Login | Register

As I’ve said in this space before, I have no fixed religious abode.  This would imply that I’m an atheist, but I don’t even have the courage of conviction for that.  Mostly I walk around with a giant question mark over my head, like those big green gems in The Sims. I was married in a Unitarian church, but I shy away even from the Unitarians because it strikes me that the church and congregation are only as strong as the pastor leading them.  The minister who married me and Lloyd was an unvarnished pleasure to listen to in church, whereas the minister of a church I attended in suburban Washington, D.C. was so irritating, spending valuable sermon time ranting about how mean the characters on sitcoms were, that I almost stood up midservice and slugged him.  ("How d’ya like THAT mean?") If I had to, under penalty of Ashcroft, if I had to pick a religion, I’d probably cast my lot with the Quakers, but so far, they have not found me.

The closest I have come to any sort of religious mindview came after I read James Gleick’s Chaos about ten years ago.  My friends who do have a fixed religious abode said they found the idea of a chaotic universe frightening, but I was actually a bit relieved by it.  If the universe is chaotic, with random moments of order, then we don’t have to torture ourselves the way the Puritans did, wondering if the bad things that happened to them were signs of God’s wrath or Satan’s never-ending mission to sway them from the path of righteousness by questioning God’s goodness.  I found myself thinking about this a lot after the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, when we found ourselves questioning the rules of a universe which could allow this to happen.  If there are no rules in the universe, you could find yourself dying unexpectedly and horribly, but you wouldn’t be dying for being insufficiently devout, or insufficiently good.

I still take a measure of comfort in this, but I recognize the power and allure of prayer for the devout.  I recognize the comfort that can come from having a benevolent God to come to with your problems, to appeal to for help in a time of need.  I wish I could pray, I wish I could ask for divine intercession, but it’s just not in me.  But oh, how I wish for it sometimes.  It’s very hard to appeal to formless chaos, to say, in effect, “Hey, shake some of that action to make things work out the way we hope it will.” It may well be impossible, but that has never stopped me before.  So here goes:  Come on, faceless universe, do what you need to do, engineer what you need to engineer, to grant Michael a clean bill of health.  Get him through this okay, please, as expeditiously and painlessly and well as possible.  We want him here for a very long time.

There are other things to talk about today, happier things, more whimsical things, foodier things, for it has been a while since I’ve been to the market, or out playing about in interesting groceries, and I’m feeling ready to do it again.  I have new books to share, and eventually I will have four cases of candy bars arriving at my office for anyone who would like one.  (There is a story behind the candy, yes.) For now, though, I have to acknowledge that today is a complicated day.

I can acknowledge it, but I feel sheepish talking about it.  Mostly I shy away from talking about That Day because my story is not particularly special.  If I sound like I’m protesting too much, believe me when I say I know what a blessing it is to not have anything noteworthy to talk about.  I know people who have stories of that day that make me shiver:  the former co-worker whose husband was an EMT lost in the collapse; the woman at the gym whose husband worked at Cantor; the friend of my mom’s whose mother had a particularly awful story of friends of hers:  two friends and the four-year-old daughter of one of them, who all decided to go to California to take this little girl to Disneyland:  one of them was on one plane, one of them was on the other plane with her daughter.  I think of the staff of Windows on the World, where I wanted to work after graduation from culinary school, and where I was crushed to learn that there were no vacancies, but please keep us in mind and best of luck in your future!  I made the mistake of reading the transcripts of the 911 tapes, hearing the general manager of Windows shouting, “I have to get my people out of here RIGHT NOW,” and the dispatcher saying “We’re sending the fire department up to you, dear,” nobody having any idea what was in store for them.  I think of various celebrities who I will not name here, glomming onto tragedy:  “well, I *thought* about flying on that day, but I decided to wait until the following week!”, and I think of Seth MacFarlane, the adorable and demented mind behind Family Guy, whose name was on the passenger manifest for one of the planes leaving Logan, who I’d thought had been murdered on that day, but who ended up missing his plane by 10 minutes.  (Seth tends not to brag about this in interviews, so I take his word a little more seriously than I do the others, the “omigod, I decided to spend the weekend in Vermont instead!” crowd.)

