Susan O'Neill's Amazon Blog

Forgive us our...whatever...

10:07 PM PDT, May 28, 2009

I’m staring at a blue fleece blanket. It has white stars and silhouettes of children on it. I just found it in my mail, inside a big plasticized envelope addressed to me.

The letter that came with the blanket tells me that whenever I use it, I should remember how my generosity can change the future for a child. The child is a small girl named Kerri, who smiles hopefully from a picture on the first page of the letter.

I wasn’t generous. I didn’t change the future for a child. I didn’t earn this fleece blanket. It’s a gift for a donation I didn’t make to an organization I’ve never heard of: the Inner-City Scholarship Fund.

I would guess that the object of this gift is to make me feel guilty, so I will send a donation to the Inner-City Scholarship Fund. This blanket is a blue, fleecy guilt-trip.

Who on earth would be so arrogant as to assume they could guilt-trip me into contributing to a strange charity by sending me a free blanket?

The Catholic Church.

For some of you—you know who you are—I could end this essay right now. Set up; punchline; done. Wham, Bam, Thank you, Sister. You have my permission to stop reading, but you must say three Hail Marys for taking the easy way out.

For the rest of you…Yes, Virginia: the Inner-City Scholarship Fund uses fleece blankets to solicit contributions, to tuition kids to Catholic schools so they don’t have to deal with the NYC public school system. It says so in my letter, which is signed by Dr. Timothy J. McNiff, Superintendent of Schools.

The title confused me, so I googled him. No, he’s the not the New York City superintendent of Schools; he’s the superintendent of schools for the Catholic Diocese of New York.

The NYC Public School system has significant problems. It is not a bad idea to rescue kids from it. Particularly kids in dicier parts of the city. Like little Kerri, who lives in a terrible neighborhood in the Bronx. Maybe it’s not even a bad idea to put them into Catholic schools.

But raising money for the Catholic Diocese of New York by invoking guilt? That’s just so…I dunno…so Catholic.

I grew up Catholic. I know from Catholic Guilt. If I told a lie, Catholic Guilt whispered that I was headed to purgatory. If I told a real whopper, it raised its unplucked eyebrows and hinted that I just might go to Hell. Catholic Guilt leaned heavily on Hell for its effectiveness. Non-Catholic kids could skip their homework, and they might make their parents cry. If we Catholics did it, we made Jesus cry. Parents could give you Hell. But only Jesus could actually send you there.

In the Catholic Church, there was one Commandment against killing people, and it was negotiable. War killing was okay, as was killing in self-defense. But there were TWO commandments against having sex when you’re not married. They were not negotiable. They even covered thoughts about unmarried sex. Or about sex you might have once you got married, if you weren’t married when you thought about it. Furthermore, the commandment stated—although not in words—that Thou Shalt Not Touch Anybody There. Not even yourself.

That’s Catholic Guilt. What other religion made you count your sins and run off to church to confess them so you wouldn’t go to Hell if you were hit by that omni-threatening bus?

I left the Catholic school system after fourth grade, but Catholic Guilt followed me. It sent me to my parish’s weekly religion classes, even though I never got anything out of them. All Catholics who went to Public School had to go; mine not to question why.

I never ate meat on Friday; the Church said that if I did so, knowingly and willingly, I’d go to Hell. Mine not to question.

Then came Vatican II. Suddenly we could eat meat on Friday, except during Lent.

I wondered what happened to all those souls that went to Hell for eating meat before the new decree. Did they get grandfathered into Heaven somehow? Or was it just, Tough luck, sucker? I didn’t ask, of course, because that would be questioning my faith, and questioning my faith made me feel guilty.

Because of Vatican II’s reforms, women were told we didn’t have to cover our heads at Mass anymore. One day shortly after this liberation, I went to Sunday Mass bareheaded in a strange church. It must’ve been a conservative parish; when I hit the rail for communion, I was the only hatless woman there. The priest smacked me on the head before he gave me the host.

Did I feel angry that he was punishing me for exercising a right sanctioned by his own church? Strangely, no; I felt…guilty.

I went to a Catholic nursing school. My training unit was run by a nun who was, it turned out, mentally ill. She fixated on me. It was creepy. She followed me. She harassed me. Ultimately, she kicked me out of school without cause. I was consumed by guilt: what had I done to make her hate me?

But I thought about my parents—their disappointment; their lost tuition—and felt even guiltier. I went over my tormentor’s head to the nun who ran the entire school. Sister B was a huge woman whose very presence struck terror into student hearts. I shook in my white nurse’s shoes, tears running down my face, as I told her my tale of woe. To my amazement and relief, she reinstated me.

The next day, I ran into a friend in the hallway. She said she’d heard I had been expelled. What, exactly had happened to me?

I opened my mouth and a big hand clamped onto my shoulder from behind. I turned to find Sister B towering over us. She dismissed my companion. When the hall was clear, she picked me up—literally—by the collar and jammed me against the wall. She glared at me, six feet and three hundred pounds of fury in a long white habit. “You will say NOTHING about what happened to you,” she said through clenched teeth. “If you do, I promise you, I will throw you out of school myself, and there will be no appeal.”

She dropped me to my feet and stalked off.

Gods help me, I did not feel angry. I did not feel ill-used. I did not feel any of those feelings a normal, healthy, non-Catholic woman might feel, who had been punished, in the first place, for doing nothing wrong, and was now being punished again—before the fact—for telling a friend that she’d been punished for doing nothing wrong.

I felt shaken; I felt afraid. But most of all, I felt...guilty.

I returned to my training unit to find the nun who had expelled me was gone. Nobody knew what had happened to her. Nobody asked. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t say a thing.

That was then.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned: It’s been forty years since I last considered myself a Catholic.

Today, the superintendent of the NYC Catholic Diocese sent me a blanket and a letter, and he’s gambling that I will look at that blanket and that letter, with its picture of sweet little Kerri, and feel guilty about receiving a free blanket, and guilty that little Kerri might not be able to go to the school of her choice, and I will fill out the accompanying form and send money to the Catholic Church to assuage my guilty conscience.

I do feel bad for little Kerri. I feel bad that she might not get to go to Catholic school if people don’t send money.

I also feel very bad that the Catholic Diocese of NYC is holding little Kerri hostage to raise that money.

I feel particularly bad that the superintendent of schools for the Catholic Diocese of NYC can’t pick up the phone and call the Vatican and tell the Holy Father that he needs money. Because—and I feel downright terrible about this—the Holy Father will not sell a small Picasso or a minor Rembrandt from his church’s mind-bogglingly enormous art collection, or a jewel from his cassock, or even a golden goblet, to help the poor children of New York. Or the poor children of the world. Or all those poor grown-ups who lost their childhoods to the twisted whims of priests who, strangely, didn’t seem to feel guilty about besmirching not one, but two very specific commandments.

In the meantime, I’ve got this fleece blanket. I’d throw it out, but I feel guilty wasting it. On the other hand, if I keep it, there’s a good chance I might go to Hell.

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Fish tales

11:43 AM PDT, May 22, 2009

We filed down the board path over the dune, down to the Delaware beach. It was early afternoon, cloudy and windy, May sweater weather. There were seven of us: Paul and I, our son KC and his partner Mary, our daughter Kym and her two kids. We were staying together in a condo for the weekend on a stretch of coastline between Dewey and Bethany, the tail-end of a week we’d “won” last year in a silent auction to benefit Paul’s summer tennis club.

Pickup trucks sat parked in the sand; fishermen lolled against them, their eyes on the lines they’d cast far out into the grinding surf.

The grandkids were in heaven, kicking up sand and chasing each other, oblivious to the chilly wind. They’re little boys, three and five, so the jarring presence of rolling stock on the beach—evidently it’s Hoyle in Delaware—was a plus, rather than a menace to the dunes above the tideline.

We found the intact body of a horseshoe crab and turned it armor-side up, chasing away the flies. The boys gawked at it and touched it with their toes, then ran off to pick in the sand for shells and shiny stones.

