Dream a little dream of me...

Over at Dementia Nights, one of my high school friends has been chronicling the experience of his father's Alzheimer's disease. Today, he is transporting his father to a nursing home. It is the hardest thing Alan, an only child, has ever had to face: being the father to his father.

I am dreading the day that I will live that experience first-hand: that day when I will be that parent to my own mother. Regardless of my having a sibling, chances are good I will be called upon the mother to my mother, and that my brother won't.

In our society, when baby boomers have aging parents who need care, unless one is an only son, it is still the daughters who do the heavy lifting. Or perhaps it is the child deemed "the responsible one" vs. "the fuck up" at an early age. We do live up to and down to parental expectations, alas.

My brother may have the best intentions in the world, but when it comes down to who's in charge of mom, that is going to be me. With bells on. Already have power of attorney. Ditto her health care proxy.

Given that both of my mom's parents went gaga, I have to think the genetic odds are unfortunately good that my mom will end up the same way. The Alzheimer's diagnosis wasn't on the radar when Grandpa Abe lost his marbles. Thirty years ago, he was just plain senile.

I have a vague inkling of what Alan is going through -- but from the distance of packing up and transporting my maternal grandmother. I don't think she ever knew what hit her during the senility send-off we gave her.

(Cue up the Mamas and the Papas, "dream a little dream of me," which went through my head while packing up my grandmother's things in 1989 and which seems to be my brain's link to that situation. Don't ask for a logical explanation for that.)

The day we parked my grandmother at what is generically the Jewish Home for the Aged, we discovered Little Haiti, the part of Miami where Granny Lee lived out her last days -- years of them. We know Haiti, the island, intimately.

We also figured that Little Haiti was not exactly in an upscale part of town. Then again, in the seven or more years Granny Lee lived at the Jewish Home, it's hard to say if she ever left the premises for more than some minor grocery shopping -- or dinner, with my brother and me.

She was happy to go to Denny's -- probably would have gone to Taco Bell, if that had been our decision. Over dinner, she informed us that there was too much sex on TV and in the magazines. That was, we think, the only time she ever uttered the word "sex," although she had, when I was a child, made reference to Grandpa Abe "getting amorous."

Grandpa Abe went gaga first. The last time we had dinner as a family, he didn't recognize my mom, his only child. He said, "I used to take my daughter fishing." I doubt he was talking to the waiter. My mom ran into the bathroom and I followed her: did that mark the beginning of my care-taking career?

Or had I always been the care-taker-in-training? I don't know, and it is way too late in the day to figure out how I got that gig. I just know I have my hat and my checklist when, 20 years from now, my mom's inability to provide nouns in her speech will render her incomprehensible. I am not looking forward to it.

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

A guide to living in reduced circumstances

Alice is sad to report, it has come to this. She would much rather produce a guide to living under better circumstances; however, in this climate (read, economy tanked), it seems inappropriate.

Until the recent, shall we say, unpleasantness?, Alice made a living, as they say, from offering financial advice, a field whose existence appears rather tenuous. Thus Alice will offer a few words on the way she lives now.

It may be ordinary for some folks, but for Alice, it is not business as usual, not S.O.P. by a long shot. Alice is a baby boomer, part of a generation that has been known to act as if instant gratification takes too much time.

Food: Alice has rediscovered her kitchen. She markets -- in ordinary grocery stores, where she watches for good prices. She is applying heat to food on a regular basis. A prescription for burn cream has been filled, and Alice slathers it on with abandon.

Clothing: Fortunately, Alice was never much of a clothes horse. Now, she is not even a clothes pony. More like a clothes shih tzu, if that. So much for predictions of pricey underwear. It's strictly Hanes -- her way or the highway. As for outer layers, good-bye catalogs; hello, thrift shops.

It's time for pre-owned clothes. Pre-owned shoes. Maybe freebies from craigslist, or bargains at a church rummage sale. (Do they still have rummage sales? Does Alice know how to rummage?) The lipstick factor is prominent in Alice's toiletry plans.

Might even be time to relearn to sew, although that could cost Alice a finger or two, which would push health care out of reach.

Shelter: At least the mortgage is paid off. There will be no improvements to shelter short of hanging already in-house paintings and reorganizing the bookshelves and closets.

Heat may be curtailed, although Alice will be damned if she's going broke in the dark. Perhaps she will rearrange the living room furniture. Or would that be the deck chairs on the ship that may remain nameless?

Travel: all air travel has been postponed indefinitely, with the exception of tickets procured with frequent flyer miles to places where Alice may stay with friends. Inter-Wonderland transit has gone public.

