In blog-speak, being “tagged” means that Barb challenged me to reveal five little-known things about myself, as well. I’ve done that before, with a giant dollop of discomfort. But since I’m a soft touch for people I like, I’m complying here. Well, sort of. Instead of giving you more little-known facts about me, I randomly opened my diary and transcribed a few entries.

April 23, 2008

Strapped into a seat, tended to by uniformed attendants, I can’t help but compare airline travel to a stay in a nursing home. In coach travel, that’s a vaguely depressing thing: It’s like quarantine in a cramped institution with inadequate funding. But here, in First Class, it makes me look forward to growing old  more than I already do.

The Serbian flight attendant assigned to the handful of us here looks blocky and sturdy, like she is carved with a chainsaw out of a tree trunk. She seems formidable, yet kind. When she bends to whisper to me, her voice is soft as butter on warm toast. “Would you like a blanket?” she coos in my ear, in a tone that suggests she is used to cajoling folks to finish what’s on their plates. I nod, and she lifts a burly forearm to drape the blanket gently over my lap.

A little while later, she wheels the food cart down the wide aisle as easily as a doll carriage. When I ask for tea, she offers me a china cup and saucer, and a real metal spoon.

This might be just a morning flight to LA. But sitting upright and fixed, surrounded by the softly muted clinks of china and attended to by someone with strong and capable forearms, I think that First Class comes pretty close to the dining hall at a better-funded facility. I fill my lungs with the stale, too-warm air, lean back, and drift off.

August 29, 2008

We had a fly problem at our house in Maine, so we hung two fly strips from the kitchen ceiling, six to eight feet apart. In a few days, the strip on the left was coated thick with shiny black fly bodies. Curiously, the strip on the right attracted only a few, and on it one fly–writhing–seemed to be signaling frantically for rescue.

“That’s the kind of party I’d be invited to,” said a teenage houseguest, Ian, gesturing toward the strip on the right, as he sat at the table eating a bowl of cereal.

“I never get invited to the really good parties,” Ian said, “and I get stuck at the loser parties where only a few people show, so it’s really tough to leave.”

September 14, 2008

Overheard in a doctor’s waiting room, a conversation between two middle-aged nurses who chatted companionably while they pushed papers back and forth and paused to answer the ringing phone.

Nurse 1: “Where did you go on vacation?”
Nurse 2: “The USA Motel.”
Nurse 1: “On Route 1?”
Nurse 2: “Yeah, that’s it. You know the one–next to the pancake house…?”
Nurse 1: “Ah… right. That place always looks so… clean.”

September 28, 2008

Additions to the running list of words I hate:
beige, slacks, pregnant, paradigm, orientated, workshop (used as a verb), panties, guesstimate, blouse, soil, and corps (in part because I can’t say it without wondering what to do with the “p” and the “s”)

* * *

And now, I’m calling on…

Laura P. Thomas
Steve Woodruff
Karen Swim
Joel Libava
Shelley Ryan

When the flight attendant advises that passengers place the oxygen mask over their own faces before assisting those seated nearby, I always interpret this imperative more broadly—that I should take care of my own needs first, whether or not I’m strapped into an airplane seat, 10,000 feet in the air. Day to day, this doesn’t really happen, of course. What with dogs needing kibble in their bowls and mail needing filing and kids needing an occasional warm embrace or a ride to school… my own needs often wind up in the back seat, shoved in the crevice between the seat cushions along with candy wrappers, pennies, and old gum.

But one thing I do hold sacred: In the morning, I don’t want anyone to bug me before I’ve cleared that first cup of coffee. Around my house, my daughter has learned to steer a wide berth for the 5 or 10 minutes it takes for me to drain the mug. My teenage son just stays in bed.

This morning, I filled the first cup before first light, and in the dark toddled over to the fridge to add a bit of milk. I unscrewed the carton and started to pour, then—surprised—stopped. The milk, which had been fine the previous night, was a startling shade of blue. An oddly bright color, like a robin’s egg.

“What the…” I said, to no one in particular. Then, more loudly, in the general direction of the bedrooms, “Hey!” I yelled. “Anyone know what happened to the milk?” From my son’s room, somewhere under the covers, I heard a muffled sort of snort that before long matured into a prolonged, knowing cackle.

When I told this story to some friends today, each looked at me quizzically, like a dog might cock his head at an unfamiliar pitch. “So wait… he dyed the milk blue? Well what’s so funny about that?”

I grew up in a house where small humorous jokes were often played on others as a display of warmth and affection—and, also, as an attempt to root you in humility, to school you in the reality that the world could be a ruthless place. “You might get straight As in school, Ms. High and Mighty,” the pranks seemed to say, “but we know where you sleep.”

Around my childhood home, asking, “What’s for lunch?” inevitably brought the response, A cracked ice sandwich and a glass of fish.

What did you learn at school today? “Nothing.” Then what’d you go for?

You might go to brush your teeth at night and, just before squeezing on the paste, discover that your toothbrush was wet. Your question —”Did someone use my toothbrush?” yelled through a crack in the bathroom door—was met by robust laughter by someone lying in wait for your reaction. Eventually, you learned to test the other brushes: Chances are, it was just someone trotting out Dad’s old trick to wet all the brushes under the faucet before returning them, one by one, to their usual holes in the porcelain holder.

This kind of ruse was a gentler manifestation of the teasing that my father picked up from his own father, my grandfather—the kind of guy who laughed pitilessly at my cousin, his grandson, who as a young boy had deduced that the safest place to hide the key to his Captain Crunch treasure chest was inside the chest itself. “That wasn’t too bright, was it?” the old man asked him, after he had dropped the key in the slot… then instantly realized his miscalculation.

