Apologies...

For having written so little in so long and for my first post back after over a month being sort of morose and self indulgent.  I will return, I promise, with some wit and wisdom.  This, being the first post of 2011, I beg your indulgence and forgiveness and welcome you to the second half of my 44th Year...

Almost 15

Child Two loves the snow.  I’m not sure we realized just how much until this past week when we visited my familial cabin in the woods in Lake Tahoe.  There, Child Two bounced around in fresh powder, made snow angels, discovered his inner snowboarder and sledded down the neighborhood streets before the plows came to do what must be done on snowy passageways.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the boy so joyous – it was as though he was a fish who just discovered the joys of the open sea or a puppy let loose in a field of bouncing balls.  Child Two took to the snow like a duck to water, pouncing into drifts and throwing himself joyously into virgin fields of white powder with abandon.  The trip, it turns out, was slightly trickier for me. 

Almost forty years ago I put on my first pair of skis – they were wooden with cable bindings.  I had red leather lace up boots and bamboo poles.  I’m sure I complained about the cold and the shlep, but for the next twenty years or so, I bombed down mountainsides regardless of weather or conditions, first with my father and then with my best girlfriend.  I tackled slopes of any level and in any location.  And then, about twenty years ago, I moved to Los Angeles.  I was making little money and could barely afford rent much less the now expensive sport and I realized two terribly important things: first, that my best ski companion had always been my father and he was now dead; second, skiing is cold and uncomfortable and expensive.  I had bad circulation and no money.  And so I quit – cold turkey – no more skiing.  And that was it.  For twenty years. 

Then along came Sig Other who decided, just a few weeks ago, that I should get back on the horse (the horse, in this case, being a pair of skis).  For reasons I am still pondering, I relented, and Sig Other, Child Two and I packed up ridiculous amounts of gear and flew north to my family cabin.  We arrived in a near blizzard and muscled through blustery snow in a rented Yukon XL.  Four days of spectacular skiing and crazy snowstorms yielded fun and happy exhaustion.  Skiing, it turns out, is sort of like riding a bicycle and after twenty years off the boards, my muscle memory did not fail and I was back at it, knee deep in powder in no time.  For four days we bombed down slopes until finally, on our last day, we took it a little easy and ended up back at the house before sunset.  Child Two had been aching to sled, so I took him for a walk in the neighborhood in search of the perfect hill while Sig Other relaxed by the fire with an aggressive game of online Scrabble.  Child Two lugged a red plastic toboggan from the garage.  I wielded an orange plastic disc.  I wasn’t thinking really, as we wandered around looking for a place to slide.  

But just up the street from our family cabin in Tahoe is where my father died.  It’s a house directly behind ours, two blocks up.   The house belonged to friends and we’d been their guests for summers and winters of my childhood.  My parents fell in love with the area and, when they could finally afford it, bought a lot here and set about building their dream vacation house.  It was, to the best of my knowledge, my father’s greatest dream to build his own house – a house where his wife and daughters could spend time in the place he loved best.  And so our friends offered their house to him as he set about the task of building our home from the ground up – just him and a guy named Chuck.  Dad started in the spring of ’81 when the snow thawed. The plan was that he’d live in our friend’s house while he built ours and we would join him when school let out for the summer to help in the task of raising walls and hammering nails and painting wherever we could.  The plan was to complete the house before the first snow of that winter.    

But it was not to be.  A few months into the build, on the last day of school and just before we were to join him, my father died in the house up the hill from ours.  Peacefully we hope and just short of seeing the completion of his big dream.  My mother made sure the dream was made complete – she hired a contractor to carry out their original plans and the house was built as he would have wanted. 

For many years I defined myself first as the girl whose father died when she was fourteen – eight days shy of her fifteenth birthday.  Whatever else I was or wanted to be trailed far behind that simple fact.   Years passed as I struggled to shed that definition – to move past it to a sense of self that lived outside of childhood trauma.  And I did.  Two divorces and a good deal of therapy later and I can now pin my neuroses on other psychological traumas.  But I grew out of, or so I thought, being jus the girl whose father died when she was fourteen.    

