LaurieWrites

Ringtumdiddy

I knew it was a ringtumdiddy day as soon as I got on the doorstep home from school. Something about the combination of cheese, tomato soup, onions, and whatever else he threw in there was powerful enough to move straight through my grandparents' thick, wooden front door and punch me in the nose. 

I hated that smell, which is unbelieveable now, given my love for both of those foods separately and, I'd guess, in combination, if I tried it.

"It's Ringtumdiddy Day. Gross!" I'd say to my grandmother, making dramatic gagging motions, as she told me to shush, maybe I could learn to like it. 

Inside, he stood at the stove in their tiny, galley kitchen, smaller than any I've had in any apartment, stirring, stirring, stirring. 

He hummed always, at all times, but especially when he cooked, and he had our genetic quirk of word repetition. 

"Hmmm...ringtumdiddy. HMMMM HMMMM HMMMM."

"Ring."

"Tum."

"Diddy." 

"You want some, Laurie Anne? You want some ringtumdiddy?" 

"NO WAY GROSS NO WAY." 

"Alrighty. Fine. Fine. More for me. Moooorrrrreeee ringtumdiddy for me." 

The stuff we have no idea we'll miss while it's happening is both a crime and a comfort. 

At holiday celebrations now, my family unravels stories we've retold hundreds of times about ourselves and what we've seen together like they're new, bringing my grandparents into the room as surely as if they were sitting there, because they can't be anywhere else when we are all together. We time travel to that tiny kitchen as we walk the rooms of that duplex. We talk about the bacon my grandmother cooked for breakfast, leaving it on a paper towel on the back of the stove for all-day grabby hands. We talk about cinnamon-sugar bread and tuna fish and hardboiled eggs on Friday. We talk about his chocolate chip cookies and blame our ovens for why we can never replicate them, no matter how much we try to decipher the hidden lines on the back of that yellow and black bag of chocolate chips.

Inevitably, one of my uncles will say,

"Ringtumdiddy. Daddy loved that godawful stuff. You'd know what you were in for as soon as you hit the porch after school."

I knew what they knew, and so did my mom and my aunts, my sister, and my older cousins. The younger kids who cruelly didn't get a chance to know him, meanwhile,  repeat their lines, no rehearsal necessary.

"RINGTUMDIDDY, what's THAT? Did you have to eat that, Dad?"

And we tell them it was something Granddaddy made, and poured over toast. We note that it came in handy during Lent. We may mention the silver double boiler, and how we don't know where the recipe came from, and we should ask one of his surviving siblings if it was something that stretched for the 18 kids in their family, or it was just something he picked up randomly along the way.

And I'll say to them the same thing, always, the thing I believe besides that he likely did enjoy the taste of it or he wouldn't have made it so many times throughout his life. I'll say what I believe after I've searched for it on the internet and found it spelled differently, and with different things thrown in, making it not what it was in our house, not the same smell of cheese and tomato soup, and maybe some onion, that came through that solid wooden front door like a memory it would be someday. 

I say, "I think he really just liked to say the word."  

California Next

I am going to California today. I am so excited, and so ready. 

In a way, I feel like I could dip my toes in the ocean and turn around and go home when I get there, but I know that that is not the plan at all. There is something there, too, and I have to spend the time I allotted to see people and things and to be in places until I'm ready to leave. I have had very little mapped out this whole time, by design, until I have to make the next decision. That was the central point, to learn to listen again. And I'm still hopeful, although I don't know about what. I'm nervous, too, but that's becoming standard, something to be worked through to get to the good stuff. 

I can't stop thinking about Georgia O'Keeffe. I keep thinking about courage, and creativity, and singular dedication to a craft that somehow shapes a life. I've been wondering if I have it, or if I just love it as an idea, a museum exhibit itself. I hope I do. I love how she didn't know she was looking for New Mexico and found it, how she just kept showing up until it all happened there for her. New Mexico was hers -- it's not mine, I know, and it doesn't have to be. It's just so useful as a guide. 

Image: Wikimedia Commons

I like that I don't know all of her story. I like how Christine and I sat on the couch last night and watched the dvd that I bought at the museum, listening to Gene Hackman narrate this pioneer artist's life, and how several times we looked at each other in some kind of amazement and also recognition of what that takes, of what it requires to make that kind of life come together. (And also the mutual acknowledgement that this lady was a badass. Just was, so much of one.) 

I have found a lot of solidarity out here. I have been surrounded by the energy of strong, compassionate, giving, people, some of the best of all of those qualities I've ever known, I'm not kidding. Everyone who has welcomed me has been a healer of some kind, which I didn't plan at all, except in my subconscious. I couldn't have done it better if I had. 

I have also found some bullshit and nonsense, both in and outside of myself. Life continues and connections begin,  reappear, and disappear in the middle of all of this activity. I do not take my best friend or my sister or my parents for granted, but I especially don't when those voices that know me the best come to me from far away. 

 

I haven't had any great revelations, just a few little ones, and I'm okay with that, because those were the ones I needed to get out of the way so the rest of the things will come along. I have lost some track of the things I wanted to document -- not pictures, there are plenty of those -- just thoughts about some of the things I'm seeing, but those are all in my brain for when I need them, too. Somewhere in the middle it just blurred, a lot of it, into signs and markers and mountains -- much of it beautiful, some of it desolate. I have loved seeing all of the things I've seen so far, even if I didn't love all of it. 

I've gotten reacquainted with some of my ingenuity, and the edges of my anxiety, too, and what I need -- not want, an important distinction -- to do to work with that. I have made some unwise decisions, but nothing too huge and damaging. I have carried some pain with me for a very long distance that is dug in pretty deep, and that's uncomfortable, but I am going to set that shit on fire as much as I can, every day, until it's gone. 

Finally, this silly picture before I get going again. I stopped in the dark and stood on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, in a huge puddle. I did this because I have this family who I miss so much, who once sat around a restaurant table and spontaneously sang "Take It Easy" along with the overhead music. It happened several years ago. It was one of the best moments of my life, easily, those endless rounds of "oooh-oooh-ooohs" with the people I love the most -- so simple and everything that mattered at the same time. And although I felt like the jerky tourist I was when I stopped to take this (plus, that puddle was disgusting, seriously) it was for a higher purpose, I swore silently to the cars driving by in the dark, slowing down to look, until I could get something that didn't make me look too bad. I wanted to say I'd done this silly thing, that I had a piece of my heart in the form of people in mind when I did. 

Lighten up while you still can. Don't even try to understand. Just find a place to make your stand, and take it easy. 

It's not a bad goal. I'm done with trying too hard, but I'm not done working, at all. I am really looking forward to the next stop. 

Laugh at the Trouble of Parting

This Mother's Day, I'm working with Clever Girls in support of Macy's Heart of Haiti to shine a light on the "trade, not aid" program, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans struggling to rebuild their lives and support their families after the 2010 earthquake.

A few days before my grandmother died, I saw her for what I'm pretty sure now I knew would be the last time.  It was late in the evening, in the last days of December. My own mother drove us to the nursing home on the way home from a family reunion, where I sat by her bed under the flourescent bulbs and wept and couldn't stop. She stroked my hand with her one good one, bewildered. 

