These Days/Tuesdays
On Tuesday, I took the subway uptown and spent the afternoon with my father. It is something that I don’t do often enough. Typically, my sister and I go together, but this week she and her husband are overseas, so I made the journey alone. With her, the journey back home is easier: forced laughter as we look back on life and rally one another as we come from a day that is both heartfelt and dutiful, wrenching and satisfying, and often melancholy in the absence of irretrievable touchstones. It is a new episode in our lives: Neither of us ever “lunched” with either of our...
Read MoreThose Days/March 2006
Last Tuesday, my husband and I took a mid-week break and flew to Florida for a visit with his parents. While we were away, our youngest took off for his Spring Break to the Bahamas, our middle one flew off to her Spring Break in Puerto Rico, and our oldest turned 23, and bemoaned the fact that while his family vacationed in the tropics, his “Spring Break” was spent on a business trip to sub-zero Syracuse, N.Y. Welcome to the real world, I said, laughing. How, I asked myself, was all this possible – that our entire family was airborne, nearly simultaneously, and flying in...
Read MoreThese Days/Creatures of the Wild
When I was a child, a well-heeled woman cradled a doll as she roamed our New York City neighborhood. She fed her from an empty bottle, burped her, comforted her. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked my mother. “Poor thing,” my mother said. “Maybe she lost a child or couldn’t have one.” “I don’t understand.” “She thinks the doll is real.” “But why?” “Just stay away from her,” my mother said. “She’s not right.” This imagery of delusion returned yesterday with Travis the Chimp who...
Read MoreThose Days/Summer 2006
Ellie was home over the weekend with her boyfriend. In about a month, the two of them are taking a place together on the North Shore of Massachusetts, a good five-hour drive from where we live, and a distance that I make a conscious effort not to think about. Of our three children, she is the only girl, the one who still allows me to wrap her in my arms and kiss the side of her head. Sometimes I pass the back of my hand along the curve of her chin, and the smoothness of her skin feels no different from it did when she was a “little one.” She is the middle child, the rose between...
Read MoreThese Days/Birthday
Yesterday was quite the red letter day. It was Walter’s birthday. Walter is our now seven-year -old cockapoo. Ellie got him in 2001, brought him home, and said that he would be my companion as she prepared to leave for college. How right she was. Walter and I are joined at the hip, much like Ellie and I were when she was a baby, a child, a teen and even now as a young woman. Walter was groomed yesterday, had his check-up and vaccinations the day before, and last night we celebrated with him at The Tribeca Grand Hotel, one of the few New York City restaurant/hotels that welcomes dogs since...
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