No Phone, No Pool, No Pets (Part One)

The book was done, as far as the parts I could do. Daughter had a light week of schoolwork. Consort had two large projects which arrived in his life due yesterday; he needed a quiet work space. We needed relaxation time. Mother-daughter road trip!

Not just any road trip, but a trip we’ve been pining over for years. This year, finally, we’d travel many, many hours to clean litterboxes and dog runs! Because it would appear I’m a little confused about what the definition of the word “relaxation” is.

 We headed to Best Friends, the largest animal sanctuary in the United States, to work for a week. How big is it? Darn big; they own 3,700 acres and lease another 33,000, which makes sense when you realize they have about 1,700 animals living with them at any given time. When you have that many animals, it’s just considered good form to have what amounts to a national park between you and your neighbors.

If you know about animal rescue, you’ve seen their work. After Katrina, a branch of their organization spent nearly a year in the Louisiana/Mississippi area, rescuing and placing homeless animals. They took in some of Michael Vick’s dogs. They’ve sent support to international rescue groups in times of crisis. They’ve got their own show, Dogtown, on the National Geographic Channel. They average 27,000 visitors a year, about 4,500 of whom end up volunteering. This is no small achievement because Best Friends isn’t just 36,000 acres of space located within a thriving metropolis. No, Best Friends is proudly off the beaten path. It’s surrounded by Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon's North Rim, Bryce Canyon National Park, and Lake Powell, which mostly means people are driving through to go somewhere else about five months a year, during the tourist season. The rest of the year you can stand in the middle of the road in the local town, Kanab, for minutes at a time if you felt so inclined, because there’s no traffic. Directions in town are based on whether you go to the first light or the second light; there are only two. How far off the grid is Best Friends? My GPS stopped working for several miles during the trip there. So if someone is coming to work at Best Friends, it’s because they worked very hard to do it.

LESSON ONE: Eight hours is not six hours.

When I punched the address into Google maps, it informed me the trip would take eight hours. I—who usually assume everything will go much worse than anticipated and take much longer— uncharacteristically decided the trip was no longer than six hours. See, because it takes about four hours to get to Las Vegas, which is almost exactly halfway to Kanab, so the whole trip would take six hours!

Yes, I’ve arranged for someone else to teach my child math.

The trip was a little over eight hours. Many of those hours were spent driving through the desert, which makes for a challenging learning experience unless you’re trying to teach your child every single synonym for the words beige and featureless. Don’t get me wrong, I actually love the desert, but it’s a love based less on novelty and more on how impressive it is to go hundreds of miles without anything actually changing. It’s the visual version of a Philip Glass piece. There was a brief flurry of excitement around Las Vegas, what with the billboards (“Mom, why would anyone need edible underwear?”) and then we were back on the moon again. To pass the time, we ate the taquitos and Girl Scout cookies I packed. Daughter learned a valuable lesson about her mother; road-trip food sneers at Recommended Daily Allowances of anything nutritious.

And then we drove into this.










Notice how it appears to only be over the highway? That’s because it was only over the highway. Over the sound of the fire-hose inundating the car, Daughter and I tried to think of synonyms for apocalyptic.


LESSON TWO: You never know.



About six hours into the journey, we started the drive through Zion National Park. A mile or so into the park, we stopped at a gate; the park fee was $25.00. I flinched. “Is there no other way to Kanab?” The forest ranger shrugged and said, “You can go back around at Hurricane.” Hurricane was an hour back, which meant I was weighting $25.00 against my sanity or a deep vein thrombosis from having sat for so long. I grimaced and paid, all the while cursing Google for never saying “Hey, this route? It’ll cost you.” We went into the park and then we saw this

 and this

 and this.

The mountains were red, as were the roads, because they used the local rocks for paving material. The sky was ludricrously blue. The clouds and the snow were the same pristine white. It was like a landscape created by a kindergarten student with two crayons. Daughter squealed in joy because she thought she saw a mountain goat scrambling across a hill but then decided it was probably a shadow. We came out from a tunnel and saw this.

 There was a family of four mountain goats, just sort of loitering by the side of the road. I mean, like three feet from the car; if inclined, the kid could have lunged from the car and touched a mountain goat horn. In the time it took me to stop squealing and grab the camera, they drifted a bit, not from fear but what appeared to be disgust at my lack of cool. We pulled over and just basked in the not-Los Angelesness of it all. I turned to Daughter.

“You remember my irritation about having had to pay?” I said to her, barely concealing a grin. Her eyes shining, the kid said to me, “It was so totally worth it.”

She was so totally right.

Eight hours and a few minutes after we started, we landed in Kanab, Utah, the setting sun turning the mountains the pink of an Easter ham, a few golden beams lighting up our home base for the next four days, the Quail Park Lodge, an adorable renovated motor lodge from the Route 66 era. I can rave about it, I can unequivocally recommend it for the customer service (details to follow), or I can show you one of the two dogs who is there every day. This is Foo,

and this is Foo playing with the three kids who stayed at the motel that night.

There's also an affable huge Leonberger named Coda, but he mostly slept and every picture I got of him looked like a meditation on roadkill. Just take my word for it, he was there.

We arrived at eight, ate the last of the taquitos and cookies as a sort of dinner and collapsed in exhaustion by nine. We needed to get our sleep; we were due at work the next day.

PART TWO: LESSONS LEARNED AND MAMMALS SOCIALIZED.

King of the Road (Part Four)

A REM cycle or two later, I hauled the two of us up the hill to work the afternoon shift, once again with the cats. Having had bronchial luck with this before, I requested to be allowed to walk a cat. The supervisor at the building said, “Oh, great! I took Princess out this morning but I think she’d love to get outside again. Let me get her ready.” I waited for her to grab a leash and harness and dress one of the dozen or so cats milling about aimlessly. Instead, she went to a chair, gently picked up a blanket and slowly walked it back to Daughter and me. Curled up inside the blanket was a tiny cat; she was full-grown, but couldn’t have weighed more than five pounds. Princess let out a tiny snore.

The supervisor smiled at her fondly and stroked the cat’s forehead with an index finger. “You don’t have to leash her, she doesn’t walk much. Her systems are failing, she’s not going to make it much longer. Princess likes being outside but I’ve got to get some work done. I’d appreciate it.”

Daughter and I walked Princess outside on her bed in a stately and ceremonial way. Princess looked around and let out a tiny peep of what I assume was approval. After much consideration, we found a perfect spot for her to sit on her blanket in the shade, because the supervisor told us the blanket was easier on her bones and full sun was too hard on her. Because while she was dying, she was still a cat, once we situated her blanket in the shade, she immediately stood up, tottered off the blanket, and sprawled in the sun.

We stayed out there for over an hour. Daughter and I idly chatted and dug holes in the sandy dirt. Princess turned her head this way and that, feeling the breeze on her face. Sometimes we petted her, which she didn’t seem to mind. I can think of hours I have spent getting more done, but I’m hard-pressed to think of an hour I’ve spent which mattered more. Princess, I came to learn, had been a feral cat when she arrived, five years before. For nearly her entire stay there, she had been alternately fearful and dismissive of the humans who cared for her. No one minded and they loved her for the prickly girl she was. In the final few weeks of her life, she had grown patient and seemingly pleased with the human’s attention. So for an hour, she got to enjoy a spring afternoon and a little bit of adoration. When the supervisor came back out to get her, we carefully lifted Princess back into her blanket and told her what a good girl she was. She looked at us, and then beyond us, out at the beautiful afternoon and at things only she could see.

When we finished out shift, I told the kid we had to make one more stop for the day. It’s on the Best Friends property, but is out beyond any of the animal enclosures. We bumped down a dirt road and then came to it; Angel’s Rest.

I’ve been to cemetaries before, some of great age and laden with history, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to one quite like this. These weren’t just animals who had lived, and died, at Best Friends. People had bought markers for beloved pets; there was even the occasional marker for a pet-loving human being. The ones who were here because they were loved made me sad. The ones who were here because they never got to go home made me sad. And yet, in the middle of that sadness, that wistfullness, there was serenity. The wind slithered through the chimes and moved the prayer flags around. The mountains were beautiful. When the chimes weren’t ringing, the silence was so deep it gave me the same swooping feeling I’d had staring at the Kanab night sky. Life was precious, and sad, and brief, and wonderful. Dying is hard, but dying also means sitting on the sand, feeling the sun on your face. These animals were gone but it certainly felt as if a whole bunch of spirits were around Angel’s Rest, around Best Friends, and they seemed like very contented spirits. Perhaps they had found their home after all.

