Without the advantages of a cell phone and GPS, I made my way to Westchester County. Our budget was lean, yet the real estate agent kept me showing homes that were way beyond what we could afford. Finally, she showed me one within my price range, apologizing as she opened the front door, but clearly showing what my money could buy: not much. The owners, who bought the house “on spec,” neglected to fill the boiler with oil. The windows were cracked and the old linoleum floors were curled and frozen. It was perfect. Six months later, during a particularly frosty March, we closed on the house and moved in – after replacing the windows and floors. Except for the kids’ room and our bedroom, we had no furniture. But an empty living room made for a great playroom.

A few months later, when spring finally arrived, I met two neighbors. The first was a woman with a child who was the same age as my oldest and so we all “played” at times. She also gave me hand-written directions to a stretch of shopping malls. Until that point, I only knew how to get to the local supermarket and back home. The other woman, no pun intended, lived a few doors down. She was a psychologist, my age (thirty), married (to a psychologist), childless, vampy and had no problem telling me right off the bat that she was having an affair with a married man who had three children. As spring sprung, she had a propensity for walking around her yard scantily clad in some get-up from Victoria’s Secret – particularly when my husband was working in our yard. I was doing my best to keep up my appearance but there was always a smudge of green beans or spit-up on the shoulder of my shirt and dark circles under my eyes from sleepless nights. She smelled like Eau de Parfum and I smelled like Eau de Vomit. To say that she intimidated me is an understatement.

Nothing made me happier than motherhood despite the loneliness of the suburbs. Despite the fact that my husband left early in the morning and came home well after nine at night. Despite the fact that I missed my mom, my friends, my touchstones and I only knew how to get from the house to the supermarket and that stretch of shopping malls was daunting. Two years later, just weeks after I had my third child (this one by C-section, so I was not a happy camper), the vampy neighbor came to visit one afternoon wearing one of her “get-ups.” I was wearing one of my husband’s old button-down’s and loose leggings, nursing my infant as my oldest (age four) sat at the kitchen table in a booster seat eating a mess of spaghetti and the middle one (age two) sat in a high chair covered with ice cream. She pulled a chair up beside me and said, “May I ask you a question about your husband?” I assumed it would be something about my state of mind as I juggled married life with three little kids. After all, she was a psychologist. She leaned in close and asked, “Does your husband have a big dick?” After catching my breath, I shrugged, laughed and said, “Yeah, right. He’s hung like a gas pump.” I told my mother the story. She was appalled – more at my response than the woman’s question and said I should simply have asked her to leave. My mother was probably right since the woman seemed to be in my yard more often after that…Two years later, we moved to a bigger house just about a mile away. Two years after that, I went back to work at a newspaper. And about two years after that, I heard that “vampy neighbor” moved, divorced, and her boyfriend left her and stayed with his wife. About five years later, my first novel was published and I quit my job at the newspaper and worked from home.

We moved back to New York City seven years ago – just after the youngest graduated high school. My grandson, Oliver, is just over five months old. He is nearly the same age as his mother was when we moved to the suburbs. It’s hard to believe. I look back and wonder where the years have gone.

This morning, I sat at my desk in my pajamas, pecking away at the keyboard as my husband left for work in his new suit – looking like the proverbial “million bucks.” Actually, just as he was leaving, the dog peed on the floor so the last vision he had of me was not only in pajamas but muttering at the other end of a Swiffer. I felt not unlike that nursing mother covered with spit-up when my husband worked in the Big City and I was tucked away in the suburbs. I thought about how I felt as my husband left for work in the city when my kids were in middle school and high school and I worked from home: Dad wore a suit and tie and “went to work” and Mom went upstairs to “write something” still in her pajamas after making breakfast and getting everyone off to school. I think about all that on mornings like this and wonder if it isn’t time to get out of my pajamas. Become a temptress with a Swiffer – or something along those lines.

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It really was the emptying and move from the apartment that my parents lived in for fifty years that was the most daunting and emotionally-wrenching. My parents were pack rats. Not hoarders, but clearly unwilling to part with papers: undated receipts, outdated legal documents and, above all, love letters from my parents to one another. Not just the garden variety written for birthdays and anniversaries, but many exchanged for no reason (apparent to me) and many when my father traveled for business to Europe and India in the 1960’s and 1970’s. My mother stayed behind with the children. The world was larger back then. Air travel wasn’t as de rigueur; the flights were less frequent, and international calls were prohibitively costly. Back then, jaunts across the ocean were only for the wealthy or the businessman.

