Are you ready for the country?

Alice is. Five weeks in Wonderland and environs, and she is ready to go again, this time to the bucolic environs of Zurich, where her best friend from grad school 25 years ago has settled, one in a number of Americans who left just as the country started going to hell under a shrub and who has since developed a life that differs from the one she left behind.

Despite her self-proclaimed news blackout, when Alice is at home, she cannot help being part of her cityscape, cannot avoid the work she likes to leave behind. This is why holidays are so appealing for Alice: out of the country is the only way she can unplug herself entirely from the so-called real world, the one where all the numbers count, where she is the dernier cri on matters financial.

BFGS claims it is 1953 in her Swiss exurb, and, given that she is walking her daughter back to school after a 2 hour lunch break, it is obvious that even the 20th century of working moms has yet to claim a perch here. Then there is the husband, and the division of labor that doesn't quite break down the way the BFGS would have imagined, all those years ago.

Yet BFGS, she of the full Ph.D., is getting her research done, her book written, and holding up the homestead, getting more done before noon than Alice in the proverbial day. Alice could not do full time domesticity; she is admittedly too self absorbed, or absorbed within her limits.

That is to say that she and the Artist are again traveling together, and Alice awaits each email with a smile on her face. A brief reversion to courtship may be just what she and the Artist need, just to confirm that next time Alice leaves Wonderland, she will very much want the Artist to accompany her.

The road not taken

When Robert Frost was writing, his choice, it appears, was between two routes, and he chose the one less traveled by. I live on one of those roads less traveled by, and yes, it has made all the difference. However, my choices, here in the 21st century, are far more vast and confusing.

Over the weekend, the Artist and I got lost in upstate New York so many times, all we could do was laugh. How else react when you call a hotel to ask directions, and they aren't sure of which little county routes are required to arrive there?

But I had thought, somehow, that she and I shared the road less traveled, until Sunday night when it became clear that, like route 9 upstate, there were several roads with similar names -- 9G, 9W, 9A and other permutations -- and underneath us, we did not have our feet on the same asphalt. We are, apparently, on different sides of the river.

For me it was if the roads had all upended, leaving me to fall out of the car, holding on -- to what, I don't know -- for sheer life. Had I misread the situation so completely? Failed to hear any of the warning signs? For she and I, it turns out, are not on the same road. For that I am sad and sorry. If hope is the thing with feathers, it may be a while before I can reconstruct mine.

Joni Mitchell echoes in my head: "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling. Looking for something, what can it be?....I want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun; I want to be the one that you want to see...." But I am not, apparently.

And, irony of ironies, we were making love in my bedroom just as the building manager whose bedroom wall adjoined mine, was busy dying. I know I am not supposed to think that way. But Monday I was shattered by Sunday night's phone call, and Tuesday morning, by a slip of paper shoved under my door.

You never know, do you, when is the last time you will see a person, or the last time you will make love with someone? When the two events hit so close together, it is a wonder anyone can stay on any road, more or less traveled, at all.

Bob Dylan had it right: "I would not feel so alone.....everybody must get stoned." A leaf from the new book at Alice's bedside table, and perhaps her new motto for this next season of brave new world. It may be the only way she can stay on this road, or any road, just to make it through another day, until she is healed.

Alt 6 4

That's the magic combination, south of the border or on any keyboard without an "at" sign, to address an email. At the public Internet lounge, I am quite in demand for this minor triumph over technology.

It's been quite some time, again, since I have written here. No sooner did I unpack from Argentina then I went off to spend my annual two weeks in Mexico, at the end of the world in Cabos San Lucas.

I invite friends, and together we dwell in Mexican version of the U.S. that is the land of the time share. This season, the other dwellers are few and we seem to have one of the lagoon-like pools to ourselves. Business is bad, down in Mexico, but for those who have escaped here, the population density feels just wonderful.

From the front page of Yahoo (Alice's sole source for news of the outside world), it appears drug trafficking has run amok in a part of Mexico far, far from Alice. No, we have plenty of security here, on foot and by camera. I send emails reminding everyone I am 1,000 miles from the border.

The main drug activity in Cabos is the purchase of medications that can only be obtained by prescription in the U.S. The pharmacies downtown do a very active trade in pills ranging from Viagra to Premarin, with all stops on the antibiotic train and several on the pain-killing one also accounted for. Antidepressants also populate the menu, for reasons Alice is looking into.

With mismanaged nightmare (that would be the pricey health insurance Alice is grateful to have) she has never needed to price-shop, say, Prozac. With insurance, Alice's drug regimen comes in at a semi-reasonable price. Without it, apparently her meds start at about $60 to $90 a month each, and some cost considerably more.

Let us all give thanks to New York State for the blessing of what is called, in insurance lingo, community rating. If you can afford insurance, full coverage is one price for all, regardless of pre-existing conditions, or whether you, statistically, are more or less likely to need care. New York may be expensive, but at least we're not exclusionary.

Only four other states have the same idea, which means Alice will remain in Wonderland throughout her days. She is tethered not only by emotional geography but by practical considerations: no state outside of the Northeast would have the least interest in making sure Alice's health care needs were even remotely provided before, and Alice can't see getting healthier as something that comes up in the aging department.

But I digress: in the land of Alt 6 4, I check in with the world once every couple of days. It is enough. These days I quite agree with William Wordsworth, whose poetry I do not completely comprehend, but whose 1806 title "The World Is Too Much With Us" contains sentiments with which I am in full agreement.

And that was long before the term telecommunications fell into the vernacular. Right now I check in with my world mostly to hear from the Artist, who makes me laugh and feel good about myself and feel like there is someone in the world who actually gets me, whom I get. We shall see as time proceeds how well these feelings hold, but for now, they are blissful.

As for Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Dancing in the streets

The news from home is grim on all fronts -- TBF (aka Clover´s Companion) is going back to the hospital for more surgery, and I am thousands of miles away, but in truth, there is nothing I can do for her in Wonderland, other than Be Properly Scared. I am. I am praying to a God about whose existence I am unsure.

Economic news grows more dire each time Alice signs on to Yahoo. Employment prospects look dim at best for the year. Alice has savings, but Alice, as observed last year, is still adjusting to reduced circumstances. (The exchange rate is so favorable in Argentina that it is cheaper for Alice here than in Wonderland.)

Nonetheless, in Buenos Aires, it is Carnaval, and the porteñonos are, as it happens, dancing in the streets. Wearing elaborate sequined costumes with make-up to match, they are celebrating. It is a joyous occasion here, and I am in need of joy. My flatmates I joined one group, made up of people ranging from toddlers to older men and women (not elderly: if you can dance in the street, elderly does not apply) fiercely contorting themselves in rhythm.

Never before have I literally danced in a city street. When Obama was elected, I wanted to dance in the West Village, but a local cop shushed us while we yelled from the concrete stoop, just as the cars were honking madly, before we could our feet could touch the asphalt. Here, we are welcome to dance in the street.

Buenos noches, Buenos Aires!

I am reliving student life, though in fact I never washed clothes by hand, never tried to iron, never washed a dish, and here I am, seriously lacking in domestic competence, and feeling ludicrously proud of my efforts. The apartment is run down, with a computer that runs Windows 98 and a telephone that requires a card for a local call, and my bed is definitely dormitory quality, if that. But what the hell -- my Spanish is improving, poco a poco, and for three weeks, I get to step outside myself.

The other students are young enough to be my children, if I had any, so I am gaining an interesting perspective on Youth.

Youth runs technological circles around me, though I suspect when I was their age and I lived abroad, I was more completely immersed in the culture around me simply because my time abroad predated the computer age. Cyber connections did not exist. We wrote letters, we sent postcards; occasionally my father sent Telexes from his office.

Daddy liked to know how his princess was managing. His princess was having a blast. Our business Telex name was hotdog, a play on my family name. My brother and I still have email addresses containing that name, to honor my father, who loved every new gadget that came along.


No one here can imagine a Telex, or a telegram. To me, the local internet cafe does seem part of the streetscape, but the cabinets where you can telephone the U.S. still seem a luxury, no matter how commonplace Youth might find them. Alice is a baby boomer, late to the global village. Youth is Gen Y or Z and knows of no other town.


Both Alice and flatmate Youth (a 19-year-old Dutch child-woman) think they are getting a great deal. Youth brings Alice coffee in bed. Alice pays for the taxi to school. Alice has been there, done that, and torn the T-shirt to rags on the rush-hour subway front, an overheated crowd new to flatmate Youth.

