My parents were “antiquers.” But they didn’t call themselves that. It wouldn’t have even occurred to them to call themselves that. My father would have punched a guy who called him something like that. No. They just liked looking for things that would last.

In the seventies, when we still lived in Queens, my parents would escape scorching outerborough summers by taking weekend drives to New England and upstate New York, to take a look around at things. This was long before Martha Stewart got her grubby little pierogi paws ahold of the antiques market, and brought about the causation of everything manufactured before 1965 to have a twenty-thousand percent mark-up.

Back then, my parents scoured roadside shops along Route 7 in Connecticut, or gingerly stepped through dusty horse barns in Vermont, to find long-abandoned treasures. My father would light cigarettes out in fields and talk to weathered old men about the best route to take back to the city. My mother would hold carnival glass bowls up to the sunlight, and show me the bubbles trapped in its curved sides. Such imperfections were the marks of human hands, forming the parameters. My mother had an eye for beautiful, broken things.I learned about dovetail joints and inlaid mahogany on those trips. This was their shared pleasure. This was their language of love.

My father was — and still is — quite handy. He learned such things from other men — his father, his brother-in-law, his uncle, his cousins — because those were the only things they talked to each other about. He taught himself how to refinish tabletops, how to tighten and balance furniture legs, and how to restore the luster of dulled brass hardware, on sideboards and dressers long abandoned by their owners. Some things he could make right. Some things he could fix.

When I was small, my father would often let me help him with his restoration efforts. He only had me — a girl, not a boy who rightfully should have inherited such skills — but that didn’t seem to matter to him at all. He’d take me on Saturday mornings to the gorgeous, old hardware store on Myrtle Avenue — the one that isn’t there anymore, the one with rows and rows of old bins and drawers, with latches and screws and handsaws all sorted and exacted in tight, new bundles. I’d run my hand along the edges of paintbrushes, watching the shimmer of light move across the bristles, as my father lingered at the counter and asked the hardware store owner for advice. We’d return home with solutions to problems in brown paper bags.

At home, he’d show me the differences in grades of sandpaper, and explain how to sand wood along the grain, how to follow its lines, or risk damaging the beauty of its natural pattern. He’d ask me to hold things – like the Philips-head screwdriver that he’d borrowed from — and mistakenly never returned to — his super in the apartment on Cooper Street in Inwood, the one that my parents had lived in when they were newly married. “Gimme Horko’s screwdriver,” he’d say to me while underneath something, arm outstretched, and I’d know exactly which tool he meant. It had a yellow plastic handle, and a few paint spills, and he’d often compliment its size and grip for proper torque. This was a good one. This should be kept.

I was only banned from our basement when my father was shellacking something, trying to protect the fragility of the surface. The smell was too toxic for me, but he’d be smoking all the while, with dinged metal cans of turpentine at his feet.

He’d unscrew metal pulls and hinges, the pieces holding things together, and I’d sit and watch them lighten in the chemical bath in the old bucket he kept in the basement. I’d witness the hand-tooled filigree emerging, the dirt and damage of a hundred years, the fingerprints, the marks, the proof of time — all dissipate into nothingness.

In an era when everyone was “going Mediterranean” or “going Colonial” via Macy’s and Levitz, my parents sought out quirky artifacts from the past to decorate the two-family apartments we rented in Queens, and finally, the small attached Tudor house on Doran Avenue that we could finally say was ours. They didn’t have much to spend, but my father thought that their money was far better spent on well-made furniture that had survived decades of use. “My sister can go see Seaman’s first,” he’d say, smirking with a Marlboro out of the side of his mouth, “but I’d rather get something made out of tiger oak.” That was right after my aunt’s pressboard Seaman’s dining room table collapsed during Easter dinner. Ham and jellybeans everywhere.

In a counter move to most of their married peers, my parents never sought the spinning-wheel and antique crock look so commonly adopted in seventies-era home decor. No eagles or shields, or little Revolutionary War-era drummer boys decoupaged on wooden plaques. Instead, they bartered for stained glass crow-barred from the window sashes of churches, and for retired preachers’ pulpits from defunct congregations in New Hampshire.

They wanted things to last.

[Click on the YouTube video for today's musical accompaniment.]

My daughter’s immersion into the historical fiction of the American Girl book series was wonderful, albeit Disney-ish. When she read about Kit, the girl who lived in a boarding house during the Great Depression, she developed a fascination with one word after completing the series: hobo. (She saw the movie, too. Really sealed the deal.)

My daughter was mesmerized by hobo culture, so much so that I feared she would “ride the rails” instead of attending a prestigious four-year college. There was, obviously, a romantic notion about such a lifestyle, since the reality of abject, widespread poverty, as well as lack of access to hygienic products, proper nutrition, and dentistry, was not so intimately discussed in the series. The target audience for the American Girl series is eight to ten years old, for crying out loud. This was merely “Great Depression Lite.” She’s eleven and a half now, and has, thankfully, moved past it, so Mommy’s diagnosis of “hobo OCD” can be safely laid to rest.

I remarked to my husband during this phase that in the seventies, friends of mine actually dressed as hobos for Halloween, with flood pants and bandanas tied to sticks, and dirt smeared on their faces. There were many of them, actually, wandering numbered streets in Queens amidst the glow of flickering jack o’lanterns. Mothers opened their doors to hand out candy and coupons for McDonald’s French fries and exclaimed, “Oh, look, Frank! Come here! How cute! This kid’s a hobo!” Let that sink in for a minute. Children’s Halloween costumes crafted from a country’s misfortune.

My husband assuaged my revisionist guilt by noting that if I’d lived during that time, I’d be the woman that hobos would visit. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) I’d be the “kind lady” — the one with that cat chalk mark in front of her house, the one that hobos left as a code for other hobos. (See chart above. I find it fascinating. The kid gets her hobo OCD from me, I guess.) I’d be the one who’d let them wash up and drink water in the backyard, who’d make cornbread for them and listen to their stories, and then tuck a little extra into their bandana before they left.