And for years I avoided this house.  No one else in my family avoids it.  They like it.  They like coming here and living my father’s dream – reveling in the knowledge that this is what he would most like, this is what he would have wanted – families united around a fireplace, a game of Scrabble, a puzzle completed, a meal cooked together.  And after years of pestering and cajoling, Sig Other finally got me to come here.  Child Two should see the mountains, have a chance to try snowboarding, go on vacation by the lake.  And I went along.

And so I found myself, four days into my vacation, after Child Two had joined throngs of kids as they belly-flopped and slipped and slid down the unplowed road soaked through and happy, walking though the neighborhood.  I found myself walking past our old friend’s house up the street – the house where my father died.  Our friends don’t own it anymore.  The kids grew up and moved all over the country and keeping the house no longer made sense.  But there it was, a little spruced up, a little fancier and now owned by someone I don’t know.  And I recognized it just the same.  I remembered the smell of the upstairs bedroom – sort of a lofty attic filled with dumpy bunkbeds where the kids all slept.  I remember the smell of Bisquick pancakes smothered in Aunt Jemima served with Oscar Meyer bacon for breakfast – our parents cooking in long underwear and sweaters and getting us all ready for a long day on the slopes.  And I remember looking through the window from the front porch into the living room and through to the master bedroom – the room where my father died. 

His body was long gone by the time I last looked through that window, almost thirty years ago now.  But I could imagine how he was laying – was I told how he looked when he was found?  Did my mother say he was on the bed, on his back, legs crossed at the ankles as they always were when he napped?  Were his hands behind his head as he lay in repose?  I’m not sure.  But that’s the image I have – the image of his legs crossed at the ankles, visible from that front porch window only from just above the knee down.  And that’s what I thought about today as I walked by the house with Child Two.

“There’s the house where my father died,” I told him.  I’m not sure why I said it.  It wasn’t necessary and I hope it didn’t freak him out.  “Does it make you very sad” he asked.  No, I lied.  I didn’t know it was a lie in the moment.  In that moment I thought I was just walking by a house I used to know in a neighborhood I used to frequent.  But hours later, after dinner, sitting by the fire trying to read a book, I started to cry.  Coming back here, it turns out, turned me back into the girl whose entire identity could be defined by the fact that her father died when she was fourteen – eight days before her fifteenth birthday.

I’m home now, a little sore and wrung out by muscles exercised in mind and body not used for the past two decades.  And its Sig Other’s birthday today.  He is 48 – the age my father was when he died.  I’m glad I went to Tahoe, glad I skied, glad I stayed in the home my father built.  But it will always be a challenge for me, always be fraught with the bitter and the sweet.  And I will always think of myself, when I’m in that house, as the girl whose father died when she was fourteen – eight days before her fifteenth birthday…

Meet me in Verona

Sig Other loves the opera.  He loves the music, he loves the voices, he loves the drama.  So when we found ourselves in Vienna for a night, staying at a hotel directly across from the Opera House, he immediately went about securing tickets to that evening’s performance of Rigoletto.  As it was high season and tickets were scarce, he was unable to find four together.  But the concierge did manage to find two pairs of seats in boxes directly opposite one another.  And so it was decided – we’d dig into our suitcases of shlubby travel clothes, put together an acceptable outfit and attend the opera as a family in style.

The Vienna Opera House is stunning and if you’ve never had the opportunity to sit in a box at the opera it is truly a special feeling.  Just inside the door to our box was a red velvet anteroom with its coat hooks and bench and mirror and imagined myself in the 1800s having arrived by horse and carriage and hanging my long coat on hooks before fishing out my fan and opera glasses.  Child Two and I took our seats in front, I showed him the little pop up translator box and changed the setting to English and we settled in.  He made it through half the first act before passing out on the balcony railing, heads in arms.  I poked him periodically to make sure he wasn’t snoring.