Off in the distance, one of the fishermen grabbed his rod and began to reel in his line. I collected the kids and we herded them off to see what the man had caught.

I had walked the beach earlier that morning with Mary, and a young fisherman with a pickup and a sweet, slobbery boxer dog had showed us his latest catch. It was a small shark. He told us he’d caught a five-footer last year farther down the beach. His friend, a chef, had offered to prepare shark for him, but he said he wasn’t sure it was legal to keep this little guy, who was at most two feet long. Nor was he quite convinced he wanted that particular culinary adventure. So he detached the fish from the hook, avoiding its very sharky-looking teeth, and tossed it back into the surf.

We had walked a few paces beyond him, and found another little shark lying in the sand, breathing laboriously. We took pictures of it and I picked it up—carefully—by the tail and flung it back into the water.

So Mary and I knew there were sharks in the Delaware ocean—small ones, at least—and wondered if this fisherman might have caught one, a real, live shark that the boys could see.

Whatever was at the end of the man’s line was giving him quite a struggle. He finally succeeded in reeling it in and, yes, there it was: another baby shark. A streamlined and perfect two-foot model of a maneater: flinty eyes, rippling slit gills, dorsal fin, pointy nose and those lovely, scary teeth. He held the fish out so the boys could see it before he disengaged it from the hook. “Go ahead and touch it on the side,” the man said. Grey and Beckett held their breath; they each put out a wary finger and pressed it against the smooth, cool, blue-gray skin of the little creature.

The fisherman clipped his hook off and hefted the shark into the sea. The small, stiff dorsal fin roamed the shallows for a moment, a miniature outtake from Jaws, then disappeared out into the deeper surf.

It was a busy weekend for all of us. We drove down to Ocean City and walked the honky-tonk 2 1/2-mile boardwalk from its quiet end to the amusement park side, where the boys took in a rally of muscle cars and monster trucks. Rehabbed Mustangs and GTOs revved around the parking lot, spewing fumes (our son cringed. “It must give them real joy to know that, with a turn of the key, they can wipe out ten years of emission standards.”).

Grey pointed at a pickup, flame-painted and jacked up on tractor wheels. “What do they use that for?” he asked.

I must admit, he had me there.

The boys rode the kiddie rides and ate junk food. They listened to the ocean in shells and climbed over a miniature pirate ship on the beach. They threw sand at each other. They rode a bike surrey. They played cards. They ate more junk food. They crayoned on bar menus. They turned an unused bedroom into a fire station, and cleaned it up with brooms and an old hokey (I have no idea where they got that gene, but trust me—it wasn’t from me). Beckett covered his arms with tattoos--the temporary kind, thank heavens. They laughed and whined and tantrumed and created the usual havoc that kids their age do, and generally had a great time.

The day after we got back to Brooklyn, Paul ran into his soon-to-be-ex-son-in-law on the tennis court. Reid commented that it sounded like his kids had enjoyed their weekend in Delaware.

Paul asked what they’d told him about their time there.

They hadn’t told him a lot, Reid said. But the one thing they were very excited about was that they’d actually touched, actually put their fingers right on, a real, live shark.

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Eeenie, Blini, Nyet...

8:52 PM PDT, March 23, 2009

Note: Last summer, my husband and I celebrated his retirement with a trip to Russia.

With previous vacations, I always put my hand-written trip journals on computer as soon as the jet lag wore off. I’ve been remiss; I let the Russia journal slide (except for a previous entry here about our train ride from St. Petersburg to Tallin: http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKHOZMY3FB75Q 1 ) until a few days ago.

I came across this yesterday, and figured you might enjoy it. I confess I’ve also used a bit of this information (with a lot of other stuff) for an entry in my new humor column at http://www.peacecorpsworldwide.org . Check it out; it’s a cool newsletter.

***

Last June, Paul and I took a 12-day river boat trip in Russia, from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The boat was much smaller than a luxury cruise ship, with three decks and tiny two-man cabins—somewhat bare-bones, but a comfortable enough base from which to see the two great cities and the countryside between them.

The only problem was the food on board. It sucked. It sucked for Paul, and he’s a carnivore. For me, a vegetarian, it was worse. God knows they tried to accommodate me, and I appreciated the attempt, but naked spaghetti and beets just didn’t make my day.

So we spent as many mealtimes as possible ashore, wherever we docked for the day, eating on the economy.

We travel a lot and, when I can, I try to learn a few words of the language of the country I’m visiting. I’ve taken German lessons, learned a smattering of tourist Portuguese and Italian from tapes, and refreshed my old Peace Corps Spanish through drills I download onto my iPhone.

But, unfortunately, some languages are simply beyond my 61-year-old ear. Like Swahili and Vietnamese.

And Russian.

In most countries, I find I can make up for language deficits with patience, humility, a sense of humor, and a lot of mime. In Russia, however, speaking English is considered a terrorist activity.

And who can blame the Russians? Until the late 80s, the government considered it the patriotic duty of its citizens to harass foreigners. Now, because tourism brings money, those same citizens are supposed to embrace us. I’d be confused, too, if I were a modern Russian. Confronted by an English speaker, I, too, might turn away. Or run away. I, too, might turn me over to the local Designated English Speaker, someone who would listen, eyes glazing, then turn away. Or run away.

Alas, this flight reflex creates a dilemma in Russian restaurants, because there’s no place to run to. I’m stuck; they’re stuck. There’s only so much I can communicate with a gesture; there’s only so much they can communicate with a sneer.

The Russian refusal to negotiate extends to all tourists, not just Americans. In one grubby little coffeehouse we visited, an elderly man from Austria tried for fifteen minutes to get two sullen young men behind the counter to take his order. A female college student finally took pity and intervened, but the man remained shaken by the baristas’ unwillingness to grant him his terrible cappuccino and stale croissant. He threw up his hands. “I speak German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. I’m sorry I don’t speak Russian!”

Eventually, through sheer persistence, most tourists in Russian restaurants wind up with something they can eat, even if it’s not what they ordered. Or at least carnivores do. Things are dicier for us vegetarians: people who don’t want to serve us in the first place are not inclined to cut us dietary slack.

Take this true scene from a blini joint in St. Petersburg:

Me: “I want two blinis, please, no meat.” I point to a dish of slaw in the refrigerator case. “With that. Cabbage.”

The counter woman stares at me. I draw a head of cabbage on a napkin and show it to her.

Her stare becomes hostile. There are real customers behind us; I’m wasting her time.

I point again to the slaw. “Like that,” I say, then point to the young foreign-looking woman in back who’s making blini skins on a griddle.

The counter lady opens the case and pulls out the slaw. “One?” she asks.

“No, no”—I wave my hands in what I hope is the universal negative.

The blini maker behind her holds up a can of what looks like sweetened condensed milk. “Da?” she says.

"Nyet," I say. "But thank you."

Paul—the carnivore—points at a big shank of meat a guy is cutting slices from in the corner. Points to me. Mimes violent revulsion. “No meat,” he says.

The counter lady taps her pen on her pad and frowns.

“Cheese?” suggests the winsome young blini-maker behind her.

“Yes! Yes!” It’s not what I want, but it’s vegetarian, and it’s edible. “Cheese! Thank you! Spotsiva!!”

I turn back to the counter lady. I’ve been living on cheese blinis; I crave greens. I point to the dish of slaw in the refrigerator case. “I will have one,” I say, nodding maniacally. “Yes. One. Da.”

She gives me her best why-don’t-you-go-back-to-wherever-you’re-from sneer.

“A salad?” I say.

She looks up at the ceiling.

“Sa-LAD,” says the customer behind me, rolling her eyes.

The counter lady brings out the dish of slaw and hands it to me.

“Thank you!” I tell the customer behind me. “Thank you! Spotsiva!!”

I then tell the counter lady I want water. I mime opening a bottle. Pouring. Drinking. The counter lady glares at me.

Paul says he wants a beer. He points at the tap.

I sigh. “Two beers.” I point at him, then at myself, at him, then myself. At the tap. Hold up two fingers.