If I think back on that night, I think my husband was just trying to get lucky. Interesting approach, though. You really have to hand it to him with the hobo approach of “Kind woman — tell pitiful story.” He’s a rapscallion. And it worked. Obviously.

What if — dear God — we had a modern hobo culture today? (I think we do, actually. It’s called widespread homelessness, unemployment, and poor healthcare and nutrition for millions of Americans.) But if that hobo code still existed today, what chalk marks would be drawn? Just a few suggestions…

My annual re-run of a 2011 post, in honor of my children’s softball and baseball seasons. Play ball.

Flo was missing a couple of teeth.  She kept six-packs of beer in the back of her large, dented, American-made car. One of us was always being sent around the corner to the deli on Cooper Avenue for a pack of cigarettes, just so she could make it through the practice without a headache. That was back when eight year-olds were sent to corner stores to buy packs of cigarettes, and the only question asked was whether they needed a pack of matches to go with them.  Flo hit balls to us with a lit cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth.  She never dropped it.  Not once.  She didn’t even ash the thing when she hit a line drive.

Our coach was somehow related to our pitcher — “Dottie,” who had wire-rimmed glasses and long blonde hair that she kept back in a ponytail, which made her look even more remarkably like John Denver. She was much like Jackie Earle Haley’s character Kelly Leak in “The Bad News Bears,” who drove a Harley and was brought on the team as a ringer.  Dottie may have been a 35 year-old midget, for all I knew.  She was that good.  She threw fast-ball softball pitches before anyone knew what fast-ball was. She didn’t talk much, except to tell us when we’d screwed up.  I was terrified of her, and almost fainted the first time she actually acknowledged my presence and commented on one of many inept plays that I’d made. I’m forty-two now, and I’ll never be as good as Dottie was when she was ten.

Flo taught me more about the game than any high school coach could have hoped.  With Flo, I ran sprints for what seemed like hours. I learned about force plays and bunts and batting stances and everything else I could soak up in two hours at Juniper Valley Park.  During games, Flo bawled me out while I twirled in left field and belted out “Yellow Submarine” to overcome my boredom. Not many eight year-old batters driving a ball past the pitcher’s mound, which is precisely why I was put there.  Flo’s gruff demeanor drove me to covet a place on her infield, which I did, after several years of hard work, scrapes and bruises.  I got to short center first — a position that doesn’t exist in baseball, although I’m not sure why — and finally got a strong enough arm to earn third base, and make those long, hip-pivoting throws to tag out the first base runner.

I grew up in Queens in the 1970s, with parents who both worked full-time, and nothing but ingenuity to get me to some of those practices.  I hooked my mitt over my bat and walked — uphill, both ways — to practices and games.  I walked under the Woodhaven Boulevard overpass, alongside the LIRR railroad tracks, to get to some of my softball games.  There were weeds and bottle caps and rocks and glistening pieces of broken glass and an occasional coin, and there was time for me to daydream and whistle to myself and wander and wonder.  Many years later, when a college friend of mine worked at a warehouse nearby, she told me that a dead body had been found under the same overpass.  I couldn’t have imagined such a thing when I was young.  I couldn’t have imagined a lot of what is so commonplace now.

Last year, my daughter clicked with softball.  She’s played every year since kindergarten, but suddenly, she can’t get enough of it.  She wants to play catch constantly, she wants to go to softball camp, she wants to know why there isn’t a summer league she can join this year.  I keep some of my glee to myself when she talks like this.  I want her to love the game because she’s found her own way to it, and not because Mommy played, too.

She’s in a different league from me, so to speak — one where coaches aren’t barking and screaming (yet) and everyone gets a shout of “good try” no matter how many strikeouts or poorly aimed throws take place.  I laugh to myself at the thought of Flo having a slightly different response.  ”What the hell was that, Kathleen?  You playin’ ball with the team on the other field?  Where’s your head?  Jesus Christ, get in the game, McKitty!  Get back in the game!”

Sometimes, while I sit on the sidelines at my daughter’s games, I still see us — the 1978 “Legal Eagles,” with our name embroidered in white, ropey script on the front of our kelly green and white-piped uniforms — out on the field, cap brims broken in just-right, open mitts on knees, ready for the call of “Play ball!” from the umpire and the crack of the bat.  We were harder, we were hungrier, and we were older, far older, than my suburbanly raised daughter is now.

It’s a mother’s curse to second-guess.  What’s better?  What’s wrong?  What’s right?  What life lesson is my daughter missing out on because of our “everyone wins” mentality?  Would I have been a better player if I’d been encouraged more gently, rather than through intimidation?  Would I have made the varsity team, instead of quitting after freshman year? Would I be a better mother if I got my child to practice ten minutes early, instead of huffing and puffing and speeding and running and yelling to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up? Am I present, am I mindful, am I good enough? We are all thinking the very same things from our camp chairs. I’m sure of it.

Then the moment comes — that gasping, shining, stop-action second when the ball leaves the bat and rises high in the air and thwaps into the mitt and the bench empties and the parents stand and cheer and whoop for the out and the win and the love of the game, for our kids and for breezy summer nights, for the sweet, sweet luxury of being there, for witnessing these crystalline memories that we’ll talk about, years later, when so many others will have left us. These will still remain.

And for that moment, we are all more than enough.

God, I love baseball.

His arm grips the headrest on the passenger seat when he turns to back out of your driveway, the one that you should really call to have re-surfaced, and which runs alongside the house you bought together more than ten years ago. You like that feeling of his arm on the headrest, of being protected, of being his, even if the gesture isn’t really about you. He doesn’t do it so often anymore, because he has a back-up camera in his car, which you refused to trust for months whenever you drove it, because you heard your father’s words echoing from that school parking lot in Connecticut where he taught you how to drive nearly thirty years ago — “Check your mirrors twice. Then turn all the way around and check everything twice. ”

You don’t tell your husband that you like it when he does that, because you only realize now, in its occurrence, that you’ve missed it. And then the moment passes. But then you think that he must have missed it, too, because he places the warm square of his palm on the back of your neck, once he’s turned around and shifted the car out of reverse. Maybe he likes that feeling of knowing you’re his, too. That he’s yours. That this is all still ours.

