Out of work in America?

Statistics aren't what they seem: for example, Alice has no employer save herself. For a long time, she had a tidy little business as a financial planner. The hours were minimal; neither early rising nor heavy lifting were involved; smoking in the office was a matter of desire, not law; all her colleagues were virtual. It was a good life.

Then came The Big Awful, with the economy blown to smithereens, and financial planning clients in increasingly short supply, and Alice's interest in the subject, at least as a career, waning considerably. Once again comes the question: what are you going to do with the rest of your life?

See, Alice and some of her friends, those who play psychopharm roulette along with her, never expected to age beyond, say, 30 or 35. However we have, which leaves us with far more time in our lives than we had anticipated. What to do, what to do? The answers are not coming fast and furious.

Alice would like to be an unemployment statistic, but she has failed to consider one critical connection: first, Alice would have to be working, doing the 9 to 5 and receiving a weekly paycheck. You can't collect unemployment without having put in 20 weeks working for someone else.

Last time Alice was eligible for unemployment was 1990, after her last staff magazine gig collapsed. Since then, as a so-called sole proprietor, she hasn't paid a dime into NYS's unemployment coffers. Hence, she is not eligible to receive, though she is working just as little as those who are collecting.

In truth, Alice's vocational calling is sleep, a minimum of 10 hours a night, every night. Without slumber, she is not-ready-for-prime-time functioning. It's been close to 20 years since Alice commuted to an office, and all she really knows about workplaces is that overhead fluorescent lighting, sealed windows, and recirculating air would be major contributors to an increase in migraine headaches.

Thus, Alice would prefer the office come to her, not that she go to an office any more substantial than the one that doubles as her dining room. Comfort first is her rallying cry. Alas, to answer FB's eternal what's-on-your-mind question, by saying will work for food, health benefits, and a really nifty retirement plan does not, in this po-mo world, constitute an active job search.

Is it time for another career? Alice exited magazine editing shortly before the demise of the printed page; she is looking to exit careers that require her to dress in heels, a good dress, a blazer and pearls in order to have her body language say, trust me. I am a good planner; it's just that our Brave New World requires too many economic projections that may well not hold.

So, now what? Alice's skill sets are mostly 20th century. She is a creative thinker whose techno-knowledge acquisition seems to be on overload. It is all she can do to burp out 10 words in a single sentence to communicate on FB, where Alice has been summering. (She is betting FB will kill whatever remaining productivity U.S. workers have pretended to retain.)

What Alice would like to do, thankyouverymuch, is retire. More specifically, she would be just as happy not to work another day in her life if not for the financial fallout. Give her a free day, and she will fill it, or not, depending on her mood.

Particularly difficult is the segue between vacation proper and back-to-some-facsimile-of-work.

A week away with a friend's family on the north shore of Massachusetts makes Alice realize how much better off we were without cell phones, computers, PDAs and the like. We could actually get away, and, unless we are filled with an unhealthy sense of self-importance -- narcissism run wild -- we need some time untethered.

Ma Bell used to say "reach out and touch someone." She meant, pick up the telephone. Alice is all in favor of the telephone (never text Alice; while she can receive messages, she can't send them and doesn't want to learn how. Texting strikes Alice as the best way to ruin her thumb joints, already fussy, forever. Not going to happen.)

She also likes to receive letters via snail mail -- just something personal from time to time. A postcard or two would be nice. Even a personal email -- coming back from vacation, Alice was greeted with 250+ emails, most of which are deletable without thinking.

Yesterday's cyber headlines are like yesterday's newspapers of old: we used to say that yesterday's news is today's fish wrapping. Difference is, now the fish wrapping is words on a screen.

And stopping the email flood would mean trying to remember what is important to bring back into the inbox. This in itself would be more work than Alice deems necessary. She gets emails she never meant to sign up for, and can't figure out how to disengage.

If you want to go ask Alice, please keep the correspondence lively. If you have a job for Alice, please send particulars. Meanwhile, in Alice's mind, she is on vacation until after Labor Day. Not only does she want no heavy lifting in a job, she doesn't want her synapses to struggle either.

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.

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.

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.

The printer ate my telephone cord...

...and other tales of urban life.

The weirdness began before Mexico. The No Exit personae were just one stop in the strange confluence of events that has been my life of late. (Hell is other people.)

It may have started the day the telephone cord inadvertently fell into the ink-jet printer, swallowed whole permanently. Bye-bye phone cord. Bye-bye printer. Hello Staples? What do you have in the way of new all-in-one-machines?

Print color documents, fax, scan, copy, enlarge, reduce, read memory cards, tap-dance, what have you. All the machine fails to do is Windows.

It does VISTA. I do not. Note to self: get XP drivers. Download from Web site?

When I packed for Mexico, I could not find my suntan lotion. I had the car service driver stop at the local 24-hour chain drug store at 5 am so I could pick some up en route to the airport. You don't want to know who else shops at that hour. I didn't.