"Whatsa mattah? Whatsa mattah? Don't cry. It's okay. Don't cry. Why you cryin'?" 

"Because you're so sick," I said. "And I can't help you. I don't know what to do."

More to the point, I told her the truth, finally: that I did not know what I would do when she left me. I told her there weren't enough tears for her. At 38, with a mother there to support me and the wherewithal to do whatever I needed to, really, to get by, I just did not know what I would do without her 85 pounds of awesome and her overall input in my physical world. I did not know how to live without her, because I'd never had to. She existed in my life from infancy as an ally and an advocate, for various reasons and in various ways. They never tell you at the beginning about this part at the end. 

I wasn't supposed to tell her these things. She was frail and sick and often confused, her body and her spirit finally caving in to rest after more than a decade of recovery and relapse from a massive stroke and God knows how many mini-strokes in the daily mix. She had never gotten over her anger at losing her physical abilities or her independence, but she showed remarkable flexibility in moving around and adapting to what were sometimes really hard transitions.

I showed up for visits to the various facilities she needed to adjust to as her care needs changed with snacks she didn't want, clothing she wouldn't wear, and an obsessive desire to fix her television that she brushed off in favor of the crappy local news channel. We talked surface stuff, mostly, things she wanted to hear about and know, a work schedule that she said was too grueling even if I told her it was no big deal, and how could I even explain the internet to her as a time-waster? (When I started working in senior services, she'd concluded that I was a doctor for old people. She bragged to the unimpressed residents at her dining table that I was a doctor. I corrected her a couple of times and then I gave up.) I'd sat with her in ERs a couple of times, done some bush league elder advocacy that didn't compare to the stuff my parents dealt with daily when it came to hospital and assisted living and nursing home staff and back again. I cried on elevators and in my car when I left, but I did not let her see it, not ever, until this cold night at almost the end. 

I really should have known better than to stress out a dying person. It seems like with all my years of counseling training, I'd have picked this up in one of the manuals, and yet there I was, dripping tears on her bed sheet. I fail end of life in my own family. 

However, my grandmother did that night what I've learned over my conscious lifetime that moms do. I learned this mostly from her, and from my own mother, her daughter-in-law, with some other data from my aunts, my friends with kids or even without who possess maternal energy that lights the world, from my childhood stories of Mary that are my strongest mythical tie to Catholicism. I quite simply believe that Marie White stopped her own hastening dying process to attend to me. Her eyes cleared and she looked at me and she told me that  this was a real shame, yes, but I would be okay. She transmitted to me with her eyes and with her touch a desire to stay and stop my pitiful sadness that was as strong as it was impossible. 

She obviously would never have left me if she had a choice, and beyond me she would have chosen not to die at all, because she liked being alive in a practical, curious way, as well as the way of a caregiver. I actually believe that she stayed alive through as many health setbacks and eating problems and winter colds and crazy surgeries because not only did she not want to leave her family, she just didn't think that she should, or that it was a good idea. And this all sounds as crazy and woo-woo to me on one level as it sounds completely rational on every other. It is the very heart of love. And if one has been lucky enough to be loved, and protected, and fought for like that, I'm not sure what else you need. 

My grandmother would have thought that talking about being a parent was ridiculous, honestly, like talking about air or groceries or the veracity of the Holy Trinity. Some things were and that was that. Her dad died pretty young and her brother was killed in World War II, she took care of her sister and pitched in for her mom. In her world of duty you did what you did and you got what you got and what she got was four sons and seven grandchildren and that was okay too.

Yes, she worked her butt off. No, I cannot speak to her dreams and inner thoughts, but from all appearances she really liked her kids and the grandchildren when we came along. She would have always rather been with us than not. She liked helping children learn and being a parent and a coach (although not always the most tactful sort) came rather naturally to her. I think she would look back at me from whatever beyond she's in to say that this is a whole bunch of goings on for something that made a certain amount of sense at the time, that of course I cried that night, of course it was a real shame that she had to go, because she'd have much rather stayed here. As the Irish funeral prayer my sister found for her funeral program says,

"All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting,  when we meet again."

She believed that. I didn't, so much. Now I do because I like the concept, nothing more, and whenever I read these words, which is admittedly often, I smile. 

I did not go back to see her after I left the room that night, and she died a few days later. I have felt great guilt at various times since that I didn't witness her passing closer to the time, but I've come to the conclusion that we finished our business that night. It was the exchange that we needed to have to mark the end of a profound human relationship. It left space for everyone else to have their time, to say what they needed, or not. I'm pretty sure our parting words that last night were the usual mishmash -- be careful, I'll see you soon, come by when you can. 

One brief moment, and all will be as it was before. 

When my family drifted out of the funeral home the last night, I hung around until my uncle said that I had to go, that I needed to leave my grandmother sometime. I conceded and did this, but although I was grateful for the nudge, I really was, he wasn't exactly correct. As I move through the world I know all of the hype is true: I never will leave her, and she will never be gone from me. My Kubler-Ross stages of grief have moved in waves for three years, they've gone out for brunch together, picked up hobbies and gone on a few beach vacations by now. But when you aren't ever left by a person in the truest sense of never leaving, you're much less inclined to do it yourself (unless you have a personality disorder or are just not the grateful sort, I guess. I'm talking best case scenarios here.) It's the best kind of luck and the only thing about love I've ever needed to learn. That, and that when you're a mom or someone like it, you'll try to take a break from a process as arduous as dying to attend to what an overgrown weeping kid needs, I guess because you've never ever ignored anything she needed before, so why start now?

I know I've been loved like that. I don't need to ask for more.  

Thank you to Macy's Heart of Haiti for sponsoring my participation in this “Share Your Heart" promotion. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Honest.

I was walking to my car today, leaving Home Goods without anything, because they didn't have what I wanted. I was wondering where I was going to go next that might, jingling my keys, digging the weather, because today was another gift of pretty that we've been getting so much of this spring that it almost makes me forget about the polar ice caps, regardless of the fact that I can't. 

A woman was walking towards me, I did notice that much. When I got about close enough to touch her if I'd wanted to, she stopped, and started talking. 

(This is odd in my area, mind you. Strangers generally do not address other strangers unless directly involved in a transaction or a resolution of some stupid slight, real or perceived.) 

"Can I ask you a question?" she said. "Because you look like an honest person." 

"Sure," I said, processing concurrently just how she'd have ascertained my level of integrity in the literal one second she'd been able to look into my face. 

I took in her physical presence, wondering if she was maybe in some kind of distress, if she was the type to flip out in a parking lot maybe and start asking questions to the air and hey, I was the lucky one who just happened to be there when she did. I'm telling you, people just do not talk to strangers around here, so it just comes to mind, and besides, after years as a counselor, I've learned to respond internally as if in crisis whenever anything out of the ordinary happens. She seemed fine to me, as far as that flawed judgment can go. Physically speaking, she was approximately five foot one inches tall, roundish, black, with closely cropped hair, perfect white teeth, and a gorgeous shade of coral lipstick that screamed "Hey world, I like lipstick, look at it." (This is a sentiment I share, so I am naturally drawn to ladies who also express it nonverbally.) 

