Happy Birthday, M!

Today is my sister's birthday.  She was a Thanksgiving baby, which accounted for my mother being missing when I got up on Thanksgiving morning, 1953.  I remember standing in the drafty garage of our brand-new tract house, and my dad telling me I had a baby sister.  I didn't know what to expect.  When we picked her up at the hospital, she cried in the car, and I said, "Send her back!"  Which would have been a big mistake.

Thanksgiving, 2011,  with a cake I brought from Berkeley

Some of her  pals lamented that they couldn't see her face in the grainy newspaper photo I posted earlier this week, so here's a picture of her taken a year later.  She was in the first grade when my mother made this dress, which featured blue cherry fabric and an organdyhalf-apron worn over the dress.  I had a matching one. 

c. 1960

Hey, thanks!

If you read my blog regularly: thank you.  I love having an audience, and I hope I don't sound too much like Andy Rooney, ranting on about bottle openers and how you're supposed to eat an ice cream cone. I used to think,  "Just how much do we need to know about one person's off-the-wall opinions?"  Ditto blog.

We're off to San Jose for dinner with my sister. It's supposed to be an indoor picnic. Yesterday she called because she couldn't find a package of  real linen tablecloths she stores under her bed. I'm assuming that means it's going to be fancier than I thought, but I'm wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

Happy T-giving.

Nursery University

That's the title of a documentary we watched last night, and I recommend it unless you're a person who doesn't like to shout at the screen.

The filmmakers follow five families as they try to get their three-year olds into Manhattan nursery schools.  There's been a baby boom in Manhattan over the past ten years, and competition is fierce to get kids into the nursery schools that feed into the right private elementary schools,  right on up to Harvard.  Parents grovel, connive, and donate to get their child into one of the top schools,  most of which cost $20,000 a year.

I liked the family of color whose child got into the Mandell Nursery School with a scholarship and the Greenwich Village family who opted out of the rat race and put their daughter into a co-op nursery.  I did not like the highly competitive investment banker whose adorable daughter got into seven schools.  I was neutral on the single mom who had twins at 57 (yes!). And the overentitled mother who says she's always gotten everything she wanted, but couldn't get her kid into City and Country Nursery School and so moved to Boston?  Whatever.

A personal note:  Without a doubt, I would not have been accepted at any of these schools.  One show of separation anxiety, my bete noire,  at the interview, and you're out.  A tantrum?  Forget it.  A dad who brags about affiliation with a college he didn't really have much to do with?  No go. The director calls to check.

I went to the San Jose State nursery school affiliated with the Home Economics department.  I remember the row of little toilets and the constant washing of hands.   My sister  didn't go at all, but managed to get a graduate degree.  Those were the old days.

Not For Public Consumption

I've been watching the PBS American Masters special on Woody Allen, and God, I find him refreshing.  Death!  Anxiety! Hypochondria! Death!  Remember that scene in "Hannah and Her Sisters," when he is so relieved to find out he doesn't have a brain tumor that he leaps along the sidewalk and then stops dead (no pun) realizing that one day it will be bad news?  Oh, Woody!

Shelves 2 and 3 

  I've got an out-of-the-way bookshelf in my studio with books pertaining to my own personal obsessions, which overlap with some of Allen's. Shelf 1:  Death and Anxiety  ("Dying at Home," "The Heal Your Anxiety Workbook,").  Shelf 2: Travel guides, always more than one for any locality because you never know what could go wrong. I've seen a documentary about Woody Allen in Venice and he is very anxious about water and boats and canals.  A definite tie-in.  Shelf 3:  Biographies and memoirs of first ladies, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt.  I'm at a loss here re Woody, although I would love it if he did a time-travel number on Pat Nixon.

The other day a contractor I've known for a long time was in my studio checking out leaky windows.  I saw him studying the shelves.

"Ah, Liz, I see you're interested in first ladies, " he said.  He is a very progressive Berkeley liberal.  "Laura Bush?"

I doubt Woody would have been chagrined, but I was.  He reveals the damndest things about himself, and people find them entertaining, maybe because they think he's more neurotic than they are.  I wonder.  In the meantime, Shelves 1-3 stay upstairs and pretty much out of sight.

The 1958 Caddie

Yes, this is us. My mother, me, and my sister  accepting the keys for a 1958 Cadillac we won at a gas station.   The San Jose State prof-- that would be my father--is nowhere in evidence.  He might have had to teach that day (or he might have thought that art professors should not be seen with Cadillacs.).

There was no question of us keeping the car, but my mother dressed up in her fake fur stole, and my sister and I put on matching fuzzy knit hats with our school dresses and patent leather shoes, and off we went for the publicity photo.

The actual car we won was red, with fins, and the proceeds from its sale became the seed money for a trip to England the following summer. My mother hadn't seen her family since 1947, when she emigrated to marry my father, whom she'd met in London during World War II.

Family lore.

You Decide

I went out to breakfast today with friends, and I heard a story that stuck with me.  See what you think:

One of the women, whom I'll call "A,"  now the girlfriend of a man who's been a friend of mine for years, was informed by her husband a few years ago that he was leaving her for a much younger woman.  This came completely out of the blue.   She was about 55 and  had retired recently thinking that their joint financial future was stable; her husband was a very well-paid attorney. 

She was shattered.  A divorce case followed.  She was eligible for ten years of spousal support.  Her lawyer insisted that there be a life insurance policy, so that if her ex-husband died, her spousal support allowance would be covered by the policy.  It was up to her to pay the premiums.  She did.

Her husband just died unexpectedly at 60.  She now has enough money to live comfortably for the rest of her life.

What's your first reaction?  Mine was:  "Ha!"  My second was:  "Good for A!"

It's the "Ha!" that troubles me.

In the meantime, she and my friend, whose wife left him years ago, are very happy together.

The Managerial Mind Needs Some Help

Years ago I heard a woman psychology professor at the University of Washington say that "women have the managerial mind."  No doubt about that today.  I have no choice.

I've got a painter downstairs, a pair of housecleaners working around that disruption, and a sick husband.  The sick husband was born in southern California and has been forever imprinted with a notion of chilly that I do not understand.  No windows open, ever, is his preference.   The painter has just laid down a coat of smelly primer.  I fling open the windows due to the fumes.   The husband whimpers ("This is awful," he said, seeing the kitchen windows open. "It's a gale in here.").

Sonia at work, cheerful and adaptable

The housecleaners are like my sister-wives for the day: sympathetic,       adaptable, humorous. They, of course, have managerial minds.  Here's to you, Sonia and Anabelle, who arrive twice a month and  lighten the load.  I am lucky to have you.