Nov 15, 2013
Mike Chielens died last Saturday. The many online comments on his obituary noted his love of baseball, beer, and rock and roll. Chielens was director of Legal Aid of Western Michigan, and the comments also spoke of his kindness, his fight for the underdog, his respect for everyone. But I knew Chielens when he was a brand-new legal aid lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid – JALA. He was a laughing elf of a man, a tiny guy with a huge heart, round face, red hair, freckles.
ROCKING AND ROLLING
Chielens loved to flirt. Though he looked like Howdy Doody, with a little boy’s physique, his charm and intensity could bowl women over. But he was loyal to his fiancée in Michigan, and whenever Van Morrison sang Brown Eyed Girl, Chielens talked about Jan, a warning to us to keep a safe distance.
Mike Chielens and Mike Milito shared an apartment. They were fun-loving wild men, smart, determined, and fierce for justice. I knew them when we were young, when all of us were young, a gang of northerners with law degrees who descended on Jacksonville to be turned into lawyers under the leadership of two slightly older Harvard Law graduates.
SOME OF THE GANG IN 1975
Jacksonville was a blue-collar city, with a large poor black population, a large poor white population, some uppercrust southerners and a whole lot of insurance executives. Lefty lawyers had trouble finding friends outside legal aid, so we became a close-knit group, living in little bungalows in Riverside, near downtown. Some of us lived at Jacksonville Beach, and kept open house on weekends.
RIVERSIDE BUNGALOWS
LAWYERS AT THE BEACH: SUE, SARA, LIZ
When we first came to Jacksonville, my five-year-old son Eric and I stayed with Sara until I found a place, an upstairs apartment with no air-conditioning, but well shaded by thick pine trees. Later, when I was no longer a VISTA volunteer making three thousand a year but a staff attorney making ten, I moved to a house, and new arrivals would stay with us.
On Saturday mornings I’d start my laundry in the laundromat on King Street and Eric and I would walk to visit one friend or another while the clothes dried. Julie and Graddy kept M&M’s on the back of their toilet to encourage their toddler to get up in the night to pee. Sue and Max always had coffee aging in a percolator.
MAX, SUE, AND EMILY – ALWAYS READY TO REHEAT THE COFFEE
In the evenings we often gathered at my house so I wouldn’t need a babysitter. I cooked dinner, Jim brought his guitar, and we sang harmony. I had serial crushes on most of the guys, but generally avoided fishing off the company pier, and instead paired up with quite unsuitable men whom I found elsewhere.
UNSUITABLE MEN
My family came down for Thanksgiving, and legal aid friends joined us. My father was impressed that fourteen people could be so jolly on only two bottles of wine. He didn’t notice some of us sneaking off to the back of the house to smoke dope.
THANKSGIVING FUN
One day our program director came into my office and found me crying. I had discovered that Eric’s after school care was atrocious, and didn’t know where to turn. That night, Paul’s wife Shirley called and said Eric could come to her house after school – she had four daughters from elementary to high school. They lived two blocks from me, and two blocks from Eric’s school.
Shirley and I decided to train for the first Jacksonville River Run, so every morning she knocked on my door at 6:30, and we ran through Riverside and Avondale, on past the huge oaks and houses of Ortega. After the River Run, I drove to the beach and joined a party that lasted well into the night.
LIZ AND SHIRLEY IN THE FIRST JACKSONVILLE RIVER RUN
JALA LIKED TO PARTY
I stayed at Jacksonville five years before I moved to Gainesville. One by one, my friends left JALA for Atlanta, Grand Rapids, Providence, DC, Los Angeles. Most of us stayed connected to poverty law in one way or another.
At every time and place of my life, except one desperately lonely year in Montreal, I have had a group of friends. Happily, in every group there is always one who keeps us all connected after we move on. For the JALA gang it’s Marie, who writes long, chatty Christmas letters, who organized two reunions in Florida, who made an email list of old JALA comrades and told us when first Mike Milito, and then Mike Chielens got terrible cancers.
