The Difference

Several times a week she empties the kitchen compost bin and cleans it out with some kitchen cleaner. She waits a few minutes until it dries and inserts a fresh liner.

Every few months he announces that he is going to clean out the kitchen composting bin.

“I will take it into the bathroom and give it a good cleaning. Where's the spray cleaner? I need the one with bleach. Where did you put the paper towels?  Also, I'll need some old towels to keep the bathroom floor from getting wet.  I’ll turn the bin upside down in the tub and let it dry.  That will take a while so you won't be able to throw away any garbage for quite some time.  I will have to hang a new bag on the cabinet door, the one close to where we keep the trash cans. Do you want me to show you where it is?”

This is the difference between men and women.

My Vocation

 

When I was seventeen I decided I had to enter a convent. I hated the thought of it and I cried myself to sleep every night for months. 

But in my benighted teenage mind I was convinced that it was the right thing to do. I thought that if I truly believed what I was learning in religion class, the right and logical thing to do would be to abandon worldly pleasures and follow God. Right into a convent.

I would leave my parents behind and see them only when some Mother Superior allowed me to. This would be my last Thanksgiving at home. My last Christmas. I would have to leave my dog. It was just awful.

For the rest of my life I would be eating awful cafeteria food like the nuns served at my all girls Catholic high school where we had to wear navy blue uniforms with white blouses, no jewelry and sensible oxford shoes. Nice Peter Pan collars, though.

I consoled myself with the hope that the convent might serve those really good Sloppy Joes occasionally served at school and maybe even those terrific peanut butter cookies Sister Constance Marie would turn out. But the rest was pretty bad. I was going to live the rest of my life without my Mama's mashed potatoes and gravy. Or my Daddy's spaghetti and meatballs.

They served something called Italian spaghetti at school and let me tell you there was nothing Italian about it.

No more new clothes. I would never again shop for  cute shoes. It would be all nuns' shoes. But I probably wouldn't have foot problems like my mom. That was one plus.

The habits nuns wore back then were a definite minus but also a kind of mystery. They were  long and black and looked pretty involved with lots of layers and a head piece made with lots of  starch. How did they get them on and off? Also there were huge white bibs to keep clean. But the nuns did sort of glide as they walked and the huge rosaries were kind of cool.

What a wretched future. I would probably end up teaching a bunch of girls like myself who couldn't wait to get out of class.

But if that was what God wanted, I guess I would have to do it. "Offer it up," as the nuns were always saying.

This went on gnawing at me all winter but I couldn't bring myself to mention it to anyone. Fear of being taken seriously? Could've been.

I made it to spring when some classmates began announcing their vocations. Everyone applauded. I just wanted to throw up.

Over Easter vacation I decided to ask my friend Julie DeBrosse how she knew she had a vocation. How did she know she wanted to join up, I mean become a nun. She told me that the life of tranquility of not having to make decisions appealed to her. She knew she would be happy in a convent. 

Tranquility? Happiness? In a convent? I couldn't believe it. Didn't she see herself as a martyr? Sacrificing her life to be miserable for God. She just sort of looked at me oddly. Julie also said that one or two of the Sisters had approached her because they thought she might have a vocation. She was made of the right stuff, just like an astronaut.

So I asked a few of the other girls who had declared their intention to go into the convent and they all said that they had been singled out as good nun material.

Well, no one, not one single nun, had ever suggested that I might make a good nun. I felt off the hook.

But the obsessive part of me was still clinging to the idea that It Was the Right Thing to Do.

Still I didn't tell a soul.

Spring was coming and with it the Prom, Graduation and something called Senior Retreat where we were required to spend a weekend of prayer and meditation at the Sisters of Notre Dame Mother House, located in a former mansion in a spiffy neighborhood that had been donated to the Sisters many years ago.

So I went to the Retreat, no uniforms required, lots of sweaters suggested because that old mansion was just plain cold. Silence and meditation were the by words. I listened to the lectures, kept my mouth shut and wondered if that old mansion had ever been a home. It was pretty dreary. Lots of dark oak paneling and straight back chairs.