No, on that day I was lucky.  Everyone I knew and loved who could have been downtown that day wasn’t.  My cousin was late for work; a friend of my brother’s, working on the 52nd floor of Tower Two, flouted the “the building is secure, please stay at your desk” announcement, took an elevator to the 40th floor sky lounge and started climbing down stairs; she was on the 20th floor when Tower Two was hit and was able to get out in plenty of time.  (She later told my brother the first thing that struck her, upon leaving the building, was seeing the piles of women’s shoes in the plaza, high heels just abandoned by women who knew there was a lot of walking ahead of them and didn’t think twice about walking the sidewalks of lower Manhattan stocking-footed.) Literally, other than watching wholesale death and destruction unfold before our eyes, the worst part of that day for me was getting a call from Lloyd, temping in Brooklyn in a neighborhood not within walking distance from our home.  At 11 a.m. he called me and announced that his office was being evacuated by the NYPD (he was working for a pharmaceutical company that was under FDA jurisdiction, so it was considered federal property).  “I’ll call you in a few minutes, as soon as I can find a pay phone,” he said.  I didn’t hear from him again for six hours, and those were easily the worst six hours of my life.  I also never want to relive the moment where I got through to my home voice mail and heard my mom’s voice, saying “I know it’s probably hard to get a line out, but if you do, just let us know you and Lloyd are okay,” trying not to sound like she had been crying.  Again, other than seeing up-close what hideous designs human beings can have on other human beings, this was the worst of what happened to me, and for that, I’m relieved and grateful.

And yet, just thinking about it all makes me feel, for lack of a better adjective, unseemly.  That Day has become a vehicle for behavior that I find repellent.  I certainly don’t want to dictate how to honor the dead properly; after all, we are all individuals, we are all different (Life of Brian fans, feel free to conclude that line) , we all mourn in our own way.  That said, I don’t see what favors were done by the people we lost that day by passing out 6” long, flag-colored, ribbon-shaped refrigerator magnets with “USA: Proud American” stamped on them, the way our building management company did when I came to work yesterday.  Maybe someone feels better for having this magnet handed to them, and I won’t stand in his or her way for feeling so.  For me, though, it took a tremendous amount of effort not to tear that ugly rubber magnet into (smaller) ribbons.  I look at it, and I think about the previous week’s adventures at Madison Square Garden, where the speakers took one of the worst days this city has ever seen and used it to beat the drum for a man at whom I can hardly bear to look, to whom I can hardly bear to listen.  Several of my pals have quoted to me the Bill Maher monologue about how FDR never said that Pearl Harbor was his administration’s finest hour, and we should not be lionizing this administration for a chain of mistakes that led to catastrophe.  I think about Rudy Giuliani, telling a cheering crowd that as the towers fell, he turned to Bernie Kerik and said thank God for George Bush, and I shrivel on the inside.  I had never been a fan of Rudy, and I still am not, but what I remember from That Day is that he was there, he was there, he was present, he was on the news a lot, saying, “we know how much people want information, but we honestly don’t have any right now, but as soon as we do, we will share it.” I thought this was a shockingly graceful and reassuring action from someone who had previously been known for being a martinet with the public’s right to know.  Fairly or unfairly, my memory of the day is this:  Rudy was talking to us, W was not, and now Rudy is shaking the can for the man who took three days to get to us, and I never realized just how furious I was about this until our poor harried security guard pushed a magnet into my hand.

Here is what I’m going to do today, on a day much like That Day, a beautiful clear color-saturated-blue-sky day:  I will go into Manhattan.  I will go to the market at Union Square, as I do almost every Saturday.  I will stand at the corner of 14th Street and University Place, the street where I lived when I first moved to New York. I will think about my nightly walks home from work in those days, when I had a clear view of the towers down University Place, where I would think, “the Empire State Building gets me to work, the Trade Center gets me home.” I will look at that open space in the sky.  I would like to say that I won’t cry, but I probably will, for the people lost on that day, for the people lost in all sorts of brutal and senseless attacks worldwide, from Armenia to Poland to Rwanda to Iraq to Lockerbie, for the hideous things we are clever and empty enough to do to each other.  And then I will remind myself that there is more to being human than brutality; that there is love and compassion and justice, maybe on a smaller scale than injustice, but justice nonetheless; that maybe our good impulses can outweigh our bad, that there just might be hope for us after all.  I will go out into this city that pisses me off, breaks my heart and, occasionally, loves me back.  I will do everything I can to let everyone I know know how glad I am that we are in each other’s universe.  And then I will figure out just what I’m going to do with four cases of candy bars.