The counter lady reels off a list of brands. Paul points at the tap, then at his black trousers. “Dark,” he says.

The counter lady snorts.

Paul orders a meat blini, pointing at the blini-maker, then at the man slicing meat in the corner. The blini-maker smiles—she’s got a great smile—and speaks to the counter lady in Russian.

Ultimately, we sit down with one cheese blini each, one light colored beer each, and a beef gyro for Paul. And my slaw. Which, it turns out, is shredded iceberg lettuce.

Slightly more frustrating was a lunch in one of those hokey Tourist restaurants in downtown St. Petersburg. We were taken there with our fellow boaters after we’d been shepherded en masse through the Hermitage.

The place was a remodeled old house, the décor over-the-top faux opulence, the waiters large men dressed as Royal Guards. They brought us all breasts of chicken covered with a reddish sauce and a side of rice.

I told the Royal Guard who set my chicken in front of me that I didn’t eat meat. He glared at me for a long moment.

I called our group’s interpreter over. This was a group meal, covered by our fees; the tour company knew I was a vegetarian; surely this restaurant had something for me? I asked her cheerfully. Maybe a sal-LAD?

She interpreted. The waiter grabbed the plate away.

He returned ten minutes later. He slapped down the same plate of chicken and rice. “Is all we have,” he growled.

I ate the rice. The cold, sneering rice.

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A small kindness

10:16 PM PDT, March 13, 2009

Today dawned cold, but filled with a hard and brilliant sun. A perfect Brooklyn late-winter day. A day to bundle up and wander the borough, or take the Q into Manhattan and hit Central Park. Paul and I were discussing our lovely, leisurely options when Kym called.

“Beckett can’t move his head. His neck’s stiff, and he’s not himself. He’s got a fever, too. Can you come with me to the doctor’s office?”

Beckett is the younger of our two grandboys, two-and-one-half years old. He’s a delightful little hellion, a male clone of his mother at his age, bright and funny and determined to keep her running. She has him and his brother five days a week under her agreement with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Today was not one of her mother-days, and the fact that she had taken charge of hauling him off to the doctor, the second time in two days, made me take notice.

Kym can be as panicky as any mother of young kids, but she’s got a spot-on intuition when it comes to her kids’ health. When Grey, Beckett’s big brother, was a month and a half old, he started vomiting after every meal. Kym stood firm against all us naysayers, doctors, laymen and even me, and refused to accept a verdict of childish reflux. She was right: he had pyloric stenosis, and it took surgery to correct it.

So…a stiff neck. I knew she’d been googling about, searching for diseases to match the symptoms. I knew she was thinking Meningitis, or even Encephalitis.

I knew she could be right.

Paul and I met her on the curb in front of our apartment building at 10:30 a.m. She drove us all to Park Slope like someone who’d aced that course for guys who have to thwart carjackers. She screeched up to a hydrant, and left Paul to find a parking space while we bundled Beckett into the doctor’s office.

Her pediatrician thought it might be a bad throat infection, accompanied by muscle spasms in his neck, but she took Kym’s concerns seriously and made an appointment at Brooklyn Hospital.

By noon, I was with her and the little guy in the pediatric emergency room, while poor Paul once again searched for that ever-elusive curbside parking.

Beckett was a zombie. Definitely off his feed. Off his liquid, too; the resident agreed that he needed hydration, plus blood tests to determine if that tank-sized lymph node in his neck boded a nasty infection that might respond to antibiotics. He probed the kid’s hands, tried patiently, desperately, to get a canula into his tiny, dehydrated veins. He tried once, twice; a colleague took a shot. The child keened, “I want to go home—I want to go home—I want to go home,” thrashing his feet weakly because he couldn’t thrash his arms or his head. It was a trial for a grandmother to watch; it had to be killing Kym.

Finally yet another resident struck a vein, and the canula held. They took their blood samples, flushed their tube, dripped in saline. Gave him Tylenol and Benedril by mouth. He protested ever more weakly, then nodded off to sleep, his mother curled beside him on the gurney.

They cat-scanned him. They x-rayed him. They gave him antibiotics through his little vein, and the vein again plugged up. They poked and prodded and re-started the IV. The residents and the staff and the attending doctor did all this with quiet persistence, genuine concern, marvelous bedside manner, but the boy was nobody’s fool: it hurt. He let them know it hurt. He let everybody know it hurt.

They wheeled him and his mother upstairs to the room where they would spend the night.

One of Kym’s friends brought food for her, then left to fetch clothes, diapers, the charger to her cell phone. Beckett’s dad arrived, his face ashen; he and Kym worked to keep their hostilities at bay and focus on the small person in the crib, his mother now crammed into this new smaller space next to him because he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Through it all, the whole day long, Beckett refused to take off his shoes. When we left at 7:30 tonight, he was still wearing them. I think he feels that, if he takes them off, he’ll have to stay even longer.

Ah, god. It breaks the heart.

It’s midnight, and Kym and Beckett are still boxed into a crib in room 547 at Brooklyn Hospital. Reid is home with Grey; he’s promised to bring him in the morning. None of us knows yet the nature of what ails the little guy.

There are theories.

Could be a cat scratch. Could be massive tonsillitis. Could be an infected lymph node.

Could be…worse. We don’t want to think about that. We can’t think about that.

When Paul and I left, we finally had time to realize that we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. So we went to a bar a couple blocks away, a place we’ve visited many times after watching movies and plays in the nearby Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The bar is an lively place with loud music and a wall of TVs tuned to sports, and the food is quite decent. The owner, Dee, is from Ireland. She sat with us for a few stolen moments while we ate, and listened to our tale about our day at the hospital. She told us about the daughter of a friend who’d been diagnosed with cancer several years ago, how the child had had the growth removed, gone through all the therapies, and was now doing beautifully more than five years after.

The place was full, so Dee couldn’t spend long; she patted my back and rushed off to tend to one of the many urgencies of her business, and we finished our meal and our drinks.

We called for the check. Paul noticed that our drinks were on the slip, but there was no price after them. He called the waitress over and asked about the discrepancy.

She said Dee must’ve given them to us free.

We paid, then walked through the teeming bar to where Dee was standing, and thanked her.

She hugged me, and I started to cry.

It was a simple thing, a small kindness. A tiny reminder that we are not strangers here, in this big borough, in this big, big city. That there are universals in the human condition that don’t necessarily demand that you know someone’s full address or even their last name.

And now we wait, hoping for the best of news; refusing to think about the worst.

How very heartening to know that we are not waiting alone.

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Starving in the Fort

2:05 PM PST, February 14, 2009

I’d flown into Fort Wayne via Chicago, and I was starving. I’d gotten up too early to eat breakfast, and I’d flown American Airlines.

American Airlines not only charges hefty fees for each checked bag, it also charges for snacks. You want your peanuts, you pay for your peanuts. I didn’t have any money left after paying for my bag, so…no peanuts.

So when I hit the city of my birth, I was looking forward to the two treats for which Fort Wayne International Airport (so-named, I believe, because planes have flown here from Puerto Rico) is famous: the Cookie Lady, and De Brand Chocolate.

The Cookie Lady is cheerful and grandmotherly, straight out of Central Casting. She toddles the entrance hall with a basket of free cookies, each hermitically sealed in its own little plastic baggie. They’re made at a cookie factory across the street. Yes, a cookie factory, not a cookie bakery; this is Indiana. Soft sugar cookies, hot off the assembly line, bland and sweet, yet surprisingly palatable.

Yum.

I reached the terminal entrance hall and glanced up and down, from the ticket counters to the baggage carousels—which is, in Fort Wayne International, roughly ten feet—and…

No Cookie Lady.

She was simply not there.

Omigod. They "downsized" the Cookie Lady.

But—the De Brand Chocolate counter was there.