The food was memorably terrible, runny scrambled eggs, slightly stale toast and margarine and somehow the tuna salad sandwiches didn't taste like tuna. 

We went to Mass and sang in the chapel and were allowed to walk in the gardens to meditate. Absolutely no talking permitted.

Spring was just beginning and I had been reading Colette. I know most people think she is all about love but I kind of got her other message: "Regardez." Look, really look and then look again. Observe what's around you closely. I sat on a rock and began to look around.

Even though the was pretty bare I could see the beginnings of color everywhere. Pale shoots and tiny buds appeared before my eyes. It started to become beautiful. I took out my notebook and began writing. I found myself making a list of all the things I wanted to see and do. It was a long list and not one of them was inside a convent.

So that is what my vocation would be: I would spend my life looking  for what was beautiful. I would be out in the world, in museums and gardens and in my own home.

I was saved. 

The Retreat worked. I guess those Sisters knew what they were doing, after all.  At least they knew something about me before I did.

Dirt Path

When I’m driving my car, am I the only person who expects my GPS to yell at me when I don't follow its instructions? I truly believe I am going to hear something like ‘Why on earth did you turn right?  I told you to turn left. Aren’t you listening? Here I am trying to make this trip easy and you have just totally made a mess of it. We will have to reroute again. This is the third time this week.’

Or when I start out on a trip and ignore how the GPS tells me to get to the highway. I can here that little click of impatience. Or worse, it goes silent. Then I think, O God, is it mad at me? Is it going to take revenge?

And then there is the suspicion that I don't really trust my GPS. It started with the appearance a few years ago of the Dirt Path. I live at 108th St. and Riverside in Manhattan and every time I look for traffic advisories for a route to some place north of the City, the GPS tells me to take the Dirt Path to 110^th St.

Dirt Path? With a capital D? Is my GPS playing games with me? Or has it made a Mistake? Does it have a diabolical streak, or does it just want to get my goat?

Just to be clear: there is a kind of footpath through a grassy area between Riverside Dr. and the parallel service drive. The dirt path is about two feet wide and is primarily used by dog walkers. Or, is the GPS really referring to the Service Drive? Not according to the GPS map. It actually shows a Dirt Path where no car could possibly go.

But here’s the part that annoys me: When the Dirt Path first appeared, I told friends about it. “Isn’t this a hoot?” I would say. “Look, the GPS has made a mistake! ”

Do you know what the invariable reaction was? My friends would say “Are you sure there isn’t some road called Dirt Path you don't know about?” And I would say, “Duh, I live here. Believe me, there are no hidden roads.” 

“Well, you better check.”

Do you know how many people have said this to me? Now I tell about the Dirt Path just to see what they will say. And always they say, “Technology must be right.”

I see this little example not as idiocy but as indoctrination, a sort of omen of just where we are going with these devices. Right now, we have become dependent on them to find our way. And it's a great thing for the directionally challenged. But doesn’t it bother you that some day you may go somewhere and the thing won’t work? You will have no idea how to get out of the place without your little device. I mean, what if you lose the signal? What if you run out of battery power and your charger doesn’t work? Do you keep a map in your car any more?

And what’s to stop the diabolical device from sending you over a cliff? Or into a trap devised by foreign agents?

On the other hand, you could be like my husband - aka “The Human Compass” - who is not willing to trust any electronic anything. He looks at maps and plans trips and remembers where he is going. He knows immediately if he has made a wrong turn, or if we’re going in the wrong direction.  "You can see by the shadows that we are heading east not west," he might explain. I swear he can see on which side of the tree the moss is growing.

I am nothing like my husband. In fact, some would say I have no sense of direction at all.

Add to that the fact that I never ask directions, not out of ego but because I can never remember what the directions were. I just look at road maps, write down directions and hope for the best. I am very good at U-turns.

But I can find my way to any major department store in Westchester County without a hitch.

What will I do if the pandemic puts department stores out of business?

Guess I had better hope my GPS doesn’t really hate me.

