A plague on your house

Monday: Once I start reading a book, I usually make myself finish reading it.  Well, that used to be true. I'm now abandoning a book less than halfway through, for the third time this year. I was reading Shana Alexander's Happy Days, and had every intention of finishing it, until I found myself pages and pages into an exhaustive exegesis of the history of Tin Pan Alley, from George M. Cohan to Irving Berlin to the Gershwins, complete with song lyrics, contract terms, and a side foray into the founding of ASCAP. (Well, that part was interesting.) I mean, am I writing a thesis? Why do I need to know the price of sheet music in 1924?

And so now, apparently, I'm a bibliographic Shark Tank. Authors have no more than 100 pages (maybe 50, if you're trying my patience with royalty schemes for hundred-year-old popular songs) to convince me to keep reading until the end. I've never actually seen the show, so I don't know what the hosts actually say to candidates who don't make the cut, but whatever it is, consider it said to Shana Alexander.

So with Shana Alexander fired or banished or whatever the Shark Tank equivalent is, I just started reading The Zelmenyaners, which according to Rokhl Kafrissen's Jewish Book Council review, is "the funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning you'll read this year." 

I know, right? I read novels about Soviet central planning all the time, and they're not usually that funny. 

I think I'm still missing the Cazalets, so I guess I needed another saga about a family with an unusual last name that includes a Z. The Cazalets and the Zelmenyaners both live in turbulent times, but of course I'd rather be in London during the Blitz than Minsk (or anywhere else in the Soviet Union) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I'm only a few pages in, but I'm going to guess that the humor is of the gallows variety.  I'll report back later. 

*****
Tuesday: It used to be, in the good old days, that baseball games were cancelled in the event of rain. That is, except during seasons when there are more rainouts than games, and the league is desperate to cram in as many games as possible before the season ends and the playoffs begin. And that's why I just spent two hours standing in the cold rain, cheering on a bunch of dispirited, mud-stained, bedraggled 12-year-old boys who weren't any happier to be there than I was. And it's going to rain again tomorrow. Maryland three days before Memorial Day weekend, and it's like monsoon season in the Ganges Delta. What in the actual hell, as they say in high school. 

*****
Wednesday: Today, I looked up the word "website," because I needed to reassure myself that the one-word spelling still prevails in most accepted style guides. I was right, and it does. Then, I had to look up the title of a journal article on drug policy, because I suspected that it had been listed incorrectly in a resume that I was readying for a proposal. I was right about that, too--a word was missing.  But that, as they say, is not the weird part. The weird part came when I clicked on Google search again, and was offered "websites to buy drugs" as a search option, before I even started to type. This was at work, naturally, so our IT department probably thinks that I'm trying to score illegal painkillers on the Internet.

"Hitman,"  for your information, is one word. So no need to Google it. Because you don't want Google to go and helpfully search "How to recruit an assassin," or "Murder for hire, cheap" the next time you want to look up movie times.

I mean, really

*****
Thursday: This weather is cordially invited to suck it.

*****
Friday: I have so much to do this weekend that I can't keep it all straight in my brain, which isn't too sharp under the best of circumstances. Exhibit A, for example: I have too much to do, and yet here I am, blogging about nothing. Is that what a smart person does? Maybe not. Maybe not. 

But it's still Memorial Day Weekend, which means that it's summer, which means that all is well. I have no problems that summer can't solve.

*****
Saturday: I inadvertently published this mess last night, and a bunch of people appear to have read it. So I apologize. I feel like a chef who just fed his customers a plate full of undercooked chicken.

*****

When I was 9 or 10, I saw a movie--I can't remember its title, nor most of its plot, but I do remember that it was about a pioneer family who endured epic, cinematic hardships as they sought to establish a homestead in the wilds of the 19th century American west. Although I don't remember much about this movie, one particularly horrifying scene is burned into my consciousness, probably forever at this point. The heroine, dressed in what a 1970s movie producer thought that a pioneer woman would have worn (gingham, pinafore, bonnet, lace-up boots), heard a strange buzzing, humming sound, which grew louder and louder until, overcome with curiosity, she stepped outside the log cabin onto the barren sun-baked dusty prairie, where (OMG, it's too much to think about) she was suddenly swarmed by cicadas, which swirled around her, landing on her by the hundreds, as she clung to her bonnet, shrieking.

I'm going to go have a drink.