You tell him that you really want to drive a restored Volkswagen bug someday. You talk about the green Bug that your uncle used to drive in the seventies, and how you used to stand on the running boards while he rolled it down your grandparents’ driveway in Queens Village, with the driver’s side door open and his arm around your waist. You thought you were the four year-old shit. Your husband laughs and tells you that he’ll buy you one, someday, when the kids are gone, so you can tool around town like the crazy old woman he knows you’ll be, and he squeezes the sides of your neck between the heel of his hand and his two middle fingers, in just a slight shift of pressure that says so many things that you already know, but still need to be told — repeatedly, forever, in small ways just like this.

You think of all the makes and models that you’ve traveled in together. The forest-green Subaru hatchback with the tan leather interior that he inherited from his parents while you were in college. The one he picked you up in when you were still friends then, and not yet dating. You fell in love with him in that front seat before you’d ever even kissed him. That’s what that feeling was, before you could really understand it.

You think of how the transmission finally gave out on that car, on his drive up to Syracuse a few days before the start of senior year, somewhere near Roscoe, New York, and that he’d called you to come and pick him up from the gas station where he’d been towed. Your heart squeezed a little tighter because he called you to come and get him. You had been dating for several months by then, so it was logical, but it still felt good that you were the first person he thought to call from the pay phone.

There were many drives between your parents’ home in Ridgefield and his in Stamford, on the Connecticut/New York border between Fairfield and Westchester Counties, when you were both home that year on school breaks. You drove your silver Subaru Justy then, the one with the three-cylinder engine and manual transmission. You’d pass Revolutionary War-era hillside cemeteries as you drove through Pound Ridge and Bedford — everywhere, really — and you’d feel a slight pang of mortality and gratitude. You shifted in time to the radio, because you were the twenty year-old shit, and you felt your heart beating faster when you passed certain markers and houses, knowing that you’d be with him in just a few minutes. Even less than a few, if you depressed the gas pedal a little bit harder. (Your father taught you to drive stick. You always shifted into third. Even on windy back roads in Connecticut.)

You think of drives you took together when you were dating. The freedom of being together on warm, windows-down nights, when you didn’t care about the destination. His hand on your thigh. The placement. The resting. The hem of your skirt and the way it fell. Your bony, Irish-white knee. The cool air on your bare skin as the fabric shifted.

You remember the parking. Outside your house or a few streets away, in places where there wasn’t any traffic. The cul de sac. The dead ends. The open area near Shippan Point. The shudder of the engine turning off and cooling down. The promising darkness that surrounded when the headlights clicked off. The radio. The cassette tapes. The mix that you made for him when he was still in London, after you’d started dating there, and you had to be the one to fly home first. The one he kept and played, repeatedly.

You don’t always think of these things when you’re riding in the car with him now. You can’t. There are too many trips filled with bad directions and snippy arguments about being late and spilled cheese crackers and pleas for bathroom stops and water and earphones and requests to close the window and open the window and just open the window a little more, Ma, and license plate games and I Spy games and entire childhoods flying by in the blur of parkways and treelines and open spaces. There aren’t even booster seats in the back seat anymore. You can’t even remember who you gave them to.

But sometimes, you reach over and place your hand on his right thigh while he drives. You run your fingers along the inseam of his jeans, back and forth. You remember. And so does he. And he takes your hand with his left hand while he steadies the wheel with his right. And he holds it, in that way that makes you feel protected, that you are his. And he lifts your hand to his lips and kisses it once. And puts it back on his thigh. And keeps holding it in the warm square of his palm. And you say he needs both hands to drive, so you try to pull your hand away, but he keeps it there, in that small shift of pressure, and says, “No. I don’t.”

This is what you’d rather have, even more than the feeling of the first time you got into his car. This is what you’ve always wanted.

You weren’t going to write today. Because there are other things that need doing. Children who need and so greatly deserve to be cared for. A husband who needs and also greatly deserves to be cared for, to be messaged and reminded that he’s adored, in the midst of a challenging time at work. A dog and cat to be fed. Checks to be written. Calls to be made and returned. Uniforms to be washed. Schedules to be organized. Counters to be cleaned.  Milk and bananas and paper towels and spinach and raspberries and mozzarella cheese — and those barbeque PopChips that your kids love to eat after school as a snack, in those little plastic bowls that you purchased from Ikea for them when they were small — all of these things need to be shopped for, and purchased, and bagged, and put away in their proper places in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets. There are towels to fold, and you’d rather not think about the unruly mob of worn, dog-hair-encrusted black Gold Toe socks forming in the laundry room. They’re restless. They cry out for cleanliness, albeit softly, because they’re 100% cotton. They want justice. They seek their rightful place with their soul sock match in the small, upper left-hand drawer of my husband’s oak dresser.

These are things that need doing. Not frivolity, missy. Not dreaming. Not crafting. Not dabbling. Know your place. Your place is good. Seventy-four-thousand other women would kill — easily, swiftly, without any remorse — for your place in this world.

And then a message appears. Something from a friend, saying that there’s a memoir workshop about to happen in a very pretty place somewhere else in this world.

Everything stops for a minute. You stare at the screen and feel your throat clench, just one involuntary spasm of muscle. And the inner workings of that part of your brain — that which you swore to turn off today — that just clicks on all by itself, somehow, because, hand to God, you were nowhere near the controls, and the whirr of the thinking and the words begins, even though the machine sputters and groans under the heavy weight of guilt and fear.

You can’t keep doing this. Not today. You’re not a writer. You’re just a woman. A girl, really, if you’re honest with yourself. Just a girl in a place. That’s all. Nothing special.