MARIE (far right) ORGANIZED REUNIONS
Milito and his wife Judy went on Caring Bridge, where we could read the step by step horrors of his treatment, and finally, thank God, his slow recovery. Chielens didn’t use Caring Bridge, but Jan sent emails and Marie forwarded them to us.
MILITO, CHIELENS AND JAN IN HAPPIER DAYS
Mike and Jan put themselves through torture, with the hope that they would have many years on the other side They didn’t; his condition grew worse and worse and after about a year of hell, Chielens died. I got the news from Marie, and cried and cried. It was Marie who sent flowers in all our names, with Dylan lyrics – ‘May you stay forever young.’ And Marie who said, ‘don’t pay me for the flowers,’ and organized a group contribution to Western Michigan Legal Aid.
I hadn’t seen Chielens in over thirty years, and only kept up with him second-hand. But I grieve for him, and for that time, for that community of young people happily misspending our youths together. We played hard, but we also worked hard, certain that our cause was just, hopeful that we could change at least one little corner of the world.
I have reached an age where my friends and famiy will be dying, unless I go first. Many of my friends have survived cancer, some are battling it now. I write this in Miami Beach, where we have come for the unveiling of my late brother-in-law’s tombstone. Adam died suddenly, a few weeks after his fiftieth birthday celebration.
ADAM, JOE, AND FRIEND
Thinking of my own death doesn’t dismay me much, though I hope to hang around long enough to launch Amanda and see her land on her feet, and it would be nice to see my books published and acclaimed before I go. But losing my family, losing my friends – that’s very hard.
SHE’LL LAND ON HER FEET
Young people see old age as boring, or at best, peaceful. They think all the excitement and adventures are theirs. But facing all this loss, facing my own mortality, this is a profound, if difficult, adventure.
Here’s to Chielens. Here’s to all the friends I have lost touch with, and all the friends I will someday lose.
Oct 18, 2013
It’s not funny anymore. It’s frightening.
I’ve just finished Connie Mae Fowler’s five-day writers’ workshop in St Augustine.click The best part was the workshop sessions and new writer friends.The second best part was having the hotel room to myself.
ALL MINE
The farewell dinner was last night. About 6:30 in the morning I wake to a steady rain. I get dressed. I pay attention when I put my cell phone in its holster, because the last five days I’ve kept it silenced in my purse. Methodically, I pack up each area – the bathroom, refrigerator, closet, dresser, desk, bedside table. Nobody distracts me with “Grandma, can I go get a donut?” “Liz, have you seen my glasses?” With everything packed I go through the room one more time, to be sure I haven’t left anything. Then I load the car.
Parking in St Augustine has taken all my cash, so I drive a couple of miles to Publix to get money for a housekeeping tip. I buy a sandwich for the road. I leave the tip, check out, grab a banana from the buffet, and head home through the driving rain.
IMAGE:NEWBYREALTY.COM
The thick, dark clouds are breaking up in the sky to the west, and by the time I reach US 1 the rain is slowing. I leave the town behind, and now I’m on 207, a fast secondary road with trees, egrets, and puddles on both sides. There is little traffic. I am entirely happy; the workshop revived my flagging writer, giving me energy, confidence, determination. I’ve made two decisions. I will put writing first every morning, and make no dates before 11. I will no longer say, “I’m retired,” but “I’m a writer.”
‘O Happy Day’ is playing on the CD player. I think I’ll call Joe, share my happiness. I reach for the phone. It’s not in the zipper pocket of my purse. It’s not anywhere in my purse. I feel my jeans pockets, my shirt pocket. Nope. I review all my packing, and I’m puzzled. I remember turning off the alarm – is it possible I left it on the bedside table?
I pull over on the shoulder, trucks whizzing by as I get out to search. Passenger seat and floor, tote bag with notebooks, books, and magazines, computer case with a zillion compartments, center console, suitcase, under the seats. Nothing. And nothing to do but drive back to the motel. I consider calling to ask, but of course…
I’m proud that I’ve stayed calm, not frantic – it helps that I left early so there’s no worry about getting to my 11:00 therapist appointment in Gainesville.
