On Winning Pencils

Mark Ryan flashed through my mind. Couldn’t imagine why or what the connection was, since at the moment I was nonchalantly checking out a man who was studiously checking out a young woman. I was making no judgment, just vaguely exploring my memory as to the last time a man checked me out. Jealousy wasn’t a factor, but I wondered how could I compete with a young woman in catching a man’s interest. Can I? I, too, have needs and desire for male attention. How do I once again attain what I’ve always in the past taken for granted: a man’s desire/lust/craving/need/attention/drool/goggle eyed/grasping/wishful thinking/ogling/wet dreaming/craze for me. And then up popped Mark Ryan into my feverish thoughts. The redhead, freckle-faced Mark and his family had just moved from Philadelphia to Brooklyn that mid-fifties spring. I remember marveling at the creeping redness over his cheeks, nose, and ears as he introduced himself to our fourth-grade class. He was a friendly kid, always quick with a smile. I don’t remember feeling that he was a threat. In Mrs. Berman’s class, I was the reigning spelling bee champ. Every Friday, we’d line up and wait our turn to spell a word she’d give of the many we were suppose to have memorized. One-by-one a student returned to their seat after misspelling a word. I was always left standing. Me, the smart, but shy and quiet girl, accomplishment recognized by her teacher and peers. The reward: a brand new, yellow No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil with a little pink eraser crowning the top. My collection was at least a satisfying baker’s dozen that I harbored in my desk drawer to finger: to get me through unfulfilling or insecure moments, a tactile reminder of my true value. The class was unaware that my spelling confidence hadn’t grown from studying the assigned words each week. Instead my knowledge blossomed during weekly visits to my grandparents’ home, studying two gigantic volumes of a Webster dictionary on the carpeted floor at my Grandpa’s knees. He kept those books in the front parlor where he sat by the coal-burning fireplace, smoked his pipe, and read the newspaper or watched a ballgame on the rabbit-eared antennae black-and-white television. The front parlor was for company only – and for Grandpa anytime he wanted. But Grandpa didn’t mind me. He didn’t have to shush or order me to stop fidgeting. Because I was reading the dictionary, Grandpa liked to let me sit at his knees – and I liked to read the dictionary because Grandpa let me sit at his knees. Those days I learned at lot of words. In my nine-year-old mind, Mrs. Berman’s pencils symbolized the serene, non-verbal, communicating hours between my Grandpa and me. Mark Ryan won my next pencil the first week of his arrival. Short of making me an orphan, I couldn’t imagine a more devastating event. I didn’t cry; I was numb. Then, unaccountably, I was afraid. No pencils, no recognition? No pencils, no love? No pencils, what? The fear slid through me and then resolved into determination: I was getting my pencil back! For the first time, I studied the assigned spelling words. Studied hard. The next week, I won my pencil. Mark simply flushed, smiled, and returned to his seat. I was the one left standing. Until the end of that school year, I never stopped studying the spelling words – and I always won my pencil. Now I realize those young women I see are Mark Ryan, and I’m going to beat them in my own way. Haven’t figured out how yet, but I still have the confidence I gained at my Grandpa’s knees. I can’t be naturally like them, but I sure can study how to be the best at who I am – and that’s pretty damn good. Check me out and see if I don’t win my pencils again.

Waiting

I don’t like waiting for anything.

Let me step into a nice restaurant and the hostess tell me there’s a 30-minute wait, watch me spin around and march right back out. There’s not that much hunger in the world for me to wait for a seating. One exception: Cracker Barrel Country Style Restaurant. The waiting is inevitable, the location too out of the way, the browsing too inviting, and the food too good.

Show me a store’s 10-person line to a cashier, I show them that re-stocking my selections is their end result. One exception: Costco – My Most Favorite Store In The World. The waiting is inevitable, the location too out of the way, the browsing too inviting, and the pricing too good.