What else? In my absence during the No Exit experience, I have a house guest arrive. My best friend from grad school is in town from Switzerland, where she has emigrated with her second husband.

America is on sale, and she has the empty suitcases to prove it. She is awake when my housekeeper, who is from Poland, enters. While I am sleeping, they discuss their respective situations as immigrants.

It is not, I admit, a coincidence that occurred to me, that they share emigree status.

Later in the day, after my guest leaves, the infant downstairs starts crying. I put on the Rolling Stones to muffle the noise. I dance to Satisfaction. CC, my best friend, is chez moi, her dog in tow. Shamrock barks to show her annoyance at the baby. The Visiting Dog Service of New York has arrived.

My one-bedroom apartment has no place for a baby except a walk-in closet. The couple downstairs, whose layout is identical to mine, failed to receive the memo informing them that the time to move out is between the conception and the delivery.

They complained once of noise from my apartment. I suggested the doorman read them the riot act, and they take it up with their landlord. They aren't supposed to be able to rent in this building anyway.

The Visiting Dog Service will return as needed. CC will teach Shamrock to stop barking when downstairs teaches their child to stop crying. Or when they move the the kid into their bedroom. It (gender undetermined) lives in the dining area, where I have my office. The wailing makes it hard to concentrate.

I am unreasonable, but not completely so: dining areas are for meals and entertainment, not for infants' slumber. Bedrooms have windows and closets, neither of which is included in the layout for this apartment's dining area.

By Wonderland city code definition, a "room" has windows; an "area" that contains them is rare. The floor plans don't call the dining area a slumber nook.

Just as I never enjoyed my upstairs neighbors' domestic disputes, I do not enjoy the downstairs child. Had I wanted to marry or reproduce, I would have. Neither experience is one I need to have vicariously. Years ago, had there been one more thud from upstairs, I was ready to call 911, fearing spousal abuse.

I set up the new all-in-one and realize the sole purpose of the fax machine. It's is for CC to send prescriptions to her pharmacy in Paris and me to do the same with mine a block from here. Without our meds, we wouldn't need it.

Then came the bizarre phone message: in my line of work, I have had clients ask me to be their executor, or a trustee in their wills. Depending on the circumstances, I may agree. Today, a stranger from upstate left a message: would I consider being a trustee if he and his wife died? I am not sure what to say when I return the call.

Do I start with, are you out of your mind? Or, are you terminal? I have no idea who this person is, much less whether I will still be working when his need for a trustee arises. Or why he would want to entrust his finances to a stranger. This is not where I would begin the conversation.

Where would I begin? With the digested cord? VISTA? The 5 am lotion stop? No Exit? The emigrees? The Visiting Dog Service? The dining room child? The fax discovery? The trustee request?

This week an expose of my prep school has made the cover story of Wonderland magazine, much to my amusement, following the Spitzer denouement on its cover two weeks ago.

One class ahead of me, like most of my fellow graduates, he was filled with the arrogance and hubris imparted with the diploma. I suspect, too, that he never got laid during his days there. That strikes me as a reasonable explanation for his choice of paid companionship.

Where will it stop? Please: someone, anyone, a clue?

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.

Darkest before the dawn

As we hurl toward the winter solstice, Alice seeks comfort she cannot find. The holiday season is never her favorite, but this year it is darkened by another death in the family -- Clover's Companion's father had a massive heart attack and died at home over the weekend.

Alice's own father met the same end, and while it was many years ago, everytime someone's father dies the same way, Alice relives the days following her own father's demise. Each time she remembers something different -- she remains foggy on many of the exact details -- but a girl only has one father, and Alice knows the ache of losing that one suddenly and without warning.

It was winter, too, when Alice's father died, when she received the phone call she couldn't believe, when she had to call back to make sure her mom said what Alice had thought. The memory alone makes Alice shake with sorrow.

So, it's not happy holidays around here. Christmas lost whatever luster it may have retained after Alice's father died. He was a master of celebrations -- the food, the gifts -- it was his time to shine. No one in Alice's family has the same high spirits; no one makes us feel that good, makes Alice feel adored as the daddy's girl she was.

And, face it: after a certain age, any present that anyone is willing to buy for you is probably something you could easily obtain yourself. Basically, it's letting your friends and family run the errands you are too lazy to do. The stores are crowded; the streets full of tourists, and midtown isn't fit for New York natives between Thanksgiving and New Years.

If you felt like shopping online, it would be a simple matter to type in the credit card number you've had the opportunity to memorize. Then, you could get whatever is in the $50 and under department without the gift wrap, delivered straight to your door. You still get to open a box.

The newest element is credit card recitation seems to be sharing your so-called secret code to verify your identity. It seems like as much consumer protection as the T.S.A. offers passengers in the way of airport "security."

