I remember my grandfather once told me that finding a job during the Depression filled him with a sense of triumph. That job was making buttons in a factory–and he was the first in his family to finish college. Back when a bachelor’s degree was more of a heavy-duty accomplishment than it is now. (I have trouble picturing young Grandpa plopped onto a contemporary couch via time machine, his admissions-essay consultant and an SAT-prep coach mopping his fevered brow. )

Be patient, gentle reader. There is a point lurking somewhere around here. I think it’s this: At the tender age of Pushing Forty, I find myself clutching at straws, employment-wise. The writing jobs that have afforded me some measure of income without having to shell out for childcare are ebbing away. This has never happened before, and now I’m competing with hordes of overqualified people for the chance to answer phones, to sell dog food. To do things I once considered swell endeavors for a struggling college student. 

Well,  college was back in the Jurassic Period for me, and I feel no small measure of shame for having failed to plan, failed to knuckle down and choose a career/life that had a definite trajectory, rather than enjoying all the side trips along the way. Having an abstract expressionist resume was cute back when I was cute, but now? My cheeks blaze and a sense of failure roils up in my throat with every online application completed.

But wait a minute. This just might be ennobling. I need to keep my family afloat, and it’s time to take care of business. There is no room for small, dumb, or awkward feelings here. 

One of my long-ago vocational side trips involved working as an activities person in a nursing home. The stories I heard back then have all melded into one emblematic voice. Never once did that collective voice complain about taking care of business during the Depression. In repose, glancing back over the yawning expanse of years, the men and women who talked to me seemed to be calmly enumerating corners cut and sacrifices made. But never was there any bellyaching: “We paid for milk with potatoes,” or “Mother would give us kids beer at the dinner table to keep the meat on our bones when food was scarce.” 

Back then, I thought it must have been resignation–the sense that there wasn’t anything better out there, so why not apply your fancy schooling to operating an elevator?

And so far, what’s going on now versus the Great Depression is a hangnail versus a decapitation.

What filled those gray heads was maturity. May God grant me some soon. 

Dear President-elect Obama,

I’ll admit it: you weren’t my first choice, or my second one, either. 

But I sure was happy to see you stride onto the stage at Grant Park two Tuesdays ago. And props to you for even wanting the job. You’ve inherited one big flipping mess. 

Your shoulders are freighted with everyone’s hopes and fears right now. If the economic clouds part under your leadership, then you’ll truly be the Obamessiah (my favorite pejorative back when you handlers trotted you out on the campaign trail to the strains of “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” (Seriously, WTF were they thinking?) It made me want to throw up a little in my mouth–and throw my support to Hill or Edwards.

Hillary fought hard. Regarding Edwards, well, maybe I was thinking, “Charismatic and Shiny,” while everyone else was all like, “Preening Narcissist.” Everyone else got the memo before me on that one.

That’s when I started to pay attention to you, first as a consolation prize, but gradually, on your own merits. I still don’t really understand the Black Liberation Theology of Jeremiah Wright–and it feels presumptuous to say I ever could. Still, that’s my one little bone of contention, which your knockout speech in Philadelphia helped to dispel. 

But Former Senator/President-Elect Obama, the thing that got me was your grace and patience. The Repug ticket played to their wild-eyed, monster-in-the-closet base, whipping up tent-revival style hatred of you because of your race. There were even calls to do you bodily harm–which Gov. Flailin’ did nothing to extinguish. 

Still, you barely blinked. And even though they also gave you a banquet of low-hanging fruit to pluck when Flailin’s daughter’s teenage pregnancy was revealed, you adhered to the high road. 

Me? I was yelling  at MSNBC, wondering aloud why you didn’t just skewer ‘em with their own stupidity. 

You played it just right when the stakes were high. I only hope you can show us more of that in the future.

And if/when you have to disappoint some of us, some of the time, because of the limitations of your power and the world we’re all inheriting from Shrub, the Expert Marksman, and Turdblossom, I hope we can be as graceful and patient in return.

