C IS FOR CROSSWORDS

     I feel that I've gotten through the first two letters of the alphabet while more or less concealing my inner geek.  I mean, Art Deco is just a design style, and what kind of monster doesn't love baby animals?  But tonight, for C, my mask is ripped off.  Hello, my name is Susan, and I'm a crossword puzzle fiend.
     Wait.  It gets worse.  For several years in the late 1980s, I periodically attended all-day crossword puzzle competitions somewhere on Long Island.  Yes, that would involve completing crossword, after crossword, after crossword.  All day.  The one who finished each puzzle first, with no errors, won a prize of some sort.  I didn't pay too much attention to the prizes, because I never won any.  I was somewhere in the middle of the pack, I'd say.  The winners (usually from among the same three or four people) were pretty scary.  They would finish puzzles faster than it seemed humanly possible to even read all the clues.  Will Shortz, who is now the New York Times puzzle editor, was always there,  involved in some leadership role.  This was my idea of a good time.
     Oh, and I also composed a few puzzles, too.  This is not an easy task for a novice.  In case you've never noticed, puzzles must be symmetrical - left to right, top to bottom.  And if you want to compose a NY Times Sunday puzzle, it also has to have a theme, and to preferably contain some puns.  I don't like to think about how many hours it used to take for me to compose a puzzle.  I didn't mind at the time, because (1) I didn't have any kids, (2) I was Queen of the Geeks, and (3) I was delusional enough to think it was fun. But now... now comes the shame.
     Fast forward a lot of years.  The Sunday Times puzzle is the only one I do on a regular basis, almost always over the phone with my son.  I've blogged about our doing the puzzle together during the post-college year he lived at home, but now we live hours apart and so we have a weekly phone session, which I so love.
     But I do the acrostic too, okay?  Wanna make something of it?  But alas, the acrostic only appears in the Sunday Magazine Section biweekly, so I have to wait two whole weeks in between my acrostic fixes.  Sometimes I work myself up thinking that someday, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon will retire from acrostic-making, and then what will become of my life?  I shudder to think.
     Leave a comment, please, if you love crosswords.  Make me feel that there are others like me who manage to live relatively normal lives.  I'd be very grateful.

B IS FOR... BABY ANIMALS

   Yeah, beneath this tough-guy persona lurks a heart of mush, and I'm not too proud to admit that baby animals are among my all-time Favorite Things.

     I mean, seriously.  And what about

 ?

     Hello?

     Not to mention:

  


And this one is for Miz B:

     I rest my case.

A TO Z CHALLENGE KICKOFF: ART DECO

                                                   

 

 

    This month I'm going to blog my way through the alphabet around the theme of  My Favorite Things, and I really love Art Deco.  Not that I'm an expert or anything - I just take great pleasure in the lines of it, the stylishness, the swoop and the flair. This, for instance, is my bedroom set:

 

 

 

 

     (If you're my friend, you won't notice the crap all over everything - you'll just see the furniture.)When I was giving my friend Ann a tour of our new house 17 years ago, she stopped dead when she got to the bedroom.  In a tone of pure horror, she gasped, "My grandparents had furniture like this!"  Well, Ann, then your grandparents had excellent taste, that's all I can say.  I don't know any kind of design model that moves me the way Art Deco does.  And yes, Ann, that includes your beloved Danish Modern.  So maybe we haven't managed to improve on the 1930's.  This stuff has character.  It has class.  Like Fred and Ginger.  Or like my dinnerware:

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Or maybe you'd just rather swoon at the feet of Erte, The Master Himself:

 

 

     Or you can just not like any of it, I guess.  You're allowed.  I'm dedicating this A to Z Challenge to MY favorite things, not yours.  No offense.  Give me another try tomorrow!





OMG A2Z!!!

     I'll just admit it right up front. I'm probably going to be the worst participant that the Blogging A to Z Challenge has ever seen.  I can't even paste the damn gadget onto my home page!  When I try to do it, my computer tells me that the gadget is "broken." Well, the gadget looks just dandy to me, so I strongly suspect that I'm the one who's broken, and my computer is just trying to spare my feelings.
     But I'm gonna plunge in tomorrow anyway.  I'm signed up.  I've chosen a topic: My Favorite Things. It's a darling topic, if I say so myself.  Now all I have to do is produce twenty-six themed blog posts in thirty days.  What could possibly go wrong?  Besides for everything, I mean.

             I'D TURN BACK IF I WERE ME

SO YOUR 91-YEAR-OLD MOTHER MOVES TO A DIFFERENT CONTINENT....