Tell me you’re going to meet me at 6:15 and don’t show up until 6:20, I’m wondering why you couldn’t have arrived at 6:10. No exceptions.

Living in New York, you’d think I’d be use to it. No way you don’t wait somewhere, somehow, for some thing. My cousin – he who thinks much of what I say or do is prime meat for one of his joking comments – says I’m getting cranky because I’ve gotten old. (It’s most definite I will get him back for that!) But it’s not true, Cuz. You’re wrong. Waiting has annoyed me most, if not all, my life. And I realize when the annoyance began – when I was a child. What neurosis doesn’t begin with . . . Mother?

From pre-school age until I was about ten or eleven, occasionally my mother awakened us kids in the chill of a pre-dawn summer morning. Sent to the living room, we’d find play outfits laid out on the sofa. Except for our shoes, everything was brand new: shorts, tops, socks, underwear, sweaters, and, for our hair, colorful ribbons or barrettes still pinned to the card.

My mother didn’t inform us when she purchased the Eastern Star or St. Philips Episcopal Church fundraising tickets for the day-long getaways: chartered bus rides from our city projects to foreign locales – usually the picnic grounds of Bear Mountain, Indian Point, or Hechster State Park. Smart lady. She didn’t abuse herself with our demands for responses – When’re we going? What time do we get there? Who’s going with us? What’s there? What can we do there? How far away is Saturday? Is Saturday tomorrow? When do we leave? How long does it take? How long ’re we staying? Can I wear my new blouse? What’re we eating? Can we have baloney, and boiled ham, and fried chicken, and peaches, and grape Kool-Aid? – so she told us nothing.

Once attired in our publicly-acceptable best – new clothes, scalps greased and hot-combed hair banged, pigtailed or ponytailed, Vaseline smoothed over face and limbs (the globby excess toweled off) – we ventured out into the still pre-dawn streets. We would have to travel to where the coach buses met.

For whatever reason, the meeting place was never on our side of Brooklyn. That meant we rode public transportation to the location. That meant we’d have to wait for the first bus or train to take us to a transfer point where we’d have to then wait for the second bus or train.

Finally, we’d arrive. The first ones to arrive. In my whole childhood, I fail to remember not being the first ones to arrive. I don’t know what it was with my Mother that we always had to be the first. We asked her; she ignored us.

A slip of light blue-grey sky peeked through the diminishing night by the time we reached the designated street corner. Deserted. No other human waiting. The first slanted rays of sunlight striped the sidewalk curb by the time a middle-aged Eastern Star sister or church member ambled up, greeting us with a wan smile. No children to play with, no help to whittle away the waiting time. No, they were probably still at home, warm and snug in their beds. We, instead, were hunched up hugging ourselves in lightweight sweaters, chilled breezes nipping at our knees, sitting our narrow behinds on the picnic box cooler or the multi-gallon thermos of Kool-Aid. We didn’t dare sit on the curbside. That would dirty our “play” clothes.

As the sun spread to more of the sidewalk, we waited in its welcomed warmth and watched people dribble in along with kids we were, for the moment, too shy to play with (and anyway, we still had to keep our “play” clothes clean). Eventually, mutterings would be heard that the buses were late. Energetic pre-cellphone discussions educated the organizer on what street corner could be found a working pay phone. Was it too soon to complain to the bus company?

At length, the buses appeared – the drivers giving flimsy excuses or no apologies at all – and we’d climb aboard. We’d each scramble into a soft, fabric covered seat that reclined with a doubled-up thumbs push of a button (an action for which our mother promised to kill us if we tried) – and waited some more. The organizer had to count heads again. She’d already done this several times before the late buses arrived.

Invariably, just as the buses began pulling away, more people ran up, waving their bus-stopping arms and shouting at us to – what else – wait. They appeared astonished/perturbed that we almost left without them. After all, didn’t they pay their good, hard-earned money for tickets. It seemed everyone but my mother knew they were permitted to be late – others waited. Even the bus drivers knew they could be late. They would however remind/warn/threaten everyone that the buses departed the picnic grounds no later than the scheduled time – On Time. No problem for the already identified.