It's subways, buses, and trains. Au revoir les taxis, those little yellow vehicles that have sped Alice from one part of town to another on a regular basis in the past.

Entertainment: Welcome to free movies on demand. Let's watch all DVDs purchased but still sealed against thievery. Read all books acquired with spines still uncracked. Can Alice interest you in a game of Monopoly? (Read about its ironic history here.) Anyone want to ante up for a game of nickel-dime-quarter poker?

Who cares if you lose? It's only money, right? Isn't it? asks the financial planner. What she really wants to know is, how far can we go before we hit bottom? Are we there yet? Please? Even the Wizard off Wall Street, major shareholder in Capitalist, inc., seems a few steps off. (Damn it, Alice should have remembered white men can't dance.)

Is there a 12-step program for the global economy?

Contemplating what to defrost for dinner, Alice is profoundly depressed. Previously she had never considered the freezer section a home for much more than ice trays, nukable proteins, extra smoked salmon, bagels, butter, and coffee.

Now she has said adieu to her menu drawer and has wrapped various meats, first in plastic wrap, followed by aluminum foil, labeling the packets with indelible marker by contents and date received. In the 'burbs, growing up, Alice remembers seeing her father do this with entire filet mignons he had cut into portion size.

It feels different now, and part of Alice is relieved her beloved Daddy isn't around for this 21st century meltdown. On the other hand, he taught her that life was a banquet. It's just that Alice hadn't planned on getting the check.

Here's to hoping the light at the end of the tunnel isn't an oncoming train.

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.

Dazed and confused...

as the song of 30+ years ago says. No, I don't know what to do. Not a clue. I attribute this state of being in part to stepping up my migraine preventive drugs to new heights of spaciness and also to the current state of the economy. Finally, my lack of time, energy, finances, and interest in business school have paid off. I don't know any more than those Wall Street M.B.A.s, but it didn't cost me a dime not to know it.

Ever so proud of the money I saved, I do does wonder how I will make my so-called living as the months unwind and the market tanks quicker than a crack addict's high evaporates. The pace is stunning. Fortunately financial planning is holistic (dreadful but applicable description). It's not just about investments. If it were just about managing money, Alice would be screwed. Talk about your ballroom days being over.... This brings Alice to her next theme.

Chaos: It's not just a theory, it's a way of life. Apparently it's the way that Alice has signed on for, whether she realized it or not at the time. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose? Alice wouldn't bet on it. Her theory on the lack of suicides in the financial district is that most of the newer office buildings have windows that don't open.

You would have to be very determined to that break glass in an emergency, and Alice doesn't think the I-bankers have the upper body strength. She could, of course, be mistaken. She is certain, however, that street vendors whose native language is not English have already cornered the market on vegetable and fruit sales. Depression-era apple selling set up shop years ago. For immigrants, it beats dish washing, and it's an all-cash business.

All-cash businesses are, well, priceless. And everyone needs to eat. The folks in Alice's upscale apartment building are all planning to apply heat to food on a more consistent basis. Say good-bye to last-minute restaurant dinners; say hello to home cooking. Alice's freezer is well stocked with bargains on meat, fish, and poultry. A year ago, she wouldn't have known a good price if it bit her on the ass.

These days she takes great comfort in her menopausal marches around the reservoir. Finally, Alice and nature are on more than speaking terms. Turns out she loves walking and even running under the trees -- far from the sound of the phone ringing or the computer chirping. She doesn't understand the multitasking walkers who have a dog leash in one hand and a cell phone in the other, or the mommies jogging behind a stroller outfitted with two children.

Domestic incompetence is looking increasingly less attractive. Still, Alice can't open the cap on a bottle of soda, much less change a light bulb or do laundry without turning everything pink. You can bring Alice into the kitchen, but you'd better bring the burn cream along, too. Given how flaky her thumb tendons are, Alice wouldn't mind a sous chef, but she suspects that position has been lost to what is most assuredly a recession.

On the money management front, Alice as family CFO has been bailing out of financials for the past year, a move not taken with any prescience about the fall of Lehman Bros. et. al, but one that looks pretty damn good no matter what its impetus. Still, it looks like that retirement Alice was dreaming of will be postponed for the indefinite future.

She is, however, keeping her carbon footprint small by not attending any financial planning conferences this year. A week in Whistler with the socially responsible folks, and Alice would have gone postal. (They seem to respect trees more than intellectual property, and Alice has a big problem with that.) A trip to Hershey to discuss baby boomers retiring, and Alice would have been puking chocolate for days.