So you go downstairs to the laundry room and wrestle with the Gold Toe mob, one by one, unfurling each sock that retains the tight,  balled-up shape that your husband left it in when he pulled it off his tired, achy foot for lo, these many nights. Sometimes it was at 7 o’clock, sometimes at 9:30, after the kids were tucked into bed. Sometimes closer to midnight — when he finally got home, after the keynote speaker and the cocktail hour and the dinner and then the wall of traffic in the damn tunnel, and still managed to take his shoes and socks off, although he was almost sleepwalking through the exercise. He works too hard. Much too hard. You worry about this. A lot. The machine hiccups, hesitates — and damned if it doesn’t start up again. All on its own.

You break up the Gold Toe mob and go back upstairs to the kitchen. After you empty the dishwasher and clean the sink, and answer the emails about the Girl Scout mother/daughter dance tomorrow, you open the message with the link again, because this is what you do to yourself, and you click on the website that describes the workshop in pictures and words. For a minute, you imagine yourself nestled under the comforter that adorns the welcoming bed of each writer’s room. You imagine yourself there at rest. Asleep. Warm. Peaceful. Because you’d done some very good work while you were there.

You think of three other people to send the information to, immediately, because they should have the spot. This is meant for someone else. Not you. But you don’t send it. Not right away. Because you think that it might make them feel worse if you do. Like you’re feeling right now.

It’s too indulgent. Too much money. It’s abject abandonment of your family, really. Leaving these three people you love for a long weekend is — in your guilt-ridden motherly mind — akin to leaving your husband and sending the children off to live with a spinster aunt in Iowa,  and boarding a bus to New York City to join Ziegfield’s chorus line. You know, like the flighty, weak-kneed flapper you really are, right there dead-center in the mushy, undisciplined core of your being. This isn’t something that you just have to do. It’s something you merely want to do. And not exactly sure that you’re good enough to do. You’re not, actually. You’re really not.

You don’t know how else to sift through what you’re feeling, except to sit down for a minute and write, in this freeform way that you always have since you were little. You write this, just what you’re reading now, because you have to expunge it. You have to extricate this very thought and see it before you, with your own aging eyes.

You think of the mother who volunteered at the library with you a few weeks ago — the one who stopped you while you were shelving books and said, “Hey, Kathleen, you’re a writer, I have a question –” And you didn’t hear the rest of what she was saying, because those words — “you’re a writer” — were right there in front of you, because someone else said them to you out loud as something they believed as absolute fact, and you almost teared up while you were putting away those damn books about American dog breeds, the ones that all the second and third graders love to read and that you find yourself forever reshelving. The ones that your own daughter insisted on checking out of the library for month after month. Enough with the Samoyeds already, kid. They’re big dogs. They slobber. We get it.

And that’s the thing of you, really, Kathleen.  These moments of truth and clarity and beauty that you almost don’t allow yourself to feel. Because you think they’re meant for someone else. Not you. That’s the thing of all of us, really. We deny ourselves so many beautiful truths.

1. That I really should have taken a toothpick or an old toothbrush or some kind of wooden skewer to those pesky corners and edges of my appliances and plumbing fixtures — the lip of the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, the sides of the stove top, the openings in my showerhead clogged with mineral sediment — all of which I can’t seem to clean properly.

2. That I’m no longer a size four, the way I was before I gave birth to my two babies.

3. That I bought the wrong-color couch, curtains or throw pillows. That the paint didn’t really match the upholstery the way I thought it would, when I squinted at fabric swatches and paint chips in a poorly-lit hardware store.

4. That Nicki Minaj did indeed have musical talent.

5. That Twitter was a worthwhile pursuit on my smartphone. Facebook, of course, was. Instagram, possibly. Just not Twitter. Or Tumblr.

6. That I really should have eaten haggis more than once.

7. That it was important to argue with my beloved over such trivial things as balled-up, stinky socks, poor time management, errant coffee cups and their resulting stains, fleeting dirty looks, and where we were spending Thanksgiving. I should have just let it all go, taken his hand, and taken him to bed a lot more often. (Husband, if you’re reading this now, don’t get ahead of yourself. I have to take the girl to her softball game tonight.)

8. That I was good enough. I know myself. I’ll still think I wasn’t good enough of a daughter, a wife, a mother or a friend.

9. That it was all worth worrying about. Not much of it happened anyway. Except this one death thing, which I couldn’t have controlled with any amount of worry, apparently. Or bargaining. Or power-walking. Or kale.

10. That I’m done. That I’m ready to go, able to leave behind the people who I love, and this devastatingly difficult and beautiful life I’ve been so fortunate to have been given. There is no question that I will confound my husband and adult children in my final moments (please God may my husband outlive me, so he takes up with a nice girlfriend — still with her own set of teeth — in the nursing home, and may my adult children be old enough to be grandparents themselves), as I struggle to throw the deathbed sheets aside, stand and grip the window frame to keep me upright, and laugh and shriek at the view of the mountains, or the FDR Drive, or a nondescript hospital parking lot somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. I will go out like Zorba the Greek. I will never give in. I will be a spit-fired, huge-hearted, passionate (old — please, please old) pain-in-the-ass Irish woman — so thankful, so greedily desirous of every droplet of this life — until the very moment that they — he, she, whom- or whatever — turn out my light.

[Click on the YouTube video for today's musical accompaniment.]

Me on the stone steps of SU's Hall of Languages, May 1992 -- a few short weeks before the entry-level publishing job, while still in my blissful Doc Marten phase

After I graduated from Syracuse, I worked in a hollow, depressing job as an editorial assistant at a large book publishing conglomerate. My duties included forwarding packets of fan letters that would mostly go unanswered by their recipients, ensuring that authors received the contractually-agreed-upon number of hardcover and paperback editions of their life's work, and circulating book jackets in process from editors, to art directors, and to publicists. The brightest part of my day involved the sharing of secret, snide jokes at assistants' desks, while waiting for department heads to check and initial requisite blank boxes.

