Several years back, Zimmerman and I went to "family photo day" at his school. It was just the two of us, and of course there seemed to be a lot of other families there with multiple kids.
"Do you want to wait till the rest of your family is here to take the picture?," the photographer's assistant ask.
"No," I said, "It's just my son and me."
"Are you sure?," he persisted.
At that point he was becoming annoying, so I enlisted him - and another family, to pose with us. For some reason they went along with it, and hardly anyone noticed the strangers when we sent around our Christmas cards out. No one really pays attention anyway, which is why for many years, I was able to avoid the "American Dream" without really letting it slip that I had missed the boat somewhere along the line.
My virtual daughter the High Tech Hottie asked me to help her with an essay she needs to write for an award she will be receiving , discussing where she would like to be in ten years. Since she sounded stressed about it, I didn’t give her the usual “why are you looking for guidance from the clueless” speech and promised to help. (She is my daughter, afterall – virtual or not). But I’m not sure I can.
You see - yesterday I got an email from Bev - an old college friend who told me that in addition to her husband’s other accomplishments, he could add the title “Professor” to his credentials. This was six months after I barely recovered from the annual Christmas letter received from a high school classmate who bemoaned the fact that her husband’s childhood piano (kept at their Rhode Island summer home) had been damaged in a storm. And so on...the stories are endless – and by the standards of success on which I was raised – I’m a failure – nolo contendere. The only things that save me from spiraling into depression when I face that face is that my sense of humor has never died – and that I avoid excessive introspection whenever possible."
Looking back, I realize that I probably didn’t have a viable “five year plan” - EVER. I'm fine with planning what to wear or what to serve at a party of course - but long term? Not so much. In fact – I don’t know if I have a five minute plan (other than to put the clothes in the dryer before mildew sets in). All I want to do is laugh and write and live my life and not worry – because even when I had nothing to worry about – ‘sans soucci’ was not exactly my theme song. And this year – I asked Dylan to learn it for me as my mother’s day gift. How did this happen? I was the one who lived by the credo “No sex before jewel-uh-rhee” for a number of years. Now - I’m living like a college freshman except that I’m in my 50s and don’t have posters of the Jonas Brothers on my walls. An associate who is far more successful than I could ever imagine being – in every possible way - recently described himself as “whim boy” and my immediate thought was “Well, that’s one area where I know I will always be able to surpass him.”
In the 1970s, When Jim Morrison’s death was announced, my closest friend Lucy and I walked from one end of East Meadow, Long Island to the other with a lit candle. We couldn’t believe it. The next day, my sister DiDi and her husband Mikey took me to Jones Beach. DiDi brought me a copy of LA Woman and the three of us hardly spoke, as we listened to various tributes on WNEW FM and other stations.
“I can’t believe he died,” DiDi said, every hour or so. Don’t remember exactly what Matty said – probably something sarcastic or wiseass that got her aggravated which caused a tiff. Then we all went to Nathan’s. Those were the good old days.
What seems like three lifetimes later – I still wonder if Jim Morrison’s words “All our lives we sweat and save/building for a shallow grave” enter anyone’s mind when they visit his (shallow) grave in Paris. Certainly his posthumous fame must be some consolation to his poetic spirit, which lingers from one generation to the next. Every time I listen to the Doors (which I do every summer, out of habit, even more than in the winter)
My virtual daughter Cartier and I watched Revolutionary Road the other night which depressed both of us to the point where we actually stopped talking (to each other and to ourselves). It was a grim depiction of a suburban couple trapped in the existential vacuum (there we go again!) whose joint and separate surrender of their dreams ended up unraveling their lives. Although it was based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was of course based on a recurring theme and pretty much it was the Ingmar Bergman version of “Leave it to Beaver” with better actors.
Having lived in suburbia for most of my life (if Queens, Hoboken and the ‘hood – where I live now – actually qualify as the ‘burbs) – I understand the problem. People move to the suburbs to live the “American dream” – to get away from the noise of New York (or whatever big city they live near) – and to find “wide open spaces” – but it becomes a vicious cycle for some. Bigger, better, more…with less time to enjoy it…having to work twice as hard for half as much pleasure…and for what?
People laugh when I tell them that when I was married, my sex life immediately went on the decline when my then-husband fired the lawn boy and got a mower. It wasn’t because I was sleeping with the lawn boy – that’s so Desperate Housewives… (Although he did look like Charlie Sheen and sometimes fantasizing about him was tempting); it was because right before my eyes, he morphed from long-haired playwright with long hair to Joe Suburbia. Suddenly the guy who used to drag me to midnight movies became someone who napped on the couch and yelled at me for leaving candles in the yard because they got in his way when he was edging.
I saw the same thing happen to my friend Gloria’s husband Artie. Artie was a few years older than we were, and had lived through the sexual revolution – plus he grew up in the Bronx so he had that “street wise” edge to him. At one point, he taught me how to properly use a bong (Zimmerman – if you’re reading this – it was when I was way over 21 and I didn’t inhale) – and he was tall and kind of sexy in an edgy way and when we were all not inhaling, sometimes Gloria would tell me stories like when they were in a group ski house and he was there with some other woman but he looked so hot chopping carrots that she forced him to sleep with her. “You had no choice,” I would say, sipping cheap champagne as we ate popcorn, M&Ms and everything else that wasn’t nailed down.
and then one day, after they bought a big Victorian home in Upper Montclair, I went to visit and saw an elderly man mowing the lawn wearing a golf shirt as Rosemary Clooney emanating loudly from Bose speakers on the newly –renovated porch.
“Where’s Artie?” I asked Gloria.
She pointed to the lawn and I did a double take.
“Oh my God,” I said, “What happened to him?" It was as though aliens had kidnapped him; he was a Stepford Husband.
"ROSEMARY CLOONEY?," I said, as though in a trance, "He used to listen to the Stones."
"Sad, isn't it?," she said, searching the beautifully renovated kitchen cabinets for ye old bong.
Last year, I had a reading by Julia the “Angel Lady” who, among other things, told me that my first gift was “feeling” and that I was doing myself a disservice by trying to bury that gift.
“This shows,” she said, with concern, “you were never so rigid before.”
Of course I bristled instantly.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, “how should I be?”
“Look around your house,” she said, “Everything is in its place,” she said, “which means you’re not using your first gift…usually ‘feeling’ types don’t care so much about appearances.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” I said, straightening the tablecloth. Then I realized that on some level she was right; at that point I was still living in my old home – where my friends told me I morphed into Doris Day.
Things later changed, and I now live on the first floor of a two-family house (which I don’t own) which happens to be close to at least three stops on the Soprano’s tour and where I occasionally skip making the bed for a whole day (gasp!) and where I sometimes leave dishes in the sink and don’t beat my son up for leaving his long board in the front foyer (although I don’t necessarily like the shoe collection).
Someday soon, maybe I’ll grow up and catch up to my friends who don’t have to sell their collection of “break-up” gold to try to get a seat at a lawn concert in the Hamptons. Maybe I'll someday finally have that book signing at Barnes & Noble (I've been practicing the photo-ready smile and have hair and make-up on standby). Today? I’m thrilled that I made enough money writing an article to afford a Michael Kors bag. And maybe get a whole case of Pellegrino. And hell – maybe I’ll get the Taittinger.
Because, as the late great Jim Morrison also wrote “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”
(Roll, baby, roll).