OK, I'm fine now. I didn't really have a drink, because it's 8 in the morning, but I can't overemphasize the effect that this scene had on my growing and impressionable 10-year-old mind. So my windows are open now, despite the light rain (and the rain! How is it possible that there's any rain even left?) and the cicadas are louder than Metallica, and what with 40 days and 40 nights of near-nonstop rain and an actual, legitimate plague of fucking locusts, I feel like I live in the Old Testament.

But it's still OK. Because it's SUMMER!

*****

Annual countdown to opening day: T minus 1. 

Actual Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend conversations.

12YO: OK. I think I'm ready. I have my hat, my towel, my suit, extra shirt, goggles, and wallet.
Me: Put that towel back in the bathroom, and get a beach towel.
12YO: OK. I just like this one because I can roll it up really really small. By the way, I have $28 in my wallet. Is that enough for the snack bar, do you think?
Me: ---

15YO: I have to work at 3. Is it going to be sunny? Do I need my sunglasses?
Me: I don't know, but just bring them anyway. It can't hurt to have them.
15YO: OK. Do you have a whistle? I can't find my whistle.
(I actually have two whistles, for swim meet refereeing purposes.)
Me: Yes. Here you go.
15YO: What size is the cork in this?
Me: What? I have no idea.
15YO: See, the ones that have the bigger corks have a better sound, and you don't have to blow as hard. I'm going to go outside and test this.
Me: ---

Apparently, the whistle passed the test. I'm not sure, meanwhile, how a person is supposed to determine the size of the cork in a whistle. I'm not going to find out, either.

*****

Sunday: I suppose I wouldn't normally mind spending a large chunk of the weekend fighting with a giant, unwieldy Word document with multiple authors. Except when the Word document appears to be very close to winning.

Meanwhile, this mess is about as cooked as it's going to be and no one should be in any immediate danger of salmonella, so now I'm going to hit publish for real.  Happy Memorial Day, and bon appetit.

It doesn't seem a year ago to this very day

I love movies, as anyone who has read this blog probably knows. I don't go to movie theaters that often, though; and when I do, it's usually weeks after the movie opens. In fact, I often don't even hear about movies until their theatrical runs are almost over. Who knows what movie lovers did before TV and Netflix.

Because I don't usually see movies when they're new in theaters, I also don't usually notice trailers. Occasionally, though, I see a trailer that makes me really really want to see the movie. In 2015, my kids made me stop what I was doing to watch each of the "Force Awakens" trailers as they were released. I didn't mind, because I love Star Wars. And for a long-time Star Wars fan, there was nothing better than seeing Harrison Ford smile and say, "Chewy. We're home." We saw "The Force Awakens" a week after it was released.

Now, I'm almost Star Wars-level excited about a new movie.  I can't believe that it has taken this long, but someone has finally made a movie about the epic 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. The movie is, of course, titled "Battle of the Sexes," and the trailer soundtrack is Elton John's "Love Lies Bleeding," which is 1973 itself, set to music.

*****

This is, believe it or not, the swimming pool at Kendrick Recreation Center.
You can't see the tennis courts, but they're behind the pool and to the left.
My kids and their swim team friends don't believe my stories about swimming
in shifts because the pool was so crowded during hot Philadelphia summers. 

I was eight years old in 1973, and I really loved tennis. I wasn't good at it--I didn’t have the necessary speed or coordination. It didn’t matter, though, because I still loved to play. I loved hitting a ball against the brick wall down the street from my house. I loved playing on the summer team at the Kendrick Recreation Center and in the juniors tournaments in Fairmount Park (during which I was usually eliminated in the first round). I loved my Wilson Chris Evert racket (wood!) that I’d gotten as a Christmas present. And I LOVED the women’s tennis tour.

I was kind of a girly girl. Not a cheerleader or a pageant aspirant type, but not what anyone would, at that time, have called a “tomboy.” (I hate that word.) I liked clothes, I worried about my hair, and I wanted my ears pierced, which my mother would not allow until I was in high school. I admired stylish, beautiful Chris Evert, with her shining blond ponytail and diamond bracelets sparkling on tanned arms. But Billie Jean King was my favorite. She was different from the other women on the tennis tour. She wasn’t elegant or fashionable or regal. But she was radiant and fierce, and I thought (and still think) that she was beautiful.

*****

I grew up in a rowhouse in a blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood, and attended a parish school with all of the other children of secretaries and sheet metal workers. I’m not sure that I or any of my friends would even have noticed tennis had it not been for Billie Jean and Arthur Ashe, who tried to bring tennis out of the country club and into the public parks. But as much as Billie Jean did to democratize tennis, she did even more for women's equality. She pioneered the then-radical notion that female athletes should make the same money as male athletes. How obvious does it seem today that the men’s and women’s champions at Wimbledon or the US Open should earn the same prize money? It wasn’t even remotely obvious in 1973. It was near-revolutionary.