     What? Like this has never happened to you? Not even once? Fine. Let's try this one: So your 91-year-old mother walks into a bar...  Yeah, I figured that one would work better for you.
     Except that MY 91-year-old mother has probably never been to a bar in her life. And yet, in 8 days from today she actually is moving to another continent. To be more precise: she is moving to the junction between two other continents, Europe and Africa.  To be even more precise: she is moving from the United States to Israel. And I'm not even kidding.
     I can explain. My mother has lived in the U.S. her whole life.  But (1) she's an Orthodox Jew, and to many American Orthodox Jews, Israel is not half a world away, it's sort of around the corner.  Even if, as in my mother's case, it's the only country you've ever visited outside of North America.

 (2)  My brother has lived in Israel for over 30 years.  He, his wife, four of his five children, the three spouses of those children, and the one new baby, all live in Jerusalem.  My mother is moving to a senior facility half a mile from my brother's home. She will be surrounded by attentive Orthodox family members, and will no doubt spend holidays and other important occasions with them.  This move was her idea, and it makes sense for her.  Much more sense than it does for her to stay in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, but where her only remaining family members are a sister who suffers from Alzheimer's and no longer recognizes her, and a nephew and his wife.  I live two hours away, and see my mother irregularly.  My kids' lives bear no relation to hers, and they love her dutifully but not deeply, and don't feel very connected to her.  So it all makes sense, right?
     To be honest, my mother did a pretty shitty job of parenting me. As an adult, I can understand that it was a byproduct of the pretty shitty parenting she received, her resulting lack of self-esteem, her need to project her enormous stockpiles of shame and self-loathing onto me because I was a girl, like her.  As a child, I lacked such perspective; all I knew was that she apparently derived pleasure from making me miserable, but I didn't know why.  As soon as I could get away, I fled as far as my own terror of the unknown and injured psyche would let me. And I managed to rescue myself, more or less, if you don't count the permanent emotional scars.
     But then when I was 33, I had a baby, and I made a conscious decision to not deprive my son of  a grandmother just because of the havoc she had wreaked in my life.  My father had died when I was 30, and when that happened, my mother gradually began to exhibit an ability I had never suspected she had.  She began, by tiny increments, to grow and change, to be able to accept that my choosing not to lead a life ruled by religion did not equate to my choosing to be a monstrous human being.  Yes, it was a laughable degree of insight, but for her it was an enormous step.  So I decided, despite my deep misgivings, to give her a chance to know her grandson.  And, step by step, she and I began to build a relationship.  It was superficial, which was all she was capable of, and it was intermittent, which was all I could tolerate.  But it was the best we could both do, given our respective limitations, and

we both hung in there with it.  And as a result, my kids know their grandmother. I made the right decision, hard as it was for me. I did it for my kids, and I'm proud that I did.
     Now she's moving far away. I've been trying hard to help her prepare for the move, to clean out her dresser drawers and medicine cabinet and pantry, to sort and throw away and distribute the belongings she's not bringing with her. I've made sure to bring my son to say goodbye, and I'm bringing my daughter tomorrow, and my husband and I will come see her off at the airport next week. And there's no doubt that, once she's safely on the other side of the world, a lot of responsibility will be taken off my shoulders and shifted to my brother's.  Relief definitely has its place in my mixed emotions.
     But so do a lot of other feelings.  Guilt, for not having spent more time with her while she was here.  Resentment that no matter who I am and what I've done with my life, it will never be good enough for her because it will never follow the pattern she chose for me before I was born.  Anger that, even though she's taken lately to telling me over and over how much she loves me and how much she'll miss me, it's too little too late.  Her job was to make me feel she loved me when I was a child, when I needed that, and she failed in every way possible. Anger, too, that I had no model for learning how to be a good mother to my kids.  I had to teach myself from scratch. And resignation that the only way I'll ever see her again after next Sunday is to travel to Israel, a country about which I have extremely mixed feelings, to say the least, and to be an awkward visitor on my brother's turf.
     It's hard, all of this.  So much harder than if my mother had just (after the Sabbath ended, of course) freshened her lipstick and walked into a bar.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMY!

     Our baby girl has somehow survived our parenting for 18 years. And we have somehow survived her childing.

     So is it time to stop holding our breath now?

     NO WAY.  Happy birthday, Amy!  You'll always keep us on our toes.