When you are a kid, you don’t realize that not every family has a father who hides in the coat closet, poised to jump out at you from between the parkas and galoshes. Or who, dressed in nothing but his boxer shorts and a big grin, stood in front of the picture window and waving good morning to our neighbors. Not every family has someone who routinely hides under the bed and—just at the moment you step onto the rug—shoots out a hand to grab your ankle in a terrifying grip.

I was the smallest child and, over time, the constant punking made me a little wary, a little nervous, a little like I had to always watch my back. As a teen, it sometimes made me plenty irritated. Possibly, it was the lack of sleep: between 1970 and the time I left for college, I slept with one eye open.

But time and distance have softened my view, as they have a magical way of doing. I’ve come to see my siblings and me back then as puppies rolling on the lawn, nipping at each other in play. It might look a little painful to the outsider, but it was all in a kind of fun that, in a way, captures the very essence of them.

So more often these days, I feel a wistful nostalgia for the fun-house pranks of my childhood. My parents are both long dead, my brother and two sisters and I live our lives, for the most part, irrespective of one another. But we shared something rich that, until this morning, I thought was gone, too.

Some children excel at sports or school, and I imagine their parents take great pleasure in witnessing their success. A child walks across the stage at her high school graduation as valedictorian, and if you were to scan the crowd you could find the parents, their eyes fixed and shining. If you could see through their clothes and skin and into their chest, you would find their hearts swollen, near bursting with joy. Those moments—and maybe million others, too… the first wobbly ride on a two-wheeler, the winning goal in the net—make the crappier parts of parenting dissolve. Gone, in an instant, are the arguments you’ve had, the anger at the acting out, the endless, epic parent-child battles of who is right and who is a nincompoop.

Standing there this morning, with my mug of blue-tinted coffee bathed in the pool of refrigerator light, I had one of those moments. Some day, maybe, my boy will bring home a varsity letter or a perfect report card, and that would be alright. But it wouldn’t please me half as much as knowing, at this minute, that ours was the only fridge in the town—and likely beyond—that held milk colored quite so vibrant a shade of blue.

Sometimes when I’m bored and have neglected to tote some reading material—like when I’m standing in line at the supermarket, or waiting for a movie to begin—I indulge in a debate I have with myself: Which do I dislike more: a visit to the dentist, or a visit to the gynecologist?

Both require me to grant access to the dark and private parts of my body that I’d rather keep classified—at least, to all but a privileged few. You might think that men can’t grok that dilemma, but my friend David suggests that the equivalent procedure for men would be a prostate exam. I’ve never had one, but—although I don’t like to—I can imagine.

I admit that I don’t like the physical exposure, the act of opening wide for strangers. Intellectually, I know there’s nothing truly intimate going on. But, still, it feels weird.

What’s more: I dread the way that the folks trained to do business there seem to regard those nooks as a kind of porthole to my life. They read them in the way a palm reader studies your upturned hand. “So you drink coffee,” my dentist might say, using his sharp pick to muck the crannies between my teeth.

Some days, I persuade myself that I dislike visiting my dentist more. Maybe it’s because those visits take longer, and I go twice as often. Or maybe it’s because dentists seem to have impossibly high standards for oral hygiene. I can spend hours working over my teeth, investing in all kinds of creams and polishes, but still I could be scrubbing harder, brushing longer, flossing more deeply beneath the gum line.

If you try to follow their advice to the letter, you are doomed to screw it up, it seems. It reminds me of a college copyediting class that tried to school us in the arcane, but exacting, rules of grammar. Unfortunately, I was always placing a colon in a sentence that demanded a semi-colon, or italicizing a bit of text that required underlining, or getting confused about whether a subordinate clause should be separated by commas or left flailing, on its own, desperately seeking its modifier. There is little nuance to copyediting—and I found it maddening and exasperating. In copyediting—and in dentistry, apparently—there is a right way, or a wrong way, but never a way that’s simply “good enough.”

“You are brushing too hard,” my dentist told me the last time I was lying supine in his exam room. “You need to find a softer brush… and try brushing in small circles. Not like this…” he said, sawing aggressively in the air as if hacking at a particularly stubborn oak limb, “…but like this,” he explained, drawing tight, small circles in front of my nose, gripping a pretend toothbrush with long, deliberate fingers.

During that visit, I was taken aback when he handed me a hand mirror and then, with a gloved hand, exposed the soft tissue beneath my bottom teeth to point out a few vulnerable spots at my gum line. I nodded mutely, the taste of latex in my mouth. And I couldn’t help but think that this particular maneuver—training a mirror on the more tender bits of the cavity—was something that my gynecologist had never, ever done.

If this were truly a debate, I decide, that would be the closing argument, and perhaps the clincher.

My debate has always been a private one. But since my annual exam at the gynecologist was coming up, I wondered how my gynecologist, who is a woman, would weigh in. So when she walked into the small examination room where I was waiting, half undressed, the other day, I steered the conversation in that direction. The doctor is about my age, and as we talked she tapped at icons on my digital chart with a stylus.

“You know who has a really weird job?” she asked, suddenly looking up. “Mammographers.” All day they lurk in small, dark rooms, painfully manipulating breasts into awkward positions, and then photographing them as they’re flattened. “One after another, all day long. Can you imagine?” she said.

I couldn’t. But then again, I said, I couldn’t imagine her job, either… one after another, all day long.

I mentioned my dentist-versus-gynecologist debate, and she said matter-of-factly, “Oh yes, I hear that all the time.” Some of the tools that dentists and gynecologists use are the same, in fact, she pointed out. The instrument that a dentist uses to numb someone’s gum is the same instrument she uses to numb a cervix, she said, and often the mix of anesthetic is the same, too. Once, she said, when she couldn’t find her own tools, she borrowed them from a nearby dentist.