In my youth, Fort Wayne was home port for such conglomerates as International Harvester, Magnavox, General Electric, and a plethora of factories that supported Detroit, like BF Goodrich Tire, where my father worked. Now, most of those places have either decentralized, leaving the Fort with crumbs of the original (Goodrich is now one of several plants owned by France’s Michelin), or closed down completely, or moved south or off to China. There is industry here—quite a bit of it, unlike in Elkhart or South Bend—but it’s mostly smaller businesses or the aforementioned pieces of mega-corporations.

But the city still hosts two popular companies of its very own.

The more famous is Vera Bradley, which is responsible for all those colorfully-printed quilted bags hauled about by little old ladies all over the planet.

A couple visits ago, I hit the Vera Bradley shop in the city’s newest mall to find a backpack for traveling the subway. I discovered a cheery red bandana-print affair, the perfect size to carry a book or two, headphones, sunglasses and a few pens. I bought it.

As I walked out of the store, I glanced at the tag. It said “Made in China.”

Et tu, Vera?

The second locally-born and suckled Fort Wayne company is De Brand Chocolate. De Brand, I can say with certainty, does NOT make it’s product in China.

De Brand Chocolate is rich, thick, real chocolate, with rich, thick, real fillings made with cream from flying cows and fruits and nuts tended and harvested by virgins in gauzy white robes with garlands in their spun-gold hair. Each piece of candy is dipped by hand to the music of fairy lutes, and meticulously wrapped in gold foil by enchanted butterflies. You won’t find De Brand Chocolate in China, although I have no doubt that Chinese spies lurk beneath the windows, disguised as peony bushes, ears pressed to the panes to steal the secret of the candy’s über-lusciousness.

It’s pricey. But so is the war in Iraq, and De Brand is SO much better.

Even while I mourned the Cookie Lady, my heart did a loop-de-loop at the sight of the De Brand Chocolate counter, there in the entrance hall of Fort Wayne International Airport, a beacon of ecstasy between the restrooms and the car rental booths. I hit the ATM, then dashed over, drooling at the thought of a plump, perfect glace apricot dipped in bittersweet chocolate.

I bent to examine the candy in the display case.

There were no glace apricots. None.

The clerk saw me hyperventilating and asked if he should call 911.

“Glace…apricot…” I stammered.

Oh, he said. Well. A couple months ago, De Brand decided to sell glace apricots only in boxes of four. Unfortunately, he was out of those.

Sorry, he said.

It was just as well that he didn’t have a box of four, because I would’ve wanted it, and no bank would have floated me the necessary mortgage. Even so, I was devastated. I purchased a mocha-filled dark chocolate bon-bon as a consolation prize. It was superb.

But it wasn’t a glace apricot.

It was also smaller and less filling than a glace apricot. After I ate it, I was still starving.

I dragged myself to my rental car and aimed it up the bypass that would take me to the north part of town, where I would be staying.

**

When I was growing up here, about the only things in the north of Fort Wayne were corn and soybean fields and a sports arena called the Coliseum, where we held our regional basketball tournaments. Now you can’t tip a cow up north without smacking a box store or a chain restaurant.

I usually avoid chain restaurants because they offer little more for vegetarians than a plate full of hard-scrambled eggs or a terrifying pasta primavera buried in shredded Colby. But I was starving, and this was Fort Wayne.

I drove past the usual suspects. McDonald’s: no. Arby’s : no. Long John Silver: no. KFC: God, no. Pizza Hut: fuggedaboudit. Fish houses, steak houses, rib houses: no, no, and no. Applebees: not on your life—

But hark—there, in that strip mall, a massive neon plastic banner: GIANT SALAD BAR.

It was a brand-new restaurant named the Golden Corral.

I pulled up and went in. I collected a tray, a plate and utensils, and marched up to the salad bar. It was indeed GIANT. It had 55-gallon drums of lettuce and acres of Midwestern Comfort Food: syrup-canned mandarin oranges, baco-bits, fifteen varieties of mild cheese, three-bean salad, potato salad, deviled eggs.

But there were also nuts, sunflower seeds, raisins, even tattered broccoli nubs and bits of browning cauliflower. I found a low-fat compound among the vats of dressing, drizzled it over my GIANT salad and bore it to my table.

For the Golden Corral, the GIANT SALAD BAR appeared to be a come-on. It’s real specialty was an all-you-can-eat entrée counter, groaning with beef and pork and cheesy-fries, deep-fried onion rings and jugs of Velveeta sauce. There was also a dessert station the size of Moldova, dedicated mostly to pies. As I picked at my salad, the clean-up lady deposited a stack of three empty plates on my table for future helpings. “Will that be enough?” she asked.

“That’s more than enough,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “You’ll need more? Not a problem.”

I hastened to correct the misunderstanding. How on earth could I eat four helpings at a sitting?

She nodded sagely and set down a basket with two buns in it that had been dipped in something orange and greasy. “Right,” she said.

I glanced around. The dining room was full.

Everybody in it was…very large. Very large people at tables; very large people at the food counters. Very large people wandering about, trays snugged into very large bellies. Very large old people; very large young people.

Once again it hit me, as it always does when I come to Fort Wayne: I’m not in New York City anymore.

Let me be honest: I’ve lost and regained my full body weight at least five times in my life. Yes, I’m a vegetarian, but chocolate cake is vegetarian. I know, for most human beings, fat does not mean lazy; nor, conversely, does slim mean industrious. If that were true, Oprah would weigh 95 pounds.

So I mean no value judgment when I say that the human scenery in Fort Wayne can be jarring. I am not myself thin; I am in no way discomfited by very large people. But great rumbling herds of very large people, bellying up to an all-you-can-eat buffet: that gets my attention.

A fitness magazine once pronounced Fort Wayne the “least fit city in the US.” Since then, gyms and exercise centers have nudged into a few of the city’s strip malls. I wonder how they stay in business. There is no Fort Wayne triathlon; no footrace up the steps of the Lincoln Tower. You don’t see joggers in the Fort. You don’t even see walkers, because there are no sidewalks.

You see cars. Cars, cars, cars, with free parking everywhere and a million drive-through everythings. Marathon, in the Fort, is just another gas station.

Call me crazy, but might there be a correlation between this and the scene at the Golden Corral?

I glanced around the restaurant, then down at my GIANT salad. I wasn’t starving anymore.

I left my stack of empty plates for the clean-up lady and slipped out of the restaurant, powered across the wide parking lot and into WalMart, where I bought an apple.

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Take a look at this face

6:54 PM PST, February 3, 2009

My wallet has ripped through the back pocket of my jeans.

It’s not the money in my wallet (although I’m open to contributions). It's my photo IDs.

I have never before had so many of them. I live in New York City, which might make a difference, given recent historical events. Even so, the scope and breadth of my photo ID card collection takes my breath away.

Thank God for them all, I say.

I am 61. I look like somebody’s small and not-very-powerful grandmother, which is what I am. One might argue that it would take a grand leap of imagination to finger me as a Terrorist.

But consider this: How many Terrorists look like Terrorists?

I welcome the photo IDs, because they guarantee my safety. My security. They protect me from people who, although they might look sort of like me, aren’t fine and upstanding citizens like I am.

Let me tell you about my photo IDs:

It began with Brooklyn College, a block and a half from my home. The first time I entered the campus, the security guard sent me into the bowels of the administration building. There, I presented proof of who I am and where I live so a clerk could take my picture and produce a laminated card that I now have to show every time I pass through the campus grounds.

In order to use the Brooklyn College library, on the same campus, they cut me a second photo ID. I had to pay for that one.

I suppose you could argue that Brooklyn College, a public educational institution funded by all those taxes we pay as residents of New York State and New York City, actually belongs to me. But I say, just because I own it doesn’t mean it should trust me.

Then there’s the co-op. Paul and I recently joined the Park Slope food co-op. I have a co-op photo ID. To enter the co-op, which is a supermarket shoehorned into a couple of Brooklyn storefronts, I put the ID under a card reader that’s watched closely by another volunteer, who permits me to enter if his computer says my fees and work schedule are up-to-date.