In 2009, after my father was ensconced in his new apartment, I made copies of the letters, some of which were already crumbling on the tissue-like “air mail” stationary; the ballpoint ink fading. I placed the originals inside cellophane sleeves of a scrapbook that I bought at Staples. Fashioned the spine with my mother’s name and slipped an 8×10 photo of her into the sleeve on the front of the scrapbook so there was “cover art.”

Our apartment is being painted this week. Painting is somewhat like moving as one has to empty cabinets, closets, and shelves. I toss what is broken, donate what I will not use, and come across items nearly forgotten — like the scrapbook. It really wasn’t that I forgot. It was rather that I tucked it away safely. I also suppose, as a firm believer in the subconscious mind, that during those emotional days back in 2009 when each letter made me catch my breath, a part of me didn’t quite process them fully. I was also reluctant to exhume the scrapbook. Revisiting the book, when I am no longer reeling as acutely from my mother’s death, I read the lines and in between. Of course, the “in between” is probably subjective with some projection on my part thrown into the mix. Children, of any age, never know their parents’ marriage.

The letters are addressed to “dearest” and “darling,” both epithets I never heard either of my parents call the other. In one, my mother writes, “My dearest, I fly with you in my sleep” and then “I awake and look at the clock and estimate where you are.” In another, my father says, “My Darling, Your letters filled a necessary void and I am deeply grateful for them. Only your presence could have been better.” In yet another, perhaps the most compelling one for me as their marriage hit the 32-year mark (mine comes due in September), my father wrote, “I looked at your little face when I left and saw the bride I loved and married 32 years ago. And I said to myself, ‘Is it worth the time, money and efforts just for vanity when love exists anyway?’” And in yet another, my mother signs off, “Take care, darling” as she waits for my father to make his way home.

The day before yesterday was four years since my mother died. First thing in the morning, I placed a dripless taper in a silver holder given to me by my mother years before. Last night, my brother, his wife, one of his sons and I had dinner with my father and toasted Mom. Our father is not the same man who wrote those love letters. Call it what you will – dementia or Alzheimer’s. He asks the same questions over and over again within the space of ten minutes. On my last visit with him, he asked, “So, have you spoken to Mommy lately?” And I explained that Mommy died. He said, “Oh, right. Now I remember. She was a wonderful person, you know. I miss her. I miss talking to her.” I said that even though she’s gone, I talk to her every day – which is true. I have conversations with her in my head where I answer for her because I’m pretty sure I know how the conversation will go.

The man who penned those letters still wears a shirt and tie and jacket even when he’s home all day long. The jacket he wore the other night had a hole in the sleeve – something neither he nor my mother would have tolerated. She would have insisted he throw it away; he would have insisted that it could be repaired. She would have won the battle and presented him with a new jacket. As I was leaving the other night (my brother cooked and I cleaned up), my father leaned over from his seat on the couch and picked up the framed picture of my mother that sat on the coffee table. “She died, you know,” he said.  He was matter-of-fact with his statement as he held the picture, and then he sighed deeply and rested his head on my shoulder. “Stephie, Stephie, Stephie,” he said.

It is painful to witness my father’s altered state although it’s been coming on for a decade now. It’s been a slow and steady decline that took a significant dive after my mother died. I want to think that there is some sort of peace in his dementia. I want to believe that his mind and memory are now selective, taking him to places filled with sweet memories, allowing him to live in a nearly childlike world where fulfillment of his basic needs is what matters most to keep him content.

I went home that night and turned on CNN. Watched what could be perceived as Armageddon in Boston and Texas if one doesn’t cling to some sort of hope. When I left my father’s, he was watching something analogous to “Dancing with the Stars.” Fluff that he never would have watched “before.” He would have been tuned in as well to CNN with rapt attention. He would have theorized and argued with the reporters. I wondered: if I showed him the letters, would they resonate with him? I wondered, what happens to love when the mind is gone?