The next morning was our final shift; we needed to end on a high note. Here’s what looks like a high note to me:

First, there was Puppy Socialization class, where they learn how not be inappropriate at things or people they don’t know. Puppy Cotillion, as it were. No, they didn’t learn how to fox-trot, but I suspect at least half of Daughter’s cotillion dance-partners would have been happier being allowed to bite a skateboard-wheel. Then we got to take slightly older puppies on walks. The puppy-walking path is less than three-quarters of a mile in total and each walk takes at least a half-hour because we’re learning our leash manners.

It should be acknowleged that Maverick will understand how to walk on a leash before I learn how to take footage while walking.

Again and again we walked, two tiny puppies at a time, watching these animals enjoy the pleasure of being outdoors, being safe.


Coming around the final time, before we handed in our dogs and headed home, I thought about our adventure. We weren’t critical to Best Friends; had we not been there, another of the hundreds or so volunteers there that day would have done what we did. But we had been useful and I could only speak for myself, but I was very happy. I turned to the kid, who was coaxing a puppy away from an eight-foot long branch he was trying to drag along.

“Did you have fun?”

She nodded vigorously and said, “Oh, yeah.”

“Are you sad we’re going home?”

She looked up for a second and went back to puppy-debranching. She thought and then shook her head.

“No. These are very nice animals, but they aren’t our animals. I need to get home and see ours.”

(To Sara and those people who assumed Averil would be coming home with us, that wasn’t going to happen for three reasons. One: our lives are insane. Two: there’s a miniscule possibility that I’ve actually learned something and won’t add more chaos to my life. Three, and most relevantly, she can’t go home with anyone under 12.)

We went back to the motel, said goodbye to Foo,

and pointed our car towards Vegas, where we grabbed an early dinner, which led to the last lesson:

LESSON NINE: Under no circumstance, if you have four hours of driving ahead of you in high desert, should you take half of your Vietnamese meal, no matter how delicious, to go.

Between the food and the dirty clothes, my car smelled like a tuna-fish sandwich buried in a shoe under a latrine. I’m not sure Daughter and I smelled much better but when we landed at home, Consort and the pets leapt upon us, each hugging us in their own way. I started the first of many loads of laundry, and went in to lie on the bed and enjoy the sensation of not-driving. Daughter was on my bed, flipping through a book, both cats in her lap. I lay next to her in companiable silence for a minute and then said, “We’ll go back soon.”

She glanced at me, kissed the cat, smiled and said “Definitely.”

Definitely.

And Every Handout in Every Town (Part Two)

The first night we were in Kanab, I had to dash outside into the  freezing darkness to get something from the car. Sprinting back in, I noticed something and slowed down. Then, I stopped. And then, I ran in to get Daughter.

“Put on your shoes,” I ordered, “you’ve got to see this.”

“But,” she whined, “I’m warm and exhausted.”

I fixed her with a hard look.

“Put on shoes.”

I dragged her outside. She shivered and looked at me expectantly. I silently pointed upwards at the sky, at the stars. She looked up. When you’re from a big metropolitan area light-pollution emitting place such as Los Angeles, you could accurately describe the night sky as “The faded navy blue place with the moon.” If you’re observant, you might see a star or two a week. For the past month, we’ve had two planets up there and that was stylish. This sky mocked any attempt at counting; were there a thousand celestial sequins or were there a thousand in just that corner over there? It was light enough to read print. If living in Los Angeles means looking around at all the stuff you want and believing you’re just one contract away from being the most important person in the world, living in Kanab must mean occasionally looking up at all the stuff that is and realizing you’re not important at all. Looking at these stars was some version of freefalling. We reveled in it all. After a couple of minutes, Daughter said, “This is very cool, but I can’t feel my earlobes any more.”

Existential perspective gave way to warm earlobes. We went inside and turned in.

We drove on to the Best Friends sanctuary the next morning for our training and learned another lesson:

LESSON THREE: Best Friends isn’t playing.

If you have an appointment for the 9:00 tour, do not arrive at 9:06 and expect them to still be getting people on the bus. I’m usually pathologically punctual, but when we went to the front office at the motel to grab some breakfast, Daughter got trapped in the gravitational pull of Foo’s charm.

Our official training began at 11, so we spent the time walking around gazing at the rescued horses frolicking in the fields, the rescued pigs strutting around self-importantly, the rescued goats angling for my jacket as I leaned against the fence. As much as I liked them, they couldn’t have my jacket, as I needed it, as it was still wobbling around freezing. Daughter entertained herself by jumping on frozen grass on and listening to it crunch. The manager of our motel had told us the weather was expected to reach eighty degrees by the end of the week. “That’s springtime in Kanab for you,” she said, shrugging.


LESSON FOUR: Kanab isn’t playing, either.

At 11, we trained and got our schedule. Every morning, from 8:15- 11:30, we’d work in one area, then we’d have lunch, and then we’d work in another area from 1:15-4:00. Because the kid isn’t twelve yet, we were put in rabbits, cats and dogs. Some day, my daughter will throw a complete adolescent fit in public and I’ll cut her slack because of the fit she didn’t throw at Best Friends when she learned she couldn’t work with the horses. Trying to convince her that rabbits, our first stop, are very much like tiny horses did remarkably little to lighten her mood. Perhaps food would help.

Small note about the cafeteria; the food is fine. Vegetable things, pasta things, some fruit. If you go, you will not notice what you’re eating because this is the view:

Pasta salad really doesn’t stand up against a glimpse of The World Before Man.

And then, rabbits! And, of course, antihistamines, because while I’m a bit allergic to some dogs and somewhat allergic to most cats, I’m wildly allergic to rabbits and hay. My protocol for the trip was Benadryl at night, Claritin during the day, and an inhaler tucked deeply into my back pocket at all times. That the rabbits have runs which are half indoors and half outdoors—thereby providing me with precious gulps of air not woven with allergens—made it all the more tolerable. I was positively sanguine, watching Daughter brush and hand-feed specially selected rabbits, trudging up and down the hillside to the far rabbit yurts, doling out cilantro and lettuce to worthy rabbits. I saw wild turkeys strutting around. I basked in the silence, as exotic and infinite as the starry sky the night before. Daughter had forgiven the universe for the lack of horses and was angling to adopt at least six of her new friends. I had done the right thing, bringing us here.

Five minutes before the end of our shift, I reflexively tapped my inhaler-pocket. Then, I tapped it again, and followed that with tapping the other pocket. Several pocket-taps later, I finally admitted I had lost my inhaler. I retraced my steps from yurt to yurt, then in the yurts, to no avail. Somewhere in the cilantro-doling and lettuce-strewing, I had dropped my inhaler and it was nowhere to be found. This didn’t bode well for the week. We finished our shift and drove back to the motel in silence.


LESSON FIVE: Small towns can be challenging.

I made a quick call to my ENT doctor in LA from the room; I could have a local pharmacy call them and it could be replaced! Now, to find a pharmacy in a town with two stoplights. Surprisingly, there were two, but both were closed for the night and wouldn’t be open again until after we were supposed to be working the next day. I chose not to think about this for the moment and find us some dinner. Yelp and the motel manager both recommended a nearby Mexican restaurant. I like the manager and I don’t want to sound like a snobby LA person, so I’ll keep my comments positive. The salsa was pretty good. What else can I say that’s positive? Oh, here’s one. Until that night, I was almost positive you couldn’t screw up rice and beans. There are five restaurants in town and this was the most lauded; something told me we’d be here again. I stared moodily at my food and pined for my inhaler. The nearest town large enough to support a 24-hour pharmacy was an hour and a half away. This is what living in a small town means. Daughter alternately read her book and noted how little room a rabbit would take up in the car, were we to bring one back from Kanab.

We got back to the motel; the manager was at the front desk. Daughter fell upon Foo,

who seemed thrilled about this. She asked how our first day had been. I raved about the good stuff and mentioned my lack of inhaler. The manager clucked her tongue sympathetically, grabbed the phone and said “Let me call Clyde.”

“Clyde?”

“The pharmacist.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I protested, “Besides, the pharmacy closed at five.”

“I’m calling him at home. He lives right around the corner. He can go back and set you right up.”

LESSON SIX: Small towns can be wonderful.

Come to think of it, the salsa was actually great.

