A leak in my big-girl pants

You’d think that after surviving a cancer diagnosis, a mastectomy, chemo and radiation, I’d have learned to wear my big-girl pants. But yesterday, I needed an adult diaper.

Translation for those who’ve lost their way in this messy metaphor: No, I didn't wet my pants. I had a bad day. And I cried a lot. And there’s nothing more embarrassing than being a big baby who’s 61 years old and 5 ft. 10 in.

It was a trifecta of misfortune that sent me into the slough of despond: hair, cat and computer. After a 12:45 emergency consultation with a colorist, a 1:30 emergency visit with my vet and a 4:30 meeting with an Apple genius, all is resolved except my hair, which remains a weird, tarry, brackish, near-black that I’ll have to live with till it grows out.

I know it all seems trivial, but it doesn’t FEEL trivial.

Decoding the frump scale

My linen skirt is a little long (grazing my ankles). So before I left the house today, I asked Other if I looked O.K. 

"Sure," he said.

"Not too much like a copy editor?" I asked. 

"No, more like an authoress," he replied.

I was happy—until I got out on the street. On a scale of frumpiness, is "copy editor" higher or lower than "authoress"?

Dear old dad addendum

On the last day of my last visit with my parents, the income-tax return prepared by their accountant arrived in the mail. My dad opened the big envelope, looked at the filled-out forms and started sputtering. "This is an outrage!" he roared. "This is completely unethical!" 


Oh, shit, I thought. 


"I'm a wealthy man living in a wealthy country, and I'm paying zero taxes this year. That's just shameful."

Dear old dad

Like many human beings, I have a mixed bag of memories when I mull over my parents. And so it is with me and my dad. I remember with admiration his undertaking camping trips. I didn’t particularly enjoy them (unappetizing packeted food, scary lightning storms, smelly sleeping bags, squabbling brothers), but even at the age of 8-ish I knew it took guts to chaperone three cranky kids on long weekends in the wilderness. The ski trips at the Sierra Club held more pleasures for me. But somehow those fairly fond memories were obliterated by the little rage problem that developed when I hit my teens. There was desperation that I take AP math and incredulity that I could not master the simplest concepts. There was the near fatal episode of employing me to help with some task related to income taxes. Let’s just draw the curtains on the outcome of that misadventure. There was the slap that flung me across the hotel room and left my ears ringing after I whined about my malfunctioning transistor radio during a family vacation (it melted as we crossed the Mojave).

The bad memories are the ones I left home with, so it took a few years to see my dad in a more favorable light: his willingness to take my son to wax museums and horror shows, to labor for days making dollhouse furniture with my daughter. But perhaps my best memories are the most recent ones. Frustrating though it is to watch him balk at hiring adequate home care or to see him muddle over his needlessly complex accounting methods, I feel a grudging admiration for his stubbornness and steadfastness. When I hear him repeat or retool an oft-told anecdote, I’m touched by his fertile mind and active social drive. And when I hear him getting up 10 times a night because of his enlarged prostate and then see him in the morning limping around the kitchen to get breakfast ready for him and my mom, I feel pride as well as sadness at his jauntiness in the face of the hardships and humiliations of aging. His last act—his geezerdom—is his best one. 

The loneliness of the long-distance yogini

It might surprise my friends to know that after all these years of doing yoga—nigh on 40 years—I don’t have a real community of yoga friends. I’ve got a few pre-existing friends, very few, who do yoga and with whom I very occasionally attend classes. But I’ve made only one or two friends through my yoga practice. Indeed, I’ve gone to classes for years without knowing the name of a single one of my sister students and without being sure that my instructor knew my name. In a way, this makes me lonely. Other’s sister would walk into her yoga studio in Amherst into what amounted to a sequential group hug. How nice! I thought when I went with her.

But I’m not sure I really, really want an intimate yoga community. I’m afraid it might lead to complications, like competitiveness or feeling overexposed or just distractedness. Although I usually practice yoga in the semipublic setting of a class, it’s an oddly private experience, like therapy or reading. And knowing the other class members too well—or at all—might be counterproductive.

Camera flash?

I acknowledge that I’m the world’s most sexually naïve person, but there are two things I cannot understand about the whole Weinergate thing.

1. What made Weiner want to send his wiener to women in the first place? I mean, I get why men like to look at pictures of naked women, but what’s the thrill in photographing and sending pictures of your own naked self? Is it digital flashing? Is Weiner doing to those women what several men did to me years ago in the Paris Metro and the Bois du Boulogne? (Weirdly, it has never happened to me in New York, but then maybe I've just gotten more adept at averting my gaze. Interesting side note: My mom was once sitting in a Paris park and thought the man across from her was holding a baguette, but …) The whole thing—camera flashing and up-close-and-personal flashing—just puzzles me.

2. If this is something that men enjoy, why don’t more women try it? I mean, why don’t Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and even that dreadful Sarah Palin snap their vaginas and tweet those bird’s nests to the world? 

Romancing the crone

One of the most romantic messages I've ever received was an e-mail from Other a couple months ago at cocktail hour, a few days after my doctor had told me my cholesterol was too high. 

The subject field: "Wanna drink?"

The body of the message was a link to a Science Daily article headlined:

New Cholesterol Fighter Found In Red Wine