It wasn’t a big deal, my daughter missing her doctor’s appointment. Not life or death. But she missed it because of all the roadblocks for an annual walk to raise money to fight a dread disease. And we simply couldn’t get close enough to the office fast enough.

Actually, it was a big deal.

We scheduled her appointment months earlier, failing to check into the schedule of walks, runs, and rides that would pass through our very small town. We still had to pay, and reschedule, months in the future.

Just the other day, the driver of a balloon-festooned follow car yelled at me, “Be safe! You’re too close to the runners!” I was driving kids to school. To be farther away, I’d have had to cross into the other lane of traffic.

That was just what happened not far from here, when a bike race for another cure caused a car accident. No one was badly hurt, but one car was totaled, another’s front end smashed, and a biker’s arm broken. The racer is suing.

Now, no one denies the glorious impulse to band together for the common good. Much of the time, if you scratch any of the bike riders decked out like the Italian Olympic team – who’s making me mad by throwing empty water bottles on my lawn — you’ll find someone who cares. Those walkers may have a daughter, a sister, a wife who battles MS or beat breast cancer.

I’m no road hog who thinks motor vehicles own the street. But as these well-meant events get bigger and bigger and more frequent (last weekend there were three in a five-mile radius) they interfere, often rudely, sometimes dangerously, with the very life they’re fighting for.

And I also know that not all those ferocious competitors are in it for the cure.

Some want a good excuse to practice the X-treme sport they love, and for which they’ve bought thousands of dollars worth of equipment. For some people, who aren’t jocks, it’s a reunion with old friends.

Nothing wrong with any of that. The money raised really helps. But organizing those events costs a ton of money too.

It would help just as surely if you gave directly to Women Against MS, with a flick of your finger to their website. It would really help if you volunteered to drive a wheelchair-bound MS patient to clinic appointments.

You don’t get people standing along the road cheering for you for that. You don’t get the tee shirt.

But it is, in its quietness, an even truer way to help.

It also doesn’t wreak as much havoc as these huge and endless walks and rides do – in small towns like mine, and in big cities. The most recent wasn’t even in support of a cause: it was commemorating the role of a famous teacher in history.

When the circus moves on, the elephant dung remains.

And that’s true of the 5K for Whatever, too. The roads are littered with Solo cups and empty water bottles; the rain shreds the posters. The organizers are supposed to tidy up; but they don’t. They’ve done their good.

Do I sound like a curmudgeon? I don’t think I am. My best friend has MS, and I’ve gone to 47 states to fund-raise for that fight.  I walk the walk, even if I don’t walk the Walk with a capital ‘W.” I actually believe more people ought to try another way, one that brings them up close with whatever they’re trying to erase – from Alzheimer’s to animal cruelty.

So, walk thirty miles with a group of pals. Do it every year.

Race across three-states on a bike race. Fight to win.

But as the old commercials say, just do it. And if you have to do it on the street where I live, don’t yell at me if I go on living my ordinary life there, too. Not everybody races for a cure.

 

Here it is, summer ended and everyone back in school – the nights no longer “good for sleeping” but edging toward cold. The old timers (and the young timers) say that this summer rushed past. I know that it did for me. It took me a full six weeks to recover from the emotional toll of two daughters graduating eighth grade.

It was joyous. It was lovely. It was, more than either of these, harrowing. Read on.

By my count, including kindergarten, I’ve graduated five times. Of course, that was what my children call “back in the day,” before iPhones, $200 ballet flats, and instant status updates – which is to say, pre-culture.

Still, I know about commencement. Three of my nine children have actual college diplomas, and they received them only yesterday, it seems. There were rituals, observances, fountain pens given and then re-gifted.

Despite this, nothing could have prepared me for the onslaught associated with the graduation of my two eighth grade daughters.

Said Thoreau, beware occasions requiring new clothes. Beware especially five of them in six weeks.

OMG, as my daughters would say.

At first, my shy girls, Mia and Merit, weren’t sure about the “semi.” (Merit, born in Ethiopia, thought this dance might be held in an eighteen-wheeler.) We urged them to reconsider and go.