If I want to show somebody through the co-op, somebody who’s not a member and doesn’t have a co-op photo ID, I go upstairs to the office, present my co-op photo ID, present my companion’s non-co-op photo ID, and sign for him or her in a book.

My companion is then given a printed slip of yellow paper with the day’s date on it. Then he or she can walk through the grocery store with me, one time on this day only, as long as he or she doesn’t buy anything.

I’ve also volunteered to read to kids once a week in the waiting room of Methodist Hospital’s pediatric clinic. It’s part of the Reach Out and Read program, whose stated mission is to impress parents with the power of reading aloud, but whose practical effect is to keep kids from going squirrelly during their long clinic waits.

The hospital crafted me a photo ID after they’d checked my background and my blood and made me pee in a cup.

The day I got my Methodist photo ID, I joined the nearby YMCA. They made me a photo ID. I hand it through the bulletproof glass at the entrance to be read by a card-reader linked to a computer, which is read by a clerk, who—if everything’s in order—presses a button that opens the door to let me in.

I am in the process of becoming a Hospice volunteer, something I did in Massachusetts before we moved here. On my last day of training, a photographer took my picture for my photo ID. I’ll get it once I’ve passed the background check, blood check, pee-in-the-cup check, reference check, and personal interview.

My library card—the Brooklyn Public Library, not the Brooklyn College library—doesn’t have a photo. Its bar-code brings up my photo on their computer. The employee at the desk compares the photo with me before I check out a book.

The agencies generating all these IDs do so For My Protection.

I’m thankful for that. Why should some slacker buy food from my co-op without working three hours a month for the privilege like I do? And yeah, even though it’s unlikely that the guy on the next Stairmaster is hiding an Uzi under his nylon short-shorts (in spite of what he might claim), it’s a relief to know that he isn’t a serial killer. And I certainly wouldn’t want somebody taking out a library book in my name, saddling me with millions of dollars in fines.

Oh, naysayers might squawk that organizations force photo IDs on me for Their Protection. Naysayers might claim that I can’t walk ID-less onto the campus of Brooklyn College, even though I look like a harmless grandmother, because the college wants to make sure I’m not the kind of low-life who’d harbor a bomb in the grandkid’s baby carriage. Naysayers might hint that I can’t just wander without my photo ID into the pediatric clinic at Methodist Hospital with my copy of Horton Hears a Who because they’re afraid that strangers might be predators, which would mean Big Legal Trouble for the hospital. The same, these naysayers might nay-say, runs true for the potential legal danger of some unaccounted-for maniac holding the hand of a dying person.

I’m supposed to believe the food co-op and the Y don’t want me stealing their services. That the BC Library wants money, and will crassly cede me access only in exchange for my purchased photo ID. That the public library wants to be able to corner me on sight if they’re missing a copy of Horton Hears a Who.

Why, that’s paranoia.

Paranoids would have you believe that photo IDs are bogus. They’d claim that my face on my YMCA ID doesn’t certify that I won’t hide in a locker in the men’s room and watch the action. Or in the women’s room, for that matter. Paranoia would scoff that my co-op ID can’t certify that I won’t snack on un-purchased grapes or throw an Organic Free-Range Chicken in my basket for a non-member. A paranoid would claim that Brooklyn College’s security guard could wave me through on the strength of my ID, without digging for the bomb under little Beckett’s blankie.

Paranoids might even say that background checks and pee tests only certify that I don’t have felonies in my past and I didn’t smoke pot the week I filled the cup. True, there’s no fine print to hint that the pressures of, say, living with a recent retiree won’t drive me to drink, snort, smoke or ingest something the day I come to the Methodist Hospital clinic, and make me whack little kids with Horton, a big book with ominous, pointy edges.

But I say, Who would dare do something so dastardly while wearing a photo ID? It would be incongruous, disloyal, like not wearing a flag pin in one's lapel.

A photo ID is not a little plastic Butt Cover. Agencies and businesses don’t issue them to make sure people won’t sue them because they didn’t take proper steps to account for me. They don’t make me wear one so that they can tell the cops that they literally Know Where I Live, they’ve covered their bases; I was Authorized and Authorizable, on a proper leash, and Gee, officer, that’s Susan O’Neill; we know her, and we’re SO surprised that it happened; we don’t even own a copy of Horton Hears a Who, and besides, her neighbors said she was absolutely normal and we checked her out; see: she’s got a photo ID, so it isn’t our fault, and little Alfonzo’s mommy doesn’t have grounds for a lawsuit.

What upstanding American company would ever do something like that?

A photo ID protects me against other nutcases. It has nothing to do with protecting anybody against me. I’m the Good Guy here. Check out the picture—is that a face to trust, or what?

Sure, they’re a hassle. But my photo IDs mean somebody’s looking out for me. Somebody’s On Top of It. An official photo ID from the New York Department of Motor Vehicles insures that the holder's not a head-case behind the wheel. A legal US Passport, with its tidy little picture, guarantees that the bearer is not cranking out anthrax in his basement.

I sleep well at night. Because I know I’m safe from threat and Terrorism, from predators and serial killers, from Uzis and bombs and unauthorized shoppers wolfing down the In-Transition-To-Organic green grapes, and from those who would threaten the sovereignty of Whoville.

Sooner or later, somebody’s going to notice that all these no-goods don’t have photo IDs, and the sh*t will really hit the fan.

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Happy *!#@! Holiday...

5:44 PM PST, December 31, 2008

Paul gave me a set of kitchen knives for Christmas.

This was quite a gift. In 38 years of marriage, we have never owned a real matched set of knives.

I love to cook. It’s a solo act for me; meditative. The kitchen is my refuge, my Holy of Holies.

Paul is culinarily challenged, but he’s very good at setting the table, laying out tablecloths and dishes and cloth napkins, arranging candles and centerpieces artfully to highlight my artistry.

This year, our daughter and the kids and Emma, their au pair—off duty, a guest—stayed overnight on Christmas Eve so we could all enjoy Santa’s largesse on our turf. It was great noisy, exhausting fun.

After all the gifts were unwrapped and the floor strewn with cars and kiddie tools and little foot-gouging Lego blocks, I sneaked off to the kitchen to create a Christmas dinner. I unwrapped my new knives. The packaging stuck on the meat knife, and I sliced an ugly gash in my left index finger.

It took much pressure and a big band-aid, but I finally made the bleeding stop.

I’d made bread and a dessert flan the day before, and assembled a fancy vegetable torta; only Paul and the boys ate meat, so I roasted a chicken for them and constructed a big salad and rosemary oven potatoes to go with the rest, working carefully to avoid bumping my new wound.

Paul spread the table with a bright cotton tablecloth and napkins, lit two new green tapers, and helped me arrange the feast on the table.

And it was good.

**

We had invited friends to dinner at our house for the night after Christmas. I had warned them that the meal would include some leftovers. I planned to frame those few things—the remaining half of the torta, still festive and pretty, and the flan, which is actually better the second day—with a brace of lamb ribs for the carnivores (everybody but me), popovers, another salad, and filo triangles filled with lemon-and-garlic kale studded with roasted pine nuts and slow-sauteed shallots.

Two hours before the guests were to arrive, I opened the thawed package of filo dough and unrolled it on a clean towel.

The paper-thin sheets of dough were torn. They were, in fact, shredded. The dough had never been out of the package, but it looked like somebody had taken a rake to it.

You cannot find filo dough in a bodega. And, if you could, it would be frozen; it’s always frozen. You cannot thaw a roll of filo dough in two hours.

I patched together the larger pieces, glued them into shape with a butter/olive oil mixture, and ladled on my seasoned kale—minus the pine nuts, because I’d burned them while I was obsessing over the filo—and arranged the finished atrocities on a baking sheet. I (carefully) sliced garlic, arranged it on the lamb, sprinkled it with fresh rosemary and hand-ground pepper. I whipped up my popover batter.

I arranged all of this and the leftover torta in my oven and crossed my fingers, bandage and all.

I love to cook; it would still be a fine meal.