We baby boomers are, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. All those great plans we had, the country houses and the sojourns to foreign countries, well, not going to happen -- not unless great Aunt Matilda conveniently leaves a seven-figure cash inheritance ASAP. In real life, half the boomers Alice knows are scraping together college tuition money or shoring up their own finances, and another, larger-than-expected portion are supporting one or more parents.

Remember Goldie Hawn as Private Benjamin? She signed up for the Army with the private rooms and maid service. Looks like we're all joining her in the barracks, at an age when the kindergarten virtue of sharing has long since paled.

Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night.

"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.

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.

I spy, trouble from the sky

As if Big Brother's newly "legalized" upgraded ability to wiretap any international conversation wasn't enough now the eye in the sky is on you. Or me.

As The Wall Street Journal would have it, in a Page One story on Wednesday: U.S. to Expand Domestic Use of Spy Satellites. So, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you. Seems to me, no matter how many toys Big Brother steamrolls over Congress, results are not forthcoming. The terrorist-catch success rate isn't even on a par with major league baseball batting averages.

(Do not ask how pathetic I find the idea that Big Brother would employ someone, with my tax dollars, to listen to my friend Maura and I, baby boomers both, whine about our aging bodies, her father's wretched wife, or my mother's latest inanity, or chat about where can we go within 2 hours of Zurich so she can get stoned and I can find a great spa the next time I cross the pond.)

What to do? Throw more money away! Add more toys! Play to the adage, "boys will be boys; all that changes is the size of their toys." Because if there is anyone in government displaying the least sense of logic or maturity, I am missing the point. That great sucking sound is my tax dollars, down the rabbit hole.

And what is down that particular rabbit hole is nothing that interests Alice. She would rather stay above ground, adjusting to her new migraine meds, hoping that the one pill that makes her larger will be counteracted by the one pill that is said to make her small. Side effects R us in Wonderland. Sometimes Alice gets the good ones.

If 40 is the new 20, we're screwed

Clearly I've seen too many commercials and watched too much retro navel-gazing TV: the ads say 40 is the new 20, and I say, I wouldn't want to be 20 again for all the proverbial tea in China. Were I to rerun the movie of my life, I would scratch 1980, for numerous reasons. The most obvious is political: the first presidential election in which I voted got us Reagan. And that was a highlight.

Sure, I had a great, no-maintenance-necessary body. More brain cells than I could addle despite drugs. But the strum und drag? The illicit rendez-vous, the intrigues, the betrayals, even my first love -- all that energy expended, only to wind up lovesick and on antidepressants. No, not my year. 40 as the new 20? What that says about our collective emotional maturity, I hate to imagine.

I wouldn't mind having the body, still, but the rest of it? Thank you, I've handed in my homework, have a couple of degrees behind me, and already recovered from a run-in or two with the age of grief. In the 25th reunion book I edited, one of my friends answered the question, what would your 1982 self be most surprised about about your current self? She said, "menopause and retirement -- looking forward to both."

The PBS two-hour celebratory "documentary" called The Baby Boomer Century made me want to hurl sharp inanimate objects at its host, narrators, writers, editors, and producers. Do we still believe we're going to change the world? Yeah, we're going to outlive our resources, drain Social Security, and live in a anti-smoking, anti-drinking, follow-your-bliss-off-a-cliff society. Sounds like a plan to me.

Women, incidentally, aren't necessarily in the work force by choice. Since 1973, it has been considered impossible to support a middle-class household on one salary. According to the documentary, we have had a "civilizing effect," on the work place. Seems a dose of Emily Post followed by a chaser of Miss Manners could have done the job for us.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote of a character in a short story, "The Dead," in 1980: "...Ilena thought it wisest to avoid complete mental alertness. That it was an overrated American virtue." I couldn't agree more. That baby boomer in the White House, lousy poster boy for cocaine rehab and a highly suspicious return to God, has demonstrated that this is not the time to pay attention. What we see, we would prefer not to. What we know, he refuses to admit. Iraq is this century's Vietnam, but no one is talking. If we were really the 20 of the baby boom years as portrayed on TV, we'd be shouting.

Or so I'd like to think. The much-touted longevity we can apparently anticipate is not something I'm looking forward to. 25 years out of college, the physical damage is done. I've already buried several of my friends, and at least one is terminal, another so close to a psych ward it terrifies me. I think it's the Gen Xers who took to the gym with a vengeance.

My generation (or at least I) went kicking and screaming. (That's about as much exercise as seems dignified.) My mother walks to keep her bones from crumbling, bored by every minute of it. I take calcium and Fosomex. The part of my generation that isn't "in recovery" does, after all, believe in "better living through chemistry."

