Let It Snow!

It has been forty-plus years since I’ve walked the halls of my neighborhood high school and I still get a thrill out of hearing the snow report school closings. My husband doesn’t understand my thinking. I don’t work in a school and I no longer have any school age children living at home. I am a bookkeeper who finds my own clients. I make my own hours and can reschedule a job any day of the week to give myself a day off. Yet, I get excited when a fierce snowstorm shuts everything down.

There is an electrical charge in the air right before a snowstorm. Total strangers will strike up a conversation about the impending storm. People are united in their fear and anticipation. Excitement builds throughout the day before a storm, when people at work start talking about the predicted snow accumulations and asking, I wonder if it will be bad enough to give us a day off? I get pulled into the frenzy with them and express my hopes for a snow day off, even though I know I will be postponing any job I have for the next day if I awaken to see just one flake of white stuff in the street.

Everyone you speak to, from the street vendor to the sales clerk, ends the conversation with an enthusiastic, “good luck tomorrow!” I call my husband at work and tell him we must go grocery shopping after dinner to prepare for the storm and he reminds me of the freezer I have in my garage that is already full of loaves of bread, home made cookies, cooked soups, tomato sauce, meatballs and other frozen leftovers that I squirrel away for nights when I come home late.

“But you are almost out of milk!” I tell him, my voice edging on panic. “Let’s at least get you some milk and toilet paper; just the necessities, in case we can’t get out for a few days.”

We always split up in the grocery store: two wagons, two lists. I make up both the lists and I put him on the cold cuts line, to buy me some extra time to read package labels and pick out the best fruit. I tell him to buy anything he thinks we might need, even if it isn’t on the list, because, normally, he will put nothing in his wagon that isn’t on his list.

When we are finished shopping my wagon is spilling over and he has the original six items on his list, plus one bag of potato chips. My wagon has M & M candies, Devil Dogs, bags of flour and sugar for baking cookies in the storm, some butter cookies - in case the lights go out and I can’t bake cookies in the storm.

The total comes to $243… just the necessities for two people in a snow storm.

Sex, Drugs And Baby Boomers

I am a Baby Boomer, a member of the generation who said we would never grow old. With all the anti-ageing tricks available - hair coloring, face lifting, tummy tucks, hair implants, breast implants – you can go on fooling yourself for a long time. But if you happen to catch The Who performing at Super Bowl half-time, you just might run to the nearest mirror and wonder: Do I look as old as they do?

The pharmaceutical companies have us duped into believing that we can turn back the clock and feel like we did when we were 30. They advertise pills that can cure anything from an overactive bladder to erectile dysfunction (conditions that our parents might only whisper about behind doctors’ closed doors). Now we are bombarded with TV commercials showing two sexually satiated giddy 50-ish people dancing, golfing and soaking in hot tubs, while a high-speed garbled voice-over lists the possible side effects from dry mouth to death.

With the development of Viagra came a plethora of drugs for sexual enhancement for those of us who are at that age when our mind has enough spark to jolt the engine but not enough to get the pistons to rise to the occasion.

One sex drug promises that if you take their pill once a day, “you can be ready anytime the moment is right.” But, it also warns, if you get chest pain, dizziness or nausea during sex you should get medical help right away. Bummer! You might also get a headache and an upset stomach, ringing in the ears and loss of vision. Can you hear me now??? And here is the kicker… In rare events, you might have an erection for more than four hours. Now, I wonder, what would my husband do with that problem all night after I’ve rolled over and nodded off to sleep?

I say, instead of spending millions of dollars in research and development for more powerful sex enhancing drugs, for a generation of old farts who’ve already had their heyday, why don’t the pharmaceutical companies develop a medication that can cure a sinus infection without giving you diarrhea for a month?