I LOOKED EVERYWHERE
The worry begins after the friendly desk clerk has given me a new key card, after I’ve methodically searched each area of the room, looked in all the drawers and under all the furniture, after I’ve stripped the bed, after I’ve returned to the buffet and asked the woman who’s making new coffee if she’s seen my phone. Back to the car, a more careful search with no trucks whizzing by two feet from my butt. I empty each bag, check the pockets in all the dirty clothes, move both seats and feel around under them. By now I know I’m repeating myself, hoping magic will put the phone where it wasn’t. I pat my jeans pockets, then my shirt pocket, and my hand bumps the cell phone belt.
Such a rush of relief. Then the real worry begins. By the time I reach the place where I pulled over, an hour after my first departure, I’m near tears. This is no short-term memory loss. This isn’t like the comical incident of dressing a salad in a colander click, or locking my keys in the car.click. I paid attention when I stowed my phone, but with all the searching, all the thinking about what I had done, I didn’t remember it.
The Muumuus and I joke about senior moments and brain farts, cozy and comfortable in our aging together. This wasn’t a moment; it was an hour.
Now my thoughts are flying. Alzheimers. Dementia. Researchers say about 1 out of 8 people over 65 suffers from dementia. I’m afraid to tell Joe, afraid tell Dr. Lynne, my therapist. I have told Joe that when I don’t know him anymore he can put me in a nursing home and divorce me, but he has to visit regularly to make sure I’m well cared for.
IMAGE:WISCONSINWATCH.ORG
I already have a strategy for my keys, and almost always put them in the basket by the door. Now I need a strategy for my glasses and phone too, and a mental checklist whenever I leave the house. I will have to establish compulsive habits. I must be present in every moment, pay attention to the now.
MY KEYS ARE HERE
But if I can’t let my mind wander, how will I write? Half the writing happens in my head when I’m cooking or cleaning house, swimming or walking. Just when my writer has come alive again, my mind starts to melt. It will only get worse. I will call my doctor and have the annual checkup that was due in July, ask for a referral for a neurological workup. There is a drug that can slow the progress of Alzheimers; best catch it early.
Last night I read a New Yorker piece about Phillip Roth and his friends. Roth decided to give up writing fiction at 78. “It’s hard to remember from day to day what you’ve done.” In Iris, the movie about Iris Murdoch, there is a scene where, as Alzheimers advances, she puts down her pen because she cannot remember words.
PHILIP ROTH IMAGE:NYTIMES.COM IRIS MURDOCH IMAGE:TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
I arrive at Dr Lynne’s with ten minutes to spare. We’ve been dealing with an old trauma, so that I can put it behind me. But this is too urgent; my fear is right at the surface. So we plunge in. She has theories about memory loss, information about how it works. My story doesn’t worry her, and so I worry less. That night I tell Joe about it. He understands my fear, but thinks it’s like looking all over the house for his glasses when they are on his head. I see his point and feel better. But I still want an assessment.
This morning in the paper, two items. Glory glory, Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (In a New Yorker interview a year ago she said she would probably stop writing because “I’m eighty-one, losing names or words in a commonplace way.”) And Julie Samples, a graduate student at the University of Florida, has just published a pilot study in the Journal of Neurological Sciences.
The first deterioration in Alzheimer’s is often in the olfactory nerve, and begins on the left side of the brain. Julie put a dab of peanut butter on the end of a ruler, and brought it closer to each nostril until the person could detect the smell. She and her advisor report, “If they can smell it far away it means that nerve is working. If you have to bring it all the way up to the nose it means it’s not working as well…We were blown away with what we saw…The right nostril was normal, and the left had impairment” in Alzheimers patients but none of the other subjects.
You know I went straight to the peanut butter jar. I put a bit on the end of a knife, blocked each nostril, and sniffed. Both my nostrils (and hence my brain?) worked just fine, smelling the peanut butter from about eight inches away. When I used the whole jar, I could smell it from a couple of feet away. I suppose I will mention this to my doctor when I get around to my so-called annual physical. And maybe I’ll ask for an assessment. But I am greatly reassured.
