Fashionably-Early Anxiety

The new Nordstrom catalog arrived,  glossily illustrating the Trends for  Fall.   Python bags and shoes, satchel handbags, skinny jeans, neon stockings, western boots, a bright orange coat.   My first reaction, as usual, is anxiety. How will I remember it all, and how will I pull it off?

As though I need to know, which is crazy given my age and lifestyle.  But that doesn't matter.  There's something about fashion magazines that makes me feel inadequate and out of my depth.  It's all foreign to me.  If there's a quiz, or God forbid, a test in a dressing room, I'm going to fail.  I have no idea how to put it all together.  I'd need flashcards. 

I flipped through again to see if I haven't been too hasty, if in fact there are a few things I could imagine wearing, that wouldn't seem too off-the-wall to integrate into my wardrobe.  Not much.  Not the very skinny cropped pants (too fat), neon-colored tights (who are we kidding?), platform heels (have a weak ankle, plus where the hell would I wear them?).  Possibly some short boots ("booties"), but not a satchel handbag (too much to carry).  I have some younger blog-readers who can wear this stuff and look wonderful, but a woman over sixty would look like  a damned fool in a lot of it.  Or do you agree?

Zipper skinny jeans

Spanx and Nordstrom tights

B Brian Atwood pumps

Various handbags--many have no shoulder strap

Chocolate: A Restrained Approach

Ginger Trail Mix

A bar of chocolate would be fattening because I'd have to eat the whole thing right away.  Ditto, a bag of chocolate chips.  But hidden in a bag of healthy trail mix: fine.    I can sort them out and have a delicious tablespoon or two.  I'll eat the nuts later.

Hurray, and yet...

I woke up at 7:28 am and immediately turned on the radio.  To my amazement, the Supreme Court had upheld the Affordable Care Act, even the contentious individual mandate.  I leapt out of bed and dashed down the hall to Jerry's study.

"Really?" he said.  "Amazing."  Last night, while we were cooking dinner, he'd come up with a strategy to save the White House from the Republicans if the Supreme Court declared the Act unconstitutional.  The plan was this:   Obama should withdraw right away, and the Democrats should run "some movie star like Reagan who's a Democrat, who could pull  the wool over their eyes."  Meaning the American people.   Sometimes Jerry's cynicism beats out my pessimism.

Today, though, hurray!  To me, this legislation ranks up there with FDR and Social Security, and LBJ and the Civil Rights Act.

But then I read the post of one of the young conservative Catholic women whose blog I've been following.  Not happy.  A long, emotional rant about losing freedom, being forced to buy health insurance or pay a tax, states rights trampled.  I don't understand this point of view because I don't see what's to be lost by more people having health insurance, but it's deeply held by many of our fellow citizens, even those who go to emergency rooms for their basic healthcare.  We insured people pay for that care, we and the government, which is also us.

Even if I think I'm right, this blue/red divide gets to me.  I almost left a comforting message on the young woman's blog because I felt bad for her, and then I thought, but she may end up benefiting from this, who knows.

Good-by, Nora

From the dust jacket of "I Feel Bad About My Neck,"  2006

Nora Ephron died yesterday, and we are all reeling.  The news came out of the blue, but she'd known for six years that she had myelodysplastic syndrome, a pre-leukemic condition, according to the New York Times obituary. 

No one else can write those movies ("When Harry Met Sally," "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail," among others).  No one else can write so eloquently of aging ("I Feel Bad About My Neck").  And certainly no one can ever achieve the payback she did by writing "Heartburn," about her philandering ex-husband, Carl Bernstein.

Oh, Nora.  We will miss you.

Addendum:  I wrote a post about Nora Ephron last August 11 ("Go, Nora").  If I were advanced enough, I'd provide a link to it here.  But I'm not.  She probably wrote about technology and aging,  maybe in "I Feel Bad About My Neck."  I'll have to check.

A Twop

(Or a twip? Something between a post and a tweet.)

