Relaxed but breathing

Posted on March 28, 2007 by onesanevoice

Final exams for my first semester of school are tomorrow and I have not studied for finals in over twenty-five years.  The thrill of pulling an all-nighter has been greatly diminished by the almost interminable delay of the season premiere of The Shield, a show that Husband won’t even be in the same room with so I have to watch it on the little 13″ TV in the spare room.  Thirteen inches can barely contain Vic Mackey and his tortured derailed morality let alone his band of testosterone fueled merry men.  So I’m watching repeats while I study and even on mute this is one disturbed cesspool of public servant humanity.  Good times.

I studied for five straight hours today interrupted only by my painter touching up the trim in whatever room I moved to which actually had us laughing after a while it was so predictable.  I also had three phone calls from the accountant about our upcoming taxes which included a conversation about Son’s tax return, this being the first year he is filing independently since he paid his own tuition last year and had a full-time job as well and will no doubt be surprised to see the accountant’s bill made out to him now that he’s running with the big dogs.  Next year he’ll probably calculate his own taxes with Turbo Tax or whatever Daughter uses to bargain with the government.  She finds it hilarious that we pay a professional to do this for us.  Jesus, I color my own hair, cut me some slack.  We’re not pioneers.

At school I get a kick out of my classmates bickering over grades with our teachers.  I think our class has acquired a reputation for being ‘grade brats’ always fighting for that extra point.  Our primary teacher, who we had for 3 hours a day and who I wrote about in an entry entitled Down the Rabbit Hole, left a while back on a medical leave and the school juggled staff around to find a suitable instructor for us but the damage was kind of already done.  Our replacement teacher was fairly appalled by our classroom etiquette or lack thereof.  We were so accustomed to being educationally abused that we forgot how to learn in an appropriate manner.  One day our new instructor yelled in exasperation, “What’s with you people?  Who calls out like this in class?”  I tried to speak for the group when I said, “You have to forgive us.  We were raised by wolves.”

The flip side to this strange situation is that we all really look out for each other.  We’re an interesting group of strangers of all different ages and backgrounds thrown together in a program with a dropout rate of 30%.  It’s an intensive two-year course of study for a specialized Associates Degree followed by professional accreditation without which we go nowhere.  The bar is set high and we’ve all had some degree of higher education or work experience that left us inspired to strike out in this direction.  We have one more semester together and then we proceed on individual paths according to our level of skill and how much we’ve managed to absorb from our varied instructors and course of study.  But first we will be tested tomorrow.  It’s midnight right now and whoever said, “Good night and good luck” could have been sitting in that class right next to me.

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A Darker Shade of Pale

Posted on March 22, 2007 by onesanevoice

We are in the middle of having the inside of our house painted and for me it is whatever comes ahead of Greek tragedy in terms of fear and loathing.  I have a long-standing aversion to having work done in the house, I don’t know why, maybe I once saw a lamp dropped on its head as an infant.  Either way it’s just another thing to add to the list for my weekly talks with the Wise Man.  I have no idea where this man and his hourly intuitiveness live but he will probably be able to add a tastefully furnished den when he’s done with me and my list.

My husband has been suggesting (begging, pleading, bargaining) for the house to be painted since we got married and he moved in six and a half years ago and I finally stopped stalling and arranged for a painter, a very talented craftsman who is related to me by in-law marriage which I hoped would alleviate (some of) my anxiety.  The day he arrived to survey our surroundings he asked when our last paint job was.  I did some quick math and realized that if we bought the house twenty years ago that was our last paint job.  My painter whistled softly and said, “That was a great paint job.  Your house still looks decent.”  Which made me think, “Shit, why don’t you just go away then?”  But that would mean I’d have to make up a story for my husband and maybe Judaism doesn’t believe in hell but I sure do so we agreed he would start this past Monday.