The Battle of the Sexes was silly and show-businessy, but it was still a landmark event for women’s sports, and Billie Jean was a heroine. At that time (even more than now), women who spoke out for simple fairness and equality for women were often mocked and derided as "women's libbers" or worse. Lots of women were afraid of that kind of mockery--in fact, lots of women still are. They'd rather endure sexual harassment and inequality than have men dismiss them shrill or unattractive. But Billie Jean was fearless. Because she stood up for women's rights, she faced relentless scorn, and not just from Riggs. Like most eight-year-olds, I believed that life should be fair, and I was perpetually outraged by sexism in general, and by the over-the-top chauvinism of Riggs in particular. My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and siblings were all heartily sick of me and Billie Jean and Bobby Riggs by the time the whole thing ended in a decisive victory for Billie Jean.

*****

1973 was a pretty big news year. I paid attention to current events more than most eight-year-olds did, so I knew about the oil embargo, and Vietnam, which was still raging; and the growing Watergate scandal. War and scandal and economic crises meant nothing, though, compared to Billie Jean King shutting Bobby Riggs up, even for five minutes. It felt like a victory not just for women, but for little inner-city working class school girls, too. Billie Jean, who also came from a working-class family, showed girls like me that things were possible, even likely, no matter where you lived, or who your parents were, or whether or not you had the right hair or clothes. My friends and I couldn’t really aspire to Chris Evert’s cool elegance and beauty, but we could all aspire to be like Billie Jean. She looked like our older sisters and cousins, and if we worked hard, we could be like her. We could be fearless, and strong, and really good at something. We could kick ass and take names and still look cute in a tennis dress.

*****

I'm not eight years old anymore, so I know that Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs were both complicated and imperfect people. In fact, there have long been rumors that Riggs threw the match, in exchange for forgiveness of his Mafia-held gambling debts. He and Billie Jean were actually friends, and they remained friends until Riggs died of cancer in 1995.  As an eight-year-old girl who liked a good old-fashioned to-the-death blood feud between good and evil, I would have been appalled to know that Billie Jean King actually liked Riggs, who was pure evil as far as I was concerned. Now, of course, I love Billie Jean even more for her friendship with crazy, loud-mouthed, flamboyant Bobby Riggs, who probably wasn't as much of a chauvinist as he pretended to be for the cameras. Even today, I can think of lots of worse sexists than Bobby Riggs. Not mentioning any names, of course.

*****
The summer of 2017 will probably feel a lot like the summer of 1973. My kids are much older than I was in 1973, but they're still young enough to believe that life should always be fair and that the good guys should always win. Twenty-five, or maybe 35 years from now, movies will be made about the cultural and political earthquakes of their youth, and they'll tell their children what they remember, and what it all meant to them.  And they'll see a trailer, and hear a song, and they'll say "OH MY GOD! THEY FINALLY MADE A MOVIE!" I hope so, at least. 

Like a mother

Monday: I might have dodged the bullet, red-light-camera-wise. And then I nearly ran another red light on my way home today, but "nearly" isn't close enough for Montgomery County to nail me for 75 big ones.

Apparently, I live in a 1940s gangster movie, and this is how we talk, see?

Why do I keep running red lights, and dropping things, and forgetting things, and waking up in a panic (and pretty much remaining there, all day every day?) This is the question that I've been asking myself, and I wonder if I maybe need to change something, or do something, or not do something, so that I can remember what it's like to have a normal breathing rate and a normal resting pulse.

It occurred to me just a little while ago, for example, as I ran the vacuum cleaner over the nearly spotless floor, that cleaning could actually be simply a response to the presence of dirt, rather than a compulsion-driven daily routine. Maybe the house only needs cleaning when it's not already clean, right?

Oh, sure. And maybe I could stop converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, too.

*****

Tuesday: Last night of class. Weeknight drinking is very rare for me, but spend a year teaching eighth graders about the Holy Spirit, and see if you don't need a drink. I have few problems that margaritas and guacamole and chips can't solve.

*****

Wednesday: Why, Washington Capitals? WHY? Why do you break my heart every year? Pittsburgh. Crosby. Phil Kessel. Evgeni Fucking Malkin. Damn it.

