second floor living without a yard

Anyone else facing the crushing purposeless ennui of Not Quite Spring? You might not believe this but I’ve survived all winter on about six sweaters because I’ve been too lazy to unpack our winter stuff from the storage unit - and hey! Before you get all whiny at me for having a storage unit, our bedroom is the size of a postage stamp. When relatively compared to my sweater collection.

Where am I going with this? Oh, I’m sick of wearing six sweaters! April, sack up ho.

However there was plenty of convivial laughter at drinks with my crowd last night and it reminded me that even when we don’t all make it into one dimension we are a multi-petaled flower of awesome! Especially when I realized I was showing off pictures of someone’s new someone on Luke’s iPhone like some kinda crazy yenta grandmama. Look at those cheeks! Puddemthere.

Did you know Stuart is going to the fair and pleasant land next week? You people should send chocolates and puppies oh wait! I have both. Maybe I will post little two-hundreds here for Stuart to read from Old Wighty. Maybe I’ll just call him. Love! It ages well.

cultural detox

I think Cairo was a hard assignment for my family. I’m not sure how my dad felt about returning to the town he’d grown up in, but I know it was hard for my mom, being there without me. Wives, you know, aren’t really supposed to work on overseas assignments, but my school and my formation had always been important to her, and she’d done a marvelous, energetic job at both, and now she was there without me, since I was in college. So it’s weird when I mention it on our laundry list of overseas assignments, since I didn’t really live there.

But I did visit, four times in all. This was the fourth. Beth came with me, during the Spring Break of our sophomore year. I had never bonded with Cairo the way I’d bonded with the other countries we’d lived in. It was loud, god it was so loud, and it just never seemed to end. Not the noise, not the dust, not the sprawling poverty. I could see, objectively, its splendor and chaotic energy and the deep veins of its history but mostly, I was bored and lonely when I visited.

But I’m glad my last visit was with a newcomer to Africa, someone whose eyes were wide at every turn because it was all unfamiliar to her. Cairo through Beth’s eyes was at its best - captivating and exotic. My mom lined up stellar day after stellar day of fun and history and a little dash of decadence. It’s from whence I get my gracious hostess genes. We had a ball.

And my mom, in her ever-aware sense of hostessing, realized that the week we were visiting coincided with Eid el-Kbir, a period a few months after Ramadan that’s usually celebrated with sacrificial animals and donating food to the poor. It’s also marked, at least in Egypt, with dipping one’s hands in blood and marking walls, cars, homes. Hey, we were visitors - we never judged - and of course, this being our third Muslim country, my family was more than used to cultural differences. Only, Mom was a little worried about how Beth would react to all the, you know, animals. So she booked our last three days at the newly-minted Hilton resort, on the mouth of the Red Sea. Some cultural detox, if you will - in my family, nothing says home like the Hilton.

Of course, Beth was fine. Beth is open-minded, fearless, and the few bloody hand-prints or carcasses we did see weren’t anything to go crazy over. Still, that little gesture of my mom’s didn’t go unappreciated. For two days, we watched dolphins share waterspace with honking big oil tankers, ate home-brought chicken pie on the beach, and cavorted on the random trampoline. I remember it as the first place I read Harry Potter (in a matter of hours), a quiet, nearly empty resort that was basically all ours.

And the jumping photos sort of became a theme.

still standing

I think my luck started to turn when we got assigned this dorm, in the twilight days of my miserable junior year. The year had been bad for so many reasons I can now assign, post-apocalyptically, with collected clarity. As much as I adore SLC for its education and wide-open sense of learning, it can be a difficult place socially. To any alumni who wasn’t drunk all four years, they know that’s like saying the West Bank is an iffy neighborhood.

The story is typical - my junior year was mostly crappy and depressing. I didn’t talk to the people that could help and soothe and rescue (my parents and Beth) and I spent far too much time talking to people who couldn’t (names redacted). But then I got back for my senior year and the tides had changed. I had a confidence I’d picked up somewhere in the lowest depths, I had stopped running the newspaper which freed up, oh, my entire life. And I was living in this fabulous, fabulous apartment with only two other people and a turn-of-the-century greenhouse out my back window. It was the very last year McMasters was standing, and was all mine.