It was 1992, and I worked alongside a then-unpublished David Rakoff, whose eloquence, humor and intelligence made the workday far less depressing. And occasionally, more so, for the very same reasons.

We were all employees of a former boutique book publishing house, which had touted the likes of Aldous Huxley, Armistead Maupin and Shel Silverstein, and was transitioning into a grinding, mass-market machine, operated by a well-known, and little-admired, Australian mogul. (The century-old Scribner's bookstore on Fifth Avenue is now home to a bi-level Sephora. Please don't get me started, or I'll weep ugly tears.) Said machine spit out less mainstream authors like cartoonish springs and shards of metal, and only opened its steel trap to ingest those that guaranteed remarkable sales. Celebrities, supermarket mystery writers, toupee-d NFL heroes -- they all fed the machine. We occasionally crossed paths with such authors as they visited the office to kick off publicity and press tours. We fetched them coffee. We retrieved their umbrellas and topcoats. We were small, small cogs.

David was the executive assistant to the editorial director of the trade division. He smoked, like we all did, and he had a gorgeous whirl of thick, black hair, upswept in an un-ironic pompadour. One or two wisps of hair defied his hairline and danced along his high forehead, and accentuated his adept storytelling and sly-witted asides.

David shouldn't have been there. David should have been an author, a performer -- something, anything other than this -- and all of us knew it. Most of all, David. The universe seemed imbalanced, somehow, at such intellectual injustice. Each of us sneered and smoked and drank through our quiet, personal pains, and stood in the shower on random mornings, crying beneath the pulsing stream of water, so our roommates wouldn't hear us.

The editorial assistants gathered at weekly "slush lunches" -- held in a windowless conference room with a long, faux woodgrain table, which held corrugated mail sorters overflowing with the fragile egos of unpublished writers. Our job was to sort through the stacks of unsolicited manuscripts each week, in exchange for a free sandwich and a bottle of Snapple brought in from the nearby deli, and return unfulfilled dreams, receipt requested. Occasionally, we read passages out loud to each other, with the same sort of gallows humor that city morgue workers and medical students must use with cadavers. We had to, or it would consume us. We were butchering souls, and we knew it.

Sometimes, we all went out drinking together at the end of the week, fancying ourselves as the latest incarnation of Dorothy Parker's Algonquin grouping. We were no such thing. Only David was.

Once or twice, the party made its way to David's place downtown. He had the kind of apartment described in an O. Henry short story -- the tenement walk-up flat with a cast-iron bathtub set squarely in the middle of the old-world kitchen. It suited him, somehow. He used the bathtub as a base for a dining table, I think, and a group of us sat around drinking and smoking and imagining ourselves salon-worthy. But we weren't. We were simply the people who would mature into larger-cog jobs and tax brackets that allowed us to make NPR and Channel Thirteen possible because of our generous donations. David was the one who actually became a regular on-air contributor to NPR. That was the difference.

In these sorrowful trenches of book publishing, I had come to the sudden realization that I wasn't going to be a twentysomething prodigy of a writer, as I had naively imagined myself becoming. I had no stories to tell. At night, I occasionally drank tumblers of cheap whiskey by myself, and quietly panicked that I wasn't going to become much of anything, really, except very much indebted to Messrs. Visa and MasterCard.

I lived downtown on Twenty-Second Street then, in the shadow of the Flatiron Building -- the tri-cornered architectural icon that stood impervious to my existence as I walked home along Fifth Avenue. I would never be integral. I wasn't made of limestone, or of anything permanent.

I rented out a small bedroom in my future sister-in-law's breathtaking loft apartment in that first year of living in Manhattan. It was a small sleeping loft, really, built above the bathroom -- so small that my boyfriend couldn't sit fully upright to read, or he'd bang his head on the sloped ceiling. The sex up there was my salvation, albeit gymnastic -- and often hushed.

It was a fabulous apartment with an open floor plan, exposed brick, and levels. Lots of levels. (Sorry, Kramer.) The first time that my father visited, he looked at me squarely and said, "You'll never live in another apartment as nice as this in Manhattan. Understand that." There were three of us sharing the apartment -- my sister-in-law-to-be, an associate at a Big Six accounting firm who traveled frequently; the loft owner's niece, who worked in derivatives at a major US bank and dated an Italian marquis; and me, who humbly made do with a salary of $18,500 per year through frugality and skipped meals, and outfitted herself only at Strawberry markdowns. (If you're not familiar with Strawberry, consider yourself fortunate.)

When I had enough money to take the subway to work, I'd ride up to 57th Street on the 4/5/6 line and exit at the stairs under Bloomingdales' flagship store. I'd pass homeless people who had made their home on and around the set of subway exit stairs, and, shamefully, envy them. My depression-tinted glasses only enabled me to see these souls free from the tether of normality, from aspirations and expectations, with nothing but time to call their own -- time I foolishly thought was spent solely on sleep, masturbating and drink. They'd already fallen and survived the impact. Not like me, teetering and unsteady atop a malformed twenty-two year-old ego. I knew there would be such an unnerving clatter, such bruising, such brokenness, when it all gave way.

I loathed the ascent of those dank subway stairs, opening onto Lexington Avenue. I hated the confines of my beige assistant's cubicle -- that place of obligation that reminded me daily, hourly, of what I was never going to accomplish.

Desperate to lift the fog -- and whittle my "fat" 128-pound waistline into that of New York's required anorexic measurements -- I'd show up for a Step class before work ("Grapevine! Grapevine!") at the now-defunct Living Well Lady gym across the street. Mind you, no lady who procured a membership to this gym actually embodied a life well-lived. She would only have an ongoing series of painful cryogenic appointments with a podiatrist, because she'd contracted plantar warts from the unsightly women's changing room.

