Totally Beast

While in New York, I learned from my publicists that the new "cool" is "beast." As in, "this publicity meeting is totally BEAST.*"** I tell you, I bore that information back home with me and presented it to my sixth grader as proudly as if I had brought him the giant floor piano from FAO Schwarz for a souvenir.

"That's not new," he said.

Well, if he doesn't want it, I'm keeping it.

One of the beautiful, paradoxical things about social media is how it both broadens and shrinks the offline world. Within about fifteen minutes of letting it drop on Facebook and Twitter that I was Big Apple bound, I had more enticing invitations for coffee, drinks, lunch, etc. than I could possibly hope to accept. It's hard for a people pleaser and an extrovert like myself to turn any offer down, but with my days full of meetings, I had to beg for a lot of rain checks.

Rather than try to spread myself too thin, I went deep, and wound up having a few really special and memorable evenings. Like introducing one of my dearest "internet" friends to one of my earliest childhood friends over prosecco at Buddhakan and eating our weight in pasta at L'Artusi, before going on to a speakeasy in the Village and having my tarot cards read.

Like going with Isabel to the Cool Mom Tech launch and getting to finally chat face to face with Liz - two women who are both smart, kind and funny enough for me to try to work past the fact that they are both gorgeous as well. Like seeing Alice and Doug again, and meeting Pierre and Christina.

And especially seeing My Morning Jacket play at Terminal 5, with Monica, who had come from Houston to see all five shows, and had an extra ticket with my name on it. I only knew MMJ for their last album, which I played on endless loop two summers ago, and from a cameo appearance by the lead singer in the Bob Dylan biopic, "I'm Not There." But I was informed by several people that my attendance at the Terminal 5 event raises my "cool" factor considerably. Which is good, because frankly, it could only go up.

The venue itself was fantastic. I love concert halls. You couldn't get me to go an arena for the second coming of Jesus, backed up by the Beatles. I like to be able to see the performers' faces, and not on a giant screen. Monica had staked us out a spot close to the stage, and I will say that My Morning Jacket fans are a gentle, geeky-hipster folk who don't push or shove. Here's a few snapshots:







*They did not actually say that. I was just trying it on for proper usage. But it was totally beast.

**Also,"my publicists" looks incredibly douche-y. Just so you know I know. But "the publicity team assigned to me by my publisher" isn't much better. Sorry about that. It's still the same old me. :-)

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The Plan

Bobby and Kiki in front of the shipwreck S.S. Effie, Newfoundland, c. 1977

When we were about fourteen, my friend Bob and I hatched a plan. We'd finish growing up, sow our wild oats, then settle down and marry each other. It made perfect sense. We met as toddlers, when his father hired mine to teach school. Our homes were 200 hundred miles apart, but our families became intertwined, root to leaf. We visited often, went camping together in the summers, and came to regard each other's extended families as extensions of our own. We were pre-schoolers who played Legos together, children who combed beaches together, teenagers who lay on the floor and listened to Pink Floyd records together. For a semester, we were college students together, goofing off in art history class. "Got a ziggurat?" Bob would whisper in the middle of a lecture, cracking me up. No one has ever been able to make me laugh as much. We share the same wacky sense of humor. Anyone listening to us talk, or reading the letters we faithfully sent back and forth, would probably think we were baked. But we didn't need to be to get each other's jokes. We get each other.

We reminded each other of The Plan often, especially when one of us was dating someone the other thought was All Wrong. Which was usually.

If this were the treatment for a movie script, it would be clear to reader by now that we were actually madly in love. Except that we never were. Once, when we were about sixteen and eighteen, and briefly between boyfriends and girlfriends, we kissed, just to see if we might be. We were both completely weirded out. I get weirded out just remembering it. It's like confessing that I kissed my brother. Which, of course, was exactly what it was. Bob is the older brother I always wanted. And always had.

The Plan never came together. As I was to learn the hard way, you can't base a proposition as utterly mad and impossible as marriage on rational sense, anyhow. I was married, then divorced, then married again, and had three children, while Bob had one long-term relationship after the other with women who were probably nice enough, but to me seemed All Wrong.

