I meant to push copy but I accidentally hit cut, hadn’t saved the post and lost my last and I thought one of my best.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere besides the obvious–always save–but it escapes me at the moment.

I’ve been trying to make banners but I’m really horrible at it–as in can’t do. I’ve been trying to make a new template that’s cool, with more features and is more user-friendly (for both the reader and me) but I’m such a zilch at it, I almost feel defeated.

However, I’ve been in too good a mood to let anything get me down. Including a comment from anonymous “oh good, another anti-Bush site…”

While I don’t recognize Bush as president–I’ll never be convinced that election wasn’t stolen somehow–I’ve been veering away from him. After I finished my post that was lost, I realized that there wasn’t one 9/11 reference in it.

I’ve lost the anger that I was feeling for so long and I feel so light and so good I’ll take stupid sarcastic comments about my blog. I’ll even take venomous e-mails from somebody I know because I know that I’m not the person this person describes. If I thought I was I would have checked myself into a mental hospital or done away with myself a long time ago.

Anyway, Dick Ebersol’s plane crash has really saddened me maybe because I’ve always adored Susan Saint James especially in The Name of the Game, used to watch all the 12:30 reruns. I can’t imagine having one child trying to save another child’s life. Her older son tried to save his brother’s life. God, to live with that knowledge would be more than I could bear. I hope that her husband and older son fully recover.

Then I read about the new Avian Flu and how it will probably cause a pandemic if it affects humans. I began personalizing that one–not my death but kids I know and had to stop reading it.

Then I read a column by David Brooks about a “rational evangelist” who would deny me the right to an abortion, and try to convert me, but he represents the best in Evangelical thinking. If that’s the best, I can’t imagine the worst.

I’d give up newspapers but I like reading them too much.

Stumble it!

Tried to proof this but it’s stuck somewhere in HTMLland that is beyond my very limited scope.
The studio had found me three years earlier, when I took my parents to see the apartment, I had found across Central Park in the West 70’s. The Upper West Side was the perfect neighborhood for me then filled with people my age (boys, lots of young single straight boys) I could easily meet in the Laundromat, coffee shops, on the street, in my building, anywhere.

I was trying to make amends with my father, who had suffered my long drawn out adolescence not with silence or mortar, but with exasperation and sarcasm. At 25 I had finished college six months earlier, and was officially living at my parents’ home on the Island while I worked and saved money for an apartment in the city. “Officially” meant that one or two nights a week somebody would drive me home at three AM, or I would take the railroad and fall out exhausted for twelve or more hours.

Banks gave presents for beginning accounts then, and I knew that it was time to leave home when my bleary-eyed father presented me a set of Teflon pots and pans. He didn’t’t like the apartment on West 75th Street. It was in the front of the building; garbage cans lined the area near the apartment’s window, and worst of all it was in a neighborhood my father hated. He bought a Times and circled an ad for a “lg studio, East 60’s, wbf, sep kit.” It was $300 a month–$50 more than the apartment on the West Side. The last tenant had moved there the year of my birth—1950.

She was a madam who had run a profitable business out of the apartment. Soundproofing was half on and half off the walls, there were more telephone lines than I had ever seen at an office, the kitchen had last been updated sometime in the 1940’s and the linoleum was tinged with decades worth of dirt.

But it was a large kitchen, the archway that separated it from the living room was large enough to be a dining room, the ceilings were high, all three bay windows stunning, and the architectural bones were good. Even I could see its inherent possibilities. I had never heard of crown molding; my studio had it both just off the ceiling and near the floor. The later was a bitch to keep clean.

We made an appointment to see the owner, a white collar criminal lawyer, who knew my father, a CPA. My name wasn’t’t allowed to be on the lease which I found strange as I had been signing leases since I was 20. “But this,” my father said in an effort to explain, “”This is the big time.”

There were certain things we didn’t’t take into account. I was disorganized with absolutely no ability to organize space. It was a difficult apartment to keep clean for many reasons and I had no cleaning abilities. While there were three large closets they weren’t’t modern and totally overwhelmed me. The building didn’t’t have a Laundromat, nor was there one near my block.