As it is, all our shopping seems pretty much a wash. Sure, the shiny paper and bows adds an element of surprise, but more years than not, Alice would just as soon go from Thanksgiving to Groundhogs Day, without making stops for the rest of the politically correct "holiday season." The only exception to this desire is Alice looking foward to exploiting her role as Aunt Alice to niece Kayanna.


What would Alice like for Christmas? Her dental aspirations include retaining her two front teeth and the rest of the matched set in her mouth. A pony wouldn't fit in the living room, and Alice is too old to believe in happily-ever-after. She would like to see her father. She would like to see CC's father. She would like to see Dona. But as Jim Croce sang 30+ years ago, she has only "photographs and memories...all that I have are these, to remember you."

Frequently it is the intangibles, the memories of what once was, or the stories Alice has created to match the memories that may or may not be factural -- or the idealized hope of what might be. Failing that, she wouldn't mind enough money so that she could live off investments for life. (Alice will never understand the people who define themselves by their jobs; she is looking forward to being able to answer the "what do you do" vocational question with, "I'm retired.) The work place is way overrated as a place to absorb her energy, or most people's, she thinks.

To top it off, the sky is pitch-black (inasmuch as a Wonderland can be, given the ambient lighting that abounds here) by 5 pm, maybe earlier. For whatever reason, it tends to be much easier to get though the day when the actual daylight sticks around. S.A.D. lamps give Alice migraines, something she would rather avoid, thankyouverymuch. In short, come winter, Alice's brain chemistry can't win for losing.

So, she apologizes for the melancholy tone of this post, but warm and fuzzy are not how Alice is feeling at the moment.

They say it's always darkest before the dawn. Alice will be very appreciative when the sun rises again.

Do it yourself? Whose idea was that?

I guess I'm just an old-fashioned girl. While I am willing to concede some wonders of technology, in the customer-service arena, someone -- just about everyone who works for any entity, private or public -- has decided the customer deserves "care." Not "service." Not, "how may I help you?"


No, these days you speak or punch in your special number for whatever entity you are calling -- imagine an airline, if you will -- then the toneless voice inquires whether you are interested in type 1 (say or punch number now), type 2 (ditto), type 3 (more of the same), or whether you are a type 4 -- one who is more apt to punch O for Operator (pardon me, "representative").


If you are a type 4 person, you may or may not connect to a human voice, depending on whether the company can comply with a simple "help me. I'm the individual; you're Big Brother of the hour, and I have a few questions, none of which comply with the tone-free voice options."


Let us contrast the concept of procuring airline tickets using a travel agent versus directly interfacing (terrible word) with the computer to use frequent-flyer miles. In the first version, you pick up the phone, tell your travel agent of 25+ years where you and your mom need to go and what dates, and he procures the tickets and confirms your seats, and had the tickets in the mail months before we need to debate what to wear and how to entertain ourselves at our destination. One phone call, and you are ready to go.

In the second, more common, scenario, you are doomed from the start. To screw up the system, you want to book the same flight, different seats, for two people traveling together under separate frequent-flyer accounts. The computer lacks any comprehension of how this might be possible for the average traveler, following standard directions, to follow. Thus, we need not one, not two, but three human voices, because each is specialized in one department: the miles, the tickets, and finally, the reassurance that yes, you have achieved your goal.


Two tickets to Dothan. Alabama in January, the vacation spot of the see-and-be-seen, the once-and-again jet set. Sign us right up. It is the one place in the world you would swear no one in the world would choose to go, short of the occasion to celebrate your niece's one's first birthday. Apparently, you would be wrong. People are just clamouring to get on this little putt-putt Atlanta to Dothan plane. Seating is tight.


I hope they have left enough room to wind the rubber bands and that passenger weight is disbursed evenly. Otherwise, some of the overweight will have to get off the tiny craft and push downhill so we can get to the next stop. In Maine, as a child, I rode from point A to point B in a plane that required some of its passengers to do just that.


And that was before deregulation. In the days when the friendly skies bore some resemblance of being such. These days, not so much. Not at all, if you ask me. I suspect the airlines would be just as happy if I never showed my face, my pathetic Zip-Lock bag of miniature toiletries, and my shoeless, coatless, beltless, braless self again.

Not to mention the two checkpoints, 20 feet apart, to determine that my name hasn't changed and my boarding pass not been altered in the wilds of the airport corridor. If I didn't need a mode of transportation faster than a bus, I'd be happy to oblige.

However, this is the modern age, and the above is what is deemed a successful transaction between customer and airline. That is, assuming the planes leave at their appointed hours and the luggage is not lost in transit.

These days, we call that an overachieving act of transportation. Person A got from point A to point B in a close-to-timely fashion, with the help of bar codes, email messages, cell phones ringing at 2:52 am to confirm that the customer will rouse herself by 4;30 to make it to the airport.