Until Tonya. Within 24 hours of meeting her last summer, I pulled him aside, and said, "This one." I was prepared to threaten him with a safety pin if necessary (I pierced his ear with one when we were teenagers, in an excruciating and highly unsanitary operation) But he was way ahead of me. They'll be married tomorrow.

It's so wrong that I can't be there in person, but it's just the way it is. Besides, I would probably just freak the bride out with crazy, had-to-be-there reminiscences and inside jokes that make no sense whatsoever. Better to save that sort of thing for after the wedding, when it's too late for her to back out. We have the whole rest of her life to catch up.

Welcome to the family, Tonya. I know everyone in it feels the way I do: this one. Bob, my friend, my brother, you're in my heart and soul always. Joy to you both, all the days of your lives.

I love it when a plan doesn't come together.

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Cure

If you are ever in danger of taking yourself too seriously, may I recommend you get together with some of the funniest, smartest, shiniest people you can round up on a weeknight, and head straight to your local karaoke bar.

By all means, pretend you are only going in your capacity as cultural observer, if it helps get you in the door. Insist to your cohorts that you don't sing. It will only make it all the more amusing when you are shaking them down later for cash with which to bribe the DJ into letting you take the stage for a fourth time, because OH MY GOD WE HAVE GOT TO SING ABBA.

I promise, the next day, you'll wake up 1000 lbs lighter, miraculously cured.

Of my four performances, one was a solo (Stay), one was singing back-up (S.O.S), and two were duets with my girlfriend Amy's husband. We killed with Summer Nights (where "killed" means "did not disgrace ourselves"). Then cleared the entire front row of tables out with Don't Go Breaking My Heart. If I should ever happen to go on book tour, I'm bringing him with me.

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Minions

When your kids are still imaginary, you dream about all the cute, original, clever costumes they will wear at Hallowe'en, and how cute, original and clever you will seem by association. Then you have real kids, and they have their own ideas. Actually, they have Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney's ideas. Nothing but that $30 licensed costume (on sale the next day for five bucks) will do.

So I was really thrilled and surprised this year, when my boys ventured beyond Saturday morning cartoons for their costume ideas. We were lucky to snag the wonderfully soft and fuzzy Max costume on Amazon before the seller mysteriously disappeared (I'm guessing we are the proud owners of a bootleg wolf suit?). My Max has hardly taken it off. He wore it for nearly 72 hours straight this weekend. If you look closely, you can probably see cheeto dust and cereal O's clinging to it.

My middle son was a ghostbuster. The proton blaster was fashioned out of duct tape, milk jugs, foam pipe insulation, and a couple of funnels. We slimed him with silly string.

I'm not sure what my eldest was, exactly. I think some sort of fascist.

And me? I was one lucky devil.

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Keeping Me Real

When life is changing faster than you can hope to comfortably—or gracefully—keep up with, it's good to know that if you are ever at a cocktail party and are heard to complain, "Well, we'd been standing around in our ski boots all morning, and it was exhausting," a good, true friend will smile and repeat your words back to you s-l-o-w-l-y and dramatically with a twinkle in his eye.

And as you double over laughing, you will know that the people you love have your back, and you're going to be okay.

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Introducing the LBDLGNO

Patrick is standing as best man in a wedding this month, which means I had to go to the mall last night to find something to wear. After several hours and numerous text messages to various people, an outfit was chosen. It takes a village.

It also takes money, time and energy, even online. As it happened, I found the perfect Little Black Dress marked way, way down. It's classic and versatile enough that I will likely wear it several times over the course of the year.

But I have other party dresses in my closet that maybe see the light of day (or candlelight of night) once or twice a year. Most women do. So I had this idea: the LBD Loaner Girl's Night Out (fellas, LBD stands for Little Black Dress, but don't tell that I broke rank and told you). You invite a bunch of friends to bring (not wear) their formal and semi-formal outfits (including matching accessories if they are willing) to a casual gathering, maybe a Sunday afternoon or weeknight just before holiday season ramps up. Cast the net wide to get a variety of styles and sizes. Refreshments, of course.