Today is my father’s birthday.  Happy birthday, Dad.

My dad and I both share a certain sense of whimsy and a willingness to go a long way to both make a joke and prove a point, although, unlike Dad, I never made a spectacular exit from a bad meeting by quoting the final verse of Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland.” I had thought that the dedication to silliness was pretty much confined in the gene pool to just him and me.  Then I heard what my grandmom and aunt, his mom and sister, gave him for his birthday.

They gave him a gift basket full of Heinz products.  Ketchup, 57 sauce, pickle relish, you name it.  They planned it for months and kept adding more to the basket until it was huge.  To anyone else, it would have been an oddball gift, but one that made sense:  my dad is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and one who has done plenty of time working for various state- and federally-funded juvenile justice and conservation corps agencies before leaving the madness of Washington behind for the bucolic charms and simpler pleasures of running a Boys and Girls Club in rural Maryland.  Anyone who knew my dad would think, “A-ha, it’s a reference to Teresa Heinz Kerry.” Or “It’s a gag on those new Republican ketchups.” (I don’t have the heart to link to either of them, but trust me, there is such a thing as Republican ketchup.  I would think that Heinz ketchup would be Republican enough, considering that the late Sen. John Heinz was a Republican, but there you are.) Good guesses, but wrong ones.

Nope, my grandmom and aunt gave my dad a basketful of Heinz goodies because today is Dad’s 57th birthday.

When Dad told me this, I was silent for a moment.  I contemplated just what a bundle of eccentricity I had been born into, this gene pool on a collision course to wackiness.

“Did they give you any of the British Heinz ketchup?” I asked.

“No, they did not,” said Dad.

“Perfect!”, I practically sang down the phone.  “I can get you British Heinz ketchup from the English grocery in the West Village!  I can get you some salad cream!  And baked beans!  How can we forget baked beans?  Beanz Meanz Heinz!”

I never thought I would see the day when I would outcrazy my own family.  But I have seen that day, and it is now.  Lock me up, throw away the key.

Dear friends,

As best as my travel-fatigued, stoned-on-the-return-to-sea-level-after-four-days-at-altitude brain will allow me, I needs must share with you the lessons I learned on my Great Trek West this Labor Day weekend:

1.  Snowball is really all that. Of course I knew that Snowball was all that.  I knew that the brilliant, winsome sweetheart we all know from her blog would be just as brilliant and winsome and sweet in the flesh.  I knew that we would get on like a house on fire.  But it’s one thing to know it in the abstract, and quite another to see it whilst riding in the passenger seat of Snowball’s little blue car, riding around the Rockies while you chatter like magpies at each other.  Seriously, anything that ails you, Snowball’s company is the cure for it.  She is as true-blue and standup as they come.  And she kicks ass at knitting.  (Not that I’m angling for a pair of Spiced Berry socks or anything.  Ahem.)

2.  If you have a return flight from Denver International Airport to LaGuardia, and you spend half an hour waiting to clear security, and another 20 minutes trying to find your gate, and you discover upon reaching said gate that your flight has been overbooked and you’re not going anywhere because United is bumping your ass, and you call your friend Snowball and employ the most piteous voice in your repertoire to tell her that you’re stranded at DIA, and she cheerfully hops into the little blue car to pick you up, and you cheerfully hop into the little blue car to head back to Snowballville, be sure to put some sunblock on your neck and shoulders.  Trust me on this.  (Ow.)

3.  Snowball does not exaggerate the awfulness of X. While we were not formally introduced, I have been one of the few, the proud, the unfortunate enough to have an X sighting.  If anything, Snowball understates his awfulness.  I was a witness to X’s announcement of his employment adventures, and it was not pretty at all.

4.  On the other hand, she does not exaggerate the greatness of her children, either. Like the rest of you, I have heard so much about B and G that I felt like I was about to meet a pair of celebrities.  Dear friends, Snowball is a hell of a mom, and her kids are living proof.  B is indeed the King of Pikmin2, and he was a real sport about explaining the nuances of the game to the clueless houseguest.  G is a card, a charmer and a real beauty.  If she stays bound and determined to go into international politics, well, folks, it’s G’s world, and we just live in it.  (And we’re damn lucky for it, too.)