I'm in  a snit waiting around for the Supreme Court to announce its ruling on Obamacare, expecting the worse, blaming George W. for appointing two more die-hard conservative (immovable?) Catholic judges, wondering if this is going to make or break Obama's re-election.  Hell!

Whatever they decided this morning on the Arizona immigration law is confusing--good or bad?  I think the governor of Arizona has bad hair color, and her hair's too long for someone her age.

Celebrating Pride

This is Rylan Madison Bliss.  His moms, Celia and Shannon,  were able to marry in 2008 when it was legal in California.   He is irresistibly charming and beyond adorable.  Sometimes when he visits his Auntie Claudia in Berkeley, I get to go with them to the Little Farm in Tilden Park.

Boozy and Completely Fun

Corinne and Leah and the two bottles of Prosecco we dispensed with last night

Last night, Leah and her pal Corinne made the short trip from next door for a girls-only dinner.  They brought the food with them (yay!).

Corinne's a college pal of Leah's and went with her to Paris in January for their five-month semester abroad.  She's here for a whirlwind five-day tour of Leahville and returns to Boston tomorrow.   Leah follows at the end of the week for a summer job.  In the fall, they begin their senior year at Tufts.

Three delicious hours of gossip and hilarity,  including paging through Leah's baby book.  Jerry staggered in around 10, having had his own night out with handball pals at Triple Rock Brewery.  The girls left around 11 and were planning to get up early to go to Stinson Beach.  Leah's car was gone early this morning, so I guess they made it.

Advice to the aging:  Have a couple of vibrant young women to dinner.  Try to get them to cook.  Contributing the Prosecco is your job.

You Go, Sister!

I've just listened the best political speech I've heard all year and the best sermon of my life--given by a  Roman Catholic nun, Sister Simone Campbell. It may be the first time I've listened to a sermon from start to finish, all 13 minutes of it.

Sr. Simone's heading up the "Nuns on the Bus" tour of seven states to bring attention to the budget passed by the House of Representatives, which would decimate programs and services for the poor.   A lawyer who ran a legal clinic in Oakland for 18 years, she's a member of the Sisters of Social Service (who knew?).  Now she's Executive Director of NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby.

Google "nunsonethebus" and you'll get to hear her speak.   Do it, and ask yourself  a) if you wouldn't vote for her for President, and b) if you wouldn't consider joining her order if you had in mind becoming a nun.  She weaves law, policy, religion, and snarky asides about Republicans and Wall Street into a stand-up-and-cheer sermon.  She's on the side of feeding people and promoting HeadStart, and "sharing the bread like Jesus did so everyone can be fed," as she told Stephen Colbert.

Needless to say, according to the New York Times, NETWORK was singled out in the Vatican's recent critique of American nuns.  Good enough for me.

Moving to Santa Fe

Armistead Maupin, the author of Tales of the City, Mr.-San-Francisco-after- Herb Caen,  leaving for Santa Fe on Thursday.   He's quoted in today's  San Francisco Chronicle as saying that at 68 he needs "an autumnal adventure," and that he and his partner would like "more space and more nature."

I so like Maupin, his writing and his political views, but here we diverge.  I don't like Santa Fe.  The last time I went I wrote in my journal,  "Carmel Gone Adobe."

We stayed in a new-adobe cottage called "Amor," on Canyon Road, which is lined with art galleries. It was quiet there, and the patio was a perfect place for Jerry to hang a light sheet to catch moths.   At first, I was seduced by the beautiful blue doors and window frames, the bright windowboxes, and the genuinely old adobes.  I enjoyed my survey of margaritas at local restaurants. 

Yes, it was called "Amor"

But afterwhile I began to hate the cultivated sameness of the architecture.  There were far too many Land Rovers and way too much money.  I got so cranky that I started taking pictures of utility wires, water meters, and plastic dust pans  to offset the preciousness.

The best part was getting out of Santa Fe and seeing the surrounding countryside.  Maybe Maupin and his partner will get a house in the hills and not venture into town too often.  Maybe, as Anne Lamott says in the Chronicle,  "...he'll come crawling back."  She says it's like hearing that "Golden Gate Park decided to move."