For part II, try to call a computer company to figure out what quirks your machine has that the printed guide doesn't cover, and you are unable to get online to read the actual manual to try to troubleshoot the problem yourself.

For part III, try to conduct financial transactions on behalf of another person, over whom you have power of attorney and for whom the only financial transaction that matters is that her monthly check arrives on time, and try to comparison shop municipal bonds on her behalf.

Then, if you have any energy left over, attempt to change a halogen light bulb located where you will have to stand on the sink to gain access to the fixture.

After all this, eat some chocolate-covered pomegranate ice cream, have a cigarette, set three alarm clocks -- the TV, the radio, and the basic battery-operated travel clock -- and hope you make your plane. Then wonder how people with full-time jobs manage to get to pick up their groceries or dry cleaning. Be grateful that you are not among them. You wouldn't make it beyond the first day.

Do it yourself? Not if you can hire someone else to do it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

An 8-year-old walks into a bar...

While I'm on the theme of, how-old-do-you-have-to-be-to-walk-into-a-bar?, I thought of my brother as a child, in Haiti. His third-grade teacher had asked him to keep a diary/journal describing his days at the beach, as my parents had pulled us out of school to extend our? theirs? (you pick) vacation.

To be precise, this was a time and place when, as father's little dividends, we were taxable write-offs to the company business. So dad, at least, was doing some semblance of business (driving into town, Port-au-Prince, a couple of days to meet with the folks who populated our factory/assembly plant). We, on the other hand, were On The Beach, big time.

My brother's diary/journal read: "got up, went to the bar, had breakfast. Went swimming. Went to the bar and had a drink. Played backgammon. Went to the bar and had lunch. Spent the afternoon at the beach. Went to the bar, had a drink. Ate dinner. Stayed at the bar while my parents had a drink. Came back to the room. Slept." Next day, "got up, went to the bar, had breakfast...." and so on.

My parents had a good laugh after they read his teacher's comments on the saga of the 8-year-old who walked into a bar, early and often.

In Haiti, our lives revolved around the bar. Every meal was served there, under the open-air chacoon; every drink we ordered was noted on a scratchpad my dad would sign by kerosene light after dark. He signed off on sticks counted by five, under the titles rum, Coca-Cola, iced tea, and so forth. Who knows how many drinks, of whatever variety, anyone in my family consumed? We weren't much on keeping track. On The Beach, who cared?

In my late 20s, a room On The Beach, plus 3 meals a day (with Caribbean lobster for dinner), cost $50 U.S. This is why I have never understood the concept of paying real money in the Caribbean, much less the idea of asking for I.D. at the bar.

In Lake Placid, my summer home, two toddlers walked into a bar. In Haiti, one 8-year-old. Perhaps I was 12 at the time, or 11. In any case, when I wanted a drink, I, too, went to the bar. Made perfect sense to me, and to my parents. The only part of humanity that didn't belong in a bar, so far as we were concerned, was that bit that was crying and throwing a tantrum. In our book, the only tantrum throwing was permitted in events that involved adultery and the Other Woman.

Superman's fiancee, my father's cousin, excelled at the tantrum. She was ejected from The Stork Club for fisticuffs in the 1940s, a feat no other woman has achieved. And our society considers Paris Hilton's goings-on a big deal on You Tube? I don't think so.

Makes me long for the day when two toddlers walked into a bar....

How Alice discovered Wonderland

Two toddlers walk into a bar, and one of their moms picks them up and seats them on the banquette. They place their standard order: two Shirley Temples, extra cherries, and could we please have some peanuts? We are treated like the princesses we are, the only two children in the entire hotel. There may be a joke in here, somewhere. Bartender, make mine a double.

I'm on the left, about a year older than my friend, the other bar-hopping child in the photo. Actually, we are in Lake Placid, and it's cocktail hour. Since the bar is in a hotel owned by a family member, legal drinking age is irrelevant. For all anyone knew, the concept might not have been conceived, much less reached the law books when it would have applied to us as three-year-olds. We weren't children; we were small adults, and expected to behave as such -- or, perhaps, better than the imitations around whom we grew.

In the Camelot years of the 1960s, two toddlers could have their own designated banquette, with excellent proximity to the bar, and we did. We two little girls of privilege wore our white lace ankle socks, black patent leather Mary Janes, and frilly Florence Eisman (famous designer of children's clothes -- the only designer of kids' cocktail dresses in the days before baby Dior) attire with smocking and hand embroidered detail. We knew how to order a drink, never forgetting our pleases and our thank-yous, or how to keep our legs crossed so our underpants weren't on display.

Two toddlers toasting: if the average picture is worth a thousand words, the one contained on this blog is worth infinitely more. It tells the story, in its entirety, of my first 18 years. As 12-year-olds, we graduated to whiskey sours, hold the whisky -- our adolescent lemonade resembling the ones to which we would graduate, when we learned how to get a buzz on.