At long last, the bus drove off to a hearty applause from the grownups and from us kids a pressure-released “Yaaaaaaaay.” Then all we had to do to get to our destination was to . . . wait. (“Are we there yet?”)

So, no, I don’t like waiting. I’ve been conditioned to a low tolerance for it. I’m not getting old and crabby. I was young and scrappy when I learned to dislike waiting.

So there it is, Cuz. You’re wrong. Again.

Is Coping Enough?

Still getting through the horrors of 9/11. Now dealing with the tragedies of the tsunami. Tonight I saw "Hotel Rwanda."

The world is too cruel.

The Beginning of The End

Growing up I lived in a pink-brick, vertical neighborhood of a New York City project. In the late Forties through the Fifties, the projects were a haven for the young family just getting started out in life. Next stop Queens or Long Island: a small picket-fenced tract house with a swing set and aboveground pool out back. In the projects we kids would play our made-up neighborhood games (with neighborhood-only rules) or go to the playground and climb the jungle gyms, swing the swings, slide the sliding ponds, and bounce up and down on the see-saws. We’d play hopscotch, double-dutch rope (which I was never coordinated enough to even turn the ropes, never mind jump the loops). Some ballgames could be played against the wall (hand ball), bounced in each other’s zone of a square concrete sidewalk, or patted by hand to the ground up and over an extended leg. Stickball was played with the handle of our mother’s sawed off broomstick. Mothers yelled at us for ruining their good brooms and mops. Skellie was played with bottle caps, which was especially good when weighted with PlayDoh for sliding across the square chalk-drawn on the concrete playing field. We got yelled at again for leaving air-exposed half-filled bottles of soda and not quite empty jars of mayonnaise in order to create our playing instruments. I liked hot summer evenings best when everyone was driven out of sweltering apartments for “a bit of fresh air.” That’s when the kids got together and played games like Red Rover, Red Rover, or Red Light, Green Light, or Johnny on the Pony. The projects were never known for being quiet, but those evenings threatened loss of hearing with the screeching sounds of laughing, sweaty children, yelling and encouraging each other to break the human rope, or jump the piled on bodies forming a head-braced and butt-in-the-air “pony” against the brick wall. Properly tapped, the energy we expended could have replaced the city’s power company for the entire year. And then somebody had to invent window air conditioners. No one came outside anymore just to hang out – not if you could cool out in your own home. Visits to each other’s house (that’s New York-speak for apartment) stopped entirely if no air conditioner was in sight. A whole summer of that isolation, and no one knew anyone by fall, through the winter, or the awakening spring. People were into themselves, and mind your own business, thank you. I can list a few things since then that has diminished/eliminated the camaraderie achieved through physical activity and the simple sense of neighborly community. But need I say much more than two words: video games. Let’s not forget also that, since more than one person in the building now owned their own TV, neighbors didn’t have to bring their kitchen chairs to that lucky person’s living room and gather to watch The Whoever’s Entertainment Show for an hour – when the TV was then turned off! – and then sometimes stayed longer to just . . . talk. I don’t care what anyone says - window air conditioners were the beginning of the end.