Oct 3, 2013
I bought The Random House Children’s Encyclopedia at Amanda’s school book fair last fall. It is simply beautiful – each article is one to three pages of blocked text with lots of interesting illustrations. For several days she browsed through it, spending a lot of time on The Human Body and Reproduction. Then it went on the shelf.
Yesterday I took it down to look through it. Still thrilled by the format and illustrations, I looked up subjects at random (after all, it’s Random House). A page about Ballet, with photos of Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anna Pavlova, and a drawing of the five positions.
MARGOT FONTEYN. IMAGE:TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
RUDOLPH NUREYEV WITH CARLA FRACCI. IMAGE XOOMER.VIRGILIO.IT
ANNA PAVLOVA. IMAGE:ARTSALIVE.CA
One for Barbarians, with a beautiful jeweled gold belt buckle. Past Bats and Birds to Castles – a most wonderful diagram/drawing of a castle with a cutaway to show the interior – storerooms, spiral staircase, and lord and lady’s richly furnished bedchamber.
IMAGE:ROYAL COLLECTION.ORG.UK
Circuses, Cities, Civil War. One page for English, one page for American. But where was Civil Rights? The Find Out More section of Civil War – American sent me to Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and United States of America, history of. The Lincoln page gave me the Gettysburg address, the log cabin, the election, secession, the war, Mount Rushmore, and a timeline including the Emancipation Proclamation. The abolition movement was “led by white middle-class Northerners.” Harriet Tubman and Andrew Scott get a mention, but where is Frederic Douglass?
FREDERICK DOUGLASS. IMAGE:PBS.ORG
On to Slavery. A brief survey from Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome to the European slave trade and abolition, with some details about slave ships, slave markets, and slave rebellions.
IMAGE: NYPL.ORG
United States of America, history of has a timeline. It includes entry into World War II, Kennedy’s assasination, Neil Armstrong on the moon, and Reagan signing the nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. WHERE IS THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT?
Oh, good, there’s an index – one of my favorite parts of any non-fiction book. And it does list the civil rights movement. It sends me to a single page on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The page includes seventy words for the whole movement, plus about fifty for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. Eyes, Oil, and Pirates get a whole page each.
Selecting topics for an encyclopedia must be an agonizing and disputatious process. I can’t imagine doing it on my own, or even worse, with a group of “experts” all fiercely fighting for space. But neither can I imagine producing an encyclopedia for American children which doesn’t cover the Civil Rights Movement.
Sep 20, 2013
Breakfast is one of my favorite meals. (The others are lunch, dinner, and snacks.) I get up pretty early, sometime between 4:30 and 6:00, and drink my coffee, free-writing if I’m on a roll, reading the newspaper if I’m in a slump. I wait a while for breakfast.
source: debwire at nowpublic.com
I like the variety of breakfast. It might be a chunk of cheese with grapes and a piece of bread. Peanut butter and jelly melting on hot toast. All the scraps and bits left on the chicken carcass I had planned to save for soup. Leftovers from the night before: broccoli and mashed potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs,stew. I like more conventional breakfasts too: I never get tired of Cheerios, Grapenuts, Miniwheats, cornflakes. In the winter I love oatmeal, which tastes so much better when you call it porridge. Winter is also the time for Orlando tangelos or marsh grapefruit from Henderson and Daughter at the farmers’ market.
sources:browneyedbaker.com, healthland.time.com
sources: doctorgrandmas.com, today.agrilife.org
Because I believe breakfast is important after the long night fast, I search for ways to be sure Amanda eats it. In third grade she wanted to eat breakfast at school. I knew it was sugary junk, but I didn't argue. My maternal battle cry is choose your battles.
source:wweapons.blogspot.com
Like many adolescents (yes, she’s not quite eleven, but decidedly adolescent) Amanda now resists breakfast, as she resists every other suggestion, request, or demand. To make the morning a little more pleasant, I’ve revived and revised the menu from Grandma’s Café, which used to be open in the afternoon after preschool.