Perhaps they don’t like a crowded oven, or perhaps they were miffed at having to share the table with leftovers; whatever the case, my popovers refused to pop.

However, the filo triangles looked better than they should’ve, and the torta reheated well. I told myself that even less-than-fully-popped popovers don’t taste bad. They’re just a little more eggy and solid than their perfect brethren.

I pulled the lamb out of the oven. I sliced into it—very carefully—with one of my new knives. It was medium rare. A little too medium rare for comfort.

I brought the rest of the meal out to the table—Paul had set it with the tablecloth and napkins I’d laundered the night before, and once again lit the tapers—and we sat down to eat the meal in stages.

And it was pretty good.

**

The next evening, we made up the guest bed with clean sheets and welcomed Paul’s 91-year-old mother for a two-day stay. We called Kym and the boys and KC and his partner—they had just returned from visiting her family in Colorado—and invited everybody over for brunch the following noon so they could visit with Grandmother (our younger son and his wife were absent, in the Netherlands visiting her family).

Kym wanted to make a hair appointment in Manhattan for that afternoon. We agreed to babysit the boys after brunch until 7 or so at night.

Kym and the boys arrived as bacon, veggie sausage (three vegetarians to five carnivores, this time), homemade homefries and eggs sizzled in various skillets. I ground coffee beans and cut up fruit and sugared a bowl of fresh berries.

I sliced bialys with my new bread knife, and cut the tip of my left middle finger. More pressure. Another bandaid.

I love to cook, but I’m not crazy about that short-order everything-at-the-last-minute stuff required to stage a breakfast meal.

Noon came; noon went. Grandmother looked peaked. Paul paced. Kym kvetched. The kids were gnawing on each other. The meal was done. KC and Mary still hadn’t arrived.

I called KC. They hadn’t left the house yet.

It takes them an hour to get here, even though we both live in Brooklyn. It’s the subway lines: they’re not designed to draw Brooklynites together; they’re meant to ferry them into Manhattan to work for the Rich People.

“Sorry--we're just so jet-lagged. Go ahead and eat,” KC said. “We’ll have ours cold when we get there.”

Paul set a new tablecloth on the table, laid out cloth napkins, and lit the tapers, now half their original length. We ate.

And it was decent.

KC and Mary arrived as we finished. I scrambled new eggs, cut two bialys—very, very, very carefully—and stuck them in the toaster, warmed leftover bacon, tossed fresh veggie sausages into a pan, set out the remaining berries, and called everybody back to the table to sit with them as they ate.

And it was okay.

**

Kym left for her hair appointment. Paul and I and KC and Mary took the kids outside to run off steam, and left Grandmother to take a nap.

It was nearly dark when we trekked back to the apartment.

Everybody was hungry.

There was a bag of Brussels sprouts in the refrigerator. The remains of three or four chunks of cheese. A half-dozen eggs. A half-gallon of organic milk. Two hot dogs that Kym had brought in case the kids refused to eat whatever I made.

There was one bag of penne pasta in the cupboard.

Dinner, it appeared, would be macaroni—Giant Macaroni—and cheese. With Brussels sprouts. I’d throw in a can of stewed tomatoes; Paul liked stewed tomatoes with his macaroni and cheese.

I’d make popovers again. Different crowd.

I whisked the white sauce with one hand; with the other, I pulled a grater out of a drawer and thrust it at Paul. “Grate cheese,” I ordered.

He dug through the refrigerator. “Asiago? That sheep stuff? Um…I think there’s—“

“All of it. Everything but the parmesan.”

I love to cook. But...it was getting old.

I strained pasta, beat popover batter, cut Brussels sprouts and stuck them in a steamer, opened the can of tomatoes.

And sliced my right index finger with the tomato-can lid.

Sh*t! G-D it!! Son of a B**ch!!!

“Shhh,” Paul said. “My mother’s here.”

I gritted my teeth, wrapped my finger tight in paper towels and kept working.

A holiday miracle: The popovers popped up tall and golden.

I stuck the mac and cheese in the oven and threw Kym’s hot dogs into boiling water for the kids.

Paul set the dishes on the stained tablecloth we’d used for brunch, and pulled a bunch of wrinkled cloth napkins from the bottom of the bin. He lit the candle stubs. I dragged the food to the table.

The boys refused the mac and cheese. I brought in their hot dogs, which looked over-plump and anemic. Beckett took a bite and made a face. Grey pushed his away.

I ran into the kitchen and brought out catsup. Both kids refused it.

I poured myself some wine, sat down and leaned my head on my mangled fingers. Paul looked at Beckett’s hot dog. “That doesn’t look all the way cooked,” he said. “Are you sure it’s cooked all the way through?”

I looked up at him. “If you don’t think it’s cooked all the way,” I said evenly, “touch it with a finger and see if it’s warm. If it’s not,” I added, “take the f**king thing into the kitchen and throw it into the microwave and COOK it.”

Silence around the table. Paul raised his eyebrows. Grandmother studied her plate. KC buttered a popover. Mary looked as if she were trying to keep a straight face. The boys each fingered up a piece of penne and nibbled at it.

And it was…

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The gift of the Ciniplex

8:33 AM PST, December 13, 2008

It’d been a heart-heavy few months. Our daughter was a basket case, facing a nasty divorce that could cost her her children. Somebody had forged my husband’s signature on a bank slip and withdrawn $5,000 from our savings account. A good friend of mine’s aching ribs were diagnosed as Multiple Myeloma, probably related to Agent Orange exposure back in his Viet Nam days. And I’d managed to break my wrist. Because I couldn’t practice Yoga with only one functional hand, my entire body was beset with strains and sprains from the lapse in my usual exercise routine.

We needed a break. We needed to get away to some warm, exotic location and kick back.

So we drove out to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to visit my family.

The snow battered us the instant the Ohio flatlands swallowed Pennsylvania’s hills. There is no cold like Midwestern cold; it’s wind-driven, damp, and comes from all directions at once. It’s a cold that wraps around your bones and freezes your nose hairs. We had just pulled off truck-clogged route 30, into a motel in Mansfield, when I got a call on my cell. It was the Herb Lady.

I first discovered the Herb Lady’s B&B about ten years ago. It’s a charming old Indiana farmhouse owned by Ralph and Louise Renneker, and it sits just around the corner from the development where my parents used to live. Louise keeps a lush garden of edibles and ornamentals, and lectures all over town on how to grow and cook with herbs, an alien concept in Fort Wayne. Compared to the little slab-built ranch home where my parents lived, her B&B was a welcome luxury for me. Now my father’s dead, Ma is in a nursing home, and the house belongs to a stranger, but I still spend my Fort Wayne nights in one of Louise’s two beautifully-appointed upstairs bedrooms, and my mornings at her breakfast table, devouring Overnight French Toast garnished with edible flowers.

Ralph and Louise are fine people, sensible, caring and humorous. They have, over the years, become my alternate Fort Wayne family.

I lifted my phone to my ear. Louise’s voice, tired, devoid of its usual cheerful irony: “Ralph had a heart attack.” It had happened the day before. He’d been rushed to the hospital and given a stent, and was still in Cardiac Care.

“Oh, Louise,” I said. “How horrible. Why don’t we find someplace else to stay, so we don’t add to the craziness?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I want you here. I need the comic relief.”

And so, when we arrived the next afternoon, we met them in Ralph’s hospital room to get our key.

**

It was a busy week, and not an easy one. We spent time at the B&B, yakking and sympathizing and, yes, laughing with Louise. She took us to dinner; we treated her to breakfast. We visited my mother, and hung out with an endless procession of relatives.

Ma has Alzheimers, and we spent a hours during our daily visits repeating ourselves, re-telling the news, re-telling her that we were coming the next day, that we were taking her to a restaurant or to our nephew’s house, that we weren’t staying at the nursing home for dinner that night. It’s not easy to watch your mother grow smaller and less mobile and more confused with every visit. Granted, she’s 87; this is not unexpected. But…this is my mother. She was once formidable, difficult and feisty and insulting. Now, she wades through her confusion with frightened eyes, her shoulders slumped in defeat. She stays in her wheelchair, avoids her walker. If it weren’t for Bingo and Euchre—with those little wooden blocks that can be turned to remind the players what’s trump, and simple marker devices for keeping score—she might never come out of her room.