5.  High-altitude baking is not nearly as scary as I thought it would be. Admittedly, I haven’t tried to bake a cake, but G and I managed to turn out a wicked Genoese focaccia on Sunday, and it was so good that even B, a/k/a the Boy Who Would Not Eat, managed to put away about half the loaf.

6.  There is a subway at Denver International Airport, one that takes you from the concourse where the arrival and departure gates are located to the terminal, where you can rent a car, catch a shuttle or be picked up by your charming hostess.  The subway plays little jingles to warn you when the doors are closing, or when you are approaching another stop.  If you spend enough time at DIA—say, if you are bumped from your flight and then your replacement flight is delayed by two hours due to a cabin door that stubbornly refuses to close—you will hear the subway jingles over and over and over.  Long after your plane has arrived at JFK, and you find yourself stuck in traffic on the service road of the Van Wyck Expressway, you will still hear the DIA subway chimes in your head.  Try not to go mad.

7.  Realize right now that your fellow travelers are batshit crazy. It is the only way to explain why, when your plane is descending through a cloud cover over Flint, Michigan and you are all being shaken like poppets and the flight attendant announces “Our captain has just informed us that our descent into New York will be very bumpy, so he has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign and asks that you return to your seat,” everybody on the damn plane decides they have to get up and pee at that very moment.

8.  Snowball did not lie when she said that her local German bakery is the best in the world. Oh, my god.  I think I need to move into it.  All I need is a little full-size cot for me and Lloyd, plus a place to plug in our laptops, and we’re all set.  Folks, if I dedicated the rest of my life to baking, I couldn’t even begin to touch this place.

9.  Apparently there are mountains in Snowball’s neck of the woods. Poor Snow.  We had serious fog and rain on both of our trips to Rocky Mountain National Park, fog and rain that cleared up just in time for me to head back to New York.  I kept saying that I’m sure I can see them when I come back on a return trip—for I WILL be returning—but Snowball was disconsolate nonetheless.

10.  The bad news is that we really did neglect to take any pictures during my visit.  The good news is that Snowball and G and I did some major retail therapy this weekend, including some staggeringly appropriate jewelry for yours truly,and there will be pictures of that.  Just as soon as I recover from my airport fatigue.

What a year this has turned out to be, indeed.

Back in January, I had no particular plans for the year.  I had a vague idea of a book I wanted to write, but otherwise I found myself stuck in a torpid state.  My plans to open my bakery had been scuttled—admittedly, scuttled by my own self, but it was my own self who realized that I qualified for a tenth of the financing that I needed, and I had nowhere to go without making a radical change I could not afford (literally, from a financial standpoint) to make.  I had this grand idea that with plenty of planning, we could have a house, a business and a baby all within an 18-month period.  Neither the house, nor the business, nor the baby have yet been made manifest; whether they ever will is a mystery.  I spent weekends stuck inside the house while subzero-chilling winds beat against the walls of our building, thinking We have to get out of here, we have to go somewhere?, but where was I going to go?  I hadn’t been on an airplane in five years, and was not in a hurry to get on another one any time soon.

By the end of the month, I learned that I won the chance to go write in Arkansas, and the choice was mine, to take it, or to mewl and puke about what a wuss of a flyer I am.  I chose the former.  I had a lark.  I came home and promptly slipped back into a funk.  Well, that’s it for me, I said.  I’m not going anywhere for the rest of the year. It was in this annoying and pouty mood that I found myself when an IM popped up from the lovely Snowball.

“So what are you doing for Labor Day?” she asked.

Thus do I find myself not only on my second air trip in two months, but I find myself doing it on a massive travel weekend, in the company not only of Labor Day holidaymakers but also a few thousand Republicans ready to get the hell out of Sin City and go to wherever home is.  And I can’t wait to do it, can’t wait to get in line at the airport, can’t wait to take off my shoes for the nice TSA people, can’t wait to see clouds flutter past my window, can’t wait to walk through the sliding glass doors and look for the little blue chariot awaiting me.

If you don’t hear from us this weekend, it is probably because we are out raising high the roof beams.  But in deference to my dear friend, and to everyone around us, I will try to refrain from shouting a giant Patrick-Warburton-as-David-Puddy-style “YEAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” I will try.

Happy weekend, all.  See you Monday night, if not sooner.