The only supermarket was a Gristedes where I would tell the men behind the checkout counter what I wanted, and they would get the food for me. Everything was incredibly overpriced, and when I would buy things for the apartment such as new flooring the price would be jacked up after the sale when the clerk or store owner found out my address.

None of that really mattered. As I didn’t’t really live in a neighborhood, I considered all of Manhattan to be my neighborhood, and learned the city better than most people ever do.

My apartment was dark, and at night with candles glowing, it looked wonderful. As it was over 40 feet long it was the perfect party apartment, with distinct areas for food, liquor and dancing nobody ever refused an invitation to 5 East 63rd Street. I lived in the center apartment on the first floor and nobody complained when the 100 or more people at my all night parties spilled over onto the street.

I had qualms about taking money from my father; I didn’t want to be his possession. He only offered when I was fully employed, and I took his money with much hesitation. It felt as if I were being bought.

But as he had insisted that I take this apartment, I felt less guilty than I had when I had dropped out of college, and saved my money for an open-ended ticket to Europe and Israel and back to Europe.

He had beaten me to the travel agency and the clerk was all aflutter over the longish haired older good looking man with a moustache who had picked up my ticket. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last time that my father had been mistaken for my lover. It was totally humiliating.

The more I prove myself to be a worthy adult, the more my father wanted to be involved in my life. If I had allowed him to he would have bought my groceries, cleaned my apartment (well, he would have paid somebody to do those things), gone out on my dates with me, and decorated for me. Fortunately my mother made him see reason (sort of.)

Once he brought over a client/friend, a graphics designer, who had a written and produced a Broadway hit that was currently playing. I had been offered various jobs that I would have taken in a heartbeat if my father had only told me about them. The one thing that my father insisted upon was that I find my own jobs.

My father’s friend was entranced by the way I had decorated the studio. A huge muslin screen embossed with a palm tree separated the living area from the bedroom. My couch and chair and a half were upholstered with pink flamingos. I had two deco swivel chairs that were upholstered in a more sedate blush with small mauve rectangles, built in shelves held my collection of Oaxacan pottery; many books were in the bookshelves. It had a decidedly undecorated but stylish look. I was proud of it except when my father came over.

“This is wonderful. I love it!” My father’s friend had always been given to hyperbole but in this case it made me happy.
“She has good taste?” My father asked that in an astonished voice.
“Better than good. Clever, witty and interesting. Exceptional.”
“Oh, just like me,” I couldn’t help interjecting.

My father left in a trance. He had to process this new information. An internationally known expert on design had just pronounced my taste to be exceptional.

I hadn’t been using the money my father put into my bank account each month as I made enough to pay for my apartment and expenses and was trying to begin saving for something. He had noticed that and was a little sad and a lot proud. My credit card had a higher limit than his, though when he found that out he immediately applied for an increase.

When we would have dinner together once a week, he had gotten into the habit of talking about his business problems with me. I was a good sounding board with good answers. Now he officially found out that I had good taste.

I called my mother to tell her that he just might have a heart attack on the way home. I was no longer his wayward child.

Stumble it!

Diana Ross stands on the driver’s side of her limo with her mouth frozen in a huge smile, and her right arm soldered into what could be construed as a wave. Her office is down the street from my mini-loft, and I see her most nights on my way home from work. I can never decide whether this is her way of recognizing me.

Perhaps she is standing giving a mass greeting, or she suffers from some syndrome that freezes her body. I ponder this each time I see her for the thirty seconds it takes me to walk to my building. But I would have heard as I’m tuned into New York and/or music gossip.

I hate Diana Ross. Her friend, Ed Koch, the otherwise occasionally fabulous mayor has let her put “no parking” signs on either side of her building. 63rd Street, between Madison and Fifth, is a deceptively quiet street where nothing ever seems to happen. It’s a great place to live partially because people who insist on driving everywhere could always find parking, and can’t bitch about the hour wait. Secretly, they love the hunt. I’m a big proponent of banning private cars from Manhattan, but enjoy having company more.

Diana Ross is ruining my secret parking street as she almost ruined my birthday when she insisted on having that infamous concert in the park during a thunderstorm when young boys ran to Tavern on the Green to overturn tables, and frighten people. A new term will enter the lexicon that night wilding.