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I felt rather nomadic. It was time for me to get my own apartment – no longer wanting to kiss my mother good-bye while her eyebrows were raised and her face was questioning. Moving to the neighborhood where my husband worked and lived and my parents lived seemed wise. So, during one of my lunch hours, I went apartment hunting and ran into my husband on the street corner near the hospital where he was doing his medical residency.

He was wearing his white hospital coat and holding a paper cup of coffee. Back then, he had longish, dark wavy hair. He said something like “Hey, what are you doing here?” and I said, “Looking for an apartment.” He looked a little uneasy. Now, understand, we’d only been “dating” for about six weeks. That night, when I got to his place, he handed me a key to his apartment that had a miniature red roller skate hanging from the key chain. I used to roller skate quite a bit in those days.

“I emptied out a drawer for you,” he said. “Maybe you don’t need to look for an apartment right now.”

Understand, my husband didn’t exactly ask me to live with him. But a key and an empty drawer mean something, right? So I stopped the apartment hunt. It took me a few months before I stopped the routine of going home to my parents and showering and changing into fresh jeans and a top. Eventually, the empty drawer filled up, and I took over some space in the closet. And, well, when you finally leave a box of Tampax in the bathroom, you’re officially living together. One year after we started dating, we were married. It was a case of heady abandon, passion, love and no doubt that we should be together despite the panic that set in for both of us right before our wedding.

My panic was more subtle and, in my opinion, within the realm of normal cold feet. As my mother drove me to the hotel where we were to be married, I said I wasn’t sure if I could “go through with it.” My mother drove ahead. “There are 250 people coming tonight. Most of them are strangers to me. Your future in-laws invited the state of New Jersey,” she said. Then she pulled the car over to a metered spot and said, “Look, just tell me now if you really can’t do this, and I’ll cancel the whole damn thing. But really, snap out of it.”

My husband, on the other hand, had palpitations two nights before our wedding and hooked himself up to a Holter monitor only to find out it was anxiety and not something organic. On the day of our wedding, he put a Do Not Disturb order on his groom’s room with a codicil stating “and this includes my bride-to-be.”

I was really pissed off.

My husband is still at the same hospital where he worked back then. He’s risen through the ranks. I rarely see him “in uniform” because usually I see him when he’s in the office and there he wears slacks, a shirt, and tie. At the hospital, he wears a white coat. The other day, I had an appointment with an orthopedist whose office is on the grounds of the hospital. My husband met me there – and he was wearing that white coat. I don’t think I’ve seen it – or I don’t think I’ve appreciated it – since 1980.

Be still my heart. I always was a sucker for a guy in uniform.

My husband sat in the room with me while the doctor examined my foot. He waited while the doctor took me in for a fluoroscope. He listened when the doctor said that I have the slightest touch of arthritis from years of dancing. He and the doctor talked about their golf games as the doctor shot cortisone into my foot. Then my husband took me for a slice of pizza and I took a cab home.

So, here’s the thing: Nearly thirty-two years of marriage later, my husband whose hair is now gray and shorter (but still wavy) looks really cute in his white coat. If someone with a crystal ball had told me about all the shit we’d go through in thirty-two years of marriage, I would have told my husband that there was no way that I could marry him. I suppose that marriage is not dissimilar to life in general: If someone predicted all the disappointments you would weather, all the rejections you would get, all the sadness you would encounter, you might just bail. Go live somewhere as a recluse. Maybe on a desert island. Just decide that interaction was too much and being alone was safer, easier, and less complicated.

Yet we remain together. Of our own volition. Not for our children. Not for parents. Not for friends and relatives or appearances. Neither of us likes it when people say things like “good for you!” when they hear we have been married for upwards of three decades. Our marriage is not an endurance test. This is a romance and a friendship rife with all that romances and friendships suffer: ups, downs, love, hate, joy, sorrow, hurt, pleasure. I’m often suspicious of those couples who say, “We never fight.” Seriously? We have knock-down, drag-out doozies. He says I’m relentless; I say he’s remote. And then somehow, we meet in the middle – because I am relentless and he’s not really remote, he just sometimes forgets to say what he’s thinking. I tell him he should have married a mind reader. He says that a penny for his thoughts is not a high enough price.

