I Couldn't Kill the Spider: Remembering 9/11

Oh my, it's been months since I've been here -- I've neglected poor Macy Swain and her electronic life. Well, here I am, slipping back into the blog life, and the occasion is remembering 9/11. This is also available on eastvillagemagazine.org.

I couldn’t kill the spider.

It was pea-sized and black and crawling over the black and white tiles of my Sylvester Manor apartment. I’m not afraid of spiders but I’d never been above smashing them to pieces.

This time was different. It was Sept. 13, 2001, and that week there had been just too much death.

Instead of crushing it, I got the creature to crawl onto the towel, and I gently carted it down the hall and jostled it into the bushes on Court Street. I freed it with aggressive determination: I wanted nothing to do with any killing.

I don’t know why that spider is the image that comes most readily to mind when I think about ten years ago.

Maybe it’s because the other, less metaphorical memories are too hard to take,

That spring and summer I had created my own debacles. In April I sat up in bed in the middle of the night and told my husband of 15 years “I think I’m moving out.” In May a truck from Red’s pulled noisily into our driveway and took half our stuff; my stuff.

That night, shocked and prickly with hope, I sat at the window in Apartment 104 and poured myself a glass of white wine to go with the Cornish game hen I’d baked in my little oven, dinner just for one.

I’d deliberately decided against cable, and throughout those summer months, which I remember as so hot the strongest smell in my rooms was the acrid bubbling asphalt of Wallenberg Drive, I watched movie after rented movie.

I had a new man already who flew in from time to time from Los Angeles. His arrivals were intense – we had loved each other for 25 years, never knowing where the other was – and it was jarring to reclaim our ardor. Daily weeping for my failed past life was a matter of course. I was 51 years old and starting over. It seemed impossible, unadvisable, audacious and naïve.

The last weekend of August my Ohio sister was in a serious auto accident. In the middle of a Labor Day party, I got a call that she was in the hospital and I needed to get there. I shot down to Barberton, where I found her dog, an expensive pure-bred beagle, untended and hungry in the house. She’d peed and pooped anywhere she liked for at least a week. I tried to make sense, yet again, of my sister’s complicated life.

The dog had an open abscess and I got her to the vet. I tried to clean up the house. Outraged at my sister and ashamed of it, I declared I was taking the dog back to Flint. On September 9, I put her in my car and drove back along Interstate 80, stopping every 50 miles to let her pee…she was wild and untrained and made the trip interminable.

My friends Bob and Philip agreed to take her, but when I got her there, she ran away, Bob chasing her up Ridgelawn yelling and yelling. He caught her but it was clear she would never be a lovely pet.

And then it was September 11. That morning I drove to Okemos to see my therapist, full of grief and guilt and anger – about my sister, again, about the debris of my life. On the way back I heard it – after tiring of the orderliness of Mozart’s 12 versions of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, I switched to NPR, where Bob Edwards was announcing that the second tower had just collapsed.

It was a different world from that moment on, was it not? I drove straight to UM – Flint and called my new man. Then I went in to my husband’s office and we hugged, along with everybody else – the electricity of the tragedy overwhelming us and making me wonder if all could be forgiven, reset.

I went to VG’s and bought whiskey, cigarettes, Hershey bars and canned fruit cocktail.

That night, I went to my old house, where my not-yet-ex-husband made comfort food, linguine with marinara sauce, and with four other souls we obsessively watched CNN. There was pot and I smoked it, but it didn’t work – leaving me only more heavily disconsolate.

I’ve often thought that if I’d ever gone to bed with my husband again it would have been that night. But when we hugged goodbye and the question hung in the air, the shock and neediness between us was intolerably raw. I rushed back to Apartment 104.

The dog didn’t work out either. Bob and Philip said they couldn’t handle her. Philip and I took her to the Humane Society on Dort, where she failed her personality test by lunging at an assistant. My husband, who always loved beagles, took her as a stopgap, but she wouldn’t stop barking all night, and he sent me one angry, accusatory email after another. We finally gave her to a student we both knew who had a farm, and the dog roamed freely for three more years before dying a reasonably merciful natural death.

Without cable, I rented The Sopranos, which I’d never seen, and watched every episode, one after the other for three days straight. The opening shot of Tony Soprano chawing that cigar, the Twin Towers in the background,seemed cruelly right, lacerating me with bad news. They’re gone, they’re gone, they’re gone. My marriage was gone, my old life was gone, the world as we knew it was gone.

Life did go on, of course. I found hope in love, and now that LA guy is my second husband. We bought a house on Maxine. I bought a big stone Buddha for the back yard and stones and candles for the windowsills. I wrote a novel, and now I even have a new job. Just like everybody else, I’ve gone on with my life, because that’s what humans do. In fact, recently realizing I’ve been in Flint a full 30 years, I realized with a start that despite all the ups and downs, I am – shhh, don’t tell anybody! – happy here.

I still think about that spider, though – how for that one moment, that one week, we were all aflood with compassion. I wish it could last. I wish – and hope – as human history rolls out beyond us -- that it is the impulse toward love that survives our primal bloody urges. Frankly, at best I think it’s a fifty-fifty chance. Absurdly, illogically, nonetheless, I’m banking on the love.

This is where I used to...

A peril of being in a place for a long time...one of my themes, day after day...is this odd sense of needing meaning from the architectures I've inhabited year after year. There's a displacement, a recurring mild angst I've been feeling lately when I walk by a place and I think, "my God, I've been walking by this for 30 years."

Walking into the Rec Center last night in the grace of 6 p.m. April daylight, I looked up at the edifice of the Harding Mott building and thought, hmm, is this a beautiful enough building for me? Is it "in" me after all these years? In fact it feels unremarkable, if imposing -- it's a building I walk toward and into time and again and don't feel much of anything. It doesn't lift me up: the predicament being that I have often, often felt ambivalent about myself and my life in the perimeters of this architecture. Wouldn't anyone? Ah, thus it is, isn't it? Does the architecture shape us, or is it we who give the walls and sweeps of brick and mortar meaning? Could a sad and preoccupied woman be unmoved by the arches of Grace Cathedral, for example, a place I've gone with my brother in SF and never failed to be moved?

I did once write a poem about my first husband picking me up at the Harding Mott building after work called "Walking Toward You, October Thursday," and I like that poem. I realize as I remember that poem, a romantic one in which I wanted him to see me smiling as I got to him, that I was in my 30s then and already feeling the lurking threats of domestic predictability, the threat of deadness, the yearning for something special never to end. It was a moment, there in the curving concrete blocks of the Harding Mott building.

And last night, walking toward my yoga class, where I tread in with my yellow ID card and always say hi to the girls behind the counter, and they always say "Have a good workout!" I felt something akin to happiness -- a pleasure in a repeated routine of walking somewhere I always walk and seeing people who always say the same thing to me and of course, knowing that in the unglamorous basement room of the Rec Center I'll be discovering some new muscle, some new alignment, some new challenge, and that when I come out I'll feel...GOOD.