P.S. Good luck with Operation Nonallergenic Rover

With the Independence Day just around the corner, it’s time to turn to our spacious skies, slack-jawed and drooly, to celebrate America! Yay! I remember hopping from foot to foot at 8:50 every Fourth of July as a kid, waiting for the magical hour of 9:00 PM to approach. That was when sufficient darkness would envelop the land, and WHAMMO! It was showtime! Gold puffballs haloed by green, pink, silver strands of fire, all crumbling to the ground in crackly splendor. Ooooh, and the finale–almost every firework my small town could afford, detonated all at once. Yaaaaay!!!

But first, there was always that damnable, mosquito-plagued waiting. And that hopping from foot to foot: it was the gotta-pee dance, since we’d been in the mall parking lot for so lo— –Alas, I’ve disclosed too much of my white-trashtastic roots. Yep, we pulled up lawn chairs at the local mall parking lot, “‘Cause why wouldja fight them pesky crowds at the park, when ya could see ‘em jest as well from the mall?” Ahhh, sweet youth! And if you’re anything like me, sweet youth also involved spying a Roman candle that belched out colorful balls of fire from a backyard near the public fireworks venue–and liking it better than the measly extravaganza your township put on that year.

Maybe most public displays are overrated. Besides, some of us are now thinking about the pollutants that these Conflagrations for Freedom release into the air. Sheesh! And I thought staying away from those roadside tents where sparklers are proffered by three-fingered merchants was the responsible thing to do! But now, we’re damned if we do patronize public fireworks displays and damned if we take matters into our own irresponsible, misguided, nanny-state-needing, potentially blown-off hands and set off those pretty Roman candles.

What to do? Well, maybe we should decouple fireworks from the Fourth and just blow up stuff for freedom whenever the urge strikes. The kids in my neighborhood blew stuff up on a year-round basis. In fact, I lost one mighty fine Muppets lunchbox to an M-80 and a majestic display of bad-assity. (I was fifteen; still tears me up to this day.). The point is, none of us has discovered the cure for cancer or become a captain of civics or industry. We’re probably of average or sub-average intelligence, all. And yet, we managed to retain our full complement of fingers, and not a singed eyebrow among the lot of us. It probably would have been even better and safer, however, had fireworks not been the slightly dangerous, illicit forbidden fruit that many state laws have made them. That way, we could have practiced our blowing-up of stuff without being sneaky–and under parental supervision. Who knows? Maybe we would’ve limited it to the Fourth.

Use common sense, be safe, but by all means, keep on exercising the freedom to blow stuff up in the name of America this Fourth of July–whether you outsource it (like it or not, there’ll probably always be a demand for those big old pollution-spewing monster displays) or take matters into your own powder-burned hands!

Apparently, the memo wound up crumpled at the bottom of Big Unit’s Backpack: we’ve got a four-alarm genius epidemic fulminating here in Southeastern PA. Maybe the smarts are raging across your pre-teen landscape like a California wildfire, too. Thank God I learned about it before ski mask-wearing MENSA goons come and haul away the neighborhood children like thieves in the night, indoctrinating them into the murky underworld of Proust and the Fibonacci Sequence.

Apparently, they won’t be stopping here. Oh, well, someone has to restock the black marching-band oxfords at Payless. And, whew! My spawn are safe! More precious years to spend eating Lucky Charms from the box and spinning around in the backyard till they topple over.

But oh, how exquisitely the Superparent™ tingles danced up and down my spine at Curriculum Night last evening:

Principal X, if we feed Festus intravenous Perrier and Boost to eliminate wasted time on that pesky eating thing, how many Advanced /Enriched courses can he fit into his schedule?

Will five Advanced/Enriched classes interfere with Madysson’s trip to Europe to serve on the Junior Mock-U.N. this fall?

I went into Middle School Curriculum Night thinking that the variety of classes they give these larval teenagers is pretty neat; I left feeling like the kid who got no Valentines in her shoebox. I was taking the gas, even though I knew better. Big Unit has enough of the ol’ ADD that waterboarding would be more Advancing/Enriching than one of those courses, despite knocking any kind of standardized test or IQ assessment outta the park.