We had our time, when hormones ran wild and our bodies were virile and sexy, and love and lust were blended into one emotion. There is one reason alone that nature made us such horny beasts between the ages of 18 and 45, and that is to procreate. Once we’ve done that, in the eyes of mother nature, we’ve used up our usefulness in the great Mandala of life. Because we are living longer, we think that we should continue to behave like young people, but I’m telling you, don’t believe the hype; 50 is not the new 30, no matter what little pill you take.

By now most of us Baby Boomers are already ushering in a new generation of grandchildren. Remember learning the facts of life and imagining your parents doing it? That was bad enough. Do the poor kids today have to look at grandma and grandpa with the same creepy thought?

Forget those sexual enhancement drugs that can kill you with a severe drop in blood pressure and heart attacks. Who wants to go blind and lose their hearing before their time? Besides, most of the women I know over 50 would much rather see their partner reach into their tool box and pull out a screwdriver or a hammer. And if you’ve got four hours to kill in the middle of the night, and you need a little action, you can quietly paint the ceilings.

What Really Matters

I had a wake up call the other day. It came in the form of an incapacitating dizzy spell that lasted for 24 hours. One day I was going about my normal activities and the next night I was crawling back to bed on my hands and knees, unable to stand upright for fear of falling down. I spent the entire next day lying in my recliner, getting up only to make the necessary trips to the bathroom, and holding onto the walls for balance.

Do you ever wonder what goes through someone’s mind when they are lying incapacitated, unable to read or listen to music or watch TV? Not much; I can tell you firsthand. You lie there and focus on a spot on the ceiling until you fall asleep. You notice all the details in the room: the cracked line where the paint meets the molding on the ceiling, the flaked paint around the unfinished door, the curtain that doesn’t quite hang straight. You just stare at these details and let your mind go blank until you don’t even see the thing you are staring at.

You leave the world behind and cringe at the sound of life beyond your window – people slamming car doors and driving off to their destinations, the mailman filling your mailbox and slamming the lid down. The worst sound of all is the telephone ringing because it cracks a hole in the comfortable silent cocoon you have wrapped around yourself and trys to yank you out by your hair.

Nothing matters at all when you feel so sick that you can’t even sip water from a straw without the accompanying ripple of nausea. And the familiar twinge telling you that you must walk to the bathroom now! makes you break out in a sweat. And making that trip with your head spinning upside down, like the worst roller coaster ride you ever had, eats up all of your energy for the entire day.

You forget about the work you are missing that day. You don’t care that the boss may be annoyed that you missed the important meeting and didn’t take the calls from the office. You know everyone is thinking, no one get’s that sick that they can’t even answer their e-mails! Everything that was so urgent and important yesterday seems like silly nonsense today.

You don’t think about the trips you never took or the career path you should have gone down. You forget the important appointments you missed and the chances you passed up. You don’t care that you haven’t taken a shower and your hair is dirty and there may be hairs growing out of your chin that no one should ever see.

I will tell you what did matter as I started feeling better that day. When I awoke from a long sleep and sat up to realize that my head was no longer spinning, I became aware that my mother was still in the room. She had been there with me all day, silent and napping in the recliner beside me when I was sleeping, jumping up to help me walk to the bathroom several times, then hovering outside the bathroom door asking, are you alright in there?

This is what really matters: To have people who care for you and love you when you are at your lowest point. To have someone sit beside you all day and have the energy of their concern and love and prayers be the healing energy that pulls you back from the edge and drags you back to life. You can’t buy that kind of love. No promotion, no vacation, no thrill, no amount of money matters as much. To feel that kind of love is to have everything you need on this earth and to know that that is all that really matters.

Beware of Dog

The lopsided rusty Beware of Dog sign still hangs on the gate leading into my parents’ back yard. There hasn’t been a dog in the yard for over forty years, so I asked my father recently why he keeps it hanging there.

“Leave it there,” he said. “It makes people think twice about coming into the yard.”