Telling us smoking is bad is not new information. It may have been new to our parents in 1964, but now? Not so much. Yet now, in Wonderland, cigarettes must be fireproof, meaning if you don't puff in a timely fashion, the cigarette will extinguish itself. Evidently we are too old or stupid to remember Smoky the Bear's warning: "Only you can prevent forest fires." In Wonderland, I can scarcely see a tree for the 30-story condo. I wouldn't worry about the forest and me. Nature and I simply are not on such close terms.

Give me the tropics in winter, the mountains in summer, but give me the hotel, not the canvas tent; maid service, not roll-your-own-sleeping-bag; room service, not freeze-dried ice cream to be reconstituted over the campfire -- if indeed campfires are acceptable and not considered eco-terrorism.

I haven't been camping since I was old enough for "no, thanks," to become a complete sentence. (Besides, as last reported, I talk in my sleep, loud enough for an entire campground to hear me yell "fuck!") Three years ago our tents in Africa had carpets on the floor, 24-hour electricity, full mosquito netting, and complete indoor plumbing. That's as much of the outdoors as I have grown to prefer without a guide taking me to tour the wide open spaces.

Don't get me wrong: I loved our safari, adored swimming with sea lions in the Galapagos Islands. My safari companion was 80; my Galapagos companion, 70; both are healthier than I ever will be.

However, I want to leave wild life in the wild. Wonderland's idea of wildlife is cockroaches, the invincible creatures of our era who dwell in our walls. Thank you, I'll take an exterminator's visit over scurrying roaches or the mouse who has taken up residence in my apartment. This would be Minnie, who searches here in vain for food. She (or he, could be transgendered) doesn't know where to find the menu drawer, my primary source for nutrition.

I'm hoping that Hannah Arendt's observation is correct: "Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come to those who, when young, were never wise."

I have it on good authority that I was never wise.

A quarter century in the "real world," II

The 25th reunion book is at the printer's, out of Alice's hands. 21 days and counting to the Big Weekend. Alice would like to look 10 years younger and 10 pounds lighter, and have forgone the past 10 years of angst, remembering instead only what was fun and interesting. It is a pleasant idea, but Alice lives in Wonderland, home of 9/11, and knows too many Republicans, so she does not trust that she can pull it off.

First, Alice's final words in her capacity as reunion co-chair (i.e., for public consumption), pre-Weekend:

Editor’s note:
“Only connect,” wrote E. M. Forster in Howards End. That is, in essence, what has brought us together this June, a quarter-century post-[college], for Reunion. For once, we are face to face.

If we choose, here we can ignore the huge technological and telecommunications innovations that have, for better or worse, revolutionized our lives. (Pharmaceutical discoveries, however, never take a holiday.)

The class autobiographies that form the center of this book show classmates both surprised and blasé about where we are and what we’ve become. Almost everyone has expressed the feeling that it is only after leaving [our college] that we truly appreciate the experiences and opportunities our sojourn there afforded us, whether academic or otherwise.

I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to this narrative, offering us a glimpse into his or her life. As Joan Didion wrote: “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be…”

Most of us cherish our [college] connections, however sporadic. We are linked by a landscape that includes the Pub, tea at the Main Living Room, daffodils by the Lake, and Art 105, not to mention the days of free beer and sudden romantic interludes.

That was then; this is now. It’s time to celebrate who we are.

Enjoy.

Alice

Now, the text Alice couldn't provide for public consumption:

Alice is tired. She has put in more than 60 hours gratis on this reunion book alone, and if the alumnae/i organization remains consistent, she will receive thanks equal to her payment for services. In other words, none. She would like to kick in the ass every classmate who signed up to help with Reunion, then vanished when a specific request was made.

She is not sure she even wants to go. The planning and preparation have been absurdly complicated, in no small part because the alum office reunion coordinator just got promoted into her job this year, and Alice and her co-chairs have born the brunt of her learning curve. One more conference call, and Alice would pretend she lacked a telephone.

Clover's Companion, Alice's once-upon-a-time lover and current best friend, graduated a class behind Alice and will not be in attendence. The Croquet Player has RSVP'd, and Alice is nervous about their meeting at the scene of their initial encounter. They both behaved badly there, and Alice is hoping they won't regress to their teenage selves.

As for the daffodils, Alice does not ever remember seeing any bulbs in bloom.