That room always delivers something. Last night Rachelle had us doing a particularly painful stretch, where we pressed our shins backwards against the wall and then tried to straighten up so that our backs and shoulders also touched the wall. I couldn't come close. When she saw us struggling with it she almost yelled, "you've had a lot worse pain than this, people, you've lost family members, you've lost pets, you've had a lot worse pain than this..." I'm smiling as I remember that now. What's a little muscle stretch, what's a pain, even a stretch that made me want to scream? We've all lost shitloads. Take it, she seemed to say, just take it. We've all had pain, pain, pain.

So tonight it happened again. Vickie and I walked by my old house on Seventh Street, the place I lived with my first husband for 15 years. So much happened there -- so many hopes and dreams resided with us there, climbed the stairs every night with us, slept with me, fed me. It was a dangerous place to go tonight. I felt my heart and my throat clench, looking at that house. I couldn't stop looking. It seems so long ago -- ten year now since I moved out on a mild May weekend. There is where I used to live. This is where I used to dream a certain dream, This is where I was thirty, forty, fifty. This is where I stopped being young. This is where I planted morning glories along the back wall and kept a triangular herb garden. This is where I wrote my novel. This is where I wrestled with many demons. This is where I stopped loving my life. This is where I stopped loving that dream. This is where I gave up that dream.

We turned around and walked away from the house. I let Vickie talk about whatever she wanted to talk about. She liked another house, the big one at the dead end. I said I used to know the guy who lived there. It seemed like there were fewer trees, as if the life cycle was up all along the street. One old house was completely gone, the bare lot startling and freshly leveled. I felt sort of hungry, an ache I didn't want to touch, like my thigh screaming against the wall last night. I've had worse pain than that. Take it, just take it.

Eventually we got back onto Avon Street and crossed the little bridge over Gilkey Creek and strode through the park back onto the side I live on now. It was safer being up there, where I have another life, another dream. It used to be when I walked over here I felt unease -- the houses were grander and I felt small and unfulfilled. Now I think I deserve to live over here, where I have matured, where I am seasoned like these solid old domiciles. It's odd the vanities and cravings architecture can satisfy. It's taken me awhile to get here, barely a quarter mile from where I used to live, and I feel something mostly good. I climb the stairs up to bed every night and climb the stairs down in the morning to a kitchen full of light. In my familiar architectures, those that continually echo a nagging past and those that yield beauty and comfort, I'm continually adjusting myself, as in yoga class -- a woman both the same and continually new.

Rumination from Feathered Infidelities

In writing my January EVM column, I found myself considering a 2010 bird study that makes me wonder what the shifting partnerships of Baby Boom mating has done to the kids. In true Baby Boom style, however, I end up making the rumination about me -- a Boomer on my second marriage, with no biological kids, contemplating monogamy and my place in the flock. Click here for the whole piece.

Scrub Brush: "This is It"

Tools of Rage and Poetry, With Cat


A new era...is how it feels, continually adjusting to life events. I'm struggling in my own quotidian rhythms to embrace and accommodate to and balance among my particularities -- the personal wrestling of my individual circumstances -- and a concept of "greater good" -- the ways in which the community -- my community or communities -- and in fact the natural world go on with or without me. What is my role in this? How do I keep my individual body going, my mysterious individual consciousness, the consciousness that inhabits me and in which I am trapped for the duration -- as are we all, of course, humans moving around in these limited containers held together by our sturdy skins.

Saturday night's reading (see below) was a fine moment -- four readers, as it turned out, an audience of 50, double-digits of wine bottles, red and white, flowing along with the concertos of voice and word. Connections with my history; I was present at the opening of Buckham close to 30 years ago; I was present when Alan Ginsberg performed there; I have reviewed many art shows staged there; I have read there myself a number of times over the decades.

Waiting for people to show up the other night, I stood in the open window at the back wall and looked down at the Torch parking lot, the brick law offices, the southbound traffic on Beach Street; it was a mild lovely evening and downtown Flint smelled like a city, delicious, evocative -- a mix of asphalt and exhaust with a bit of stubborn spring green mixed in. Framed in the window, that swatch of Flint on a spring Saturday night seemed romantic and melancholy, my own history and desires and sadnesses inescapably in the air. I went to the gallery's bathroom where I've retreated for solitary earthy functions uncountable times during uncountable art openings. There's a full-length mirror in there, and I inevitably looked at myself, my whole self, before going back out into the world of the life I've made. Hmm: yes, that's me, I had to say. Still me. I recognized myself, still there. In that one specific moment. As Sheldon Kopp says in Item One of his Eschatological Laundry List: This Is It.

Before the reading I was in a foul and volatile mood. Trying to load paper into the empty printer, I couldn't get the packaging on the ream open and in a sudden fury, slammed the whole pack down onto the floor. Ripped off my glasses and threw them on the floor too, violently swearing. The symbolism isn't lost on me. Language, my beloved, trusted soul tool, so often resists. The world so often resists our words, or doesn't care. And what I see, sometimes clearly, the evidence of my senses, often leads to pain and disappointment.

So I abandoned the upstairs and, in the spirit of Gaston Bachelard, stomped down to the basement. To clean the cat litter. In the pungent cool darkness. Still in a fury. The place smelled so strongly of ammonia my eyes watered. Back from Pedro, we had somehow forgotten to check: forgotten our duty. Three litter boxes overflowing, the cats had peed on the concrete floor and pooped in cool corners. I took over the basement with dangerous energy. Ted came with me. That fact. The man who loves me: In the basement, holding the bag for cat shit, holding the dustpan for piles of scattered litter. I filled a bucket with bleach and water and got down on my knees, slopping the mix onto concrete; me in a teeshirt, old socks, raggedy shorts and rubber gloves, daring Ted to laugh at my flaggellating getup. He refrained. He simply held the bag. I scrubbed down the stink and my rage with an old scrub brush. I like that word "scrub brush." My scrub brush helped.

The basement smells clean now. The floor is soothing and cool and free of crud.

The eight poems I read Saturday night were, as my new literary pal Matt Falk said, a "set" encompassing a range of emotion. On the whole, indeed, I felt them as a sequence, a cri de coeur from my whole Flint life -- one poem I first drafted in the 80s, several others I wrote within the past few months. It felt good to cry them out, to declaim. I am at cusp these days and the act of witness, of saying my life, of working the sounds of my life -- all of it was gratifying. I slept well that night.

See, I am taking this as a serious occasion in my life, even though my current poetry manuscript has been rejected at least ten times since September. I am taking this as an act of scrubbing into my life, doing what I can do. On my knees in the cool basement, taking it in, taking it in, making my life whatever it will be.