In short, after thirty-one years of marriage, although it sometimes feels like Paradise Lost, on days like the other day when he’s in his white coat, Paradise remains. It takes me back to a boy who gave me a key attached to a roller skate and suddenly there’s clarity.

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When my only daughter and middle child, Ellie, met her husband, she was 21 and he was 27. She was just two months shy of her college graduation and I had just bought a beautiful lavender duvet cover for her homecoming. But this child, who was always glued to my hip, stayed behind with Larry. Four years later, in November 2010, Ellie and Larry were married in what was the wedding of their dreams in their sweet New England town that looks like an Edward Hopper painting. And then this past November 22nd, Thanksgiving Day, at 1:01 a.m., Ellie gave birth to their baby boy named Oliver. It’s the stuff that makes a fairytale. Oliver tipped the scale at a surprising 8 pounds 2 ounces (Ellie carried so small, we were certain that he would be a little one). But still, he was half the size of the turkey back at Ellie and Larry’s house that had to wait until Saturday when the new family came home. The midwife popped a knitted “turkey” hat on Oliver’s head, fashioned with knitted “feathers” (made by one of the volunteers) since he won the contest for the first-born Thanksgiving Day baby. As planned, my husband and sons had driven up the night before Thanksgiving and about an hour after Oliver’s arrival, they came into Ellie’s birthing room and met him with awe. It was, indeed, a special Thanksgiving. And even though Oliver is Ellie and Larry’s baby, he is what the rest of us in this family call “our baby.” We are all in love.

I went to Ellie and Larry’s town in Massachusetts about ten days before Oliver was born and hunkered down in a one-bedroom “apartment suite” at the local Quality Inn. I was on a mission to be there for my daughter and son-in-law during the days before Oliver’s birth and then to see them through the week after. I was visible when necessary and invisible when they needed space (and when I did). My suite was spare – the requisite mismatched Corelle dishes and tinny flatware, a toaster, two dinged-up pots in the galley kitchen and tired furniture throughout. But there was the added perk of a gas fireplace where I curled up in the evenings with green tea. I was “on-call,” so no evening glass of wine while I waited for Ellie’s labor to begin. And as I sat by the fire, I thought mostly about impending grandmotherhood and the “circle of life” that was hitting me like a thunderbolt. If the truth be told, I over-thought, as is my tendency.

I was having a tough time with impending grandmotherhood. I didn’t understand friends and acquaintances (the seasoned grandmothers) who asked if I wasn’t “just so excited” about the prospect of becoming a grandmother. My answer was always, “not quite yet” which led them to assure me that I would change my tune once the baby was born.

Just you wait, they said. You’ll see. Being a grandmother is the best thing in the world.

But my response was always, Why? Honestly, I felt like a freak of nature: Was I supposed to feel a thrill that I wasn’t feeling? Was I suffering from some sort of grandma frigidity? I joked with them that I still wasn’t over motherhood, but they didn’t think that was funny. When I explained that becoming a grandmother was a major life change, that I couldn’t get excited until my daughter was through the birth and there was a healthy baby, they l looked at me with a mixture of pity, confusion and disdain. As the gestational period went on and my excitement still wasn’t up to their standards, I felt angry and misunderstood. For me, becoming a grandmother felt like a greater transition than motherhood was. Motherhood held promise, youth and fertility. Becoming a grandmother reeked of age. My oldest son got it perfectly after finding out that his sister was pregnant, “Wow, Mom, so you’re going to be a grandmother,” he said. “That’s great, but, man, that must feel kind of f***ed up, right?”

Exactly. It’s great-but-wait-a-minute.

In that moment when Oliver emerged, knowing that my daughter and her baby were both fine was my prevailing emotion. I wondered if my sigh of relief was audible. In that synapse, there was also the irrefutable truth that my daughter was now a mother and, yes, I was a grandmother. How was that possible? My grandmother wore sensible Red Cross shoes and cream-colored chiffon blouses over tailored beige trousers. I loved to nuzzle into the Emeraude-scented softness of her gray mink coat. She took me to Broadway shows when I was old enough and when I was small, she sent me organza party dresses. She and my grandfather stayed with my brother and me one summer when my parents went off to Europe for a month. She bought me a “bride doll,” tons of books and introduced me to Prokofiev. I wear blue jeans and cowboy boots. Maybe one day, Oliver will remember that his grandma smelled of Angel perfume and how he loved to tug on her dangly earrings. And when he hears The Pussycat Dolls, he’ll think of me since I play “Don’t Cha” to get him to sleep. And yes, when he’s older, maybe I’ll take him to Broadway shows and Peter and the Wolf will definitely be on the agenda.