When we were 13, Uncle Teddy fired the restaurant glass washer, and appointed we former toddler princesses to take his place. Apart from running the ancient switchboard when it was raining, this was my first job, one with actual responsibility. We took our tasks like a duck to the proverbial water. The bus boys returned trays with half-filled wine glasses to us. We drained them, loaded up the dishwasher, ran it off and emptied it, the last being our first lesson in wine. Taste was never the issue.

However, we could distinguish a Moselle stem from a Burgundy glass from a white wine glass from a brandy snifter -- and no matter how many glasses we swilled, our breakage record was better than our predecessor, the grown-up to whose job we had been assigned. We were greatly saddened to be relieved of our duties.

We had, however, learned lessons well beyond our years: neither of us, since the age of Shirley Temples, had seen an adult respond to reality after 6 o'clock. I don't know about my friend, with whom I have since lost touch, but this inability to distinguish sobriety from altered states may well be why I became Alice, for Wonderland is a place where reality is in the eyes of the beholder, and its bearing on truth has never been established.

I grew up in the fun house of alcoholic blackouts, came of age in a fun house filled with substances grown in a multitude of gardens. If the White Knight is walking backward, and the red queen's "off with her head," what other lead have I than to remember what the doormouse said and take those instructions to heart?

For everything, there is a season

Several years ago, Alice decided to stop spending Christmas with her mother because Mom drank too much. One Christmas eve in particular, Alice and Mom went out for dinner, where the wine was poured very freely, and the service (at a Posh Hotel that used Frette linen) was abominable. By the time we got to dessert, Mom had taken it upon herself to chase down the waiter in the kitchen, to score our sweets and coffee.

When the check arrived, Mom decided to retabulate the sums, so she took the ballpoint pen and wrote down all the figures from the check on the tablecloth. To complete her work, she wrote "FUCK," with a flourish, on the once virgin-white linen.

There was no where for Alice to hide, and no way for Alice to stop her. That was the last holiday meal Alice had with her. Alice has subsequently made other out-of-town plans to save what she can of holiday joy.

However... Mom recently had one of her long-time Closest Friends stay with her for 10 days, and Close Friend drove Mom nuts because CF wanted to start drinking at 4 pm, and was ready for dinner by 6 pm, and in bed, probably passed out, a couple of hours later.

Mom prefers to wait until 7 to drink -- CF loses it somewhere near the end of martini # 3 and the beginning of martini #4 -- and Mom, well, Alice can never be certain when she has left the building, but she weighs 92 pounds, so she's only good for two drinks (Dewars on the rocks, with water, promptly.)

Alice had dinner with Mom and CF one night, and it appeared that CF was going to pass out in the soup, and her conversation wasn't making much sense. Still, when Mom bitched to Alice about it, Alice couldn't help telling her that she got like that, sometimes. Until that exchange, the Christmas-from-hell incident had completely escaped Mom, who never has a clue when she has blacked out. Evidently, however, there is a season for all things. This was Alice's for Truth to Mother about Christmas past.

Alice would prefer it if Mom passed out; then the line of demarcation would be clean. Blackouts, on the other hand, come and go. You can never tell what is real, and what will be a lost memory by morning. Is is any wonder Alice lives in Wonderland? It is the minefield in which she grew up, one which those in less alcoholic families find quite disturbing, but which pass as S.O.P. chez Alice.

For Alice, Truth to Mom was simply one of of the most recent entries into Mom's blackout hit parade, one that began when Alice was 20, in Paris, and Mom inquired one morning, "who poured me into a cab last night?" (The night before, Mom had turned all the do-not-disturb signs on the hotel floor to the please-make-up room side, then stood in her underwear in a picture window in front of the Rue de Rivoli.) That was the dawning of a new age for Alice, the one in which under the influence coincided with leaving the building.

Since CF presented such a golden opportunity for Alice to illuminate Mom's own behavior in a mirror she could see, it was, indeed, Alice's moment.

Feeling Jamesian...

My mind seems stuck on tunes that made me sad 30 years ago, and once again they are exerting a pull toward tears. Responsibility overload, stemming from a myriad of sources, mostly family related and to which I am inextricably tied. Top on my mind's hit parade is Billy Joel's James:

James...we were always friends.
From our childhood days
And we made our plans,
And we had to go our separate ways.
I went on the road --
You pursued an education.
James...do you like your life
Can you find release,
And will you ever change --
Will you ever write your masterpiece?
Are you still in school --
Living up to expectations...James...
You were so relied upon, everybody knows
how hard you tried --
Hey...just look at what a job you've done,
Carrying the weight of family pride.
James....you've been well behaved.
You've been working hard
But will you always stay --
Someone else's dream of who you are.
Do what's good for you, or you're not good for
anybody....James
I went on the road --
You pursued an education...James...
How you gonna know for sure -- everything was
so well organized.
Hey...now everything is so secure,
And everybody else is satisfied.
James...do you like your life,
Can you find release
And will you ever change,
When will you write your masterpiece?