After all, we’d had an eighth grade dance. It was in the gym – in a gym similar to the place where, four years later, we would go to the prom.  We bought dresses. We bought them at Sears.

How could we know that, once unleashed, our girls’ desires would make  Anna Wintour look like the poster girl for voluntary simplicity?

They thought we might have to go to New York for a weekend to shop.

They discussed how to measure up to Simone, Stephanotis, and especially Serena, whose dress was created for this purpose when she was eight or something by a designer in Istanbul using age progressions.

Then came the class trip. Not a day trip to the amusement park. A week trip to D.C. No more than $150 each in spending money!

Next, an LBD.

For the dinner dance.

What’s up with dinner dance? A dinner dance is what your parents went to in 1969 at the Moose Lodge.

The EIGHTH GRADE dinner dance is being held at a place called the Jailhouse Tavern. I’m not making that up.

This leaves only the yacht cruise.

Now, our family is so large that when we moved to this small town, it basically changed the census data. We have a certain need. So the school was gallant in helping make sure that our daughters were included in all these adventures.

We also did our part.

Each event required multiple corollary events.

Christmas tree sales, wrapping paper sales, bumper sticker sales, fudge sales, bake sales, yard sales, plant sales, car washes, cat grooming, piñata demos, spaghetti dinners, pancake breakfasts, pizza lunches.

Of course, as with all school fundraisers, no one except the parents buys anything. Co-workers now avert their eyes when they see us coming, even if we pretend the sign-up sheet is just a petition to ban books or something.

Now, there are the tributes. Serena’s parents are buying ads in the local papers and hiring a videographer. Stephanotis has an uncle who designed fireworks for their family celebration. There’s a question of dresses for the private parties? Is re-wear okay?

I put my foot down. It’s okay for Katherine, Duchess of Cambridge. It’s okay for you, too.

We bought dresses. We bought those dresses at Sears.

And yet, since January it’s been a check check here and a check check there. Here a check, there a check, everywhere a check check.

What am I going to do for high school graduation? Sell my plasma starting in tenth grade? Will Serena’s parents host a destination party in Tuscany?

Does anyone else think this is a little excessive for the culmination of only the first eight years of school?

Isn’t this consumer culture pushed to its extreme, ordinary life as an MTV reality show, the unsurprising adultification of adolescents, the trickle down of red carpet desires into a blue-collar world, the crass reification of life altogether?

And isn’t it nuts that I have to do this three more times?

 

 

 

 

WEATHER PORN

I’ve only lived three places in my life.
One was Chicago where, although there was some of the most barbarous weather south of the south pole, people tended to kind of shrug it off — as they did almost everything else. Baby born at home? Take it to the hospital when the game’s over. Head wound? Looks worse than it is most times … he awake? Business failed? You always wanted to travel …          And so, when I moved to Wisconsin, at the tender age of 21, I was unprepared for the nearly salacious atmosphere of amazement, jubilation, and downright tongue-lolling arousal that greeted every cumulonimbus. People didn’t actually want tornadoes to touch down and blow up their houses, but they kind of wanted tornadoes to touch down and blow up their unattached garages. People didn’t actually want school to be closed by the blizzard of the century … but they actually did want school to be closed, and, in anticipation, bought seven gallons of milk and queued up eleven back-to-back episodes of Special Victims Unit. After a long time (34 years), I moved away from Wisconsin, to, as it turns out, the other place on earth where weather is porn.
Now I live in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.
As I sit here (in Wisconsin, at a relative’s house), the sun shines brightly after a wimpy little blizzard scarcely deserving of the name “dumped” (they always “dump”) six new inches of snow on an already frosted landscape. I was to have been in Boston, but I missed the narrow window of opportunity, and now can’t go back until at least after the weekend, until End-of-the-World-Storm-Nemo has done its worst. I should be glad. But I’ve changed. I’m jealous of my family, about to participate in a branch-popping, road-clogging, light-quenching, hem-drenching big fist of a blizzard. I want all that drama. I want to see that mean North Atlantic face. I want to huddle with my nearest and say, it’s really coming down now, as if it would do anything else.
On Cape Cod, people still often fish for a living, or do other things that put them at the indifferent mercy of the elements. They speak of the weather the way they speak of boats and tides, with a rueful, respectful, and undeniably lustful approbation.
This is the day for meteorologists. The other reporters stand when they walk through the newsroom.
White collar crime?
It’s for sissies.
No-collar crime?
Another day.
Give us weather, that’s what we want — the bigger and meaner the better. We want to be controlled.