"Well, I just got a job opportunity," she said. "It is good, and I got it. And I think I should take it, but my boss wants me to stay where I am. He is guilting me about leaving, 'It's a busy time, we need you,' he's saying. And I'm not sure what to do. "

I can tell you right now that I did not think about what I said at all, or whether or not I was going to say anything. I just said: 

"I say do you. Take it. You have to take your chances, and especially not NOT take them because someone else doesn't want you to or makes you feel badly about them." 

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you so much." 

And then she walked on, and so did I. And as I opened my car and got in and realized that I had just given solicited career advice to a stranger in a parking lot, I felt floored and giddy and drunk with some kind of weird universal connection that I cannot even tell you just about what or why. 

I told Twitter what happened, worrying that it sounded like I was advertising myself as some parking lot shaman who knew stuff about things, but I didn't care. I just...maybe I should have called my mom? One of my best friends? What was I supposed to say? 

"Hey, some lady in a parking lot thought I looked honest and asked for some career advice." 

Because yeah. That is what happened. And as I told Twitter, this person looked, upon further reflection, like a person who really just needed an answer right then and there, or at least needed someone to reflect something, anything back. 

And I guess I was there for that, which is cool. And I started wondering, what if we did that all of the time? What if we stepped outside of our comfort zones more? She didn't know me. I could have been a real jerk. I could have told her to go away. I could have said, no, I'm not comfortable answering your question. 

And hell, I could still be completely wrong. I didn't ask what her current job is or what the new gig is or why she wants to leave or what she's going to. She could be leaving a senator's office to work at a fruit stand, I don't know. But as a human being who has recently given up an incredibly stable position for the unknown, I don't think I'm thinking about that so much right now. I believe that we look for other things when the things we're in aren't cutting it. And people who want us to stay in those things either live in some kind of (not entirely unfounded, sure) fear for us or aren't usually clear on our worth. But I've also come to believe (because I am in some kind of crash course on change, not that I know anything, really, I swear) that even if the next new thing isn't the right one, there will be another thing, at least one, beyond the one you cut your losses for.

I just saw a worry and confusion in this lady's eyes that I've seen in myself a million times, that I've seen so much over the past year that I am sick to death of it, I knew it like I'd seen it in my mirror. Maybe she could spot it from across the parking lot. It's possible. 

I am so glad I did what for me was the correct thing. I'm glad I didn't give in to some kind of freak out fear that she needed something I wasn't prepared to give and shut her down, because I admit it I am not immune to that reaction. I'm glad I listened. I am amazed that she chose me. 

I told my mom that I felt badly, that I felt like maybe I ought to have offered up some kind of connection beyond, asked for an email or given one. But you know, I think maybe some connections are meant to be a minute long. Sometimes any longer and it's spoiled, I guess. I hope so much that her new job is dope. I feel grateful that someone could think for even one second in a parking lot that I'd be the one to answer a question, to tell the truth. That's the grace here. That's the thing I need to live up to. 

I am so grateful to -- and hopeful for -- her, for anybody who's ever felt the need to ask and didn't. I've been her, so many times. I'm so glad she did. 

December First

It is your birthday. You would have been 90 years old today. 

"90?" you would have said. "That's too damn old anyway." 

There is a reason why I'm like this. 

I went to visit you in the cemetery on Thanksgiving for the first time since you died. 

I didn't think for these two years that I could do it, so I didn't. I put it on my life list, even, because it was something I really wanted to do this year, but I had no idea when I'd manage it. And then I went to this two-hour yoga class that morning for the holiday (yoga people like giving thanks and gratitude and all of that bullshit. It's why it's probably good that I hang around them a lot.) And in savasana I set a couple of unintentional intentions (because that is also how yoga messes with your head. It clears a lot of the garbage out and makes you think good things are your idea.) 

So I decided to go see you, that it was time, and that I was capable, and that it was a good use of my time on that particular day. 

I told Sarah on the way that I was going, in the context of another conversation, and she kind of went with me, because she shows up for me like that. She was in my phone in my pocket, anyway. She said she would help me do it  when she saw it on my list, which I thought was the most uncommonly sweet thing that I'd never have to take her up on, and yet that's how it turned out. 

(You would like her so much, because she is straightforward and not sketchy and truthful and fun, like you. You would appreciate that she is a good friend to me, that she is available to me at times like that when I am sad and resolute, when most people would have nothing to do with me at all, also like you, as it turns out. You would make her pancakes and bacon and point her to the Jack Daniels under the sink. And for that, among many other reasons, she would like you too.)

I stopped at My Mom's Place and the same lady who has been there for 20 years was selling flowers. I cried behind my sunglasses because I suddenly couldn't stop when I told her I was there to see my grandparents. She probably hears so many of these awkward stories a day, but she responds like they're new. She's a nice person. She and her son sold me some roses, the color of fall in the sun.

As I told Sarah, she is always open in daylight, even when you pull up there most afraid she won't be. 

You were there. 

There is no nameplate quite yet, which made it easier, I admit. It eased me in. But I knew you were there, because I remembered leaving you there almost two years ago. 

I talked with you, with both of you. I sat scraping dirt and leaves away from the granite while the most amazing late November sun went down around us. I told you things weren't great, but I was pretty sure that they would be okay. I told you that I knew you weren't just there, that you were everywhere I went, because that is true, although I guessed you'd know better than me where you were? I don't know.

I thanked you, again, to the air where I hoped it mattered, for giving me so much of whatever it is that makes it possible to carry this on, responsibility, faith, family, whatever, I don't know. I asked for your help. I did. I need it, not knowing where it will come from, but asking anyway. 

I miss you every day. I will, in some way conscious or not, until I die, because you were one of the indelible prints upon my life. We were buddies since I was born. You taught me to read, and to regulate myself in certain situations, and to ease into someone loving me for no reason. You made me sugar bread and beat me at Yatzhee almost every time and took down the clothes while I walked round and round the oak tree with the dogs.

You also taught me to fight back, to (maybe ill-advisedly) say the thing not quite appreciated in mixed company. You walked with me hand in hand down the street to Nanny's and you were the only person in the world who could always, always remind me in a way that didn't piss me off but instead felt like a Valentine that Jesus and Mary would always love me even if I didn't see it right then. 

You were to me like breathing, and no matter how old you were when you died, which seems to be what people use to measure the impact of a death, it was still the worst thing I've had yet to endure . And I wish I believed what you always taught me to, the part where we are together, but I'm not so sure about that. I just know that every thank you, every memory, every action that happens in my life as a result of what it meant to be your granddaughter for 38 years matters enough to me to create some kind of secular heaven, even if I'm the only one who ever sees it. That is enough for me, and I am grateful, for you, so much, the most. 

Duran Duran (make me smile)

I turned 13 in December, 1983, and like so many other kids my age, I was madly crazily in love with Duran Duran. 

I developed a deep, personal relationship with John Taylor then, and I should probably minimize it now. I should probably tell you I'm over it. I should probably tell you that there is not a creepy time every June 20 when I remember that it's his birthday. I should probably say that when my friends who have similar feelings tell me that they love him more that I'm kidding when I tell them with a fierceness that they are absolutely stone cold wrong. 