In many domestic relationships it is the woman who chooses the decor.  The guy makes his preferences known, like no flowered upholstery or cute pictures of animals, but he’s more invested in the outside stuff.  Guys buy the snowblowers.  Not so much the towels.  I’ve seen guys shopping with their wives at Bed Bath & Beyond and they’ll pick up a green throw rug and show it to their beloved who responds, “I read that beige is the new green” while she tosses a tan rug in their cart.  The guy shrugs and they amble over to the shower curtains while he’s thinking, “This is time lost at Home Depot.”

My husband has definite opinions on home decor.  He once told me a story about his late wife and how she used to decide to rearrange the furniture when she was feeling stressed.  He wouldn’t know about it and when he came home from work and the house was dark he’d walk into the sofa because it never used to be there.  This struck me as a revealing domestic anecdote and I committed selected parts of it to memory.  The part I neglected to remember is that he wants a say in where the sofa eventually lands.

Colors are evocative.  Colors are emotional.  I need to be one with the color.  Ohm.  It so happens that Husband, while having excellent taste in clothing style and furniture arrangement, is fairly color-blind.  Part of our morning ritual is for him to motion me to stand next to him at the mirror and sign off on his choice of shirt and tie combination.  He can usually tell by my facial expression if it’s a successful pairing.  On days he needs to go back to the drawing board I start by saying. “You know that I say this with love…” and before it’s out of my mouth he’s peeling the tie off.

Before all the current home makeover shows hit the airwaves there were very few straight guys who would admit to knowing about decorating flourishes.  Now even men who were never in the closet have an opinion on what color it should be.  Husband was years ahead of the pack.  And it turns out that wanting to be one with the color has nothing to do with being able to see the color.  The night before the painter was to arrive while I sifted through the soft creamy neutrals for our bedroom, Husband decided he wanted an accent wall.  As he handed me the Benjamin Moore Mexicana Red paint strip I repeated my color mantra over and over in my head.  “You know that I say this with love…”

And as it further turns out that red wall looks great.

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Bad Day and Getting Worse

Posted on March 16, 2007 by onesanevoice

The day started with Son coming to tell me that the toilet wasn’t behaving.  I ran into the bathroom just as the water was reaching the top.  “Did someone put something in there that doesn’t go in there?” I demanded.  My family stared at me like I was speaking in tongues.  Then Daughter, who’s never sick, said she couldn’t swallow.  “Okay,” I told her, “stay home, watch your soaps, drink plenty of liquids, don’t use the upstairs bathroom and I’ll check on you later.”  I left feeling worried and guilty.

To get to work every day I drive through a neighboring upscale area we’ll call Tonytown.  For all the years I have lived where I live Tonytown has been a well-documented moving violation hell.  You cannot traverse the length of Tonytown Lane during the morning rush without seeing cars parked by the curb like big dead roaches with flashing lights behind them.  This ribbon of road is a cash cow for the municipality as commuters hurry through the dozen or so stop signs that pop up around every bend like clowns out of a Volkswagen.

I nonetheless travel without fear because I am a stop sign junkie.  I have other serious driving quirks like checking my lipstick in the rear view mirror and making sudden turns but stop signs are my friends.  So when I was unexpectedly distracted by the lights behind me I blithely pulled over so the patrol car could pass me and go after the lawbreaker.  Who shockingly turned out to be me.

I rolled down my window certain that this little misunderstanding would be cleared up as soon as the officer saw my innocent face and realized what a dreadful mistake he had made.  He glared at my friendly smile.
“You missed that last stop sign.”
“Me?  I what?!”
“That last stop sign.  You didn’t quite make it.”
“What are you saying?” I gasped.  “I always stop at stop signs.  I’m militant about it.  My house faces a stop sign.  I go out there and harass drivers who don’t stop.  I’m detested, I swear.”
“Well you almost stopped at that last one but your wheels were still rolling a bit.  That’s not what I call stopped.  THIS is what I call stopped.”
“This is PARKED.” I answered outraged.

If you ever find yourself in this situation let me share that outrage is not the way to go.  My policeman’s mouth tightened against his teeth and his eyes went squinty.  He hissed for me to stay right there and he stalked back to his car where he disappeared for eternity after which time he emerged with an illegible document written in Klingon.  He thrust the ticket through my window and wished me a cautious day.  In a mood that could best be described as foul I proceeded to work, late.