That raised all kinds of questions in my mind, but I didn’t ask them. I was too busy being amazed that her other patients had made the same comparison. It’s nice to hit a nerve, I guess, but I liked the idea more when I thought it was original and completely mine. It reminded me of when I was 13 and wrote a long, narrative poem about the heroic struggles of a tiny family that lived under a mushroom. I thought I had invented the concept of the epic poem. But then I got to 9th grade and read Beowulf. Suddenly, both my story and I were stupid, small, and ordinary.

I never did get an answer out of my doctor, so I don’t know where she would come down in the dentist-versus-gynecologist debate. But an ongoing poll I stumbled on at fitsugar says most women would rather go to the dentist (57 percent) than the gynecologist (43 percent).

In a way, I pity both the dentists and the gynecologists among us, and maybe now mammographers and proctologists, too. I wonder how they drag themselves out of bed each morning, having invested so much time and money in a career that sets them off each day to meet one-on-one with people who wish they were anyplace other than sitting, exposed, in their exam rooms.

In my mind, a dentist or gynecologist is like a tax preparer or divorce attorney—they are professionals no one ever really wants to hire, but sometimes must. But maybe dentists and gynecologists are more like garbage men: When we imagine our world without them, we are very, very grateful they exist.

So where does your preference lie in this debate? The dentist’s chair or the gynecologist’s/proctologist’s table?

Day to day, I couldn’t predict its mood; it was like living with a touchy teenager.

Eventually, I realized that I would need to make the necessary arrangements to evict the tiny squatter. And so I went to see a dermatologist, who peered at my nose suspiciously and asked if I’d been under the sun much. I thought of all the summers I’ve spent thoughtlessly plopped in a beach chair, toes dug into the warm sand, book propped on my lap, while the sun toasted my skin a rich, bronzed color of rotisserie chicken.

“Umm… not really,” I hedged. I felt a pang of guilt, like I was 17 again and coolly asking our family doctor for birth control pills solely to regulate my periods, when I actually had something more interesting in mind. What is it that makes us want to present a scrubbed, sanitized version of ourselves to those in positions of authority?

Instantly, I recanted. “Well, I usually use sunscreen,” I allowed, rationalizing that “usually” was interpretive enough to make it a true statement.

“Well, we’ll see.” She was brusque—and efficient, clipping off a piece of the angry interloper, which in response promptly bled at her. “We’ll be in touch,” she said.

A week or so later I got a flimsy white postcard in the mail from the doctor’s office. On it were three pre-printed options with open boxes next to them, and one was checked off: “Your biopsy showed a cancerous growth,” it read next to the check mark. “Please call our office to schedule a follow-up appointment.” In ballpoint pen, underneath, someone had scrawled, “Basal cell carcinoma.”

I had to admit: It was efficient. Nonetheless, there was something a little off-putting about it—the healthcare equivalent of a service-call reminder that it was time to rotate my car tires.

My teenage son, reading over my shoulder, snorted and said, “Wait a minute… did you just get a postcard from your cancer?” Immediately I pictured a small skin growth waving to me from the deck of a catamaran in Cancun. “Weather to die for. Sights are gorgeous. Wish you were here!!!” Of course, I wish it were vacationing there, too, preferably on somebody else’s nose.

Basal cell carcinoma is pretty much the milquetoast of the skin cancer family. In medical-speak, it’s not very “aggressive.” It’s small and weak—a pipsqueak—and it generally doesn’t spread to other outposts on or in the body. Even the most ambitious basal cell carcinomas—the valedictorians of their cancerous classes—can usually only ever hope to achieve an ugly disfiguring. “It’s the one you want,” my doctor had explained. Still, I thought, that was kind of a curious way to describe any cancer, even a wimpy one.

And, even so, the news came as a downer, if only for the portended hassle of another visit to another doctor, and then a third visit to a plastic surgeon to re-putty the small but prominent spot in the center of my face.

But I cheered myself almost immediately by considering, still gripping the doctor’s postcard, the idea that this little dot on my nose was so trifling, so insignificant, that it didn’t even warrant a telephone call. Instead, a cheap piece of mail moseying its way to my mailbox sufficed. This pipsqueak was nothing my doctor hadn’t seen before, a million times. There was comfort in thinking that she already had a system, a routine in place to roust it from its perch on my nose, and I was grateful that I was in such experienced hands.

In fact, I kind of liked this process of postcard notification. It seemed an inherently easier, less messy way to deliver news that is otherwise a bummer. Imagine, for a minute, all the drama that could be avoided when the surgeon greets the family after a risky procedure. “Will she live…?” the family pleads, plaintively. And the doctor shrugs, “Go home and you’ll receive a postcard in 7 to 10 days.”

I think of all the unpleasant news I’ve ever had to deliver or—worse!—received. Slacker employees fired. Bad relationships severed. Emotionally wrought times in life when pages and pages of conversation that start with “we have to talk…” and end up, three days later, with both parties exhausted and bleary-eyed and rung out from endless faults, accusations and indiscretions examined and exposed. Wouldn’t it be so much cleaner to just send your once-beloved a white, clinical postcard, with a box checked next to: “It’s over. Don’t call.”

I was still liking this postcard process, because the day hadn’t yet come when I’d face certain realities. I hadn’t yet had the follow-up appointment with a new surgeon, when his nurse would circle the spot on my nose with a purple felt-tip pen and photograph it at pore-close range. Then, as I sat across from the surgeon and his partner and discussed the surgical procedure with a fat purple circle on my face, finally one of them, sensing my humiliation, would lean over and wash it away with an alcohol wipe, like I was a preschooler with some jam left on her face from snack time.