Other differences? Youth gets cramps; Alice wanted to sell her futures in Tampax on Ebay. Flatmate Youth instant messages; youth texts; youth emails, youth spends an inordinate amount of time facebooking (my verb of the day).

I, on the other hand, still find blogging a 21st century revelation, and if I want to talk to someone, I don´t want to sit at a keyboard and cripple myself. (Youth willl have to invent great voice-activated software. In 10 years, they won´t be able to type.) Call me old-fashioned, but call me. On the telephone.

Muchos gracias and hasta luego.

Alice, far from Wonderland

Alice becomes a "godthing"

Iguassu Falls (on the Argentine/Brazilian border) is the world's widest waterfall -- more than 270 km or 1/4 mile across, in contrast to Niagara, which has the most volume, and Victoria (Zimbabwe), which stakes its reputation on some other superlative.

It is amazing. Water, water everywhere, tumbling down steep rock cliffs.

Alice goes first to Brazil, a four-hour sojourn for which she has spent at least twice that time in New York getting her spite visa (the U.S. has a cover charge, so Brazil thinks it only fair to have one in return), where the falls are distant and panoramic. Then onto Argentina, where Ricardo, the tour guide, keeps a special eye on Alice, the only solo woman traveler.

A couple from San Francisco, Shelly and Jack, adopt Alice for the day. They are accustomed to adopting friends, usually only children who have become only adults, something Alice frequently feels despite the brother in Alabama. Originally from the East Coast, we share a sensibility.

Their adoptees are not their godchildren; they are their godthings, a title Alice wears for the day with love and pride.

Ricardo calls Alice's attention to several different views, calls to Alice and Alice alone. By the time he points out the bathroom, Shelly says, "oh, do I get to go too? Or is the bathroom just for Alice?" She and her husband are I are laughing hysterically.

He and I have bonded over scarring from the same prep school circuit; she and I have the crazy moms and non-linear career connections.

In the boat that took us into the falls, we shared a waterproof bag for all our belongings. We scrunched together in the same seat to be blasted with water, soaking us head to toe as the boat operator scudded us through the rapids, and the distant mist became a close-up, cold, soaking shower.

It is at that moment that I realize one of the best things about being a solo traveler is the people I meet and the serendipitous nature of my journey. Laurie Colwin's story "The Lone Pilgrim" comes to mind: "Single, you carry only the uncluttered luggage of your own personality, selected and packed by only one pair of hands."

I am a diversion; I am entertainment; a conversation with me is not tantamount to what I imagine the intimacy of marriage, not that I am sold on that institution.

(Shelly and Jack have it right: I could be married, too, if I had my own bedroom, my own space. All their friends, who once thought them insane, are now envious.)

Another joy for this trip is that other people have made all the decisions; for once, I does not have to be in charge. I can become a child again, having all the fun and lack of responsibility the title brings with it.

The Argentinians want to take care of me; the female tour guides want to hug me, cheek to cheek, as does the woman who later washes and braids my hair in Buenos Aires. It is a huge luxury not to have to braid my own hair.

The male guides watch my every move; George in Buenos Aires narrates the history of his city, wants to assure my comfort, explains such peculiarities as double-daylight savings time, brought to the country by its president, who may not have all her marbles.

George knows everyone at the airports, which pays off big time when I check in. I go straight to the front of every line, thankyouverymuch. It is bliss.

I share odd cultural references with the San Franciscans. For instance, the coffee stirrers in Argentina resemble the ones McDonald's retired when too many people were using the tiny spades to shovel coke up their noses. This too bonds me to my family for the day, the people with whom I later pad around the Sheraton pool, blissfully cool in the hot Iguassu sun.

The San Franciscans came from Puenta Arenas, Chile, nearly the most southernmost town in the hemisphere. They have traveled extensively, as have I. On my trip to Africa three years ago, I noticed that you did not get to safari in Botswana without having seen all of the Western world and a good portion of the rest; the same is true in Iguassu.

Later, I will develop a fierce sunburn, due to my confusion between when to apply apres sun spray and when to apply sun protection spray. Whoops. In the airplane returning to Buenos Aires, the flight attendant offers me a barf bag full of ice to cool my inflamed skin. Finally, a use for that item eternally riding in the seat back.

This is inadvertently my second stay in Buenos Aires. The first was prompted by a missed airplane connection. It astounded me that American Airlines came through with a night at the Intercontinental hotel, plus dinner and breakfast.

It is a fancy joint, and after my massage, I learn that the AA crew stays in the same hotel -- a far cry from the kinds of hotels I had imagined the crew frequented. Note to self: flight attendants have a much nicer gig than it may first appear. If this is any example, they stay at ritzier hotels than I do.

Airline finance mystery solved, for a week the brave new world does not obtain, and no news is both good news and all the news I will allow.

Abroad, riding the unemployment wave

Even in Argentina, the news is unavoidable: U.S. jobless rates reach a 26-year high. That about sums up Alice´s time in the marketplace. This leave her back where she started, only a tiny bit wiser and a whole lot older.

When did Alice attempt to enter the workplace initially? That would be 1982, the year to which the current lack of jobs is being compared. But how did it happen that Alice has consistently ridden the recession wave? First, she tries for gainful employment at a time no one is hiring.

Later, she becomes a recessionary trend-spotter, as noted by her 1990 exile from corporate America. That time, she worked for a company that the magazine where she toiled on the same day that it won a National Magazine Award for general excellence, an experience recently likened to working for a TV show that is cancelled the day it wins an Emmy.

She hit the 1990 unemployment line ahead of the benefits extension afforded colleagues who quickly landed subsequent jobs at trendy mags that folded just a few months later. So, Alice has had her recessionary bout with government subsidy of artistic pursuits without incurring Jesse Helm´s ire, or so she chose to look at being on the dole then.

Now, she´s been self-employed for long enough that the only unemployment money she will get is from the first national bank of Mom, a long-standing institution that has only made a couple of bad loans in its day, none of them to Alice. Her credit is good there.

The terms of doing business at the bank of Mom would be unacceptable to most people: while repayment plans are at the customer´s request, in the interim the customer and her daily life are subject to far greater scrutiny than they would be at, say, the late Wachovia or the deathbed-rattling Citibank.

How did Alice come to Argentina? Frequent flyer miles, the last remaining currency. And why? Because if she is going to lose money, she might as well have a good time in the process. A couple of thousand bucks are nothing compared with the beating her portfolio has taken in the past six months -- and this time, she will have a great suntan, leather goods, and some excellent adventures to show for it.

Once upon a time, the U.S. was the land of opportunity, or so it was perceived. Now, immigration seems to work on the pay to play principle, which is not exactly what I consider welcoming. It appears to me that if you want to get foreigners to spend their dinero in the U.S., you would want to make it cheap and easy for them to visit. No, first we make everyone pay a toll.

Welcome to America. Whatever you want, we make you pay tax on it, and, unlike other countries, we offer no rebate upon your exit. Whatever you´ve got, we´ll take it. Pity we couldn´t convince enough people to buy what we were selling, so our deficit is so high, if the U.S. tried to write a check, it would bounce sky-high. Knowing us, we wouldn´t apologize.

On election day, I was a patriot. Today, not so much.

Today I want to be an Argentine.

a la recherche du temps perdu

In lieu of Proust's madeleine, what would probably trigger my generation's collective consciousness would be a bong hit, a line snorted, or some recreational pharmaceuticals consumed. At that point, we would all realize who we were, if we couldn't see who we've become.

It has been reunion season chez Alice, and in the past month, she has attended two 30th high school reunions. One was at the prep school from which she actually graduated; the other, from the public school system Alice fled in 1975, but where Alice spent most of her childhood. In other words, Alice went back to see her kindergarten, elementary school, and junior high school class. These were the people who knew Alice before we had permanent teeth, much less tits.

Herewith the report on public school reunion, an opportunity sought out through the Web, not from any list of invitees for whom the organizers had addresses.

You might call this, About Last Night. I got on the train to the once-upon-a-small-town White Plains. The cab driver who took me to the hotel was Haitian, and together we mourned what has become of his country, the one he has fled and to which I can never return. I also didn't recognize the town through which he drove me. It is calling itself a city, which I find to be at misnomer at best.

Driving through urban renewal land with a Haitian driver lent is an odd perspective from which to begin the evening -- to remember who I was for many years as a facet that none of my public school friends would have recognized.