On my grave, I don’t want it to say, ‘SHE NEVER MISSED A DEADLINE.’ I do want it to say BELOVED MOTHER. But also, I want it to say, SHE HAD EXCELLENT MANNERS.
Now, I’m … polite.
I’m … personable.
I’m .. not nice.
I’m … gallant.
But I want to have manners of the kind demonstrated by my friend Whitney, who is practically British.
She would never bring up a problem of her own, even if her arm were detached and gouting arterial blood, before asking after yours. She would never put a morsel of food in her mouth before seeing that you had your lunch (brunch, dinner) with a cloth napkin. Upon me, she did inflict her cat — even though I have allergies to cats that border on rabies. I did not say she’s perfect. But she has excellent, excellent manners.
She also responds to a gift with a handwritten note MENTIONING WHAT THE GIFT IS and how she intends to use it. When you sleep over, she provides cocoa before bed EVEN IF YOU DON”T ASK FOR IT, which why would you, but you want it desperately?
She does no icky things, like look at her Kleenex after she blows her nose. She dresses up for everything.
I think that excellent manners involve restraint.
I think that is what excellent manners really are: they are the practice of civility in the want of the actual good cheer. Good manners mean that you are really listening, instead of just waiting.
What do they mean to you?

Today I told a therapist who’s an acquaintance that I’d be happy to go to rehab if I had a vice.
I don’t drink or smoke or chew, or go with boys who do. (Actually, I suspect one …)
The idea of daily therapy and a cell with clean sheets, just for a break, would be pretty fabulous.
I wouldn’t want to bring anything except my computer and my single page of research.
If all people who went to prison were smart, more great books and novels would come from prison (some have, despite the fact that the lights are on all the time). With 60 days to write, group therapy, and huge amounts of free time, I could get the biceps of Jillian Michaels and write Warren Peace (it’s a retelling). I could write five articles, a novella, and a screenplay. And a chapbook. I don’t even know how to write poetry. I could learn.
Why do only people who are addicted to things get to go to rehab?
Why do only nuns get to go to convents?
Why isn’t having nine children with complex lives a pre-existing condition requiring sequestration?
Don’t write to me and say that I shouldn’t make sport of this because your brother or sister, or god forbid, your beloved child, really did have to go to rehab. It goes without SAYING — yet I will say it — that this is a sendup …. except not really. I really would feel far less guilt, and far more pleasure, if someone FORCED me into seclusion … and I’m not taking it back.

My son Marty and I spent the day in the hospital.
It wasn’t unfamiliar.
You know how people say of some folk, why, he was never sick a day in his life? Well, of my 23-year-old son, Martin, you might say, “Kid was never well a day in his life.”
The surgery he has Thursday on his broken hand will be the third in a short life — all of them harrowing. He was on his way to rehearsal, for his first Equity show, ‘Oliver!’ in Boston, when he was T-boned by a guy trying to make a left turn from the center lane on a one-way street, the presence of Marty’s car in the left land notwithstanding.
In most of the rest of the country, excluding perhaps southern Florida, this is known as “mayhem.” In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it is known as “driving.” You start your engine and you take your chances.
For Marty, this is, sadly, business as usual. Nothing is simple for him. Because his brothers had flu, when he was twelve, I told him to drink 7-Up and lie down. When he collapsed onstage, we found out he had a ruptured appendix. There was a slight chance an abscess would form, requiring future surgery.
Three of those.
Because he had sleep apnea, he had his tonsils removed and uvula clipped when he was sixteen. There was a slight chance he would have hemorrhage.
Marty woke me up at 3 a.m., carrying a mixing bowl of blood.
He said the most painful part was cauterizing his throat.
I find all this so gross and sickening. But, Marty didn’t lick it off the ground. When I recently got a new physician, she looked at my recent medical history (which included breaking one of my teeth off below the gum, with catlike grace) and a little surgical test last spring that ended up with pulling out some of my parts and my spending a month with my little sister and her husband and their boys in their thousand-square-foot farm house. The doctor said, “Are you, trying to kill yourself or something? Slowly?”
Marty … will heal.
I am still sort of healing (differential of just over 30 years in immuno-joy).
Still, by his age, I’d only broken one hand and had a concussion as well as a welter of bee stings.
What lies ahead for this hapless kid?
And he’s an actor.
While his face is his fortune, so is the rest of him. And they’re chipping away at him … while I could be a brain in an aquarium and still do my job.