At Living Well Lady, I was an idle participant in a class of obese outerborough admin assistants and bank tellers, all strangely unaware that the eighties -- and several dress sizes -- had passed them by. They mocked present-day fashion, and their very shapes, in shiny, strained leotards and tights. They mis-stepped on varying heights of molded plastic risers, and plodded ever closer to turning their edema-ish ankles, abruptly ending their grotesque morning kickline. After class had ended, I'd sit alone for a few minutes on the locker-room bench as their sleeves and blazers grazed my head, a poly/acrylic flurry of Chaus and Jones New York, rushing to be at their desks before life's starting gun went off at 9 am.

After several years in this repetitive routine, I moved on to the next stage of my life -- to a series of jobs at Conde Nast that eventually offered me the title of advertising copywriter. I still keep that first business card in my wallet, because I shamefully needed that talisman. Still do, even now. Who am I kidding? Writers doubt. Always.

I didn't keep in touch with many of those assistants after I left. I speak to perhaps only one or two now, on Facebook. We've all moved on to grander positions, and hopefully, to happier places in our lives. It's a time that many of us haven't been ready to return to. I'd heard through mutual friends that one assistant had even been institutionalized, for a time. Perhaps still, in a small, cramped, New York City apartment somewhere, with no natural light streaming in.

David, however, had soared, to his obvious credit. He became a contributor to Ira Glass' program on NPR, wrote articles for magazines and the New York Times, and earned a rightful place on bookshelves as a celebrated author of several essay collections. Years earlier, he had suffered from a "touch of cancer," as he once called it, having been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in his twenties. He'd gone through several rounds of radiation then, and avoided chemotherapy, a decision which predisposed him to being a likelier candidate for a second, more aggressive battle with cancer later in life. They were poor odds. He'd be stricken with the disease again in 2010.

About a year or so before his death, when I was unaware of the recurrence of David's cancer and his grim diagnosis, I had messaged him to offer congratulations on the publication of his third collection of essays, Half-Empty. I hadn't yet finished reading it, but I selfishly wanted to connect and tell him how happy I was for his achievements. He was kind, and slyly cutting in his response, just the same as he always had been. We messaged back and forth, and a week or so later, he "liked" the photo I posted of my son on Facebook, the one proudly showing off the library card that he'd just secured. David went on to write me a kind, private message about my son's eyes, and how much they looked like mine, and that they were already wise. He wished us all well. I wished him the same, not knowing how ignorant those words could seem to a person facing such dire realities. I would realize his circumstances only when I reached the final essay in his book, the one that candidly and achingly described the betrayal that his body had inflicted upon him. I couldn't read the essay in one sitting, but approached it cautiously, opening and closing the book over a span of several days, because the details were so frighteningly real.

David died last summer, after a painful and disfiguring battle with a sarcoma that had erupted from his left collarbone. As he explained in the essay, several surgeries and rounds of chemo had left him weakened, without the use of his left arm, and finally, with resignation as to what would transpire. "Why me?" he said in an interview before his death. "More likely, 'Why not me?'"

Strangely, I learned through social media that David had died, in the way that I've come to learn about so many other facts and pieces of breaking news. I was backing out of my driveway in my suburban automobile, and received a message from a mutual friend on my smartphone. I pulled my car over to the curb, read through the message, and cried in the driver's seat. The skies opened just then, and pelts of rain, eerily timed to my sobbing, rapped on the hood of the car.

I wasn't his friend. I wasn't his peer, although I realized that some of the injustice I felt was rooted in the unfairness of his being taken so young. He was only forty-seven when he died.

I simply knew him during a short period of my life, for a set time, and that was all I could really say. And that wasn't what mattered. I didn't deserve any grief in this.

David deserved to live. He deserved to write more essays and publish more books. He deserved more acting roles. He deserved the very banality of life that I continue to hold a place in.  It still didn't make any sense, although some oncologist or genetic researcher could surely say otherwise. I don't want to know their reasons.

I don't even deserve to write this essay about him. That's how much lesser I am, than his life, his talents, and his trials.

But I'm writing about him today, because I can't delete this draft that I've been keeping in my WordPress file since he died. Still, so selfish.

David wouldn't give my words any thought or credence, if he were here, but if I'd managed to corner him in a dark downtown bar in Manhattan, and pressed him for a critique, he'd delight in dissecting such an essay, in finding the many cliches and poor word choices that litter this text. Black eyes glinting, lithe dancer legs crossed, lips pursed and hinting at his amusement, he'd unleash a barrage of literary bullets on me at close range. Because he was that gifted, and because that is what I so righteously deserve. Such is life's cruel, beautiful imbalance.

[Click on the YouTube video for today's musical accompaniment.]
Stacey Loscalzo, my friend and immensely talented writing cohort, always gives me thoughtful writing prompts through her blog posts. I should be working on the first assignment for a writing class that I’ll be taking in June — my obituary, which really is a fantastic exercise. Doesn’t even spook me, because I’m Irish, and we plan our funerals way ahead. Like, years in advance. I come from a long line of people who let everyone know that the dresses and suits they want to be laid out in are hanging in the front closet, wrapped in dry-cleaners’ plastic. But I’m just not that morose this morning. I’d rather do this exercise first. A list of my life’s firsts.

First car: It wasn’t really mine, in so much as I made payments for it, but the first car I drove was a 3-cylinder Subaru Justy with manual transmission. (Taught my then-boyfriend-now-husband how to drive a stick with that car.) If you hit the dashboard just right with both palms, the headlights switched off. Good times. Drove it back and forth to Syracuse in college more times than it should have survived such trips. I still love Subarus. And I still love the man who grinded those gears on Redfield Place.

First teacher: My kindergarten teacher, Miss Joan. Looked and dressed like Jane Russell.

First job: Babysitting at twelve or thirteen. Does that count? First office job — quality control assistant at Monitor Plus, a company in Wilton, Connecticut which somehow had ties to Nielsen’s TV ratings. My job was to watch VHS tapes of station broadcasts from end to end, and confirm that commercials aired when the network and its affiliates said they did, per their billing statements. Perfect job for fifteen year-old kids like me and retired people, of which there were many. For weeks, I had to help them figure out all the buttons on their VCRs. I’m a nice girl. I felt bad.