The truth is, when it’s our own health nothing is really routine: no pregnancy, prostate, cancer or canker is much like another—at least, when it’s happening to us, inside our own skins. But modern healthcare—with its postcards, and patient appointments stacked one after another, and whatever other efficiencies administrators can manage—seems to stumble along as if it were… workaday, just plain routine.

In fact, the system seems teed up in way to disrespect both the patient and—at the same time—the physician. The factors that lead to patients in tightly packed queues and diagnoses sent through the mail are the same ones that burn out doctors. Mostly, it’s because of the lack of financial stability and autonomy, says Salon’s medical writer, Dr. Rakul Parikh. And unlike most business transactions, in healthcare the customer is not in control.

“A generation ago,” Parikh writes, “doctors were accountable only to their patients.”

But these days, of course, they are accountable first to insurance representatives and hospital administrators, “many of whom have no direct experience in healthcare but hold power over budgets and reimbursements,” he points out. “It’s that lack of control that has frustrated many doctors and left them feeling pessimistic about the future of healthcare.” And burned-out doctors feel about and behave toward their patients very differently.

If it’s frustrating to be a patient in the system, it’s alienating to be in the doctor’s shoes, accountable to administrators rather than their actual customers. On top of it all: they have to hear folks cop to only two drinks a day when regularly they pour themselves a few more—or swear they take multivitamins, or say they wear sunscreen… when they don’t. I’m vowing to do a bit better there from now on.

This election season, talk of healthcare reform usually centers on access. But I’m wondering if we should also be talking about how to reinsert a bit more humanity—some real caring—in healthcare.

On the surface, I should like her. Sarah Palin is 44, precisely my age. We were born three months apart. And like me, she’s a mom and works full-time.

We should hang out, clink our highball glasses, and salute the kind of kismet that competent women often need to create real achievement. Except, in her case, the kismet catapulted her to the national stage and into history. In my case, it occasionally lands me a first-class upgrade.

Sarah and I could talk about stuff that professional Moms our age talk about: The rush of being in charge; the need to wear seriously rimmed glasses, even if your eyes don’t require it; and techniques for gagging and hogtying that persistent little voice in the back of our heads that suggests our ambition comes at the obvious expense of our kids.

But for some reason, I can’t warm up to her. And last Thursday, when she stood on stage in St. Louis and faced off against Joe Biden in the vice-presidential debate, I studied her face on the small screen and understood why. I know Sarah Palin. I went to school with her. And then, with a small shock of recognition, I saw who she was… and realized: I hated her in junior high.

In school, her name was Pam. When I met her, we were 7th graders. She had feathered brown hair that bounced around her shoulders as she walked down the hall, surveying her domain, left to right, like the felted nodding-dog dashboard ornament my grandfather had in his car. Her eyes were hooded with a shade of azure eyeshadow, and her full lips could reveal her horsey teeth in a sweet smile or condescending sneer with equal ease. Sometimes, her mouth seemed to hold both expressions at once. I thought Pam had real talent, and I practiced her expressions at home before my bedroom mirror.

We had Study Hall in the auditorium together, which allowed me to study technique from afar. We had assigned seats in the auditorium, and prescribed rules about talking, and facing forward, and chewing gum.

All during 7th grade, Pam flouted the rules, changed seats, chewed gum, sat in the back between two boys, whispering and cocking her head close to them with an intimacy I found exciting. When one of the teachers would call her on any of it, she’d fix them with a certain look, widen her eyes, and conjure up that sweet, apologetic, toothy smile. And, somehow, she always got away with it. She had everyone fooled–the teachers, administrators, the janitors who scraped her gum off of the bottom of the folding seats–and it was astonishing. Like them, I was transfixed, in total awe and wonder at her celebrity.

One time, though, she caught me studying her in my absentminded way, and she stared back at me pointedly, narrowing her eyes and raising her clenched fist to her chin, vibrating it in my direction, as if to warn me about getting too close. It took me a few days to peek in her direction again.

That winter, I had a brand new yellow ski parka. The color of a ripe banana, it was hip-length, with a cool belt that fastened snugly at the waist with a brass T-buckle. Unlike most of my clothes–which either came from an older girl who lived in my neighborhood or from a discount store with cheap brands–the coat was new and it was fashionable. In school, it became my anti-anxiety parka: I wore it constantly as a sort of armor as I walked from class to class, sweating through my day.

The only time I took it off, in fact, was when I walked into the auditorium. Miss Dolan, an exacting English teacher who demanded that both the rules of school and the rules of conjugating Latin verbs be followed with the same precision, despised it when kids wore hats or jackets in school. It wasn’t worth protesting, even if I had a voice that spoke above a whisper. It was best just to peel off the offending clothing and park it where she pointed, on one of the last two rows as we entered the auditorium. We could collect them an hour later, on the way out.

One day, I walked into study hall and noticed with a quick rush of pleasure and embarrassment that Pam had the same yellow jacket I did. Since my strategy at that point of my life was to attract as little attention as possible, sharing a wardrobe with a popular girl wasn’t a good way to fly below the radar, I thought. But then I reconsidered: in a way I couldn’t quite pinpoint, it was validating.

A few weeks later, I noticed that Pam’s coat had a huge blue stain on it, as if a pen had leaked in her pocket. And a few days later, when the bell rang in study hall and we filed as usual along the narrow aisles to the door, I paused to collect my coat. But it wasn’t in the usual spot where I’d left it. I cast around, confused that it wasn’t there, a panic beginning to bubble in my gut.

“C’mon,” my friend Denise said, tugging at my arm. And when I didn’t budge, it was Denise who flagged down Miss Dolan and explained what had happened: I couldn’t find my coat, which I always folded in half and placed exactly on the same seat. Miss Dolan set her iron blue eyes on me, “Is that right?” she sniffed, with a slight suspicion. I nodded mutely, and pointed at the backside of the yellow coat in the front of the line: Pam.