Au Courant and Sleepless the Night Before Class

Getting ready for bed, my husband tells me
a joke that I don't get.
To make matters worse,
I'm propped up on six pillows reading
the latest touted book of poems.
It won a prize in New York.
On the jacket the poet is an eminence,
bearded, gray, a this-is-serious
kind of guy.
I read these poems and I don't understand.
What's with the marble wall, and how
can it be "dark" and "sunbaked" both?
And why are lemurs suddenly swimming
down the third verse?
My forehead furrows and my lips
tense up. I crimp my glasses and
look again.
I don't want to be lost the night before class.
I feel completely dumb.
Maybe I'm not smart enough to be alive.
Is the true thing finally here,
my smarty ruse a bust at last?
I took Valerian an hour ago.
I'm not sleepy.
Did you get to the first poem yet? My husband calls
from the other room, where
the electric toothbrush whirrs.
I didn't understand it, I mumble from
my billowed perch, the poem my bean
a mattress down.
Good, he intones,
You're not supposed to "understand" a poem,
Remember?
But I'm the teacher, I say. I'm the teacher.

The Hardest Part

...of being a teacher is grading, and I've just finished off the end-of-semester marathon: 14 fiction projects, 14 final personal essays, and 45 freshmen papers. The last round of the semester is especially difficult: one evaluates not just the last piece of writing, but the student's whole semester, aiming to come up with a final number for class participation as well as for the class. And of course, one evaluates onesself.

So many decisions. I feel my forehead furrow even as I write this in a moment of breathing and debriefing.

Yes, I'm aware I have to really work on my breathing while grading -- I tend to tighten up, tense up, hunch up...an old, unhealthy habit I fell into long ago when working hard. Now I'm picturing my yoga teacher admonishing me to throw back my shoulders -- sit up tall!, she says. Or as my beloved therapist said gently all last spring, "it's okay to breathe..." This matters, I've gradually come to understand. Grading is a process of hard truths: grading is the field and the farmer both -- the humus scrutinized for depth and health, the farmer taking a taste of the soil, like my dad used to do, and taking a measure of what's there. Did we seed with enough rye grass? Is it getting enough oxygen and drainage? Is it too alkali?

Funny to be thinking about my dad standing in his much-fussed over little plot down in Ohio decades ago. But I see the instinctive rightness of this analogy for me. There's a cycle to it -- a cycle of planning, high hopes, constant tending, the frenzy of planting and harvest, then the hard realities: the strawberries just didn't make it. The rabbits got into the lettuce. The beans are diseased. The tomatoes never ripened up right. But those potatoes -- what a crop! And how will we deal with all those glossy green zucchini? Did you ever taste such sweet cantaloupe? Welp, I can hear him saying, there are a few things I'll have to do differently next year.

Over the past couple of years, I've become a tougher grader. I'm on the alert about this: part of me wary of advancing codgerly despair at the lunkishness of the young. But another part of me argues it is right to demand something of the younger generation. I want to say to them (and do -- probably more often than I should) , "Pay attention, dammit. Some of this stuff matters. Wake up!"

So I anguish over individual situations that I know affect my students' performance. Was I too hard on the one who's pregnant? Was I too hard on the one I got into a kerfuffle with midway through the semester because he loudly complained about the book I'd chosen -- and then proceeded to give me some of the worst writing I've ever received in a fiction class? Was I too rough on the kid whose thinking sparkles but whose proofreading is horrible -- knowing that she grew up in foster homes? Was I too easy on the eager kid who did okay, not great, because I know his mother was in jail? Was I too easy on the one who praised me and shared my political beliefs? Did I bend over backwards for the one who quoted Glenn Beck and was watching for any sign of liberal bias? How to keep the head clear and focused on the text: the paragraph after stumbling paragraph rolling out on that screen.

We only had 14 weeks together -- not nearly enough to really learn to write. Or for me to concentrate on these individuals before me, focusing on their complications, their needs, their resistance to learning.

It is not a question of whether I am objective or subjective, but rather a question of how subjective I am and in what direction. Even within the system of criteria, rubrics and points I have devised with few illusions, the matter of how many points I dole out has at least a partly visceral dimension. With writing there is hardly a cut-and-dried system, at least not that I am ready to embrace. Some of it is intuition -- and thus the perils of teacherly misuse of power.

But then again, my job is to try to help my students be better writers, not to solve all their late-adolescent life crises. So it probably doesn't help much to give them a break if they don't deliver what I think they need to know. It doesn't help them, I say primly, and it doesn't stand as good teaching. That's what I say to myself when I make the hard calls: give 'em consequences -- build the connection between what they do and what happens to them as a result. Good old Skinnerian behaviorism. But then, but then, writing IS life. All those complications, all those complexities -- they're what feed and challenge the writer. Tra la, tra la.

So, my body achy and craving relief, I fill the bathtub with the hottest water I can stand and invite my husband in for a long chat. "The point of life is learning how to adapt so you can survive," my husband reflects, the steam puffing at our faces. Our tub is big enough for us to sink in up to our armpits with heaps of bubble bath on top of that, our knees white Pyrenees. Used this way, the two of us sharing it, facing each other, our legs intertwined, the hot water lasts far longer than a quick and thoughtless shower, and it does us both good to take our time. It's something we've learned.

The Clock is Ticking

I'm taking a deep breath as the last hours, last minutes of my fifties slip away. For some reason, it feels both melancholy and surprisingly hopeful -- an occasion worth observing.

Our lovemaking last night was something special -- the connection between two old dogs -- I'd like to say, two sweet old dogs, who know each other very well and have been through some rough times and come through a little bit scarred, but with our gratitude and humor sharp in equal measures. We took a shower together, gently soaping each other up, well aware of our flaws and the niches, aches, wrinkles, bumps and lumps of the bodies we still manage to love. Because these are the bodies we have. And they still ache with surprising desire -- earthy and persistent -- more than you'd think, really, for a couple of old dogs.

I'm now the oldest woman my husband has ever made love to -- by many years, actually -- and he claims that he's looking forward to a continued erotic life with a woman in her sixties. With THIS woman in her sixties. This is, to be sure, uncharted territory for us both.

And today, a long walk through the neighborhood, and I found myself saying, "this is the last walk I'll take in my fifties" and now it's getting ridiculous -- this is the last blog I'll write in my fifties, this is the last cup of herb tea I'll drink in my fifties, this is the last time I'll pee in my fifties, this is the last time....okay, I'll stop now.

Curled in spoons after lovemaking last night, we talked into the almost dark, golden light of two vanilla candles, about how getting old requires finesse. The fear always lurks, a sharp-horned little gremlin -- the inevitable end ahead and god knows what will come between now and then. So we pledged to be happy, to choose to be happy. To not die until we die.

