peevish mama

Adventureland’s soundtrack got me thinking about music and how for me, it used to be a really tactile, physical thing – both literally and figuratively, in a way it just isn’t anymore. In 1987 we were listening to music on cassette tapes. Plastic, durable, stackable, bulky tapes with scratched cases. I can still smell the ribbon and feel the anger in my throat when it got pulled out and chewed up by a rogue tape player or a little brother. I remember spooling it back in with a pencil, holding my breath, hoping it would still play. Taping songs off the radio, making mixed tapes, it was a manual thing – you had to get the timing right, you had to listen and press RECORD and STOP at the perfect moment.

When you went to the record store and plunked down nine dollars and change for a casette, you were taking it on faith that you were going to like all the songs as much as you liked the one you bought the tape for. You listened to the whole tape as soon as you got in the car. It was cumbersome to fast forward to a particular song, although it’s a skill we all honed. Doctor Dash was exceedingly good at this, though he had had many years of practice by the time we started roadtripping together.

Music was experienced by album back then – not by song – so there was a depth of familiarity and listening that I’m not quite getting anymore. We used to listen to our tapes over and over until we wore them out. Now I flit around, clicking and dragging, making playlists, dismissing songs I don’t like in the first ten seconds. Truth be told, there’s so much music on our computer, I haven’t even listened to a lot of it. Music is an ocean now – vast, unknowable – I feel I can’t do much more than sail along on top of it.

When I was young, I would very specifically and deliberately associate certain songs with certain times or people. A song was like plastic wrap and you would wrap it around a memory and there it would stay forever. Packaged, accessible, easy to hold in your hand daydream fodder. Lionel Richie’s Hello offered direct access to the one and only time I danced with Danny Voss – hunky, blond, turquoise-sleeveless-t-shirt-wearing, cousin-of-a-girl-I-hated, Danny Voss. Talk about yearning. Talk about visceral. This song made my stomach do flip flops for months on end.

At the beginning of law school, I sat on my fire escape and cried because someone was having a party at a house nearby and loud snatches of Uncle John’s Band kept floating over to me. The late afternoon sun, the Dead, the smell of beer and pot – that was college and I missed that life so much it hurt.

Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes? High school dances – unfettered Molly Ringwald dancing. I Melt with You by Modern English? Also school dances – spinning, dizzy, swallowed up in the music, wishing I had a boyfriend.

The Reflex by Duran Duran was the lip synch contest at camp. A girl from another cabin peed on stage. Pee and nervous laughter as she pretended to play the keyboards. Darkening concrete beneath her feet.

U Can’t Touch this by MC Hammer was the lounge at school. Girls in uniforms dancing on the coffee table.  

Brass Monkey by the Beasties was Fourth of July fireworks. I was really really tan and my hair was really really big. I was wearing Levis, rolled and tapered at the bottom, a pink tank top and opalescent lipstick. Hot shit.

And if there’s any woman my age who can’t hum the song from the Sixteen Candles scene pictured above, I’ll get a spiral perm tomorrow.

Do kids still do this? Lock in music to moments? Or is that something you only do when you can fit all your music into a shoe box? When the rate of discovering new music is directly tied to weekly rides to the mall? Is there too much music now? Is our capacity to make music our own finite and ultimately being diluted by instantaneous and unmitigated access? Is the very fact that I’m posing these questions, proof positive of my old lady status and that I just don’t get it?

And then there’s irony, which creates even more distance between the gut and the song. A friend was complaining about how her high schooler was listening to Phil Collins, whom she had never liked and liked even less now that her daughter and her friends had discovered him. I can’t say I disagree, although perhaps I find myself softening on Mr. Honey Tones and Thinning Hair as the years pass. On second thought, Sussudio really was unforgivable.  Maybe I was uniquely unjaded when it came to music, but I always took it as it came. I certainly didn’t listen to music with any sense of irony. I do now. And kids now seem to as well. Is it their loss?

I hope not. I hope that when Saint James is 35, he can pick out a handful of songs that send him shooting to his teen years, to specific moments in time when he couldn’t breathe for laughing so hard or being so smitten, to driving with friends with the windows open and the wind on their teeth, to playing foosball in smoky basements, to wrestling in the snow because he and his best friend were both being dicks and it was the only way to work it out, to pressing a finger onto a girl’s sunburnt shoulder, watching his print recede and doing it again.

Which songs did you wrap around your memories? Do tell.

I’m not sure what the appeal of Golden Girls could have been for a young teen, but I loved it. Maybe it was the fact that my parents had banned me from watching Laverne and Shirley as a child, their reason being, and I quote: They are cheap ladies! Cheap ladies! No further explanation necessary, apparently. Perhaps the Golden Girls seemed like cheap ladies disguised as old ladies. They were certainly as sassy and brassy and funny as Laverne and Shirley. Perhaps, despite their age (which seemed ancient to me back then), it was clear to me that their female friendships were as compelling and enduring as my own. Perhaps I enjoyed them because both of my grandmothers lived in Argentina, and it was a bit of an old lady fix. Or maybe I just watched a lot of TV. 

I don’t remember any particular plot lines. Just a lot of robes, house dresses, pastel pantsuits, wicker furniture, lanais, whipped white hair and cheesecake. Their Miami condo, decorated in 80’s tropicalia, probably smelled of powder and perfume and I fantasized about all the sweet creamy confections they might have in their refrigerator, about falling asleep on the mauve couch printed in sage palm fronds. I fancied I might be welcomed there – fawned over, even. Bea Arthur was a classy lady with a great voice and wit. She could move laugh tracks with a mere look of exasperation or a raised eyebrow. I’m sad to see her go.

Every time I try to write about my upcoming knee surgery, I feel myself morphing into a paunchy ex-jock, swigging my beer as I regale you with war stories of  my high school football glory days. Not very sexy, but nevertheless, here it goes. Errp. Scuse.

It was May of 1988 and the Academy of the Sacred Heart Gazelles (I know, so cute and yet so ridiculous) had travelled to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio for the last lacrosse tournament of the season. A few of us seniors had come straight from prom – my light pink strapless dress swung virginally from the garment hook of Marian’s mom’s car. She drove us through the night because there was no way we were going to miss this tournament – even if it meant bidding our flummoxed dates adieu at two a.m.