Rigoletto, Sig Other had warned me, has a complicated plot with twists and turns that are difficult to follow.  He’s wrong, of course.  It’s incredibly simple and sort of silly really.  It’s about betrayal and revenge and the love of a father for his daughter.  Sig Other tried to taunt me with his knowledge of plot as the end approached.  “Its so tense,” he said, “you have no idea what’s going to happen.”  “She’s going to die,” I said and he looked sort of crushed.  “Her father said that thing about dressing as a boy.”  “But its tragic,” he continued.  And of course she died.  And of course Sig Other wept and clung to Child One.

The thing about opera is this – its structure is antithetical to how I life my life (and how I do my job for that matter).  Opera takes something very, very simple and makes it very, very complex and overwrought.  Subtlety is thrown out the window.  It’s a teenage fantasy really.  A thought as basic as “You’re pretty” can turn into a ten minute aria and “I’m going across town to tell the baker” becomes high drama.  I suppose Shakespeare could be accused of the same.  I suppose a sonnet is really just a long, drawn out declaration of a simple thought.  But the truth is that the music of Shakespeare’s language is just easier on my ear.  The cadence of the well-written word is a rhythm I find more enjoyable. 

This is not to discount the EXPERIENCE of going to the opera. I will happily escort my husband on special occasions and when we find ourselves in cities boasting phenomenal operas.  I enjoy the architecture and the feeling of being thrust back to another era.  And the idea of attending La Scala in black tie is truly marvelous.  Its just that I find my editorial instincts taking over and wondering why “I love you” couldn’t be said in a shorter amount of time.  I find myself thinking a truly complicated plot could justify three full acts and my mind drifts to how those women sing in those tight corsets and why all opera singers are a little hefty.  And then to this: when the man says, “dress as a boy and meet me in Verona” you know bad things will happen.  

Railway in Birkenau

Photo credit: Sig Other

Auschwitz

It’s the stairs I’m struck by.  From the first floor to the second, they’re terribly worn - warped and wobbly from years of use.  We’re walking through the barracks and around the grounds of Auschwitz and I’m struck not by the numbers or the stories but by the stairs.  Auschwitz is made of three parts: the original camp which was a former Polish army base, Birkenau which was built exclusively as an extermination camp and Auschwitz 3, the labor camp, which no longer exists.

As we travel from Auschwitz and Birkenau I ask about the stairs.  I worry I’m not clear – I don’t know how to ask what I want to know.  Agnieska, our young Polish guide, understands immediately.  The wear, she tells me, is not from the footsteps of concentration camp victims – she knows that’s what I was thinking.  It is not from any of the 80,000 shoes that represent a mere fifth of those who perished.  The wear is from the shoes of visitors.  “Remember,” she tells me, “the victims were here only five years.  Visitors have been coming for over sixty.”  Millions of feet stepping where victims stepped – tens of millions of visitors tracing the footsteps of one million victims – tracing but not fully getting the picture.  I find comfort in the wear of the stairs of Auschwitz – comfort in the familiarity of dips and grooves.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe its knowing that so many have come to see – so many have come to try to understand – so many have come to remember.  Or maybe it’s just that I fixate on the worn stairs and find comfort in the familiar amidst the unfathomable. 

Agnieska doesn’t go into the room with 80,000 pairs of shoes.  It’s the thing she cannot tolerate.  The display of shoes, to her, is the most upsetting sight.  It isn’t the shoes that bother me.  It’s the wax.  Across the hall from the shoes is another room with a display of brushes and combs on one side and a case holding tins and tins of wax and shoe polish.  Shoe polish is something you take with you when you believe you are leaving home to build a life elsewhere – to live in a place where you want to look presentable, build a new community, celebrate family birthdays and anniversaries and weddings.  Shoe polish is not something you take with you when you believe you are leaving home to die. 