Alice spent the latter three years of college stone-cold sober, and kept a nightly journal. She knows where the bodies are, if not buried, have encountered one another horizontally. She can't remember what she ate for dinner last night, but who slept with whom 25+ years ago? She's right on it. She has been known to have inconvenient recollections pop out of her mouth.

She has also been known not to alter her language or behavior due to the appearance of small children, for she remembers when you were trying your damnedest to avoid procreation, not to dwell on it.

As for her "career," Alice just laughs. What an overrated concept. Her college sends out its fair share of coffee-achievers, but, honestly, Alice turned in that assignment before graduation. She has worked with enough idiots to change jobs and find that regardless of her occupation, she flunked or never took the course in the patience required for real life.

She is hoping to cheer up in a very short period of time and that a good haircut, much-moisturized and pampered skin, and a decent bra will draw attention to the parts of her that have remain closest to her 21-year-old self. Her penchant for sarcasm has not changed.

Alice can only do so much to stop aging, not that she's complaining publicly about waistlines, wrinkles, and grey hair. She's just thinking it. That, and the fact her eyesight is shot; she has orthopedic problems and a crumbling bone structure. Fortunately, gravity is an equal-opportunity leveler.

Everyone who answered the questionnaires thought the Internet was the best thing since sliced bread -- the technological orgasm of our time. Alice, not so much. When it's good, it's very, very good. When it's bad, it really, really sucks. It operates at a much faster speed than Alice, who fears some connection got lost in the cyber translation, and she's never going to find it.

Oddly enough, even the gay couples didn't consider the fact that they are happily and publicly partnered to be one of the most significant changes in the last quarter century. Alice would put that way before the Internet in her list.

No lesbian considered it that significant that she could, on her own, have a baby, without being consigned to be a social pariah. Now, the lesbian mom gets points for diversity if she's looking to place her kid in private school.

After reading through her classmates' replies, Alice is confounded by their lack of creativity. She and her cohorts are baby boomers, albeit on the young side, but they did love sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, and now all their talk is of money and technology.

While the class of 1982 was never out to save the world, Alice thought it had more of a social conscience and interest than it has demonstrated in the reunion book. She has also been surprised that in 25 years, no one has learned to meet a deadline.

Maybe she shouldn't be. Maybe at this point in our lives, it all does come down to whatever-gets-you-through-the-night, and that "you" is very personal. Alice understands that, really. Her favorite innovation/invention over the past 25 years the first S.S.R.I. to roll off the assembly line in the late 1980s.

Sealed for whose protection?

Forget going green. I grew up in the day of "Give a hoot. Don't pollute." I remember the first Earth Day ever. That was in the late 1960s, at a time when the most challenging package to open was a cardboard milk carton. In the 1960s, the golden word was "plastics."

These days, the packaging industry, in particular the clam-shell and shrink-wrap divisions, is alive and well, and trying to make it impossible for you to open, in no particular order: a CD (why does it come with theft-proof tape when I bought it online, and the retailer doesn't have any brick and mortar stores); ditto the calculator or camera trapped in a clam shell, which has also never seen the light of an actual store; or the vitamins with an outer clear plastic seal, an inner foil liner, and of course, a "childproof" cap.

And our pharmaceuticals: the "childproof" prescription bottles for which you need the child, especially when you would need to put on your reading glasses to see what the opening instructions were; a "squeeze to open" Aleve bottle, when one of the medications main uses is to help those with arthritic hands, and hands with problems -- arthritis, tendinitis, loose tendons, and the like -- can barely button a blouse, much less tangle with the great God plastic.

Following those challenges comes the squeeze bottle, whether it contains moisturizer, shampoo, chocolate syrup, or mayonnaise. Without the ability to press one's fingers comfortably to one's palms, you will need to reorder these supplies more frequently than someone who can squeeze every last drop out of the squirt-top (not removable, of course).

And finally, the toothpaste tube: you know that toothpaste manufacturers adore the fact that no one can completely empty the tube, unlike in days past when the tubes were metal and you could attach a toothpaste key to make sure you'd finished off the tube. This practically defines planned obsolescence.

What I want to know, in the age of An Inconvenient Truth, is whether it takes more energy and a larger "carbon footprint" to manufacture all these items from plastic, or whether it took less energy and we were less wasteful in the days of glass and metal, without shrink-wrapped plastic covering our every purchase.

'Cause my cohorts and I aren't getting any younger or gaining more manual dexterity, and right now, at the supposed height of our buying power, we are not the happiest of consumers.

The thrill of victory...