A Few Carats Less

We rented a cottage on an island in Maine for many years. It was called Gem Island.

It was a big old two-story cottage on a tiny island accessible only by a small motorboat. We had lovely views of the bay and could watch lobster boatmen at work. There was a covered porch with comfy rockers and although there were mosquitoes they were the inept kind that could be batted away.

It was plain, strong old house probably 100 years old. It was a no nonsense house with wooden floors and walls. There were four bedrooms but not much in the way of decoration except for book shelves and comfy chairs. It smelled clean and wind swept. Nothing musty or old about it. It was comfortable and also comforting to stay in.

Gem Island didn't ask much of the visitor. Reading and chatting and playing games were all you had to do. Maybe row over to the lobster pound and eat on the picnic benches a magnificent meal of lobster, biscuits, corn on the cob and blueberry pie. Or bring some home for lobster pie.

The cottage had a lovely old kitchen with an electric stove and refrigerator. There was electricity but no septic system so there was a composting toilet in the bathroom. We had to bring in our drinking water, but rainwater collected in a cistern for hot showers.  

It wasn't even expensive. Gem Island had been owned by the same family since World War II who weren’t interested in profit. They liked to rent to people who loved the place as much as they did.

It was pretty sweet. We felt we were lucky to have found it.

Some of our friends found the plumbing situation a bit too dicey for a visit. That was okay. It made me feel slightly adventurous – not an adjective I normally associate with myself.  But it gave us most of the time to ourselves.  We had two weeks in July every year alone and one terrific third week when Tony and Larissa and the boys came.

Jamie and Nicky loved it. They thought Gem Island was Maine. For them, the whole state existed on that tiny island.

Like many good things, our summers on Gem Island ended when Nancy, the last member of the family, died and left it to her sons who lived in California. They sold it for an enormous sum that was way way out of reach for us to buy.

After a long search, we’ve found anther cottage with lots of amenities and a killer view of the ocean and several lighthouses. Since it's a lot more expensive than Gem Island, we stay there for only one week with the kids. There is a small beach where they swim, quite happily, in the unbelievably cold water. We love it but everyone agrees it just isn’t Gem Island.

Jim and I have kept longing for something a little bit more like Gem Island. Last year I found an island for rent on a lake in central Maine. Accessible by canoe, without water or electricity, with a porch looking over the lake, it looked really charming.

And the name was Little Diamond Island.

So Jim and I rented it for four days to try it out.

After our usual week on the shore, we waved goodbye to the kids and headed inland to Lake Cobbosseecontee.

We found the spot where a canoe was waiting for us but somehow it took over an hour to figure out how to open the clever, extremely simple looking lock that held it fast.

We paddled the canoe easily enough and followed the directions to Little Diamond Island. The instructions said to go south past a big island and a smaller one would appear. Well, a really tiny spec did appear that looked like the online picture I had seen.  So we tried it, feeling a little like Goldilocks.  The keys opened the locks, so we were sure we had found the right place.

The island was even smaller than Gem Island. we were greeted by a mother osprey who had built a new in a very tall tree right above the deck.  the tiny deck was lovely as was the bedroom and the bitty living room. 
The kitchen, however, was another matter. It had windows but they didn't seem to offer much light. and it was already late afternoon. It was full of very old, rusty looking indefinable items. There were dark corners lurking everywhere and a certain odor of critters gone by.

We were searching for  lanterns without finding them when it occurred to us that something important was missing. Oh yes, where was the bathroom?

It just wasn’t there. The cottage was so small we couldn't have missed it. So we looked in the shed, under the cottage, banged on walls until the sun was setting before we found there was a false door at the back of the shed. And there it was: the composting toilet perched about three feet off the ground and surrounded by really smart mosquitoes.

I don't have a problem with composting toilets, but somehow I don’t deal well with one in an outhouse that can only be reached after sunset with a flashlight. Climbing up onto the darn thing with a flashlight in my mouth was also rather unappealing. If there was a light in that shed I didn't find it.  I mean it just didn't seem right to do that much work just to use a bathroom.