It was weird to me that no one said, you look great or you look pretty -- which is S.O.P. for all the prep school and college reunions I've attended. Plus, there was a cash bar. Usually I don't drink, but I was also really surprised that no one offered to buy me anything, although my one friend from my street, did toss $40 my way when I said I needed cash. I was grateful, but once again, it appeared I'd landed firmly in DIY land, a surprising place considering how many married and traditional women were present.

Since I have put reunions together, I was really surprised that there were no hors d'oeuvres; dinner was buffet-style, and for drinks, it was strictly a cash-only enterprise from a less than complete bar. All this, for $100 a head.

Alice has planned reunions before, and at that price, even accounting for the venue rental, Alice knows you can get a lot more for your money -- and if your ticket prices breaks $100, an extra $20 for adult comforts isn't going to make or break the attendance records.

Then, too, the organizers knew I was coming, and that I hadn't graduated from the school, but the only name tags created were copies of people's senior year yearbook photos along with their names. My name tag was hand-printed, which didn't exactly feel welcoming. Granted I may be more than a little sensitive about some of this, but this was my take on the evening. Truly the best time I had was late in the evening, when the DJ was playing music I loved to dance too, and I just hurled myself on the dance floor, partner be damned. There, at least, I felt like myself.

One of the women at the reunion, Trisha C, whom I remember vaguely, recognized me as "you were the smart one." I must have recoiled slightly, because she added, "I meant that as a compliment."

Maybe now, but back in 7th grade or 8th grade, I remember becoming acutely aware that my spoken grammar was impeccable and that in junior high school, that was simply another mark of how different I was, and I had enough of those marks against me as it was. There I was, the last of the late bloomers, being more intelligent than most of the people in my class, not knowing what that meant, and not having the social skills so many of my classmates seemed to have -- not to mention not having a clue about, say, boys.

I did confess my 6th grade and my 9th grade crushes to the boys who had grown into men. And I grant you I was looking for what can only be called the fuckability factor -- a resounding zero, unless someone expresses subsequent interest in Alice, which she is not anticipating.

No one seemed to see the humor in my observation that I knew these people before I had my period and now I'm going through menopause. Or something else I've commented on before: I went to kindergarten with many of these people, so we all knew each other before we had permanent teeth, much less boobs and hips. (I never could wear those junior-high-school-hip-huggers that went with the huckapoo shirts, since I lacked the body curves. I do remember those shirts, though: 100% genuine polyester, guaranteed to go up in flames if the wind were blowing in the wrong direction when you lit a cigarette.)

I'm glad I went to the reunion, but I can't say I'll be back again. I thought there might be some variety in the stories I would hear, but the $100 ticket price pretty much guaranteed that the stories would be homogeneous, surprisingly so. Everyone, male and female, was married, with 2 or 3 children, most of them living in the 'burbs, or "locally," as one woman I went to elementary school with put it. Professionally there were, I was not surprised to find, a lot of lawyers. Most of the practicing ones were men.

There were a fair number of women who hadn't been in the workforce since shortly after they either conceived or delivered their first child. It felt to me like they had all drunk the same Kool-aid, and turned into their parents without a question. Probably not surprisingly, the women all looked great and the men weren't aging well -- a lot of rotund bellies coupled with major baldness or very short gray hair. I looked at the boys I had had crushes on in elementary school and junior high school and wondered, what was I thinking? (Not that I would have known how to handle a relationship then if someone waved it under my nose.)

Meanwhile, I'm single, never married (in my 20s most of my relationships were with women, so marriage wasn't really part of the picture), and have no progeny. Plus, I live in the big city, know nothing about cars, and was genuinely perplexed when some of the conversations turned to cheerleaders and football -- that seemed like something out of the 1950s. The one thing I do have in common with most of the people with whom I spoke is we all have aging parents. I, however, had to tell so many people my dad had died that I had to retire to the ladies' room for a brief cry. You can only clutch the windshield sticker that summarizes your life in 30 years and 30 words or less for so long before the glass breaks.

A good portion of my elementary school was present, and a fair number from junior high. Since I was only at WPHS for one year, and that was the year that pushed me over the edge to get the hell out of suburbia, I don't remember too many people I met that year.

I don't know why I thought I would feel more connected to the people I had known as a child, but the reunion didn't bring that out for me. What it did bring out was I suppose I've always been a nonconformist, but never felt it so acutely as I did last night. Some people have kids; I travel.

Where there were supposed to be a few years after college that we were equal with our parents, and neither of us had to take care of the other, I missed that experience. I went straight from graduation to feeling like Queen Victoria, not amused that my dad and brother were getting high together. Nancy Reagan might have been shouting just-say-no into a windstorm, for all it affected my family.

My family dynamics are not quite out of a Tennessee Williams play, but on the other hand, June Cleaver or Donna Reed would have been a far cry from any scenario I saw as a child.

I do think it important to revisit my past, if only to satisfy my historical curiosity, my wanting to know for posterity what has transpired.

I've been emailing an old friend I tracked down, who decided to sit out the reunion at home in her sweats eating chocolate. We've gotten below the windshield sticker arena, and, as I wrote to her, "as for your feeling you went through a phase of "mediocre mom and student," I'd say you came out pretty well. I have a friend who, at the the age of 40, had already raised 2 teenagers (with the help of her ex-husband and then current one) and published 5 books of fiction; her take on how she had achieved all that was that she had done it all badly.

"So it's a matter of perspective. No one's perfect, and I would bet that over the long haul, your kids are probably proud of you. From what I saw at the reunion, very few women had switched gears since the first "I do," and it takes guts to go against that tide.

At any rate, I'm very much enjoying our correspondence, and I hope to hear from you soon. I'm glad you come into the city, because after last night, I don't want to get on a commuter train again for many moons. I hope this missive makes sense to you -- I feel like you didn't drink the Kool-aid and hence might have a clue about my life, and perhaps an interest in it, for I would really like to see you, now that we are past the windshield-sticker level."

As for my prep school reunion, the day after, I was completely depressed. Like the public school gathering, this was filled with those who drank the Kool-aid. Once again, I was the only person who had failed to get the marriage-will-make-you-happy memo, and, apart from one friend, I was carried the childless banner solo. She was gracious; when asked whether she had children, she didn't say, "I had cancer, not children." In her shoes I'm not sure I would have been so polite.

Here is what perplexes me: we were raised in the 1970s, with The Rocky Horror Show our backdrop. It was, in essence, the anthem for nonconformity. I took it to heart and I have never felt like a solo operation at a college reunion, but the lack of diversity at either my prep school or public school reunions makes me think, the only reason people attend these gatherings is to show how much they have taken the current social zeitgeist to heart, fallen down a rabbit hole I have scrupulously avoided.

No wonder I have become Alice; I cannot think of anyone else in history, real or imaginary, with whom I share so many traits.

Questions, comments? Post here or go ask alice, at alice dot uptown at gmail dot com.

Incidentally, Alice will swear that the logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. She echoes the door mouse's plea, "feed your head." And she blesses the Western pharmaceuticals that have made it possible to Alice to remain here, to share a thought or observation or two, no matter how infrequently.

Viewer discretion is advised

Why this disclaimer doesn't run prior to every newscast, atop every newspaper, as a pop-up ad before every Website hit, I don't know. Seems to me there is a lot in this world the viewer would be advised to think twice before taking it in.

Life is beyond see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, touch-no-evil, taste-no-evil, feel-no-evil: evil has, in various guises, become unavoidable. Here in Wonderland, we're into our sixth day of a so-called heat advisory. (Touch- and feel-no-evil the primary principles involved, with see-no and hear-no a close second if the TV set is nearby.)

Translation: 90+ degrees before noon, humidity to make a person wilt. Con Ed wants us to conserve energy. Forget kilowatts: the energy I'm conserving is my own. I'm following what the signs in on the lawns at Central Park suggest: passive activities encouraged.

For our continued enjoyment of the park, the sign-makers suggest we not wear it out. They are trying to keep the grass from getting flattened from too much use, an odd idea for a park, you might think. Still, it is Wonderland, and the park rules reflect our lives, the truth of living among so many people in such a densely populated area.

The private sector has pumped a ton of money into our park in the past ten years; we finally have lawns where once there was just mud; and no one wants us -- the public -- to trash the efforts of those with another kind of green.