By this point in the season – the end of the season, we were in the best shape of our lives – we had hearts like bulls. Lacrosse is a graceful running sport and it is played with no out-of-bounds. If you wanted to burn up time on the clock, you could just take off with the ball and sprint across the next field over, pretending you were a young Native American brave thumping across the prairie in a loin cloth, your heart pounding in your ears. Our coach, Ms. Dritsas, never let us forget it was a game invented by the Plains Indians and played on vast fields that were miles and miles long and wide. The games could go on for days, with hundreds of players on each team. We Gazelles proudly played with the traditional wooden lacrosse sticks made by a guy in Northern Michigan, while all the other teams used plastic sticks, easier sticks we used to say. A stocky woman with spiky gray hair, Ms. Dritsas ate orange peels and was suspected to be a lesbian due to her habitual ass slapping. Somehow, this seems a lot less newsworthy and titillating now than it did then, but we were sheltered Catholic school girls and we liked to make fun.

The beginning of the season was a cold rainy blur of Ms. Dritsas sending us on long runs. Don’t come back for an hour. Go. We would dutifully trudge off, our pony tails flicking behind us, our colored spandex tights gleaming from beneath our oversized shorts. As soon as we were out of sight, we would drop into a saunter and go to our friend Sherry’s house to eat Pop Tarts for fifty minutes before wetting the hair at our temples in the sink and jogging back to school. Sherry isn’t alive anymore. How could we have known as girls, giggling in her house, feeling like we were getting away with something, that she would die in a tragic accident in her early thirties? It is still beyond comprehension.

I’m not sure if I felt it as much as I heard it, but mid-stride in a dead run, there was a pop. A pop that ended my world as I knew it, a world where girls played fierce and hard and felt completely invincible. As I lay on the ground, a thick fence of gold knee high socks surrounded me, but I couldn’t see past anyone’s knees. I remember screaming, over and over, I don’t want permanent knee damage. Please don’t let it be permanent knee damage. Even then, at that moment, there were too many words coming out of my mouth. Meaningless, impotent words. 

Arthroscopic surgery determined that in the last game of the last year of my high school career, I had a completely torn my ACL, screwing up my knee forever. And for the next twenty years I would put off getting it repaired, learn to favor my other leg without even thinking about it, let all the sports I used to love fall by the wayside, and generally get on with my life. 

In five days I’m having surgery to repair my ligament and the cartilage that has been worn down due to instability. If I don’t perish during surgery or from a flagrant, angry infection, I will be on crutches for six weeks. War and Peace, the Nile River, Rapunzel’s hair. Six. Long. Weeks. This is bleak, people. Bleak. Doctor Dash has a couple weeks off during that time and my mother and mother-in-law are each coming for a week, but still – how is this going to work? Who’s going to do everything that I do? How am I going to tolerate sitting around all day, lying around all day. What am I going to do if Devil Baby throws a tantrum in a parking lot? How am I going to get used to asking for help? 

I was fitted for my crutches today and given a lesson on how to get up and down the stairs. This is going to be incredibly humbling. Every fiber of my being feels like I cannot possibly be taking myself out of commission for six weeks. That this is utter insanity. That I will end up crying on the floor as my house crumbles around me, my family falling away with the debris, their faces covered in white dust. I have to dig deep – dig back. I have to rely on the fierce, fearless, selfish girl in me to see me through this, to push me through this. Why? For the sake of the old lady I hope to become. So I can walk and dance and coyly cross my legs when I’m sixty, seventy, eighty.

What is six weeks against decades? Right? RIGHT? Please tell me I’m right.

postscript: if there is a girl athlete in your life, check out this article.

Today I did a very stupid thing. I came out of yoga with Devil Baby, strapped her in her car seat and pulled a u-ey on 44th. It must have been a combination of dehydration and blissed-outness, but I took my turn too wide and somehow ended up completely wedging my minivan on a giant roadside ice floe. Fuck. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck! As I tried to reverse, my wheels spun in the air. 

I had a flashback to college when I did the very same thing to my parents’ enormous silver gray pleasure cruiser van. That time it was the two passenger side wheels that were left dangling in the air. This is family folklore, never failing to get everyone chuckling and snorting at my stupidity. She calls me on the phone, tells me she’s stuck in the snow, so I come to pull her out and there’s my van, tipped! my dad shrieks, keening to one side to illustrate, tears streaming down his cheeks. Two wheels in the air! And there is no snow – no snow – anywhere! No where!  Ha ha ha ha. 

It is true that I managed to lodge the van on top of the only chunk of ice in sight, but, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you stop to think about, this actually cuts in my favor. I now call myself to the witness stand.

Me: On the night of whatever night that was when you were home from college, did you or did you not take your parents’ silver gray pleasure cruiser van to the local supermarket?

Me: Yes I did.

Me: And were you alone?

Me: No, my younger brother, Mario, was with me.

Me: And why did you take your parents’ silver gray pleasure cruiser van to the supermarket that night with your younger brother, Mario?

Me: I wanted to buy chocolate chips, so I could make chocolate chip cookies for a boy I liked at school.

Me: And what did you find when you arrived at the supermarket?

Me: A&P was closed.

Me: Did you park the silver gray pleasure cruiser van to ascertain that the supermarket was closed or did you do a drive by?

Me: I parked.

Me: After you parked, what did you do?

Me: I got out of the van and walked up to the doors even though I could kind of tell it was closed, and then I jiggled the doors to make sure and then I realized it was really closed.

Me: And what was your brother, Mario, doing at this time?

Me: I can’t recall.

Me: How would you describe your state of mind when you reentered the silver gray pleasure cruiser van?

Me: I was upset. I really wanted to make cookies for Roy.

Me: Did you look around you at that time?

Me: I can’t recall.

Me: Do you remember seeing any snow?

Me: No.

Me: Do you remember seeing any icebergs?

Me: No.

Me: Do you remember seeing any large masses whatsoever?

Me: No.

Me: What happened then?

Me: Well, I probably complained to my little brother about the supermarket being closed. Maybe I even cried a little tiny bit. For sure I was mad. I might have said shit shit shit. Then I threw the car into drive and . . .

Me: Thank you, that will be all. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I think you’ve heard all you need to exculpate this young woman from the shame of having implanted her parents’ silver gray pleasure cruiser van atop a rogue iceberg secretly lurking in front of the vehicle. Surely, she could not have been expected to remember having parked behind an iceberg, when the anticipation of making chocolate chip cookies for a boy she liked at college was so cruelly dashed by her disappointment at finding the A&P closed for the night. 

And ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, who was really more stupid in this scenario? The girl who was in-like, who was the hapless victim of a bit of a lead foot and a shameful, furtive, iceberg? Or her parents, who showed up “to the rescue” with nothing more than a shovel and the family Golden Retriever’s red leash. Yes, my good people. You heard right. They looped Ginger’s leash onto the bumper of their SUV and the bumper of the silver gray pleasure cruiser van and attempted to pull it off the iceberg. You can imagine how that worked out.

I rest my case. 

But today was different. Today I was stupid with a capital S. Like Goldie Hawn acting her stupidest in the stupidest of her stupid movies. Having some experience in the matter of impaling my car on ice, I suspected I might be in a bit of a pickle. I threw some snacks at Devil Baby, grabbed the ice scraper, jumped out of the car and kneeled to survey the situation. Oh man, I was stuck – really really stuck, on an angry, immutable chunk of ice. I knew I needed to chip away at the ice to free myself, so I went at it. Like a fury. A few women from yoga came out and found me in my yoga pants and pink legwarmers revisiting child’s pose with the addition of violent sideways ice chipping. And bless their hearts, they wouldn’t leave. They made me get in the car while they pushed with all their little post-yoga might. One woman brought me some cat litter and sprinkled it under the wheels. I tried to protest that what I really needed to do was just – keep – chipping – off- arrgh – that – chunk. 

A sexy older cowboy pulled up in his pick up truck and sauntered over with a shovel full of sand, like he does this everyday – multiple times a day. Noblesse oblige. My yoga teacher, Annie, flirted with him a little bit. I thanked him and said something about his hat and that really, I just needed to get the chassis off the ice, making a mental note to look up the word chassis because here I was throwing it around like I knew what I was talking about, when really, I quite did not. The cowboy tipped his hat up and said, Honey, you’ll never dig yourself outta this one.

I pressed everyone to leave – this was my problem and I would get out of it. It was a mercifully warm day and the exertion of my frantic chipping soon had me shedding my coat. Eventually, my knees started screaming, reminding me I was kneeling in snow, so I pulled a floor mat out of the car to kneel on and kept chipping away. One woman, Kate, insisted on calling AAA for me. I tried to resist, I didn’t want her to have to wait around. Let me call, she said. If I leave, you’re screwed, she didn’t say. She called and went to her car to wait.  

As I kept on chipping, two older men pulled over to help me out, and unlike the cowboy, they got on their knees to assess the situation.  We’ll pick up the car, they said. Oh God, it’s so big, I thought. Let’s try. So they tried and I made them stop because I was seeing too many bulging neck veins through my dirty windshield. I knew I could get it if I just kept chipping, but they didn’t think so. I told them AAA was on its way, thanked them and got back onto my knees. For a nanosecond, I thought about calling a friend to pick me up and leaving the whole bloody mess for Doctor Dash to deal with, but that just seemed unfair. My poor father is one thing. My poor husband, another. Have I grown up at all in these last twenty years?

Shame and necessity give you strength and I chipped and chopped and scraped and dug with a vengeance. I was spitting and swearing – my big cheap rhinestone studded sunglasses slipped down my nose and my pony tail came loose. I was covered in ice and side-of-the-road grime, my knees soaked to the bone, but I eventually got through that shit bastard hunk of ice. 

Everyone had poo-pooed me, but I knew I was free. I got in my car and rocked and rolled and rocked and rolled and after a few good rocks, Kate the Angel ran over cheering to help push and another random guy in a white sweatshirt  jumped in too.  One more rock and roll and I was out, baby!  We called off AAA, chuckled at the big black plastic piece of something hanging down from the bottom of my minivan, and said our goodbyes. 

Thank you cowboy, old dudes, cat litter woman, random white sweatshirt guy, Annie, and mostly Kate – for sticking around. You all tried to help in your own ways.  And where would we be without the kindness of strangers? Not anywhere I’d want to live.

But in the end, sometimes, you just gotta chip yourself out.

Ah, Ricardo. I was indeed saddened to hear of your passing.  You will be missed by multitudes – by me. You bring me back, Ric . . . may I call you Ric?  Ric, seeing your handsome Mexican aristocratic features brings me back to a more innocent time. To my girlhood, Ric.  How peculiar that you, a gentleman old enough to be my the older brother of my father, should feel so inextricably woven with my youth – those tender years when I wiled away the hours watching TV on my belly on a musty brown shag rug in the basement of a split level suburban Detroit home. Your prominent and distinguished eyebrows, so reminiscent of my own at the time, bring back a flood of memories as softly contoured and rosy-hued as one of your fantasy sequences where you doled out wishes and life lessons with such knowing benevolence from your tropical pleasure cove. Ric, seeing you in your impeccable white suit, sitting with such ease and grace in that wicker wing chair, flanked by your trusty numero dos, Tattoo, is like opening a beautifully wrapped but long forgotten box tucked way back in my girlhood closet. Inside that box, Ric, are memories – oh so many memories. Memories of the most perfect Saturday night imaginable for a girl of eight in 1978: McDonald’s for dinner, the arrival of a babysitter, a fragrant and breezy kiss goodbye from the parents and the best night of TV in history.  

The holy trinity of TV:  Dance Fever, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island.

Oh Ric, I wish I could hold your soft tanned lovingly manicured hand as I take this walk down memory lane.  I’m sure you remember Dance Fever: four couples, four sets of razzle dazzle costumes, four shots at the big one!  All disco dancing their little hearts out under the sexy gaze and slithery pulsating hips of Danny Terrio. Oh, Ric, don’t make that face. Danny had nothing on you.  He strutted around in jazz shoes and white vests and yes, he had great hair, but he was just an acorn to your strong magnificent oak. You were a father figure to Danny, Ric. Surely, after all these years, you have come to see that?

After that extravaganza of sequins, sparkle, panache and heart came The Love Boat, setting a course for adventure, our minds on a new romance. Again with the face Ric! I’m shocked. What’s that you say? Captain Merrill Stubing was a bald paunchy nelly? Well, of course! He was just trying to be you with the white captain’s suit and all, but he couldn’t hold a candle. This is beneath you, Ric. You should feel sorry for Captain Stubing – he spent his whole career sucking in his gut and talking about you. But you must admit, Ric, The Love Boat promises something for every one – including this eight year old girl.  I might have missed the significance of most of the sultry looks, meaningful glances, and coy double entendres cast about in the soft breezes of the Promenade deck, but oh, how I loved that show. Ric, I know this is going to make you crazy, but I had a crush on Gopher for a little while. Get up, stop that! I know he wasn’t attractive, but I had to pick someone to have a crush on, and he was the only choice when you think about it.  I suppose now I would have picked Doc, but back then, well, Gopher just seemed so friendly.  Oh I know, I’m not proud of it, but I was eight, Ric! Cut me some slack. And really, it was that pool I was hot after. Imagine that!  A pool on a ship! Funny, at this point in my life, I hope to never see a pool on a ship, but back then . . . oh, how titillating that was. Do you happen to know, Ric, being such a man of the world, whether you feel the pitch and roll of the ship when you are in the pool? I always wondered.

