see the Glee 3D movie. No, I’m not particularly proud. In my defense, it was a rainy Sunday; we were coming down from an activity high after a week spent at the Tyler Place; and it was the only film appropriate for all audiences that I thought I could tolerate. I’ve never seen a whole episode of Glee, but I was a theater geek in high school.

Aitch enjoyed it. I thought it was mostly inoffensive but not particularly memorable. Minor hated it.

“When is the MOVIE starting?” he asked about ten minutes in.

“This is the movie, honey.”

“No, it’s JUST SONGS!”

“It’s a concert film.”

“I don’t LIKE concerts!”

Sorry, little dude.

There was only one moment in the movie that made me sit up and take notice, and that was Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance of the song “Forget You.” (Is it just me or does Gwyneth’s dress style skew younger and younger the older she gets? I mean, she’s pushing forty, and the other young women in the cast looked positively mature next to her.) Gwyneth is an adequate singer, I guess, but it was the song itself that really grabbed my attention. So catchy! When I got home I Googled its identifiers so I could find it on iTunes and realized that every other person in the country is already aware of this Cee Lo Green song, because it’s gained notoriety in its unexpurgated form, titled “Fuck You.”

I thought long and hard (double entendre completely unintentional I assure you) about which version of the song to download. On one hand, I’m not unopposed to a bit of well-placed musical profanity. One of my favorite songs to scream along with in the car in the pre-child era was Ben Folds Five’s “Song for the Dumped,” which features a soul-satisfying, “Well, fuck you too!” Also, I’m not crazy about the practice of bleeping or otherwise obscuring offensive words in songs; I’d rather not hear it at all than have to suffer through the Bowdlerized version. (Don’t even get me started on that rendition of “Brown-Eyed Girl” that replaces the line “making love in the green grass” with “skipping and a jumping” from an earlier verse. Oh, my virgin ears.)

On the other hand, at least “Forget You” is a legitimate alternate version produced by the original artist. Also, it’s such a poppy tune that the note of anguish that “fuck you” brings to the song isn’t really necessary; “forget you” is just as appropriate, although rhythmically a bit awkward. And I want to be able to listen to the song when the kids are present.

I downloaded both versions.

Turns out there are quite a number of songs with similar titular sentiments.

Three topics frequently covered in this space aligned in today’s Daily News coverage: John Updike’s grandson won this week’s final Newburyport road race, the High Street mile, barefoot.

Per the article, he’s not a proponent of barefoot running, but he had wounded his foot and couldn’t bear the pressure of a shoe.

I call that a good excuse to skip the race.

Kenyans.

Fit men in their twenties.

Fit teenage boys.

Fit men in their forties.

Walkers who are still finishing up the 5K course.

Teenage boy in an NHS cheerleading outfit, complete with skirt.

Fit women in their twenties.

Fit middle-aged men.

People who chit-chat while running.

Women with actual boobs.

Fit women with strollers.

Preteen boys.

Senior citizens.

Walk/runners.

Men with actual boobs.

I would not say that I quit my job to write a novel — how flaky would that be? — but rather that, having quit, I would be remiss if I did not attempt to fulfill a life-long dream by finishing a novel. In other words, I’m going to devote hours and hours to creating something that will not earn me money, further my career, or get me laid. No, that doesn’t sound flaky at all!

Here’s the thing, though: It’s summer, and sitting on my porch exploring the farthest reaches of my Wi-Fi connection is getting lame. Typically, when the weather is this good I would be beachside, or poolside, or in a kayak. Near some body of water other than condensation of an air conditioner. How to reconcile my desire to write with my love of the great outdoors?

I had a radical thought: I could write longhand! But how would this work? I would need some paper, but what if the pages blew away? I would need a pen, but what if it ran out of ink? I could bring two pens, but what if I wanted to erase something? A pencil was a possibility, but what if it broke or wore down? And I frequently find that I need to refer to an earlier part of the text; how would that work? I spent a good fifteen minutes working out these seemingly intractable problems, and ended up by packing a notebook, two pens, some printouts of my existing text, a beach umbrella, a chair, lunch, drinks, and sunscreen for a writing jaunt to the beach.

I found that my handwriting has deteriorated to a shallow sine curve. For example, I would write the word “Pennsylvania” as “Pen~~~~~~~~~,” willing some kind of magical Autocomplete and, when it didn’t appear, thinking, “Ah, I’ll know what I meant.” Also, my hand hurt, really hurt, with a cramp that eventually extended all the way up my right arm to my shoulder and neck.