When I set out on my menopausal marches, otherwise known as my hour-long, 3.75-mile speed walks on the bridle path around around the reservoir, I do stick to the trails. The bridle path has become a misnomer: Central Park is now bereft of horses. Dressed for walking, I wear more metal than the average equine. A friend has me wired for everything but sound.

I strap on a heart monitor, wetting the two leads before hooking them to the actual metering device; I turn on the pedometer strapped to my sneaker (running shoe, to be precise); and I press "start" on the watch that keeps track of it all: heart rate, distance, speed, time elapsed, calories burned.

The sheer computing power of the device attached to my wrist exceeds that of my Kaypro II X, the computer I owned in 1985, a "portable" machine lovingly known as Darth Vader's lunch box, all 26 pounds of it.

Funny thing is, apart from the Internet, I'm not sure I can do much more with the computer I own generations (and several operating systems) later. I did not sign up for technological advances at the speed of light, and at this point, my brain remains one formed by the last century. The computer has vast capabilities of which I remain unaware. I work on a need-to-know basis.

This century requires more viewer discretion than the last: the economy is crashing and burning, and my former industry, editing magazines and newspapers, has gone to the dogs. Copy editing is being outsourced to India. Want to buy a house, cheap?

Friends tell me paralegal tasks are performed at cut-rate prices next to the copy editing; we know any kind of computer "technical assistance" has long ago left these shores. What remains for us, as even our intellectual capital is offered offshore to the lowest bidder?

Clearly I have chosen the wrong vocations: I should have learned electrical, or plumbing, or how to run a boiler, fix the air conditioning, tile a bathroom, any form of construction -- tasks that cannot be shipped offshore, many of which are unionized.

One of these days our local news will come from China, where it is clearly cheaper to produce. The fact that none of the reporters will know uptown from downtown will no longer be relevant. More evil here I wish not to see.

Rumor (or the government) has it that we are exporting far more than we are importing, due to the weak dollar. What I want to know is, what do we have left to export? I didn't know we had any manufacturing plants remaining, especially after my tour of Lowell, MA last week.

Lowell, once the site of America's first textile mills -- many of which were water-powered, in those pre-oil-dependent days -- have long since been shuttered. Downtown is the nation's first urban national park. The area feels like an actual city, except that the streets are empty, as if someone built a city but forgot to drop in the people.

Our political landscape makes me wince: why is anyone surprised that Obama turned out to be, horror of horrors, a real politician? I'm a yellow-dog Democrat; of course he has my vote. But I don't expect him to change the world. Camelot, after all, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

The late M. Wyrebeck wrote: "Be properly scared." I am.

"Helicopter" parent age

"Helicopter parents," I recently discovered, are those who hover over their offspring long after parents like mine -- those who gave you my generation, the baby boomers, decided to honor the generation gap and leave their offspring, i.e., me, to fend for themselves.

These are scary individuals. Roughly my age and younger, they have what strikes me as an overly extensive interest in their children's care and feeding above the age of majority. I'm sure every one of them wrote the essays for his kid's college applications. (I'm not sure mine even saw what I wrote.)

I would bet they worked on their kids' high-school geometry homework. Personally, I handed in mine in 1975. I suspect if I had asked for parental help, I would have been told, we haven't had to prove two triangles congruent since the early 1950s.

We love you, but you're on your own. Had I needed a tutor, one would have been found. But my parents had long since graduated from high school, thankyouverymuch.

I met several helicopters last weekend, while visiting my alma mater during parents' weekend. This year, like last, I volunteered as a sales girl for the annual Haiti Project art auction and craft sale. A Haitian village needs my support far more than my well-endowed college does.

Last year, since I stayed just one night, I didn't meet any of the parents at the college-owned inn where I sojourned. (The auction is held on parents' weekend because, of course, they have the money.) The college inn is the only ho/mo tel accommodation in walking distance of campus.

This year, I stayed two nights, and the parents I encountered in the inn's TV room made me feel I had stepped back into la vida loca all over again. In this world, parents seems to think having junior graduate from a brand-name college will set him/her up for life.

I didn't have the heart to tell them, 25+ years post-graduation, that a diploma from my college and a MetroCard will get me on the subway, and I don't expect it will take me any farther than the Staten Island Ferry.

Sure, I went to college in the 1970s. So did these parents. Did they forget that all we did was get stoned? My idea of schoolwork in college was to expend the least amount of time needed to get a decent grade.

Brand-name diploma was, for some, a $40,000 bar bill; for others, their parents' receipts; for me, a windshield sticker in the academic domain; for a few, recognition of honest academic achievement.

The last was not mine, nor did I claim it to be. The helicopter parents in the TV room would have had a collective stroke if I had described my college experience, or what I remember of it, to them.

Needless to say the idea that junior might be in it for the four years of freedom, sex, and crystallizing an adult self might does not seem to have permeated their collective consciousness.

These parents are going to get boomerang kids: they've raised their kids to live in a style to which they have all become accustomed, and it's not a style your average 25 year old earns enough to maintain. I would bet these kids are going to look for their parents' blessing in a mate. My generation, not so much.

I don't know anyone who returned to live with their parents or blended families for the prepared dinners, laundry service, and free cable. I could not have born the angst of retreating to that nest, but given the economy and the amenities, I'll bet it's looking a lot more attractive these days.

During my four years in an academic cocoon, I spent 40 hours a week in the college pub, and fewer than 10 in a classroom. I spent close to 60 hours a week in my dorm room, whether sleeping, studying or doing something more entertaining. Toss in hours spent primping, gossiping, flirting, and in hysterics, and you've just about captured my college years.

My memories of those long-ago years reflect the time spent in each area. I wasn't out to save the world, master six disciplines and come out ready to fall into coffee-achiever parents' concept of what a life should be.

My parents, I belatedly realize, let me make my own discoveries, my own mistakes. They would comfort me if I cried, but they did not assume, not being overly invested hoverers, that they were at fault. In the long run, I think that served me best.

Friends who are parents remind me we are living in different times, even those who have come late to the parental party. Nothing is as safe as it once was, and, given that my home was Wonderland in the days of "Ford to New York: Drop Dead," the safely gap has grown into a chasm.

It is one I am grateful to be of an age that I didn't fall in.

La vida loca

I have come, again, to Mexico.

This time, I am sharing a hillside villa overlooking the Pacific.

My fellow travelers are a retired professor and his French wife, newlyweds en route to a stint as house guests in the U.S.; a retired artist, who lives downtown in Soho, age 80; a 70-ish Englishwoman with U.S. citizenship who is a legal assistant in the Connecticut countryside; and a whiz-bang management consultant in her 40s who thinks traveling for a four-month stint to work in Atlanta is a good time.

What we have in common is our absent hostess: my travel companion from Africa and Eastern Europe, who was felled by arythemia last week and forced to stay near her doctor in New York. If she were here, the villa might take on another, friendlier tone.

The French woman has taken charge of the kitchen and is starving us to death under the guise of feeding us healthy food: she is the kind of French housewife who can look in a bare cupboard and a refrigerator containing leftovers I would have thrown out, then produce what she calls a meal.

Last night she used carrots, ginger, and potatoes to make a soup, which she deemed "dinner." Personally, I go for more calories and a protein, a starch, a vegetable, perhaps something chocolate for dessert.

Nutritionally, we don't see eye to eye. She was miffed when I made grilled cheese for lunch in lieu of her salade Nicoise, made of leftover mahi-mahi added to tomatoes, peppers, hard boiled egg, and brown rice. That was her idea of a big, "heavy" meal. Another main meal consisted of two mangy pieces of cooked chicken with reheated spaghetti.

Neither combination fits my definition of a snack, let alone a meal, much less something to replicate an American dinner.

The management consultant and the Englishwoman spent an hour yesterday walking the beach, picking up five bags of trash. I suppose it gives them a goal, a plan. Today, they went to a time-share presentation. (Having already bought a time-share in a fit of middle-aged, menopausal impulse, I didn't care to join them on their excursion.)

Besides, the consultant was here last year: she and I inhabit different worlds, and without our hostess, she barely makes an effort to speak to me. Hey, I'm trying, but our first point of departure is that she wears two- to- three-inch heels as a matter of preference, and I am a flat-shoe person. This in itself separates us in a way I hadn't anticipated.

The whiz-bang consultant has glommed onto the Englishwoman and instead of going out to dinner in town at the two restaurants where she had originally invited us to join her, she has lunched at both with the Englishwoman, leaving me here with French soup. I am growing increasingly less enamored of her presence. Passive-aggressive for $100, anyone?