In a last ditch effort to preserve some order in a day that was obviously on the downslide I stopped at my favorite deli for an extra-large decaf as usual.  There was one of those appealing light drizzles falling so I dashed back to my car and yanked open the door which was, of course, locked.  Inertia being what it is the ensuing jolt caused the coffee to slip from my hand and smash at my feet creating several new designs on my pants and shoes.  I trudged back into the deli.

“I dropped it.”

They all looked at me.  In the two years I’ve been stopping at that deli in the morning I have never dropped my food.  I’m very good that way.  They held up the nearly empty decaf pot.  “Would you like to drop a regular next?  We’re out of decaf.”
“I can’t drink regular.  It makes me hear voices.”
They squeezed a small cup of decaf from the pot and looked at me sadly.
“Hold on tight now.”
“I will.”

I went back to the car and flung the door open angrily.  The whoosh of air that followed caught my glasses hanging from the visor and sucked them down into the puddle of coffee and mud at my feet.  I could feel little tears forming in the corners of my eyes.  I was wet and sad and my glasses were covered with muck.  I got into my car, turned on the radio and drank my coffee quietly.  Pelts of rain stung the windshield.  Ben E. King came on with Stand By Me.  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.  Today I would be very late.

Copyright 1995 by author

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I Must Not Be Listening

Posted on March 11, 2007 by onesanevoice

First, if you are a subscriber to this blog and have been receiving repeats of entries in your inbox I am so sorry.  I was not aware that any time I revise a published article due to an overseen error the update goes out again to subscribers as if it’s a new entry.  I actually asked my blog host about this before I went ahead and did it and they assured me no one would get it again, it’s just a revision of something already published.  But several subscribers emailed me to say otherwise and I feel bad jamming people’s boxes like that.  I contacted the host again and they said yeah, that’s what we said, it’ll go out again to everyone.  Oh, now I see.

A while back a student dropped out of my program at school and it is now official, I am the person present with the highest potential for wisdom achievement, meaning I’m the oldest one in class.  The program I am in requires a huge amount of memory since we are learning an unusual language and must know how to communicate with perfect accuracy both verbally and written.  At the end of this last week I felt like information was literally running out of my ears, there was no other space for it inside my head.  Could it be that the available room in there is proportionate to the amount of crap we’ve crammed in divided by the years we’ve been cramming it?  I mean I’ve certainly been shoving shit in my brain longer than anyone else in the room, right?  The young woman sitting behind me probably started committing lyrics to memory with Mary J. Blige but I go all the way back to Joni Mitchell.  And that’s definitely stuff I’d like to keep.  What I need to eject is the theme song to Gilligan’s Island.  That would free up acres of space.

It makes sense that learning a new language comes more easily to the young and I know this because you never hear about someone’s mother arranging music lessons for them at 18.  It either happens in grade school or it doesn’t happen at all.  When my son was in kindergarten he came home one day and announced he wanted to learn the violin.  A fellow student had performed for the class and Son wanted in on the action.  He began taking music lessons in earnest and it was months before I found out that the classmate who inspired him was a Raphaelean beauty with chestnut curls and an angelic smile.  Hmmm.  Baseball season came and the Itzhak Perlman dream was replaced by visions of Ozzie Smith.  But while they lasted the lessons did work some magic.

My daughter requested piano lessons in first grade and got more than she bargained for.  Her beginning teacher was an older female drill sergeant type who rapped out instructions in military cadence.  One day I overheard Sarge admonishing her pupil to practice longer and harder.  Daughter protested that it was too much to learn.  “If I can get it in my head you can get it in yours!” Sarge barked at her.  Daughter replied, “Look how big your head is!  I have a little head!”  Sometimes size really does matter.

And sometimes instructions don’t make sense no matter what.  Today I was on the highway and stopped at a rest area.  On my way into the ladies room there was a computer printed sign on the front door that said WE ARE NO LONGER ADDING CHLORINE TO THE WATER SO DO NOT DRINK IT AT ALL FOR ANY REASON.  The words circled around in my head as I entered the stall next to the occupied one and I wondered what would happen to me if I took a little sip.  Would my liver turn to jelly on the spot?  Would I go slowly stupid and not know why?  Quickly stupid and know why?  Would microscopic parasites invade my body and run rampant like tiny aliens until I sent Sigourney Weaver in to tame them?