I ask Agnieska about herself – how she chose this job.  I know she is not a Jew and I am struck by her youth – such a young woman to choose such a serious job.  Her grandmother, she says, was sent to a labor camp in Germany during the war.  As a girl, Agnieska would listen to her grandmother’s stories and became obsessed with the holocaust and so she studied history and Hebrew and became a guide so that the stories would continue.  She speaks with great pride about her country – about the Polish people and how they suffered during the war.  The camps, she is quick to point out, were not just for Jews.  The Poles were the first prisoners of Auschwitz along with a few hundred Jewish intellectuals.  As she speaks we walk slowly down the gravel road of Birkenau and snow begins to fall.    

The barracks of Birkenau are lined up in neat rows, as they would be in any army base.  They’re made of brick or wood.  Row upon row of standing barracks followed by row upon row of ruins – skeletons of chimneys and outlines of buildings that once were - all precisely stacked up on either side of the long road to death.  Past that, the woods – dense and beautiful – a sharp contrast to the haunted foreground.  It is stunning in its simplicity, in its austerity, in its quiet. There are no signs blinking “death to the Jews”, no splashes of blood on the walls, no emaciated skeletons reaching from the dark.  There are only barren buildings, scant photographs and the chill wind whistling between buildings once stuffed with humanity waiting for extinction.  It is the familiar of this place that is so striking - the absolute everydayness of it.   Sig Other notes that it is shockingly ordinary.  Without thinking, I say it is actually beautiful in a way.  He looks at me funny and walks on.  I feel odd, using that word in this place.  But it is, in a way.  Or rather, stunning.  It is orderly and ordinary and stunning in its simplicity.

Auschwitz does not bring you to your knees in the moment.  There were no tears shed as I walked the long road that runs parallel to the railway track that leads from the entry gate of Birkenau to the memorial erected between the ruins of the gas chambers number two and three.  Auschwitz sneaks up slowly – etching itself indelibly in your brain and cutting deep into your chest where it lives forever as a haunting memory of lives not lived.  

Hail to the Snotty Chief

I marvel at the brilliance that is seventeen.  Seventeen means you can drive yourself, it means you can drive your siblings and your friends, it means you are old enough to self-regulate to a certain extent.  Seventeen is accompanied by a fair amount of adult freedom and responsibility.  It is also accompanied by a fair amount of insecurity and uncertainty and the emotional swings that come with adolescence. 

Our seventeen year old, our Child One, has all of these things.  She has lot of that adult freedom.  She’s incredibly responsible and she comes and goes as she pleases.  But she is not adult.  She can’t vote.   She can’t drink (not that she wants to).  She is still, legally, a minor.  Seventeen, I’m often reminded in spite of her poise and maturity, is still quite young.  Take, as case in point, a moment with her earlier this week. 

Child One had given a brilliant speech at a fancy Beverly Hills fundraiser a week prior.  She was a little nervous.  Her voice was maybe pitched a bit higher than normal.  She held her head maybe a little more awkwardly than she might otherwise.  But only those of us who know her best were aware of any of these flaws.  The rest of the room saw her as brilliant and articulate and composed – a performance belying her few years – a performance worthy of a well-educated, secure adult.  After her speech, several admirers approached – people who had never met her before – people impressed by her ability to speak with such command at so young an age.  One man, a rather wealthy and powerful businessman, asked her where she intended to apply to college.  And then he told her she could do anything – he told her she could be the next President of the United States.

This may seems silly – a grand statement from a complete stranger to such a young girl after hearing one speech on a Wednesday night in a ballroom in Beverly Hills.  But the man meant it.  And why not, really?  Why shouldn’t Child One be anything she wants to be, even the President of the United States? 

The excitement of her speech behind her, Child One re-engaged in the rigor of her daily life - she continued to obsess about schoolwork and SATs and college apps and internship and her senior project.  Bedtime continued to come too late and mornings began too early and as anyone who lives a busy life can tell you, Child One started to break down.  It started with a stuffy nose and deteriorated to a low grade coldy/flu bug.  Our brilliant, strong, vibrant girl turned into a weak, sleepy, snotty little kitten. 