When will I write my masterpiece? That is, as they say, the $64-thousand-dollar question. My friends from college are surprised I haven't managed at least one published volume 25 years out. I start projects -- the most recent being a memoir of my father, Haiti, and our family's careless self-destructiveness -- but it's difficult to maintain my concentration. Life intervenes, day after fucking day.

If you had asked me in 1982, I could not have imagined myself in the position in which I find myself today: putting out all of my family's financial fires, to name one thing that occupies more of my time than I could have guessed. Never seeing my father or Haiti again. Having synaptic lapses made more pronounced by medication I can't change. Knowing my aunt and uncle's hotel in Lake Placid burned to the ground.

They say you can't go home again: between Haitian politics and the demise of where I spend my Adirondack summers, I honestly don't have a childhood place that I could happily call home. My mother sold the house where I grew up 15 years ago, and I was never attached to that house, where I spent a tortured adolescence, then escaped to college, so it hasn't possessed the allure of home that Haiti and Lake Placid have.

My college went on a building spree after I left, so now the campus is strewn with what I presume are considered post-modern architectural gems but which remind me that my architectural aesthetic stops somewhere short of women's suffrage. Any building that has all the charm of an airport lounge and the same amount of character is not one I think of as home.

What no one told me was that as I grew, my brother would grow away from me, from the city where we were both born, that he would marry four times, and with each wife, I would feel he was less and less a part of my life. He has a daughter now, my niece Kayanna, whom I would like to see and get to know. I'm not likely to have another. But this marriage of his is still in its infancy; he lives in Tiny Town, Slow Southern State, and I am old enough to be the mother of his child-bride.

I seem to be more active as Aunt Alice to Clover, my best friend's shitzu puppy. Those of us who don't have children do take out pets rather seriously. Last year, it broke my heart when I had to put the off-White Rabbit to sleep. Clover comforts and entertains even more so than the White Rabbit did, and both pets are considerably more reliable than either of our siblings.

I'm in melancholy mood at the moment. What I have to keep in mind is a lyric from another Billy Joel song, also from the Turnstiles album: "They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known."

Workers of the world, take your vacation!

All summer I've been reading about how indispensable American workers feel about their place in their work environments. So much so that fewer and fewer employees are managing a full week of vacation -- just the occasional long weekend here and there, and even then, checking the Crackberry to make sure they aren't missing anything.

Newsflash: unless you are a neurosurgeon who is the only one in the country who can perform a particular type of surgery, chances are you can take a break and not be missed. I don't care what you do. Europeans take a state mandated minimum of four weeks of vacation a year, and while they may not score highest in the overrated "productivity" race, they have more balanced lives.

TV shows will air; trains will run; newspapers will be written, produced, distributed, read, and recycled; food will be packaged and delivered and sold at supermarkets; the stock market will have its jolts with or without you; houses will or won't sell regardless; widgets will roll off the line no matter who's staffing the joint. Products and services will not grind to a halt because you went to the beach to chill out. I promise.

If you want, take two weeks. Call in sick. Remember that the folks who make up your "employee benefits" handbook are the employers. They aren't in it for your sake. This being a capitalist society and all that, the object of the game is for Big Business to suck the life out of Little Employee for as much and as long as the Little Employee will concede.

Yes, we all have bills to pay. No, we don't want to lose our jobs. But if we don't get time off, our jobs have us. We lose control -- and that, my friends, is a very bad feeling, one that reverberates into other parts of our lives, making us hypercontroling where we have the remotest chance of succeeding -- as with small children who ask, "why?" To which the answer is, "I'm the mommy/daddy. That's why."

Losing control in one area is a feeling that spreads like wildfire. It makes for dreadful relationships. It makes for the kinds of families that end up with one parent getting alternate weekends and Wednesday nights with the children and the other parent having primary responsibility the rest of the time.

It isn't pretty. Granted, it is difficult to coordinate having two working parents off from work at the same time as their children are free. No one ever said it was easy. But I think it's necessary. How else are your kids going to know who you are, or care?

I didn't realize until I joined the work world, where I was favored with three whole weeks of vacation from my job, that my childhood had been unusual: we spent the month of August in Lake Placid; my father closed his office from Christmas through New Year's, and we traveled extensively through the winter and spring. Three weeks -- considered generous -- wasn't going to do it for me.

This is a private sector problem. Whatever else I may have against Big Brother, federal employees get off work at the drop of a hat. Congress takes rather lengthy recesses, though it chooses not to mandate any vacation for its constituents. There's something wrong with that picture, just as there is with Congressional attempts to overhaul health care when they have never had to face an HMO, so they don't know what the rest of us are up against.