Am I grandma material?

My grandmother friends can’t wait to “take” their grandchildren on either the nanny’s day off or just a random Saturday. For me, I love the days when we are all together and Oliver is the center of attention as we watch him do nothing and yet we are amazed. Ellie jokes that had she known her brothers would have paid her this much attention as they have since Oliver’s birth, she would have had a baby when she was in high school. I love to hold him, to change his diaper, and do the loads of laundry that Ellie would otherwise do just to give her a break in what is the endless routine of a newborn.

In particular, I love when Ellie and I are with Oliver “alone.” I watch this beautiful young woman, my child still, who asked when she was a little girl if I would “have the babies for her” when she grows up. Of course, I said that I would. I watch my daughter: a mother so capable, so caring, so in love with this child. This is the way in which I am a grandmother – passing the torch to Ellie who is now the keeper of the flame.

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I tried not to watch the clock when I came home. Tried not to picture my eight-year-old dog (who everyone thinks is a puppy) as the intravenous was placed in his hind leg and he was rendered helpless. When the phone rang hours too early, and the caller I.D. read “Vet,” my heart skipped beats. The call was just a progress report to reassure me, but it brought me back to times when the phone rang and my breath caught: When a child’s after-school activity ran overtime because there was an injury; when a teen missed curfew and I sat wringing my hands, and then fast-forward to the days when my mother ailed for five years. When the phone rang with the caller I.D. from her home, I never quite knew what to expect, always anticipated the worst, yet when the inevitable call came that she had “arrested,” I was completely unprepared.
I picked up Walter at the end of the day. His fur was matted, his eyes glassy and unfocused, his nose running, his gait wobbly. I carried him home. He weighs only fourteen pounds, but he was dead weight as he flopped over my shoulder. Was that his heart pounding or mine?

We ordered in sushi last night, and Walter barely let out a “woof” when the delivery man rang the bell. He usually barks relentlessly. Walter slept in his bed while we ate. I gave him a pain killer wrapped in turkey. More deception, I thought. I ate too fast last night, eager to be done with dinner, wanting to just be alone and unearth what was bothering me: I sent a spry little dog to the vet that morning and received a dog that look ten years older. I couldn’t shake the comparison to my mother who’d gone in for a simple procedure seven years ago, and suffered complications. She left for the procedure looking beautiful and elegant. She came home leaning on a walker.

If I’d been able to read the stars last night, they might have told me to check my email, something I did anyway. One of my cousins scanned in old pictures of my mother for me: As a child with her brother, as a young twenty-something in an outfit of high-waisted trousers and floral print blouse, and one of the two of us some twenty years ago at a family reunion. The photos made me happy and sad; emotions crashing into one another at high speed as I wondered how the young girl with thick wavy dark hair (Mom) became the woman with a blond bouffant and a “new” nose because, in her forties, her “old” nose wasn’t the right one for her.

My husband and I were exceptionally tired last night. At least for me, it was the emotional cacophony of the day, coupled with writing, laundry, and post-weekend cleaning – the latter of which is an impossible job in New York City. Wipe the window sills and more soot appears just moments later. Masking city air (that’s rife with diesel) with scents called Ocean Breeze and Fresh Linen is a useless exercise. As tired as I was, I couldn’t fall asleep so I went into the guest room, watched at least three episodes of mysteries, read, wrote and then I heard the tapping of paws and a scraping at the half open door. Walter had staggered down the hall to find me. We lay on the bed together, my hand resting on his back below the incision. I remembered the days of my three babies with night frights, chicken pox, and just plain colds – how I sat with them until we all fell asleep. I remembered my own days as a child when shadows became monsters, and Mom stayed until I fell asleep.