So, here in the last 170 minutes of my fifties, I say, "I'm happy." I am happier tonight by far than when I turned 30, and 40, and 50. I'm proud of that. And relieved -- that my life has taken me to this happier place. Tomorrow, when I'm 60, I'll get up with my husband and pet my cats and go to breakfast at my favorite spot and wander around at the Farmers Market and get together with our friend Teddy and hang out and gossip and dish about UM politics and the sorry state of the world, and tomorrow night Ted and I will go out to dinner together and then to "Hair," a frivolous little trip into nostalgia and we'll come home and find our way back into our happy bed and life will go on, as joyfully and for as long as Fate permits. And so tonight I breathe deeply, from the diaphragm, composing myself, and tuck away, at least for now,l the fear.

Okay, back to the sun. Sigh...

Yes, we made it back, and yes, coming into the yellow California light and 68 degrees and the sun setting big and orange over the water as we watched along Paseo del Mar -- it's all a huge relief. I am emotional in these comings and goings, especially this one, which is the first return since my recent illnesses, and I see as one big agenda a reprogramming of my expectations -- this is a benign and lovely place, and this time I will not be sick.

Had the geezer dinner (the special that ends at 6 p.m.) at Chicago Ribs and talked about giving up dreams. I know that sounds gloomy indeed, but it's a reality of my age, a new element to how I look at life. How will the rest of my life be? What do I want to do? What do I have to do? This is the first year that my denial about aging cracked a little, when a certain weariness and impatience with professional commitments requiring the adrenalin of ambition kicked in. We held hands across the table and reaffirmed our love. Whoever we are, looking at each other -- that's who we love. There is liberation in these gentle evolutions.

And now back in time to snuggle into the loveseat with my favorite blanket in the San Pedro living room, Ted in his LazYBoy, to watch Lehrer News Hour and peacefully contemplate the quiet pleasures of the next 10 days. Maybe it was the reassuring sunset on a familiar stretch of Paseo del Mar that did it -- I feel a little salute, a hug from the world. Reason for hope is not absurd. There is reason to hope.

Bicoastal Blues

What does it mean, really, to have the kind of life that shuttles me back and forth with regularity from one latitude -- the one with not enough sun, Vit. D or youth, the one just a few miles south of the halfway point between the equator and the n. pole -- and another -- the one with sea and cliff and rainbows of color and too damn many people and cars and overstimulation?

Here I go again, embedded in the airport part of my life, competing in the NWA World Club for one of the chairs near a three-pronged plug, the chairs with black faux marble ovals that can be pulled out to support the computer. We all make a beeline (interesting metaphor -- will it become archaic if the bees die off, or, if the bees die off will we too, making it a moot metaphor?-- for these chairs which work very well, something like the desks with pull out armrests in college classrooms. Only for grownups who need and want extra padding for our derrieres. People graze the ever diminishing choices of snacks up here in the "club" you have to pay for, where the frosted glass doors swing open at your approach and you have to show a card and drivers' license. It's a luxury to be up here, maybe shameful in these times, but I don't feel apologetic. I paid for my membership and Ted's with the honest work of my "pen," my cursor, my Puritanical drive. Didn't charge it. Didn't get a bailout from the U.S. Government for it. Don't fly my private jet anyplace for any reason.

And we upgraded, using precious miles accumulated from our air peripatetic life, to first class. Another luxury I crave and want and want and want -- more space, more privacy, select access to the tiny bathroom (only 20 people or so use the lst class loo) and a flight attendant for only us..."would you like the croissant or the pasta?" "Would you like some more hot tea?" Sometimes they call you by name, from their little lst class chart. "Ms. Worth, would you like a blanket?"

We arrange these comforts, at some cost to ourselves and with the more-than-a-twinge of moral upbraiding that accompanies our mutually guilt-freighted upbringings -- Ted's Catholic childhood in Brunswick, Maine, my Protestant rectitudes of mid-Ohio -- out of a kind of desperate need for safety, space -- the distances we have to traverse to sustain our chosen unusual life large and long. It is sometimes confusing but we do it out of love and commitment -- and a dogged primal drive to protect ourselves and cosset ourselves in the unnatural realm of planes and flying at 38,000 feet -- for love.

Long Day, New Poem

Ted and I have a ritual of ringing my mother's Chinatown dinner bell when we think the longest day of the year is over. The wait proved to be a muse. Read it fast. I'll pull a Rappleye and "poof" it after a day.



*poof*

Okay, readers, here's a new draft. It, too, will go poof in a day.

*poof #2*

Only a Cold Hearted Sourpuss Would Object

I'm a married het for same sex marriage. I'm happy for the gay and lesbian couples in California who are getting married today. I do not understand the protesters who see these joyful acts of commitment as threatening to anything. What's the problem? It's love. The more the better. It's a civil rights issue. These judges are not "activist judges" as one dour critic put it this morning on NPR -- they are judges paying serious and responsible attention to the Constitution.

But more to the point, weddings are just so much fun -- tribal events that involve neither war nor death. My first wedding was great -- in my back yard, with lots of hugging and champagne under the leafy maples. My late father in his ministerial robes read I Cor. 13 and gently launched us; my niece, now a prospering physician, was our bashful flower girl. it was a fabulous day and made me happy to be alive. My second wedding, on the cliffs of San Pedro, was one of the best days of my life: full of hope and the milk of human kindness -- my handsome smiling husband in his straw hat and his arm around me -- a day of flowers and great food and sweet affirmations: everybody in purple leis, dancing in our driveway while the July 4 fireworks popped sensationally over the LA Harbor. We renamed the holiday, henceforth our anniversary, Interdependence Day.

Sourpusses who would deny this outpouring of l'amour to others are hard-hearted and mean. Here's to love and lots of it.

On Not Being A First Wife

Wm. Kittredge: Middle Aged Love

Reading about the recently deceased Stewart Mott and his mother Ruth Rawlings Mott, I got to thinking about what it means not to be a man's first wife. Ruth Rawlings was C.S. Mott's fourth wife (according to the New York Times, though Wikipedia says she was his third -- I trust the Times more). At any rate, she was his last wife. At the time of their nuptials, he was 59 and she was 33. They were married 39 years. They had three kids and she outlived him by 26 years. Perhaps what I've heard about their courtship (below) isn't true -- that strumpet part and the window-climbing part -- but still, she appears to have had a vivifying effect on the rich old guy, who lived to be 98. The official biography says they met in Baltimore, a long way from Applewood's accessible leaded-glass defenestrations.

I'm my husband's third wife, and he is my second husband. (I was my first husband's second wife and he has since remarried his third wife, for whom he is her second husband. Thus it goes in the 21st century: eight of us all told in this marital geneology, five women and three men. Among us, interestingly, we produced only six kids).

Anyway, I happen to have had a chance to know my present husband briefly when he was on his second marriage, when I ran across him in Tonga. While we scandalously connected under the palm trees and never forgot each other's charms, he had a reputation for being arrogant, noisily opinionated and confrontational. He was. I fell for that street smart Alpha Dog in 1976, but I can see how it caused trouble in his rambunctious life back in the States.