I Know Every Engineer on Every Train (Part Three)

Once again the proud guardian of an asthma inhaler, Daughter and I set off for our morning’s shift at the cat center. After our training video, we were presented with the seemingly unanswerable question:


In which cat building do you want to spend your time? There are over a dozen buildings, most with a specific kind of cat. We could pet and coo older cats, or help care for cats who have a hard time getting around, or we could SPEND TWO HOURS INTERACTING WITH KITTENS!!! KITTENS, WITH THEIR PIPE-CLEANER TAILS AND THEIR DISPROPORTIONATE HEADS AND THEIR IRRATIONAL FEAR OF THAT THING NOBODY ELSE SEES IN THE CORNER!!!

KITTENS!!!

Which was exactly why we didn’t go to kittens. Right before we left, Consort helped me pack the last of the suitcases in the car, stole a Girl Scout cookie from the Road Trip Snack cache, looked deeply into my eyes and said, “I don’t expect you to come home without another animal. But, please, try very hard not to come home with another animal. I spend enough time as it is thinking about quadruped shit.”

Being as the cats seem to take an almost sadistic pleasure in waiting until we sit down to dinner to commit an unspeakable act in the litterbox in the nearby laundry room, and being as my little road trip had made him King of Pet Excrement for the week, I couldn’t actually argue with him. He’s a saint, that Consort. Best to not be exposed to temptation. Daughter and I voted to work at the Casa de Calmar, a house for cats with feline leukemia. Cats with feline leukemia can live healthy lives and the disease can’t be transmitted to humans, but our cats at home don’t have it and I couldn’t in good conscience bring an infected cat into our house. I could fall in love many times over at Calmar and never once ask the question, “Say, is there an adoption application around here?” I still wasn’t certain, though, how much cat-fur my immune system could stand, even with medical back-up. I prayed there was something I could do where I wouldn’t go into respitory failure. Even though the buildings have both indoor areas and screened porches

 (catteries), that might be more than my lungs could take.

“Would you like to walk Moses?”

LESSON SEVEN: Walking is beneficial.

Prayers answered. Some of the cats like to snap on the old harness and leash and go out for a stroll. Mostly, I was told, they stand around outside, mark a bush or two, glare at the wild turkeys who have the audacity to stand mere yards away, gobbling rudely. Not my walking-buddy Mo. We spent the better part of an hour trudging, leaping, pouncing, skittering, cakewalking, and talking our way around the back of the property. This was one of the few moments we weren’t lunging off towards a new adventure:

When we finally took him back in, he was content to head off to a sunny spot in the cattery, and I was giddy; I had been of service and my breathing was still inaudible! What else could I do which was useful and fairly low in allergens?

Daughter went off to brush, pet and generally be an eleven year-old girl around the cats and I washed dishes. Not quite as strange and lovely as a walk in the Utah mountains with a cat, but still useful and the steam kept my bronchi open, which has its own peculiar beauty.

After lunch, we got to work with the dogs. By work, I mean walk. It was an efficient little machine; the kid would be handed a leashed dog, I would be handed a leashed dog, and we'd head towards the hike-path. We'd walk the path, take the dogs back to the building and be handed another two dogs. Best Friends has enough property so that each dog-building has their own hiking path, which means dogs who see each other on the walks know one another a bit and are less likely to act out. This means the dogs--healthy, young, ebullient dogs--know exactly where they are going, heading away from the building as if the path is paved in Snausages. I tried to get a movie of our walk but it's hard to get decent footage when someone about knee-height is concerned you've missed the INCREDIBLE CACTUS TEN FEET IN FRONT OF US PLEASE GET A MOVE ON.

Here's the path. Yes, this part of Utah looks remarkably like someone moved to Mars and did a bit of landscaping.

Daughter and I walked three dogs each, at which point it was time to pick our dog for the sleepover! There are bunnies, cats and dogs who are authorized to go on sleepovers, as long as the place you're staying is so inclined. I had picked our motel for just that reason. Our first pick was Avril, a gorgeous marshmallow of a dog who had been making seductive eyes at the kid all during our shift and came highly recommended by the employees in that building. The trainer for this building let us hang out with Avril while he pulled her paperwork for the sleepover. Avril was kind enough to me, allowing me to pet her and make a big deal about her spotted tummy, but her heart was clearly taken by Daughter. She inched closer and closer to the girl, finally putting her paw in Daughter's hand:

They stared at each other, delighted. The trainer came back, rubbing his head.

"How old are you?" he asked Daughter.

"Eleven," she said, furrowing her brow. No one ever seems to care about her age until they are going to deny her something.

"I'm sorry, but Avril is only authorized to have sleepovers with children over twelve."

Avril and the kid both stared at him, Avril inching further into her lap.

"It's just that she was taken from a really bad abuse case, which involved a child. She's obviously better, but she still hasn't been officially cleared for younger people."

I braced myself for the sulk we'd all now be enjoying. Instead, Daughter gently slid Avril off her lap, whispered something in her ear, got up and said calmly, "Then let's meet the dogs who can be around me."

We walked out of Averil's pen. I asked her what she had said to Averil.

"I told her I was sorry."

"Sorry for not being able to take her?"

"Yeah. Sorry for all of it."

"Me, too."

Avril stood in her outdoor run and watched us go.

LESSON EIGHT: You're never fully ready for houseguests.

We were placed with Poppy, a lively and bouncy young dog who was incandescently joyful that someone was snapping on her leash and grabbing her overnight bag. Very bouncy, in fact; owing to having had distemper as a puppy, she has neurological damage, which means she spends most of her life as if she's standing on couch-springs. A more polite houseguest I couldn't have asked for: she enjoyed the walk we took; she enjoyed sitting with us watching us eat on the Mexican restaurant patio; she enjoyed the car trip back to the motel.

Ten minutes after arriving at the hotel, she was this relaxed:

And a half-hour after this, she was this relaxed:

It's hard to get a picture of a black dog in shadows, but trust me, she was the embodiment of a curled up, relaxed dog. I had every reason to suspect we'd have a quiet night.
 
There are several points to Best Friend sleepovers. If you're thinking about getting a pet, you can see if you and the dog are the right fit. You can give an animal a night of undivided attention, which most animals revel in. Or you can give Best Friends valuable information about the animal you have sleeping over. For example, say you've been given a dog with a neurological condition that makes her bounce and the trainer from Best Friends tells you she doesn't do it while she sleeps. After a single night of sharing a bed with her, you could tell the trainer that, in fact, she does twitch while she sleeps. That, in fact, sleeping next to her is like sleeping next to someone with hiccups. Daughter proved that, as an adult, she will be able to rent apartments situated under The El by sleeping soundly the entire night, even with Poppy next to her. I, on the other side of Poppy, enjoyed up to four minutes of sleep at a time. In the morning, I dragged myself up to Best Friends, waved Poppy a numbed farewell, stopped by the main offices and told them we wouldn't be working that morning, headed back down to the room and slept until noon. Daughter told me afterwards that while I slept she watched Sponge Bob Square Pants for three solid hours, which I am going to declare a continuation of our animal adventure.
 
NEXT: More.

Put the Blame on Me

Click

I should really be on the east coast, volunteering with Best Friends or the Humane Society, cleaning cages.

Click.
No, wait! I should be with Occupy Sandy, helping cook or something. Wait, food given to people digging out from a catastrophe shouldn't bring on despair; maybe I could just unload boxes or hand out spoons. But I absolutely should be there.

Click.

Oh, God! Haiti! Those poor people with the tents and the cholera! Why am I not down there doing something! I could get a cholera vaccine and then go there and...I don't know, but I must do something! 

Click.

A friend has a friend whose downstairs neighbor moved out and left his three cats. Do I know someone who wants to adopt three full-grown mixed-breed long-haired cats, all black? They need to be saved by 7pm, otherwise the landlord is taking them to the shelter. Also, they'd need to be picked up at the apartment and bring gloves, because they're aggressive towards strangers. But they're very sweet!

Click.

Girls in developing nations desperately need and want educating. I should go to Pakistan and teach English. Take the kid with me, make it a learning experience. I really should do that!

Click.

Photos of animals on death-row at different shelters around the country. Would it kill me to just run to Sacramento and save that guinea pig? WOULD IT! GOD, LOOK AT THOSE EYES!

Click.

JAPAN IS STILL HURTING THANK YOU VERY MUCH QUINN HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT JAPAN LATELY NO I DIDN'T THINK SO JUST EAT A BON-BON AND DO A QUIZ IN COSMO MAGAZINE, WHY DON'T YOU.