Miss Dolan shouted above our heads. “Pam!” she barked. “Are you sure that’s your jacket?”

Pam turned to Miss Dolan and there it was: the sweetest, most dazzling smile you’ll ever see. All her teeth were bared, but she didn’t seem threatening. Instead, she seemed so heartbreakingly cute and friendly, really, that I felt a flicker of something inside, and I tapped at Miss Dolan. “It’s okay…” I started to whisper.

I don’t think she heard me, though, because at that moment Pam piped up loudly. “Oh, this is mine,” she assured our teacher, nodding. “We have the same one.” Then she pointed at a spot behind me, “That must be hers.”

Miss Dolan stooped to retrieve an identical yellow parka from the floor. As she held it up I could see the indigo stain on the right pocket. She shoved it toward me, depositing it into my arms, and waved us through the doors. “All right? All right,” she pronounced, in the manner of someone who was used to seeing issues without nuance, in black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. “Out you go.”

I didn’t mind, really. All I could think was, She noticed we had the same coat. It would be a while before I’d see it otherwise.

In The Nation last week, Linda Hirshman called Sarah Palin a “Mean Girl,” the kind of girl Rosalind Wiseman terms a “Queen Bee” in her chilling 2002 book about tweenagers, Queen Bees & Wannabees. Like the name suggests, the Queen Bee is the royalty of the middle school, a larger-than-life figure who (unlike an actual queen bee) packs a barbed stinger, and wields it at will.

I picked Hirshman’s story out of one of the 358,000 results you get if you Google “Sarah Palin Mean Girl.” Hirshman likened Sarah’s shenanigans onstage at the Vice-Presidential debate to a kind of staged performance art piece of The Rules, Ellen Fein’s and Sherry Schneider’s controversial 1995 book that, as Hirshman put it, had upended 30 years of feminist teaching.

“Forget all that equality and intelligence stuff, ‘The Rules’ advised. Who wants to be Hillary Clinton? Men are simple, attracted to sexual symbols and bright, shiny objects. If you want them, they argued, you must sport long hair and wear sexy, attention-getting clothes,” Hirshman writes. She points out that the suit Palin wore for the debate with Joe Biden was “some amazingly iridescent material, and she sported an eye-popping sparkly rhinestone flag pin. The governor as the It Girl of the ’90s singles scene.”

It wasn’t just her clothes, of course. But her flirty demeanor, her “hey there, Sailor!” wink, as Richard Cohen says, and “all those doggones, references to her working-class status (net worth in excess of $2 million), promiscuous use of the word ‘maverick,’ repeated mentions of ‘greed and corruption on Wall Street’ … and, of course, that manic good cheer. ”

As Amy Poehler said during a recent Saturday’s “Saturday Night Live” sketch, looking over at Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, “When cornered, you have a tendency to become adorable.”

Adorable, I thought, as I leaned into the screen, scrutinizing her. She was dazzling. Heartbreakingly cute. And friendly.

I hadn’t thought about Pam in a long time. But, suddenly, there she was. Between the relentless smiles, and widened eyes, the winks, I recognized both the Mean Girl and the old familiar sense of being played. I felt the lack of anything close to sincerity, or the truth. And then I recognized her: playing to her spectators to get what she wants, at whatever the cost.

As Hirshman wrote, the real problem is that how a Mean Girl acts “does not have to reflect what she really believes–or even what she knows.” It only has to be effective with the target audience–of 7th grade boys, or junior high Latin teachers, or voters.

I know Sarah Palin because I went to school with her. And, in fact, most women did. Then, the Queen Bees or Mean Girls were just that. Now, they’re really scary.

This post previously appeared in the Huffington Post.

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Thirteen years sounds like a long time. It’s not.

The experts say losing a child is one of the most wretched things to experience. It topples the natural order of things—your children should bury you, not the other way around. It’s completely upending.

Worse, it mixes an odd cocktail that you are forced to hold to your lips and shoot—something like one part of furious anger and one part defeated vulnerability. You gradually learn to stomach it, to cocoon it someplace inside, because it’s dangerous and scary to walk around like that. But grief is not linear. Sometimes, cyclically, you can taste it rising in your throat again, like bile.

Birthdays are one of those times. A child’s birthday—without the cake, the candles, the presents, the child—is an empty day. We sit around now and look at each other blankly.

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I hear. “What do you want to do?”

It strikes me that, if our boy were here, he’d hardly recognize us. He has a little sister now, born a year and three days after his death. His older brother, who used to tower over only him, towers over us now, too. His parents live in two different houses. And the patient black Lab who tolerated a toddler’s straddling her like a bronco is gone, too, replaced by a trio of small, silly dogs and another Lab who doesn’t tolerate much.

The life he might recall ended when his did. I wonder what he’d think of that… and, in an odd way, I think he’d be okay with it. As the second son, the one who grabbed a nap in his car seat while I drove his brother to and fro—preschool, play dates—he was used to accommodating.

The night of the January 5, 1996, the snowy evening before we buried him, I shut the door to my office and thought hard about my boy. I thought about the cards that had come those past few days, the flowers, the hugs, the number of times I’d heard the cluck of the tongue and the words that went something like, “Such a shame. Such a life unfulfilled.”

They meant to soothe, but they stung. So I wrote this, below, in part to counter the unbearable thought that his life was, in any small way, lacking. From his perspective, I decided, it was very full. To the brim.

Someone—I don’t remember who—read this at the church the next day. And here, today, almost 13 years later, with that odd familiar taste in my mouth, I still have to believe it’s true.

* * *

January 5, 1996

To those of you who grieve because our Colin’s life was taken from him quickly and much too soon, I share your sorrow. We all grieve for a life seemingly unfulfilled.