My neighbor exited her stall when I did and we exchanged a nod and proceeded to the sinks.  As we stood in front of them we looked up at the mirror to another sign that said ALL FAUCETS HAVE BEEN TEMPORARILY REMOVED.  And sure enough there wasn’t a piece of hardware in sight.  Our eyes met in the mirror for a second and then she said, “I guess they really don’t want us to drink the water.”  I nodded in agreement but was secretly hoping that all this new information would be enough to finally push out Gilligan.

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Talk Amongst Yourselves

Posted on March 6, 2007 by onesanevoice

You never fully appreciate how different Americans are from the rest of mankind until you surround yourself with other cultures.  That’s not to say certain differences can’t be observed simply going state to state within the U.S.  Traveling through the Smoky Mountain region on a college break many years ago my friend and I stopped to eat at a crowded local spot in a rural town.  In a moment of post-adolescent awkwardness I spilled my coffee and then spilled the replacement cup as well.  Sensing my embarrassment the middle-aged waitress announced in a bullhorn drawl, “Don’t you worry, darlin’.  I got me a boy at home your age who’s so clumsy he could walk down the fifty-yard line and knock over both goal posts.”  In New York we just say Fuggedaboutit.

My husband and I took a vacation last year on an Italian cruise ship that departed from Venice.  For seven nights we were among 100 English-speaking passengers on a 1400 person European vessel.  There were enlightening aspects to this but we were also literally outside the joke in every verbal exchange we encountered as well as frequently clueless spectators to the action.  One night we happened upon an atrium packed with passengers overlooking the Teen Club event unfolding below.  To the rhythm of a pounding house beat a voluptuous cruise director was emceeing a competition consisting of two groups of teens holding down adjacent tarps underneath which something was going on but we had no idea what.

Caught up in the excitement we joined in clapping our hands and stamping our feet while the movement under the tarps increased.  Finally, the music reached a crescendo and the chesty emcee raised her arms shouting as the teens all let go of the tarps and revealed a flushed boy/girl pair under each tarp wearing each other’s clothing.  The pair who had managed to emerge wearing the most of their partner’s clothes in the allotted time was the winner.  The boy in the winning pair was wearing the girl’s bra and shorts.  The girl had the boy’s shirt on backwards and his jeans around her knees.  They were about fifteen.  The passengers went wild.  Husband and I looked at each other and in a Vulcan mind-meld formed one American parental thought:  Lawsuit.

We discovered something else on this cruise.  No one outside the U.S. drinks iced tea.  Europeans don’t care so much about ice at all and the British consider cold tea sacrilegious.  So we would routinely hold up the buffet line scrounging for ice cubes while balancing cups of hot water and tea bags.  If this happened at the end of the buffet near the pool it was tricky because European women tend to wear bathing suits with not much coverage (and this means your mama and her mama) while the men favor Speedos.  Try juggling cups of boiling water next to someone’s grandfather in a marble bag.  Distracting to say the least.  I would turn to apologize for the delay to the people behind us only to see some German passengers shaking their heads like, “And they won the war?”

Then one night at dinner we were seated with a family from New Jersey.  Thrilled at the prospect of regular conversation we introduced ourselves eagerly and exchanged pleasantries.  The woman was a sculpted blonde who seemed vague about her occupation.  Her teenage son’s name was Drew but he told us to call him Vinny.  Next to Husband sat the blonde’s cousin, an older man with shoulder-length black hair who looked like a Hell’s Angel.  He said he was a priest.  The empty seat next to the priest belonged to the blonde’s brother who was in the cabin waiting for his medication to kick in.  We didn’t ask.  We didn’t care.  Tell us no secrets and we’ll tell you no lies.  Just speak English.