When I met him again in 2001, he was 59, the same age as C.S. Mott when he married Ruth. I quickly ascertained that my old friend had seriously mellowed. He had been through ruinously hard times of professional and romantic turmoil. He had survived, but was, to quote an environmentalist I heard speak this week, deeply "adapted and mitigated." And the man he is today dramatically better suits me than when we first collided in our youthful heats. We've talked about this a lot: what if we'd decided to give up everything at the time to marry each other then? I think it would have been disastrous, despite our intense physical attraction.

I'm grateful not just to him or to the vagaries of life that polished his rough edges, but also to his first two wives. While they might look back on their marriages to my husband with exasperation, he learned from them and that made him a better husband for me.

Likewise, my own wildness has thankfully subsided. I used to want everything from a man, and when he failed me in even small ways (I broke up with one guy because I didn't like the way he chewed his food) I'd quickly dump him. I was the original mindless recycler -- piling men away in bins and never caring where they went from there. I thrived on adding up "experience" and cottoned far more to the conquest than the follow-through; in that regard, a therapist once suggested, I was playing out an extended agitated depression and frantic approval-seeking. I've calmed down. I'm still sometimes subject to bursts of post-menopausal flurries, but in general now I'm in a much more appreciative, less edgy, less judgmental place than I once was. My husband has learned to listen and, god forbid, open up his feelings to me. (Cue the Morris Albert) I've learned to relax and be grateful, to let him be. (Well, okay, in general. I'm still evolving.) I love his mature masculinity. I contend the ripening of many men in their fifties and sixties makes them finally able to be good companions for, um, women of a certain age. They don't care as much about fighting and proving. They appreciate tenderness.

Sometimes we're hit by waves of the mortality blues, and we turn to each other and say in quavering voices, "I wish I could be young for you again." Those are bittersweet moments that remind us to Be Here Now. I feel lucky my husband loves to touch my old dame curves. And I told him I'll sit in his lap from time to time as long as he will have me.

So, here's to being a third wife to a second husband. Three cheers for the fullness of conjugal contentment.

The Hutch of Womanhood

Furniture makes me feel grown up. Even that word -- furn-i-ture -- sounds substantial, reliable, and reassuring. I suppose at my age this should be far past relevant, but anybody over 30 knows there's nothing about one's years on earth that guarantees maturity. I'm always on a scavenger hunt for signs and symbols that I've made a dent on life's confusions. Furniture, for whatever idiosyncratic reason, seems to say "yes, you have."

This matters today because Ted and I recently added a large, significant piece of furniture to our household. It's a tall oak china cabinet in two heavy pieces -- what my mother called a buffet and what Ted and I have been calling a "hutch." The latter seems the right moniker -- it's big, yet designed for peaceful, cozy purposes, like housing the remnants of my Great-Grandma Youtz's flowery china and my collection of cordial glasses. And, of course, "hutch" is also the word for a rabbit's house. What a language! How can anybody who speaks English not be a poet?

Anyway, there was once a time when I was proud that all my "stuff" fit into my '67 Bug. Those were days of heady road trips across the U.S.A., as I freely flew down freeways, 10 and 40 and 80, east to west to east to west, enjoying my unencumbered youth. I think what I had was a bunch of hippie clothes and a "stereo" in three pieces: the turntable and two speakers that slid onto the right and left. There would have been a couple of boxes of books (Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson) and a box of "records" -- yes, children, that's what we called them -- Grateful Dead, The Band, Joni Mitchell, Crosby-Stills-Nash-and-Young, Cream, Janis Joplin, Beatles, of course. And a few keepsakes like a small black ivory elephant my dad brought me from the U.N. and a vase given to me by Sadie Russ, a 98-year-old woman in Akron, Ohio who had been friends of my long-dead grandmother.

I still have all that stuff -- well, not the Bug or the stereo, but most of the rest. Eventually the open road, actually and metaphorically, lost its luster as it so often does when one's knees and neck begin to go, and I wanted not a million choices, but anchors to one spot, one house, one man. I wanted to get to know one tree intimately and watch it grow. I wanted to get to know one man and I wanted him to stay awhile. I wanted dishes and cloth napkins and rugs and a real bed with an actual headboard.

I learned that furniture doesn't keep a marriage together, but can outlast it. One of the hardest things I had to walk away from in my first marriage was a dining room table with leaves to seat a dozen. We'd had years of memorable dinner parties there, and it meant something to me. I gave it up. But it is somewhat easier to replace a table than a husband: when I left that marriage, one of the first things I did was buy another one (a table, that is!) -- smaller but solid, suited to what I hoped would be my intrepid solitary life. The emotional reward was mixed but irresistible.

Later, my present husband and I bought a dining room table and big chairs that please me immensely. They haven't been seasoned by the rowdy soirees of my thirties and forties, but they were made by Mennonites in Pigeon, Michigan -- built with deliberate, loving craftsmanship, I like to think, that took some time. When we bought it I told Ted, "Some day I'll need the 'hutch' to go with this." He remembered, and this year, in the sign of the Scorpio -- mine -- he delivered.

It matches the table and chairs and has glass doors and a mirrored back and built-in recessed lights that make my granny's china sparkle. The other night I left the lights on dim, just so that if I woke up in the middle of the night I could come downstairs and look at all my keepsakes shimmering in the dark.

It doesn't change the world or feed a baby, but it makes me feel rooted and substantial. I have a hutch. I must really be a woman now.

Jefferson and Dionysius in the Back Yard

I’ve been thinking about back yards. As I write this I’m sitting in a place with no backyard – with no yard at all. It’s an apartment on a steep hillside overlooking the L.A. harbor, and all the other little bungalows and apartment buildings, terraced by law so as not to cut off the view of the row above, are so close together I can hear my neighbor on one side snore and on the other side, sneeze. Sometimes we yell “Gesundheit!”

People cultivate cacti, aloe, portulaca, pansies and hibiscus in pots on their tiny porches and decks. Here and there is a nook just big enough for a thick-necked palm or a medusa’s head of bougainvillea. But no back yards.

One can develop a taste for it: if you can at least see and hear the clanking, ever varied harbor, with its container ships, liners, tugboats, yachts, flags, cranes, bridges, foghorns and of course, the sparkling sea stretching out beyond the breakwater – all that business you don’t have to tend to but which goes on with or without you -- you can actually relax and forget about your claustrophobia in your microscopic high-density bit of real estate. The harbor’s a big complicated front yard, hard-won and shared by everybody on the hill.

For back yards, you have to go to the Midwest.