Walter was better this morning, and we took an early morning walk. The sky was gray; the air was damp. The sanitation trucks churned as the men in padded gloves threw in endless wet black bags of garbage. One of them told me that he felt “exuberant,” and I laughed. The masts of the tall ships at the Seaport stood motionless against what is really just a patch of sky over the East River, but vast for Manhattan. But more, I felt a sense of true déjà vu, laden with nostalgia and uncertainty, and yet a sense of something familiar and comforting.

I knew all along last night why I couldn’t fall asleep: Walter was too far away in the “other” room, yet I was reluctant to disturb his slumber and bring him in with me. I was equally reluctant to admit how connected we are. I have learned in the last half dozen years that devotion is dangerous and requires courage. But with my hand on Walter’s back, I fell asleep and dreamed of Mom: We were at a wedding, and as in all my dreams of her, she was elusive and ghost-like. Attachments are unavoidable. Devotion is ever-lasting.

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I was developing a sort of Quasimodo gait as I navigated the city streets and people on the subway shot me dirty looks as I bumped them with the luggage that hung from my shoulder. Although not one for New Year’s resolutions, I made one privately. I had to let go of all the baggage that was literally weighing me down. I needed to pull up the strangling roots steeped in another era when I was once physically and emotionally responsible for the health and well-being of three other lives – often to the exclusion of my own.

Over the years I developed a reputation as a result of The Bag. Even meeting a friend for dinner typically elicited the statement (for example) of, “Give me a tissue and a Claritin, would you? I didn’t bring my own since I knew you’d have that.” And then my friend would take a gloss from her small, neat bag and coat her lips while I dug into the infinite depths of the heavy monstrosity, so pleased and proud that I could accommodate as I extracted her need.
It happened when my daughter and I shopped at a DSW in the first week of January: On sale for a mere nineteen dollars in gen-u-ine leather, it was a veritable apocalypse. With two exterior pockets for my cell, Metrocard , two credit cards and driver’s license (one does not need their Triple A card when taking the subway, for example), an interior zip pocket for bronzer and the essential Love That Pink lipstick, and room for one pair of glasses, tissues, a small comb, and house keys, I took the plunge. I even left my Epi-Pens at home figuring that if I was so unfortunate to ingest pine nuts or pesto sauce made with pine nuts, a call to 911 would have to suffice. I was riding bareback. It’s glorious, although rather a shock to friends and family who are having a hard time with my change of heart not to mention what they perceive as a radical change of persona. They think I’ve gone mad.
The small bag (and at that price, I wish I had bought three of them in all different colors) is an emblem of freedom. I confess that during the first week of carrying this bag, I felt naked and vulnerable, not to mention irresponsible and negligent. Was I abandoning a family after thirty years of reliability when it came to having every imaginable supply on hand?

Of course, the bag is merely a symbol of feeling unencumbered. There is still that umbilical cell phone: When it rings and the caller I.D. displays the name of one of my kids, my world stops for a moment as I answer, unable to let the call go to voicemail, unable to assume that the “child” can wait, afraid to be absent in case I am needed. I am scolded if I answer and say, “Is everything OK? I really can’t talk right now.” I am told I simply shouldn’t bother to pick up. I think that one day they, too, will carry a diaper bag and it will take decades to break the habit. Perhaps, by then, I will  be on their caller I.D., and they will feel compelled to take my calls because (if I’m lucky) I’ll be old. In the end, I suppose encumbrances remain regardless of how and when we pare down the symbolic baggage. Right now, leaving for the day or an evening with just my own essential needs is strangely liberating.

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In the gallery, I spied a ring in a case of “one-of-a-kind jewels.” Set in white gold, it was a flat, natural pearl – its color neither white nor pink, its surface neither smooth nor rough, with a delicate swirl of tiny pave diamonds above and below so the pearl appeared to float. It was something I uncharacteristically desired – having never been one for jewels, let alone rings which I feel draw attention to my “working hands.”

Mom was never a jewelry person either, and never bought anything of value for herself. What she left in her small yet elegant collection are pieces that were either my grandmother’s or bought for her by her husband – most of which, she rarely wore save an “Egyptian head” brooch that is an unidentifiable metal which she bought for herself at Sylvia Pines Uniquites  — her favorite antique store on New York City’s Lexington Avenue. I cherish the few pieces Mom either gave me from her collection or bought for me at Sylvia Pines.