The entire crew think it odd that I don't drink, even with the explanation that I am on a new medication, and I don't care to experiment. (Finally, tremor-stopping pills that work!) They think it odder, and more ominous, that I smoke cigarettes, no matter how few, and that I am happy to do so.

They get up at 6 am, where as I am content to start the day at 9:30 or so. The only reason I don't consider 9:30 the middle of the night is that we are on Pacific time, 3 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight. (In my real world, this 9:30 would be 12:30.)

Am I stranded on a Mexican version of Gilligan's Island? If so, I am either the ingenue or the movie star. I don't have a WASPy husband at hand, but I do have a different life than the rest of this entourage. I make different demands.

I do not care if we waste electricity my friend the villa owner has already paid for, not when our landscape would be pure desert were it not for an overabundance of water desalination plants to keep terra firma green. Why should we try to save water ore electricity when they are used in such grand excess all about the grounds?

Call me semi-retired, and I see what I have in common with the elders of this tribe. Call me a working woman, and I have a few traits in common with the younger members. Still, I am neither one nor the other.

I am sure they find me as peculiar as I find them. Sarcasm is not appreciated here, which limits my conversational forays, even as commentary to the evening news we view on CNN International.

Irony is another area in which I find this crew deficient. Too, I am puzzled why one would want to see what's on HBO each evening. The conversation lags. Time-share life grows in surreality.

Next year, regardless of my friend's health and love for this mountainside villa, I shall decline her invitation. She has hundreds of friends, gathered over the years, and I don't think it occurred to her how this particular mix would play out, what alliances would form, what would leave me by the wayside.

Again, we are part of an English-speaking compound. Without our town trips, we could be in Any Resort, USA, while we struggle to deal with a staff that speaks a language not our own. I did finally get to use more of my limited Spanish vocabulary while I held up the bed linens to demonstrate. Limpea means "to clean." I do not know the words for "change the sheets."

I managed to convey to the maid which beds needed to be changed, not without feeling victorious that the communication succeeded. Si necessito, por favor, and quisiera (I would like) constitute the other relevant phrases I know. My French is coming back to me in leaps and bounds, not that it is any help aqui.

While I am happy to be away from Wonderland for 10 days, I cannot help thinking that the next time I depart, I want to arrive in a location that is what it is, not an American enclave outside of the U.S.

If Alice leaves Wonderland, she wants to be damn sure she has left the building.

At the end of the world

Baja California has thousands of unspoiled, undeveloped, straight-from-heaven miles of land, acres of untouched beaches and shorelines. Timeshare territory, however, doesn't fit into that category. At the tip of the peninsula, 1000+ miles south of the U.S. border, Alice has stumbled upon – and bought into – a peculiar American enclave.

It's an odd bit of the U.S. imported into Mexico You are a visitor to a country within a country. No getting around it, timeshare owners are turistas. Any place that the tap water has been purified, rendering bottled water unnecessary, is a spot for capital-A Americans.

Cabos San Lucas may call itself “the end of the world,” where desert meets mountain and El Arco marks the end of the landmass, but in Alice’s immediate vicinity, it is hard to tell, difficult to feel the implications of geography and language, nearly impossible to sense she is abroad. She gets the U.S. primary results from CNN.

It is a long way from her telephone-less, kerosene-lit childhood in Haiti, an island with no tourist infrastructure -- where few Americans ventured, where Alice spent 20+ years with no TV and limited electricity.

The "owners' party" feels like a freshman-year college mixer. The opening questions differ slightly. What's your name? your hometown? How many weeks a year do you come here; how many years have you had this unit? What restaurants do you like in town? Done any whale watching?

A mariachi band plays Mexican songs recognizable to the American ear. There are contests for owners to humiliate themselves dancing or imitating a Mexican yell in exchange for a bottle of tequila or a Mexican wool blanket.

No one asks what you plan to major in, and most owners have reached the place in the workforce to which Alice aspires: retired.

Some cultural differences are noticeable: the resort is run Mexican-style, despite the players speaking English. The P.R. person, the sales people, the concierge, the hospitality department, and the front desk are all separate fiefdoms. The idea of an American-style meeting or memo explaining how the departments and the whole enterprise could be coordinated would never be issued.

It is one way to know Alice has left Wonderland. Another is the pelican landing in the swimming pool, something that would never occur in over-chlorinated America. The pelican swam around, took his time before taking flight and seemed no worse for the wear. The third is that the timeshare’s English-speaking doctor makes the equivalent of house calls for $100 U.S. This is startling and useful for Alice’s friend.

For Alice, not so much: the doctor wouldn’t write her a prescription for her U.S. migraine meds, and instead offered something Alice had never heard of, at $4 a pill. Alice sticks to over-the-counter muscle relaxants for which she would need a script at home. She prefers to know precisely what drugs she’s taking.

Alice knows of less touristy locales to explore: San Jose del Cabos, Todos Santos, La Paz. To see those as a traveler, she has belatedly discovered, you need some rudimentary Spanish, a map, perhaps a guidebook and, most definitely, the guts to drive a rental car on bumpy Mexican highways. Perhaps next year, if Alice’s driving skills improve, or if she brings friends better equipped to get behind the wheel.

Mexican roads are better than those in Haiti, home of Alice’s beloved palapas-like chacoons. They are closer to first world streets than those in undeveloped countries. Yet the asphalt is not nearly as smooth as one might expect, given the general emphasis on keeping los turistas americanos from realizing they are not in Kansas.

Last week she and her friend mistakenly took an English-speaking tour of San Jose. The guide glossed over the art galleries, churches, and historic sites they wanted to see, in favor of attempting to make los Americanos do their part to enrich the local economy (and probably his relatives in particular). The guide took them to the Mexican fire opal store, where he hoped his group would drop muchos, muchos pesos.

With Alice, he didn’t stand a chance. She has had guided “tours” of pearl, enamelware, and rug “factories” in places like China, and not only did the fire-opal merchant’s shop tour seem identical to the pearl and other factory “tours” she had experienced, but the sales methods were dead ringers for ones she has previously ignored.

Alice wasn’t buying, not in San Jose del Cabo, not anywhere. Alice has sojourned in and traveled to too many continents to consider herself an ordinary turista. No “bargaining” for her, thankyouverymuch.

Alice practices her minimal Spanish with the housekeeper, and in exchange, teaches her new words in English. It is frustrating: while Alice can converse almost fluently in French, it is a distant enough relation of Spanish that it doesn’t translate. Her Spanish-English dictionary doesn't contain the words she needs.

For the party, Alice dresses the part of an owner, runs through the standard questions, and realizes what she forgot when purchasing her two weeks at the end of the world: that is, she is not an American. Alice lives in Wonderland; she is a native New Yorker. What’s more, she is a yellow-dog Democrat.

Her birthright imprinted on her the sense to consider everything but the coasts is fly-over country, filled with towns she will visit on business or to see friends, but otherwise avoid. The only time Alice has passed through Texas has been to change planes. Given the Texan owners she met, she plans to keep it that way.

Mainstream American culture is too bizarre to contemplate: Alice is single, childless, and lives in a city most owners will never visit. The owners’ party has too damn many gun-toting, anti-abortion, warmongering Republicans present for her comfort. Thankfully, the next day she meets some New Yorkers, upstaters though they may be; some Democrats from California, and liberals from Minnesota.

It occurs to Alice that in her adult life, she has knowingly had only two Republican friends, and she no longer speaks to either of them. After the Shrub slid into office, neither was sufficiently embarrassed to admit what an imbecile occupied the White House. Both former friends have a considerably more mainstream take on what life “should” be than what Alice’s life was or would become. Both are car-dependent suburbanites.

Save for large cities on both coasts plus Chicago, Alice sees the U.S. as a place with favorable currency exchange rates and peculiar customs, all of which involve driving to the mall and countless visits to Wal-Mart. Some involve parties at which Velveeta is the cheese product of choice, and "fine wine" has a screw-off cap, vs. cheap wine from a box.

It is places like Tiny Town, Sleepy Southern state, where the brother and family live. He telephones from the car, the supermarket, or Wal-Mart, never from his home. The South has manners that scare Alice almost to death.

In Wonderland, Alice uses public transportation, and the only call she makes from a supermarket is to ask whether more purchases are requested. Wonderland is blessedly Mart-Mart-less, in Alice's neighborhood where real estate prices make the cost of entry prohibitive to Major Marts, and the zoning laws have been created to keep Mart-Marts, though not 40-story condos, at bay.