First concert: Peter Gabriel at Madison Square Garden, 1984. I was fourteen and really thought I was all that. (Thanks to Wendy Evans and her mother, who sat at the coffee shop in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street and waited until the show was over so she could take us back home to Connecticut.) Still have the t-shirt, and I sleep in it sometimes, but only when my husband’s away. Because no husband should bear the shock of seeing his wife in bed, adorned in bedclothes that display the faded, bare-threaded face of Peter Gabriel in full “Shock the Monkey” makeup.

First plane ride: Everyone we knew lived no more than two hours away, so we didn’t go anywhere. I was thirteen the first time I traveled on an airplane, because my parents were finally able to afford a fancy vacation. It was a big deal. We went to the Florida Keys. I think I still have freckles from that trip.

First best friend: Ann Widerka. Met her when I was four. Friends for almost forty years.

First sleepover: I think it was at Ann’s house. Must have been.

First person you talked to today: My daughter. My husband leaves for work long before I’m roused and cognizant of speech.

First movie in a theatre: Bambi. My mother took me to a matinee when I was four, on a hot day in August. It was a beautiful old theater — I think it must have been RKO Keiths in Flushing, Queens, because it was air-conditioned. Probably a primary reason why we went to the movies, since we didn’t have it at home yet.  Can’t remember. I cried when Bambi’s mother died, and rubbed my eyes with salty, buttery fists fresh from the popcorn tub, and cried some more because they were stinging. I can still viscerally feel the salt in my eyes, the urgency with which my mother pulled me by the arm out of the theater, and that horrible shock of light and heat as I was roughly ushered out of the dark, cool, quiet and out into the bright, loud midday street of the outerboroughs. I still can’t watch Bambi. God, I have issues.

First state you lived in: Born in New York. New York City, to be exact. Island of Manhattan. Not that I’m proud of it or anything. I think there’s a small plaque in front of Mount Sinai Hospital on the Fifth Avenue side. Really small.

First pet: A pet worm, aptly named Shermy, which I adopted with said best friend Ann. We found him after a rainy day and kept him in a dirt-filled shoebox for three days. It’s so ironic how a child’s well-meaning, misplaced love can bring about the untimely demise of so many innocent creatures, when forcefully removed from their natural habitat. We meant well. We left him grass and dandelions.

First foreign country you visited: Canada on an eighth grade field trip. (Me too, Stacey! Mohn-ray-ahl. And Kay-bec.)

First doll: My mother says it was a fabric doll with yellow yarn hair named Pinky. I remember a Holly Hobbie rag doll. I wasn’t much for dolls when I was little. I much preferred furry plush animals for sleeping and hugging too tightly and drooling on.

First magazine you subscribed to: I think my mother bought me a subscription to some progressive teenage magazine, which is now, sadly, defunct. We saved Highlights for trips to the dentist.

First horror movie: Friday the 13th at a sleepover when I was ten or eleven. Scarred me to this day. I despise horror movies, gore, anything depicting abject torture and agony. I’m too empathetic.

First collection: Rocks. My father used to work for a mining company and would travel to mining locations in California, the South and the Midwest, Mexico — even South America. He’d always bring me back a rock from one of those trips, and he’d sit with me and show me the veins on the specimens, and the minerals and gems they were in search of. He once brought me a rock hewn by a hand tool, not machine-drilled or cut, just extracted by the sheer strength of one blow.

First instrument played: Guitar. Even though I really wanted to play the drums. Desperately wanted to play the drums. We lived in an attached house in Queens. No drums. Started taking guitar lessons again at forty-two. Trying to get up the courage to ask my guitar teacher if I can sit behind the drum kit in his practice room.

First thing you learned to cook: Sugar cookies with my mom. That’s really baking, not cooking. If we’re going to be strict about this — then I’ll say english-muffin pizzas. If we’re going to be really strict and insist that it had to be stovetop-related, then Chinese stir-fry.

First professional sporting event you went to: A Yankees game, mitt in hand. Didn’t catch anything, but I didn’t care, because I was just so thrilled to be there.

I’ve posted this before, but I’m posting it again. Yes, yes, we mothers all deserve the breakfast in bed and the mani-pedi appointment and the seven minutes of peace and the handmade cards and coupons for dog-walking and the floral arrangements and the brunch — oh, the mimosa-saturated brunch of delight! — on Mother’s Day, the holy day of maternal obligation, when we are thanked profusely for all the ass-wiping and uniform-washing and food shopping and bill-paying and fight-stopping and homework-helping and stuffed-animal-recovery and boo-boo-kissing and dear God, perhaps most important, the tongue-biting.

But on this Mother’s Day Eve — I don’t know what the hell it’s called, work with me here –I’m posting this with gratitude for all the good men out there who make Mother’s Day — and every day — so meaningful. Especially mine. Thanks, babe.

************************************************************************************************************************************************

He’s gonna kill me. But I’m going to publish this list on my blog anyway. What the hell. That’s what you sign up for when you marry a perimenopausal hack.

[Click on the YouTube video for today's soundtrack.]

1. He is the father of my two children, and whenever they do things that make me burst with pride or laugh in a spit-out-your-morning-coffee-kind-of-way, they make me so goddamn grateful that I chose him, and that he chose me. No one else in this world that I’d rather combine DNA with.

2. He makes yummy sounds whenever I cook for him.

3. He never panics. Even when there’s an oxygen mask suddenly strapped to my face while I’m giving birth, and twelve people in white coats and nurses’ scrubs urgently rush into our hospital room. Even when I get a call that my father has to be wheeled into open-heart surgery immediately. Even when our little boy’s lips turn ashen-gray and he has difficulty breathing and we don’t know why. He looks directly into my eyes and doesn’t look away. He winds his way through the twisty-turny maze in my head, and seeks me out until he finds me, cowering in a mushy corner of my over-analyzing brain, hiding and terrified. He tells me it will be alright, and I believe him. Completely.