After close to 30 years of voting, I don't think it's too much to ask that my team wins -- this marks the second time since 1978. I remember where I was the first time Clinton was elected: at a writer's colony in Massachusetts, about a half hour out of Northampton. We had no TV; everyone and her sister did not yet have anything close to a Web page; we could follow the results on the radio, but even then, the reception was spotty.

So I drove into town to celebrate with my fellow Democrats, at the only election party I have ever attended. Didn't matter that I didn't know anyone there: the important thing was, finally, I voted for a winner. (Mayoral elections in Wonderland have always left me feeling that the two evils were equal, and hence, I have abstained.)

This year, however, I should be happy. I was, too, for about 20 minutes.

Unfortunately I have reached the age where I know some of the lunatics who are running the asylum, and one of them, who couldn't get elected to student council at my prep school, is now my state's governor-elect. The one good thing to come of that is that he, like Wonderland's current mayor, can't be bought by special interests. Each of them has too much money of his own to care.

This brings up a couple of questions: are politicians all like Sally Field? Do they really, really, really want you to like them, to recover from previous slights in the popularity polls? The other question is: do you have to be not merely well-off, but out-and-out rich to win an election?

The current price of a year's tuition at my prep school: $29,100 per student, per year, in after-tax dollars. I think it safe to say that my governor-elect's three children are not attending that institution courtesy of my tax dollars. However, I noticed no comments were made about improving the public schools during the election campaign.

I can't help wondering if that is because the governor-elect and his offspring have experienced our state's public school system only when riding by any such institution in a chauffeur-driven vehicle. I spent kindergarten through tenth grade in a suburban public school system. Apart from my being miserable in public school(and how much of that was due to adolescence and would have been true anywhere?), was the education noticeably that much better at my prep school?

I lived in a town whose housing options ranged from Section 8 Federally subsidized apartments to mansions down the street from horseback riding stables. I knew first-hand about socioeconomic differences; the children of various strata were in all of my classes while there was scarcely more than a single strata in my homogeneous prep school, and that one started at upper-middle class, skyrocketing upward from there.

Perhaps I would welcome this year's election victory more gracefully if I hadn't grown up to be so cynical. But my training started in that same public school system: when I was age 8, I read in My Weekly Reader that Richard Nixon was a Quaker, and I knew Quakers didn't believe in war. Yet there Nixon was, ready and waiting to bomb Cambodia. Cognitive dissonance had its first ruling, and now I feel it no matter which party label is in office.

The inmates have taken over the asylum...

while I have been running away.

It hit home today, once again, that the inmates are my peers. They shared elementary school, high school, college, and other quasi-academic venues with me.

The man who writes front-page New York Times articles covering Bush and Iraq is the boy who my entire sixth-grade class pegged as "queer," in the elementary school vernacular (not to be confused with current gay-pride reclamation of the word).

The boy who graduated a year ahead of me in high school has made his name as my state's attorney general (ruining the careers of many from our alma mater ) in his securities industry cleanup. Now I get invitations to fund-raisers for his campaign for state governor. Governor? This guy wasn't popular enough in high school to be president of the student council.

If I don't know the people writing the best-sellers, I do know the people who edit and publicize them. I danced at the wedding of the New York Times op-ed editor. At that wedding I met the folks who got me my freelance gig at that same newspaper. I was there as a guest of the bride, a best-selling feminist author I'd met at a writer's colony.

Last night I checked the credits for one of my favorite TV shows; in my 20s, I drank nightly for several summers and swam in Vermont with one of the producers, a woman to whom I am related through fewer than six degrees of separation: her father coached a national football team owned by a man whose mistress was my father's first cousin. Small fucking world.

Where have I been, while all around me have become such high achievers? Alive and stumbling in the nervous breakdown lane, making large contributions to members of the American Psychiatric Association and to shareholders in every large pharmaceutical company on the New York Stock Exchange.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda -- well, as it happens, couldn't. Depression is polio of the brain, and there are times my mind needs a wheel chair. When it doesn't, I am off and running, usually as far as I can. It is the only way I don't feel guilty about being self-employed and not producing anything salable. It also affords me some time away from the daily phone calls from my mother, who has taken to calling attention to odd postmarks recently.

As it happens, the year I turned 38 I was diagnosed with osteopenia, precursor to osteoporosis, the disease of disintegrating bones that makes old ladies break their hips.

My solution? Take my calcium and get on a plane. See the world before I crumble. I've succeeded there, six continents in six years: according to the stamps in my passport,

North America: eight trips to the Caribbean -- three to Grenada/Carriacou, two to St. Martin/St. Barts, twice to Barbados, once to Aruba -- once to Mexico; and three or four trips to Canada, from Vancouver to Toronto to Montreal.

