My 17-year-old will be in college next year, and right now he and I are deep in the process of applications and school visits and talks that spring up suddenly at dinner or in the car and begin with, “Maybe I should think about…?” or “Have you considered…?” It’s a process that feels very much how I once heard a writer describe the process of writing: Like feeling your way, a foot or two at a time, along a very long and very dark tunnel; you can’t fathom where it ends up.
Sometimes it’s my son who starts the conversation, and sometimes I do. But either way, it’s clear that this is less a new topic than it is a thread of a conversation we’ve been having for many months, and probably years. It’s the same conversation every parent has first with a spouse and then later with the child himself, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I know I’ll miss him next year, and I know that will feel right. My friend Andy has a son who is several years older than mine, and when his went off to college Andy told me that little boys evolve into teenage boys so that you are more than happy to help them pack when the time comes.
In fact, I missed my son when he was away for six weeks this past summer. (I didn’t realize quite how much I missed him until suddenly there he was, grinning at me in the kitchen, and as I wrapped my arms around him I thought of that line in the poem by Walter Dean Myers, “Love that boy, like a rabbit loves to run.”)
When I told people then how he was loving the long hours he spent in the school’s clay studio and how he went back after dinner, and when I tell them now how he wants to study Ceramics in college, people often nod in a vague way about how wonderful that is before they ask something along the lines of, “So how’s he going to make a living at that?” [Read more →]
It’s alarming to talk with someone on the phone and realize they suspect you are a liar. This past week I received, via FTD, a belated birthday package—a gourmet basket with some of my favorite things. Like tea, biscotti, and dried apricots. There was a warm message on the card accompanying it, wishing me lots of post-celebration, feet-on-the-ottoman relaxation this autumn… but there was no signature. No name. In effect, I got a thoughtful gift from someone I couldn’t thank for their thoughtfulness. Weird.
I called the customer service number in the packaging, and someone named Danielle answered. (On a Saturday afternoon… Kudos, FTD!) I explained the predicament, and Danielle said she understood but couldn’t tell me who sent the package.
“You mean you can’t tell me, as in you don’t know?” I asked.
“Oh, I know who sent it,” Danielle said. “But it’s just that I can’t reveal it to you.” When I asked why, she said, “Well, it’s our policy. A precaution, you know, in case they don’t want you to know who sent it.”
But why would someone who sent me a birthday gift want to remain anonymous? This was a gift basket, not a wing at the Met. Danielle paused for a minute before replying, matter-of-factly, “Because maybe you aren’t supposed to know.”
Danielle emphasized the “you” in a manner that implied that I might not be, in fact, who I said I was. Maybe I wasn’t, her tone suggested, the recipient of the gift, the one who would be sipping hot tea by a roaring fire, dipping almond biscotti. Instead I was some person who was inquiring about a gift given to someone else. [Read more →]
This morning I got an update on a former foster dog — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel who lived with us two years ago, from just prior to Halloween to just before Christmas.
The dog had some kind of skin condition and arrived hairless, itchy, raw, reddened and miserable. He was about as sad as sad can look. He didn’t come with a name, so I named him Georgie, because his naked face reminded me of the illustration of the children’s book character Curious George.
Another volunteer, Huntly, picked Georgie up in Vermont and a mutual friend delivered him as far as a highway exit in New Hampshire. The first time I saw him, he was in a dog crate in the back of a van at a rest area, growling and snarling, his skinny body pressed as far back as he could get against the crate’s back wall, and looking for all the world more like a gremlin than a Cavalier. (More “Lilo and Stitch” than “Lady and the Tramp.”)
Prior to the pickup, he had been living by himself in an unheated trailer, with a litter box and a bag of cheap kibble. Details were fuzzy, but there was something about a divorce, and an owner who had moved to a place that didn’t allow dogs, and a hope that he might have been adopted to someone the owner knew. But who wanted a hairless, irritable dog with some kind of undiagnosed, ugly skin condition? [Read more →]
Remember AOL disks? If you owned a mailbox in the late 1990s or early-2000s, you know what I mean, because America Online’s aggressive direct mail strategy probably distributed CD-ROMs and diskettes into it with irritating frequency. More than a billion disks were mailed between the late 1990s and 2006, when AOL stopped the mass mailing. Or mass irritation. However you look at it.
In fact, the end of that era likely came without you being aware that is was, in fact, the end of an era. But that’s how evolution is, right? One day you have to bungee-wrap your trash cans against the bands of marauding wild animals outside your cave, and the next thing you know you can’t remember the last time you saw a mastodon happen by.
Things change. Technology evolves. And suddenly you’re dealing with a whole different set of problems. When was the last time you got a busy signal? Or went on (or heard of anyone else going on) a true “blind date”? Looked up a number in a phone book? Had one of your kid’s friends call the house phone? PC World compiles a list of these and other obsolete things here.
Which brings me to the real point of this post. The other day I unearthed the item pictured below from an old desk drawer. It didn’t seem that foreign an object to me, but my 12-year-old daughter had no idea what it was. “Is it some kind of violin bow?” she asked.
But you guys know what it is… right? Anyone…? (Shout it out below!)
I had some happy news last week: The story of Gigi’s adventure with her beloved green tomato has been picked up by The Bark, a magazine I happen to love. In other words, if I were a dog, my tail would be wagging like that of a retriever with a tennis ball. (Or Gigi herself with a pork chop.) Big shout here to The Bark editor Lisa Wogan for making it happen.
If you don’t know The Bark, it’s a bi-monthly magazine about modern dog culture, with a literary twist. If NPR’s office dog hung around after hours, The Bark might be what he’d produce as his moonlighting project. I’m tempted to say that there’s plenty in each issue to appeal to the non-dog lover as well. But I have four dogs, so you shouldn’t trust my opinion anyway.
My childhood friend Ron Ploof was so inspired by the pathos of Gigi’s story that he adapted it to the small screen. I think he did a fine job with it, and I particularly like the tweak of the ending. So what do you think?
It’s alarming to talk with someone on the phone and realize they suspect you are a liar. This past week I received, via 