But though brief, Colin’s life was indeed very full. And knowing that he lived his short life fully can give us all comfort during some very difficult days.

As a newborn, Colin was full of mother’s milk, which made his cheeks and belly grow round and his eyes shine.

Never happy to be set down for very long, he was full of yearning for the people closest to him, and he wanted to feel them holding him as often as he could.

As an older baby, Colin was full of curiosity for his big brother, reaching for his toys and projects, and reaching for hugs and kisses as only Evan can give.

He was full of affection for our dog Syd, and received much enthusiastic affection in return, as only a Lab can give.

As a toddler, Colin was full of lots of things; full to the brim.

Loving animals, music, toy cars and balls, he was showered with attention and full of wonder on his first birthday and during this past Christmas season. He especially loved books, and he was full of the joy of reading his favorites again and again.

He was full of excitement to see the people that mattered most to him: his Daddy coming in the door at night, his small friends and their older brothers and sisters, his family arriving for a visit.

And he was full of delight for smaller things, too: the guinea pig at his brother’s school, his first lollipop in his Christmas stocking, crayons and paint and paper to use them on. He was full of generosity; always ready to share any of these treasures.

Full of geniality, he was ready with a wide smile for family and friends and those who saw him only in the front seat of a grocery cart.

Colin was full of humor, waving bye-bye to me as he slipped down off the bed in the morning, padding down the hallway, and bursting open the bathroom door on Daddy; playing peek-a-boo around corners and in cupboards.

And sometimes, Colin was full of mischief. Stepping with his shoes on into Syd’s water bowl; scaling a flight of stairs before I knew he had left the kitchen, and working faster as I chased him.

Most of all, Colin was full of love. Full of the love poured into him by his parents, his brother, his grandparents, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins, and many special friends.

Every day for me, Colin was the sunshine, symbolized by the sunflowers present here today. With his blond hair, blue eyes and gentle ways, he was to me more beautiful than I could ever dream. Sometimes I worried about the heartache such a gentle soul would have to endure in this world. My angel is at peace.

We can grieve for Colin, today and for many days to come. But I ask you all to remember him, and talk about him, and to keep his light alive.

Remember Colin’s life not as one unfulfilled, but one that was filled to the top, and indeed overflowing.

Photo credit: Andrea Hart

It has come to my attention that there has been some confusion about your roles and responsibilities within the organization, which has led to infighting, yelling, and name-calling—this happened just yesterday, prior to 7 AM. Such behavior is both unprofessional and upsetting, and it is my job as the CEO and central “brand” of this enterprise to address this situation before it begins to negatively affect morale as well as my performance in the marketplace, also known as “school and social life.”

First, a word about the incident that prompted this memo and took place at headquarters yesterday. Many of you, I know, heard it—or heard of it—and I need to clarify actual events to dispel any notion that the CEO of Coddled Teenage Boy Enterprises was at fault. Because, as you know, it’s never my fault.

The incident took place in the early morning. It concerned the crazy idea that two individuals traveling to the same school campus should to be liveried in the same vehicle, and therefore ought to be ready to depart at approximately the same time, even if one of us requires more careful and meticulous currying of my excellent hair and a careful consideration of which band T-shirt looks most awesome with my jeans. There was yelling about did I know the price of a gallon of gas, and the driver’s own needs (don’t get what that means), and something was said in a rather overwrought tone about how It’s all about you, isn’t it?

All of this made the second and final shuttling to school tense and unpleasant, and left me grounded this weekend, which is a wholly unacceptable result of what I see as a giant misunderstanding. The bottom line is that the sister involved in this situation is… well, clearly a Sister Subsidiary. Known officially as The Easy Child Enterprise, the Sister Subsidiary should be staffed and run as a separate operation, independent of the needs of Coddled Teenage Boy LLC. Especially since a tenet of that aforementioned subsidiary enterprise is Hates to Be Late, whereas at Coddled we take a much more interpretive view of the clock.

Now that we have that out of the way, I’d like to get back to the business of this memo, which is to redefine and, in some cases, reassign the various roles each of you play in keeping this enterprise running. As you know, we have grown in leaps and bounds over the past decade, growing literally from a Mom-and-Pop entity to a conglomerate with endless, gaping needs and demands. While it once took only one or two people to feed, diaper and bathe me, it now requires an entire staff to manage the complex operation that is my life.

You might think that my ability to actually use my limbs purposefully and my mastery of other basic life-skills (like the ability to read signs, or jot down a note, or climb bus stairs, or use the toilet) might allow me to exploit my own abilities and increase self-reliance. But, sadly, the answer is no. In ways that even I don’t really understand, it seems that the operation is more complicated than ever, and it requires additional resources and more staff than ever to maintain.

Last year in Math, we studied Inverse Functions, in which the sign f “acts on” a number and transforms it. Essentially, you can define the inverse of f as the function that “undoes” what f did. My understanding is some enterprises grow precisely like that: As new products are brought to market, or new services introduced, others are mysteriously negated. In other words, it’s not my fault that company operations have gotten multifarious and increasingly unwieldy. You can argue the application of this point, but not with me. Take it up with a mathematician.

So without further ado, herewith the new Job Titles as reflected in this most current Reorg of Coddled Teenage Boy Enterprises:

Manager of Livery Services—Dad (AM Manager), Mom (PM Manager)

Director of English Essays, Proofing and Editing Division—Mom

Laundry Services—Mom, Dad, Sister-When-I-Have-Something-to-Bribe-Her-With

Bag Lunch Boss—Mom, Dad

Homework Helpers—Mom, Dad, the Friends-Who-Actually-Take-Notes-in-Class Squad

Personal Belonging Tracker—Mom, Dad, various friends (Gordon, Zach, Janey, Chris, etc.) in various classes who run after me when I leave my various shit behind

Shower Timer—Mom, Dad, Sister-When-She-Needs-to-Use-the-Bathroom

Forms and Paperwork, Small Details Division—Mom

Dispenser of Petty Cash—Whichever parent drives us to the movies

Emotional Support Team—Pretty much everyone, all the time (note on-call hours)

The two remaining jobs still available at this time are:

Minister of Wiping My Ass

Director of I’d-Forget-My-Head-If-It-Wasn’t-Attached

Referrals welcome.