I wake her at 6:30, and she chooses from the menu or suggests something else. I speak as little as possible in this encounter – she needs time to float up out of sleep. I go into the kitchen and fix her breakfast and my own, call back to her “It’s ready,” and then, depending on my own mood and my sense of hers, I retreat with my breakfast to my chair, or settle at the kitchen table. I put her plate on top of the refigerator to keep it from Trisket, who has stolen many omelets, tuna melts, and bowls of porridge over the years. click
Trisket
Amanda almost always shows up within fifteen minutes, mostly dressed, mostly ready for school, and she almost always eats what she has chosen.
A few years ago Luli gave me a big electric griddle, and sometimes Amanda makes Sunday pancakes from a mix for the three of us. She has become very adept. She doesn’t need to measure, but judges the batter by its consistency. She knows I like mine small and dark, and she always gives me the little crispy drops that fall on the griddle.
When Amanda was in kindergarten and living with her mother, I used to pick her up to drive her to school. As I drove I would gauge her mood, and ask whether Angel’s Café was open. It usually was, and it was the best breakfast spot in town. The service was faster than any McDonalds – I asked for coffee and almost before the words were out of my mouth she was handing me a cup of black coffee, brewed in the big pot with the wooden spoon that had somehow ended up in the back seat. The only item on the menu was whatever you want. Sometimes pancakes with eggs and bacon, sometimes black beans and rice, spaghetti and meatballs, or best of all, chicken soup. The recipe is obvious to any five- year-old. “What did you put in the soup?” I asked. “Chicken.” “And what else?” “Soup!” indignant at my ignorance.
Angel's cafe closed years ago, but I still love going out for breakfast. Then I eat things I don’t cook at home: biscuits with sausage gravy, bacon, stir-fried veggies and tofu, salmon cakes, breakfast burritos.
I know many of our breakfasts don’t fit one diet theory or another: too many simple carbs, or eggs, or Lord preserve us, SUGAR. Feel free to go through the list of what I eat for breakfast and shake your finger at all the food sins: sugar, fat, eggs, potatoes, pesticides on the banana peel, caffeine in the coffee.
Food has powerful emotional resonance. I feel safe when my freezer is full of homemade soups, stews, beans, casseroles. I feel safe when Amanda goes off to school with a full stomach.
Lots of dinners (and an ice-pack) in my messy freezer
I have doubts about so many parts of parenting: the rules, the lessons, the consequences, when to be strict and when to loosen up. I’m not crazy about all the junk food in our lives, but I get in as many vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes as I can, and I don’t have any doubt that eating homemade meals together is good for our souls, and good for our family.
Sep 6, 2013
Have you ever taken the Meyers Briggs test? If you do, you’ll end up categorized along four different scales, including introvert/extrovert. This doesn’t have much to do with the usual idea that an introvert is shy and retiring while an extrovert is a party animal.
Party animals. Image from sugarbutterbaby.com
Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, made a discreet splash last year. I can’t bring myself to read it. I’m sure it’s full of important data, amusing anecdotes, and helpful advice, but it sounds too earnest for me.
The concept I remember from Meyers Briggs is that an extrovert gets her energy from being with other people, while an introvert charges her battery with solitude. No one would think it, since I can be pretty lively in company, but I am an introvert. I need huge doses of solitude to keep me going.
Charging my batteries
Once when Amanda was four and sitting quietly, I said something to her and she complained, “I was thinking, and now I’ve lost my think.” That’s how I feel. I like my thinks, and want to be left alone to wander around with them.
When I get home and see Joe’s car in the driveway I am likely to feel, “Oh good, Joe’s home.” When there is no car in the driveway I feel, “Oh boy, I’m alone.”
Oh good, he’s home!
Once we were spending the evening with Mary Anne and Larry. I’ve known them over thirty years, and the four of us are as close to family as friends can get; among other things, we share late-in-life parenthood. I said to them, “Being with you is almost as good as being alone.” They understood that I was expressing profound affection.
These blessings came late in our lives
Since I retired I have had lots of solitude. Amanda goes off to her school, Joe goes off to his. My day stretches out in front of me, available for puttering, reading, writing and thinking. I love that.