When Duke, our German Shepherd, was in his prime, there was a game that the kids in the neighborhood would play. It was a game of dare. Someone would dare some clueless kid to simply lift the metal latch on the gate and let it fall back into place. At the point of contact there was a single note, a clink! Then the count would begin: one -one thousand - two - one thousand - three - one thousand… No one lasted much longer than a few seconds with their hand on the gate before Duke would come charging around the side of the house, teeth barred, ears pointed, hair standing up on his back, barking and crashing into the fence. The fence is still bowed out, to this day, from Duke bashing it in his attempt to get at his tormentor.

When we got Duke he was a sweet little puppy, very loving and gentle. But soon, my father was training him to respond to sounds of entry, like the tinkling doorbell or the metal latch clicking open at the outside gate, or the front door opening. When the doorbell rang, my father would call, “Duke! Duke!” then he would growl like a dog, bark and grit his teeth while commanding in Italian, “Mangia le! Mangia le!” (Eat him!). This is how my father taught our pet dog to be a watch dog.

It is no wonder that my father often opened the front door to find no one there. Who, in their right mind, would stick around on our porch with a vicious German Shepherd barking behind the door, and my father barking and growling beside the dog, while bellowing out, “Who’s there!? Mangia le!”

When I started dating I would have such anxiety thinking about the scene my would-be boyfriend would eventually encounter when he came to my house to pick me up. It was a true test of character that my boyfriends had to endure just to pass through the threshold of our home. Before I would agree to a date with a guy, I would access him myself. Could he pass the test of my father’s vice grip hand shake, the steely eye contact? Would he make it past my overprotective dog? Was this guy really worth it?

If he could make it through those first few minutes out on the porch, he would then be face to face with my father - a large, broad-chested man dressed in a semi-transparent undershirt that revealed his full muscular chest of dark curly hair and bulked up biceps that stretched the very fibers of his t-shirt to their limits.

Before he even greeted the boy, my father would open the front door while he continued yelling commands to our barking German shepherd, who leaped up to greet the house guest at eye level, slamming into the glass storm door with his front legs. Dad would then show his own strength by flexing his huge bicep, grabbing the dog’s collar and yelling in a deep throaty dog-like growl, “Sit! Sit! Sit, goddammit! I told you to SIT!” The dog would take a few moments to calm down, his tongue would be hanging out dripping saliva and he was alert and ready to leap at the next command of Mangia Le!. This went on with every first greeting. It was a show of strength and warning. Don’t mess with my daughter!

If the young man had any ideas of impropriety with me before ringing that doorbell, they were certainly replaced by primal fear and silent prayers of redemption.

My calm well-mannered boyfriend, the one who many years later would become my husband, found that display of brute strength by man and dog humorous and would not be intimidated or deterred by it. He continued to ring my doorbell and even went so far as to kiss me in front of the overly protective growling Duke. This boy and that dog had a hate-hate relationship for months, pushing it to the limits, until one lovely spring day when we pushed Duke too far.

My boyfriend was walking me home from school that day. We approached the gate with the lopsided “Beware Of Dog” sign hanging from years of Duke bashing into it in his attempt to get the mailman, the UPS man or anyone of the neighborhood kids who played their game of daring Duke. After loudly clanking the latch a few times, we paused a moment, as we always did, to be sure he wasn’t in the yard. I called out, “D–u-k-e, D-u-k-i-eee?” in the sing-song voice I used to get his attention.

My boyfriend, laughing aloud, imitated me in a high falsetto, “Oh, D-u-k-i-e; Dukie boy?” We were only met by the sounds of chirping birds and gentle spring breezes so we proceeded boldly around the back of the house, my boyfriend walking in front of me, both of us laughing as he continued his silly dog calls.

It all happened so quickly: my boyfriend crouched and running across the lawn, his books scattered in his path, Duke running after him, boyfriend on the ground rolling and moaning with his hands in his crotch, Duke yanking at the end of his chain, trying to break free so he could finish the job, hovering with his tongue hanging out only inches over my boyfriend’s head. I stood frozen in my tracks. What happened? I never heard a growl or a warning bark to let us know he was there.