I could have dealt with the bathroom if the kitchen weren’t so creepy or vice versa. Anyway I guess I am just not that adventurous. I am fairly game about many things but that goes only so far. I am, after all, a scaredy cat just like my sister always said. I was too fearful to try to figure out the propane stove so we ate cold rolls for breakfast, canoed out for lunch and ate salads for supper. Wine doesn't need cooling. But doing dishes in lake water was sort of fun, and if we had found a sunny spot to heat the solar water shower thingy, bathing would have been fine. Even lake water is cold in Maine.

But come sundown the shed became ominous. I have seen too many 'murder in the remote woods' movies I guess. But between the icky kitchen and the scary shed, we said goodbye to Little Diamond Island with few regrets.

We have found another cottage on top of a hill, which gives the illusion of being far away from civilization. You can see the sea if you look sharp. But it has a nice little kitchen and a working bathroom right inside and has a screened in porch to help fight off the mosquitoes.

We are always on the lookout for another gem of a place to stay. But every single one is always a few carats less than our memories of Gem Island.

Silly Socks

Sitting in the park the other day, I observed a woman walking past me wearing black and yellow socks that definitely looked like bumblebees. She wore ankle length pants so the socks were quite noticeable.

I saw as she went past that she was otherwise clad entirely in typical NY black. Hmm I thought what do those socks say about her? Is this a style statement or some indication of an inner desire to break loose form drabness perhaps not only in her clothing but also in her life?

The other question I asked myself is why would she wear the darn things. They were to my mind close to ridiculous. Was she a very serious person maybe a judge or social scientist with an inner silly person?

I have seen any number of women beyond the carefree years of youth wearing socks which looked pretty much like munchkin attire. Or maybe like those Oompa Loompas from Willy Wonka.

Invariably these women dress otherwise quite conservatively.

What does it mean? Are we to view socks as a means of self-expression.

I asked a friend for her thoughts and she said, "Well its what they are selling nowadays. And I guess you have to buy what’s out there. It's a merchandizing scheme to get people to spend more money.”

I agree with that totally but it doesn't explain why this particular advertising campaign has been so successful. You see silly socks everywhere. There are even some that look like old library cards. I’m a librarian but do I want people to identify me by my socks? The id being Old Librarian.

If you see clothing as a means of self-expression, just what is being expressed?

Maybe silly socks reflect a wild unconventional streak that usually remains hidden and can only reveal itself through socks?

I have come to the conclusion that socks are an American version of the French woman’s scarf, which she uses to make her clothes more interesting and appealing.

We go to the Wizard of Oz for inspiration. The French look chic we look silly.

Do these socks say we aren’t in Kansas anymore?

Of course they don’t. Nobody in Kansas would wear black all the time.  I bet they wear actual colors like blue and green. With silly socks?

I'd like to think that those bumblebee socks said something about the lady’s inner personality.  She returned and passed me going in the opposite direction.  She had silver-gray hair done in a kind of bouffant up do that was quite arresting. Almost as much as her socks.

I bet she could sting.  

*As I sit here in front of a rain splashed window wearing purple and green striped socks I wonder at the nerve I had in writing this piece. Its kind of like how I feel about Amazon: I can tell you every thing that is wrong with the company yet I still order stuff from it. I have excuses - oh lord do I have excuses but I haven’t stopped buying certain things.  I tell myself that I only buy things I can't find elsewhere.

If I had the courage of my convictions I would do without those things.
Right.

And I wouldn't wear these silly socks either. But they are so warm and cozy, just what I need on this chilly morning. And I feel a tad more cheerful wearing them

So what is the silly sock thing all about?

It’s really pretty simple: it's a cheap way of wearing something fun and kind of cute. They make you feel a little fewer drabs. (I really wrote a little less drab but the grammar tool changed it. It’s worth noting that someone, if only an app, gets the difference between less and few even if it is goofed up in the end.)

After all I do wear black ninety percent of the time too. What's wrong with lightening it up a little?