It is my dearest hope that this will help you accept and relish the critical job you have as part of Coddled Teenage Boy Enterprises, and see yourself for what you are: Part of my team, because we are all in this together. As they say, there’s no “I” in “team.” And there’s no “Boy” in there, either. God knows I can’t do this on my own.

Regards,

Coddled Teenage Boy

P.S.: Has anyone seen my soccer shorts?

So I listened with some intent, leaning forward on the top railing of the small second-floor balcony, as if Leigh were right there with me, perhaps perched on the branch of the scrub pine just beyond the railing. The little balcony is like a bird’s nest, a private spot away from the rest of the house, and as Leigh spoke I absent-mindedly rocked to and fro, swinging my bare leg through the balusters.

Then, just like that, I couldn’t. My knee, which had moved more or less freely through the railing, was improbably caught: Most of my leg was still with me, inside the railing, but the business part of the knee was lodged outside of the balcony, through the balusters. When I peered over at it, my knee appeared as a smooth, flesh-colored tennis ball that might have gotten wedged in a courtside chain-link fence by a really superb forehand.

At that moment, two things went through my mind—actually, three, if you count that one of them was to quickly hang up on poor, confused Leigh. Another was that this situation was unbelievably ridiculous: Was I seriously stuck here, like, for real? If I twisted my leg just right, I thought, it would suddenly free, like a lock that springs open with the turn of its key, or a wooden tavern puzzle solved by fingering the secret notches.

But no: It seemed the more I squirmed, and the more I worked it, the less play my leg had between the wooden rails. I could see the sensitive skin on the inside of my thigh already starting to burn and redden. I swore I detected some swelling.

And that was the third thing: panic. The longer I stood there wriggling, the more alarmed I felt. My insides grew a little cold with dread, and at the same time I started to sweat.

I’m not really much of a worrier—except about things that are irrational and unlikely. And, in fact, the more irrational and unlikely the scenario, the more likely that I will worry about it.

I don’t worry about paying the bills or losing my job or being on time for a meeting. I don’t worry about lung cancer or menopause, the price of a gallon of gas, spiders, open water, heights, crowds, the dark, internet security, the clunk under my car hood, choking on a mint, or what that glass of wine will do to me.

But here’s the thing: I might not worry about my son riding without a bike helmet, but I do worry that he might be kidnapped when he’s out alone on the streets. I might ride around in my car without a seatbelt, but on an airplane I’m preoccupied with not surviving an emergency landing. When I was a kid I would sometimes voice my fears to my mother—not those, exactly, but others: our house catching on fire, our dog being stolen in the middle of the night. My mother’s response was always the same: She’d look at me squarely, release the smoke from her Tareyton, and say, “Now think about that for a minute: What are the chances of that happening?”

And with that phrase she’d unwittingly confirm that while whatever I was worried about might not happen, it would nevertheless be truly disastrous if—or when—it did.

One summer, when I was six years old, I was struck by a speeding police cruiser as I skipped across our street to join my friends. Actually, “struck” is too strong a word—I was more sideswiped by it as it swerved dramatically to avoid me, and its tailspin knocked me back a few feet onto the pavement, where I landed on my tailbone. The cruiser held two cops who were making a show of scaring a rowdy, dangerous teenager who lived a few doors down, and their presence on our quiet street—a street home more to working class families than to bad boys who, it was rumored, tossed kittens into fans —was both unexpected and out of context.

I dusted myself off that day without a scratch. But the way the mothers of the neighborhood flocked to our yard and, later, surrounded my mother and rubbed her back as she sat on the front steps of our house and wept, told me that the outcome of some accidents, some emergencies, can indeed be unthinkable. Decades later, when my own toddler son contracted a rare virus and was brain-dead within hours, I knew that this was true: The emergencies that seem the most unlikely and preposterous are often the ones that hurt the most. They are the ones you can’t ever get over. Bones can mend and wounds eventually heal. But, in my experience, the outcome to the phrase “What are the chances of that happening…?” is almost always impossible to recover from.

So right then, trapped on the balcony like a raccoon in a leghold trap, I have a sense of foreboding: What if I never free my knee?

The thought, I know, is completely irrational. Actually, it’s ridiculously so, and it borders on the kind of crazy that might make someone point a forefinger to their temple and wind small circles in the air. And so I cajole myself out of it. Stuck there on open deck, 15 feet up in the air, I indulge in a sort of freak-out fantasy: I calculate the time of my last meal, how long I can go without water, whether the August sun will blister my lips and render me unable to cry out for help.

In my daydream, I wonder whether anyone will be there to toss a raincoat over me in the event of some weather, how old I’ll need to grow before my bony knee slips out of its hold like a ball joint that has lost all sinew. For a moment, I contemplate the notion of “What are the chances of that happening…?” The very idea that there you are one day, talking to a friend on the phone. And the next thing you know, your lot has changed forever, and you’re praying for a miracle.

I’m standing there with an idiotic smile at the thought, which is enough to lighten my predicament. Which is good, because just then a miracle happens. Below me, from someplace that sounds far away, I hear a door slam, and voices. I hear my daughter, roaming downstairs from room to room, calling out for me: “Mom!” She is with her friend, Emily.

“Here!” I yell with some urgency, as if I’m signaling the Coast Guard from a deserted beachhead. “I’m right here!”