MY PITCH

I've got a great story idea. Like many great story ideas, it was inspired by the headlines, but the headlines are only a kickoff point. The only thing I believe this story is missing is a hook. I'll lay out what I've got so far, though, and maybe you can help me come up with one.
     My protagonist - let's call her SubRosa ("sub" for literary submissions. Aren't Latinate puns the best?), has been working for years at a branch of a government agency. Following a semi-Stalinist purge of all the longterm managers (and that's just the prologue), a new head honcho - let's call her Juno - is brought in from a different branch of the agency. Juno is like no manager Sub has ever seen before. For one thing, her wardrobe is a dead ringer for those of Sub's young daughter's Barbie dolls, but Juno herself is no Barbie doll. Her outlandish clothing style, accompanied by the kind of heavy makeup and styling usually seen only in professional photo shoots, and her Aging Club Kid persona, mask a cool and calculating intelligence. One of Juno's first acts as manager is to convene a meeting of the office professional staff and inform them that, unlike the former disgraced honcho, she will not require them to sign in or out, or to keep the office apprised of their whereabouts during the standard working hours. There is only one limit placed on their new unaccountability: "Just don't embarrass me," Juno says with a subtle smile. It's a phrase that will come to haunt Sub.
     The reason for this largesse soon becomes apparent. Juno herself has no intention of being accountable for her whereabouts during the standard working hours, and by granting to others the same freedom she assumes by right, she plans to buy the loyalty of those inclined to take advantage of it. And her plan works. The staff professionals who share her deep commitment to their own entitlement begin to drastically cut back their hours on the job. And, when they are physically there, they no longer feel compelled to actually produce much work, because it doesn't take them long to discover that very little is expected of them in that regard as well. The office becomes divided into two camps: those whose goal is to get away with doing as little work as possible while still collecting a paycheck, and those who care about the agency's purpose and are appalled by what they see going on around them. Juno smiles, and flits off to an 11:00 a.m. yoga class. Those who are appalled by her have no power; she has divided and conquered; mission accomplished.
     Juno remains uneventfully in her title, though not at her desk, for ten years. When Sub inquires of her better-informed colleagues as to how this could be, she is told that Juno's father-in-law is deeply politically connected, as a result of which Juno's role as head honcho is "untouchable." Juno operates in her titular position by delegating almost all of the day-to-day work to her overwhelmed subordinate managers, while she herself is absent and, even to them, frequently unavailable. On the rare occasions when Juno's presence graces the office, she has been known to boast to those same subordinate managers about her own inherited power, her untouchability. She takes some level of pride in it. Over the years, she maintains the contacts and makes the decisions that can only be done at her management level. Otherwise, she is MIA, with only one notable exception: Halloween. You see, Juno is a wiccan. She makes no secret of it; in fact, a tiny, playful image of a witch on a broom hangs on the usually-closed-and-locked door of her usually-empty office. Although Juno always spends Halloween itself in Salem, Massachusetts, with her fellow wiccans, she always ensures that her minions at the office arrange an annual Halloween party (unheard of before her tenure) sometime that week, and she never fails to attend, in full costume. And since her daily attire could legitimately be considered by many to be a costume, it stands to reason that her actual costumes must be seen to be believed.
     In the end, Juno triumphs over all her foes. After 25 years of nominal employment with the agency, she retires with her full benefits and pension. The only side-effect of her tenure is that she has driven Sub's branch of the agency into the ground, destroyed its reputation, and trampled the rights of its clients. This is such a minimal price to pay that it does not even register on Juno's radar screen.
     A few years after Juno is safely retired, a news story breaks about the governor of the state in which she and Sub live and work. The story at first seems minor it itself, but it soon snowballs, revealing a viper's nest of corruption involving the governor and his cronies so brazen as to amaze even diehard political junkies. Eventually, many roads of dirty power and dirty money are traced back to one man who has profited perhaps more than any other under the governor's reign. One man who is so confident in his unassailability in the powerful position to which the governor has appointed him that he routinely ignores his own obvious conflicts of interest, freely voting on matters involving the agency he heads which affect his own financial affairs and those of the private company that bears his name. He is, you see, untouchable. And what, you might ask, does that man have to do with this story? You've probably already guessed. He's Juno's father-in-law, of course.
     So what do you think of my story? I know, it violates a lot of conventions of story-telling. For one thing, the protagonist plays no active role; she just watches the story unfold. And, for another thing, there's no hook. But maybe that's because the ending of the story hasn't been written yet.

 

p.s. Dad-in-law's resignation from the agency is a good start for the ending, though.