Someone will need to bring a clothes rack or string up a clothes line to display the outfits. Tie a card onto each hanger that describes every item in the ensemble and provides the owners name and contact info. Assign each outfit a number on the same note. The hostess should put out a clipboard with a numbered sheet where guests can reserve to borrow an outfit for a particular date. Everyone should agree to return the items, dry-cleaned, within two days or whatever. The hostess should hang onto the sheet in case anyone needs it for clarification or contact information later.

This way, several people could borrow one outfit in the course of the season, but if you wanted to keep it real simple, you could just let everybody go home with their loaner that day, and declare a general returns deadline.

Naturally, everybody has to be comfortable with loaning out their pretty things. And an unavoidable element of risk has to be understood. Wine spills, things snag. I would lend an evening bag, but probably not my pearls. Tell guests in the invitation that they shouldn't bring it if they can't stand to lose it. But I'm sure most women have a gorgeous dress or two that will languish unworn in the back of their closets this season, and we could all use one less trip to the mall.

I don't have time to pull this off myself this holiday season, but maybe somebody else will (or has) and will let me know how it works.

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Special Delivery

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

...and out comes my Nana Ferne's Christmas package. Few events caused more excitement in the house on Armstrong Avenue than the annual arrival of the big cardboard box from New Brunswick.

In my memory it is always the size of a wheelbarrow, and contains a hundred packages, all individually gift-wrapped. My grandmother worked at a variety store on the U.S. side of the bordertown where my mother grew up, the kind of place that got swallowed up by the Wal-marts and the Dollar Stores. There was a talking mynah bird in a cage that hung near the sales counter, and dusty shelves of synthetic clothing, cheap nylons, tacky bric-a-brac, and garish cosmetics. That Christmas package was a biopsy of the store inventory, rounded out by acrylic handknitted things that might have been hats, or cozies for toilet paper, jars of preserves mined from the walls of my grandmother's earth cellar, and most anticipated of all, a Ganong's chocolate box lined with wax paper and filled with her homemade peanut butter fudge. The damn thing weighed as much as two bricks. I gorged on it so much as a kid, I haven't been able to touch peanut butter fudge in twenty years. Maybe it's time to revive the recipe for my own children.

Like my mother, I married far away from home. Here, so many years and so many miles later, I wrap the Christmas package to go to her house in Newfoundland. If I could tuck myself in it, I would. But since I can't, I make it as beautiful and as special as possible, hoping to recreate some of the excitement of Nana Ferne's package for my sister (her namesake)and her son and daughter (who is mine). There aren't a hundred, or even, dozens of gifts inside. The contents change with whim and fortune. This year, there are just four special things, swaddled and nestled in different bags, wraps and tissue. Bejewelled and ornamented with ribbons and floral picks.

It's extravagant, maybe even sinful, to put so much into wrapping that is meant to be discarded. I saw somewhere a campaign for a wrapless Christmas, and I suppose it's a virtuous thing to do, given the state of the economy and environment. When you can be there to give it, maybe a hug can be plenty embellishment for a present.

My grandmother's package, filled to bursting with things that never cost more than a dollar, was extravagant, too. She loved us extravagantly, and we always knew it, even though we only saw her once or twice a year. That simple, faithful parcel was the emissary of her own full heart, a magi.

A few weeks ago, our Maine balsam Christmas wreath arrived on our doorstep as it has every year for several years now. "Nana's wreath" has become just one of the many ways in which my children are reminded that their grandmother's love for them is evergreen. As extravagant as her mother's was for me, and as mine is for her, my sister, niece and nephew. I hope they they get a little whiff of that when they open my box each year.

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Fluff

The hostess-y arts come easily and naturally to some, and not to others. If you have to wonder on which side of the comma I fall, here's a hint: I went through a whole deck of 3 X 5 index cards between the day I marked my calendar "bday party" and the hour the first guests walked through the door.