I can't. I'm not. I won't. I can't.  

He looked like this then.

Seriously? How do you process that when you're an (extremely) awkward 13-year-old? Well, if you're me, you make a scrapbook. (Yes, I still have it.) You swindle your mom out of money to buy overpriced British music gossip magazines because they had pictures that American magazines didn't. (Thank you, Smash Hits.) You paper every possible surface of your room with his face.

You play air bass, although you have no musical skill. And when you get to high school two years later, you take a creative writing elective wherein your first story is a pitiful fictional account of your MARRIAGE to this man and your vacations ("holidays", naturally) on the very islands where his band's videos were filmed.  

(That last one may have been a little bit painful to type. Oh well.)

I loved him. I thought he was beautiful. I was 13 and he was...24? 25? Sure. Then I was 14 and the video for "A View to a Kill" debuted on Friday Night Videos in the spring of 1985, and I sat up and wrote a NOTE in INSTALLMENTS to my friend Carmen, who was doing the SAME THING at her house, while we waited for our ONE CHANCE that week or maybe, oh my hell, EVER to see this video.

If that doesn't amplify the knowledge of our collective access to media now, I don't know what does. And really, all of my love for immediate gratification aside, was that so bad? We learned anticipation. We had to wait and wait, and doodle flowers and "I LOVE JT" in bubble letters (Simon, in her case) and sit up later than we usually did and then, all of a sudden, there it was, the three-minute thing we were waiting for. There they were, and then they were gone.

That summer I went to what may have been the first concert of my teenage years -- Howard Jones and Paul Young were in the same timeframe -- to see John with Andy Taylor in Power Station, partially processing my grief at missing the entire band on tour in support of Seven and the Ragged Tiger the year before. 

My parents sat in the Merriweather parking lot and drank beer and waited for my cousin and me to emerge. I was even more smitten. He had started another BAND. He could do anything, truly. He was even more beautiful in PERSON.

Seriously. The energy of my love for this guy I didn't and would never know probably wafted the 20 miles or so from where I lived to the White House and contributed to the finer points of policy. Mr. Reagan asked Gorbachev to tear down that wall two scant years later. Coincidence? 

Maybe. 

Anyway. It continued. Power Station quit and Duran Duran took a break with no known end and reconfigured. There was Arcadia, which I thought was quite good, actually, and then in 1998 John put his "Trust the Process" site together. A shirt I bought from that project is still one of my favorites and I'd show you a picture of that too if it wasn't in the laundry. 

But I wasn't just a groupie, I swear. I may have had Duran Duran posters taped on every surface of my room, including the ceiling, which was a huge effort as I've never been terribly coordinated. But as I grew into my appreciation for their music, and spent crazy hours focused on what they produced, I knew they were talented and not just hot pieces OMG. 

Because John said to, I listened to Chic and Bryan Ferry and Ultravox and T. Rex. He dated Jody Watley briefly, so I skipped over "Don't You Want Me" on my dubbed tapes with a certain level of disdain that only matched my envy for her hair. My mother had no IDEA what these cassettes were that she was after for my Christmas stocking (except for Chic, because everybody knew "Le Freak" and "Good Times", and my mom has always been pretty hip.) I knew who Nile Rodgers was, because they told me about him, and I learned early on that I didn't quite get Andy Warhol, but okay, I probably should. I knew that Barbarella was a Jane Fonda movie, and I thought it was funny that they were so obsessed with Debbie Harry, because who wasn't, then? And although language has never been a huge problem for me, "contrived" was one of the first 50-cent words I ever worked into my vocabulary on a regular basis, because they used it constantly in their interviews and it was something that I knew they really didn't want to be. 

And yes, I owned one of those stupid fedoras, and may have purchased some jazz shoes, and rounded out that ensemble with my "Choose Life" t-shirt a la Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" video, because I was Brit Pop all the way. I only pronounced the "True" band's name as "SPAN-dau BAL-let" in what I knew to be entirely supportive company, but the truth is that I was a tiny Anglophile tool, immersed in the music and the vibe of a country that to this day I have never visited. 

It was really, really fun. It was a sickness and a habit, and looking back over how it all evolved I know for sure that there is no way that I could have been any different. 

And then there were songs. I knew every word to every song on every single Duran Duran record. Try me. 

I can peform, in its entirety, including sound effects, the 12-inch single of "The Reflex" (this isn't easy, people) and when I am alone and I listen to "Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile)" which was a cover tune lifted from a British band called Steve Harley & Cockney Rebels, a B-side on that Reflex remix and, in my opinion, one of the best on a very short list of what I consider great live recordings in all of pop music I cry every time. I also air drum, in this case. It's just a great song. 

We had a thing, me and these guys. I don't know when it happened, although I entirely know why (it's not something I can explain, it just makes sense.) It has lasted since 1983 and I'm pretty sure it will always be with me, because why not?

In 2004 (I think, it may have been 2003) they came to D.C. -- to Constitution Hall, in fact, where I will see them this weekend -- on their reunion tour. I had never seen the group intact, and never even seen them perform in any configuration as Duran Duran, only Power Station.

I worried that it would be disappointing. I was concerned that it wouldn't live up to my memories, and that I was too old and too past the point of excitement with them for it to be a good idea. 

I was wrong.

My sister and I went. We were in the upper deck, and it didn't matter, because it's one of those venues where you can see pretty well from anywhere. I lost my mind. I screamed like a teenager. They sounded great. The old songs were as I remembered them and the new ones weren't bad. I was so happy to be there.

We went back again in 2008, to a show at an outdoor venue on the Red Carpet Massacre tour. We had -- I think -- even more fun then. It was everything I needed it to be. 

As for John and all that he portends?

Well, I think this. I think that in the mess of relationships and real life and growing up that is an adult, American life, that if we are lucky a few unsullied things and places and connections remain among the mess. He is one of those things, for me. He was one of the first men -- real or fictional or fictionally real -- who I thought was gorgeous and talented, tall, funny in interviews, with an accent that made me die and a strange little lispy voice that I can hear in my head right now. Was I ever going to know him or be around him or date him? No way. But could I have an uncomplicated, purely appreciative relationship with him at a time when I didn't know how to do that with anyone? Sure.

I don't think I still know how to do that with anyone. Can I still have that with him? Sure. My reasons for this are scarcely different from the reasons why pre-teens chase after Justin Bieber on his Segway, or why my mom's peers passed out for The Beatles on Ed Sullivan or why any of us feel any glorious moment of fleeting, unimaginable joy when we drive with the sunroof open on a perfect weather day. 

Some things just are, and in our culture, this is one that we get for pretty cheap. I can always see the "Save a Prayer" lighter reflections in my mind's arena, is what I'm saying. 