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Odds, Ends and Friends

Posted on March 2, 2007 by onesanevoice

Twenty years ago our family packed up and moved from the city to the suburbs thereby essentially rewriting a future history that never happened.  The next two decades up to the present played out with the joys, despairs and memories as unique to our family as they are commonly recognizable to any group of people related by birth and proximity.  With the added dimension that we have always kept in touch with a small pocket of people who would have been the daily players in our lives had we never moved away.

This week Son’s college senior photos arrived and like Bogie and Bergman in Casablanca I can’t seem to see them enough.  I walk by the piano where the framed 8×10 is displayed and I can feel an uncontrollable smile spread across my face.  Neither of my parents attended college.  In fact my father left school in the 8th grade to help support his family and didn’t get his GED until many years later.  He went on to become a successful and beloved maverick entrepreneur who was wildly proud of his two children who also never completed their college educations.  Daughter’s university graduation would have been the first in the family either of my parents would have attended but the event unfolded in Boston while they both fought terminal illnesses in New York.  Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys stood in the middle of the Fleet Center singing In My Room, while Daughter waved from the massive sea of gowns, a distant jellybean recognizable only through binoculars by the Superman artwork on top of her cap.  It was magically giddy.  The only thing missing was my parents.

Earlier this evening I left my house for dinner out with my Brooklyn Girls, the moms of the kids my kids knew as kids, and the two things I brought with me were a bottle of wine and Son’s graduation picture.  Our gatherings have become less frequent over the years but that has only served to make us covet them more.  We shared some health concerns, some new adventures and old routines.  We compared college timelines and whose kids were on the five, six or seven year plan, what their goals were, where they were living and where we’d like them to be living.  We looked at the pictures we all brought and discussed how our conversations with our children have changed now that they’re all adults.  One friend said how she talks to her twenty-something daughter now more like she would a friend.  I said how I recently told Daughter a tidbit of too intimate information that inspired her to respond, “Okay, so now I have to go squirt something on my brain to wash that away.”

We ate and we laughed and we set a date for our next dinner.  I drove home on the Belt Parkway in the rain with Beyonce on the radio singing Irreplaceable.  Perfect.

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Just Wait and They’ll Come Get Us

Posted on February 25, 2007 by onesanevoice

I went driving upstate this past weekend and traveled through a couple of radio station zones along the way.  At one point I was treated to a commercial I hadn’t heard before for a dental practice called Pleasant Dreams Dentistry.  The concept here is that they cater to people who are terrified of dentists, be it for anxiety reasons or pain concerns, and they promise techniques of sedation that will ensure an experience just short of memorable.  In fact the kicker is at the end of the spot when music from either a Moog Synthesizer or Ravi Shankar on the sitar wells up and an eerie, ethereal female voice intones, “Your dental needs will be met and you won’t remember a thing.”

This struck me as maybe being a little too eager to render patients unconscious.  Perhaps when they sat around and considered prospective names for their medical service it was a toss-up between Pleasant Dreams Dentistry and Eternal Sunshine of the Root Canal.  I wondered what the real motive was here, compassionate concern for people’s fears or manipulation of their phobias for profit.  Of course, having patients in an oblivious state would also seem to eliminate the possibility of medical personnel being overheard saying, “Oh shit!  Can you reach that before it slips all the way down his throat?”  I had plenty of miles to consider this and I decided that if I’m having some sort of dental procedure and I happen to open my eyes in the middle of it to find my dentist’s hand up my sweater or him and his assistant doing lines of coke off my limp arm, that might be a memory I’d lean toward preserving.  You know, for court.

During my drive I stopped at a women’s consignment shop which happens to be my not so secret passion.  Husband and I have traveled to many of his professional conferences in states across the country and I’ve managed to find gently worn kick-ass designer garments in every city.  In fact that’s how I identify them.  I’ll look in my closet and think, “Maybe I’ll wear that $20 Saks Fifth Avenue blazer from Scottsdale that fits perfectly except I have to roll up the sleeves.”  Or, “Now where’s that Ft. Lauderdale cropped top that only matches the dry clean only skirt from Malibu?”  These stores all have playful names like Second Glance, Coming Around Again, Don’t Think Twice, etc. and I had a great time trying things on and imagining who might have worn them before.