For those of you who are similarily impaired, here's the playsheet.

Two weeks before:

Sent out invitations. I actually put the party on the calendar and started working on a guest list about a month in advance. I had to really work at not going overboard with it. Our house is small and my affections are wide. To keep myself from going crazy, I wrote myself a lot of rainchecks for future dinner guests.

I also had to keep from overthinking it. My criteria was simple: to spend my birthday with people who delight me. The minute I veered over into worrying if so-and-so would have anything to say to so-and-so, I shut it down. I think weddings and certain kinds of funeral gatherings are so memorable and special precisely because they throw unlikely people together.

If you can arrange to be married to a graphic designer in time for your party, I recommend it. Patrick is too modest to let me post the illustration he did of us for the invitations, but it was a hoot.

One week before:

I started making and hanging these pom poms. They are just giant Mexican paper flowers, layers and layers of tissue paper folded up like a fan and then trimmed and fluffed. If you grew up in the 70s, like me, you probably remember fluffing the Kleenex version of these for some older cousin's wedding or graduation.

The day before:

Cooked. In the past when we've staged large gatherings, they've always been potluck, b.y.o.b. This time, I really wanted to let everyone off the hook. I looked for finger-friendly recipes, and came up with this menu:

Romas and Goats. New favorite appetizer recipe. I made these with miniature Romas, halved and stuffed with the chevre and panko mixtures.

Onion Frittata Bites from Cooking Light (which I didn't—I used whole eggs instead of egg substitute, and there may have been heavy cream involved, but there are no witnesses)

Bloody Marys from Martha Stewart (as a rough guide —toward the end, I was just tossing a shake of this and a dash of that in a pitcher)

I did everything in batches of four dozen. The brunch menu was filled out with a spiral ham, fruit salad and miniature biscuits baked from frozen. And, of course, the birthday tower of five dozen Shipley's Do-nuts, chocolate glaze with sprinkles.

The night before:

I hung the rest of the poms, boxed the favors, arranged the furniture and put out all the serving platters and barware on the table and sidebar with sticky notes reminding me what food went with what piece. It was kind of Rainman-meets-Martha Stewart.

The morning of:

Everyone pitched in with cleaning house. Patrick picked up the donuts (ordered a few days in advance), and I stacked them on a big foil-covered cake decorators' platter with ribbon hot-glued around the edge. I had already worked out at what times and in what order everything needed to be heated (yes, there was actually a chart —my non-linearly inclined brain was stretched to its outermost limit), so from 9 am to 11 am, the oven was in steady service.

In between, I got dressed and finished decorating. All hands were on deck, except the Littlest Who, who slept late. When he woke up, he wandered through the rearranged furniture, flowers and poms-poms to find me outside, wrapping crepe streamers around the porch pillars.

"Mom!" he said, eyes wide. "Is all this for me?"

Of course I told him it was.

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Full

Too stuffed to type. Another first in our new house. It's hard to believe how much can change in a year.

Apart from badly scorched chocolate pie filling (my teenage nephew offered chivalrously, "I thought maybe it was coffee-flavored"), Thanksgiving dinner was perfect. Patrick made his mother's dressing. The kids gathered autumn leaves for table decoration. Relatives came with warm casserole dishes and helped us shuffle a thousand puzzle pieces around the coffee table. The edible pies were served on the antique side plates sent by my mother to match the china set I started last Christmas.

The last guest was just sent home with a full foil pan. The kids are playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii. There's a stack of newspaper circulars on the floor telling me to get up early tomorrow and bust some doors, but honestly, I don't see anything in them that I would let come between me and my pyjamas.

At the end of our meal, the men pushed their chairs back from the table and sighed in unison. I feel like one of them. Enough.

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Favored

My birthday gift to myself this year was to celebrate over brunch with a few of my favorite people, who each went home with a little symbol of the sparkle they bring to my life.

It's a wonderful thing to look around a room, and realize you can die anytime with the certainty that you will have a splendid funeral with charming guests, plenty of food, an abundance of kindness and wit, and buckets of flowers. Everything after that is icing and sprinkles.