And finally, Ricardo, your show. Be still my beating heart – the fabulously escapist and inimitable Fantasy Island came last of all. It was quite late by then, maybe ten o’clock, and my drowsy state probably enhanced the dreamlike qualities of your show. Ric, I wouldn’t have missed it for all the stickers in the world. I forced myself to stay awake. I imagined my eyelids held apart with toothpicks, like those of a sleepy cartoon character. Oh Ric, I loved that opening sequence, with the float plane and Tattoo – you really found a winning formula there. I loved the lays and the drinks and the expressions on your guests’ faces as they alighted from the plane: wonder, skepticism, confusion. Oh, Ric, it was just too much! Each episode was so exciting, an unwritten chapter in a book of wonders and you were the magician, Ric.  A dashing, distinguished, and wise magician. You allowed your guests to seek and strive, to chase their dreams, but you always knew when to step in to save them from themselves.  Danger, romance, longing. You were a virtuoso, Ric, a puppet master of unequaled skill and wisdom. Eventually I would lose my battle with the sandman, the toothpicks snapping into useless splinters. I would drift off to the sounds of your deep and knowing chuckle, the pitter patter of Tattoo’s little shoes on the dock, the propeller, revving and then fading into the distant horizon. Have a safe flight, Ric . . . and a happy landing.  And one more thing.  Thanks.

It was 1980. My family had moved so I was starting at a new school part way through fourth grade – George P. Way Elementary. My teacher was named Mrs. Hood and she had crazy green eyes – possibly early incarnation, rudimentary, not very subtle color contacts. Every day I rode the bus with a mixture of trepidation and wonder. I sat alone those first days, hoping not to be noticed, warily observing these strange new kids, trying to intuit where I would fit into the pecking order, hoping it would be anywhere but the bottom. It was winter, and I began to identify different kids by their brightly colored ski jackets and hats, by their chapped lips or perpetually runny noses.

I remember two things from those bus rides:

I remember the exact moment I fell in love with Jeff Borglin.

I remember the exact moment I fell in love with music.

Jeff Borglin was a tall fifth grader who ignored me at the bus stop. He kicked the snow. He threw snowballs at tree trunks. He stomped on ice to make it crack. But he didn’t talk to me. Not that I tried to talk to him either. We waited for the bus in silence, tiny puffs of white air holding no words hovering in front of our mouths.

One day he sat up on his knees with his back to the steamy bus window and pull off his ski hat. I gasped. I was smitten. That’s all she wrote.

He was blond. His face was dark – I had just assumed his hair was dark. But he was blond . . . I silently pledged my nine year old heart to him and spent the next few years pining for him, spying on him, concocting cockamamie schemes to put myself in his path. I took bogus surveys with my best friend Susie, furrowed brows and official looking note books in hand (favorite food: hotdogs, favorite sport: soccer, favorite subject: math). I rode by his house relentlessly on my aqua Schwinn ten speed, cooly sitting back using my arms for carefully choreographed moves to Electric Avenue instead of holding the handlebars . . . until my dog, Ginger, ran in front of my bike and I wiped out right in front of him. We’re gonna rock down to Elec-tric Aven-ue. And then we’ll take it higher. BAM! Stupid golden retriever. Stupid Eddie Grant. One time I even played the damsel in distress card. There was a frog in our pool (horrors!) and I quickly dispensed my little brother to go get Jeff Borglin to help us. When Jeff silently lifted the frog out with the skimmer in two seconds and threw it over the fence, I felt pretty lame . . . and I’ve never played the damsel in distress since.

You live, you learn.

The other love I found on that bus came wrapped up in these words:

We don’t need no educa-tion . . . we don’t need no thought control . . .

Someone in the back of the bus had a little radio and I remember peering over the seat and wishing so badly I knew what it was. It is absolutely my first memory of any kind of rock music and I was completely enraptured by the tinny, scratchy sound I was hearing.

No dark sarcasm in the classroom . . . Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

My parents only listened to classical music, and in those days of cumbersome turn tables and gigantic speakers, even that was a rarity. I felt my stomach churn with longing as I watched, greedily hoping against all hope that one of the kids might blurt out “Hey, I love this BLANK!” Even then, what would I have done? I had no idea how to find music . . . how to get music. And I certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to touch the stereo. I was the oldest child and I had inherited nothing by way of musical heirlooms from my parents. I was a tabula rasa. If I wanted music, I was going to have to find it for myself.

All in all you’re just a – nother brick in the wall!

I loved how they said “wall” and I innocently mimicked the Cockney accent when I scrunched my face and sang those couple lines to myself in the mirror, over and over. Wohl. What was I hearing? What WAS it? Powerful beautiful angry confusing. I needed to know. I don’t think I even knew to ask “who” . . . I don’t think I even knew there was such a thing as bands . . . singers . . . rock stars . . .

When I was twelve I bought myself a little tape player/radio with forty dollars of my babysitting money. I spent all my time listening to the top 40 station and trying to tape songs off the radio. I would get so angry when the dj talked into the beginning of the song, ruining my Abracadabra, my Jack and Diane, my Eye of the Tiger, my Hard to Say I’m Sorry, my Tainted Love, my 8675three-oh-niyiine.

That little piece-of-shit radio cracked open the world for me and out spilled the blood, guts and glory of eighties rock. Just take a look at this and see if it isn’t just a bubbling stew of mushy pre-pubescent melodramatic yearnings. Or maybe the stew was me, and I was just projecting it onto the music. No. It wasn’t just me – this bunch is drenched in harmonizing male falsettos and swelling synthesized guitars -perfect fodder for a bookish twelve year old girl holding nothing but a little black box of unrequited love: her little black radio.

Doctor Dash knows to forgive me for the occasional lapse in . . . shall I say . . . taste? Most people our age were bequeathed rich tracks of musical territory from their older siblings or their parents. If your baseline is The Dead, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, The Who . . . If those are the bands you took for granted, that constitute your early consciousness of music – pre-reason, pre-choosing, then what a gift you received! What a golden starting point for your musical journey!