My mother ran out of the house chasing the dog with her dust rag, calling, “Duke! Duke! Get back on this porch!” The dog pausing a moment to think about this, then loping back to his place on the back porch alertly watching his prey as it writhed on the lawn like a caterpillar that’s been poked with a stick.

“Is he alright?” my mother called out to me. We had only been dating six months, so I didn’t know how I would check his injuries. All indications were that he had been hit in that spot that makes guys curl up and die.

“Are you alright?” I asked meekly, still standing far away from him. He only moaned louder.

“Can I get you an ice pack?” my mother called from the porch steps. “Was he bitten?” mom asked me. “Should I call an ambulance?”

We heard a low groan from the lawn. “I think he said no,” I reported back to my mother. I looked over at Duke and I swear that dog was gloating. Is it possible for a dog to smile? I could see one curling on his mouth as he was panting, his tongue hanging out, eyes all sparkly.

“Bad dog!” I said to him and he lowered his head a moment and then took a quick peek at his victim in fetal position, lying motionless on the lawn. Yes, that dog was gloating.

The amazing miraculous thing was that this boy kept coming back for more. He continued to ring my doorbell and walk with his arm around my shoulders and even kissed me in front of the growling Duke.

The dog continued to assert his alpha male dominance over my boyfriend in little ways. There was the time Duke devoured the entire heart shaped cake I had made for my boyfriend on Valentine's day.

Then there were the times we would sneak inside after a date, when we knew everyone was asleep and Duke was tucked away in the garage for the night. We would watch an old movie, snuggled up on the TV room couch, but the minute we would start kissing and getting a little frisky, Duke's radar ears would pick up on the heightening emotions and start barking in the garage in an attempt to wake up my father.

The war of dominance eventually ended with Duke's passing. My boyfriend is now my husband, and with thoughts of Valentine's Day approaching I'm thinking about making that heart shaped cake that he never had a chance to see or taste. As for my husband, he does not need to worry about buying me some useless token of love. He already proved his love for me some forty years ago when he defied the Beware of Dog sign and walked into hell and back again, and again and again.

Psychic Tony

I went to a psychic about five years ago. I brought my mother along for a little coraggio. I’ll admit I was a little nervous and my practical minded 78 year old mother was the perfect companion to soothe my nerves.

“What are you nervous about?” she asked on the drive over there. “You don’t believe this stuff, do you?”

“If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t be spending $75 to hear it.”

“Seventy five dollars? Are you nuts?! Keep your money and let’s go shopping instead.”

“Let’s see what kind of neighborhood he lives in first. If it’s a rundown shack with candles glowing through the windows, we’ll bolt.”

When we pulled in front of the house, my mother summed up the neighborhood with an approving, hmmm. “This is a better neighborhood than we live in.”

When we reached the front door I decided to test Tony’s psychic abilities. “I’m not going to ring the doorbell,” I whispered. “Let’s see if he can feel our presence.” We were a few minutes early, anyway. I was still a little timid about going in – afraid that I might hear bad news. My mother and I had already agreed, on the ride over, that I was only going to believe the good news and discount the bad stuff.

“Nice geraniums,” mom said, pointing up to the hanging pots that filled the wrap around porch. “They are all so healthy looking.”

“Take a closer look,” I told her. “They’re all fake. Who hangs fake geraniums in June?”

“I like this wooden porch,” she said.

“It’s not wood. Touch it and see; it’s that pressurized plastic. Everything is fake here -except these butts.” The tiny table between us held two packs of opened cigarettes and a soup bowl full of burned up cigarette butts.

The front door was suddenly yanked open and out flew a slim man with a slight paunch, and long skinny legs. His receding hairline was slicked back with a thick greasy gel that pasted every strand of dyed black hair in place. A slight red rash creeped below the well manicured matching black goatee.