I digress. My point is, no one ever said on her deathbed, I should have spent more time at the office. So, if you have more vacation coming to you, make a plan, any plan, to take that time off. Stay home and paint your toe nails. Sleep until noon. Eat ice cream for dinner. Whatever. The world won't grind to a halt without your presence at work.

Independence Day?

Once upon a time I pledged allegiance to Richard Stands, as did many of us in the confusion of elementary school in the 1960s. Now, not so much. Right now it seems the best thing we have going for us vs. the United Kingdom is that Congress is not -- assuming the Democrats have some interest in what shreds pass for privacy -- debating a national identity card. The kind with your finger print and iris scan.

If Big Brother wants to know where I live, I'm sure he can get the job done without any further assistance from me. What I want to know is, why do we celebrate our "independence" with what, for all intents and purposes, sounds exactly like the proverbial bombs bursting in air?

Couldn't we try for patriotism with a bit less gunpowder? It is unseemly, the number of soldiers getting blown to shreds in Iraq and elsewhere, and what do we do? We throw a multimillion-dollar fireworks display for the folks at home. Is this the best use of our resources? Would the right wing curl up and mourn without its annual firepower celebration?

I think there are many ways to be patriotic, if one wants. Waving a flag doesn't do it for me. I'd rather stick with fighting for liberty -- justice, though blind, probably has a smirk on her face given the Supreme Court's latest decisions.

Our local Big Brother of Wonderland has pushed through some more laws to protect us from ourselves: no more trans fat in our food, thank you. I never realized a need to legislate food stuffs beyond assuring that they won't result in a nation keeling over from food poisoning. If I knew anything about cooking, or nutrition, I imagine I'd feel some deep seated hostility toward Wonderland's fascist food police.

Then, too, I wonder: Wonderland just passed some noise abatement laws -- including a five-minute limit on the time your dog is allowed to bark. Well, okay; I'd rather have dogs seen but not heard. But that goes for babies, too, and I don't see anyone legislating where and when it is appropriate for your child to have a public meltdown, or how long you have to rescue your child, in whatever form that takes.

And the fireworks: sound like bombs, much? Going off for nearly half an hour tonight? Surely that should fall under the decibel police's province. Or is it only unacceptable when the decibels are not emanating from a so-called public purpose "celebration"? Since Macy's foots the bill for the Grucci brother's handiwork, then beer ads are sold to subsidize the cost of broadcasting the affair, doesn't that take it into private hands? Isn't that where the decibel police come in? What about the folks measuring our carbon footprints?

Mind you, I don't take all of this as seriously as all that. I just happen to like a little less hypocrisy, a few more protected civil rights, in my legal system. I don't think it's going to happen. Happy Independence Day, anyone?

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.

Happy Groundhog's Day?

Whoops, wrong celebration. Appropriate, though, for the amount of attention I feel the change in dates deserves. You have to be young and energetic to like New Year's Eve. For the rest of us, it just means the television listings are screwed up and you can't go out for a decent meal. Everyone I know is staying home, exhausted from Christmas.

Even in my teens and 20s, New Year's always felt like the night everyone was desperate to have a good time, damn it. It was a night for -- still is -- for tourists. Your hard-core party people were out every other night of the year. New Year's is amateur hour.

For the record, I had two Christmas celebrations during my holiday in New England, which began a few days before Christmas proper and ended yesterday.

First up, Christmas in Maine with the cousins -- where no room was left decoration-free, and most of the hall-decking took place in record time on Christmas Eve.

It's not a holiday if every ornament my Presbyterian cousin owns isn't festooned upon a tree and the appropriate candles "lit" in the windows. We all went to church -- usually my blood relation, my first cousin, and I skip all things religious, seeing that we are, in our fashion, Jewish, while his wife and kids go off to services.

This year, one of their children was in one of the numerous choirs held at the service, so off we all went. The children's Christmas service reminded me of a talent show where no child was left behind. Next year, I may skip that part of the proceedings.

Every year, Santa visits with more and more presents, and I am stunned by the expense. My cousin and his wife were up wrapping presents until 6 a.m. One of the children's gifts retailed for close to $400. I can't help thinking toys were much simpler when I was the 12-year-old's age. I think the most expensive gift my parents gave me was a ticket to Europe, back in the days when travel agents gave gift certificates.

Farther south, outside of Boston, I had a second, more low key, holiday with one of my closest friends and her extended family, some of whom I had met last summer in Gloucester. (Their upbringing gives mine competition in the what-were-they-thinking sweepstakes. That's a long story, but my sojourn at her family's country house is one of the few not detailed in this year's blog. I did spend some time in Wonderland this year, but logged considerable mileage and hospitality elsewhere.)