My baseline was 80’s rock, if you can even call it rock: Rick Springfield, Survivor, Toto, Men at Work, Yes, Aha, Olivia Newton John, Journey, The GoGos, Duran Duran, Boy George, Eddie Money . . . Eddie Grant! I started there and by early high school had immersed myself in the Cure, New Order, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Yaz, Alphaville, Brian Ferry, Thomas Dolby . . . synthesizers and effeminate men . . . then I worked my way back to the greats, and then forward and then back and around and around to where I am today . . . still peering over the plastic bus seat, wide-eyed, confused, and falling in love.

I must have been about five years old.  We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in an unremarkable, dull brown complex called Royal Manor.  It didn’t look royal and it certainly didn’t feel royal, but I fancied the name and looked for opportunities to tell people the name of the place where I lived.

Royal Manor was housing for medical residents at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan and was filled with young families, like ours, whose parents spoke with funny accents, like mine.  Upstairs lived my friend Sapla who wore pretty dresses and gold bangles that jingled on her thin brown wrists.  I ate rice with melted butter at her house.  Sapla ate with her hand and I used a fork.  I also tried pomegranate seeds for the first time at her house.  To this day, every time I spend a meditative few minutes dislodging pomegranate seeds from the waxy white pith, my thoughts turn to Sapla’s mom, beautiful in her diaphanous saris, telling me they were called Indian Apples in a voice as thick and golden as honey.

One night our buzzer rang.  I jumped up, leaving my dolls in a shocked heap – frozen and wild-eyed – and slid to my mother’s side in socked feet.  She opened the door and there, in the florid yellow light of the hallway, stood a perfect fairy princess.  She was shorter than me – and much more beautiful, with long, wispy, white-blond hair, a poufy pink skirt, sparkly wings and a tiny tiara on her head.  She was holding an orange globe and she positively took my breath away.  I hid behind my mother.  

“Trick or treat,” she called in a tinselly but surprisingly loud voice.  My mother cocked her head to one side, put her hands on her hips and bent over to peek inside the globe.  I held my breath.

“Ay, ohkay, leetle bayllerina . . . wait, wait.”

My mother turned and strode into the apartment, leaving me alone with the fairy princess.  I lowered my eyes to her ball, wondering what my mother had seen.  She reappeared shaking a box of white peppermint Tic Tacs – the box that normally shimmied around her purse with a crinkly blue pack of Parliament cigarettes.  She was about to toss the Tic Tacs into the girl’s ball, when suddenly the door burst open and a jumble of children pushed their way into the hall yelling “trick or treat” in a rowdy chorus.  My mother calmly assessed the motley assortment of streaked face paint, vampire teeth, capes and wigs and, ever the pragmatist, proceeded to shake a few Tic Tacs into each expectant bag.

My cheeks burned.  I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I did know that these kids were at least entitled to a whole piece of unopened candy.  The children fled, their excited voices growing fainter and fainter, finally flittering away through darkened branches into the night sky.  

My mother closed the door and with a casual flick, turned off the light and laughed, “No tengo mas!”  She thought this was funny and my shame flipped to anger.  As I glared at her in the dark, she reached behind me, pulling my long black hair up into a ponytail, smoothing the sides, checking for stray wisps with her warm fingers.  She held my hair in her hand and gently led me to the front window where I plopped down, my hair dropping heavily around my shoulders.  She sat behind me – much younger then than I am now, remembering all of this – and curled her body around mine.

My mother and I waited in the dark for what seemed like a long time, peeking out from behind the sheer white curtains.  Shouts and laughter signaled the approach of more children and we tensed up and giggled as they ran up our steps and rang the buzzer.  We waited, covering our mouths, frozen for an eternity until they thumped back down the steps.  I looked at my mother and laughed, but I felt sad to see them go. I felt sorry for having tricked them.  I exhaled a cloud of breath onto the cool glass in front of me.  As I watched the foggy ghost I had made slowly recede, I mouthed those magical words silently to myself, feeling them in my mouth like a couple of slippery white Tic Tacs. Trick or treat.

The stars aligned themselves this week – just so – in order to bring us two of our favorite people:  my best childhood friend, Sweet Sue, and our hilarious college buddy, Duddy.  It felt like an embarrassment of riches, to have these two in town for work (and a bit of play) at the same time.

Sweet Sue has known me in all my fiendish glory since I was twelve.  We were silly, hyper, over-achieving Catholic schoolgirls together, we were awkward boy-starved, melodramatic journal writing teenagers together, we were crunchy, boozing, bar hopping, bored by our hometown college girls together . . . and now, as impossible as it is to believe sometimes, we are all grown up.  Women.  Sweet Sue lives in Manhattan. She’s a standup comic and a writer. Her life is technicolored and glamorous to me – a world away from my deciduous tree kid-centered existence.  We’re both busy – we correspond by email in intermittent flurries and then go dormant for weeks, months even.  We squeeze in good long juicy phone calls a few times a year and a visit every couple years.  There is no one, and I mean no one, who I’d rather loom with than Sweet Sue.  She and I raise loitering to an art form.  We once spent nine hours slothing it around Fanueil Hall in Boston and on the same trip, logged an ungodly number of hours in a nondescript park in Washington, D.C., happy as clams, moving from park bench to park bench, amused spectators to a tiny chunk of the world I couldn’t find again if you paid me a million dollars.  We meander, eat, sit, people watch, shop, and most of all talk.  We can certainly talk on a couch in a quiet room, but something about being out in the fray, with the world swirling about, that sort of allows conversations to unfold and skip along in expected and unexpected ways.  The volume on the world gets turned down, and we talk of life and love and loss.  We talk of clothes and hair and celebrities.  We used to talk about weight a lot – and then do nothing about it.  Now we talk about skin care – and do nothing about it.  Why is it so good for my soul to spend time with her?  Because I love her, plain and simple.  I just do.  And because when we’re together, the girls we used to be are there too, shimmering closer to the surface than in regular life.  When we’re together, it just doesn’t feel that different from when we were twelve.  I don’t think it ever will.