And then last night, after anxious tossing and turning, after hours of organizing and re-organizing and sheep counting and white noise, Child One succumbed to the adolescent side of her seventeen year old self.  Child One did, as she had when she was a tiny girl, what every small child does when they can’t self-soothe – when they can’t put themselves to sleep.  Child One crept into our room at 3am and crawled into bed next to Sig Other.  “I can’t sleep,” I heard her say.  “Shhhh,” Sig Other soothed, patting her head, “stay here and I’ll put you to sleep.”  Within three minutes, Child One was snoring soundly.  So there we were – me, Sig Other, Beta Dog and Child One – all jammed into bed together.  I knew that Sig Other wasn’t asleep – I knew he was trapped in an awkward twist, one arm under Child One, one around her back but neither moving so as not to wake the sweet girl.  And I certainly wasn’t asleep, kept awake by the drone of the buzzsaw of Child One’s snotty snore.  But neither of us would speak, lest we wake the sleeping child.  And so I looked across the bed, past sleeping Beta Dog, past wakeful Sig Other and over at the now blissful Child One and I thought to myself, “oh look – there she is – the future President of the United States.”

Ground Control to Major Domo...

I love rich people.  I don’t mean people who are financially secure or people who don’t worry about paying for college or retirement or even people who have more than one home.  I mean really rich people.  The kind of people with staff.  Not nanny or housekeeper staff.  But full-time, round the clock, take care of everything staff.  The kind of people who have a major domo.  I met one of those people the other night at a dinner party meant as a social networking function for business women.  I pulled into a fancy property through a fancy gate, handed my car off to a well-dressed valet and was met by a suited gentleman who introduced himself as “the Major Domo of the household” before whisking my coat and handbag away to a closet the size of my bedroom. 

Major Domo.  Sig Other’s fantasy – someone to organize the house, keep the pantry well-stocked, fix the little heres and theres that fall apart, stop working or otherwise fail to function at their highest capacity, someone to bathe and care for the beasts and finally, to bring Sig Other coffee and the paper in bed.  The latter task we sorta figured out.  The papers arrive via internet onto Sig Other’s bedside companion, the iPad.  And most days (though I confess not EVERY day) coffee is delivered to him in bed by yours truly with a smile and a little dance.  In fact, most tasks on the list of things that would be otherwise handled by the Major Domo are, in fact, handled by me.  This is not to say I am without help.  It would be ludicrous to suggest that I work full time AND manage to do every household task on my own.  I have housekeepers and a gardener and pool man and even a part time assistant (though I desperately miss my last household assistant who doubled as a brilliant manny to Child Two – he was as good at Rock Band and Halo as running errands). 

And yet I still consider it a great failing of my personal and professional life that I have no truly rich friends – no friends to offer up their vacation homes or whisk us away on the jet to their Mediteranean-moored yacht or private Italian villa.  I’m not entirely sure how I’ve managed twenty plus years in a city full of rich people and have not one single stinking rich friend.  Don’t get me wrong.  I know some rich people.  I’ve been invited to some rich peoples’ houses.  But I don’t have any friends who are truly rich.  Truly, sick money, filthy nasty full-time staff rich.  Child One has failed us in this manner.  She has lovely friends from her fancy private school.  But none of them has fancy rich parents.  None of them have vacation homes that they want to invite us to so we can all spend grand holidays together in exotic locales with delicious food and indulgent wines.  Child Two has failed us as well on this front as he is simply not terribly social. 

But lately, it doesn't seem to matter much.  Lately, Sig Other and I have reasoned that we would be, in fact, very bad house guests.  We’ve realized that being guests in someone else’s home, no matter how fancy, is not actually our idea of a good time.  We like hotels where there is room service and maid service and a certain level of assumed privacy.  And we like our own home where there is actual privacy.    So the idea of really rich friends with fancy vacation homes may be a terrific fantasy, but in practice would serve us not at all.  A major domo on the other hand…