My Necklace

I won’t go so far as to say I feel guilty but I do wonder why I didn't give that little girl my necklace.

It would have been the nice thing to do. It was obvious she wanted it. Why didn't I?

My mom would have given it to her without a second thought. Why couldn’t I?

Anyway, the little girl was about three and her name was Lydia. She wasn't exactly cute. What she was was gorgeous. Like a little movie star. Really.

We were on a two-hour boat tour of Maine oyster beds on the Damariscotta River and most people were there to eat oysters and drink wine and glance occasionally at the shore.

Not a lot to do for a three year old.

She kept looking at me from across the deck as I was chatting with a couple who were wowing me with the fact that they spent two months each summer in Maine.

Lydia came progressively closer and closer and it became clear she had her eyes on the necklace I was wearing: A cheerful blue green and yellow plastic affair that is lightweight and great for travelling because it seems to go with everything I wear.

With it there was no need for thinking, I could just put it on and go. It wasn’t expensive. I had found it in a museum store. It cost less than $20.

It looked like candy drops.

I liked it a lot.

So did Lydia.

I thought, “Oh dear the nice thing to do would be to let her wear it while we on the tour. But what would happen when it was time to give it back?  I would probably give it to her.”

I just didn't want to.

It was mine. My toy.

I wanted it.

I turned this little episode into a stupid drama. What was going on? Could it really be as simple as the fact that it was the one of the few pieces of jewelry I had with me for a two-week trip?

Or was I jealous of this child. She was absolutely stunning with sun-streaked ringlets, a perfect tan, a little rosebud mouth and incredibly intense blue eyes.

I did think “Oh my gosh she doesn't need my lousy twenty dollar necklace with those looks she will get what ever she wants. She doesn't need it.”

I made it into a whole existential crisis.

I was pulled out of it when the woman I had been talking to said, “Don't give it to her. It will just end up in the bottom of her toy box.”

So I didn’t give it to her. And she was still staring at me as we all climbed off the boat.

Sticking with my Shift

In the last year not one but three people have asked me why, at my age, I continue to drive a manual transmission car when there are so many excellent new automatic shift cars.

New cars feature signals to tell you if you are wandering out of your lane. There are beeps to give you warnings about how you are applying the brake and if you are not braking quickly enough, the car will stop for you.

I was sort of offended, especially on the age thing, but my reasons for sticking with stick sounded lame even to me. I answered that I get better mileage and that its safer to have the added acceleration it gives small cars when entering highways. I think newer cars have overcome these issues.

So I have come up with the argument that studies show adding technologically advanced safety warnings makes drivers less attentive. Drivers tend to let the car make decisions for them. (My son told me he feels that way.) I think that we need to be even more attentive not less as we age as drivers. I feel like the more I have done for me the less I do for myself.

This is strange coming from a person who adores most laborsaving devices. Dishwashers are a gift from the gods and I could but don’t want to live without a microwave, self-cleaning oven or a frost-free refrigerator. (I do live with one of those and I hate it.)
Currently I am looking into buying Roomba vacuum cleaner. What could be more fun than watching a little robot cleaning my floors?

But to get back to the car thing …

There is something even stronger than safety keeping me driving my manual car. It’s an art or a skill I have mastered and I am proud of it.

There is nostalgia involved. As a little girl, my father let me help drive his truck. I would shift the floor gears while he manned the clutch. I was thrilled.

Then there are the happy memories of the boys in high school and college who loved teaching me the finer arts of stick shift in their bargain clunkers, although I do remember one who had a red convertible with fins.

Anyway, I learned how to listen to the engine and how to let it tell me when to shift. Never to ride the clutch, I mastered the nerve-wracking skill of waiting on a hill and shifting without backing into the guy behind me. I can rent a car in Europe without paying premium prices for automatic.

And then there is my very satisfying memory of taking my car to have it washed and being paged from the waiting room because none of the men knew how to drive it on to the cleaning ramp.

So it makes me feel like a bit of a jock.

Allow me my small pleasures, please.