So here’s my confession:  I bought a mink stole.  Just saying those words out loud conjures up images of wild-eyed PETA members running toward me in their Birkenstocks flinging red paint at my chest.  And I wouldn’t blame them.  I’m not a fur coat person – never owned one, never wore one – but this mink stole followed me out to my car and hopped in the back seat, I swear officer.  And it’s from the forties or fifties which means those mink are so gone for so long even their great-grandchildren are toast.  I don’t even know if I’ll ever wear it but if I didn’t buy it I’d just have to throw that $50 into the dirt it would be such a shame.  Confessing hasn’t made me feel better.  I am still spiritually against wearing dead animals.  But if you wear them alive they claw your neck.

Later I stopped at a CVS and noticed a table set up by the pharmacy offering customers free blood pressure tests.  There were fliers spread out advising of upcoming services such as diabetes screening in the summer and flu shots in the fall.  Come Christmas they’ll be offering complimentary DNA tests to see if you’re the father of Anna Nicole’s baby.  Nothing like a windfall for the holiday.

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What, Me Worry?

Posted on February 16, 2007 by onesanevoice

There is peace of mind and then there is a piece of your mind.  The moment you become a parent you start giving out lots of the second in an effort to get a small chunk of the first.  Here is a hint to all the youngsters out there who might be reading this:  The thing not to tell your Mom in the only phone call you make to her as you backpack through Eastern Europe with your buddies is that the hostel you just stayed at did not provide towels so the best way to dry off after a shower was to run naked through the hallways.  The only thing this will ensure is that your mother will stay awake so long she will need an Ambien enema to get any rest.  Send a postcard instead.

If you are a male child older than voting age and you have just returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic with a posse of friends and your Mom asks if you met anyone special, think twice about telling her that all the young women you were introduced to had the same name:  “Hi, I’m A Hundred Dollars.”  Even if you assure her you stuck to your tight budget she will only smile at you lovingly and wait for you to leave the room so she can go on Web M.D. to research social diseases and open up that special occasion Pinot-Grigio-in-a-Drum.

All my life I thought nothing of hopping on planes headed for distant lands just as my children do now.  But certain current events coincided with my entrance to parenthood.  As soon as my kids were born planes either started dropping out of the sky or I started noticing and all of a sudden there was no trip worth taking that might leave my children motherless.  There was an episode of Mad About You with this theme.  Paul and Jamie had just become parents and in their patented urban neurotic way they decided to fly in separate planes to a family wedding so their baby would at least have one parent left if there was a disaster.  Ultimately they realized that trying to second-guess fate robs you of life.

And ultimately so did I.  After twenty years of remaining earthbound I married a man with a passion for travel and a persuasive manner.  For our honeymoon we flew to Europe and took a Mediterranean cruise.  When Daughter joined her university’s first study abroad program post 9/11 we visited for a week in the small Italian village where she spent a semester.  We have flown across the Atlantic a half dozen times and traveled to at least as many states in the U.S.  All in the past six years.  That’s not to say it’s a stress free experience for me – ever.  I’m cranky, I never sleep on board and anything I eat sits in my stomach like a dead possum.  Once we’re at our destination and people ask me if I had a good flight I just smile at them and think to myself any time my seat lands with the rest of the plane it’s a good flight.

In my regular weekly meetings with the Wise Man I attempt to unravel the reasons behind my poorly disguised death-march drive for control.  When I tell him about the self-imposed air travel moratorium and my struggle to shake it off he asks me, “What do you think this is about?”  I tell him, “I don’t like being on a plane someone else is flying.”  He gives me his inscrutable half-smile.  “No one does,” he says, “but so few of us are pilots.”

And our time is up.

