Then I was down on myself for trying to relax. Stupid I can be so stupid. Wow that could be a lyric for a C&W song. When I lived in a building with a pool, Lucia and I spent the summer doing two things: making fun of the pool people who I will write about one day because there’s nothing so funny/sad as people trying to pass for classy at a pool in Riverdale, the Bronx, no offense to the five good people; and we tried to write a C&W song about Zachary. We got as far as this:
Six months of heaven, a year and a half of hell.”

Worked on that damn lyric for two solid months. Of course we were constantly interrupted by people who wanted our opinion on such pressing matters as sheets. Do you put the top sheet so that the bottom on has the design showing or not? Never really did understand that but it was a two hour conversation.

Jodie had new clogs. They were hot that year, and she talked all summer about her dynamite pair. Then we met in the elevator one day and she almost killed me as I was wearing a new pair, never talked about that were obviously more pricey and cloggier than hers. I’m not sure what cloggier means but they were square toed and for some reason strangers would stop me and ask where I had bought them, and this being Riverdale, how much did they cost.

I learned my first day in the building that people would ask me my rent, and what was a girl like me living in Riverdale. Never knew how to answer that last part. The first part; well, it was a few years before the real estate frenzy, and girls like me, never talked prices about anything really. In my world which wasn’t Riverdale, talking about money was considered to be gauche

Other subjects included talking about anybody who wasn’t there. And talking about me though I was there. I was the girl from Manhattan who had moved to the building with one specific object in mind.

I was going to steal me a husband.

Truly that was news to me as I don’t believe in affairs on general principle, if I did believe in them wouldn’t have one with somebody in my building on the don’t shit where you eat principle, and while the husbands were better looking, more intellegent and funnier than the wives, I met better men in the bathrooms of gay bars.

There was another single 40 year old woman but she had never been married. I suppose in Riverdale in the 1990′s, a divorced woman was looked at as desperate and willing to go to the ends of the earth or The Bronx to get some. Now why somebody who had never been married or lived with a man was exempt from being desperate, I have no idea. Though her body shape was squat and mine wasn’t.

It was during one of my thin enough to be sexy periods, not too thin nor too fat. I am a good swimmer and have even better form. The husbands did look. I wouldn’t have noticed as I don’t wear glasses or contacts when swimming, but they, the husbands, would compliment me on my form and ablity to swim laps, it was an almost Olympic sized pool, underwater. But all they were doing was complimenting my swiming, and I would just smile and say thank you. Maybe if I talked more people would have seen that I wasn’t in the finding a husband in Riverdale business, or finding a husband period.

Hell, can I be honest? My move to Riverdale had a lot to do with my decision to become a born-again virgin, part one. If I wanted a husband….oh finding them had always been easy for me. It was actually getting married that I had problems with. Just not the marrying type. Now Lucia was a member of the four before 40 club. She often compared herself to Elizabeth Taylor. Okay….

Yes,I’m really on vacation and just beginning to get into it. So while I might not comment for awhile, I have to write a lot, and have to write a little in my blog, just have to.

Please understand and love me anyway. I promise that I won’t steal your husband, wife–there were rumors about me and the pool manager who I befriended because she talked about more interesting subjects than the correct way to make a bed. The sheet thing was just one part of an extended summer conversation. The amazing part was how animated the conversation would become.

I had never realized how important the subject of bedmaking was. You made a bed, you slept in it. You washed the sheets. I could get into how much fabric softner to use. I’m personally big on it, but the art of bedmaking itself…. Well it had never been something my friends and I discussed. Nor did my Mom and her friends.

I was to learn that summer that no other household chore was as important or talked about. Apparently you could have different methods of dusting, vacumming, washing dishes, and anything else. But how you made a bed determined just how good you were at housekeeping.

Once some of my neighbors invited themselves over. And yes, they did go into my bedroom to see how my bed was made. I’m afraid that I failed at first sight as I had a platform bed. Apparently, platform beds were kinky and on a par with waterbeds. An you couldn’t see my top sheet as I had a comforter and under that another blanket that was folded over where the top sheet should have been. It would have been very depressing if I gave a damn. And yes I had a top sheet. It just didn’t show.

Actually I might never write about the pool people again. Though getting them down into precise detail has always been one of my big writing ambitions