Does any of this have anything to do with me, beyond my chaotic inner life and faulty DNA jumping into his chromosomes? With my success or failure as a parent, I mean? Probably not, unless I’m throwing raw meat on the floor, forcing the Units to fight it out with the dogs every night, and actively encouraging them to watch my DVD treasury of this for hours on end.

But…so….hard…not…to…get…sucked…iiiiinnnn. And yet, Glory be! The Black Plague of Genius has passed over our mediocre abode!

This from Little Unit, in our time of grief. We’re getting used to the idea that the Younger Units have no more grandpas, and I have no more dad. Even though I’m a really, really old grownup, his absence still cuts to the quick, kwim?

But two-year-olds are not renowned for their empathy. And Little Unit is apparently determined to go to prom in a sequined pull-up, so she’s not above using words to eviscerate ( and to keep us busybodies from cajoling her into having a seat on the White Potty). Actually, it came out more like this:

“Ah hate-a mah potty, an’ Ah hatechoo!”

After that, I thought it best to let Little Unit remain naked after stripping for the second time. We weren’t having dinner at the White House, after all. On cue, Micro Unit wails for food. I feed Micro Unit, casually tracking Little Units movements as she putters around, stealing shoes from my closet and tottering around in a pair of red wedge sandals. Where is Larry Flynt when you need him?

Little Unit squats suspiciously.

Too late. I leave Micro Unit howling in the middle of the bed, lift Little Unit high in the air and hustle her to my own White Potty.

Sploosh! The “kids” miss the “pool” and land on my scampering foot. I gingerly peel off the offending shoe and hop downstairs to deposit Little Unit on her White Potty.

“Stay here,” I implore, leaving her on her perch and running back upstairs to:
1. Check on Micro Unit
2. Clorox the shyte outta my bathroom floor.

Moments later, I cauterize my hand, collect Micro Unit, and hustle back down to Little Unit, presumably on her throne.

Ieeeeeeyygh! Little Unit is, well, besmirched with poo.

Micro Unit is deposited somewhere again, howling. Wishing for child-size tongs, I pick up the clean parts of Little Unit and deposit her in a bubbly tub (wishing Clorox was gentle and tear-free).

Amazingly, I remained tear-free. But just barely

Oh, well, could be worse. What if giant snakes—wait a minute!

No personal stuff, I told myself. Blogging that would be like reading diary entries through a bullhorn. Besides, who wants to hear about trips to the supermarket, etc?

But one car trip I made last week has managed to suck all the oxygen out of my lungs: I had to drive up to my dad’s hunting cabin to identify his body.

He had gone to bed satisfied. He’d spent the day in his favorite place in the world, setting up his turkey blind somewhere on the 40 mountain acres that cradled his one-bedroom “chalet.” (My mom had bothered to hang curtains inside and stock the place with dishes, prompting the undertaker who kept him for us to remark, “That was a woman’s hunting cabin. Real nice place.”)

And it was. It is. The other shoe has dropped. We all knew that Dad–a juvenile diabetic since grade school–was not going to live to be an old, old man. In fact, when my parents were engaged, a doctor counseled them to get cracking and have some kids ASAP if that was in the cards, so that he’d stand a chance of raising them and seeing them launched before his life was foreshortened by his disease.

Well, those hypothetical kids are long past the need for raising (on our good days) and he was able to share his mountainside, his river and the odd turkey sighting with his grandchildren. He beat expectations by a country mile, and kept going. A scientist who went corporate to support his desire to live in the woods , he knew the limitations of the human body in general–and his in particular.

“Why didn’t he just take up golf?” my mother would wail, wondering why a man saddled with a failing heart insisted on a solitary pursuit where success lay in the ability to hide in the woods. While things didn’t end quite the way she envisioned when her worries had her in a chokehold, my father’s final day was not too far afield from her darkest predictions.

But he was never afraid. He knew the risks, and instead of hand-wringing and taking it easy, decided to go run his life the way he wanted to. How many people can honestly make that claim?

Well done, Dad, even though I’ll miss you forever. You were improbably sweet and tender under your hard, crunchy shell. And improbably vigorous in the shadow of an “inborn error of metabolism,” as one of your old books called it.