"Will there be presents?" my sister asked me on the phone yesterday morning as I was putting on my jewelery.

"I hope so," I grinned, feeling deliciously birthday princess-y.

"Good," she said wickedly. "None of that 'no gifts' nonsense."

Anyway, what's a cake without icing and sprinkles?



There were lovely presents. A vintage desk (at last, a real desk!) from my true love. Kitschy-kitty salt and pepper shakers that instantly fell under the category of things to grab in a fire. Chocolates, wine, flowers, and many more pretty things.

I hate to play favorites, but I have to confess that this last present of the day beat all the rest:



As someone with a better grasp of math than me pointed out, my fortieth year is now officially underway.

So far, it rocks.


(Snapped by Missy.)

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Hollywood Legend

Gary "Hollywood" Ray, 1950-2008. My "special" shoes, 1997-2007.

I'm pretty sure it's against all kinds of rules to post an excerpt from a work in progress on your blog, and I'll probably have to take it down tomorrow, but I want to show you something I wrote yesterday morning that gave me occasion to think about an old friend we haven't seen in years. I paused for a minute while writing it, debating whether or not to use his "real" name, Hollywood. I decided it would be okay, and that he would probably be tickled to wind up in a book. I tried to figure out how old he was when we were hanging out, and wondered how he was doing these days.

When I got up this morning, eleven years out from our wedding day, Patrick had placed the obituary section of the newspaper on my place at the table. Hollywood died yesterday.

If you've never had breakfast with a fully bearded man wearing a trucker cap and a ladies' silver lame blouse wholly unbuttoned, you've merely scraped the surface of life. If it weren't for him, at least one chapter of my story would be a whole lot less colorful:

...I put the word out among our drinking associates that I’m looking for something that pays cash, under the table. Our drummer friend, Hollywood, a weathered and whiskered reprobate in the mold of Levon Helm, sends me to a blues shack down by the tracks, the venerable Whitewater Tavern.

As far as anyone knows, the Whitewater has been in Little Rock longer than Jesus, and its “corner crew,” the shift of hardcore regulars who cling to the corner of the bar with the tenacity and devotion of old world Catholics at daily Mass, sprang out of the red dirt with it. Its hymnal is the blues. Hang around a while and you will hear “Stormy Monday” in more variations than Goldberg had on Bach.

The place cycles through phases of vogue. Every few years, a new generation of white college kids rediscovers it, and it becomes the fashionable place to demonstrate one’s authenticity and hipster cred. New management comes in with new ideas. Stormy Monday goes out, replaced by punk, or pop, or rap or whatever music the hot new band in town is playing. The corner crew hunkers down; smokes, drinks, waits. The band gets signed and goes on tour, the kids move on, the band breaks up, the place burns down. Someday plays Stormy Monday. Repeat. The Whitewater Tavern is the blues.

The trough between “kids move on” and “place burns down” is the place where I come in.

Thank you, Hollywood. Peace, baby.


Me and Hollywood, God knows where, 1997.

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But the nineties were just last YEAR

Wednesday night, I went out for dinner with a group of fabulous moms. Seated next to me was a new, very cute friend who has two small kids. She was asking about my husband. I told her how the first time I saw a photo of him, he reminded me of a very thin Dave Pirner, and she said, "Who?"

Then my skin shriveled up and my bones crumbled to dust. The End.

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There are a thousand cupcakes in the naked city.

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Be a Part of It...

The last time I brought my family home to Newfoundland, in the summer of 2005, we had an eight-hour layover in Newark, New Jersey on the return leg. Obviously, we were not going to spend eight hours in Newark, New Jersey. At least, not in the airport.

So we hopped a train and some time later, found ourselves in Times Square with about four hours left to kill.

It was quickly determined that, obviously, we were not going to wander around Times Square for four hours with three kids age 1, 4 and 6.

So we hopped on a bus. A double decker tourist bus. With a loudspeaker and a "New York Sightseeing" sign emblazoned across the side. I was mortified. I wished I had a souvenir t-shirt that said, "I may heart NY, but in no way do I identify with my fellow passengers."