At home in Flint, I have a fine back yard. Midwesterners generally do: small or large, usually with a swathe of grass that we mow – one week diagonal, another straight across, another up and down. The night after you mow it, it smells fabulous and for most of the summer, there are fireflies courting in the fresh-cut blades. I’m thinking about how sweet that is.

Back yards offer solace and – old-fashioned word – surcease.

One of my first memories is sitting in a galvanized iron tub in a back yard in Ohio, cooling off on a hot August day. Another is shelling peas with my mother -- on our laps, bowls of fat pods, fresh picked and still sun-hot from the garden. I remember how happy she was -- peas right out of her own garden! We ate them that night.

I got married once in my back yard –the leafy triangle behind the 70-year-old house of my first domestic era. We piled up a feast on a long table, and we sat out there drinking champagne until 3 a.m. The next day two dozen plastic corks poked up from the grass like shuttlecocks.

I celebrated my second marriage in a back yard, too – new husband, new house, new back yard to seed with memories. After dinner al fresco, we put up a big screen and showed an outdoor movie of our California rites. We served drinks out of the garage and lit sparklers after dark.


Back yards can be theaters for revenge. A buddy of mine said when he got divorced the only thing he took was his Weber grill – totem of the back yard life. I like to imagine him using it still, vindicated with every juicy bratwurst in his new, happier life.

Back yards are our own little nature preserves, where we exclaim over cardinals, yell at squirrels, equivocate over bunnies and try to get tomatoes to grow. Sometimes, they’re graveyards. Our late cat Joey, a transplant from California who zestfully claimed our Flint back yard, is buried under the bird feeder where he loved to lurk. We had a funeral for him one summer evening after a game of croquet (another backyard must) and after a few toasts, we took turns spooning him into the cone of good Flint dirt we’d hollowed out for his feline eternity.

We like to own our back yards, and in the city, of course, we put up fences – not out of hostility or fear, like at the Mexican border or around the Green Zone, but, I contend, out of respect for our neighbors and a deep-seated taste for privacy. I think we bound our back yards too because we revel in idiosyncrasy and we want that undisputed spot where we can be ourselves.

Not to get too high-falutin’, but it just occurred to me that Midwestern yards reflect an itchy tension in the U.S. of A.: the front yard is sort of Hamiltonian, where we defer to the majority and keep up a respectable, potted-geranium face; the back yard is Jeffersonian, where we assert our personal liberty and, say, flaunt our taste in hostas or let the crabgrass go wild or put a terra cotta Buddha under the mulberry or even, say, hopefully throw out the occasional cannabis seed if we damn well please. Front yard, Apollo; back yard, Dionysius.

So, my fellow Americans, there’s something worth fighting for, if you ask me: the right to back yards. The right to those earthy squares of liberty, where, on certain summer nights, you can lie down on a quilt and listen to the cicadas until, as James Agee once remembered, the night is “one blue dew,” the stars “wide and alive…each like a smile of great sweetness.”

This essay is also available in www.eastvillagemagazine.org under "Village Life: A Smile of Great Sweetness." Photos by Ted.

The Palmer Method at the Bellaire B&B

OK, so yeah, maybe it was the relaxation of the deep jacuzzi and eucalpytus massages; maybe it was the plush bed and marble fireplace; or maybe the combination of great taste and kindness of our hosts, Jim and Dave. But when the sickness hit, we were so feverish, about the only thing we could manage to do was lie side by side and snuggle.

Then the most marvelous thing: my husband started writing on my back with the eucalpytus oil. Murmuring that he'd studied the Palmer Method of cursive writing from the nuns way back in Brunswick, Maine, he gently sent me missive after missive. Ah, this sweet man knows I love my language.

It's great being old coots in bed. We get to do anything we want, including the Palmer Method. There's one reason to keep cursive alive.

Pentimento on M-10

I don't often go north from Flint in winter. Thursday I did, traveling alone to Ferris State for a conference. Driving those roads gets me melancholy, thinking about my first husband. He spent blue collar summers up there and the scrubby lots and pines in rows and brown rivers all touched his heart and filled his poetry. Used to be the only time I'd go up there was with him, waiting watchfully for the sweet sadness to descend on him around Evart. I loved that part of him. Remembering his love for white birches doesn't go away with the end of marriage, now six years past.

But one lays down new memories, even in old territories, a pentimento. Is that the word? I look it up. Oh, man, yes, that's what I mean. Rooted in the Italian for "repent, " the artist changing his mind, painting over that hand that didn't look right, making the eyes turn another way, reangling the troublesome feet, paint over paint. Regret and trying again.

So, my trip a pentimento. MapQuest took me up 75 to M-10, as usual -- 85 miles an hour easy all the way to that cool rest stop at Clare with the cast iron sculptures and the good bathrooms. But after that, M-10 narrows down to a two-lane and if you've got any sense you take a deep breath, not try to pass every pickup or old Dodge, and just pay attention.

Going west in the late afternoon, I hit ochre sunset slanting off wide fields of snow. The brown this time of year is beautiful, every twig limned and distinct, every hawk feather, it seemed to me, sharply visible in the clear late winter air, shadows of the stone houses and outbuildings extending halfway back to the fenceposts, the stiff remains of cutdown cornstalks elegant contrast to sensuous curves of snow.

Last week when I flew back to Michigan from California, gloomy and resistent to my all-too-familiar Midwest, the view from the air after the Mississippi River was like a reverse Wizard of Oz, stunning change from technicolor to black and white -- or brown and white, really -- a shock of subtraction. But driving into the sunset the other day on the old roads, thinking about a lost marriage and heading toward something new and good, the land seemed rich and textured and full of lovely subtlety again.

Reader, I Married Him

Five years ago this week, on a frigid night in Flint, I got take out shrimp from a Chinese place, ate it alone in my high-ceilinged lonely apartment, and went to bed feeling isolated and depressed. At 4 a.m. I jolted awake in a panic, my heart wildly racing, my neck burning, my arms tingling, my legs cramping, and my stomach nauseous. Desperate and afraid, I got up, walked around and around the wooden floors in my stocking feet. I was convinced I was having a heart attack. I didn't want to die alone. I forced myself to get dressed and drove myself on a snowy, icy freeway to Genesys Hospital, where I stayed for two days for tests and more tests, until they finally assured me that it was not a heart attack and sent me home, shaken but relieved.

I remembered this anniversary of sorts Sunday night when I watched the last half of the new Masterpiece Theater version of Jane Eyre. I remembered that Jane Eyre, my 2002 panic attack and my own Rochester, the man I married in 2005, are all tied together. On the way home from work tonight, a full moon glowed overhead and I could swear there was a full moon that week, too, one I could see from my hospital bed in the cardiac unit. I remembered I'd been reading Jane Eyre that winter, and I thought I remembered that I had written notes in it as I'd waited anxiously for one test after another in the hospital. At home, I rummaged from room to room. I really wanted to find the book. I wanted to reflect on that terrifying moment of my body's fragility, and what I might have noted about it. And I finally did-- find Jane Eyre, that is, pushed behind some old CDs in a downstairs shelf.