I’ve been asking my readers and friends: share your favorite silly (or not so silly) phobia.

Mine — when people fold paper and then run their fingers along it? It gives me chills of horror just to think about it.

Syrup. When I was about four, I chased my mom into the corner grocery store, and ran smack into this  pyramid display of about 40 glass bottles of maple syrup. (Who makes a PYRAMID of maple syrup bottles?) There was a storm of glass and a spreading lake of syrup and blood … never ate maple syrup again.
REALLY big birds. They’re just too prehistoric.

Malls. This is self-explanatory.

But the big one, the only one that is real is … being lost, on foot or in the car. Being lost, rural or urban, night or day, makes me feel as though I’m at the edge of the apocalypse.

Now for others …

Paper cuts

Eating meat that’s identifiable as the animal it was when it was alive

Cotton, the kind in aspiring bottles

Dark water

Cats

Felt (not as in “a deeply felt narrative,” but the cloth)

The sound of a sewing machine

Dogs barking

Train whistles at night

Candlelight

And the biggest number of votes … of course, clowns.

Back in 1990, when I was a young mother and got a perm (a great, fat, pyramidical perm), I knew even then that this would be an occasion for photo-album shame. Little did I know that, during my perm period, things would happen, such as the whoopsie doodle publication of my first novel, THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN, that meant I would be recorded with that fuzzy pyramid on my head. Right now, I know that little tattoos, in celebration of turning 30 or 40 or 50, are not going to last — while the kind of tattoos that are a lifelong symbol of a raw and unexpected dawn after a twenty-hour night in some castaway place, will last forever. Vertical platform heels, that make even the agile walk like a wooden toy soldier, will not last, but ballet flats will. Tans won’t be back. Bubble mini skirts are headed down the wind tunnel of memory. And Axe for men will be replaced by something that doesn’t make clean smell like dirty papered over, the sooner the better. Do you know which current style is headed out forever?

Speaking of thinking person’s thriller, I can’t think of a better way to describe Jacquelyn Mitchard’s groundbreaking, pitch-perfect What We Saw at Night (Soho Press, $17.99, 243 pages).  Best known for penning the first ever book selected by Oprah (The Deep End of the Ocean) Mitchard this time out serves up teenage protagonists who all suffer from a rare illness that makes them deathly allergic to sunlight and thus confined to a vampire-like existence roaming the streets at night.  Daredevils occupying their own private dystopian world in stark contrast to the hours ruled by the “Daytimers.”  This is a rare tale that’s as riveting as it is heart wrenching penned by a true master of the written word.

Best friends for life, Allie, Juliet, and Rob rule the night country — liberating boats for midnight swims, dipping in the hot tubs of fancy ski chalets, looking for any risk or thrill or secret the night can offer. They’re out there because they can never see the sun. A genetic defect, XP, means that life is the toaster, and they are the bread. Their lives may be short. They don’t want to die without ever having really lived. When they take up the fierce, demanding urban sport of Parkour, leaping from buildings, vaulting over walls, they are, for the first time, more powerful and free than “the daytimers.”  But one night, the night of their greatest feat, bouldering up a five-story cliffside building, they glimpse, through a glass door, the unspeakable: a man with what appears the dead body of a young woman. In their terror, they don’t realize … he sees them too. That night breaks open a world of old secrets and new lies, and terror even greater than the fear of death.

Of WHAT WE SAW AT NIGHT, Lauren Myracle, author of ‘Shine,’ says, “Dangerously addictive, breathtakingly beautiful, terminally awesome.”

Whoo hoo! Pub DAY!