I had some money tucked away (it’s usually what I slip the kids whenever I see them – I’m always good for fifty bucks here and there). I went through my jewelry box and pulled out some things that have been lying in there for the last 25 years (none given to me by Mom). Nearly every shop window from the shoemaker to the jeweler has bold signs “We Buy Your Old Gold,” and so I went with my gold in a Baggie. I had enough to buy the ring. Yes, I could have just put it on a charge card and slipped the expense by my husband, but the point was to buy something from me to me: Something Mom never did. Mom forgot to teach me that sometimes it’s important to pamper yourself. In truth, indulgence can be like oxygen: You can’t give air to someone else if you can’t breathe yourself. With the ring’s purchase, Mom’s legacy was undone, although not without a modicum of guilt and a palpable shaking off of the self-indulgence factor. Belief systems are hard to leave behind.

I realized, it wasn’t simply that I loved the ring. Rather, I was drawn to it. The ring personified all things metaphorically a “pearl:” Simple, raw, unprocessed, valuable — and yet refined. In other words, the ring defined Mom. The purchase was an ode to Mom’s dreams and pursuits many of which, since she’s been gone, I realize were unfulfilled. It said, “See, Mom, once in awhile you can do something that’s just for you.”
I lost the ring this past weekend when Mark and I were in Miami. The humidity caused my hands to swell and I placed the ring on a magazine atop a table on the balcony of our hotel room. A false move into the table sent it flying to the ground below – a mix of saw grass, foot-high reeds, and a swamp. I am covered with spider bites now from crawling on the ground for hours, using a fork to separate the blades of grass and stones as I searched everywhere but the swamp.

For sure, I don’t want another ring , and I don’t want a duplicate because there is none. Like Mom, the ring was one of a kind. I’m trying to figure out what the Universe is trying to tell me.

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The saving grace was that for some reason I shaved my legs and moisturized this morning before working out. Ah yes. I remember the days when I was a young Miss as opposed to a Ma’am, and I strutted past construction crews — bristling and welcoming the whistles at once. Now, mind you, I was hardly expecting any attention as I walked past the crew. I was simply feeling “spry,” and trying to cross the street which resembles a war zone downtown here in New York City as the new subway hub is being built and office buildings are renovated to make for more lavish and overpriced residential “dwellings.” Apartments are no longer called “apartments” – they are “dwellings” or “residences” where “habitation” is a “lifestyle.” The advertisements and billboards woo us: Come home to a “sanctuary,” a “haven” in an urban jungle. Lobbies are dimly lit Zen-like labyrinths with black slate floors, waterfalls, and couches so low that both sitting down and rising are challenges for those over 50. As for the slate floors and dim lights, falling on your keester is a definite maybe.

So, there I was after a great workout, exiting the presciently named Crunch, nimbly stepping in between a cement mixer and a paver when the toe of my sneaker caught in the small gulley between the new curb and the old sidewalk, and although to my credit, I did not go down like a lead balloon, I did execute a rather awkward partial handstand. As I write this blog, I notice that aside from the eggplant (hmmm…perhaps aubergine? tres chic) knee, the knee also has a dotted circular abrasion (wet tar will do that to you), there is a sliver of glass in my left hand, and a deep blue bruise on the palm of my right hand.
The upside is that most New Yorkers pick up after their dogs now, and my teeth are still in my head.

Speaking of teeth (or lack thereof), in the last year, I have managed to pulverize bridgework on the upper left of my mouth (the original loss was the aftermath of a mistakenly deployed air bag about ten years ago), and pulverize “real” teeth on the upper right. I now have one less bridge than Lower Manhattan. Upon examination, the oral surgeon asked if I was “under stress.”
“Why?” I asked, trying to talk with the rolled gauze pad between my gum line and teeth (and feeling oh, so lovely, as one can only feel while drooling at the dentist).
“You’re a grinder,” the dentist said solemnly.
“Meaning?”
“You probably should sleep with a device.”
“A device?” (Grinding? Device? Though I figured he wasn’t thinking of some “toy”  from The Pink Pussycat Boutique – does that place still exist?)
“Yes. A bite plate. To prevent you from grinding.”
Attractive, I thought. I imagined the scenario. “Excuse me, darling, while I slip into something more comfortable and put in my bite plate.”
My dentist made me a subtle device that fits between my upper and lower front teeth. Add some pointy ears and I would look like Alfred E. Newman.
“How about if I just wear wax lips?” I asked, device in place, as I viewed my visage in a magnifying mirror under the fluorescent lighting in the dentist’s office (yet another assault to my increasingly fragile self-image).
And so, after the fall, I sit here now with a bag of frozen corn on my purple left knee. I should mention that this most recent fall comes three months after a fall from the window sill in my apartment onto my right knee. I climbed onto the sill seeking leverage as I attempted to open the gargantuan window that was sealed so tight, it was immovable (the aftermath of this heat wave which caused the frame to “swell”). I finally called the handyman to open the pane glass mammoth: Even he needed to call an assistant to lend two more hands. I fell because it really is foolish to climb on a window sill while wearing high heels (at any age) and step down onto an unstable hollow hassock when the hassock’s lid is askew.  The answer to the trick question is obvious: My ego is far more bruised than my knee, and hurts a lot more.