The semester had just begun and I was teaching Women's Lit for the first time, replacing a professor who was on sabbatical. I had left my husband of 15 years the previous spring, and that first long winter was rough. We were all still reeling from 9/11, of course, and on top of everything I was in the throes of a turbulent, mercurial menopause. Everything was hitting me hard. I was 52 years old and it seemed hopelessly improbable that I could begin again. There was too much history. Who did I think I was, starting over? Yet there I was, having wrenched myself from one life and thrown myself into another.

I adopted Professor Zeff's syllabus as she had always taught it, without changing a thing, and there at the top of the reading list was Jane Eyre. I'd read it in college 30 years before, but never since. So I was madly reading it again, trying to keep ahead of my students, the 50 or so women and three men staring back at me as I reported in each day from what felt like a fabulously irrational new life. I had reconnected with an old friend from Peace Corps, a man I hadn't seen for 25 years, and he'd been flying in to Flint from LA to see me about once a month. I loved him, but it seemed impossible to plunge into a new life with him so hard on the demise of my old. I was still in deep mourning for the death of the dream of my marriage. I could only think of what was lost. But when Ted came to visit, sometimes I began to forget the grief and let in a little pleasure. We connected physically, and I was startled and amazed.

When I set off for the hospital that night, gripping the wheel and expecting to be attacked by pain all the way, part of me was still planning to show up for class the next day, and so I had tucked my copy of Jane Eyre into my purse. Inside it now, there is still a folded menu from one of my hospital meals -- it says "fruit cocktail/jello/dry creamer/decaf coffee/whipped potatoes/hot beef sandwich/carrots/no salt." On it I wrote, "Hospital food really is nasty, still we eat it because we're hungry." By we, apparently I meant me and Rita, in the next bed over, whom I wrote was "impossibly frail with a mastectomy on the left side from the same year her husband died." I cried when she told me. She, too, thought that she was having a heart attack, and in her case, she was right.

I kept going back to Jane Eyre. "What good it would have done me at that time," Jane writes, returning to Thornfield after her first dramatic encounter with Mr. Rochester in the moors, "to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined." I wrote on the menu, "smiley faces everywhere. Darling, honey, kiddo." There was a National Geographic with an article about the aurora borealis. I found it comforting. And a ten-year-old issue of Prevention Magazine on the windowsill.

Eventually, of course, Jane falls in love and after she first touches Rochester and he clings to her hand, she goes back to her room "tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea," intensely sensing a "freshening gale, wakened by hope." I'm not sure how far I read in the novel those two nights at Genesys, but I know that the book gave me hope. I began to believe that whatever time was left in my life, it was good -- this passion I had, to begin again in love.

From California, crazy with worry, Ted finally found out where I was and called my hospital room. "Why didn't you tell me what was going on?" he demanded, crazily angry that I had left him out. "I want to come out there. Do you want me to come?" I wasn't sure I could ask anything of him, nor sure if I wanted to. Or dared to. But I knew I'd just terrified myself and I was afraid of being alone. "I want you to come," I finally said, and the next day, there he was, hugging me back to life in my apartment, the old radiators chugging out noisy heat. That weekend I let him take care of me. That first night when we snuggled into bed, he put his arms around me and whispered, "Were you afraid?" And when I said yes and finally gave in to tears, thoroughly and unapologetically in the moment, with its terror and joy, I knew something big was happening -- to me, and to us. Things were different between us from that moment on.

And my beloved copy of Jane Eyre, with the page predominantly earmarked where she announces, "Reader, I married him," is here in front of me now, a cherished artifact of starting over, of a sea change, of a molting that has been the biggest and most wonderful surprise of my life. Early Happy Valentine's Day to you all.

Happy Holiday Doubt in the Pedro Sun

Christmas Eve in San Pedro -- the day awash with that energizing California sun streaming in through the bedroom drapes, getting in my husband's eyes as we roll over and click on the morning talk shows. Out here, Stephanopoulos and Russert start at 8 a.m. and I love lolling on the bed, what's left of the beleaguered LA Times splayed around me on the comforter. I can alternately watch Meet the Press, read the paper, stare out at the harbor and sip coffee reheated from last night's dinner party in big red Christmas mugs. What languid and lovely multitasking!

In the "Current" section, my husband finds something he wants to read out loud, an article about the myths of atheism, while that bountiful Christian communitarian, Rev. Rick Warren, robust and at ease in his tie-less pinstriped shirt allows as how he can be pro-life evangelical and an AIDs activist; "being sick is not a sin," an inserted box quoting his wife Kay reassuringly reminds us.

"I'm starting to like this guy," I say. He's easier to watch than Joel Osteen, that glazed-looking evangelical cyborg whose Christian smile looks botoxed and demented. We debate whether Rick Warren or Mitch Albom is richer, and I figure it'd be a close call, what with Albom's adorably heaven-heavy oeuvre. We reflect on Barbara Walters's special on heaven and how it seems to us people believe in heaven because they hope they'll get to see a lost loved one again. We both find that poignant, if delusional.

So my husband picks up the LA Times again and reads, "Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse," Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason contends. Under Myth #2 -- "Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history" -- he argues, "There is no society in history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."

Oh, music to my Christmas Eve ears. I come from Quaker forebears, folks who got run out of England and then Nantucket and then South Carolina because of their religion, and I grew up in a passionately fervant Christian home, so appreciation of freedom of religion is deep in my bones. This history is also part of my own passionate suspicion of the mischief religion propagates on nonbelievers; I'm one of them. As an adult I am much more comfortable with reverent doubt and not-knowing. I agree with Harris's view, under "Atheists are arrogant," "When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance, it is intellectual honesty."

Well, I'm happy in my nonbelief. This time of year I like to play one of my personal Christmas carols, Randy Newman's "God's Song." I can't resist quoting it here:

"Lord, if you won't take care of us
Won't you please please let us be?"

to which God replies:

"You must all be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why i love mankind
You really need me
That's why i love mankind."

Anyway, eventually my husband and I clambered out of bed and clicked off the tube and went out for a walk in Pt. Fermin Park and breakfast overlooking the marina at 22nd Street Landing, The sheer beauty of our surroundings seemed to still our impulse to cogitate. As Harris asserts, "from the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation." Indeed. Evidence of this still gorgeous, if troubled, earth is all around me this day before Christmas, and it is sufficient.