Sure, I could ascribe some kind of weird meaning to how John Taylor, as my first teenaged celebrity crush, represented the first of several (in an entirely fictional and unrequited way, of course) weird relationships with real live bass players and drummers that have taken place across the span of my life. I could say that he was the original representative of men I've driven around and waited for outside of crappy venues, carried their stupid amps and then kissed. I could talk about how scarily prescient it all was, and also the reason why I tell anyone who insinuates that I ought to go out there at 40 and look for a musician to shut her hole, because no thank you. The rhythm section is shut down. We have all retired, unless at some point I pick up a drum, which is entirely likely. 

But I don't want to do that. I just want to call that coincidence, really. Because it's shut down, that is, except for him. JT is forgiven, everything, because in my life, he didn't do anything wrong. He played the bass line on "New Religion" and "Come Up and See Me" and "Last Chance on the Stairway". He smiled that tremendous smile.

And in the most kickass way possible, me 40, him 51, he's still bringing it full circle, back to where we started, which was my favorite part anyway. 

 

Disclaimer: My friend Sarah is working with Duran Duran on blogger outreach for this tour. I have a ticket to the show, and have agreed to use the #duransocial hashtag and to write a post about my experience. But as I hope I have made abundantly clear, I would have gone anyway, and shared my appreciation for these guys with you regardless. 

And the meaning is something you only know

A good friend of my family's died this week. I didn't participate in any of the rituals associated with Jerry's death, and I feel like shit about it, quite honestly. But the story of why is for another blog in another time, and I'll spare all of us. Sometimes the best that I'm capable of being is all locked up, put it that way. 

Jerry was my father's childhood friend. The first thing I remember about him is being away with a bunch of my parents' friends at a farm on a river on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I was probably six or seven years old. Jerry was in law enforcement then and carried a gun. A guy there who ought not to have ever had control of a firearm ended up with it after a lot of hours of beers and hanging out by the river in the rain. This turned into a funnier story than it might have, one near the top of the pile that my family pulls from to retell whenever we get together. 

Never mind. Jerry was one of my father's closest friends. He was a pretty quiet guy, but I always knew that he loved my family. That was clear. 

He got brain cancer a decade or so ago. It didn't look good in the beginning, but he rebounded really well after an initial round of treatment. Shortly after he got what passed for better, he came to my dad with his list of stuff he wanted to do with the time he had left. Bucket list, life list, whatever you want to call it. This was the real deal from a guy who thought he was going to die, got a reprieve, and didn't know if would happen tomorrow or in ten years.

I never knew or don't remember anything else on that list, but a sizable chunk of it added up to he, his girlfriend, and my parents going to places like Atlantic City and Northern Virginia to see Huey Lewis and the News play. Jerry was a party dj for years and enjoyed rock and roll and pop music. When Huey wasn't busy recording crap like "I Want a New Drug", apparently his band was pretty good and Jerry dug it. With a heightened sense of limited time, he wanted to see Huey Lewis play, so that is what my parents did with him.

This also explains why there is a photo in her living room of my mother with Huey Lewis. She likes "Heart of Rock 'n Roll" a lot.  

I'm just...sick and sad that Jerry died. There's nothing profound to say about things that just suck, and I'm tapping away here like I know something but I don't. I'm so sad to see my parents lose their friends in their 60s, because that's too young, and it's happened too many times already. I'm sad that I'll never see him again at any of our gatherings, hovering around the edges in sweat shorts no one but he would wear on purpose, shifting from side to side, showing a constant and engaged knowledge of whatever important thing it was that you may have been up to, the thing that was important to you, anyway.

This, by the way, is the trait that rules the world. Making other people feel valued and showing that you remember and care about things from trivial to tragic that occur in their lives has no equal besides honesty, as far as I'm concerned.  It's the opposite of waiting for someone to stop telling you how they are so you can talk about yourself, dump your own baggage and set the scale back to even. It's a pretty cool way to be, effortlessly. It doesn't come along a lot. 

And I look back to when Jerry brought my dad his list and said "these are the things I want to do that I have a chance to do now, and I would like you to do some of them with me," and I know my parents would have done any of them, pretty much, because their friend had brain cancer. They wanted him to be happy in what time he had left, and didn't want him to be alone. They were the people he wanted to hang out with, and that's such an honor, I'm weeping from it. With all the extraneous garbage I get caught up in from day to day, I wish I could remember all of the time that that's the most important thing, the  people we love and what we all want to do together, whether our timeline is obviously shorter or not. 

I like two Huey Lewis songs. One is "Heart and Soul." The other is "Do You Believe in Love," which I have just listened to approximately 60 times in a row, hoping Jerry may have appreciated that more than my presence at his funeral that I missed. And that is what I will play for him today, because I'm not dead yet, and I have a tiny blog on the Internet, and I can. 

 

Over all we've left undone

(This is a writing exercise for me for the last day of 2010 and the week of my birthday and of a decade...and yes, I'm calling this the end. It's every Reverb10 post I missed and all the truth I can handle right now rolled into one. I'm so glad it's over. I'm so grateful for the chance to mark this time I can't see straight. Happy new year to anyone whose eyes reach this page.)

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"Starless night, come fall around me
Over all we've left undone
I know a light that shines forever
Howsoever we may run."

~ "Reservoir", Hem

When I finally realized I had no interest in forgiving you it freed me up to consider why I should.

I  haven't been able to do it for a long time, it turns out, even though now I have to really work to see your face in my mind. I think that everything was just too much when it hit and kept hitting, the list of grievances too long, the memories too persistent and sad. I'm also as oddly ambivalent about forgiveness as I am any apology that is less than spontaneous and independently given, which may or may not be a result of being raised to believe I needed to talk to God about it, channeling my redemption through another human being who would close the screen and send me to an altar, assign me a certain number of prayers and call it even.

I don't know. I'm still oddly, ritually Catholic  in that part of my mind, as distant from any practice as I am. And anyway, what I can say I believe for sure is that I don't know if I can believe someone's really let go of anything, even if they say they have. I don't know who should. I think some things are, actually, unforgiveable in a way.

And for a long time, I didn't know I was going to have to. We couldn't or just didn't stop talking long enough for me to figure out that you were gone. And when we finally did stop -- when my grandmother died and I learned what real, bottomless loss and grief were -- I had nowhere to put the rage it turned out I'd been hiding under instant messages and inane e-mails since the day in January when you walked away from me and invalidated everything I'd imagined we were.

This was, of course, the problem. Suppositions in matters of the heart are a tragedy in waiting, a sad fact for situations so prone to them, unfortunately. They don't work in the worst, most consequential part, which is to say the longest run.

You have to ask the questions with potentially dreadful spirit-shattering answers early, just in case those answers make you turn this car around eventually. That's what I learned from this. You have to split hairs and clarify semantics. Because if you don't you'll end up on the phone with a grown man's mother, a week before he's going to leave your ass and your city and all your stupid, fragile dreams, and she'll ask you about what kind of socks you think will be best because it gets really cold where he's going and isn't this so exciting for him? Or maybe you just end up sitting in a Dairy Queen parking lot with your head on the steering wheel, mumbling it's fine that you're checking the classifieds in another city, honey. It's fine, really. BUT WHEN WERE YOU GOING TO TELL ME?

Now. Oh.