Still, I have discovered that you can get too much of a good thing. Recently I had minor surgery on my foot. I have a walking cast, but mostly I have to sit with my foot elevated. The pain comes and goes, and if I’m willing to sleep for hours, I can control it with drugs. With all this solitude and enforced leisure, you’d think I would write and write, read and read. Instead I’ve bought streaming Netflix, and I’m watching many movies, as well as multiple episodes of Parks and Recreation.
This experience confirms my belief that watching TV is depressing and addictive. And when I’m confined to a chair, solitude is no fun at all.
So while Sartre had a point when he said that Hell is other people, Milton also got it right. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” I’ve got my dog, my cat, my ice pack, good books, good drugs, but if I can’t emerge when I want to, my little solitary heaven becomes a bleak and gloomy place.
May 23, 2013
In December my friend Iris went to New York for six months to be nanny to her newborn (and first) grandbaby, Amelia Jane. She would stay with her son Jordan, his partner Danielle and the baby in their two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment.
This plan evoked various responses from the Muumuu Mamas: ‘WHAT!?!’ ‘Omigod,’ ‘Isn’t it amazing that they asked you?’ ‘It will be an adventure.’ We ended up enthusiastic and supportive, but also convinced that Iris was going to need a break. We resolved to go to New York one weekend and kidnap her.
HAPPY IN BROOKLYN, BUT NEEDED A BREAK
With money issues and schedule issues, only five of the Mamas ended up making the trip in April. We took the first flight out of Gainesville. The others were exhilarated, but Joe and I had run out of coffee, so I was uncaffeinated and subdued. I bought a cup the minute we reached the airport, and then realized I couldn’t take it through security. So they went ahead and I sat, happy alone with my coffee, until I heard Michelle’s laugh like rippling water, and my vacation began.
As we waited at the gate, a man overheard Michelle describing a report she had seen on TV about high-intensity cardio exercise, and he entered the conversation. Fully caffeinated, I felt the Muumuu rising, and offered to demonstrate the intense cardio I do when I have no machines. This entails a super-rapid bouncing on my feet while flailing my arms in the air. I heard the man say “I didn’t see it,” so I did it again. It turned out he was talking about part of the TV show, but I’m sure he benefitted from my thorough demonstration.
In Newark we took public transport – airtrain, New Jersey transit, subway. When I was little I would follow my parents through train stations and subways without a clue, and when in my fifties I finally negotiated the system alone, I felt like a grown-up. This time too, I felt able and free, competent in New York City. I’m too old to worry about looking like a tourist, since that’s what I am, and we asked directions of many smiling people. I think people like to see a gang of women “of a certain age” having a good time together – if they think that we’re ‘cute’, so be it.
WAITING FOR THE TRAIN IN NEWARK – MARCIE, MICHELLE, JULIE, LIZ, PEGGY
The six of us (including Iris) had two rooms at a midtown hotel. Some guidebook had said midtown was a desert, but we found plenty there to enjoy. And I loved looking up and up, to the angles and curves, glass and blue and copper.
VIEW FROM OUR HOTEL PHOTO:MARCIE
We all had wondered about six women sharing two rooms – that’s a lot of togetherness. But it went beautifully – it was like a slumber party, except that we fell asleep by 10. Michelle, a member of the Gainesville band Other Voices, wrote a song in the shower and sang it to us. Julie read us a poem by Billie Collins about beginnings, middles, and endings, and cried as she read. click We talked about our parents, our children, ourselves.
TIRED IRIS
We did as much as we could, and ate as much as we could, in our four days. Our first night we met Iris’ son Jordan for drinks before dinner. I lived with Jordan when he was three – it’s a treat to see him grown. Only after he left to catch his train did we realize he had picked up the check.