And improbably patient with everyone you met, for someone who did not suffer fools gladly. Thanks to your remarkable self-restraint, for instance, I grew up believing that Saturday night’s back-to-back broadcasts of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island were the shining twin zeniths of television programming. All because you didn’t shoot the TV.

How did you resist the urge?

I wish I could ask you that, and so many other things.

Aliza Shvartz: Did she or didn’t she? (Only her hairdresser knows for sure!)

Well, maybe not even that many people. This is stale news, but the questions it raises have been festering in my brain for awhile. Does Ms. Shvartz’s ill-fated senior project at Yale constitute art?

I’ve gotta hold my nose and say “yes” on this one. The very idea of her alleged products of conception–which would’ve been lovingly displayed with the goal of starting a dialog about choice and mastery over one’s body–makes me reflexively gag. The blood, plastic cube and video diary of abortions-as-sporting events, in and of themselves, are art.

And so is me peeing in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to protest the war in Iraq. Which is to say, the materials responsible for such an uproar are sooo not art. But the uproar itself is, totally. The web of lunacy that Ms. Shvartz has woven around this nonevent (with a little help from university officials) is an unparalleled example of performance art for the 21st century.

By allegedly admitting that it was all smoke and mirrors to Yale brass, and then asserting that she really did inseminate/clean out her uterus, Ms. Shvartz has masterfully crafted a shitstorm of epic proportions. And in the end, she didn’t even have to unveil the material piece at all. Brava!

Still, I hate performance art with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. And the worst part is, you never know when it’s gonna sneak up on you. There you’ll be, innocently watching a new “play,” then, WHAMMO! “It’s incomprehensible, therefore, it’s art!” sneaks up on you in all of its black trenchcoat-wearing, Smiths-listening glory.

Yep, it happened to me one time in the early ’90s. The scene of the crime was a large university’s black box theater. I was watching a bunch of thesis projects in directing. On comes a “play” whose dramatis personae consists of Man and Woman.

Uh-oh. Gallagher smashing up watermelons is starting to look like George Bernard Shaw.

They’re wearing masks a‘ la Ultraman. And they’re fighting…on the isle of Crete (insert cretin joke here).

Man: Submit to me, you damned woman!
Woman: Never! You cannot oppress me!

Repeat oh, I dunno, 25,000 times and you’ve captured the theatergoing experience that day.

What made it art was the question-and-answer session that followed. A young woman stood up on trembling legs, stammering and blushing as she asked:

“Um, no disrespect to the playwright, but what the hell did I just see?”

The theater erupted in applause and laughter. Brava!

Maybe it’s not so terrible after all. I just got back from a reunion (not college-sanctioned–the best kind evah!) with about eight of my close associates, or my posse, as the young people would call it these days.

Met up at a bar, then progressed to the host’s hotel room. My husband thought it’d be all “immature” and stupid, but I think he was just pizzed about having to stay home with Big, Medium, Little and Micro Units while I (gasp!) had fun without him.

Turned out he was half right. It was totally immature! But it was also wonderful, and about a day too short. We’re all reaching that age where some lofty aspirations have been traded in for pragmatic concessions. Lots of our 21-year-old selves would call our 35-plus selves “sellouts,” but nobody went on an American Beauty-style bender about how their lives had played out.

This was a happy bunch of people! And I don’t think it was all attributable to the Molson. Or to a steady run of zippity-do-da events. There was plenty of sad intermixed with the good stuff, but I’m proud to still know these folks because of the way they respond the the maelstrom of life swirling around them. I drove down feeling nervous and vaguely frumpy and friendless, but I left reluctantly in the wee hours, just as the beer muscles were popping out and choice bons-mots like, “Man, how’d you get so fat?!” were wafting around the room like so much love-dust.

My only hope is that they derived the same reassurance that they were, in fact, still abundantly “friended” out of my presence. That I listened as much as I talked.

That they will stumble into the unlocked gym again next time. I want to stay for the second annual shirts vs. skins game.

What’ll Pennsylvanians do after the 22nd? We’re like the spawn of besotted yuppie parents committed to having only one child, citing “environmental concerns.” But then, whoops!