*****
Thursday: Apparently, I'm the type of person who goes to wine and cheese school fundraisers, meaning weeknight drinking twice, in the same week. That's a walk on the wild side for me, suburban PTA lady venue notwithstanding. I probably say "fuck" more often than most suburban mothers (well, I also say it more often than a lot of sailors and coal miners), but other than that, I'm probably about as conventional and middle-class as they come.

*****

Friday: Three nights in one week! This is borderline rehab territory for me. Meanwhile, let's say that a large national florist delivers your mother's expensive potted gardenia plant in a broken container. Would you say that their offer to replace it with a slightly less expensive item, for delivery on May 31 (weeks after Mother's Day) is

A). Excellent customer service OR
B). Total bullshit

I'm going to assume that the dozens of people reading this agree unanimously that the answer is B. And I managed to persuade the florist that their offer was entirely inadequate and unacceptable, too. Righteous indignation combined with relentless persistence combined with two glasses of wine make me an unstoppable force.  A few more glasses of wine and a few more outraged phone calls, and I'll have Trump impeached by Labor Day. You're welcome.

*****

Saturday: My first post-Cazalet book is Shana Alexander's Happy Days: My Mother, My Father, My Sister & Me. It reads a little bit like Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Brilliant journalist recalls an unusual New York childhood with a self-absorbed mother and equally self-absorbed though much more kindly remembered father.

While the books are actually quite different, both authors (like all women, myself included) impose a long statute of limitations for maternal crimes. But my mom, just like most of the rest of us, did the best she could. So Happy Mother's Day.

A few notepads and a Scrabble dictionary, and we're in business

I'm down to the last few pages of The Cazalet Chronicles, and I have to stop, because I'm not ready to let go of the Cazalet family. I've never taken this long to read a book, but it's actually five books in one, and over 2,200 pages, so that's how long it takes, I suppose.  Elizabeth Jane Howard seems to have understood people, and life, better than most writers. Female writers who write about family life and relationships--you know, humanity--tend to be dismissed as non-serious, and non-literary. Maybe that's why I had never heard of this great novelist until I started reading the Cazalet books. I'll miss them.

*****
Sunday: The sun came out! It's 8:45 AM and I just came in from a walk. I wore gloves, in May. But the sun is out. Yesterday's gloom was so heavy that I thought it would push me right under with it.  I even took a nap, which I almost never do. Everything seemed gray and ugly, and so I slept through it. Today, it's still too cold (again--gloves, in May). But drenched in sunshine, everything looks clean and cheerful again. I'm wide awake.

And the Capitals won last night. Like most other Washington Capitals fans, I'm a little cynical during the playoffs. And we're nowhere near out of the woods yet. But we avoided round 2 elimination, for now.

*****
Summer is fast approaching. Another summer of swim meets and weekly swim team emails and hanging around at the pool. Oh, and work, of course. I do have a job. Last summer was the first summer in nine years when I wasn't either working from home or working part-time. And surprisingly, it was still a lovely summer, full of swimming and barbecues and even a road trip. I returned to work full-time because I needed to, financially. But I've found that although I miss hanging around with my kids, I also really like working. I like being busy. I like being needed. I like that my job is interesting enough that I think about it when I'm not actually at my desk, and I get ideas, and I keep a notebook with running lists of things to do and things to write about.

*****

If the making and management of lists was a profession, then I'd sit alone atop its pinnacle. I'd probably have my own company. Or I'd be one of those NBC News special correspondents, called upon to comment when a big list-making story breaks.

List-making and spelling. These are two areas of endeavor in which I excel; sadly, however, demand for these rather rarefied skills is pretty scarce. There's not a spelling draft, because if there was, I'd have gone pretty near the top of the first round. There's not a list-making event in the Olympics, because if there was, I'd have been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, weighed down under pounds of gold.  Or maybe I'd have a media empire, built on my extraordinary spelling accomplishments. People would get sick of me. They'd sigh every time I showed up on TV. "There's that spelling bitch again," they'd sneer. But I wouldn't care. I'd cash the checks and let the haters hate. Eventually, the underpaid Harvard graduate who managed my social media would write an anonymous "Devil Wears Prada"-style tell-all, and the whole thing would come crashing down.

By all means, rely solely on spell-check.
You know how that thrills me. 

*****
That, right there, was adult ADD in action. I folded laundry, unloaded a dishwasher, and looked for my next book to read, right in the middle of that paragraph. Just a few more pages to go, so I can no longer delay my parting with the Cazalets.