It was not exactly the kind of hipster, have-kids-will-travel globetrotting I always thought I would one day do. The truth is, just navigating the supermarket with small kids is too much for me. The globe will have to go un-trodden until the youngest can get an international driver's license.

But all my self-consciousness melted away as we pulled out from the curb. Because, Oh My God, I was in New York! I gawked and pointed uninhibitedly the whole time. I loved it, and I knew I would have to go back one day to gawk from street level.

The year before I was born, in the spring of '68, my mother went to New York with my father and his brother and my aunt. I grew up hearing stories about them stumbling onto a love-in in Greenwich Village, about being in Harlem when riots broke out because Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. It was a mythical place in our family lore. And though my mother travelled wide and far since then, she never got back to New York city.

This week she is attending a conference in Connecticut, and for months, she has been planning to spend this Saturday, her birthday, in New York. She has been emailing me excitedly about her planned pilgrimage, which largely revolves around dead poets and beatniks. It's a hybrid of a pub crawl and the stations of the cross, as I understand it.

Everytime she's mentioned the trip, she's expressed the fond wish that I could join her. From the beginning, I've had to say no. It just wasn't financially, or logistically, possible this year. Another time.

Some weeks ago, I found out that I would be taking a little business trip. My expenses would be covered. There were still logistics to be worked out around childcare, and I knew we might be moving house soon, but whatever hesitation I felt evaporated when I looked at my calendar and realized that I was being dispatched to New York on the one weekend in forty years my mother would be there, for her sixty fifth birthday.

There are moments when you realize you've been conscripted into something much bigger than your own agenda. I seem to be having a lot of them.

---

Got a favorite show, cupcake shop, funky neighborhood, or dead poet in NYC to recommend? Do tell—there's a birthday party to plan!

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I Went to Ladies' Night with Kristen Chase and All I Got Was This Cool T-shirt.

...well, the cool t-shirt, and an indeterminate number of $1 martinis. And a keepsake menu that I set on fire. On the table. In front of Kristen. I also got to tip over my chair twice, standing up to go to the ladies' room.

All of us ladies got to enjoy Kristen's wit, intelligence and radiant beauty, which does make it a little difficult to concentrate on the first two things, because you are marvelling the entire time over her porelessness. We got to talk about the kinds of grown-up activities and products that Kristen writes about on her sex advice blog, and then we got disapproving looks from the patrons behind us who did not find us at all ladylike.

The wait staff all got big tips, and my single dad friend who lives around the corner from the bar got to make a big pot of coffee for four of us. Would you not be delighted to see us ladies standing on your doorstep at one in the morning on a school night?

Kristen was not with the touring company of Ladies' Night, having the good sense to sip one martini, drink lots of water, and head home to her lucky husband and children at a decent hour. When I watched her go to her car, she was running.

I'm hoping it was only because of the rain.

---

The t-shirt is wonderful, soft and fitted. You can save yourself the pyrotechnics, day-long hangover and having to send a whole lot of email apologies by just buying yours online.

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Radio Free Jen

Most of you already know that I am friends with the extraordinary Jen Lemen. Jen is cut from the same template as the little girl who picked me out the first day of preschool to be my friend, guardian and cheerleader. I had barely arrived on the blogging playground when she linked her arm through mine and whispered that we would be best friends. She has an incredibly generous spirit and a heart that broadcasts "I believe in you" on all channels, all the time.

I could give you tons of examples of how Jen is tuned to a different frequency than most. Like when we were at the rooftop cocktail party at the Blogher conference in Chicago this summer. I'm standing around, stuffing my face with canapes, wondering how to meet Rebecca Woolf and if I should guilt my pregnant roommate Alana into giving me her drink ticket, when I notice that Jen already knows the wait staff by name, and country of origin. Or going to another party and finding out later that week that while I was at the wine table, debating white or red, Jen was doing this.

But I like this one the best, from a Saturday morning telephone call, several weeks ago:

Me: Hi! What are you doing?