Going through my email entreaties flays my soul. And yet I will not "Unsubscribe" to these lists not because I like the flaying; I promise you, I don't. It's just that every time I have a moment's thought of "You know, Quinn, you can't actually volunteer in New Jersey and Haiti right now, let alone at the same time, and if you give money to everyone, you'll be broke and might possibly have to live in a cage on animal death-row. You might want to stop reading these" my brain screams "ENTITLED PRINCESS! With your irrational need not to feel horrible first thing in the morning!"

This is the first cousin to the previous blog about my inability to keep up with all the new social media, but at least if I'm a bust at Instagram, nothing dies, gets typhoid fever or never gets to go to middle school. It's as if the part of my brain which longs to be useful has the same properties as kudzu and has grown over every other inch of my brain. Intellectually I understand that, as my friends in 12-step programs say, I can only keep my side of the street clean; what I do is annex everything to do with children or animals and declare it a new subsidiary of Quinn Street. This is exhausting. We're not even factoring in all the volunteering I do because "I'm at home and I do have the time," and the driving the kid to everything because even though I know she sees lots of friends, I'm still convinced that years from now Daughter will look at me with tears in her eyes and moan "Oh, if only I'd had more socialization! Would it have killed you to take me to that birthday party twenty miles away?"

Dear readers, you have proven in the past to be sensitive and sane individuals, so I come to you; when is enough? How do you take care of what matters to you and not let the undone bits drive you nuts? Is anyone else fixating on that aquarium in New Jersey which was in dire need of batteries right after Sandy? Is anyone else very concerned about the well-being of those sharks?

Or maybe I should just read my email at night.

Steal This Movie.

If the last week has had a flavor, it has been Robitussin. If it has had a sound, it has been the sound of a small cardboard box of potential peril hitting my front door. Neither one plans on stopping any time soon.

Permit me to explain. Two weeks ago, Daughter got a cold which kept her home from school Monday and Tuesday. For some unknown reason [which might have had something to do with Daughter sneezing into my eye when I was giving her a glass of water], I had the cold Wednesday through Friday. Daughter was re-infected by my slightly mutated cold virus, and had it over the weekend. Because it was lonely not having a Kleenex next to my nose I took the cold back on Monday and kept it through Wednesday. Daughter claimed it again for a single day on Thursday, and I am currently in Day four of this siege, with no end in sight.

Here’s a nice visual that will tell you how low I’ve sunk. While driving away from school last week, I needed a Kleenex and grabbed one from my pocket. It felt a little rough and possibly used, but I wasn’t going to cavil. It was only after blowing my nose that I looked and determined that I had blown my nose into a tea bag.

The only question now is whether I have moved into a sinus infection. I get them so often you would think I’d be capable of diagnosing one from five miles away, and I usually am. But whatever this particular disease is, it’s coy.

At midnight, I feel as if someone has stuffed a wriggling hedgehog into each nostril and I think, “Definitely sinus infection. I’ll call the doctor in the morning.”

Morning comes, and the breathing is easy and I think, “I’m going to go to the Doctor’s office and he’s going to tell me that I have a cold. Then he’s going to look at me with pity in his eyes and assume I made a big deal out of this because I am some poor shut-in without friends.”

I decide not to call the doctor, and my sinuses cunningly wait until after business hours to start the hedgehog thing again.

None of this will come as a surprise to my mother, who can vividly recall how my cold would unfailingly ramp up into bronchitis at 5:45 on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

So, I’ve been sniffling and hacking and watching movies, which leads me to the other constant in my life right now. I am a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body of people who vote for the Academy Awards. Being as I am a Girl Scout about the darndest things, I take this honor and responsibility seriously. That is, before I write down my five nominees in the acting categories, I want to see every single performance that could be a contender, no matter how unlikely. *

About ten years ago the studios, wanting our votes, started sending out tapes of the movies in contention to watch in the comfort of our living rooms. I loved this, because not only was it easier to arrange to see every single film, no matter how unlikely (Have you seen more than one Jean-Claude Van Damme movie? I have.), but I could lend the films to certain friends. If I knew someone with a newborn, or someone who couldn’t comfortably sit in a theater for two hours, or someone whose financial situation prevented them from spending fifty dollars for two adults in a theater and one babysitter at home, I could lend them a tape. It wasn’t as if I was taking money out of the studio coffers, as these people weren’t getting to movie theaters in the first case.

At the end of the voting season, I would take the seventy-five or so tapes I had been tripping over for three months and happily give the lot of them to a shelter for battered women or to a hospice; it kind of pleased me to think about movies transporting people who desperately deserved it. It also really pleased me to remove the tapes from the house as, stacked up, they were taller than I am and were more apt to fall down and trip people than I am.

Within the last five years, most of the Academy members starting requesting DVD format, which is far easier to copy than a tape, and the studios started getting really nervous. I’d get a DVD, and wrapped around the jewel box would be a note on studio letterhead saying, in effect, “QUINN CUMMINGS, WE HAVE ETCHED YOUR NAME ON THIS DVD, WHICH WILL EMBED ITSELF IN ANY COPY MADE. IF IT EVER SHOWS UP ANYWHERE, EVER, WE’LL THROW STARVING LAWYERS AT YOUR ABDOMEN.”

I would pop in the film, and up would come something along the lines of “QUINN, THE FBI KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE. FOR THE SAKE OF SECURITY, WATCH THIS MOVIE AND THEN EAT IT.”

I lent the films to only a few people, mostly relations, and people I knew not only weren’t movie-stealers, and didn’t know people who were movie-stealers, they didn’t know people who knew people who were movie-stealers. Okay, we’re not exciting. But I’ve never seen an FBI badge in person, either, and that’s okay by me.

And then, last year, one member of the Academy got into some big trouble. Somehow, several of his movies ended up with a friend of his several thousand miles away, being copied. Maybe it was an honest mistake; maybe he meant to send his friend some Mel Torme records, and accidentally sent the box with the DVDs, it doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is that this Academy member was fined in the mid six-figures for this little mistake, and I was forced to suddenly reexamine my relationship with the DVDs. Maybe no one I know copies DVDs, but whose to say my friend with my DVD doesn’t have a handyman, a great-nephew or a neighbor with a house key who has criminal habits?

So now I treat these DVD’s like unexploded ordinance. They show up on average of two a day, I sign for them and secrete them in a secure undisclosed location and cover them in a camouflage blanket. They don’t leave my house, and I watch them with the blinds drawn and sometimes wearing a disguise. After I finish watching the movie, I place it in a new safe place with all the DVDs from last year that I was too paranoid to give away. I will say, conservatively, that there are 200 of them in there, and we get another 100 or so a year.

According to actuarial tables, I have another 42 years of life. That means, upon my death, Daughter will inherit 4300 DVDs.

Note to self; put coded message in will, telling Daughter about spring-loaded poison darts protecting secure DVD location.

* As a member of the acting category, I only nominate Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Movie. When it comes time to vote on the best of the nominees, I vote on all the categories, including things like editing and special effects, two subjects about which I know virtually nothing. You nominate in your area of expertise (theoretically); you vote for a winner based on whether you had been in a good mood when you saw the movie. The next time you hear someone saying, “It’s an honor just to be nominated”, please remember that it’s probably more of an honor to be nominated, especially in the technical categories.

Fund A Mental

Hi, I just happened to be in your neighborhood. I noticed that your back door was ajar and decided to take a look in your kitchen cabinets (love the contact paper, by the way), and I couldn’t help but notice that you’re still storing your cereal in cereal boxes. You know, Tupperware does a fabulous Cereal Server™ with their first-in, first-out feature, which allows you to put the cereal in the bottom and pour out through the top, which will keep you from getting stale cereal, and who likes that? Also, I noticed that you don’t have a lot in the way of Christmas table accessories (whew, is your crawl space dusty!), and I immediately thought of the Tupperware Bell Ornament Place Card Holders™, which is fun for the Christmas season, and also a lovely housewarming present. And if you have a friend who celebrates other holidays, don’t fret, you can never go wrong with the Tupperware Sheerly Elegant Butterfly Server™ which comes in emerald and clear and can hold a variety of food items including fruit. Who doesn’t like fruit?

So, either you can buy a couple of Tupperware items from me that you need anyway, or we can talk about what I found in your medicine cabinet.