When I took my head out of my ass and  finally let the anger out, I'd carried it around for several years, and not like a baby, as a therapist suggested once. It was more like a hand grenade, honestly -- a live hand grenade baby in my purse, I guess. For God's sake no one jostle that thing.

Honestly it was partially my fault, or the involuntary fault of my deluded little brain anyway. I had one thing (one thing only) in mind when you walked down those stairs and away, theatrically crying like it wasn't your idea. One sinister subconscious plan all the times we talked in the just-friends zone for years after. One thing when I went to your adopted city and stared at statues of men on bronze horses and walked in other peoples' footsteps painted on the concrete, anything but free myself. All along I really believed and claimed that I was there to close a door when really, no. That wasn't why I was there at all. I was holding that door open with my shoulder and my knee, juggling grocery bags of delusion and crazy and not-so-shatterproof hope.

I had a brain full of incantations and silent pleas.

I had given you that red-string Chinese bracelet, so naturally that connected us, even though neither of us knew the Kabbalah from a hole in the ground and neither were we Chinese.

I was a complete and well-rounded, hyper-educated idiot of a disaster area.

Because the truth is that I was waiting for you to come home. I was believing stupidly against all clear evidence that you would finish this part of your dream and come back, because you had to, because the construct and all that was right with the world (my world) demanded it. And what I was doing that whole sad time was spread-eagling on the train tracks while whistles blew and hobos scattered and, deaf and blind fool I was, I got run over time and time again. And then like the crazy clown punching doll my grandmother had for us to kick around when we were little, I'd pop up again to hope another day.

At least I'm resilient. Stupid, maybe, but the resilient kind of stupid that people make reality shows about sometimes and pat on the head. I may have survived on the Mayflower, not to insult the pilgrims.

And even though I don't want to, because I honestly don't like you, and I hate everything you did and have reached a calm, bizarre ambivalence about your existence on this planet wherever you may be, I need to forgive you for letting me do all of that.

I need to forgive you for asking me to help you long after you should have, for pinging me with links  and words of the day and stupid jokes, resumes to edit and songs to listen to and scary questions in the middle of the night.

I need to forgive you for not respecting the power you had to break my heart, over and over again, for not ending all communication as soon as you knew that with me was not where you wanted to be for the long haul.

I need to forgive you for continuing to look into pitiful eyes like mine looked at you and keeping that poor dumb soul hoping. I still don't know how you could do it, honestly, but I need to forgive you for it.

I need to forgive you for telling me that I was the one who was broken, the one with the problem, who loved too hard and gave too much, that it was always my choice to come back so it must have been okay by me and the consequences? They were what they were. Because you had told me. You had told me.

I need to forgive you because even though it's long since gone and my life is pretty good, I know for a fact that I carry the garbage you dumped on my heart with me daily, and with it I've crafted a plastic bag eggshell shrine to my own failure to love, to connect, to be enough.

Because if I couldn't make it with you? I couldn't do that with anyone. But really it's that I just never wanted to. 

And even now that I can mildly envision opening up again, sadly I still believe that. I have not turned that corner, in spite of hope and work and positive self-talk, in spite of the good words of my friends and the deaths of people who meant more to me than you ever possibly could have.

I need to forgive you, most of all, for going on about what great friend we were and trashing me like no true friend ever could. For the part you played in wasting my very limited and entirely precious time, for being my one truest, saddest regret, and for taking advantage of my love given with a clear and well-intentioned heart until it got twisted by fear and rejection, because no one, I have since learned, should do that to anyone, for any reason.

They should walk away immediately, is what they should do. They should have the courage to set the other person free.

And while this might seem strange and untimely, it is entirely punctual and necessary for the person I am being and becoming. And it's essential for these words to live in a space where I spent two years anonymously talking to you, until you stopped reading and went on with things, finally allowing me to do so too. Two years later, I'm finally ready, on my own schedule, on my own dime. And I believe somehow that if I send this wish on the wind on the last day of what was in some ways the most disappointing year of a decade consumed by loving, losing and recovering from you, I'll have done the part that I needed to do a long time ago.

I honestly, finally believe that I can finally offer it up, that I can finally -- in my heart, where it matters, whether I should have done it years ago or never -- forgive. For me.

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This accidentally turned into Day Three.

Following are the writing prompts for 30 Days of Truth, should you be interested in doing so yourself.

Day 01 → Something you hate about yourself.
Day 02 → Something you love about yourself.
Day 03 → Something you have to forgive yourself for.
Day 04 → Something you have to forgive someone for.
Day 05 → Something you hope to do in your life.
Day 06 → Something you hope you never have to do.
Day 07 → Someone who has made your life worth living for.
Day 08 → Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.
Day 09 → Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.
Day 10 → Someone you need to let go, or wish you didn’t know.
Day 11 → Something people seem to compliment you the most on.
Day 12 → Something you never get compliments on.
Day 13 → A band or artist that has gotten you through some tough ass days. (write a letter.)
Day 14 → A hero that has let you down. (letter)
Day 15 → Something or someone you couldn’t live without, because you’ve tried living without it.
Day 16 → Someone or something you definitely could live without.
Day 17 → A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
Day 18 → Your views on gay marriage.
Day 19 → What do you think of religion? Or what do you think of politics?
Day 20 → Your views on drugs and alcohol.
Day 21 → (scenario) Your best friend is in a car accident and you two got into a fight an hour before. What do you do?
Day 22 → Something you wish you hadn’t done in your life.
Day 23 → Something you wish you had done in your life.
Day 24 → Make a playlist to someone, and explain why you chose all the songs. (Just post the titles and artists and letter)
Day 25 → The reason you believe you’re still alive today.
Day 26 → Have you ever thought about giving up on life? If so, when and why?
Day 27 → What’s the best thing going for you right now?
Day 28 → What if you were pregnant or got someone pregnant, what would you do?
Day 29 → Something you hope to change about yourself. And why.
Day 30 → A letter to yourself, tell yourself EVERYTHING you love about yourself

Imaginary Ocean

My two-hour Thanksgiving yoga class ended with a half-hour shivassana/meditation. I love this part because I'm a fan of lying down quietly, especially after an hour and a half of feeling like I'm going to die in a series of rapidly shifting positions that have me holding up my own considerable body weight and trying to balance on my legs or my arms -- neither my strong suit. This kind of flow yoga is really helping me get out of my head and into my body in a productive way, but it's harder than what I'm used to.

Meditating can be difficult for me. My brain never shuts off with the chatter, no matter what kind of music is on or how tired I am. So today when the teacher started leading the meditation (with a gong for accompaniment. I'm still not sure how I feel about the gong. What's wrong with Enya? Chanting? Anyway.) I was surprised that my mind went as blank as it can get.

Sadly, usually when I'm in a quiet place and maybe someone is reading some guided imagery prompts, I'm making shopping lists or mentally reviewing tasks, listing off everything I haven't done that I should do to justify my existence. I'm basically a one-woman band of meditative insanity, volleying between "Look to the LIGHT! See the golden aura!" and "Oh shit, I forgot to buy bread crumbs. OF COURSE I DID."