Keystone, say hello to your new brother, Indiana! He’s little, so he needs a lot of attention right now, and we’ll be carrying him around, feeding him and sleeping with him for awhile. But you know how much we love you, too! Right? We’ll do lots of special things together, too. Just us. Promise!

Okay, dumb metaphor. (Besides, I really like creative names like “Ashton” and “Caden” better than “Keystone” and “Indiana!”) Before my great state goes into attention withdrawal, it’s worth checking out some remarks made by Obamessiah in San Francisco more than a week ago. He was characterizing “these small towns in Pennsylvania” as bereft of good jobs and having been left behind economically by Presidents Clinton and Bush (Good strategy so far).

But then,

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

RUT-ROH!

Cue the hyenas (I mean, Merry Christmas in April, McCain and Hillary!). Republicans accused the Chosen One of being an out-of-touch elitist. Hillary alleged that he was arbitrarily judging people in whole swaths of the state as unenlightened.

Really? When I’m bitter, I cling to this and this.

Seriously, I think maybe Ed Rendell (a Hillary fan) had a closer take. He pointed out the obvious when he said that rural Pennsylvanians have always valued hunting–which requires firearms, more often than not–and have their own rich religious traditions. Those things have always been part of the cultural fabric, not the crutches of snaggle-toothed yokels in the backwoods.

And really, hunting is a way of keeping game populations in healthy balance, since we have encroached on the territories of natural predators. What should we do, shoot birth-control darts into deer (I’m talking to you, Main Line!)? As for religion, didn’t Obamessiah just silver-tongue his way out of a little Preacher Problem himself? Antipathy towards people unlike themselves? (I’m talking to you again, Main Line!).

Anti-immigration and anti-trade biases? Well, those things are growing among the disappearing middle class in PA and, uh, everywhere. I don’t think either one is right; I’m just sayin’ that maybe people feel threatened when the brutal gulf between the haves (who can afford to be all self-congratulatory in their embrace of “diversity”) and the used-to-haves (who may be looking for anything to explain the unraveling of their lives: if they can eradicate the causes, maybe things will go back to normal) threatens to swallow them whole.

Probably not an intentional slap at Pennsylvanians on Obama’s part. Just. Very. Dumb. coming from someone who’s very anxious that voters not view him as a stereotype, or hold his particular brand of religion against him.

Read the transcript of Obma’s comments here. I’m-a gonna load up my Winchester, tromp out to the old quarry and pray to Xenu before bed. Aaaargh! So bitter!

So today, Big Unit (DS #1) has decided that his (flag!) football coach is “too mean,” bc during last Saturday’s game, he grumbled, “Awww, c’mon!” when Big Unit fell. Believe me, when in doubt, I tend to jump in and rescue. I also feakin’ despise the overinvested, red-faced parents helicoptering on the sidelines. And whenever I set foot on a baseball diamond, I wax all nostalgic about the kind, encouraging ol’ retired guy who coached my summer softball team when I was 10. Even if you couldn’t hit the side of a barn, on his team, you mattered. (And he ended up with a respectable record using that approach.)

Big Unit’s coach is no cuddly grandpa type, but overall encouraging. And hey, what coach says, “Well kiddos, I sure hope we place fifth today!”? I think Big Unit needs a little of this to light a fire under his kiester. If I can help spare him three decades of going all fluttery with discouragement in the face of relatively mild adversity, then I’m all for it–as long as Coach’s critiques are about the game, and not the kid.

OTOH, I feel Big Unit’s pain. If anything, I tend to get all cringey and flustered when Authority Figures raise their voices or express displeasure. But it’s time for Big Unit to learn how to deal with all types of people.

Jumbo Unit (DH) was backing me up on this at dinner tonight, and he said:

“Big Unit, that’s football. If everyone got a group hug after every play, it’d be gay lawn ball!”

After laundering the piss out of my pants from laughing, I got to thinking: What would gay lawn ball look like? I’m thinking something croquet-ish, with lavender polos and white patent-leather oxfords, but who knows?

The Sachets v. the Yankee Candles, tonight on LOGO!