Yeah, Daughter’s school is having a fund-raiser, and I have a catalogue in my purse. I’d feel better about carrying around a live strep-throat culture; at least then I’d know it was an object to be kept away from people. Instead, though, I have to find friends and loved ones, shove the increasingly grubby catalogue into their hands like a used Kleenex and mumble “Fund-raising. Buy, please?” At which point my friends go through the catalogue, trying to decide whether they need Butter Huggers™ (“…Dispenses butter when rubbed across ear of corn. Includes area for salt...”) or Stuffables™ (“…Flexible seals that expand, so you can overstuff them with irregular or odd-shaped objects such as pork chops..”). I know they don’t need either. They know they don’t need either. I know they know they don’t need either. But the ones who are related to Daughter will buy something to support her, and my friends do it to support me and support their school.

That’s right, I said their school. Every close friend I have right now has a child under fifteen, and they all know that before December is done, they will be shoving their fund-raising catalogues into my ribs. After only two years of the kid-in-school circuit, I have developed distinct favorites. I like ducks best of all; I buy some rubber ducks, they float someplace in some sort of competition, and I never hear about them again. I will never win the weekend in Palm Springs(Grand Prize), the gift certificate for a luxurious massage (2nd Prize), or the not-quite-complete set of Calphalon pots (3rd Prize), but I don’t care.

Wrapping paper is useful, but problematic. First of all, the paper is hugely marked-up. I know this shouldn’t be about buying deeply-discounted expendables -- I usually buy a closet full of Christmas supplies on December 26th -- but when it’s three times as much as it would be in a store, it starts feeling too much like a shakedown (“…You want your kid to learn the last 13 letters of the alphabet, you’d better push the entire Country Cuties™ gift wrap package…”). Also, only about twenty percent of the inventory in a catalogue is actually wrapping paper -- the rest is a gallery of must-have collectibles, assuming you are the kind of person who must have a ceramic figurine of an angel-faced child of indeterminate gender, in pastel pajamas, huge eyes gazing heavenward, with the words “My Gramma Wuvs Me” carved in gilded script at his/her feet. I can only speak for my family, but if I brought that into her house, my mother would throw fireplace tools at my head.

These catalogues are an embarrassment of riches in objects which hold no appeal for me at all. Apparently, the good people who publish these catalogues have done copious research proving beyond any reasonable doubt that mothers of elementary-school children LOVE THE HOLIDAYS! Not only do we LOVE THE HOLIDAYS, we cannot get enough of any holiday, no matter how obscure! The target audience of every fund-raising catalogue has asked herself the question: “How am I going to decorate the hot-water heater to best commemorate Arbor Day?”

They have Halloween gnomes you can hang from lampshades, Easter-bunny pixies to hide in flower pots, Valentine cherubs to stick on your picture window, and St. Patrick’s Day leprechaun t-shirts to wear as you lie in a puddle of your own green beer-soaked vomit. I haven’t found the Memorial Day “Commemorate-Our-War-Dead and End-Of-Season-Shoe-Sale” doorknob hanger, but it’s out there. Since I have an aversion to bringing one more object into this house which is relevant for only one week a year, and since I must buy something from this kind woman who has already bought something from me, I get wrapping paper. I figure with my deeply discounted December 26th savings, my inventory costs pretty much even out. Better yet, I can say without fear of contradiction there is no holiday so obscure I don’t have a wrapping paper for it. An Armistice Day present for a six year-old boy who likes reptiles? Far left corner, behind the Ramadan ribbon.

But the worst, of course, are the candy catalogues. Nothing but second-rate chocolate, as far as the eye can see, usually in a tin decorated with holiday-themed teddy bears (I’m guessing research shows we mothers of the school-age really spin for teddy bears). I sit at Gymnastics, holding a catalogue and frowning.

A two-pound rectangle of milk chocolate with “2005” written on top? Nope. That only gives me two months to gift it.

A massive bag of chocolate-covered pretzels? Nope. I got them last time and had the suspicion that dipping them in chocolate-colored wax was how manufacturers got rid of pretzels too stale to sell in third-world vending machines.

Walnut fudge or pecan turtles, so I can pretend the nuts negate every other toxic ingredient? Nope. Non pariels, because no one in the house really likes them so they might actually last a week? Nope.

I will spend more than two hundred dollars this year on the fund-raisers of friends, all of whom will spend somewhere in that neighborhood on the fund-raisers of their friends. I know we’re doing this because not everyone can afford anything beyond what they are paying in tuition or school fees, which is why the fund-raising is voluntary (a word that takes on a new elasticity after you have been pulled aside by the fund-raising chair at your school).

But I’m going to suggest something here: couldn’t we just give this money directly to the schools? About sixty percent is going to the wrapping paper/chocolate Santa/personalized pen people, anyway. If we want to keep it in the fund-raising spirit, the fund-raiser can randomly grab a different parent each week and crow over the new soccer balls while the parent writes a check. The school gets to keep more money and the parent gets the same feeling of accomplishment without having to find a place to stash another two foot-high decorative tin of chocolate-covered packing material.

In the meanwhile, though, I have you down for the Saucy Silicone Spatula™ and the Thatsa Bowl ™ in Lacquer blue, right?

Patrick Thomas Dwyer 1964-9/11/2001

Tonight, I run this for him. I participated in the 2,996 Project, for which 2,996 bloggers volunteered to write a memorial for one person who perished in the attacks on 9/11.

Patrick Thomas Dwyer, 37, Nissoquogue, NY. Bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. Left behind a wife JoAnn, a son Brendan and a daughter Sarah, who were five and three at the time of their father’s death.

When Patrick was randomly assigned to me, I stared at my computer screen blankly for a long time. Weeks, in fact. I wanted to do the right thing by this man, but what do I say which doesn’t become political, maudlin, or somehow all about me? Even the best eulogy becomes as much about the speaker as the departed, and I don’t claim to write a world-class eulogy. The memorial becomes exponentially more difficult when you don’t know the person intimately, and I had no desire to write something general and inane about how he was a nice person and that this was such a tragedy. My first rule with this blog has always been: “Tell the truth, Quinn, as best as you can”, and I certainly wasn’t going to break that rule now.

I never met Patrick Thomas Dwyer. From what I have read about him, this is my loss. Patrick loved what he did for a living and did it well enough to find plenty of time to enjoy his family and friends. He and his wife centered their lives on their kids and their friends and extended family. They loved entertaining.I have never met nor spoken to anyone in his family. I do, however, know what it’s like to have your father die when you are very young.

The brutality of losing a parent when you are a child is that the death continues to reverberate forever. It isn’t a huge single loss; it’s a continuum of huge single losses.Patrick was there to teach his son to ice-skate, but he wasn’t there to teach his daughter.He was there to see his son go to school for the first time, but not his daughter.Brendan will remember him, and probably idolize him his entire life. Sarah might not have anything but filaments of memories from a birthday party or an afternoon at their pool that last summer of 2001 -- memories which are half-real, half constructions from photos she has seen or stories she has heard. Brendan and Sarah will grow up, and laugh, and cry, and slam doors, and graduate, break bones and win awards. And each time something happens in their lives their father will be dead.

Within their family and their community, they will be Patrick and JoAnn’s kids. There will be plenty of people around them eager to tell them what a funny guy their father was, what a sports fan and a true friend, and what a great marriage their parents had. But as they grow up, and make new friends and meet new people, there will always be that hanging question: “You were how old when your father died? When did he die? Oh my God, did he die on 9/11?”At the least likely moments, when all they want to do is be normal and anonymous, they will be forced to embody a national trauma and to relive the greatest pain a family can endure.For a while after my father died, I told inquisitive strangers -- people I never expected to see again -- that my parents had gotten a divorce because that was accepted without further comment. A dead father led to more personal interrogation than I was prepared to undergo. Until my thirties, I would actively avoid telling people he died on the last day of shooting of “The Goodbye Girl”, because the combination of pity and curiosity was nearly unbearable. Brendan and Sarah will never stop being victims of 9/11 and I feel so wretched for some of the stupid and thoughtless things people are going to say to them in years to come.

If Consort gets home late, after Daughter is sleeping, he will always go in and kiss her goodnight. Being a very sound sleeper, she takes this with nothing more than a slight break in her teeth-grinding and maybe a murmured grunt. But Consort doesn’t mind. He says, “She knows I kissed her goodnight. Her skin knows it". With a father who took the 5:20 train every morning to get to his desk at the World Trade Center, I bet Sarah and Brendan had a lot of kisses left upon them when they were sleeping. I hope their skin remembers. I hope his kisses give them some comfort today, and every day of their lives.