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Down the Rabbit Hole

Posted on February 11, 2007 by onesanevoice

At the multiplex near our home, the movie previews and ad graphics are loud, slick, and in-your-face.  Last week Husband and I saw The Queen at a small upstate theater, and before the movie began, the screen time was devoted to local advertisers.  With no accompanying music or sound, giant business cards scrolled across the screen — Corner Pizza, Lakeview Landscaping, Main Street Plumbing — you get the idea.  We watched in silence until a card for a general contractor appeared with the words “Attention to Detail, Expert Crastmanship.”  Great attention to detail right there, making sure one of those misspelled business cards got put on a movie screen.  This stuff makes me mental, typos seen by hordes of consumers going uncorrected forever.  I nudged Husband and whispered, “Did you see that?  Crastmanship?  Do you know how many customers they’re losing giving out cards like that?”  “None,” he replied, “because no one will notice but you.”

He said it sweet and polite, but I heard the implied “You’re a nut job” and I don’t know why, but misspelling and sloppy grammar in public places disturbs me more than reason can explain.  I’ve always been a word nerd and grammar cop, and I often find myself biting my tongue to keep from announcing my observation and being identified as an anal retentive potty training flunk-out.  Three years ago I sat in a prominent Manhattan hospital waiting for my father to finish a radiation treatment.  On the wall in front of me was a sprawling, full-color framed poster advertising the superlative care patients receive at the hostipal I was wise enough to have chosen for treatment.  All I could think was they charge $75 for an aspirin, but they couldn’t hire a proofreader to give this poster a once over before sending it off to the printer and plastering the hostipal with them.  Looking back, it wasn’t such a bad thing.  I was at that hospital a lot that year as my dying father fought lung cancer, and it began to bring me a measure of comfort that even though that poster had something really wrong with it, it still stayed on the wall.  So I guess sometimes blessings come misspelled.

I’m taking a class right now taught by a much older, crotchety instructor who no doubt had moments of clarity in the past, but not the recent past.  We are learning an entirely new language from him and he’s torturing us with English on the side.  A couple of weeks ago we were going over the words ‘kneel’ and ‘knell’ in our textbook and he announced it was a typo since there’s no such word as knell.  I raised my hand and said respectfully, “Knell is a word, sir.  It means to signal something of doom or importance.”  “No,” he answered annoyed, “you’re always trying to correct me when I know I’m right.  There’s no such word as knell.”  I kept giving him sentences using the word until he finally shouted, “All right!  It may have something to do with a bell.  Some famous quote.  Something like don’t ask about why it knells.”

Just shoot me already.  “It’s toll, sir.  ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee’ is how the famous quote goes.  You’re looking for toll, not knell.  But knell is also a word.”  He waved his hands over his head and went into a coughing fit, and we all took a break and walked into the hall to check our phone messages.

This week we covered the ‘p’ words like peak, peek, pique, and pike and how lots of people confuse them because they’re so similar.  I don’t know which people, but he said there are lots of them.  He sat behind his desk mopping up his nose and said, “Just remember the word pike means the top of a mountain.”

Here we go.  “Pike isn’t the top of a mountain, sir, you’re thinking of peak.  A peak is the top of a mountain.”

“You’re doing it again!” he squealed, “Correcting me when I’m right!  A pike is the top of a mountain and I’ll prove it.  Pike’s Peak!”

Oh, God, I’m growing a brain tumor in this room.

“Pike is the man the peak is named for, sir.  That’s why it’s called Pike’s Peak.  It’s the man’s name.  The top is still the peak.”

“Then what’s a pike?” he demanded.

“Well, for one it’s a fish.”

“Are you Jewish?”

My mouth dropped open.  The class fell silent.

“What did you just ask me?”

“Are you Jewish?” he yelled even louder.  “Because they’re the only people who know what a pike is.  It’s what they make gefilte fish from.  Do you make gefilte fish?”

I must tell you I have not been asked many questions in my life that took my words away, but this one knocked me speechless.  With no response to give, I looked around the room at the other students, and locked eyes with Keisha who looked at me like, “Oh shit, now he’s gonna notice I’m black.”

Rather than search for the village missing its idiot, I soldiered on.

“Pike can also mean a sharp stick, sir.”

“Like something you’d put in a vampire’s heart to kill him?”

“Well, most slayers use a stake, sir, but if a pike is all you have, I’m sure it will do.”