Seeing us, he stopped short, clicked his heels together, and with a mime's exaggerated look of surprise, he stood with both arms outstretched waiting for us to introduce ourselves.

"I'm Chris, your 9:00 reading," I said.

He ignored me as he grabbed a cigarette from the table, snapped his lighter open and sucked in three short puffs until the tip glowed red. Studying my white haired mother with a peering eye, he squinted through the cigarette smoke, cocked his head to the side and pointed the lit cigarette at her left shoulder. She glanced quickly to see if there was something there to brush off, a bug perhaps.

"There is a gentleman on your left,” he said looking at the air over her left shoulder. “He is there all the time, watching over you." His cheeks caved in as he sucked hard on the cigarette, watching us closely, as my mother and I discussed who it could be.

"It's your father, of course!" I told her, as Tony blew a smoke cloud above our heads.

Mom's mouth was agape as she watched him in awe. Was it the information he gave her that caused her jaw to drop lower, or her latent desire to suck on that cigarette he was flaunting in front of her? I couldn't tell.

He paced back and forth in front of us, head down, concentrating on something. He stopped abruptly and, turning to my mother, said, "He was a piece of bread; capese?" He leaned between us to stub out his cigarette in the cereal bowl and grabbed another. Suck, suck, suck - three short puffs got it glowing red.

"A piece of bread…" mom repeated. “Yes, but he was unhappy,” she added.

"No he wasn't,” his words coming out in puffs of smoke. “What makes you think so?"

"People made a fool of him," mom said, her mouth turning down.

"No! He knew who he was. Anyway he's happy now," Tony dismissed her mood with a wave of his hand, blowing smoke around the top our heads.

"He is?"

"Of course! Everyone is happy up there. They don't have desires or anger or lust or any of the things that we have down here that make us pazzo - crazy - capese?"

"No?" she asked, not quite convinced.

"Of course not! And your father is in a good place. He's very happy. You have to believe that," he mashed his butt stub into the bowl to make his point. “Let’s go inside and begin the reading.”

As the front door opened we heard a mechanical sing-song voice announce, “Front door opened, making entrance.” There was a small camera and a TV screen recording our entry.

I asked to use the bathroom before we began. I locked the bathroom door and searched for cameras behind the mirror and around the ceiling moldings. Nothing. When I was done, I walked out to find Tony and my mother had vanished. I heard voices and followed them toward the kitchen. Empty. I walked back in the direction I came from, peering into a darkened hallway where every door was closed, I knew they couldn't be in there, but I still heard the voices. Muffled voices - they were behind a wall somewhere.

I had the feeling I was being watched – hidden cameras? - so I tried to visually take in the whole house without looking like I was snooping around. I kept my head straight and rolled my eyes around as far as I could to see beyond my peripheral vision. My sneakers made a squeaking sound on the polished wooden floors as I walked slowly back toward the kitchen. I was getting the creeps and would have fled on foot if my mother wasn’t hidden behind one of those doors somewhere. If only I could find her and sneak out. We would go shopping all day and forget this psychic escapade. I called out in a frightened whisper, “mom?”

Tony surprised me and came in the room from a direction that I wasn’t watching. He walked me to the kitchen table, and, pointing randomly, he said, "You sit there," as he scooted off into the darkened hallway and disappeared again behind a door. I wasn’t sure which seat he wanted me in, so I stood there waiting for him to return. Psychic auras being what they are, I wouldn't want to provoke the wrong spirit.

After a few minutes, he burst back into the room, his unbuttoned shirt billowing out behind him like a parachute. Grabbing a bottle of Windex, he sprayed the kitchen table, then vigorously wiped it down.

"I didn't know which seat you wanted me in," I said, still standing where he had left me.

"That one," he said, pointing to the specific seat. "I sit here," he said, pulling out the chair at the head of the table. It figured he would sit at the head of the table. It had to be the best place to channel the spirits. "I can only hear out of this one ear," he explained pointing to his left ear. “That’s why I want you there – on my left. Did you bring a piece of jewelry and the deck of cards?"