The boys wanted to take me to a club on the East Side that features Maria Montejo, a singer in drag, who looks almost as good in gowns as I do. Actually she looks better as she knows how to walk in stiletto’s. She has tried to teach me but I’m hopeless.

We’ve agreed to go to the club the next night so that the boys can come to my surprise birthday party. It’s going to be at my girlfriend, Lucia’s apartment, and I’ve planned almost every detail as one of my talents is planning parties. If only I had planned to get to the Upper West Side earlier, but how was I supposed to know that people wouldn’t be allowed to go from one side of the park to the other. Both Central Park South and Central Park North are cordoned off to traffic for too long.

My boyfriend has to work late, but I’’ve seen pictures of the ring he’s going to give me. It’s immense.

I can’t get to the West Side until sometime in the wee morning hours. Everybody’s blitzed; I’m shown Polaroid’s of my birthday cake so I can see what I missed; my boyfriend’s making out with some unknown girl who he will impregnate that night and marry. He won’t give her that ring.

He will call me every night for months and beg me to take him back.
“It wasn’t anything. She was there and you were not’t.”
“Should have thought about it then.”

I’m nothing if not principled. Later I will realize that he was a good boyfriend who actually had money, values (though not that night) and loved me. I hold Diana Ross personally responsible for all that happened that night. Too bad she wouldn’t give a damn if she had learned about it.

I spend a long time lamenting not accepting the boys invitation. It was the last year that they were all alive; and the last year before people begin joining “A” groups enmasse.

New York will lose some of its glimmer; stars literally will burn a little less brightly, and for the first time I won’t blame myself for everything that will go wrong. No, it’s all Diana Ross’s fault.

Stumble it!

From the Archives: I hope to be back tomorrow with something fresh! Then again maybe I need to clear my head.
Sometime in the mid 1980’s
My dad, Max, a CPA calls me one day from his client/friend’s studio penthouse at One West 47th Street. His client’s a cartoonist and graphic artist who I have known since I was a child.

Max sounds perplexed but proud:
“I’m going to be in an MTV commercial.”
“That’s too cool, daddy. What are you…?”
He interrupts before I can finish my question.
“So what’s MTV?”
“It’s a TV station that only plays music videos. It has VJ’s instead of DJ”s. Get it?”

I have forgotten for a second that this is my father I’m talking to. He likes the world to fit his perceptions. If his perceptions don’t fit, he changes the facts around until they make sense to him. I know that he’s a brilliant accountant with the ability to quickly read, say a balance sheet, see the whole picture, and explain it. He calls himself an accountant. My mother, Marion, calls him a CPA. Most of his personal clients call him “my business adviser” or “my business manager.” He’s in his 70’s and each time he thinks of retiring a new and more prestigious client drops his way.

Yet I wonder how he can be so brilliant at his work, and still perceive ordinary life so wrongly. He also believes that Nixon and Reagan are the two best presidents ever. Except for some Russian emigres he hates conservatives. Trying to understand Sam is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing. It just can’t be done. Yet….Of course he didn’t get my explanation of MTV. If my parents would get cable he could see for himself. But on principle they won’t. Don’t ask what principle. They’re a two person household with four TVs.

He sighs. “No, you’re wrong. There can’t be a station that only plays rock music. An hour a day, I can see. But no station can survive by playing videos.”

“Why don’t you ask?”
He won’t. Admitting that he doesn’t know what MTV is would mean that he’s not in tune with pop culture. If Max doesn’t like the answer he can’t tell his client he’s wrong. Max only tells his clients they’re wrong on matters relating to business and politics. I don’t want to get into a fight over this.

“What are you going to do?”
“He told me that I was just going to hold a sign that says ‘MTV’ and stand in for the real actor. But when the people from MTV saw it they wanted me.”

He sounds a little incredulous. I smile because I’m sure that his client planned this the whole time. Max doesn’t look or act shy but he is. Sometimes he’s amazed at how his life turned out. He did the whole early 20th century, poorer than a Shul mouse Jewish boy bit. Marion and I are the only two people to realize that he’s always on poverty alert. In his head he’s still a boy in East Harlem.