Add to Ma’s woes my own miseries at home, the cold and rain and snow that kept us from grabbing a few minutes of exercise outside, the poor Herb Lady’s upheaval, and that constant stream of relatives, relatives, relatives: After four days, we were desperately in need of a dose of escapism.

We needed a movie.

I checked my iPhone and found. “Australia” at the local multiplex.

I’d seen a trailer, but no reviews. What’s not to like about Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman (especially, for me, Hugh Jackman)? And didn’t Baz Luhrmann write and direct Moulin Rouge? I’d loved Moulin Rouge (one more reason my sons claim I’m really a gay man in drag).

So we packed up our sorrows and took them to the movies.

**

“Australia,” it turns out, was the worst big-budget film I’d seen since “Titanic.”

I like movies. All kinds of movies. A good movie is a gift.

And, sometimes, a bad movie can be even more of one.

Bad movies come in many flavors.

There are films that are mediocre bad. Like, say, much of Sandra Bullock’s oeuvre. I find them fun, if they’re light and meaningless—“Miss Congeniality,” for example—but depressing when they try to grapple with Grand Meaning. “Crash” comes to mind.

There are films that are intentionally bad in the name of Camp. “ The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” “Hairspray.” “Mama Mia.” They can be fun, if only because the actors seem to be enjoying themselves so much. It’s hard to not love Meatloaf on his Harley, or Travolta in fat-suit drag, or Streep on her island.

There are films that are unintentionally godawful, but in a charming, innocent way, like just about everything Ed Wood made. They’re GOOD-bad precisely because he intended them to be good-GOOD. Many movie buffs claim that “Plan Nine from Outer Space” is the worst movie made. My own particular favorite Wood groaner is “The Bride of the Monster.” I love how, to satisfy the religious piety of his backer, Wood tacked on irrelevant footage of an A-bomb blast at the end and had his narrator say, “He tampered in God’s Domain.” Stuff like that is priceless.

Wood and his lot were working with teensy budgets. The big-budget movie that goes seriously awry, the Big Bad Movie, can be a treat for the same reason that Plan Nine or Bride won my heart: they seriously ascribe to excellence.

A disclaimer: not all bad big-budget films are enjoyable. Many, even most, are miserable experiences. I’d still like to sue Speilberg to recover the hours I’d wasted watching “AI.”

Ah, but there are those rare, lovely, misshapen and misbegotten gems.

Take the aforementioned “Titanic.” Horrible dialogue, the stifled rich versus the happy, dancing poor, the criminal misuse of good actors to play cardboard figures. Lovers with no chemistry. Dumb narrative framing. Great special effects, yes, but the rest of the package was horribly miscalculated, delightfully empty, gloriously over-the-top. The picture overreached itself so far that it belly-flopped as heavily as the boat. Hilarious.

And now: there’s “Australia.”

“Australia” was so bad—so predictable, so calculated yet disorganized, so poorly-written, so riddled with stereotypical characters, such a very, very awful clunker of a movie—that it was wonderful. My opinion strictly; Paul wanted to leave after the first half-hour. But I couldn’t have walked out if someone had yelled “Fire.” I was too busy saying the lines before Kidman or Jackman or that cute little kid who, for reasons known only to the gods, was stuck with narrating the film. I poked Paul: “Now she’s going to tell him she never wants to see him again.” Poke: “Now they’re going to shoot the Token Aboriginal! Cool—he’s like that Yeoman Dispensable they used to throw into Star Trek.” Poke: “Now the kid’s going to do his Walkabout, after all.”

All those models up in smoke. Nicole Kidman in an Olive Oyle hairdo, wobbling between determination and tears, determination and tears, determination and tears. Hugh Jackman taking Conflicted Machismo to…well, not much of anywhere. The narrator kid singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The Aborigines, so Put Upon and brave and musically inclined. The Cattle Baron reeling off long lines of improbable dialogue to keep us apprised of the plot. The director hitting us over the head with Relevance.

It was just such fun. Really. I made imaginary notches on my mental check-list: Über-Manly Outback man? Check. Pampered Woman who becomes Plucky Landowner? Check. Brave Aboriginal child who endures against the odds? Check. Prejudiced Guy who turns Hero? Evil Villain? Society Snobs? Check, check and check. Wise Old Shaman Grandfather who’s completely irrelevant, but looks so cinematically authentic perched on one leg in the most scenic spots in the country? We got us a check.

I laughed; I bounced in my seat; I poked and poked. I left that picture light, my burdens lifted, my spirits freed, my mind cleansed of the detritus of reality. It was indeed a gift.

I never want to see it again, but I’m grateful as hell that Luhrmann spent130 million filming it for me.

Too bad they don’t give an Oscar for Unintentional Solice...

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Just another day in the 'hood...

6:06 PM PST, November 16, 2008

We had just dropped off our older grandson, Grey, at his mother’s apartment after a day at the Big Apple Circus—a kid-friendly one-ring dazzler that will have him swinging from his school gym equipment by his knees for years to come—and we were hungry. Paul suggested we have a quick dinner at Paradise East.

Paradise East is about five blocks from our apartment, in that stretch of Coney Island Avenue between H and I where Halal groceries and sari shops give way to Kosher restaurants and Israeli fruit stores. It's a smallish restaurant next to a big function hall, both of which share a common kitchen. That kitchen seems to be located on the function hall side, so the extremely pleasant young staff of the restaurant run marathons on sneakered feet to bring patrons their meals.

The meat served at Paradise East is Halal, and the walls are festooned with signs that state that alcohol must not be drunk on the premises, in keeping with Islamic prohibitions.

Alcohol is unnecessary at Paradise East. The food is nectar enough. Wonderful stuff. It’s made fresh for each customer and seasoned beautifully. I have never tasted better Palak Paneer—spicier than most Indian versions, with an underlying hint of cardamon.

We sat down among assorted families and regulars and placed our order.

A band was warming up in the function room, and percussive music drifted into our side. As we ate, the restaurant filled up with bigger parties of prosperous-looking adults. They wore rectangular badges pinned to the breasts of their business suits and festive salwar kameez (Kameezes? Kamice?). The badges showed the picture of a man.

I asked a waitress what was going on.

“The Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court is coming next door,” she said. “There’s going to be a big party for him. All kinds of security; everybody's rushing around—it’s really crazy.”

The Pakistani Chief Justice?

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s in the country because he’s getting some awards from Harvard and Columbia.”

I immediately looked up his name on my iPhone. That’s what iPhones are for.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammed Caudhry.

I remembered reading about him some time ago, and about his very brave court; he was one of the most outspoken and influential critics of the corruption in former president Musharraf’s government. His penchant for honesty was greatly admired by folks in Pakistan who looked up to the court as one of those rare government institutions that didn’t demand baksheesh or deal in bribes and revenge. The president, however, wasn’t a fan; he sacked Chaudhry last year and put him under house arrest.

This caused a general outcry from the citizenry, and the lawyers in Pakistan went on strike.

Anyway, Chaudhry was eventually freed from his house arrest after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but the government refused to reinstate him. Now Musharraf’s gone; there’s a new government in place in Pakistan, a new president. But, to the dismay of many, the formidable former Chief Justice still remains former.

My iPhone told me that the New York City Bar Association was making him an honorary member. And that he was speaking at Fordham, rather than Columbia, and yes, at Harvard, which gave him its Medal of Freedom last November--in absentia, because he couldn’t get out of his house to make the trip.

So here he is now. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. In this obscure corner of Brooklyn. In the function hall of our little neighborhood restaurant.

Wow.

I told the waitress that I was in awe. This, I said, is pretty amazing stuff.