Fortune Cookie

Well I was out in California with my boyfriend when my ex emailed me that he was having a party, and would I come along with everybody else in what I’ve taken to calling our tribe, the tribe that shifted like a piece of flaky shale after our divorce, even though everybody kept trying to act like everything was the same but really it wasn’t, and then finally one by one people would drink a little bit too much at some party and say, “It’s not the way it used to be” and I’d shift from one foot to the other and feel guilty, because I thought I might have started it all. My ex suggested that we all bring a gift for his new girlfriend who just got accepted into some master’s program, and we would celebrate that and the new paint job (plum, school bus yellow, rust red) in the rooms of the house where my ex and I got married in what I’d have to say was a sweet event even back when the walls were ivory and cream.

Then later he wrote to me again and asked me not to come.

Something about her mother being there and how you couldn’t expect an 83-year-old to understand.

I didn’t tell anybody else in the tribe that I had been disinvited. Back home from California, alone that Friday night, I decided I would party by myself. I was in a dangerous mood, bound to prove I could be just fine on my own. I told myself I wanted to be alone. I wanted carry-out Chinese: there’s something about those generous little white boxes, the piles of rice, the feel of the sticks on the teeth, the clean taste of the delicate wood. I went to a place I hadn’t been to since we split up, Young Sing, on the grimy East Side.

I used to go there with him – there first, then the movie store. It was how we spent our Friday nights. But now I felt like a female Frankenstein, walking in, awkward, clunky. I wanted to order what I always used to order, but I couldn’t think of the name of the dish, the way to ask for those crunchy noodles. I used to get them here, there used to be a woman who spoke English behind the glass window who knew what I liked. Where was she now? Confused and startled that my mind would not help me remember the name of that dish, those noodles, I sputtered, oh, okay, just give me beef and broccoli. I didn’t want to act like I had to buy my Chinese food from some American to get it right, and I sure didn’t want to make their Friday night harder by not knowing what I wanted, but I did want something. But what were those crunchy noodles called? I was struggling, fumbling one more time to explain myself.

I sat down at a cold linoleum table to try to find what it was I wanted on the menu. Surely it would pop out at me, but it was if it had disappeared, a star that used to be in the sky but wasn’t anymore, a mystery. I felt crazy and upset. Two black women were eating mu shu at the next table, talking about work, their lousy boss who’s going through menopause. They looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.

I want the crunchy noodles, I said one more time. Then, finally, a spark: It’s the Cantonese-style chicken chow mein. That’s what I want.

Crunchy, then, the Chinese woman said, visibly rolling her eyes at the Chinese man in the hot kitchen behind. Or did I just think she did? Forget the beef and broccoli? Just the Cantonese-style chow mein, then? No beef and broccoli?

That’s it, Cantonese-style chow mein, I said with relief. That was the dish I always used to get. The black women wiped the corners of their mouths delicately and re-applied their makeup. They both had earthy bodies and they were dressed in their work clothes and they looked great, comfortable in their curves and big earrings and their beautiful fancy round hairdos. They seemed like old friends, relaxing after a hard week. They seemed competent and spunky. I was envious of their obvious ease. I was in my grey sweat pants and a tan sweatshirt and I realized there was a spot of something on it, right between the breasts, as if something had dribbled off my chin. My hair kept falling into my eyes.

So I waited.

On the table, an April 1993 New Yorker. A Donna Tartt story about a child actor, now grown, who had to visit kids at a cancer hospital. I thought this was the same New Yorker that had always been here, all those times I came with my husband, the one single New Yorker, as worn at the edges as it had ever been, but not particularly more so. What was a New Yorker doing here, anyway, in this shabby neighborhood where half the girls are fast and the other half are pregnant with their second kids and they’re not even 21? Knife fights and drive-by shootings around here hit the papers every Sunday morning; not long ago one teenage twin thrill-killed the other in somebody’s basement.

Right down the street was Angelo’s, a local coney joint where they once had to close the place down because of a grease fire. I once took my new boyfriend when he was here from California, and I wanted him to see how campy it was and to savor along with me the local color, the tattooed guys and the senior citizens with oily pony tails and the waitresses biting their pencils and chewing out the trade. But that time the place was just awful, bits of cigarette ashes and egg yolks on the table, everything dirty and depressing, and he said, “Why did you bring me here?” and he didn’t want to touch his food.

And down the street from Angelo’s, a funeral home where I’d mourned two suicides and a grisly fatal accident, Johnny Johnson and Bruno Valdez, one dead musician each in the creepy side-by-side rooms. I can’t believe I just remembered their names, those great musicians, blasted into forever by some drunk.

And a bar, the El Toro, where I once tried to order sparkling water with a bunch of my slumming artsy friends and the waitress popped her gum and spat out, “No sparkling water, honey, this is the East Side.”

So the New Yorker on the table at Young Sing was a miracle, that one ten-year-old New Yorker, something made and sent out and saved from way before my life changed, way before 9/11 changed everything, a piece of innocence, I almost wanted to say, a curiosity. I felt anchored after all. If that New Yorker was there, I knew I’ve been here before. I knew there was a dish there that I wanted, that one with those crunchy noodles I couldn’t get anywhere else in town, the dumb old town I’d lived in way longer than I ever thought I would. Maybe I was one of those ones who never got out. But, there was a New Yorker on that table, and I read it again, turning its pages sacramentally and emotionally as if it was the Gutenburg Bible.

Then I had my Cantonese-style chicken chow mein and a box of crunchy noodles, two white boxes in a brown bag, and I was back in my car. Pulling out there was always a problem for me – I was always scared of turning left, but this time, going to my new house, it made more sense to turn right – a blessing that I didn’t have to turn left out of Young Sing’s and risk losing my re-arranged and measly messed-up life.

Back in the house, I moved the easy chair around because I couldn’t yet figure out the feng shui and I didn’t have it all set up right to watch TV. I couldn’t decide yet where everything should go. I poured a glass of merlot from a half-empty bottle somebody left at the housewarming two months before. Settling down, finally, I watched “Laurel Canyon,” about a bunch of cool people who really weren’t so cool, and I ended up crying when they reconciled around the swimming pool. The part where the son grabs his mother’s toe and holds on, like a baby might, got me going, and I cried and cried.

And that’s when I opened the fortune cookie. The little white strip read, “You will be welcome at any gathering.”

God. I said it out loud. I didn’t bother to crack a smile – who cared – it would have come out like a clownish grimace and I thought, who needs fiction. And then I poured myself another glass of wine and toasted to the East Side.

Sitting there, I knew that when I called my boyfriend who was in California and didn’t have any history to speak of with the East Side, I was going to cry about it all again, and I knew what he was going to say. He would say, you feel what you feel – let it flow through you. He’s a great guy, my boyfriend, an old hippie, the best. He would say, every time you’re sad you’re letting some of it go. Don’t stop. He would tell me, that’s the classy way to handle it, to have your merlot and feel what you feel. But in the meantime I read my fortune again. I was going to be welcome at any gathering. But then I just kept crying and crying, tears dropping on the chicken chow mein and chunky noodles in white boxes on my lap, in the Laz-Y-Boy, the credits on the sad movie rolling.