Note the pipes and utility wires

A plastic dust pan sunning itself near a not-wood window on a new adobe

Pillow Messages

My next door neighbor, Annika, came over today to use my living room sofas as props while she took photos of a recent art project.  There are five pillows, each with a precise cross-stitched description of someone's personal routine.  The pillow above describes one of my own.

She asked numerous people, including Jerry, for descriptions of things they did every day.  Not everyone had a routine interesting enough to warrant a pillow, she said, but he and I did (is this good or just ridiculous?)   Can you guess which one is his?   The entire project is called Just So.

Just So, Annika Bastacky, 2012

Weddings to Read About

Today's New York Times has six pages of wedding announcements, June brides and all that.  Most couples are heterosexual and in their 20's or early 30's.  Their faces look unlined and confident.   I think, "yeah, yeah, and good luck to you.  Let's talk in 30 years and see what's happened." 

What interests me--and the only announcements I actually read--are couples who are a) gay and/or  b) in their fifties or beyond,  people who've had some trials and tribulations and are still willing to step off a cliff and hope for the best.  Getting married is easy when you're 25, straight, and doing the expected thing. (Or 27, in my case.)   When you're over 50 and a little worse for the wear, or when presidential candidates are debating your right to marry--that's the story I want to read.

Today's featured couple,  Nancy Coffey and Timothy Nagler, ages 66 and 65 , would seem fall into my sphere of interest, except that she's clearly had lots of cosmetic surgery, so much so that I thought she was 35, and he's lost 50 pounds to please her.  (She said when she met him "he looked like he was pregnant, literally, and he was wearing a pink linen shirt.  He was a sight to behold."  Oh, Nancy!)  So good luck to them, but I hope they can accept the physical realities of being in their sixties.

No, give me come-back weddings; weddings where the bride and groom have imperfect bodies but big, glowing smiles; weddings where the perfectly toned body of the bride isn't draped in Valentino.  And definitely weddings where the Times has to say which bride or which groom in the photo.  Way to go!

Bedtime Reads

The draped lamp

For three months, I've been following a doctor-prescribed routine to help me get to sleep.  At 10 pm, I drape a lamp, sit in my chair in the living room, and read for an hour or so.  No bright lights, no computer, no TV.  Then I listen to five minutes of a hypnotherapy tape and get into bed.

By trial and error, I've found books that engage me but aren't too upsetting or challenging.  I have other books, such as a riveting Japanese mystery that features cutting up bodies, that I read at lunch.

Here are a few bedtime reads, in no particular order:

In the Garden of the Beasts, by Erik Larson.  The story of  William Dodd, the US ambassador to Germany from 1933-37.  A mild-mannered, well-meaning academic, Dodd took his wife and adult children with him to Berlin, where they witnessed the flowering of the Third Reich and had social encounters with Hitler and other now-infamous Nazis.  I liked learning more about the history of that time and place through the lens of a family, which damped down the horror.




The Submission, Amy Waldman.  A committee of survivors, artists, critics, and politicians unwittingly chooses the design of an Arab-American architect for the 9/11 memorial in a blind competition.  All hell breaks lose when his identity becomes known.  There's not one completely sympathetic character, and some are in dire need of a comeuppance. 

Below Stairs, by Margaret Powell.  If you think the servants on "Downtown Abbey" like their jobs, think again.  Mrs. Powell was a housemaid and then a cook in the early twentieth century, and she tells it like it is.  So much for the romance of "downstairs."  People can be beasts to servants.  She married a plumber and escaped, big relief.

A Widow's Story: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates.  "People" magazine calls it "a chronicle of grief."  I call it a long-winded memoir of the several months after Oates's husband died.  Just the facts, m'am, and a little less rumination and metaphor!  But then that's my problem with Oates's works.  Spoiler alert:  She remarries less than a year after her husband dies, to fellow Princeton professor whom she meets at the very end of the book. To be fair, I think she's remarkably honest about the isolating wilderness of grief she found herself in.