JoAnn Dwyer, my condolences on your loss. I wish I had met Patrick. I wish I had no reason to be writing about him.

Patrick Thomas Dwyer, 1964-2001

This is a repeat, but he deserves it.

I participated in the 2,996 Project, for which 2,996 bloggers volunteered to write a memorial for one person who perished in the attacks on 9/11.

Patrick Thomas Dwyer, 37, Nissoquogue, NY. Bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. Left behind a wife JoAnn, a son Brendan and a daughter Sarah, who were five and three at the time of their father’s death.

When Patrick was randomly assigned to me, I stared at my computer screen blankly for a long time. Weeks, in fact. I wanted to do the right thing by this man, but what do I say which doesn’t become political, maudlin, or somehow all about me? Even the best eulogy becomes as much about the speaker as the departed, and I don’t claim to write a world-class eulogy. The memorial becomes exponentially more difficult when you don’t know the person intimately, and I had no desire to write something general and inane about how he was a nice person and that this was such a tragedy. My first rule with this blog has always been: “Tell the truth, Quinn, as best as you can”, and I certainly wasn’t going to break that rule now.

I never met Patrick Thomas Dwyer. From what I have read about him, this is my loss. Patrick loved what he did for a living and did it well enough to find plenty of time to enjoy his family and friends. He and his wife centered their lives on their kids and their friends and extended family. They loved entertaining.I have never met nor spoken to anyone in his family. I do, however, know what it’s like to have your father die when you are very young.

The brutality of losing a parent when you are a child is that the death continues to reverberate forever. It isn’t a huge single loss; it’s a continuum of huge single losses.Patrick was there to teach his son to ice-skate, but he wasn’t there to teach his daughter.He was there to see his son go to school for the first time, but not his daughter.Brendan will remember him, and probably idolize him his entire life. Sarah might not have anything but filaments of memories from a birthday party or an afternoon at their pool that last summer of 2001 -- memories which are half-real, half constructions from photos she has seen or stories she has heard. Brendan and Sarah will grow up, and laugh, and cry, and slam doors, and graduate, break bones and win awards. And each time something happens in their lives their father will be dead.

Within their family and their community, they will be Patrick and JoAnn’s kids. There will be plenty of people around them eager to tell them what a funny guy their father was, what a sports fan and a true friend, and what a great marriage their parents had. But as they grow up, and make new friends and meet new people, there will always be that hanging question: “You were how old when your father died? When did he die? Oh my God, did he die on 9/11?”At the least likely moments, when all they want to do is be normal and anonymous, they will be forced to embody a national trauma and to relive the greatest pain a family can endure.For a while after my father died, I told inquisitive strangers -- people I never expected to see again -- that my parents had gotten a divorce because that was accepted without further comment. A dead father led to more personal interrogation than I was prepared to undergo. Until my thirties, I would actively avoid telling people he died on the last day of shooting of “The Goodbye Girl”, because the combination of pity and curiosity was nearly unbearable. Brendan and Sarah will never stop being victims of 9/11 and I feel so wretched for some of the stupid and thoughtless things people are going to say to them in years to come.

If Consort gets home late, after Daughter is sleeping, he will always go in and kiss her goodnight. Being a very sound sleeper, she takes this with nothing more than a slight break in her teeth-grinding and maybe a murmured grunt. But Consort doesn’t mind. He says, “She knows I kissed her goodnight. Her skin knows it". With a father who took the 5:20 train every morning to get to his desk at the World Trade Center, I bet Sarah and Brendan had a lot of kisses left upon them when they were sleeping. I hope their skin remembers. I hope his kisses give them some comfort today, and every day of their lives.

JoAnn Dwyer, my condolences on your loss. I wish I had met Patrick. I wish I had no reason to be writing about him.

Even Downtown, Voices Carry

Readers, I need you to help me decide something.

About a month ago, a blog of mine ran in a magazine. It wasn't the entire blog, just part of one. And it wasn't a great blog to begin with. Of the 550 blogs I've written, it was my 550th favorite. But the magazine chose it and they bought it. I offered to write them another one, such was my innate suspicion that this wasn't going to end well for me, but they wanted that one and, overriding my fears, I let them have it. For what it's worth, they paid me $500.

As a pessimist, it's always comforting when things work out even worse than my worst fears. Scores of emails later, I now understand that I am a mean, elitist, stupid bitch. Also, I hate librarians. And I'm an idiot. And I'm mean. And I'm also a bitch. Yes, a few people have written in to say it was possible I was just having a bad day. I was having a bad day so I'm very grateful to them. And let me assure the people who now complain that I'm the MEANEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD, and a BITCH, that I'm certainly having no fun now.

My regular readers know my blog was never meant to be a hagiography. If anything, it's quite the opposite because I am usually a knucklehead and report my knuckleheadedness with frequency and precision. Also, I don't edit out readers' comments even if I come off badly because, hey, what the heck. But after the first fusillade of complaints on the Good Housekeeping article, I posted my own reply in the comments section explaining that I had never been a fan of the original essay, that I hadn't chosen it for publication and that it had been edited for space. I can't say cutting two-thirds of the piece rendered my behavior any less defensible, but it didn't help.

For weeks now, I've let people comment here. I happen to be a big fan of the First Amendment and if readers worked hard enough to articulate an opinion about what a collossal ass I am, they deserved the chance to be heard. But it's been weeks and I'm flinching whenever I hear the sound of an incoming email. Today's hate-letter was from yet another librarian, saying she was cancelling the magazine to all twelve of her libraries and--need it be said--would never buy another book of mine, which I guess is her prerogative as a librarian.

I know it hardly seems to matter at this point, but the pointless little power struggle I originally experienced wasn't actually with a librarian. It was with a clerk. And it may sound a bit "some of my best friends are librarians" to mention this, but I've been an avid library patron since I was old enough to not gnaw on books. I can clearly remember Rita, my first librarian in the San Vicente branch in West Hollywood, helping me pick out books. My daughter received her first library card (a featured player in this particular controversy) when she was two years old. We visit a library at least once every week. Over the years, I have done a lot of volunteer work for libraries. I love libraries. They made me the person I am, which should cause added consternation in those people who hate me.

Such is my desire to make it right with libraries (and such is my overwhelming desire to go back in time and have written a blog about kittens that week) that I am donating the my magazine fee to the Los Angeles Public Library. I'm not doing this so these people who now hate me will like me. That boat, she sailed. I'm sure many of them had never heard of me before and will never see this blog and would sneer at the gesture anyway. But this entire experience has been so unpleasant that the only way that I can possibly start to feel better is to give the money to people I may have unfairly offended.

So here's my question to you:  Is there a point where I can close the comments? I'm sure it's "elitist", "bitchy" and "mean" to even consider this but, quite frankly, I'm very tired of being kicked. Part of me thinks closing the comments will just rile certain people up. They will accuse me of being as dismissive of them as I was of the library clerk with whom they obviously identify. I'm even willing to consider that most people commenting are going to be friends or regular readers, who might say some version of "You served your time. You can close the comments." I'm willing to take my lumps without another peep if even one person makes a good argument for keeping the comments open.

In sum:  I posted a mediocre blog and I'm sorry the magazine bought it. Repeat that a thousand times. I wish I had written it differently, more in keeping with what I actually felt, which was a meditation on bilateral pettiness. But I'm not sorry that two years ago, I was frustrated by a trivial encounter with a bureaucrat and I abided by my original promise to my readers when I started this blog: whatever I wrote about, I would tell the truth.

One woman wrote in that she was appalled at what I had written. That word struck a chord with me. "Appalled" is powerful word, especially when it's levelled at you. Personally, I'm appalled by the fact that 16 million children in the US go hungry each day. If one particular blog continues to appall people, maybe I should continue to give them an outlet.

What should I do? You tell me.

Everybody Do the Jerk

First of all, I would like to say that I hate having a cold in the summer. It’s not like I say “Hooray! The days are getting shorter and my nose is running!” when I get a cold in November, but at least soup and warm blankets don’t sound like an abomination. You are not supposed to buy Ny-Quil while wearing shorts. How can I prove that a summer cold defies the natural order of things? It’s called a summer cold. Do you call it a winter cold? You do not, because a cold is supposed to plague you in the winter. I couldn’t feel any more incongruous if I was basting a turkey and making cranberry relish this week.