On to the q’s.

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Hands Across the Water

Posted on February 6, 2007 by onesanevoice

This past weekend marked the yearly race my Husband and I participate in without fail:  Seeing at least one Oscar-nominated movie before the awards show.  Little Miss Sunshine was the Sundance breakaway hit of all time.  Haven’t seen it.  The Departed is Scorcese’s most scorching hit since Goodfellas.  Haven’t seen it.  Helen Mirren, who I adored in the BBC’s Prime Suspect, gave the performance of her stellar career as Queen Elizabeth.  Missed it.

So we got out the movie listings and weighed our options.  I voted for The Departed because I love crime noir like L.A. Confidential, The Usual Suspects and Memento.  Husband leaned toward The Queen because he loves historical depictions, majestic settings and my attraction to filmed violence makes him squirm.  Since we were spending the weekend upstate in the Hudson Valley we decided to see The Queen at a little theater in one of the charming, rustic towns the area is famous for.  We caught an early afternoon matinée, a movie time that traditionally skews to a senior citizen audience.

Two ladies sat down behind us and while Husband cruised the snack counter I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation.  They both had very mature lady voices with upstate New York accents.  Without being obvious and actually turning around to look at them I figured I’d put them somewhere in their seventies.  One started telling the other she had purchased an undergarment to wear to this Pilates class she was taking and she wanted to call it a tank top but it wasn’t.  The friend suggested it was an undershirt.  The first one said no, it had a fancier name but she couldn’t think of it except she thought it started with a ‘c’.  The friend offered ‘chemise’ but that didn’t sound right to either of them.  They were so adorable I almost turned around and said ‘camisole’ but even I realized that would be rude and besides, did she say Pilates?

Lady #1 then mentioned she was surprised at the number of men in her class.  Lady #2 asked if there were any good ones.  Lady #1 said there was one who had a lot of energy and she described him.  Lady #2 said he sounded like a guy who played in a band she used to go listen to.  Husband returned with no snacks and began to explain why but I shook my head ‘no’ in the short staccato bursts a wiretapper would use for the pizza delivery guy.  Lady #2 then asked if anyone had heard from Alexandra lately since she hadn’t returned her phone call.  Lady #1 asked why didn’t she just go on her website?  The lights went down and the previews came on or I’m sure I would have heard one of them offer to burn the other a Goo Goo Dolls CD.

Staying ahead of the curve is de rigeur these days with events and technology causing the cutting edge to become obsolete faster than you can Google it.  We Baby Boomers learned early on that our sheer numbers would not keep the universe revolving around us indefinitely.  That particular realization occurred to me about twenty years ago when I was paying the teenage babysitter after an evening out.  She was gathering the music cassettes she had brought with her and I noticed one of them was Paul McCartney and Wings.  Feeling very musically connected to someone half my age I asked her if she was also a Beatle fan.  She looked at me for a split second and then brightened. “Oh, The Beatles.  Wasn’t that McCartney’s first group?”

Were The Beatles Paul McCartney’s first group?

Was The Bible God’s first book?

I mean He could write a string of best-selling romance novels after that and who would care?  He wrote the frickin Ten Commandments.  I could see my sun lowering on the horizon.

The Queen was terrific, a really thoughtful telling of how and why the monarchy seemed so clueless and obstinate in dealing with the death of an ex-Princess worshiped by the people more than the monarch herself.  And therein, as the Bard would say, lies the rub.  Aside from the many ruminations as to who ultimately drove Diana to her death – the Royal Family for first arranging the marriage and then disparaging it, Charles for never developing a backbone to stand up to his family, the media for stalking her, the adoring public for demanding to see and know everything about her thereby creating the stalkerazzi – beside all that the compelling question remains can any government effectively lead a people without truly knowing and caring what’s in their hearts?  There is a point where cluelessness becomes disrespect.  How surprising that the seemingly repressed and conservative British managed to convey that to their Queen in the five days between Diana’s death and her funeral and we expressive, liberal Americans across the pond haven’t pulled off that trick in four years.

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