Making Toast, by Roger Rosenblatt.  A sad but compelling memoir about Rosenblatt and his wife going to live with their late daughter's family, including three very young grandchildren, after the daughter's sudden death in her thirties.  They and their son-in-law are now raising the children in Bethesda, a five-hour drive from the Rosenblatts' home on Long Island, which they've kept for occasional visits.  The children's grief and how they express it is especially heart-breaking.

A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, by Janny Scott.  We know almost nothing about Obama's mother except that she was an anthropologist who married an African man.   This was a very intelligent, feminist woman who earned a Ph.D., wanted the best for her two kids, who loved men but couldn't seem to make two marriages work for her, and who died way too young, at 52, of ovarian cancer.






And books for newly-struggling insomniacs and readers-on-the-beach-or-planes:  Minding Frankie and Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy and Lady Killer by Lisa Scottoline.   The first two are romantic, everything-falls-into-place books set in Ireland, and the third is a mystery with an Italian-American lawyer heroine in Philadelphia.

Car Care

I'm terrible at it.  I've had the oil changed  twice in the last 5,000 miles (I know,  I know).

I blame this partly on my car's primary care provider,  a garage that specializes in keeping Toyotas and Volvos running as long as possible   All the time they want me to bring it in, every few thousand miles.  I hate driving across town early in the morning to drop it off.  I hate being without a car all day.  And it's expensive.

I've been getting around this by going behind their backs and taking it to Midas occasionally for an  oil change. Heh, heh.

Unfortunately, Jerry got wind of this the other night after I'd had a couple of glasses of wine.  No garage check for 5,000 miles!  He was appalled.  His own car may be a mess, full of bug gear and golf shoes and hats for every occasion, not to mention apples rotting under the seat, but, by God, he meticulously keeps track of mileage and servicing in a little book.  Which he's done since he bought his first car, a 1938 Pontiac jalopy.  It's actually kind of tedious hearing about all his cars.

Due to the dinnertime revelation,  I had to get up early this morning and drive across Berkeley, which is wretched during the rush hour. As I pulled out of my driveway, the woman next door pulled out in her brand new Porsche Panamera, which my sister tells me costs around $100,000.   I followed her car as it made its way sleekly across town so she could drop off her son at the high school.  I managed to escape that mayhem and continued on to the garage.

Gleaming and awaiting inspection

Where they were very nice, to my relief.  They didn't chastise me.  I was so freaked out yesterday about being delinquent that I had the car washed, so at least it would look good on the outside. 


Then Jerry picked me up in his car, which smelled like pizza.  He said he knew nothing about it.  But when we got home, he discovered there was half a pizza back where he keeps his collecting gear.  "Huh," he said.  Didn't faze him for an instant. 

Basil, Part 2

Into the green bin...

A varied response to my recent post about my inability to grow basil:  Most people reported that they, too, have had problems growing it and that even experienced gardeners can fail with that plant. In Spain, apparently, it grows easily for everyone except a friend who is English; she blames it on a bias against Anglo-Saxons.

Another friend sent the following advice. It's so practical and encouraging, I might even give basil another go:

"Basil needs sun and regular watering. The trick to getting a good full plant is to pinch it back when it's about 3" high. This will make the plant branch. You can use the parts you pinch off in your cooking, then wait until those parts grow a few inches and pinch again. Before you know it you'll have enuf for a pesto. From your pic I'd say you need to get a new plant, that one's had it. Several plantz is better so you have enuf pinched parts to actually do something with. (dangling preposition--I know) Also, never let it flower. Once it's making sex it's no longer growing for you."

Thank you, Marion O.!   Especially for that last (paradoxical?) sentence...

Curiosities in the Closet

Unworn for years:  everything on the right

Fully half the clothes in my spare closet (old house, tiny closets) are parked there for no particular reason. I haven't worn them in decades. I get a pass on my wedding dress, a knee-length double-knit number, because that was a memorable day.

But a sundress I wore when I caught a bridal bouquet? A satin coat I made to wear to my high school Senior Ball with a guy I didn't really like?  The very- eighties peplum outfit I wore to my 20th high school reunion, which went so badly I never went to another?