Dream Laughing

Sometimes I wake up laughing. For the rest of the day I’m bright yellow sunshine. Not the crystal, white sunlight of cold winter days that make me feel brittle, fragile and inconsequential. Inside I’m the child somersaulting down a grassy hill – freed from my Sunday dress and good shoes, into my play clothes and bare feet, laughing and whooping all the way down. I’m young, bold, and strong. I can do anything. I’m a good girl, bad girl, who-cares-about-anything-because-I’m-having-fun girl. Feeling that girl in me is like eating a Charlotte Rouse. For those not in the know, a Charlotte Rouse is an Italian pastry inserted in a three-inch cardboard tubing, the same width of a paper towel tube. Inside is a one-inch disc of pound cake, topped with about five inches of whipped cream custard. You push up a circular cardboard from the bottom with your finger as you slowly lick off the cream until you reach the buttery cake. You nibble on that until the last crumb. How I enjoyed being a little girl for those gastronomic moments. Out shopping the other day, I spotted an Italian bakery . . . and there they were lined up in the window, beckoning to me. Never lose an opportunity to bring out that little girl inside, I was thinking. I bought one – just one – and stole away with it to the privacy of my parked car to explore shameless youth-reviving pleasure. It was just as good as I remembered – every succulent lick. I don’t think it was fifteen minutes later that I went into such a sugar shock. The restorative nap that I surrendered to was definitely in order. Reality check – that gluttonous little girl in me had aged out. Waking up laughing is preferred.

Another Road Trip, Please

It’s time for another road trip. Love my road trips: open the top – the sunroof my consolation for not getting a convertible – and feel the sun soften and dissolve from my face thinking-too-much lines. It’s better than . . . a spa. I ride a 2000 Maxima: Black Beauty is her name. Like drawing silk over skin, she glides over the highways. The Bose sound system spreads bass notes through my chest; trebles tickle my ears. I’d close my eyes in thrilled surrender, but, oops . . . Every six months Beauty’s dressed and polished in turtle wax. Chrome teeth smiles her appreciation. Perfumed vacuuming keeps Beauty internally fresh. She’s protected from New York’s disrespectful climate by an enclosed garage. And I rarely abuse her by driving the city streets – unless necessary, like going to my most favorite store in the world, Costco. A road-trip-to-anywhere represents freedom to me. It’s American. Within thirty minutes, I can cross the border into New Jersey. In two hours, I’m in Delaware. Another hour, Maryland. And on, and on, and on. Not once do I have to show a passport. No request to leave my state or permission to enter another. No armed guards at the borders (no, State Police don’t count). When I hit the road, my head seems to expand with the giddiness of my release from urban restraints. I feel my posture relax into the leather bucket seat that’s cradling me. The speedometer climbs without a body quiver to 50, 60, 70, 80, 85 . . . easily matching the pace of my fellow roadsters. (I truly believe it's mostly law enforcement types that own SUVs. They break all the rules and NEVER get stopped!) As long as I gas up, pay the tolls (E-Z Pass, I love you), and obey, within reason, the speed limits, I’m free to travel the public highways wherever I please. I’m free.

Happy New Year!

No, I didn’t go out to celebrate it. I slept in to celebrate it. My son woke me at midnight to greet it in, while his new bride claims she slept through the whole thing. No, the honeymoon’s not over, and he’s far from being a Mama’s boy. I think he’s just checking on me because I kind of disappeared on him Christmas Day. Another story.

Frankly, I’m momentarily at peace with the world because the other day I found that, in my own way, I still connect with the twenty-somethings of the good ol’ US of A. Channel surfing one night, I landed on the first few minutes of what I guess you’d call a romantic comedy. My mind had been drifting when slowly I began to notice the movie. I would not have turned to it on purpose. It starred six twenty-somethings: some girl named Something-or-other Potter, and, I think, Freddy Prinze, Jr -- he’s cute (probably what kept me from immediately changing the station) – and four runway models. Was I ever that young (Yes), that slim (Yes), that spontaneous (Still)?

The movie was called “Head Over Heels.” It was hysterical. Even though it had the Americans-must-have bathroom humor, these scenes were actually funny. In fact, several scenes had me boisterously laughing with the requisite tears.

Can’t tell you why this movie struck me this way, because the plot was soooo predictable to this jaded reader/writer. I guess because I had no expectations, and left myself open to just enjoying it – regardless of the shifted age perspective.

I’m still me, going on sixty-something. Still learning that my spirit can enjoy some things that are twenty-something.

The universe is telling me it could be a very good new year.