And after Sweet Sue’s short and lovely visit, I turned my attention to Duddy, who was Doctor Dash’s roommate in college.  He and Dash and three other guys lived down the block from our little blue house of girls on Saint Peter’s Street.  Duddy was the beautiful curly haired boy with the station wagon – the wagon that I conjure in my memory as having clouds of pot smoke billowing out of its windows as it sharked its way through the streets of Southbend.  It was so good to see him again.  We feasted and we partied and we laughed our asses off.  We talked about our kids.  Duddy has three beautiful children. In a way it blows my mind – but I also have this down in the gut certainty that he’s a great dad.  I haven’t seen him with his kids, but after seeing him with my kids, I just know.  And I’m not surprised.  What else were we doing in college, but in some ways preparing for this?  We were finding ourselves and figuring out who we wanted to be.  We were free and happy and in constant pursuit of a good time, a good buzz – soaking it all in, completely unaware of the blink of an eye that would take us to our real lives, our lives with a capital “L”. 

We were unwittingly setting the bar for ourselves: the bar for friendship, the bar for happiness.  

Duddy and Dash knew me when I was young.  When motherwas not my identity.  When every thought, emotion, decision and perception didn’t emerge, slightly altered, through the filter of motherhood.  It’s almost inconceivable to me now that I was actually that girl once.  That I walked through this world freely, unconnected to these children that are now everything to me.  For these reasons I have always cherished my college friendship with Dash and our friendships with our other college friends.  It’s a cliche, but man, you really do pick up where you left off.  I hadn’t seen Duddy in ten years and it’s as if a day hasn’t gone by since we were all huddled around a keg in fishermen sweaters and flannel shirts.  At the same time, there’s this intriguing decade and a half long chasm filled with the stuff of our lives:  marriage, work, children, pleasure, survival, compromises. There are music, books and ideas to be shared. There’s a whole hell of a lot to catch up on.  And catch up we did. 

Dash and I are both transplants to this fair city, so we don’t have many old friends here.  We have friends that are starting to feel like old friends, friends that will some day be old friends.  Here’s the thing – our old friends are scattered around the country, so when we see them, the past  – our shared past – is breathtakingly immediate.  We tap right back into that fountain of youth because we haven’t had time to pile other experiences on top of it.  There haven’t been barbeques and kids’ birthday parties creating new memory growth rings that change our perceptions of ourselves and each other from when we were twenty-one.  I suppose that’s why these little peeks into each other’s lives as grown ups are so sweetly compelling.  We see our own growth in each other . . . and in each other, we are reminded of how it all started.

                                            Photo by Kathy Quirk-Syvertsen

Everyone has their sleep rituals – the little noises they make before they drift off, the way their bodies move as they slip into sleep.  Last night Devil Baby came to our bed in the middle of the night, which hasn’t happened in a while, and I became reacquainted with hers.  I’m not sure what time it was, but having turned in at nine, I had gotten my chunk of sleep and knew I wouldn’t fall asleep again.  Not that I could have with the foot frenzy that was happening next to me.  Devil Baby flutters her feet around like a pair of crazed seal flippers.  At first I thought she was messing around, but I realized she was trying to fall back asleep.  As her little feet ran up and down my body, probing every nook and cranny, I felt like I was being frisked by a saucy and opportunistic Italian policia.  I blearily thought - Jesus, she’s like Helen Keller over here.  Then I thought - No, wait, Helen Keller had arms . . . she’s like Bonnie . . . Bonnie Consuelo . . . 

For my old friends who read this blog, even though you didn’t actually know and even though I didn’t actually know, we both sort of knew on some unconscious level that it was only a matter of time before Bonnie Consuelo sashayed onto my little stage here.  In middle school religion class we were shown a movie about one feisty armless woman named Bonnie Consuelo.  She was a petite brunette with a feathered-hairdo.  And no arms.  Nevertheless, she was a mom and able to do all the things a mom needs to do.  She insisted on wearing sleeveless shirts (I suppose empty sleeves would have looked a bit lackluster and deflated), and she was able to drive and shop and cook and apparently, style her hair.  She could even put on a belt.  In the supermarket, she pushed her cart around with her waist and slipped her feet out of her white open toed wedges to squeeze melons (a discerning consumer, Bonnie was) and place them in her cart.  The movie was supposed to teach us valuable lessons about overcoming odds, perseverance, acceptance . . . blah blah blah. 

Obviously, when you serve Bonnie Consuelo up to a bunch of mean girls on a silver platter, the message is going to get lost.  We were horrified and hysterical.  We couldn’t get enough of Bonnie.  At one point in the movie, Bonnie is sitting on a stool at her kitchen counter, cutting tomatoes with her toes.  They are juicy and messy and she is wielding a knife like nobody’s business.  All of a sudden a fly starts buzzing around (and if this isn’t the kind of unscripted coup de chance that directors dream of, I don’t know what is). Bonnie puts down her knife and snags that fly right out of the air with her toes, Mr. Myagi-style, and throws it in the sink.  She then resumes her tomato slicing . . . without washing her feet hands!!!!  We were jumping out of our skin!  Gross!  we shrieked. That’s so foul! Nasty, Bonnie, nasty!!!  We jeered and heckled.  If we had had food, we would have thrown it at the screen.  Our poor teacher.  Talk about missing the point entirely.

No matter.  It has taken me all these years of hard won growth and maturity to appreciate Bonnie Consuelo. Who else but Bonnie would be able to provide a small chuckle in the middle of the night after twenty-five years? My teacher would be so proud.

Yesterday Supergirl bounded into her new life: that of an elementary school kid.  She’s now a full fledged kindergartner and never has there been a girl more ready to fly.  I keep watching for signs of insecurity, chinks in her armor.  I don’t want her to feel like she has to keep a stiff upper lip.  I want her to know it’s o.k. to be scared, o.k. to be nervous at least.  Despite my hovering and searching looks and leading questions, I just see a girl powering through, happy to be out there and ready for it all.  I’m not sure how she got to be this way.  I certainly wasn’t like that, which, I think, is why I have a hard time accepting that she’s just that confident.  

I was as anxious and butterfly-bellied as could be on the first day of school.  I had long, long hair which I wore in a barrette on the top of my head.  Only my mother could put the barrette in, or so I believed, because my hair was so thick and heavy and the barrette was too small.  I lived in fear that the barrette would spring open leaving me to survive the rest of my day as a little Latina Cousin It.  Tallish and knock-kneed,  I remember being afraid of the big kids, afraid of the special-ed kids, afraid of riding the bus, afraid of dropping my tray in the cafeteria.  I had a pair of light blue polyester slacks that had a gum stain on the butt and standing for the Pledge of Allegiance was a torture for me.  All for naught, it turns out because no one really picked on me.  I was more likely to be ignored than bullied.  