Europe: England and Switzerland mostly, the former for a couple of days each way to visit old haunts en route to Africa, the latter four or five times to see my best friend from grad school.

Africa: South Africa (twice) and Botswana, home of the five-star safari.

Australia: all over the East Coast, visiting a friend from my writer's colony, and all over New Zealand, where my best friend from high school lives. I stayed with them in Denmark, but that was another time, and an earlier passport.

South America: Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.

Asia: China, Hong Kong (no visa, separate stamp, despite China's rule), Japan.

Next up, per the airline ticket on my refrigerator, is the Czech Republic, Hungary, and France.

I've been traveling for 30 years, sometimes as a student and others as a five-star Eloise, and I don't think I'll stop making plans any time soon, in part because I'm not sure how later will play out, either in terms of my body or the world-at-large.

I have great and horrific hotel stories, bad and worse air travel ones, and, within the U.S., tales that exemplify why a driver should come with whatever car I rent.

If auto makers really wanted to make their cars safe, they would forget about the you-need-your-oil-changed e-mail and concentrate on making a robotic chauffeur. You tell it your destination, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Drivers in New York, California, Florida, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington D.C., Virginia, North Carolina and places unknown can attest to that. My rent-a-car should come with a cautionary bumper sticker: driver doesn't know where she's going and cannot guarantee simultaneous navigation and maintenance of control of vehicle.

I do try to avoid Hertz and Avis in my travels: if there is a bus, a train, a plane, anywhere to get me to my destination that does not involve my having to merge onto highways, I'm there. It is the least I can contribute as my public service and civil duty to drivers everywhere.

I have changed planes in states I would be afraid to visit: Texas, Utah, Georgia and Colorado come to mind. (I do have friends in various parts of Texas, both in the blogosphere and from pre-computer days.) As airports go, I don't recommend Chicago, either, although I have had fun with friends there. Where white supremacists and old-fashioned bigots live, like Idaho, and the Carolinas (North and South), I would not, in the era of Bush, care to return.

For that matter, when I saw the "Jesus is looking after the New River Valley" billboard near the Appalachian trail in Virginia, I got very nervous. Had I not been to see an ur-WASP friend, I might have turned and run. Yet in all the years I vacationed in Haiti, I was not once afraid. No one was out to lynch me for being nominally Jewish, and a born and bred New Yorker. In small towns in the South? I had less confidence.

Given the malignant state of American "democracy," some dictatorships start looking benign by contrast. My father's long-ago comment echoes: "You don't talk politics in a dictatorship." He died before it came to pass that politics deteriorated to the blue-state, red-state level, and that talking politics could be more provocative here than in Athens, the ancient cradle of democracy.

My family visited Athens when I was a teenager, enamored more of room service than democracy, although in retrospect I am glad I climbed on the Parthenon just before a Plexiglas shell was designed to preserve it.

In our hotel suite were buttons to press to summon a housekeeper, a meal, or the bell man. That, however, was long ago and far away, the year we cruised the Greek islands, with a one-day stop (long enough for my non-kosher family) in Israel.

When I was younger, I was happy to tramp through Europe with one tiny suitcase, overnighters in one country one night and another the next, convinced I could get by with my semi-fluent French, regardless of my location -- Italy, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, even Austria or Germany. Now I most reluctantly wheel my own luggage and make sure I have health insurance and bail money wherever I go, and never spend fewer than three nights in one place.

In the U.S., I am sometimes convinced that Wonderland is a country unto itself, since I fail to comprehend so much of what happens west of the Hudson or anywhere near the Bible belt.

Besides, Wonderland is the asylum into which I was born. As I get older, I will know more and more of the asylum-runners, though I don't expect to be among them.

"the trick is not to get frightened..."

So says a character in Wendy Wasserstein's play Isn't It Romantic, regarding the prospect of living alone and not sharing a life with a partner. Ten years older than I am, Wasserstein wrote plays and essays described the dilemmas of a generation -- the baby boom. She was on the leading edge, and I, trailing in her wake.

Wendy Wasserstein died today, at age 55, leaving one daughter, Lucy Jane, age 6 or 7, in addition to the living members of her "family of origin." The news reports say she "succumbed," after a "battle with lymphoma."

I am sorry her death was so horrid and painful, yet I can't help wondering: why is being treated for cancer a "battle" one might win, when so few other illnesses, mental and physical, receive this war-like description in the obituaries?

I imagine Wasserstein's definition of family was much broader than her blood relatives: she was good friends with countless playwrights and actors she knew through Yale Drama School. In her plays and essays, she depicted to my friends and me what awaited us when we left college.