This view is still precious to me. Walking across the Slonim House lawn on my way back from class or conferences or coffee, looking at that old sloping roof and knowing my bed, my refuge, was there. I had a fire escape landing outside my room, with its own door and everything - and although my two uptight roommates didn’t like me using it since it didn’t lock from the outside, I used it a lot anyway.

It’s a pity that the apartment was the scene of the total dissolution of a friendship with a girl I’d known since freshman year. If I can speak in therapist-talk, she stopped being able to handle my truth just as I was growing the balls to show it, all the time, and damn what people expected of me. She broke up with me, even, in a nasty Dear John letter left on my desk; when I showed it to my therapist, foaming with indignation at the leveled accusations, Maureen wisely asked, “do you want to KEEP this friendship? No? Then she’s done the work for you.” A wise point.

It was a good year regardless. There were long talks with boys that didn’t mean too much, there were hilarious late-night photo sessions and cigarettes smoked happily off the back stairs (damn the roommates again). My car was parked right downstairs and it was my ticket to all the fun I had that year, free at last from the heavy burden of the paper. The room, in my memory, was always littered with color test prints, piles of clothes, and nothing but true friends. It’s a trend I’ve held onto.

I know SLC needed the arts center they built on that lot, but I wish that apartment was still there.

packing up

My sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence started at the crack of dawn in New Jersey, when I left my parents sleeping at a family friend’s place in Union and drove to Westchester. I remember telling them, grown-up that I was, that the first few hours of Registration Day were going to be a zoo and they were better off joining me later in the afternoon.

How prescient. I got to campus and ran smack into a housing crisis. My gorgeous off-campus dorm house, a rambling early-1900s home rented from nearby Concordia College, that I’d expressly picked because I’d get an enormous room all to myself, was suddenly equipped with a roommate paired in haste and probably not thoughtfully, either. I would have thrown a full-grade tatty but my situation was nothing compared to the students allotted rooms in the living rooms of other dorm houses, on campus. After a quick conference with Beth, my freshman roommate and anchor of friendship on campus, we proposed that my unknown roommate take Beth’s single on campus, and Beth move in with me over at Ressmeyer. Everyone was happy.

And the year went on. Eventually, a room cleared out downstairs - oddly enough, by an unnaturally quiet girl named Alexis who would have a profound and sometimes devastating impact on my junior year - and Beth moved into it. It was an amazing year, living in this glorious old house ten minutes from the incestuous bubble that was SLC. We had a big kitchen, a wraparound porch, and street parking. We had Trader Joe’s down the street, late evenings on the stoops with beer (never mind being 19), and long, funny talks well into the night.

It wasn’t a perfect year, it never is. Two of the friends we had in that house aren’t really friends any longer, for very different reason. One had her own layers of baggage about Beth and me, but mostly aimed at me. Our friendship dissolved in rather annoyingly close quarters, my senior year. Another brilliant girl in the house was a mixed blessing housemate - genius and funny and full of surprises, but also going through her own high-level trauma that impacted Beth more strongly than me. Both of these once-friends are names and memories that draw difficult ambivalence in us. They’re names and stories with which Josh and Stuart are familiar.

So the year came to an end, and this is Beth moving out of her sun-drenched room and into her forest-green Honda Civic, packing to head back to Texas to find herself, and Josh. It’s the first picture I remember taking of Beth with her adult confidence, a new mantle she was trying on and which she still wears so well today. There’s that Ben Folds Five teeshirt of which I was always so covetous. And those worn wooden steps that I sat on, or dashed down, or dragged groceries up.

It feels like my entire sophomore year, in one frame.

the last days

I don’t know who took this picture. It was the very last day of classes at ISK, in Nairobi, and no one was doing any work. I was with my friend Erik on the left, whom I’d wisely did not to date and is thus still a good friend, and the great first love of my adolescence, Siegfried, who was looking at my yearbook.