I just discovered all this when I went to clean out the closet. Alas, all are still there.  Sigh.

Relic in 2012

Wearing it in 1976

The matching dress is long gone, but the coat's still in the closet

Wearing the coat in 1968

Worn in 1988 to a reunion  that didn't go well

The Essence of Summer

What am I doing wrong?

I love basil.  I think its fragrance is the essence of summer, but I can't seem to grow it.  Year after year, I try--full sun, water-- but it never flourishes.  

Basil always reminds me of my sister-in-law, Delilah.  She was an avid gardener and grew vegetables and flowers on a cultivated section of the 40 acres Jerry's brother owns in Humboldt County.

In the summer of 2004, we drove up to visit them several times. Delilah was seriously ill, and we wanted to do anything we could to help. They had no refrigeration, so I took all the food, packed into ice chests, including a cherry pie at Delilah's special request.  She was the kind of person you had to force to make a special request. 

On our first visit,  I mentioned that I loved basil and bought a bunch every week for 89 cents at the Monterey Market in Berkeley.  She looked startled and led me out the back door to a flourishing basil plant.

"When I want basil, I just come out here and pick it," she said.  There was no judgment in her voice, just wonder. But  I felt very wanton, spending 89 cents a week on something I could grow myself. 

So I've tried to grow it.  Yesterday I read in Sunset that a gardener's task in June was to "plant basil seedlings every three to four weeks for a steady supply all summer."   Ha! In my dreams!  I'm back to buying bunches at the market, and it gets slimey in plastic bags in the fridge, and then I have to buy more.

Here's a picture taken during our first visit to Delilah and Peter in July 2004,  when she pointed out the basil in her garden.  She died two-and-a-half months later.  In fact, the day we arrived  she'd woken up feeling puffy, she said, the first sign that her remission was over.  I will never forget how brave and graceful she was, or weeding her zinnia beds with her, or massaging her hands on later visits, when she lay in the very hot loft bedroom they shared.

Delilah and Peter, July 2004

 

Catalog Finds

The old becomes new:  Now you can buy a "retro" handset ($39) to plug into your iPhone.  (I think this is to aid in multi-tasking.)  And the iPhone itself can look like a little handbag with a "knuckle duster case" ($58).

                Is it 1969?   "Adorn Your Hair with Bohemian Flair" for $28-38.

Getting to Know the Other Side

Several weeks ago, I saw a segment on the PBS News Hour about the Vatican deploring the lack of strict orthodoxy among American nuns.  One of the panelists was a board member of Christendom College, which I'd never heard of.  I googled it and found that it's a small college in Virginia with standards  foreign to those of us who went to colleges unaffiliated with a religion. A strict dress code, no drinking, no fraternizing between the sexes, no dancing close, a faculty who must sign a loyalty pledge to Church law.

Who knew?   I have several friends who are "cradle Catholics," born into the faith, some educated in Church schools and colleges, but as far as I know, they're all over the map in their views on contraception, abortion, women serving as priests,  and gay marriage.  They seem a pretty easy-going lot: they drink alcohol, wear whatever they want, and the women don't cover their heads outside a church.   I don't know what they use for birth control and wouldn't dream of asking, but none has more than three children.

More googling, and I discovered an online community of young Catholic women who embrace strict Catholic law, and some of them write blogs. Now I read three of them regularly.

Reader, I'm torn.  These are introspective people, intelligent and sometimes funny; all are converts to Catholicism.  I'm a liberal, agnostic Democrat, and they're conservative, religious Republicans, but now that I know about their pets and children and recipes, I've grown to like one of them and to empathize with two of them.   I'm also agog at how much trouble they go to in order to adhere to their faith.  It's no small commitment.

And it would all be okay, except occasionally--more often with one of them--politics comes up.  Specifically, their positions on gay marriage, contraception, abortion, and Obamacare, and they lose me.  I squint and their faces disappear, and they become The Other Side, the group we can't reason with, the people who want to push their views on everyone else, many of which are unkind.   I really wish we didn't have this fundamental disagreement, but we do.