The good news? I have always wanted to introduce someone as “Jeeves, my amanuensis,” and now I have a perfect excuse to hire one.

A friend invited us to swim in her backyard pool yesterday. Aitch and Minor quickly became involved in a water-gun battle there with her boys, roughly the same age as my two, and some bigger kids from the neighborhood. Presently, the big kids teamed up against the smaller ones and took them “prisoner.”

“Hand over your weapons!” one of the big kids shouted to Minor.

“Why?” he asked.

“Security reasons,” was the answer.

Okay, so that was a little ripped-from-the-headlines creepy, but I didn’t intervene; I wanted to see how Minor would handle it. You could almost see the wheels turning in his brain. Clockwise: One of the big kids is talking to me! If he’s telling me to do it, it must be right! Counter-clockwise: This is a pretty cool water bazooka. It doesn’t seem fair that I would have to give it up.

He decided to fight, blasting his attacker with water to keep him at bay. The much taller kid simply reached over and disarmed him by grabbing the water gun out of his hands. I didn’t intervene, figuring that this was part of the way that boys play. “Put up your hands!” he ordered Minor, demanding his surrender. Instead, Minor put up his dukes, now ready for hand-to-hand combat.

The big kid reached out with his free hand to grab one of Minor’s fists. The next sound I heard was “Owwwwwww!” as Minor twisted that kid’s arm as hard as he could.

Then I intervened, to stop my five-year-old from injuring a boy twice his age. But first I laughed a little bit. Actually, a lot.

Population: You.

Thursday afternoon was beautiful, so my friend C. and I decided to spend the afternoon kayaking. Time was short, so we headed for a nearby lake that had a nice little swimming beach within a short paddle of the public boat launch. It had been years since I’d been there, though, and I misremembered the name of the access road, so we could not find the launch spot. We drove around looking for a place to get directions and eventually came upon a bait shop. C. ran in to ask while I stayed out in the car to try to Google the location on my phone.

After about three minutes, C. came running out. “Did you get directions?” I asked.

“Not only that, but dates for dinner,” she said. “Go, go, go before they follow us!”

She had asked two of the shop patrons directions to the public boat launch, and one responded, “I guess that means you’re not from around here, are you?”

“Not really,” she said.

“Then I guess that means you and your friend might be free for dinner tonight?”

She declined politely (a professional heartbreaker, she has lots of experience) and hightailed it out of there.

Bow down to her, ladies! She picked up two men in three minutes in a bait shop. She ought to teach a workshop at the Learning Annex.

In other kayaking news, I managed to coax the boys out on an excursion by tying an inner tube to the stern and trailing them along behind me. I haven’t yet told them that the the tube is usually towed by a much faster boat.

I left my job of three years last week, just packed it in with a vision of taking the summer off and no other back-up plan. I had recognized some time ago that I wanted to be performing a role that was more central to the success of the organization, but was prevented from looking for a new job internally by the realization that the commute was making me clinically depressed. (Forty-five miles from home, which translates to one hour each way under the best of conditions; ninety minutes on a good day; and two hours if raining, meaning that I was in the seat of my crappy little commuter car anywhere between two and four hours a day.) I tried to look externally, but it was hard to do that and perform my current job adequately. So I gave six weeks’ notice, starting my vacation at the same time as the kids. It was counterintuitive, leaving a well-paid job working with brilliant colleagues who treated me well and supported my professional growth almost without limits, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it especially wasn’t where I wanted to do it.

Upon hearing the shorthand version of this tale (”left my job to take the summer off”), each auditor to a man has responded the same way: “Congratulations!” As if quitting sans safety net were a clever strategic ploy, rather than something that any knucklehead could do. (They even wrote a country song about it.) I suppose what they’re really congratulating is not my sagacity but my circumstances, the fact that I can take time off without imperiling my mortgage. Believe me, I’m beyond grateful that I had that choice.

Last week, with all my new free time (!), I read Poser, a memoir by Claire Dederer about motherhood and yoga. Although I generally liked the book, I felt it verging on Eat, Pray, Love territory: Privileged white woman drops out of workaday existence to solve spiritual crisis through magical encounters with another culture! And then I thought, hey, that sounds kind of like me! Privilege, check; drop-out, check; now all I need is immersion in a foreign culture and a few cheesy epiphanies.

Do you think I could get a book deal based on a weekend in Lowell?