I handed him my wedding band and he slipped it halfway up his pinky finger. As I handed him the deck of playing cards, unopened, as he had instructed on the phone, he said, "First, let me tell you that the reading I give you is not the final word. You must listen to a power higher than me. And that is God. He is the supreme power and you must trust in him only. O.K.?" Aha! So that cleared him from anyone blaming him for bad luck.

"Well, I've been praying for guidance," I answered. "some answer to my question, but I haven't seen it yet. That's why I called you."

"O.K. Let's begin."

He slapped the playing cards into neat piles, observed them while scratching his chin, then his forehead, slapped a few more down, squinted at them than looked up and said, “The cards show me a state of confusion. You are trying to come to a decision about something” Didn’t I just tell him that? “….your job?” Good guess.

I answered, “Yes!” a little too quickly. I should have let him tell me more, because for the remaining hour Psychic Tony became Career Coach Tony.

“You’ve got to reinvent yourself,” he told me. “You’re too quick to give up when it gets tough. You’ve got to stick it out, nothing worthwhile comes easy… blahblahblah…”

We went on to discuss cooking and recipes for eggplant parmigiana, pizza dough and meat balls. He told me stories about his old neighborhood in Brooklyn and I laughed alot. He was very entertaining, but not very psychic. After about 45 minutes, I could sense that he was getting fidgety as he kept glancing over to the counter where his cigarettes were. “OK, let’s have a look at the photos you brought.”

He tapped on the faces of the people in the photos, looked at another photo, tapped his forehead and closed his eyes, and, finally the third photo. He shuffled the photos around on top of the table - like that game you play with the cups where you try to find the hidden item under one of the cups. Finally, he said, “Someone is getting married soon and a child will be on the way. There will be a death in the family. A male. Your husband loves you very much.”

“Who is getting married?” I asked. “Who is going to die?” I wasted all my time talking about recipes, and now that I finally had some psychic revelation, it was over.

I jumped out of my seat when, from nowhere, a black cat leaped onto my lap and flicked his tail in my face. “Cleo likes you,” said psychic Tony. “That’s a good sign because cats are psychic too and they know good people immediately.”

“Well, maybe Cleo can tell me who is going to die,” I said. That’s the only reading that I wanted more information about because I knew neither of my sons were ready to get married and I had no doubts about my own marriage.

“Come back for another reading and we can go into more detail,” said Tony. “Do you want to make another appointment now?” he said reaching for his crinkled pack of cigarettes, squeezing them tight.

“Let me see what my schedule is like,” I told him. We both wanted to get out of there for different reasons. I checked my finger to be sure I had my ring back. “Where is my mother?” I asked, as he yanked open a door to reveal her happily knitting in a chair in front of a small TV.

Back in the car my mother wanted to know what he said.

“He said I should work harder to build up my business, someone is going to get married and have a child and my husband loves me. He told me stories about the old days in Brooklyn and we swapped recipes.” I didn’t tell her about the death coming. Even though we decided not to pay attention to the foretelling of bad fortune, I knew it would weigh on her mind, as it was now on mine.

“So what’s the big news?” she said. “That someone is getting married? I wonder who? Peter?... James?... Paul is too young.”

“I’m sure every one of them will be married - eventually. And they will probably all have children – eventually. I already knew my marriage was good. And who doesn’t know that hard work builds up a business? The guy is a chain smoking quack who didn’t tell me anything I don’t already know! And I’m the idiot who just gave him $75 cash!”

“I told you to save your money. Now what are we going to do with the rest of the day?”

“I don’t know, mom. Let’s see if you can read my mind.”

“Well, we already travelled this far, why don’t we go to the Huntington Mall, grab a bite at Starbucks and have a look in Talbot’s?”

“Amazing! And you got it right on the first reading.”