It is bad enough that Wonderland has been deluged by local chains, like Duane Reade, a ubiquitous lousy drugstore, and national ones -- high-end cosmetic and mid-range chain clothing and lingerie stores like Origins, Banana Republic, and Victoria’s Secret. The independent bookstores have been eaten by Barnes & Noble; the local leather goods stores pounced on by Coach; the candy stores by Godiva.

There is scarcely a movie theater left that is not a conglomerate-owned multiplex. Individual hardware stores in Alice's neighborhood have been replaced by a monolith known as (Un)Gracious Homes, now competing with Home Depot. Home Depot is situated in the Bloomberg building, which holds the eponymous mayor's business. One of his goals seems to be making Wonderland less so.

Back at the end of the world, Alice tried to make conversation at the owners' party and realizes the fatal flaw in her attempt to amortize trips to warmer climes: in a hotel, guests have varied nationalities, interests, and stories. On timeshare turf, everyone is American, and most, it seems, are conservative.

Too late: Alice should have realized the basic timeshare owner requires no surprises in vacation destinations, whereas Alice is accustomed to and has spent years seeking them. It is only in the communal hot tub that Alice meets Democrats, people with whom Alice shares some basic social values and with whom she can keep up her end of the conversation without apoplexy.

She even gets to play Scrabble and meet people to join on a sunset cruise. The sunsets, too, remind Alice of her younger days in Haiti, albeit without the rum. Tequila is its Mexican equivalent.

A Brit Alice knows refers to Wonderland as "an island off the coast of the U.S." He is correct, and, common language aside, at the timeshare owners' party, Alice was in the country of Americans completely alien to her: Republicans.

Subsequently she has met people who did not come out for the free margaritas and guacamole, those who were on Alice's team on Super Tuesday. She suspects they are a minority.

It is strange to contemplate how many winter weeks Alice has purchased in pseudo-Mexico. All she can tell you is, the welcome mat is open. Any winter you choose, Alice's casa es su casa.

Alice remembers Internet cafes of the past

It's been 10 years since Alice has bolted into a town to connect with the world at an Internet cafe. Then, she was at a writer's colony in Massachusetts, racing in her rental car over 40 miles of a winding, hilly, two-lane road.

In Mexico this week, Alice saunters into the cafe calmly. She isn't expecting any salacious, lavicious communications these days.

Why the urgency then? She was conducting an affair -- though, since Alice is and was single, did it qualify as such? She had made no promises, taken no vows. The Married Man, on the other hand.... was philandering his hobby? An entertaining diversion from suburban less-than-wedded-bliss, kept intact because he loved his children and hated to cook?

Alice admits to some twinges of guilt, for she did know -- and had gotten along famously -- with TMM's wife years before. If TMM's wife hadn't phoned Alice a lot worse for the wine when her husband was out partying with the boys, there might have been more guilt. At the time, not so much.

Ten years ago, Alice needed those town trips to check email, flirt in cyberspace with the TMM, who had instigated the affair while Alice was staying with his family. Sure, she had hesitated. Stop making passes at me, she said. I'm in your son's bunk bed while your wife is in your bed, passed out from last night's drinking. What are you thinking? (No verbal answer.)

She did not protest too much to find herself having amazing sex with TMM in her favorite Wonderland venue for a clandestine rendez-vous, a hotel. The room overlooked one of the city's only private parks in a lovely residential area three miles south of chez Alice, convenient to Grand Central Station for TMM.

With its dark bar, residential location, and old-fashioned separate taps for hot and cold water, the hotel was a quaint landmark from another era. It's long gone now, purchased and demolished to make way for another overpriced, over-amenitied condo project selling for $2,000 per square foot or so.

Alice broke off the affair -- and has steered clear of married men and women in matters of the heart (or body) ever since. TMM taught her a lesson, one known to most single women of a certain age: TMM was out for himself, and Alice a convenience.

Though all she wanted was sex and some laughter -- if she had wanted to be a wife, she would have sought out that slot, say 20 years ago -- six weeks with TMM re-enforced the fact that Alice lacks the emotional filter required to remain superficial. She starts to take matters seriously -- and serious is where the single and the married part ways.

La vida es bueno en Cabos San Lucas

Life is good here. It's sunny, laid back, not crowded, and the people are extremely pleasant. I'm not besieged with maternal phone calls.

Bonuses are, I get to ignore the New York State primary election, with Hillary and Obama leaving vote-for-me messages on my answering machine, not to mention the testosterone-fest of Superbowl Sunday.


I'm with a friend for a week, then I'll be here a week by myself. Note to self: learning how to communicate in Spanish was a resonable New Year's Resolution. Alas, I did not achieve it, so I'm glad to be with someone who can utter sentences in Spanish. My default language is French -- and all of that is flooding my brain.


Espanol? Not so much. Not yet. Perhaps next week I'll conjugate verbs, after my friend, who has German, Russian, and some recently reaquired Spanish under her belt, leaves me to my own devices.

We have great plans, places to go, art to see, but most likely, we will stay here by the pool or under the palapas, the Mexican version of Haitian chacoons -- thatched hut roofs made of sisal or banana leaves that shield us from the sun.

It is, I realize, the palapas that attracted me most, attached themselves to my soul when I was here last year, that made me think, this is like the Carribean I knew as a child, the one where my family was intact, where Christmases were merry.

I am older now, and will probably never see another chacoon in my life -- the Haiti I knew has vanished, with all the political upheavals, my father gone (17 years as of last week), all my family's ex-pat friends dead or relocated to safer climes. I have no more ties there, so I am making a Haiti for myself, one for this century.

This one is a land with electricity, telephone, cable TV, hot and cold running water, enough water pressure for a jacuzzi, but still: a beach where, at night, the stars shine through clear skies; I can hear the ocean from my bed; and all we do is eat, drink, play cards and backgammon. We sleep as soundly as children. It is Alice's version of a winter Wonderland.

Y'all come back now, ma'am...

Five days in Tiny Town, Slow Southern State, where brother (the bro), sister-in-law, (A), and niece, Kayanna, reside. 120 hours with my mother, including hours of one-on-one transit and ho-motel time. (119.5 hours too many for my nervous system.)

We went to celebrate Kayanna's first birthday, and to meet the relatives on A's side. (While the bro's previous wives never earned the title of sister-in-law, A is the mother of my niece, so regardless of what happens to his marriage, which I hope is stable and lasting (previous evidence to the contrary) she will always be related to me, always have a special place in my heart for making me Aunt Alice.

Fortunately it was a big party, first birthdays being more of a celebration that the parents survived a year than that the child did, so we didn't chat much with A's relatives, mostly nodded and stayed on the level of introductions. Surprisingly, my mother didn't drink until after Kayanna's Tinkerbelle-themed fete was over.

(We must thing alike, A and I. Knowing nothing about the party's theme, I had brought Kayanna the perfect complement: a DVD of Peter Pan.)

My niece is perfect: her temperament is serene; she has huge blue eyes, fine blonde hair, incredibly soft and unmarred skin, and the smile of an angel. Sure, I am biased, but my next-door neighbor in Wonderland (with no vested interest) says if Kayanna lived in Wonderland, she would make a great baby model, on the cover of American Baby or its current equivalent, as her daughter was.

Tiny Town is not much to write home (or here) about except for a few details. Unless hearing a Japanese chef with a Southern accent counts for racial diversity, Tiny Town is in the clear on that account. I did, however, notice upcoming observances for Martin Luther King Day, so perhaps the town, all 50,000, did get the integration memo.

It is not cosmopolitan by any stretch of the imagination. The inhabitants are, per Southern custom, exceedingly nice and polite. Shockingly polite to those -- and apparently I am one -- whom they perceive as their elders. Several of the guests at the birthday party said, "yes, ma'am" to questions I posed. Ma'am? Moi?

I'm not sure how long my Yankee mouth and I would last there, but, as Scarlett said, "tomorrow will be another day."

And I shall return (sans mother), to dote again.

The Human Condition

I haven't gone philosophical and read Hannah Arendt's book, just the reviews on Amazon, which tell me that my version is much simpler and easier to apply to every day life.

On an individual level, there are two states of being: better and worse.