“Mom?” Caroline says again, attempting to follow my voice. “Mom! Where?”

“Here! Upstairs!” I yell back. And so it goes on like this for a minute or two. Caroline calls out, I chirp back, like she’s misplaced the telephone handset and is zeroing in on its location under the couch.

Finally the two emerge in the bedroom behind me, and then they are on the deck beside me, regarding me with some intent, like they might a curiosity at the carnival. They are smirking slightly, and I glimpse myself through their eyes. But I give them credit, because they don’t laugh. Instead, we talk over our options—Emily mentions lubricants—but in the end we settle for naked force. Emily will pull, it’s decided, and Caroline will lean over the railing, her hands positioned to push against my knee.

That Emily is tall and sinewy, and she’s pretty strong for an 11-year-old. When she wraps her long arms around my waist and pulls with all her might, I am, guided by Caroline’s final push, finally free. My knee slides through the wood and we all lunge backward along with it. I inspect the damage: On both sides I have an angry, oozing scrape. And, inside my thigh, I’m already growing a purple, doughy bruise the size of a pancake.

Later, I call Leigh back, and apologize for cutting her short. I sum up what happened, and I wait until she’s finished laughing. Then finally she shrugs, “Well, what goes in must come out, I guess!”

“Right,” I say. “Exactly. No big deal.”

My network’s broadcast schedule means that I’m getting to bed late most nights. At least, late for people who have trains to catch and clocks to punch. Because I work at home, I have a little more slack on this issue, and so, for the past week or two, the Olympics have helped me reconnect with the deliciousness that is sleeping in.

But today was a different story. This morning, I got up at 5 AM. Unlike other people I know, who love to crow about how early they get started in the morning—how splendid the sunrise, how empty the roads are when they go for a jog at dawn—I am not especially happy about it. In fact, I’m not what anyone would call a morning person, and I’ve never quite understood this whole business of the worm giving it up for the early bird.

Who says that rising at daybreak is somehow the hallmark of an honorable, virtuous life? While I’m sure many glorious things happen in the world between daybreak and 9 AM, lots of good stuff happens for me between those hours, too, spending them, as I have been, swaddled in my bed, conjuring adventures in my dreams.

Last night, I drank a tall glass of water before bed. I paid for it this morning when I rose to pee and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I had loads of stuff to take care of today, and those niggling details nagged at me until I sighed, gave in, and un-swaddled. I was barely at my desk when my teenage son stumbled up to my office. It wasn’t yet 6 AM, and looking up to see him standing in the doorway, disheveled and swaying slightly, seemed as jarring as discovering a monkey in a baby carriage. It turns out he couldn’t sleep either, and, like a drowsy but friendly street person, he had wandered in to say hello.

Like me, Evan has a tendency to lie around, writ large as an unperturbed teenager. On a weekend, I might rise by 10 AM. But this summer, he hardly ever sets foot out of bed until the crack of noon. Seeing him there upright, as the sun crept over the horizon behind me, reminded me of a story my friend Scott told me recently about his grandfather.

The old man was a notoriously early riser, lulled to an early sleep, Scott said, by an afternoon spent busily throwing down tall glasses of whiskey. Come daybreak, he would be well-rested and raring to go. And when his grandkids would visit, it would irk him that others didn’t keep the same hours.

He’d rise at 5 AM or so, full of loving gratitude for the day and sipping his coffee in the kitchen while his family slumbered upstairs. But by 6 AM he was banging cabinets and slamming the fridge door. By 7, he was livid. So he took to positioning himself at the bottom of the stairs with a marine horn, fetched from the garage, the kind with a can of compressed air fixed to a plastic horn. They are meant for a distressed boater to use to signal the Coast Guard, or sometimes they signal the start of play at soccer or Little League games. Whatever the case, the horn is meant to sound loud enough to melt your eardrums. In Scott’s grandfather’s house, one long sound of the horn simultaneously shook the paintings on the walls—and the kids and his wife from their beds.

One year at Christmastime, Gramps retrieved the boat horn only to find the compressed air too cold to make the horn sound. Muttering, he tramped into the kitchen, running the air can under hot water and shaking the propellant loose.

I don’t know much about marine horns. But after Scott told me this story, I located one, and right there in the store aisle I read the text of a warning label that clearly said, “Caution: Contents Under Pressure. Do Not Heat.” I don’t know whether Scott’s grandfather, in his fury, couldn’t read or what. But the thing blew up in his hand, precisely as the Warning… well, warns.

What the warning doesn’t tell you is that when it blows up, it’ll boom loud enough to rouse anyone sleeping in, say, the room situated above the kitchen. I imagine that, sleeping there, Scott’s grandmother got quite a start, too, which was kind of lucky for Scott’s grandfather, since he needed a ride to the emergency room. He came back wearing a bandage the size of a boxing glove. But what really irked him at that point, Scott said, what really set him off and sent him bellowing back at the bottom of the stairs, was that Scott and his brothers were all still tucked under their blankets, invoking the sweet dreams of the innocent.

And so I wonder, in part for Scott in the 1970s and in part for me now, what’s so great about getting up early? For me, now, it’s 5 o’clock in the afternoon. And yet at this impossibly early hour for dining I’m irritatingly aware of gnawing in my stomach. I’m too young to eat dinner at 5 PM… but do you see how getting up early will age you prematurely?

It makes me wonder anew: Who says that rising at daybreak is somehow the hallmark of a virtuous life? Who came up with the notion that sleeping in is somehow lazy, slothful, weak, despised?

What about the merits of a soul that’s well-rested? What of the virtue of late-night camaraderie, or—this summer, anyway—the national solidarity of staying awake to the bitter end of the swim finals? What’s wrong with all of that?

Flickr photo: Brenda Anderson