So it was really remarkable that this time in the quiet I just...went to the beach. I saw myself in the ocean. I put myself in the best place I know to be, when it's late in the day and the water is warm and relatively quiet. I could see the sun and the waves, the water coming up and over me. I could see the exact stretch of sand I love the most in all the world, the place I would rather be at all times than anywhere.

And in the distance on the shoreline, I saw my grandmother, come to visit me from wherever it is that she is these days.

I miss her today. I miss her more than usual on every holiday, but I don't talk about it much. I think that's partly because I don't even actively think about how I feel about it very often. We talk about my grandparents a lot on holidays because they defined these events and a big part of our lives for a very long time and telling the same stories to each other about everything over and over again has turned into a family ritual.

But when it comes to my own personal pain about her absence, I think it's just been tucked away for self-preservation. It's so big, I had to make it malleable so that I could put it away where it wouldn't hurt me on a daily basis.

Regardless, today there she was, on this beach. My mind bounced around between images of her face and a weirdly specific mental tour of our old house. I was amazed at how I could remember things in such detail -- the cigarette burning on the kitchen counter, the turkey on a platter, the scuffed-up cigar box of crayons, the sound of the door slamming on the coffee table where all of the games and books were kept, the horrible shag carpet up the steep stairs, to the point that I could feel its loops between my fingers as I used to when I picked at them, talking on the phone or hiding on the stairs from my expanding brain and shaky grip on growing up.

I went upstairs and saw the plug on a chain that kept the water in the tub, the pink tile and the twin beds, the monstrosity of my accountant grandfather's adding machine, the fake wood paneling on the back addition.

She appeared in my mind in a series of regular situations -- carrying the laundry out to hang on the line, making coffee, lying on the couch watching basketball, eating cookies. She yelled at one kid or another on the porch and let her tiny Boston Terrier Bonnie out in the yard. I sat in my memory under the clothesline, looking up between the sheets, aging from a pre-schooler singing songs around the huge oak tree to a depressed 15-year-old girl loved beyond reason by a woman who -- only knowing what it was to parent sons -- made early crooked stabs at barrettes and ponytails.

I heard her voice in a typical conversation, let her presence come into my mind and body like it has not in two years, technically, but in many ways way longer than that. My time-traveling mind's eye saw her not at 89, the year she died, ten years after a stroke wasted her body and stole her physical capabilities and independence -- the things that made her her. I saw her strong, laughing and fussing at all of us on her two feet, making mashed potatoes for this dinner that has never once been the same since 1997 because she didn't do that one simple thing that she did better than anybody else.

Again in the imaginary ocean this insane grief came to life again, a realization of how it defines how I've walked through the world since she inevitably got sick and died, how much of my childhood and my perceptions of family and duty and life and love were defined by my daily interactions with her.  And more sadly, clarity came of how I haven't transitioned very well -- because I didn't really want to. Because I didn't know how. Because my life is a little unstable and the magnitude of that relationship makes losing it harder, and there is no guidebook for any of this but some self-help literature and a flawed and distractible human brain. 

At her viewing I was the last one in the room at the end and my uncle said I had to leave her sometime. And of course it was true but I dragged my feet away from her body like I'd be back tomorrow. I never knew how I was going to live in a world without her. The thought of her eventual absence was so dreadful through my life that I could never wrap my mind around it and in many ways I still can't. I realized that as much as I can gracefully let her go on the surface, and sometimes even in my heart, that the primal connection never goes away and it hasn't integrated with now, in this case, whatever that even means, however you even do that.

When my meditation was rudely interrupted by a class assistant who apparently thought I needed a leg adjustiment I hadn't asked for and that I immediately resisted, I lost the invisible thread. Irritated, I shut my eyes again and tried to get her back, silently, frantically imagining the ocean that I'd been in minutes before. It almost worked, although not quite as well. Somehow I was back in the water, she was on the shore, in the wheelchair that was her hated transportation for so many years. My mind let her age again, to gently take on her eventual frailer form. I integrated her selves, somehow, in a way I really haven't since she began to physically fail -- the most difficult transformation I've ever witnessed.

I sat by her on the sand. We talked. I tried to imagine her forgiving me for all that I didn't do in the years that she was sick -- all of the time I wasted on a man who would do nothing but find me inadequate and break my heart, and friends who in spite of varying value would never mean as much to me as she did.

She reached out her hand and told me to stop. She would never acknowledge my need for her forgiveness. She absolved me everything, never thinking she had to absolve me anything.

So instead I opened up the box in my mind where I put my inability to forgive myself, where I put what I know about what I did and didn't do for her. I waited a beat, knew I wasn't ready to turn the corner for that yet, no matter what she said. I thanked her again, a daily unconscious practice, honestly. I told her that I missed her, and she said, as she always does when I imagine her in my mind, that it was a real shame she couldn't stay. I pushed her with considerable effort through the sand, and that was that.

Off the mat and walking to my car, my mind blown, I said "I'll be damned" out loud because I really had gotten just what I needed in spite of myself, however painful, however bizarre. Amazing that she somehow showed up on Thanksgiving to help me deal, to recognize that grief isn't over and that's okay, that sometimes you have to let it in to let it go.

Brains are amazing. Life is very strange.

And although it will never be enough for my selfish soul, I took some comfort knowing that some bonds work their magic regardless -- that beyond death and the things we can't hold back with our human hands, that we -- she and I and whatever it meant -- still walk through the wet sand together in the only way we can.

 

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This accidentally turned into Day Three.

Following are the writing prompts for 30 Days of Truth, should you be interested in doing so yourself.

Day 01 → Something you hate about yourself.
Day 02 → Something you love about yourself.
Day 03 → Something you have to forgive yourself for.
Day 04 → Something you have to forgive someone for.
Day 05 → Something you hope to do in your life.
Day 06 → Something you hope you never have to do.
Day 07 → Someone who has made your life worth living for.
Day 08 → Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.
Day 09 → Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.
Day 10 → Someone you need to let go, or wish you didn’t know.
Day 11 → Something people seem to compliment you the most on.
Day 12 → Something you never get compliments on.
Day 13 → A band or artist that has gotten you through some tough ass days. (write a letter.)
Day 14 → A hero that has let you down. (letter)
Day 15 → Something or someone you couldn’t live without, because you’ve tried living without it.
Day 16 → Someone or something you definitely could live without.
Day 17 → A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
Day 18 → Your views on gay marriage.
Day 19 → What do you think of religion? Or what do you think of politics?
Day 20 → Your views on drugs and alcohol.
Day 21 → (scenario) Your best friend is in a car accident and you two got into a fight an hour before. What do you do?
Day 22 → Something you wish you hadn’t done in your life.
Day 23 → Something you wish you had done in your life.
Day 24 → Make a playlist to someone, and explain why you chose all the songs. (Just post the titles and artists and letter)
Day 25 → The reason you believe you’re still alive today.
Day 26 → Have you ever thought about giving up on life? If so, when and why?
Day 27 → What’s the best thing going for you right now?
Day 28 → What if you were pregnant or got someone pregnant, what would you do?
Day 29 → Something you hope to change about yourself. And why.
Day 30 → A letter to yourself, tell yourself EVERYTHING you love about yourself

Reubens of Unusual Size

Sarah and I were hungry after the Yankees game on the Sunday night after BlogHer, screwing around in Midtown looking for someplace that was open late.