Anyway...

Veronica flounced in to our lunch date just as I was toying with my second slice of bread. She hit the ground running.

“What do you do when a close friend has married a jackass?”

I asked, “Are we talking Consort? Is this an intervention?”

She shook her head decisively and grabbed a breadstick.

“No, he’s adorable. My family just got back from a week at Lake Arrowhead. We stayed at the house of my best friend from college and her husband.”

I said sympathetically, “Bad?”

“Bad?” she snorted. “Finding out you owe three years of back taxes is bad. This guy is a nightmare.”

“Was he always this bad?”

“Actually, yes, but I didn't see enough of him to know this was his personality.” she said thoughtfully. “We’ve had dinner with them a bunch of times, and I always walked away thinking he was a jackass, but I blamed it on wine. But he’s not drinking now and, if anything, he was worse.”

“Like how?”

“Okay. You know how much he paid for their vacation house? Because I do! I also know how much it has appreciated, and that another partner at his firm paid twice what he paid for a house not as nice as his. He also paid fifteen thousand dollars for the carpet in their vacation house, if you care. Because I didn’t care. And I cared even less every single time he told me.”

“So, it’s money.”

“Oh, no. Just money would be almost tolerable. At one point, I went down to the dock to relax and read a book. After about ten minutes, he plopped down next to me and informed me of the personal details of his recent divorce clients.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“The way he does it, yeah. I toyed with the idea of telling him I recognized the husband with the fetish for online livestock porn and the founders’ stock in Yahoo. But that would have required talking to him, so I decided not to.”

I winced sympathetically.

“He’s a loudmouth with a wallet for a brain. Ouch”

“He also likes to tell my friend, Amelia, how she’s gaining weight and can’t cook and can’t get pregnant. Only, of course, he does it as a joke so she’s supposed to laugh. Of course, it’s a completely unfunny joke, so he’s braying and smirking while she kind of laughs along, but she looks completely miserable,” she said, stabbing fiercely at a tomato. “I seriously thought about drowning him. Only, I’m short and he works out six times a week, which happens to be another of his favorite topics.”

I chewed and thought.

“Does your friend see any of this?”

“I think she does. There were points when he was running his mouth about something where I would look at her and she would just seem…” Victoria thought for a second.

“Sad and embarrassed?” I volunteered.

“Yeah,” she sighed.

We both stared at our entrées and ruminated. It was time to change the subject, so we did.

***

Every decade or so, all women get to confront the great issue of what to do with a friend who is dating a jerk. In your teens, it becomes just one more marvelous ingredient for the Drama Stew you are all simmering in (“…He’s totally cheating on her, but what am I supposed to do? And do you have the notes for the French midterm, because I am totally going to fail unless you help me!...”)

In your twenties, you have enough dating scar tissue to know that:

A) Men are temporary, but anything you say about a temporary boyfriend is permanent; and,

B) If you get too judgmental about your girlfriend’s choice in men, you will be fated to date a drummer before Thanksgiving.

In short, you give your friends room when they date the extremely irritating, and welcome them back into the fold when they jettison the idiot.

Even into your thirties, you can support a friend dating a fool. Granted, it ends up being a lot of lunches where she cries and you offer things you recall from an article you read in Self magazine “…You have to ask yourself, are you a better person for dating him? Are you happier? Are you remembering to contract your abs during the height of the crunch...Oh, sorry, wrong article.”

Even the worst-case scenario is manageable. She can marry a nitwit in her late twenties or early thirties, and you can wear your bridesmaid dress with a certain confident knowledge she’ll come to her senses. Eventually. Then she’ll move in with you and you can share the waffle iron you just gave her as a wedding gift.

But marry a jerk in your late thirties or forties, and your friends will avert their gaze. They are going to assume the woman they know and love, the woman who was smart enough to get her and her friends through Italy on a two-week bicycling trip without knowing a word of Italian, knows what she has gotten into. That, due either to a fear of growing old alone and developing a need to rescue cats (which eventually eat her still-warm flesh when she dies alone in her bathroom), or the mistaken conviction that this is all she deserves, she has taken on the Prince of Pompous.

Our job is to watch our beloved friends fade away a little more each year, drink a little more wine, stay on the Vicodin after surgery longer than medically necessary, and mourn the happiness they gave away.

That, and hope devoutly that the husband’s heart fails on the back nine while he’s telling a friend about the deal he just got on a condo in Palm Springs.

Patrick Thomas Dwyer, 1964-2001

I am participating in the 2,996 Project, for which 2,996 bloggers volunteered to write a memorial for one person who perished in the attacks on 9/11.


Patrick Thomas Dwyer, 37, Nissoquogue, NY. Bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. Left behind a wife JoAnn, a son Brendan and a daughter Sarah, who were five and three at the time of their father’s death.

When Patrick was randomly assigned to me, I stared at my computer screen blankly for a long time. Weeks, in fact. I wanted to do the right thing by this man, but what do I say which doesn’t become political, maudlin, or somehow all about me? Even the best eulogy becomes as much about the speaker as the departed, and I don’t claim to write a world-class eulogy. The memorial becomes doubly difficult when you don’t know the person intimately, and I had no desire to write something general and inane about how he was a nice person and that this was such a tragedy. My first rule with this blog has always been: “Tell your truth, Quinn”, and I certainly wasn’t going to break that rule now.

I never met Patrick Thomas Dwyer. From what I have read about him, this is my loss. Patrick loved what he did for a living and did it well enough to find plenty of time to enjoy his family and friends. He and his wife centered their lives on their kids and their friends and extended family. They loved entertaining.

I have never met nor spoken to anyone in his family. I do, however, know what it’s like to have your father die when you are very young. The brutality of losing a parent when you are a child is that the death continues to reverberate forever. It isn’t a huge single loss; it’s a continuum of huge single losses.

Patrick was there to teach his son to ice-skate, but he wasn’t there to teach his daughter.

He was there to see his son go to school for the first time, but not his daughter.

Brendan will remember him, and probably idolize him his entire life. Sarah might not have anything but filaments of memories from a birthday party or an afternoon at their pool that last summer of 2001 -- memories which are half-real, half constructions from photos she has seen or stories she has heard. Brendan and Sarah will grow up, and laugh, and cry, and slam doors, and graduate, break bones and win awards. And each time something happens in their lives their father will be dead.

Within their family and their community, they will be Patrick and JoAnn’s kids. There will be plenty of people around them eager to tell them what a funny guy their father was, what a sports fan and a true friend, and what a great marriage their parents had. But as they grow up, and make new friends and meet new people, there will always be that hanging question: “You were how old when your father died? When did he die? Oh my God, did he die on 9/11?”

At the least likely moments, when all they want to do is be normal and anonymous, they will be forced to embody a national trauma and to relive the greatest pain a family can endure.

For a while after my father died, I told inquisitive strangers -- people I never expected to see again -- that my parents had gotten a divorce because that was accepted without further comment. A dead father led to more personal interrogation than I was prepared to undergo. Until my thirties, I would actively avoid telling people he died on the last day of shooting of “The Goodbye Girl”, because the combination of pity and curiosity was nearly unbearable. Brendan and Sarah will never stop being victims of 9/11 and I feel so wretched for some of the stupid and thoughtless things people are going to say to them in years to come.

If Consort gets home late, after Daughter is sleeping, he will always go in and kiss her goodnight. Being a very sound sleeper, she takes this with nothing more than a slight break in her teeth-grinding and maybe a murmured grunt. But Consort doesn’t mind. He says, “She knows I kissed her goodnight. Her skin knows it.”

With a father who took the 5:20 train every morning to get to his desk at the World Trade Center, I bet Sarah and Brendan had a lot of kisses left upon them when they were sleeping. I hope their skin remembers. I hope his kisses give them some comfort today, and every day of their lives.

JoAnn Dwyer, my condolences on your loss. I wish I had met Patrick. I wish I had no reason to be writing about him.

Essay Faire

Dear Future Readers of My Book,

First of all, thanks for all the notes and questions about the book. If you are new here, I have a book coming out next year. I’d give you a more specific date, but it’s been changed three times already. I have been assured that this most recent date is the real and final publishing date, but when my editor said that I said “Uh-HUH, okay!” in the bright and superficially supportive way I used to when friends would swear to me that their fifth trip to rehab was going to be the one that stuck. As soon as we all agree on a title, you will know that as well. Marketing has yet to be sent into raptures over a title suggestion of mine and, in publishing as in nearly everywhere else in the explored world, we need to make Marketing happy. But right now, I want to you to know what I am doing for you, the reader. Even more than Marketing, I work for you and you are a stern taskmaster, you are.