I think Siegfried was being coy, in this photo. We’d broken up back in September of the previous year, halfway between my birthday (August 31) and his (September 15). Really, I’d broken up with him. I’d found myself attracted to another friend of mine, a Brazilian, and the damage was done - Siegfried and his crazy moods were getting too much for me to handle and the Brazilian seemed like a sane option. Of course, he ended up doing far worse damage but that’s another story I may never tell here.

So Siegfried, with all his Italian passions (and, I suspect, a small dose of bi-polarity), absolutely stopped talking to me after the breakup, especially when I started going around with the Brazilian. I lost another, far more valuable friend in the breakup. It wasn’t until our end-of-year dance, in April, that Siegfried and I mended ways, as friends. Things weren’t perfect, of course, because of afore-mentioned Italian passions, but in this photo, at least, we are cautiously friends.

It’s funny to see me smiling because there aren’t many like that, from the end of that school year. I had a lot of miserable baggage, created by small schools and smaller minds (other international-school brats know of what I speak). When my parents announced we were moving back to Houston for my senior year, directly after this, I was almost physically lighter with relief. But it was a tough balance because those two years in Nairobi had taught me so much about myself and what my limits were. I grew exponentially in those years, and going back to the Houston of my freshman year felt like cramming back into a tiny, cheerleader-shaped closet.

So I’m smiling, maybe because it’s the last day of the year, maybe because my traumatizing haircut (a direct result of the breakup with Siegfried, who always swore undying devotion to my long curls) was behaving itself, maybe because Erik really was that awesome of a guy; a friend I made in that last year when I was shedding friends like snakeskin.

I don’t know what Siegfried ultimately wrote in that yearbook, and I don’t know where he is these days. I always remember him as a well-intentioned guy who loved me very much in his own manic way, a boy I would later describe as a Knight of the Round Table, hundreds of years too late. I can’t be as generous about other boys I loved, but that’s how we learn, right?

Anyway, it’s good to see myself genuinely smiling on one day that year.

maggie's surprise

I lived in Austin for three months in the summer of 1999, all by myself in a rented apartment on Guadalupe and 39th Street. It was an experiment in adulthood - I learned how to make dinner, manage an internship, pay rent, keep myself in line. I also learned how to not drink too much and how to change the damn tires on my car so that I didn’t hydroplane on I-10 going 87MPH - well, I learned that one the hard way.

I lived there, for all intents and purposes, with my then-boyfriend Alex. We had been together, long-distance, for my first and his second year of college, and I think that summer of adulthood was our undoing. My best memories from it very rarely involve him - they’re about riding around on William’s Vespa, or working for Ken, or dropping watermelons with Erin and Rachel. My worst memories of the summer very much involve Alex - realizing I would completely go to pieces if someone left the house during a fight, having to lie to his parents about whether he was living with me (he was! Rent free!).

One scorching Austin day, we went to the PetsMart to get food for one or another of Alex’s beastly little beasties (he was a fan of snakes and snapping turtles. Why I thought this was The Big One, I don’t know). There was a woman giving away puppies outside, swearing up and down that they were eight weeks old. They were two weeks if they were a day, and Alex and I felt so bad, we took one home immediately, checked for male genitalia and finding none, pronounced her Maggie.

I think we got a dog to save our relationship. And to be fair to Maggie, she was a little godsend. Puppies are adorable, and she took our minds off our ever-increasing fights. Of course, I took far better care of her, making sure she was fed and weaned and potty-trained, teaching her to walk around on a leash and not bark when I left the room. Alex mostly played with her. And then one day, about a week before I packed up to leave and after Alex had finally moved into his own place (his backyard in the photo), Maggie’s balls dropped.

It was shocking. Alex thought it was funny but I was traumatized. My sweet little Maggie was a boy. And she wasn’t even my boy anymore - she was Alex’s, staying behind in Austin. He promptly named her JB, after Jimmy Buffett. I have no idea where she is now, and she’ll always be Maggie to me.

Alex and I broke up less than a month later. Although when it happened, I was upset, it was like the anguish of amputating a limb that’s more pain than its worth. We were never right for each other, which was duly proved that summer. Still, I was glad to have Maggie in my life, before she became Alex’s JB.