I located a few late night possibilities on Yelp, including the Carnegie Deli. We decided to go there because it was really close, supposedly an institution that I had never visited before, and hey, a deli, why not?

As soon as we sat down there were half-done pickles, which always pleases me. But when the waiter told me that the only Reuben option was $24.95, I was less pleased. I don't know what I was expecting, a Reuben Happy Meal or what, but it seemed crazy even in this neighborhood where dollar bills seem to magically fall out of your pockets into the steam grates.

So I told him I'd take the Woody Allen, a corned beef and pastrami combo that was so very much more reasonable at, oh, 18 bucks or so.

In hindsight, the menu alone caused me to lose all sense of perspective. We also missed the part that said you could share for $3.00. We are very capable of sharing food. This was an unfortunate oversight, brought on no doubt by four days of limited sleep, not so much solid food and not a little bit of wine.

Sarah ordered a roast beef sandwich. I asked him for a Coke and prayed it wasn't ten dollars. Minutes later, this arrives on the table:

I can't even explain to you what happened in my brain when this pile of meat appeared. The pictures do not show how large this thing was. I didn't know whether to name it, apologize to it or get it its own table.

Sarah looked at the sandwich and at me and I looked at her and then the sandwich and I really wish I had video of the way we looked at each other over the plates that were somehow, ridiculously, on our table.

"Dude," she said, when she had words. "Your sandwich is STUPID."

And that is when I lost my mind. I started laughing, and she started laughing. We laughed so hard and so uncontrollably that I think it warranted a clinical diagnosis. We could not stop, for minutes, until we were crying. I am not a person who normally laughs until I cry, but I was weeping. And every time I stopped, we'd look at each other, or we would look at this,

(Pickle for perspective)

(The little pieces of bread make it look like PeeWee Herman with that bellboy hat on, or a giant wearing a beret.) 

And it would start all over again.

I looked around suspiciously at other diners. There were empty plates and beer bottles, people chatting like they weren't in a wackjob land of gargantuan food. The ladies next to me had had entrees that didn't look extraordinarily large, although they probably cost $37. Probably payday.

"No one else is acting like this is weird at all. Look at them," she said. "We sound high The last time I laughed like this for this long I was in my college cafeteria at 7 a.m. and I hadn't slept in a long time."

"I feel high," I said. And I did. It was an almost out-of-body Willy Wonka kind of deal.

Lick the walls! They taste like corned beef and dusty picture frames! I swear, you'll love it! Everything's just really BIG here.

And for the most recent time, I wondered where the hidden cameras were.

The Carnegie Deli's walls are covered with 8x10 autographed photos of a variety of famous visitors who may or may not order the Woody Allen or even eat anything at all. I actually think they are all lying if they say they do. We had several photographs on the wall right next to us. Because I was concerned that the tears in Sarah's eyes were actually those of distress and not hysterical laughter, I decided to focus on what we could control.

"Hey," I said, because I am observant. "We have company. Look, you get to eat with Ryan Seacrest."

That cheered her up.

What did not cheer her up? Or me either for that matter? The fact that these insane piles of meat are held together by (in her case) a brick of cheese and those teensy beensy pieces of bread -- no vegetables, no condiments, nothing. The waiter walked by and Sarah said, "Excuse me? Could I get some...mayonnaise?"

And swear to God dude looked at us like we'd asked for fish tacos in a deli.

You know? Mayonnaise? That spoonful of saturated fat that helps one choke down a side of beef? DUDE.

Ahem. Back to the wall gallery. We had calmed down some. Sarah was pissed off at the wasteful nature of this establishment, what with the pound -- probably more, come to think of it -- of corned beef and pastrami on my plate that was so overwhelming to me (and, quite frankly, dry, minus the six bucks worth of sauerkraut, dressing and cheese that I totally would have sprung for if I had a time machine. I didn't bother to ask for mustard.) She was scowling, occasionally gnawing on her meat, and worst of all, neither of us had a beer to soften the blow. I looked to my right, at this guy.

I thought I knew who he was, but I couldn't remember his name, just that he wanted me to "Save room for the awegfaergvaergaerawgr," to which I say, "Right on."

"Who is that?" I wondered aloud.

And in a version of her voice that I wish I could share with you in an audio file, she said, and you are in no way going to think this is as funny as I do,

"Ooooooaaaaatttttteeeesssss."

As in "John." As in "Hall and."

Yeah, no. I decided to eat with this other guy anyway.

Done. Done. Absolutely done and done and done. Please keep in mind that Sarah makes me laugh harder than just about anyone I know on a regular basis so this was like that experience, except dosed and off the rails.

I started laughing again and did not stop completely until we left the building. Every time I thought this would stop being funny, something insane would happen. For instance, the jolly ladies next to me were not finished when their plates were cleared, oh no. Minutes later, pieces of pie or cheesecake arrived in front of them that were approximately a foot tall, like this:

(I found this on the Internet. It is ostensibly from the Carnegie Deli, and because it looks like the food of Gulliver on the island or an insane person in Wonderland, I can only surmise that it is, in fact, from their dessert case. If I had seen it in person, I would have laughed longer, because, pecan roll on cheesecake? Right.)

I mean, hey, eat what you want, but where do you PUT IT? I was still flailing intermittently at my meat with a fork and getting nowhere. It was like I ate it with my eyes.

Also, Ooooooaaaaatttttteeeesssss was still with me. One or the other or both of us would say it about every thirty seconds, because it turns out that once you start that shit up it's difficult to stop.

It's really, really difficult to stop, or maybe just if you are us.

I do know that there is some kind of joke inherent in leaving a place like this and being hungry and slightly nauseous because I just really couldn't eat what was put in front of me, because just how oh how do you even take that seriously? I couldn't, and when the guy asked me if I wanted it boxed to go I was very fortunate that I did not hurl on the table.

I'm sure that there are people who go there and enjoy it. I think I would have if I'd stuck with maybe six more pickles and a Coke and that's all, a blintz maybe, and giggled at the photos. I'm sure there are people who would call me an idiot -- didn't you KNOW? It's the Carnegie DELI, it's KNOWN for its enormous sandwiches, you imbecile.

But I didn't, or if I'd been told -- if it was the question to a Jeopardy answer or a passage in a travel article -- I forgot. I can only hold so many references in my head at once, or for a lifetime, you guys.

But I can tell you two things. One is that if you're going to have any kind of friend at all with whom you voluntarily spend a significant amount of time it should be the kind who can laugh with you until you cry, damn whomever's around. Because as ridiculous as this may have been and as much as that pile of meat could've fed several hungry people, I know that when I look back on my life I will remember this in technicolor, and it will never not make me smile.

And the other is that I have the tragicomic kind of life where when I opened the refrigerator at my parents' house the next day when I came home, this is what I saw.

And I made myself a Reuben of totally usual size, and it was really good.

(Frying pan and stove for totally normal perspective.)

And I texted Sarah and lost my shit laughing again, and the circle was unbroken.

The end.

Except, you know. Ooooooaaaaatttttteeeesssss.