Because of you, I read nothing which would make me happy. There is a new David Sedaris book in the stores; it’s been there since late May. I have not bought it, nor have I looked through it at Borders, even when it called to me sweetly from behind a copy of Teen Cosmo. There is a new Sarah Vowell book out shortly; I have not bought it in advance on Amazon. And it’s not just the written word, either.This American Life plays every single week on NPR, and I turn it off if anyone more compelling than an insurance actuary has written a segment. I heard David Rakoff’s voice on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me and after I turned off the radio I fell into a self-pitying fugue state for the rest of the afternoon. I do this because I love you.

I also do this because I am very much like tofu, in that I absorb the flavors of whatever writer is being smart, self-deprecating and quirky near me. If I read or hear the Davids (Rakoff or Sedaris), I end up sounding like the poor man’s gay man. And, believe me, when you grow up in a gay neighborhood and then you go into the entertainment industry and you live for a while with a bunch of gay men and then you move to the Castro district in San Francisco and you kind of look like Liza Minnelli in the wrong light, you’re very nearly a gay man as it is.

I can’t read Anne Lamott right now because if I read her, I start thinking I have something to say to or about God. She writes about her faith so simply and lucidly that a person starts to think, “Why, I’m having doubts, just as Anne had doubts! I should write about those doubts and then overcome them with prayer!” forgetting that I can certainly shake a doubt loose or two with the best of them but I find that prayer isn’t always as effective for me as reading essays by the Davids, which I can’t do now. So, no Anne.

I can’t read Sarah Vowell because her voice walks confidently into my head and sets fire to mine. Sarah has an encyclopedic knowledge of history, and such a seemingly effortless way of finding the small human voices in the shouting tumult of American history that illuminate the bigger picture. If pressed, I remember something about the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.

[Actually, I did find something recently that I liked. As I have mentioned before, my favorite royal family were the Bourbons of Spain, for no better reason than they did some of the most unapologetic inbreeding seen in a royal family since the Egyptians. Searching for something else in Wikipedia, I found a picture of a Bourbon, and I found a picture of his family tree, which is less tree than double-helix of cousin-marrying. He was related to his own great-grandmother fourteen times over. Oh, how I love the Spanish Bourbons.]

Recently, I learned that Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff and members of the Sedaris family are friends, which made some sort of horrible sense. It’s like a lunch-table I can only peer at longingly. God knows, I can’t read it.

It goes on. I can’t read Bailey White, or Jean Kerr, or Erma Bombeck. I can read lesser essay writers, but why would I want to do that? I could read fiction, but I don’t want fiction. I could read science books, but I don’t want science books. Like my friends who have drifted down the path of Atkins, gazing at a plate piled high with bacon and steak, weeping piteously for a Saltine, I want the thing I cannot have the tiniest bit of right now. I want essays, good ones. I want my book finished so I can go back to being the kind of person who when asked “How’s the book?” will only think of the paperback jammed in her purse and will say happily, “It’s great, you should read it.”

I Can See Myself In the Movies

There’s a reason I stay away from the entertainment industry. The reason I stay away from the entertainment industry is because I have a working memory. I love the bit between “Action” and “Cut,” but other 99.87% of that life doesn’t suit me at all. For me, the life of an actor has always been the bad boyfriend, the lout with the great hair who gave you the most delightful weekend of your life and then, having sensed you were falling for him, slept with your sister and ruined your credit.

If history has taught me anything, it’s that the dreamier the opportunity the more hellish the fall afterward, so the only way you can win with acting – as with a bad boyfriend – is to genuinely not care. Of course, genuine indifference is catnip to both sociopaths and casting directors, which means that having not cared you will inevitably get the guy, or the job, which works extra hard to woo you again, until you’re thinking things like “I can do this! I can maintain this relationship without compromising my baseline sanity!” Which is the exact moment the bad boyfriend/entertainment industry sets your car on fire.  And if acting is Bad Boyfriend, being around it risks turning me into Nightmare Ex, all miserable inadequacy and self-doubt, hiding in the bushes jealously watching whatever actor has currently won his favor. Whatever being a writer has done for my natural introversion (made it worse) and my wardrobe (even more worse), I can still leave being repeatedly wooed and dumped by Hollywood to people more resilient and optimistic than myself. I won’t be pulled in again.

Which leads me to Marc Maron.

As I’m sure you know, Maron has a terrific podcast, WTF, where he interviews people in his garage. He began with comedians he knew from his stand-up days and, with well-earned success, branched out into talking to whomever interests him. He’s a wonderful interviewer. If you’ve never heard his podcast with Robin Williams, get it. It’s honest and funny and, oh just get it.  WTF is a twice-weekly trip to the edges of the Cool Table in high school, which made it all the more shocking when he reached out to me to ask if I wanted to be on his show. 

When you’re a former child actor who writes about your suburban-adjacent life and homeschooling, you might be an intermittently productive member of society but you are most assuredly not cool. Perhaps he was doing a theme week: People Who Remind You Of That Friend Of Your Sister Who Lives In Madison. It was not for me to say. I accepted, grateful that my email reply couldn’t convey nervous giggling. This was last October. I was given an interview date in April. I used the run-up time to vaguely wish I’d been a heroin addict in my twenties because while friends who’ve kicked tell me it’s a fire-breathing nightmare, it would be something nice to talk about. Perhaps he’d want to hear about my passionate feelings about buttered toast. Against my will, I grew a little excited.

And then I made a terrible mistake.  I told two people I was doing the show. If you’re a civilian, you just thought “So?” If you’re in any way associated with entertainment, you just gasped in horror. 

First rule of acting, directing, screenwriting, all the way down to production assisting: YOU NEVER TALK ABOUT THE GIG UNTIL YOU SIGN THE CONTRACT. Talk about it before the contract it signed, you will lose the gig.  The only thing worse than the crushing despair of losing a job are the well-meaning friends wanting to know you why you aren’t in Prague right now working on that Willem Dafoe movie?

(Ideally, you don’t tell anyone you got a job until you’ve shot it and attended to the premiere because you might have been cut out. This has happened to people I know.)

This law must be obeyed. I don’t understand gravity, I don’t understand how meringues work and I don’t understand why you can’t tell people you got a job but these are immutable laws of the universe. When it comes to a job, you keep your mouth shut until it’s locked. I even hesitated before telling my two friends but hey, they’d booked me! That’s like a contract!  It’s not acting. We’re talking about writing here so the law doesn’t apply, right? There is no harm in telling two whole people! I am feeling excited and optimistic and desirable and sure, this feeling is kind of like the bad boyfriend/acting feeling but, see, it’s different this time!

Three days before the interview I got an email from Marc’s producer: could we push back the date a bit? No reschedule time was indicated. What was I going to say? “No, I insist you interview me at the prearranged date! No brown M&Ms and make sure to have the buttered toast piping hot!”

I said no problem.

Marc followed up a day later with an email asking which of my books he should he read, to get the best sense of me. After, an embarrassing amount of ruminating, I suggested my first book, which was more about the industry than the others, which weren’t.  Yes, I was slightly deflated but it wasn’t a complete blow-off. Believe me, I have experienced people creeping away from me in polite horror.  “Hey,” I told myself, “He asked which book of mine he should read. That’s not something a person trying to forget you exist would say, right?”

Right?

That was April. It is now December. I’ve gone through “He hated my writing” to “After he interviewed Obama, what did he need from a woman who only appears to be interested in cats and buttered toast?” to “God, he really hated my writing” to “He finally realized he meant to invite Melissa Gilbert” to “Yeah, that book thing was a polite blow-off.” 

I was back in the metaphorical bushes, staring covetously at the people he interviewed, feeling that familiar sorrow that I simply wasn’t good enough. Finally, I decided this probably doesn’t have anything to do with me any more than the myriad ways the entertainment industry screwed with my head, while corrosive, wasn’t ultimately personal.  Sober drunks shouldn’t work in bars.  An acrophobic shouldn’t be an air marshal. I can’t be near this shit without losing my equilibrium. But, once again, the metaphorical bad boyfriend is on my couch, putting out a cigarette on my soul, explaining in his most soothing voice, “Don’t blame me, sweetie. You invited me back in.”