Our dinner reservations were across the street at Basso 56. We were warmly welcomed though we were half an hour early, we sat long over our meal and the waiters never rushed us, and the food was unpretentious and perfectly prepared.click
After dinner we walked, enjoying the buildings and store windows. Picture six middle-aged women in their sensible walking shoes looking into a store window at pumps with five-inch heels curved like a scimitar. Picture them breaking into song. Do your best to picture the smallest of them demonstrating her Irish jig in front of a huge sculpture of a rat. I tried embedding the video but alas, the technology defeated me.
PHOTO: MARCIE
On a rainy morning we took the subway to the Tenement Museum on the lower east side. click There we toured the tiny apartment of the Moores, Irish immigrants who moved into the higher-status German immigrant neighborhood. The tour was very well-done, packed with ideas and information, and it helped us imagine their lives.
GRANDAUGHTERS OF IMMIGRANTS CROSS DELANCEY PHOTO: MICHELLE
Afterwards we walked to Chinatown in the rain for lunch – the Muumuus tolerated my crankiness, though they were as hungry and tired and wet as I. The restaurant was almost empty, but the remaining diners were Chinese, which seemed a good sign. We couldn’t understand the waiter, and our happiness and enthusiasm had no effect on him, but he took our picture impassively, and brought dishes until the lazy susan was loaded.
While I took a nap, the others visited Grand Central Station. While I visited my niece and her family in Washington Heights – quite a transit adventure, as the subway was being repaired – the others walked on the High Line and ate a French lunch in the Village. One afternoon we went to the theater: Marcie, Peggy and Michelle to Once, a musical, and Iris, Julie and I to Old Hats, a clown revue by Bill Irwin, David Shiner and Nellie McKay. We were worn out, and ate in our room that night – the company was terrific, the food so-so.
Sunday was our day for walking around Brooklyn; we wanted to see Iris’ habitat, and of course, meet the baby. We decided to visit Ground Zero first; we took the subway, and saw the construction fences stretched around the site, the new World Trade Center rising in all its American hubris. Young men were peddling books of photographs. They pointed out the huge neighboring building that remains, and then pictures of the vanished towers, dwarfing it.
WORLD TRADE CENTER PHOTO:MICHELLE
We walked down to City Hall and across the Brooklyn Bridge., The weather was warm and clear, the water sparkling.
At the end of the bridge we walked down and around to a neighborhood called Dumbo (down under the Manhattan bridge), to an outdoor weekend market of food vendors. We shared spring rolls, Ethiopian vegetables, fried fish, pecan pie made with bourbon, a huge black and white cookie, a salad.
FOODIE MARKET IN DUMBO
Jordan, Danielle and Amelia Jane met us there. Danielle was instantly at ease, gracious and friendly, she and Jordan both besotted with their adorable baby, in a zebra-striped onesie and a blue denim hat. All the Mamas oohed and cooed and took turns holding the baby.
We walked the rest of the day, first along the water with a fine view of the Statue of Liberty, and then through Brooklyn Heights with a stop for shoe shopping.
THE STATUE OF JULIE PHOTO:MARCIE
Our subway ride to Bay Ridge was creepy: one of the tracks was blocked off for asbestos removal, and dust was flying. In Bay Ridge we sat out in the sun while Jordan served us grilled vegetables and wine.
MORE BABY-HOLDING (WITH WINE) PHOTO:MARCIE
Then we walked and walked and WALKED past beautiful fancy houses to a middle eastern restaurant, where we ordered too much food.
PHOTO:MICHELLE
We walked home to Jordan and Danielle’s, and bless him, Jordan drove us back to the city.
THE OFFICIAL KIDNAPPERS’ PORTRAIT PHOTO: DANIELLE
My favorite parts of the trip? The food, of course. Theater. The wonderful streets of New York and Brooklyn. Meeting the baby and Danielle, checking out Iris’ temporary life, and seeing Jordan thriving. But the best part was being together on this adventure. Six women who care about each other, ages 55 to 67, all with children, many with grandchildren. We are quick to inquire, to comfort, to rejoice and grieve together, with tears ready to spring, but laughter the dominant note. Whatever would I do without the Muumuu Mamas?
PHOTO: MARCIE
Note: There are probably far too many pictures of Muumuus. But it makes me so happy to look at them that I can’t resist.