To this day, one of the most stressful experiences I can remember was spilling Love’s Baby Soft in my desk at Shroeder Elementary.  I remember taking off my socks to soak it up, but the smell, nothing could stop the smell. It was like I had released a genie shrouded in cloying pink fumes and I couldn’t get it back in the bottle.  I was in a cold sweat – my teeth literally chattering.  Mrs. Watson was my teacher and she never noticed – at least I don’t think she did.  Supergirl would never bother to take Love’s Baby Soft to school.  And if she did, and if it spilled, I think she would raise her hand and tell her teacher.  Simple as that.  What was Loves Baby Soft anyway?  A perfume?  Probably a body splash – those were big in those days.  Remember Jean Naté? Friction Pour le Bain!

Another mom sidled up to me after school yesterday with a concerned look on her face and told me that she had been at recess and Supergirl had had a moment of being a “little upset” and had told her she wanted to call me and come home.  I was surprised, but I was all over it, ready to listen, soothe and assuage like only a recovering Nervous-Nellie can.  Later, after the celebratory first day of school Dairy Queen stop, as I gently tried to prod some detail out of Supergirl, the only thing I got was her quick and snappy version of the story:

“I was bored because we couldn’t play on the monkey bars because it was the first graders’ turn, and we were only allowed to play on the driveway and that’s, like, sooooo boring, so I wanted to come home.”

Sounds about right.

Supergirl, may you always run faster than the worries and fretting and don’t turn around – take it from me, you’re better off without them. 

Just as I was bemoaning the end of summer, something really good happened.  My big fat Fall issue of Vogue came in the mail – the September giant that weighs at least five pounds and never fails to get me all in a lather for boots and frocks.  Even before I subscribed to Vogue, in fact even before I was out of a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, the Fall issue was synonymous with the change of seasons and the fun new clothes that went with it.  

In Michigan we have apples up the wazoo, so to me, cider and Vogue portended cool winds, piles of crunchy leaves and the faint smell of backyard fires.  I would spend hours pouring over pictures that were beautiful and challenging, confusing, even. There were clothes I didn’t understand, but knew on some level were the ne plus ultra.  If I wanted accessible, I could go to Seventeen magazine – and, of course, I did that too.  

Now I want fantasy, inspiration, escape . . . and my lovely Vogue brings me all of those things.

Example:  something I stumbled upon buried deep in the pages of Vogue simultaneously tickles my funny bone and my covet bone and is helping, in some small way, to take the sting out of fast approaching Autumn.  The inimitable Karl Lagerfeld has succeeded in realizing a twenty-year old idea with the help of his resourceful Roman furrier friend.  They have succeeded in creating . . . are you ready for this?  They have succeeded in creating GOLD FUR.  GOLD FUR, people!  G-O-L-D FUR!!!  If you think you detect a note of sarcasm, you’d be wrong.  I love this.  I don’t care who thinks me vapid and cruel.  I love the over-the-topness of it.  It’s gorgeously ridiculous – ridiculously gorgeous!  Leave it to that white-maned, pointy-booted, cigarette-panted, cape-wearing, dark-glasses-clad wily fox to come up with something like this.

These sartorial mad men have figured out a way of sending the fur through a space-age washing machine where a bar of 24 carat gold sits waiting to act like a fabric softener.  The gold is pressurized into a mist and at some point the cellular membranes of the fur open and absorb the gold and then when the pressure returns to normal, the gold is sealed into the fur forever.  Genius.  I love the idea of research and development for gold fur.  I know, I know, we need to find a cure for cancer, but Karl would not be doing that anyway (his fluttering fan would knock over the test tubes), so let him dream up the unthinkable and send his minions on fantastical treasure hunts, luxe and bizarre wild goose chases.     

Alas, I will never own a gold fur.   C’est très chic, mais très chère.  But once again, my big fatty fall fashion mag has succeeded in giving me something delectable to chew on.  Can’t wait to go back and peruse the rest.

There is nothing like returning to the place where I grew up.  It never fails to send me into a spiral of adolescent regression.  We have been visiting my family in Michigan for five days and although it is lovely to see everyone and for everyone to see us, I don’t particularly care for my attitude.  

I have slipped into a fog – a dreamy torpor.  I can’t think.  I can’t write.  The only thing I want to to do is lounge around and read magazines . . . sleep, eat, watch TV.  In short, I want to be sixteen again.  

I don’t want to worry about my kids.  I don’t want to worry about my worries.  I want to be left alone.  I want to pick the apple skins out of my braces, throw my hair in a ponytail and race off to tennis practice.  I want to cruise over to the white colonial on Chesterfield Road, pick up my best friend Susie in my Buick Electra and drive to a matinee, shrieking and giggling and weaving in and out of traffic the whole way.  I want to stew in my juices, wallow in my angst, tape songs off the radio, daydream in a swaying hammock, drive to the drugstore just because I want a new flavor of gum, a new color of nail polish.  I want to meander up and down the cool carpeted aisles of the Bloomfield Hills Public Library, picking a pile of books to read in my yellow beanbag chair.  I want to go to a concert at Pine Knob, smoke a joint and fall over on the grassy hill because I’m laughing so hard.  

I want to go back to being the center of my world.  

I want to go back to being taken care of.

I want to go back to when everything was still ahead of me.

About thirty years ago, I got my first pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals.  They were navy blue and I had to beg for them.  Everyone had a pair, including the mother of my Belgian friend, Effi.  Effi’s mom was, in retrospect, a very sexy Belgian.  She had long straight hair, high cheek bones, perfectly crooked teeth and (aside from her Dr. Scholl’s) many non-sensible shoes that Effi and I used to love to wear around.  (Her father also had a huge collection of Playboys that we used to pilfer and spirit away to the basement for sessions of neck craning naughty giggling, but that has nothing to do with Dr. Scholl.  Even then, I knew the presence of these magazines had something to do with them being liberal Europeans).  

Today is Father’s Day and my very own Papi is in town visiting.  Ironically, he knows nothing of this blog because I want to be able to freely discuss my sex, drugs and rock n’ roll lifestyle without worrying about my parents.  The fact that he would love this blog is not lost on me, and being a dutiful parent-pleaser, I feel a bit guilty.  I might need to create a shadow site -  PGpeevishmama, where I only post my most innocuous and innocent ramblings, those in keeping with my status as the responsible, straight-A, straight-laced, oldest daughter of immigrant parents, wife, mother of three, etcetera, etcetera. Not that I’m writing anything all that subversive, I just don’t want my parents, my kid’s teachers, or any of the school mommies deciding I’m some sort of miscreant mother. 