The post After the Fall appeared first on These Days by Stephanie.

I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side where the homeless (a term unused back then) were oddities in the 1960’s and 1970’s – and quickly carted off lest the neighborhood be “sullied.” In other areas of New York City – Times Square, The Bowery, near the old Madison Square Garden, what we then called “bums” or “hobos” wandered the streets and slept in doorways — they were more than predominantly male, and most of them looked aged. Of course, when you’re a child, everyone looks aged. I remember the Sundays when my father drove the family in his Cadillac, turning off the FDR Drive onto Houston Street, and locking the doors with a flourish, the automatic locks snapping down like prison gates.

“Bowery bums,” he explained, as I gazed out the car window. “Most of them are veterans or were journalists during World War II. They’ve lost their way, but then again you never know. You have to be careful.”
Our destination was Chinatown for trinkets, and then a stop at Katz’s Delicatessen for a hot pastrami sandwich and a Cel-Ray Soda. Clinging tight to my mother’s hand, we quickened the pace as we walked to and from the car. I was both fascinated and terrified by this other world, and eager to get back to the sanctuary of not only the Cadillac, but the Upper East Side.

The city’s homeless now transcend both age and gender. Although they are ubiquitous in Manhattan, I am not inured to their presence. I have made so many calls to 911 when concerned that someone is not breathing that I am wondering if 911 has me listed as a “crank.” Just the other day on Mulberry Street, a man lay on the corner, swathed in rags, the side of his face pressed against the hot pavement, his bare feet filthy – and none of the telltale signs that the corner might be his home (shopping cart, bags, blankets, plastic cups). I stopped (yes, at a safe distance) to see if his chest was going up and down. I couldn’t tell, and called emergency. I waited a while, and no one came. I called again, and they said that someone was on the way. Passersby walked around him, barely glancing down, reminiscent of the scene in Midnight Cowboy when the unconscious man lies on the street in front of Tiffany’s. The neighborhoods once notorious for human debris have been cleaned up. Times Square is a mall: It’s misleading. The homeless have merely been cleared out of Times Square so the tourists have a different impression.

A wave of unidentifiable emotion came over me when I discovered that the joyous clapping and dancing came from the woman at the church who seemed undaunted by the oppressive heat. I wondered where she was from, if she had a family anywhere anymore, and what she was like as a child. I wondered what happened to her along the way. Was she ever in love? Did she ever have children? Was her decline insidious, born from trauma, born from mental illness? Is she even remotely aware of the men in suits and ties, and the women in their black pumps and narrow skirts who disappear into apartment and office buildings and dine in the windows of restaurants across the street from where she lives?

Joseph O’Neill writes in his novel “Netherland” that once we have lived in Manhattan, it is not only difficult to leave, but nearly impossible not to miss it if you do. I used to believe that more than I do now, and yet there is a part of me that remains nearly addicted to this city despite what is a cacophony of the harsh, pleasant, comforting, miserable,and frightening. The city can assault you with its gloom and lift the spirits within a block’s walk. It is a film noir, and so black and white, with eight million stories, indeed.
I wonder what would happen if I tried to speak to the woman who lives in the church doorway – or perhaps her world is best left to both her imagination and mine. At least downtown here, nestled in the church doorway, she appears to be safe, and appears to feel at home.

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