4. When he’s driving too fast, and I jam on the imaginary passenger-side brake that I still believe will work after nearly sixteen years of marriage, he doesn’t stop the car and pull over to the side and tell me to get out and walk. He really should, but he doesn’t.

5. He breaks the cardinal rule of Guys’ Weekend and tells me all the details afterwards.

(At least I think he does. Hmmm.)

6. He’s my own personal Geek Squad whenever something’s fer-screwy with the computer. Or the printer. Or my cellphone. Or the cable box. Or the DVD player. Or the answering machine. Or the garage door opener. (I was an English major. Not a mechanical bone in my body.)

7. He believes in me, especially at the exact moments when I’ve stopped believing in myself.

8. He lets me buy clothes for him. We went through an unfortunate overalls phase together in the early nineties, and he didn’t fire me as his personal shopper, even though he looked like an extra in Dexy’s Midnight Runners “Come On Eileen” video. Thanks for that, honey.

9. He’s a gem of a man in every sense of the word. Like, Top Five Men Ever In Existence. OK, Top Three. Jesus and Levon Helm are One and Two. I can’t provide details or there will be lines of women outside my door with pies and casseroles.

10. He puts the stresses of the day aside each time he walks in the door at night. I don’t know how he does it, but he is present, and loving, and cheerful, every time. Every goddamn time. (Now I’m rethinking the Top Five Men Ever order in #9 above. Maybe my husband is One and Levon Helm is Two. Because Jesus wasn’t even that easy-going. Remember the moneychangers in the Temple? That was a tough day at work for JC, and he totally lost it. And snipped at Mary Magdalene afterwards. Not my husband. No, sir.)

11. He doesn’t say a word about all the deliveries that arrive here regularly via UPS. Not one word.

12. He signs up for every shift in our little family. He wants to make memories with his babies. He wants to let me know he’s got my back. He shows up, he makes the effort, and he participates. Actively. He’s in this — this whole messy, frustrating, heart-swelling, mucky, glorious, exhausting, uplifting thing that we built together with chewing gum and college dive bar beer coasters and London take-away Chinese food containers and subway tokens and Cheerios and plane tickets and Advil tablets and burp cloths and cups of coffee and loose change and honest-to-God love.

13. He has the ability to grow a beard eight seconds after he shaves. Damn, that’s sexy. I miss his full-on mountain man look from our college days. Mercy. But the weekend scruff is enough.

14. He leaves me alone every December to string the lights on the Christmas tree all by myself. He’s Jewish. He didn’t grow up stringing Christmas lights. And he’s secure enough in his manhood that he can hand that task over easily. (He’s also not an idiot. Who the hell wants that job?) He’s never understood why we drag a dead tree into the house and decorate it with “Precious Moments” and “Peanuts” ornaments. And electrify it, thereby increasing our risk of a fire tenfold. And then turn all the lights off, swig Baileys, and cry. (And we Gentiles think a bris is a bizarre tradition?) He leaves me be while I blast my Christmas music and curse in the living room in the darkness, tangled in tiny white lights that may or may not be working, just like my father did before me and his father before that. He honors my traditions. Don’t even get me started on St. Patrick’s Day. The man should be canonized for lo, these many Marches.

15. He still holds my hand. And he still puts his arm around me at the movies.

16. He’s an old-school man of honor. In his life, in his expressions of love, in the way he parents, at his workplace, in the moments that make his children — and his wife — so proud of who he is and how he conducts himself. The older I get, the more I realize how few of them are out there. And how lucky I am to have this one under my roof.

17. He listens to me — about my delusions of grandeur and my moments of worry about the children and my surety that I’m dying from a rare disease and my flashes of anger about untrainable dogs or highway drivers or insurance companies.

(At least I think he does. Hmmm.)

18. He’s filled twenty years with words and actions that let me know exactly how he feels about me, and I’ve done the same, and if something happened to both of us tomorrow, we both know that we’ve had all of that, that it was real, and it was ours, and that it’s been much more than enough. I pretended for a long time that I was a tough outer borough Irish chick who didn’t need anybody — not no way, not no how. I’ve learned that the honest, vulnerable expression of love is much tougher — and more fulfilling — than any tough chick persona. And so worth the risk. I’m more grateful than I can ever say that he’s taken the leap with me, and that he’s held my hand — so tenderly, so assuredly — through the glorious rush of life.

Here’s my Week Three installment of a fun and thought-provoking year-long exercise from Morrea Seal, aptly called the 52 Lists Project. This week’s assignment: list the things you should be proud of. If you’re in your forties like I am, and need a magnifying glass as big as your head to read my list from the Instagram shot below, just scroll down and you can read my list there. More important: write your own list. Then tuck it away someplace safe and special. You’ll feel pretty, pretty good afterwards.

 

 

• my strength — not so much physical as emotional
• my never-ending goal to improve myself, do better, keep trying, and get back up when I fall
• my children’s hearts — and their capacity for love
• overcoming a painful childhood and ending (or at least lessening) generations of dysfunction
• transitioning from a little girl into a full-grown, blossoming woman without too many chinks on my armor
• my sense of humor, which saves me and — occasionally — others
• for keeping the the child within me well-loved and nurtured
• my writing — for sharing it and submitting it, and for being confident enough to risk rejection, frustration and failure
• being brave enough to live out loud
• being told that I make other people feel loved, welcomed, supported, and cared for
• teaching my children to be kind and loving souls
• having the cojones to try stand-up comedy in NYC in my twenties
• moving across the country to San Francisco, knowing no one else other than the husband who asked me to come with him
• being a pretty darn good hostess
• my acting ability — I coulda been a conten-duh
• writing essays and stories and gratitudes that make other people feel really good
• my cooking skills
• my creativity
• my ability to make our house a cozy, safe, nurturing home
• my photography skills — especially my selfies (ahem)
• my about-to-be-seventeen-year marriage — the smartest thing I ever did was say yes to that man