All surreptitious blogging and guilty feelings aside, I credit my dear dad with my love of literature, and by extension, my love of words.  When I was little he used to bring me books all the time, which represented something warm, visceral and deep:  his love, his faith in my intellect, his desire to share all that there is to discover between the covers of a book.  He gave me Jules Verne’s 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a book he had devoured as a boy in landlocked Cordoba, Argentina.  It didn’t really float my boat, but the book became emblematic to me, a talisman of sorts.  It was a handsome, hard cover book with gorgeous illustrations on the cover of undersea life . . .  limpid blue water, flaming coral and schools of fish, undulating octopi and sinister eels . . . I remember running my fingers over the smooth cover, daydreaming about mermaids and pirates and submarines. The book represented adventure and promise.  

When I was twelve he hired a scuba teacher to give us private lessons in our pool.  We learned to read decompression tables and to spit in our masks so they wouldn’t fog up.  We learned not to surface faster than our bubbles to avoid the bends and how to share a regulator in case one of us ran out of air.  I was at the height of my raging tweeny, drama-queen ways, but with my dad in the water, with the weight of the scuba gear and the lessons we were learning on my shoulders, I was clear-eyed, competent and calm.  He expected nothing less.  

We got our scuba certifications, taking our open water test in a quarry in some hick town in Ohio.  The water was murky and cold and we carved our initials in a yellow school bus that was shipwrecked at the bottom of the quarry.  My dad always carried a scuba knife strapped to his leg, just in case we ever got tangled in a net or encountered an underwater marauder (or had the occasion to carve our initials on the side of a rusty bus).  He has a little James Bond in him, my dad.  

We were in a manmade hole in the ground filled with junk, but we felt like we were 10,000 leagues under the sea. 

Eventually we did scuba dive in actual salt water, in the Bahamas, in Mexico.  Fish used to nip at my hair as it streamed behind me like a mermaid’s.  We saw a shark once, manta rays . . . we watched in horror and wonder when a guide named Pirata ditched his scuba gear to plunge under a reef and emerged triumphantly clutching an enormous crab which he wrestled into a net and made me drag along for the rest of the dive.  

My dad was always amazed at how slowly I went through my air.  I was smaller, yes, but I was also calmer.  Scuba diving was something he had dreamed of as a boy, waited a lifetime to learn, and approached with a sense of wonder and excitement.  To me, it was no big deal.  I never felt I wouldn’t be able to do it, never had a chance to long for it.  I was learning it practically before I knew about it.  This particular skill set, like so many others, was handed to me on a silver platter.  This portal to adventure, to the watery deep, was an inheritance of sorts.  

I always thought I could do anything, be anything.  Now I understand that it’s because someone was working very hard to make sure I felt like that – smoothing my way, but pushing me hard.  Empowered, entitled, brazen, hungry for knowledge, power, adventure, happiness.  

The world was my oyster.  

Papi, te quiero.  Gracias.

I’ve brought the lap top to my bed and am lying on my stomach typing away.  Chewing gum, crossed ankles – très high school girl, except I have to glance out the window from time to time to make sure none of my children is out in the street.  Do you remember that terribly dangerous trick where you and a co-conspirator popped up on opposite sides of the road and pretended to pull a rope when a car was coming?  How horrible!  How rife with potential disaster and tragedy!  It makes me shudder to think of all the dangerous things I have done in my life, the rope trick being about a 4 out of 10 on the danger scale. Maybe a 3.  

Survival is such a crapshoot.  We should all be dead ten times over and yet we continue to squeak by.  For now, anyway.  

Not so Marsha, this line of thinking . . . a tad morbid. Perhaps time to change the channel.  In other news, Devil Baby is making huge strides in the potty-training department and if I can crumple her up and swoosh her into the “done” basket in the next couple weeks, I am going to write a book and then I’m going to go on Oprah.  I will become a potty guru and I will share my pithy tips with a benevolent smile.  I will debunk the myth being perpetrated by BIG CORPORATE DIAPER, who, through shady and unethical means get pediatricians to proselytize the message that kids aren’t ready to be toilet trained until three years old, and even then, you shouldn’t push them because . . . o.k., all together now . . . every child is different.

Well I’m here to say that there is a definite potty training window at age two and if you seize the day and believe that it can happen, that’s one whole year less of diapers choking our landfills and, more importantly, one whole year less of cleaning smeared smelly shit off your child’s ass.  If I’m wrong, that means my kids are defecation geniuses, pissing savants, which would be a bit of a waste and a pity,  so I’m sticking to my theory.  

Again, I’m way off the Marsha vibe. This stomach typing is killing my back anyway.  Must move to a chair.  Anyway, that’s my message, and Devil Baby is my ticket to paradise because I’m going to get rich when people figure out that I know the secret to potty training . . . it has worked for me . . . THRICE . And if you try my simple (and fun) techniques, it will work for you too.

What I haven’t figured out is how to keep my kids from engaging in risky behavior.  Even that seemingly innocuous camp trick where you bent over and took ten huge breaths then someone pretty much choked you against a wall until you passed out is SO FUCKING DANGEROUS!!!  Kids have DIED doing that!  We did it all the time at Black River Farm and Ranch, a girl’s horse camp in Michigan – we’d eat Doritos and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, clean the dust off our faces with cotton balls soaked in Sea Breeze, paint our nails with glitter polish and strangle each other for fun!  You felt like you were gone for hours, when really it was just a few seconds of eye rolling and twitching.  Oh. God.  I can’t believe I’m not dead.  Nothing like letting another twelve year old decide how long to deprive you of oxygen. 

My guys are little – the risky stuff hasn’t even begun yet.  But if it takes one to know one, I’m going to say that Supergirl is going to be a little speed freak, a devilish risk taker.  We put her on a kneeboard when she was three and her face when she climbed back into the boat took my breath away.  There were sparks flying out of her eyes.  Literally, she was electric – buzzing from the adrenalin, the noise, the water, thespeed.  This is the kind of kid who will drive very fast, who will try to outrun the cops, who will think herself invincible, who will run around downtown Detroit at night giggling and screaming with her little girlfriends in bermudas and madras miniskirts . . . oh wait, that was me.  

I need a secret, a ticket to her safety . . . some trick . . . a prayer, some voodoo, some mojo . . . a miracle . . . or maybe . . . just a little luck.