If you happen to find yourself in neither category but instead would describe your condition as "okay to good" on one hand or "heinous or despairing" on the other hand, then I'm interested in hearing from anyone who knows what meds will induce the "okay to good" reaction for me and for my friends' lives. Great would be pushing it. Say "fabulous," and I will think you are full of shit.

Despair, I know well, up close and personal. It's when my psychopharm cocktail acts like expired vitamins, for one thing. I suspect it's also the state of many people living under truly hideous conditions, but that definition has outward measures, whereas inner despair flies into situations that would look marvelous to someone who is not "worse."

Heinous describes conditions at Guantanamo Bay or Iraq or any other war-torn, poverty-stricken, fascist-controlled (that includes the U.S., where Big Brother made sure privacy was dead and buried prior to the end of the 20th century) country that springs to mind.

When you're better or worse as a general condition, you're more likely to get to heinous or despairing than to great or fabulous.

Perhaps this doesn't make sense to you. If so, I suspect your are a psychopharmacological virgin, that is to say, one to whom no psychiatric drugs have ever been prescribed. Yes, for some, recreational drugs are the limit. I would have put myself in this category when I was 18 and my Quaalude dealer took checks.

But then the migraines began in earnest and the blackening depression was finally recognized. Voila: Sansert, your link to migraine free days and to LCD, from which it differs by one molecule. In some Swiss lab, LCD was synthesized just prior to Sansert.

The original thought was that LCD would cure migraines. Evidently, not so much -- though the drug's ability as a hallucinogenic trigger is not to be disputed. Then again, Sansert gets high marks as a hallucinogen as well. At 19, no one thought to issue that warning to me.

Eventually, neurologists stopped prescribing Sansert, the one antimigraine drug that worked, due to the severe, extensive and permanent nature of its side effects. It's also not the drug for the serotonin impaired, which covers most of us whose neurotransmitters need to take their orders from the better-living-through-chemistry folks.

For that, welcome to the world of antidepressants. Prior to the Prozac revolution in 1987, the AD drugs all had serious cautionary warnings (one type were the MAOIs: many food did not mix with this drug compound, i.e., aged cheese, beer, bacon and red wine. Ingest any of these or related foods, those magical nutrients would bring on a stroke or death).

The other type were the tricyclic ADs. Gain 7% of your body weight in a month, become incessantly dehydrated and continue to cry daily as before. Not highly recommended, but some folks still take them for nerve pain. Personally, my nervous system's full-body issues didn't respond. My leg, for example, wasn't depressed; it just hurt.

Living with depression is like living behind a mirror: you see all the people in the world, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the horrifying. However, you don't react at all -- a condition known as "lack of affect," or you react badly.

I'm not going to list the 7 or 10 or how many signs Big Pharma asks one to count to determine whether you are officially "depressed." Let's just leave it as for me, January is a month that consistently falls on the "worse" end of the spectrum, and I find there is no such thing as too much sleep, nor is there much in the way of food that interests me, and my concentration is shot.

I have had a few great afternoons recently: a friend took me through acres of Central Park I'd never seen, and the air smelled of spring, a quality it never possesses four blocks away. Another friend made dinner for me and played backgammon for hours. I am cramming in lessons in Spanish, for the two weeks in February that I will be in Mexico and need to order food, find the bathroom, and ask directions.

Still and all, this month is the anniversary of my father's death, and for that reason alone, despite the joy of my niece's first birthday next week, when Aunt Alice heads to Alabama, I can't imagine a January that will find me in the "better" state of the human condition.

Even the home you hated is gone

Thomas Wolfe knew what he was talking about. Like it or not -- and I detested it for the 15 years I lived there -- the town where I grew up has no resemblance to the town that currently bears the same name.


The places I lovingly considered home, in Lake Placid and in Haiti, are both gone, one lost to fire, the other to political anarchy. Even Paris, where I lived as a grad student, bit the no-smoking dust, as of yesterday.


The true title of this post should be, what the fuck? However, I'll let The New York Times tell the story, with all italics mine, and bold italics my commentary.
January 3, 2008
White Plains Journal
Urban Success Story, With Hint of Unease for Poorer Residents
By Fernanda Santos
WHITE PLAINS



" The heart of the downtown here spreads out like an oddly shaped T — from west to east for a half-mile along Main Street, and from north to south down a shorter stretch on Mamaroneck Avenue, where new restaurants, pharmacies and wine stores seem to sprout by the day.

"Downtown" White Plains used to consist of 4 blocks of Mamaroneck Ave., with maybe a block on either side of the four avenues that bisected it. Woolworth's, which occupied huge space on that avenue, was where my mother, who worked in a private psych hospital, "took the [looney] 'tunes to town."

There was a deli, several pizzerias, and a Chinese restaurant for your nutritional enjoyment. The Army-Navy store was popular, as was a jeweler specializing in silver, a couple of men's wear shops, Macy's, Sears, two movie theaters, and my favorites, an outpost of Hammacher-Schlemer and several book and record stores.

Our family pharmacy and liquor store were in walking distance of our house, about four miles away from "downtown." We had house accounts there, at our corner deli and the gas station. The only place I saw money exchanged was if my mom went grocery shopping at the supermarket.

My father was a great fan of the house account, and I learned to say "charge it" long before anyone needed a credit card. I suspect he single-handedly kept the before-its-time Gourmet Shop in business.

Even in the 1960s and 1970s, pre-mall days, White Plains was a shopping mecca, with department stores ranging from the now-defunct discount Alexander's to Saks Fifth Avenue, which has since been demolished, to Neiman-Marcus, now linked to an "upscale" mall.

" The steady drone of cars, once an aberration of sorts within the city’s nucleus, is now intrinsic to its fabric. And pedestrians, a rarity after dark just a few years back, stroll around at all times, amid the concrete-and-glass towers that rise like shiny exclamation points into an otherwise barren skyline.

Growing up there, I never saw a building taller than six stories, unless it was federally subsidized housing, and that was plain red brick. There was never a reason to be "downtown" at night. My parents ate out every weekend, and never in White Plains.

In junior high, at night, we hung out in residential parks, sharing bottles of cheap sangria or Boone's Farm strawberry hill country-fresh wine and chain-smoking cigarettes.

" “I like to say that I live in a small city with a big-city vibe,” said Jordan Bachelder, 29, a financial adviser who traded a rental studio apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan for a one-bedroom condo here in 2004.

I'd say he's delusional. The last time I was in White Plains, in the late 1990s, the vibe was, shop here and get the hell out. This guy is still so far off Broadway that he couldn't sing a show tune to save his life.

"At the time, [early 1990s] the area’s most memorable landmark was the vacant site of a former Macy’s department store, a cavernous hole at the corner of Main and Mamaroneck.

We shopped at Saks, where my mom didn't have to pay for parking, but as teenagers, almost my entire junior high shoplifted at Macy's, where we never went because my mom would rather pay Saks' prices than feed a quarter into the meter elsewhere.

I preferred the higher-end stores, because they had no security in place. Bergdorf Goodman and Brentano's Books were the five-finger discount targets my teenage self focused on.

"Today, downtown is a study in contradictions, a place where brands as popular as Wal-Mart and Target and as exclusive as Trump and Ritz-Carlton occupy prominent spots in a newly developed strip spanning four city blocks.

The Times, late to the story as always, could have made this observation 35 years ago, albeit by citing considerably lesser extremes. Have any of its reporters looked around the neighborhood where they are employed? Or where they live?

You don't have to get on a train, or even take public transit to see that our city, perhaps any true city, is, by definition, a study in contradictions and contrasts.

"It is a place where luxurious condominiums stand near public housing projects that are home to many of the city’s working poor; and where mothers chat in Spanish at a Dunkin’ Donuts, while young professionals tap on laptops in a Starbucks on the opposite side of the street.

Sounds vaguely like the Wonderland I inhabit; the major news here being the rate of demolition for mom-and-pop corner stores to make way for 40-story overpriced condos, whose storefronts boast banks and chain stores as their tenants.

One mile uptown, and the demographics are vastly different, with low income subsidized housing predominating the zip code. On the other hand, you don't have to go more than half a block from my apartment to find numerous people for whom English is not their native language.

Those condos multiplying like rabbits are making us lose what made us special, the individuality our streets showed, which breaks my heart, not to mention adding great inconvenience to my daily life. Our nearest Chinese restaurant, with 25+ years across the street, has been replaced by Godiva chocolates.

The corner restaurant and adjacent butcher, cigarette/newsstand, and dry cleaner, are all on the verge of closing as the next block away from mine is razed for yet another overpriced and underspaced sun-blocking condo.