Jen (breathlessly): I'm driving across town to help a Rwandan genocide survivor escape a domestic slavery situation.

Me: Oh. Well. I'm folding laundry.

I have a feeling if you asked Jen's husband Dave, he'd verify that this is a pretty typical Saturday morning exchange in his household.

---

There's a great picture of Jen, me, and another of my favorite playground friends on Jen's blog this week. (The talent she refers to in the caption would be my talent for scoring comp drink tickets. Which explains why I don't actually remember this photo being taken.)

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Ladies Night

"All the girls walk by, dressed up for each other"

Van Morrison, Wild Night

The afternoon of Peggy's funeral, an email went around from one of my girlfriends that suggested the institution of a regular girl's night out, instead of waiting for someone's birthday or other special occasion to get together. The inaugural "Ladies Night" was last night ( I love to say "Ladies Night", because it immediately cues the cheesy disco song of the same name in the mental muzak player—no, don't thank me; it's my gift to you for the rest of the day).

In honor of the event, I wore my Superhero Necklace. We met on the back deck of a neighborhood pizza joint. There were about eight of us in all, a salad-eatin', check-splittin' chickfest of love.

Through the years, I have been blessed with great girlfriends. But I didn't know how to be one until my thirties. When I was (a lot) younger, I'd drop any girlfriend for a guy, sometimes their guy (if this happened to you, I am so sorry; you were much too good for him anyway). Even today, I worry I am more of a taker than a giver in my female friendships. I am not so good about remembering birthdays, or initiating get-togethers, or even chitchatting on the phone. Sometimes it seems like all I do is show up.

But when I do, I am all there. Not there merely on a layover to something else, not there tossing my empty head around wondering where the boys are, not sitting there plotting how to get with someone's sorry-ass boyfriend. Getting dressed last night (on a day my I Ching reading aptly brought up the symbols for Critical Mass and Exhaustion) I felt my spirits lift with anticipation, the way I used to feel getting ready for a date. I did my hair, I put on jewelry, I hummed. You'd have thought I was going out with someone really special.

And you would be exactly right.

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How We Roll

Back from the service. Completely wrung out. The church was filled to the choir loft. Peggy's children were troopers. Her husband spoke. Steve, if you are reading this, the theory of the "Loser Magnet" is one of the most funny and true things I have heard in a long time.

I was proud of my big boys. My six-year old whined just a little at not getting to stay home with his teenage cousin who'd been conscripted into keeping the three-year-old, but I told him, "We have to go because we're a community. We're going to show our friends we care." And then he was fine. Not another peep. I figured if the universe was going to make Peggy's kids attend their mother's funeral, mine were going too.

As the pearls were being clasped and the ties tied, Patrick remarked, "Well, it's easy to see that this family doesn't believe in ironing."

I laughed. "I like how you put that. It makes it sound like we abstain on principle."

---

Brought to you by the Church of Latter Day Wash and Wear. Motto: the family that is rumpled doesn't crumple.

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Calling All Angels

Peggy Adams and her children. Photo by Sean Moorman.
Used with kind permission of the photographer and Steve Adams.


My friend Peggy died on Friday. She was part of my community here in Little Rock, and if you are a repeat visitor to this site, in a way, she was part of yours.

The last email I had from her was in early May, tacked on to the end of a brief exchange we had following my son's third birthday party, which she had been unable to attend. We were going back and forth with social niceties, and then — almost as if in afterthought — she sent me this short message

"P.S. I read your blog quite regularly and that helps tremendously...Love, Peggy."

I cried when I read that. Not just because I was touched and flattered (very few of my in-the-round friends read this blog; I guess they get all they can stand of me in person), but because it came in response to the offer I'd made with studied casualness to be of help to her family while she was feeling "less than 100 per cent". As if it were a bout of the flu that had her housebound, and not the devastating cancer that she had battled for over two years and which had now won the upper hand.