My friend is not exactly a minimalist, but all her kids' presents fit in the trunk of one car. Her attitude is, please, don't bring any more crap into my house. We've got more stuff than we have storage as it is. Their house, built in 1860 or so, has been completely restored -- she and her husband did a gut renovation -- but closets were lacking in the average 1860s home, and did not gain much footing in the renovation. The only presents I brought were edible.

At her family gathering, I got to wish her grandmother a happy 99th birthday -- the only time in my life I've known someone to reach that milestone with all faculties intact. Her other grandmother made it to 98. The longevity of the women in her family is a bit overwhelming, from our 40-something perspectives, as is the longevity of the women in mine.

She and I are financial planners, and we know how much it costs to retire. Given the female longevity profiles in our histories, it does not look like we will be leaving the work place any time soon. Pity, for retirement strikes both of us as a fine idea. We could keep ourselves happily occupied without ever having to work for a client again. Meanwhile, we soldier on, stunned by the numbers we crunch, horrified that we are each at the top percentage of people in the U.S. who have retirement savings.

I suppose this begs the could-be-construed-as-new-year's-pondering: how much is enough? I could get all philosophical and spout the Tao te Ching, or hard-assed practical, and quote numbers, but instead, I will just go to sleep.

Incommunicado

In case you were wondering, that's my state of being. I haven't felt like talking to anyone of late. I suspect it's called depression. No, I know it is. The symptoms are all too familiar: not eating, barely washing my hair much less getting dressed, leaving the house only under duress, sleeping oddly, crying out of the blue -- I've been here before, and will probably return to this state again, no matter what psychoactive cocktail the shrink can devise.

Problem with the cocktails is, it's all a matter of guesswork. I am a perpetual guinea pig. If one drug doesn't work, we try another. And another. Then another. But we don't make changes very quickly: first, we'll try one for three weeks, and not until it's had a chance to take effect (or not) will we move on to the next.

At the moment, the drug added to my previous cocktail helps me feel, if not better, than simply less. Less is better than sad. Less means there is a stronger film between me and the world, so I don't take in anymore than I can process. This does not leave me with much to say; hence, my lack of posting. Less circumvents my cognitive abilities.

Less doesn't seem like a great loss, not now, in the middle of the holiday trifecta. Train of thought? Derailed quite a ways back, stranded without a cell phone. In my mind, the pony express is more than a fast enough way for my synapses to travel.

This week was the saga of the tea-soaked keyboard: when typing while hands are splinted, it is probably wise not to leave a large mug of tea nearby. Once sweet tea hits the keyboard, the keyboard is doomed. Since this is only the second keyboard I've assassinated in 21 years, I don't think my record is that bad. Many have killed far more electronics than I.

I killed my first modem, but that was 300 baud, very much pre-cell phone, pre-Web, pre-ubiquitous email, and the software that accompanied it suitable only for the technologically inclined, which I was and am not. No one has mentioned baud rates since the early 1990s.

The first keyboard I killed was in an office: that time, I spilled coffee, with cream and sugar. I called the tech support department, and was amazed at how grateful they were that I inquired about a new keyboard. What difference did it make to me? It wasn't my keyboard; it belonged to the company.

The fact that the tech people had to cannibalize another machine, instead of having a spare keyboard or two on hand, astounded me. It should also give you a good idea of why I don't work in publishing any longer. If I had asked for pen and paper, I the office supplies department probably would have had to run across the street to the five and dime to procure them for me.

Sugar in hot liquid remains the keyboard's nemesis; it makes the keys stick in one position, refusing to rise to type another letter. While waiting for a new keyboard (and the folks at Dell, who keep track of your purchasing history, try to sell you on a whole new machine when all you want is a $50 means of communicating with the machine you have), I pulled out a former keyboard, only to discover that the letter "d" likes to go on strike.

It annoys the hell out of me when my electronics have a mind of their own, one that is not in accord with mine. I don't like it when they pull tricks out of the ether that I have no way of comprehending. It makes me feel stupid. Woman vs. machine: why can't the woman win more often? Just curious.

The first holiday of the trifecta is down: Thanksgiving at my house, where my mother came to help and managed to take over the entire cooking process, not to mention critique my ability to arrange fruit in a bowl. I also was not the hostess she thought I should be. My conclusion? Next year I won't invite such a critical guest.

My brother's wife -- dare I saw sister-in-law? -- is counting down the weeks until she is officially a mother and I, an aunt. Pregnancy in the eighth month is apparently dull as dishwater, and it is all she can do not to jump up and down and shake my niece-to-be out of the womb.

I am trying to work up the energy for Christmas, preparations for which are helped greatly by the vast arena of on-line shopping venues and my part-time assistant, who has been with me for the past six weeks.

Essentially, I am renting her hands, to write since I can't hold a pen, enter data for which I have no patience, wrap and ship presents, shred papers, write checks, send out correspondence, balance checkbooks, file paperwork, and, when I am tired of all that, follow my instructions to bake brownies.

This week we're making a double batch, with chocolate chips.