" “Our dream was to design a city that if you lived here, worked here or visited here, you didn’t have to go anywhere else,” said Mr. Delfino, a Republican who is now in his third term as mayor. “I think we’ve met that objective.”

No, a town of 50,000 can't pull that off, not where I grew up and fled, not at all. 50,000 equals the population of students at the university where I attended grad school.

Don't know what's in the water up there, but I wouldn't mind swilling a few gulps from that delusional bottle.

"But the pace and depth of the transformation, arguably the most remarkable traits of the downtown renaissance, have also been a source of concern to some low-income residents, who fear that they may be pushed out as the area gentrifies.

White Plains has been trying for an urban renaissance since I was in junior high school in 1973. Then, we were taking downtown to see "urban renewal" in progress (much to the embarrassment, I later realized, of my classmates (the "bus children") who lived in the area our middle-class teachers deemed suitable for a "field trip.")

In kindergarten I didn't know that the kids we called "the bus children" were poor; I just knew they lived in another neighborhood that wasn't in walkable distance from our elementary school, a building hastily and hideously erected in 1964 for the housing developments where we baby boomers lived.

The one thing I will credit White Plains for was the racial and socioeconomic integration of its school system, a rarity in Westchester County in 1965 when I entered public school.

" “I love the way downtown looks, but is there a place for working people like me in the new downtown? I don’t know,” said Darryl Jenkins, 53, who has lived at the Winbrook Houses, a downtown public housing development, for more than 30 years. “It seems that all the homes that have been built so far are for rich people.”

Jenkins is correct, and I rather doubt that tolerance was mixed in to any of the new construction projects, much less more than a minimal amount of subsidized housing for a town that may be losing its middle class as quickly as Wonderland is.


"In 2003, downtown White Plains saw the conclusion of its first significant development, a $325 million project called City Center, which replaced the abandoned Macy’s.... The complex includes a Trump Tower, where some condos have sold for more than $1 million; luxury rental units in a doorman high-rise; several chain stores and restaurants and a multiscreen movie theater, the city’s first since the early 1990s."


This is truly the what-the-fuck part of the story, the part that brings it into the 21st century boggle-my-mind section. Trump condos for $1 million plus? I've heard there's a sucker born every minute, and right now, they seem to be clamouring to live in a Disney-fied town.


The place seems more of a horror show than the one I fled close to 30 years ago, before every store was a national chain, before every store fled to the security of a mall for pedestrian traffic.


When I left, the only mall in town was anchored by a supermarket, and its most memorable tenant was McDonald's. There still was a downtown, with individual chain-free stores, there. I never realized how much that characteristic was something to appreciate.

" "White Plains is a whole different city,” said Louis R. Cappelli, who developed the Ritz-Carlton and City Center projects. “It’s a balanced city.”

Obviously this depends on your definition. Last time I looked, Ritz-Carlton's rates (starting at $369 a night in not-so-scenic WP and rising to $5000 a night for some special penthouse suite) rather tilted the balance. Personally, you'd have to pay me $5,000 a night to stay there.

"In all, White Plains officials have approved the construction of 4,400 units of housing downtown, and more than half of them have been built — the first residential projects developed in the area since 1989, Mayor Delfino said. Most of the new construction is geared toward upper-class dwellers, a move the mayor said was necessary to balance the disparity in income among downtown residents.

I don't see them balancing the disparity in income in the part of town where I grew up, the house up the street from a then-working stable where my brother rode and roamed into what was then a completely wooded area.


The woods have long since been superseded by a million-dollar-plus single-family-home development. No, that nabe is secure in its zoning and prosperity, not to mention obscene property tax rates.


"John McIlwain, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, said that a resurgent downtown needed wealthier residents to support its retail base, but that the challenge was to retain an eclectic mix of backgrounds, which is vital to its city character.


Astounding, how retail in White Plains had been limping along with one of the five highest-sale malls in the U.S. before Donald Disney and friends came along to seduce people into mistaking White Plains for a real city. (I've been to that mall. It is walkable, a far cry in space from Minnesota's Mall of America, a spot I ventured to as reluctant anthropologist.)


As for "city character," take away a town's history, however benighted, and whatever character the town may have had is lost to the historical society.


"Rita Z. Malmud, president of the White Plains Common Council, said that the goal of the development was “not to turn downtown into a playground for the rich,” but that the area needed to achieve “the right mix.”


I don't see White Plains as any one's playground, save that of a lunatic. As for the "right mix," I shudder at the implications.


"She added, “What we have to make sure is that downtown remains a welcoming place to people of all races, all income levels and all stripes as we move forward.”


I can't help thinking that before the malling of suburbia, White Plains probably was far more welcoming, even to those like me who despised it, than it is today.

It was what it was -- a big city shopping mecca compared with its minute neighbors, a town with few overt pretensions -- primarily the covert ones belonged to the country-club set.

It was a postwar bedroom community for boomers' parents in what had been, before estate taxes ate up acreage, a country oasis for those who owned the large properties that later became housing developments. It probably always had its share of less affluent workers and families, some of whom minded the local shops or worked for the large landowners.

There are, I'm sure, those who are happy to call it home. I've just never been one of them.

Behind the gates

Here in Wonderland, we joke that a gated community is the kitchen Clover's Companion fences off with window screens so her puppy doesn't have a chance to have an accident someplace untoward, like the living room rug.

Other gated communities are homes, like the cage in which the off-White Rabbit lived, or the bars that separate the monkeys in the zoo. In short, gates are for the animals; however, Alice does realize that is within a microcosm of larger gates, ones that have no bearing on Christo's orange gate installation in Central Park a few years ago.


In Florida, from which Alice has just returned, gates are for people. She visited three people in three different communities, each of which had its own gate configuration for entry.


Assuming you are in a car, and if you're in Florida, that would be the main form of transportation available -- you must roll down the driver's side window, give your name to the gate lady, wait until it is accepted, then show an ID, all to get into the parking lot. If there's no gate guard, you need to know the magic code to punch into what would be the order-taker box at a drive-thru to allow you to enter. At the very least, your host must leave some indication that you are among the blessed and wanted.


Alice has encountered this before: in Arizona, she visited friends whose gate was controlled either by intercom or via swipe card. She can't imagine what a nuisance it would be to have the world shield her with a piece of metal. It generates as false a sense of security as the TSA does at the airport, waiting to seize a contraband lighter or a bottle with more than 3.4 ounces of liquid.

True, as Adrienne Rich wrote: "the door is simply a door. It makes no promises." In Wonderland, an entryway door begs to be rung, so that she who speaks into the intercom can be buzzed in to the building without other tenants assuming the worst.

If there is to be a gatekeeper, Alice prefers it be a person, like her doorman. While a good part of his job consists of determining who is allowed entry into the apartment building -- a guest arrives, he takes the guest's name, and rings Alice on the intercom or by telephone to get her blessing to send the person upstairs -- he provides a human touch.

The gate to Alice's abode is strictly for people, not for animals, unless the animal is a guest, like Clover's Companion's puppy. What goes on inside any apartment is basically his/her own business, so long as they meet the requisite percentage of rugs on their floor. Our "homeowners' association" is the co-op board, members of which Alice doesn't always recognize and whose control is primarily deadbeats and decibels.


At Alice's friend's house, one of about 100 meeting the architectural criteria for inclusion in Sea Breeze, or River Walk, or Atlantic Gardens, or whatever that particular gated assemblage is called, the homeowners' association clearly has too much time on their hands. Her friend, like 21 others in their compound, has received notice of fascia dysplasia.


Fascia has something to do with gutters or is connected with the roof in some way. In a "private community," the fascia police, like the dog-size/noise police in New York apartments, have the power. (Alice doesn't understand why the decibel police don't exist for crying babies. She is quite sure her mother would have shushed her but good, without raising a fist, if Alice's tantrums rose above the level her mother could tolerate.)


Whether co-op board nazis or fascia fascists, each requires that you must live up to a group standard that may or may not leave you with Constitutional rights . This is becoming a trend across more and more of the U.S. according to The New York Times.

Even when Big Brother, in the name of "homeland security," doesn't take away your right to free speech, you sign an agreement with the co-op board or the condo/homeowners' association in order to have a decent place to live. No wonder no one realizes our rights are melting away; they have already signed contracts spelling that out. We're all behind one gate or another.

Janis Joplin knew what she was singing: freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.