Two Encounters Around Food

1. 

At the Food Pantry yesterday:  Three young men came in, perhaps in their twenties, and approached the check-in table.

"Can we get some food?" the first one  asked, tentatively.  "We're homelesss.  We're living in a van."

"Sure," I said.  People are supposed to live in Berkeley or Albany to get food at the Pantry, but if they're homeless, they're homeless, and they still have to eat. 

We set up all three young men with clients cards and gave each  two bags of food.

"Oh, thank you!" they said.  "We were driving around wondering if it was okay to steal food because we were so hungry, and we passed this place.  God was looking after us."

After they left, my sidekick at the client table, Pat, who was raised a Catholic, said, "Stealing food is illegal,  but it's not a sin."


2.

I went to Berkeley Bowl West today, the enormous supermarket down near the 880 freeway.  As usual, it was packed with people, and it was a chore manuevering a shopping cart around.

I came to an intersection where three of us were head-on, nothing moving, and I quickly pulled around an older man, in-his-way-out-of-his-way, to get things moving.  As I passed him, he said, "You're welcome."

I turned around and stuck out my tongue at his back.  For quite a while.  If they have cameras in Berkeley Bowl and someone were watching, he must have wondered what that woman was doing.

God Save the Queen and Her Tea Towels

From the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

 I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but I buy tea towels compulsively in museum gift shops when we're in England.  Most are linen or cotton/linen,  stiff and easy-to-wrinkle, but they're a relatively cheap way to bring fabric home.  (Liberty prints cost a fortune, and most of the other fabric I've seen I can buy here.)   Someone in my quilt group suggested I use them on quilt backs.  This is but a sampling of the ones in my stash.




Detail of a tea towel from Kew Gardens



From Downe House, Darwin's home

From Sissinghurst Castle

Every National Trust property seems to sell them



The British Museum

A William Morris print from the Victoria and Albert Museum

Mom Jeans

Am I the only person in the world who didn't know about this concept?  I came across the term in a novel and went straight out and polled my friends.  Yes,  they'd heard about it, and what planet was I on?

Oprah helped me out.  She has a online article that describes all the characteristics of Mom Jeans so you can decide if you're wearing them and then do something about it.  I'm not sure what.

Note the "heart-shaped butt"

A high waist is the diagnostic of Mom Jeans.  It accentuates the "flat curvature of 40+ buttocks, resulting in the characteristic upside-down heart-shaped butt."  Note  the  baggy thighs tapering to a narrow ankle,  plus the tucked-in shirt  Add a thin belt to this get-up, and you're in Mom Jean Land, for sure.

Definitely Mom Jeans:  The Ice Cream Cone

But be careful if  you try to escape Mom Jeans, because there are all kinds of pitfalls.   If  you wear boot cut jeans, especially if you're under 5'4", you can end up with thighs hugged too snugly.  And, sadly, stretch denim can be no-no, because it can give you "dimples below the tush."  (But it's so comfortable!)   Distressed denim can highlight problems like thighs, butt, and hips.  (What's left?  Ankles?)

The Dimpled Tush that can result from stretch denim

And, however obvious this solution to Mom Jeans, do not rush out and buy jeans with a low-cut waist because that could result in a "muffin top" spillage over the top. (Shoot me!)

I ran all this by my sister at lunch yesterday.  She's a designer and always looks sleek and pulled together.  She wears boot cut jeans, but she's quite tall, so that's okay.  Her jeans come from The Gap, FYI.  She says that jeans are good for only one wearing because they stretch out and become too baggy in the butt.  You have to spray the butt with water and throw the jeans in the dryer to get another day's wear out of them.  Unless you want, as Oprah's expert puts it, "your backside sagging like a day-old diaper." 

A friend who works with a lot of young women thinks it's hilarious that I didn't know about Mom Jeans.

"We're old," she said.  "So what?"

How about the brand, "Not Your Daughter's Jeans?"  I said.  I have several pairs of those.  And I never tuck in my tops.

She shook her head.