The waitress said, somewhat apologetically, that she really didn’t know much about Pakistani politics. "I'm not Pakistani," she said. "I'm from Afghanistan." She was actually a commercial Real Estate agent. “We were about to do a multi-million dollar deal on that big building on Wall Street.” She sighed. “But then, you know, everything kind of fell apart. So I’m working here a few hours a week until things pick up again.”

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cast into the maelstrom

11:29 PM PDT, October 10, 2008

Thank god that my word processing program capitalizes the first word in a sentence. My right hand no longer makes the stretch to the shift key. Apostrophes, too, are a bit of a nightmare; I try to hit one, and I;m stuck with a semicolon.

I received my first cast today.

The cast on my right hand is fiberglass, state-of-the-art, and ugly. It bashes on the base of my laptop. But it’s (how curious—the computer just corrected it’s) small, and my fingers are free.

Whee.

I have a non-displaced fracture of the distal radius. I’d put that in quotes, but I can’t reach them (can’t? again, the computer corrected it. wow).

I tell people I now know why New Yorkers never look up.

What happened was, well…a dumbass thing. A nasty mix of bad luck, inattention and clumsiness.

Paul and I were walking down a street in Manhattan, on our way to a museum.

I was watching this little boy ahead of us. His mother pulled him along by the hand as he paused to kick each poster on a wooden construction fence next to the side walk. Cosmetic ad—whack. Kath & kim poster—whack. Cute; what kid hasn’t enacted that sort of ritual? Don’t step on a crack; hop over each puddle—

Then, whomp—I was sprawled in the dirt in a three-foot square cutaway meant to hold a tree. The tree was long gone, but the empty dirt patch, edged with lumpy paving bricks, was very much there. It took up half the sidewalk. And there I lay, my ankle twisted, my watch gone from my left wrist, the band in pieces beneath me, and my right wrist hurting like hell.

People stopped to make sure I was all right. I;m fine (okay—why does the computer correct doesn’t, but not I;m?). Yes, I can stand up. Thank you. Just fine.

Paul helped me to my feet, collected my watch and its severed band, brushed the dirt off my knees, and—once he was sure I’d survived—made a not-terribly-funny remark about how I shouldn’t have dropped out of ballet school when I was a kid.

We dragged into a deli to get some lunch and a bag of ice for my hand, and I felt my stomach roil.

Uh, oh.

I don’t understand the connection between broken bones and nausea, but it was there for my kids when they fractured various pieces of their skeletons. It was there for me both other times I broke bones. Never has a sprain nauseated me, but bones…

And so we walked the few blocks to my doctor;s office. Where we sat for most of the afternoon. In the waiting room. Waiting. Waiting for ex-rays, waiting for an exam, waiting for a referral, waiting while a beautiful sunny day passed and a fine museum closed its doors for the day.

**

this is, as I said, my first cast (Hmm. The computer doesn’t cap the first word after a pair of asterisks), but not my first break. My first break came from a skiing accident. I was 40, and I broke my tailbone against a tree. I knew I’d broken it because of the nausea, and because I couldn’t sit down afterward.

There is no way to cast a broken tailbone.

To add insult to an already insulting injury, I was cross-country skiing, not downhill. Downhill terrifies me; if god had meant me to ski downhill, he wouldn’t have had me born in Indiana.

I worked at that time on a newspaper. I came in the next day and placed my foam donut on my office chair, and my colleague clucked in sympathy. Until I told her I’d been cross-country skiing.

Nobody hits a tree cross-country skiing, she said (sorry ;bout those missing quotes). All you have to do to stop on cross-country skis is to sit down.

I said I’d sat down. Hard. On a f*&*!ing tree. So there.

I;m a little sensitive about my clumsiness.

**

the second time I broke something, I was flying my bike over some flat terrain in the cham tribal territory in viet nam. This was in 1999, not the first time I was there, when we were not encouraged to bike anywhere. Or drive. Or walk.

Paul and I were making a two-wheeled tour of the country. This particular morning had been horrible. Rain and wind in our faces, lousy roads full of traffic preparing for the tet holiday: a jam of oxcarts, motorcycles carrying whole families, smoky old Russian trucks filled with live pigs that had been stuffed into basket-ish carriers and stacked like cordwood. Other bikes; three-wheeled putt-putt taxis; buses with bags and chickens and people clinging to the roofs.

But in the afternoon, the weather cleared. So, mercifully, did the traffic. The wind blew gently, and at our backs.

I was flying. Absolutely flying.

A teensy motorcycle pulled up on my right. The driver, a small cham man, grinned and waved. He wore a woman;s felt cloche hat with a fabric flower on it. His wife clung to his back, and a boy of two or three years was sandwiched between them.

I waved back, and he powered ahead, insofar as such a small and overloaded contraption could power.

We caught up to each again. He was still on my right, and he made a quick gesture to the left, toward a filling station on the other side of the road. Then he turned across my path.

I tried to stop, but there;s this law about a speeding body in motion staying in motion in spite of a motorcycle full of cham tribesmen crossing its path, in spite of hand-breaks, in spite of that speeding body;s screaming Noooooooo so loudly that it could be heard in Kazakhstan.

The crash was spectacular; we flew up through eerie silence, then landed one by one. I watched myself hit the road—my butt, my helmeted head, my elbow.

The family picked themselves up, checked each other out. The flower nodded on the little man’s cloche hat as he hauled the motorbike across to the filling station. His wife carried their son after him. I followed, my battered bicycle in tow.

Paul, who;d been riding some distance behind, screeched up to me so quickly that he, too, hit the pavement. He picked up his bike and joined the parade to the filling station.

I wrote about this incident a few years ago for a veterans; magazine called vietnow. I wrote about how the cottony silence had been shattered by the wailing of the small boy, who appeared to be in good condition, although much aggrieved, and clutched his healthy but shaken mother. I wrote about how I found myself facing the motorcycle man and his hat between the gas pumps; how a crowd magically assembled from nowhere. How the man yelled at me in his language, insisting that he;d signaled (no, I couldn’t understand—but his gestures were quite graphic); how I yelled at him in English that I’d tried to stop. How Paul stepped in and yelled, too, while the mob watched us closely, with growing unrest, heads swiveling back and forth from one to the other of us like spectators at a tennis match.

It was when I raised my right arm to stop the babble that I felt that nausea that told me something was broken. But this was not the time to worry about x-rays and casts.

I very slowly and clearly told the motorcycle man in English and mime that, yes, he;d signaled. Yes, I’d seen him signal. I lifted my bike and showed him that, unlike the Chinese no-speeds the locals used, it bore a bizarre assortment of gears and levers. It was, I told him—very, very slowly—a fast, fast bike that can not stop quickly. I demonstrated the brakes with my hands. The crowd leaned in.

I;m sorry, I told the man. I;m sorry.

He told me—in a slow, accented, rustier-than-a-bike-chain-in-the-monsoons English—that he was sorry.

We shook hands with a vigor that bolted pain through my entire body. The crowd relaxed, nodded, smiled, talked amongst themselves.

The man in the cloche hat gassed up his little motorcycle. His wife hugged their boy, and the child sniffled into petulant silence. Paul and I straightened our handlebars and rode off.

I bound my elbow with an ace bandage for the remaining week of the tour, and avoided turning the gears on my right handlebar shift because that particular motion made me want to barf.

When I got home, a doc x-rayed my elbow. It was a common impact fracture, he said. One that wouldn’t require a cast.

**

so now I have my first cast. Paul and I ate lunch at a sushi place afterward. I manipulated my chopsticks left-handed. I had learned to do that after the viet nam accident; even so, it was not easy.

Many things are difficult for me to do left-handed: writing, blow-drying my hair, wiping my butt—pardon me, but it’s true—and pulling up my pants, brushing my teeth. Flossing. Eating soup with a spoon. Applying deodorant to my left armpit. Removing that *!@& childproof cap to take an advil.

But I can type, even though my name is now susan O;Neill and I;ve lost my ability to quote.

And I don’t have to sit on a donut, or placate an angry mob.

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October 10, 2008-May 28, 2009

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