She posed the big question previous generations of upper-middle class women did not have to face. Should we "have it all"? Is that what we wanted? The ages and stages of womanhood, from college through middle age, and how these stages transformed themselves, perhaps when we were not yet able to understand the difference between how we had been raised and what we were suddenly expected to become.

My understanding was that women wanted equity, not necessarily equality, with men. Men do so much -- play such games -- that women need not emulate to prove their capabilities in the workplace, and so little, statistically, to pick up their share of running a household and child-rearing while their spouses/partners hold down equally demanding jobs.

Yes, the trick remains, "not to get frightened." Hearing some of my friends' divorce stories, and their realization that none had ever lived in a home alone before the decree came down, I realized I have practice and am mostly comfortable with my living situation, where no one squeezed the toothpaste from the middle excecpt me, not to mention more major eccentricities.

I know I am rare: I have never rented an apartment. I have owned the two places I have lived. I have never had roommates -- I could afford not to, and couldn't think of anyone who would want to live with me, a woman who woke up screaming in the middle of the night, with bad dreams and excrutiating migraines. (My housekeeping/domestic skills are far from being on a par with the consistency of my insomnia and headaches.)

I saw Isn't It Romantic in 1983 with a WASPy friend, to whom I had to explain the few Jewish jokes I knew.

Much had ostensibly been resolved or remedied by 1970s feminism by the time we reached the workplace. I did not, for example, have to type to get an entry, entry level editorial (journalism) job, nor did I make coffee for my boss. Indeed, the woman came to work frequently without Tampax, cigarettes, or car/bus fare home, and I often spilled my coffee over my desk, because I wasn't awake enough to hold the cup, nor did I care to be.

However, as an editor 15 years my senior, 20+ years ago, accountable for a $1 million-plus magazine budget, she ought to have learned to be responsible enough to remember when she had her period, and learned long ago not to leave the house without what my grandmother would have called her "mad money," the cash you carry when the situation becomes one you wish to leave. I hold that belief to this day, and have added only the ubiquitous cell phone for further safety.

I lost all respect for this grown woman who counted on her under-, underling to keep her in cigarettes, cab fare, and Tampax. When I said, "isn't there something wrong with this picture?", she didn't get it. What part of, "I get paid pennies an hour; you make something resembling a real salary," did she miss?

The whole damn thing. I had to explain it to her. After that, she didn't ask for cash or Tampax anymore -- she took her begging down the hall to the art department, where pages were designed.

No one there stood up to her to say, "if you're the responsible adult in charge of putting out this magazine, and you can't remember a token to get home on the bus, exactly what part of your juvenile behavior is meant to earn our respect?"

I couldn't find any part. And when I left, she took the staff (all 6 of us) out to lunch, and was pleased as punch to make a fuss over her gold AmEx card. I couldn't resist, innocently (yea, okay, not so much), saying, "when I was a teenager, I didn't know AmEx came in any other color."

This woman also said, "you don't want to grow up and be like A." A. was our contributing editor, who came and went as she pleased, single at 40, and not looking to change her marital/partnership status. From where I sat, at 23, A. had the life closest to the one I wanted to achieve, the one where you earn money on your own terms, vacation when you would like, and rely on a close circle of friends.

I think A. was straight, though it was she who pointed out that it would not be appropriate to describe the window of a San Francisco kitchenware shop by its predominant design, blue jeans with different color handkerchiefs in different pockets.

I almost fell out of my chair when I heard her tactfully explain why this was not suitable for a PG, half-Midwestern audience, not in the age of AIDS in particular. My boss, the editor, lived 15 blocks from Greenwich Village, and she had never observed that the handkerchiefs were more than a fashion statement.

At it happens, I have known for 25+ years about the handkerchiefs and their symbolism. (When A. had to explain to the editor-without-a-clue why the term "honey pots" was inappropriate, I almost fell off my chair.)

I have never been in a corporate workplace long enough not to make sure I took all the vacation I was allowed, and I announced I was taking two extra days at Christmas, for which I didn't care if I were paid. I was well on my way to, who do you have to fuck to get out of here? I quit before I verbalized that sentiment, went to graduate school, and never held a 9 to 5 job again.

Wendy Wasserstein knew intimately the lives of women like me and our choices, and she remains a woman I deeply admire, one who had the courage of her convictions, regardless of where they led her.

Late at night, when I can't sleep, the line from Isn't It Romantic reverberates: the trick remains not to get frightened. Morning will, after all, arrive soon.