I was tiptoeing, trying to make an overture without intruding. Peggy did not discuss her condition with just anyone, and I was never part of her innermost circle. She and her husband drew a dense privacy screen around themselves and their children where her illness was concerned, and it was baffling to some. We live in an age of personal transparency; of group therapy, self-help, online diaries and Oprah. We all want to share, analyse, weigh in, process. We all want our turn with the talking stick. Peggy wasn't going to let us have it. I respected her for that. It was as if, upon her diagnosis, she said, "You all deal with it. I have these three children to raise, and a life to get on with." I can see her tossing that glorious mane of hers, punctuating it with her delicously earthy Puerto Rican-Brooklynite accent. "What Evah."

And get on with life she did. I saw more of Peg and her family in the two years after her diagnosis than in the eight years I'd know her before. In between the endless treatments and surgeries, she continued to homeschool her children. I saw them at the park, the market, the library, fashion shows, and block parties. The family took vacations together, including a cruise. She and Steve continued to be the most beautiful couple in the room at any given get-together. The last time I really saw her was at a Valentine's dinner party, hosted by my friends Rod and Lennie Byran, just before I left for Ireland. Her long hair was cropped short, sacrificed to chemo, but she was still radiantly gorgeous. She was especially generous to me that night, and insisted I come to raid her closets to outfit myself for my readings. As if I had a hope of fitting anything. In the best of health, Peggy was about a size zero. Lennie called her "little big you".

I remember being struck that night by her perceptiveness about my mixed feelings over leaving the kids for two weeks abroad. She seemed so genuinely enthusiastic about my writing, and made several observations that caused me to think, "hey, she really sees me." I felt buoyed up by her validation and warmth. It was a wonderful evening, and I treasured the memory of it even more after she revealed that she had been peering through this particular window on my soul. She really did see me.

That email spurred me on to write this past month like never before. I'm sure Peggy didn't want to hear about all the prayers I prayed, she didn't need me to take her children from where they most wanted and needed to be, she sure as hell didn't need another casserole, but I could write for as long as it gave comfort or diversion. God, I'd have raced to her bedside and knelt and told her stories all day and all night long if I could have done so without getting in between her and what mattered most: time with her family.

Ironically, I got the news later on the same day I wrote my piece on how that time slips away. I was on the front porch with the children, making ice cream. The crank handle had just gone flying out of my son's hand, and he couldn't find it. Then the phone rang.

"Peggy died."

And then the conversation is over, and Peggy has died, and the crank handle still has to be found, because we still have to make the ice cream.

I keep turning the fragments of that that scene over and over, trying to piece together the making of the ice cream and the late afternoon sunshine and the losing and the finding of the crank handle with that phone call, but I just haven't been able. I have been running my fingers over the places where Peggy's and my lives ran parallel, but never really merged; the kindredness of spirit that was almost subtextual, seeming to exist mainly between the lines. Wondering how I came to be chosen, among others, to speak at her memorial next week, and what she would want me to say.

I was still trying to make sense of it all when I went to Peggy's myspace page tonight for the umpteenth time today (as if expecting to find something new from her there), and noticed in her profile that she listed the Jane Siberry song "Calling All Angels" among her favorites. I wasn't familiar with it, so I looked up the lyrics. This jumped out:

...and every day you gaze upon the sunset
with such love and intensity
it's almost...it's almost as if
if you could only crack the code
then you'd finally understand what this all means

Almost, Peggy. Almost as if.

---

Peggy Lopez Adams was 36 on May, 27, 2007. She is survived by her husband, Steve, daughters Chloe, 11, Simone, 9; and son Loic, 5. She wished to be memorialized through donations to the Open Arms Shelter for youth.

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Goin Up Country, Baby Don't You Wanna Go

I'm spending the weekend with a few girlfriends at a waterfront cottage. My husband likes to imagine the program looks something like this:

morning:	lingerie fashion parade
afternoon:	prancing, cavorting, frolicking
evening:	ticklefight

In fact, it looks more like this:

morning:	sleeping
afternoon:	carb loading
evening:	E! tv marathon (suggested attire: sweats; b.y.o. Cheetos)

Photos on flickr (sorry, no ticklefights).

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