Max’s a handsome man, I guess. He’s my father so it’s a little difficult to see him objectively. In 1969 he grew a moustache, and it’s remained black as his hair is graying so he kept the moustache. He has deep set eyes that are remarkably like mine though I was adopted, a small mouth like mine and large Slavic cheekbones that are also like mine. Only his nose is different; larger and with a bump. I have heard all the jokes, and no he definitely didn’t sleep with my birth mother. My friends think that they’re so funny.

Daddy’s going to be in an MTV commercial and he hasn’t even invited me to the taping. I gave up relationships with men in music a few years ago for attorneys with Doctorates in math or science. Now I seem to be going through a character actor and men who produce or are cameramen on TV stage. Once again Max tops me. Not that we’re in competition or anything. He doesn’t even know that I’m dating or who I’m dating. But I’m too happy for him to let this be anything but a passing thought.
“Whens the shooting?”
“Tomorrow. They told me what suit to wear, and to bring two shirts one in pink and one in blue. Know what the best part is?”
The hunky cameramen, I think.
“I have no idea.”
“They’re paying me. $250. I would have done it for free.”
“Did you call mommy?”
“She’s not home.”

I’m not home either. I’m a project manager for a litigation support company. It’s a stressful job, and I used to be always reachable by phone for family members until I stopped answering my own line. I talk if I have the time or it’s a real emergency.

The commercial turn out to be part of a series. Max’s client’s younger son plays the teenager or the expected viewer; Mrs. Havasi, the client’s mother-in-law plays the “old lady;” and Max’s the “successful middle-aged businessman.”

I know this because Max calls one day to tell me to look at The New York Times. There’s a fawning article about the series. (Canner does op-art and other cartoons for it.)
“Mrs. Havasi is younger than me.”

I can’t resist. As a child I was taught to read The Times with a skeptical eye. Max’s a rabid newspaper reader who thinks that The Times distorts the truth. When he was “progressive,’ it was regressive; now it plays fast and furious with the facts.
“You know to never believe anything you read in the Times. Except maybe the obits.”
“Well, Pia, sometimes even they are right.”

The commercials are nominated for Clio’s. (They don’t win.) Somebody from the TV show PM Magazine interviews Max. It’s in every market but the New York metro area. Nobody we know anywhere knows how to program a VCR.
“I was horrid in it anyway.”
“Why?”
“They asked if anybody followed me around asking for an autograph. Nobody ever has so I said ‘no.’”

I feel for Max I really do. But I would have said ‘just my daughters. They run down the street with blank checks for me to sign.’ Then I would have held up pictures of me and Cara. No I wouldn’t have been that tacky but…
It’s not that I’m in need of a job or a man, but just once I would like my father to introduce me to somebody who has a great job to offer or has a great job, is single, straight and looking. He loves to give us money but he would never introduce us around, and he knows so many people. Is he ashamed of us or just shy as Marion claims?

I don’t have a VCR so I lend my copy to my mother’s younger sister, my hippie Buddhist aunt Adele. If I have one adage in life, it’s never lending anything you want back to somebody who has slept at the Dali Lama’s feet. Being Max’s daughter entitles me to be quirky, and while not anti-New Age (I’m sure that Yanni has some good qualities) I’m too New York, too cynical, too fast, and too in love with my own life to need Marianne Williamson, the Dali Lama, Gary Null, and everyone in between to tell me how to live my life.

Obviously Max knows that. People are always telling him how much they love my “fierce independence.” Many people assumed that I was going to be a daddy’s girl. I fought it, and now our relationship is one of equals. I know how much he needs me, and I’m beginning to believe that I need him also.

I meet rock stars like Iggy Pop; Max knows (and has kept me from meeting many times) Mick Jagger. True I have given up musicians but there’s a part of me that is and shall always be star struck. It’s Max’s fault, of course, he brought me up to expect the moon to fall into my hands if I want it badly enough.

Stumble it!

Explanatory note for all who don’t know New York: Duane Reade is a huge chain of everything stores that were named for two Manhattan cross streets. Duane Reade is always made fun of, but life was much more difficult before it.

I used to live on 63rd Street off Fifth Avenue; in a huge studio that had seen better days. I had been planning to move to the Upper West Side (UWS) where I fit in perfectly. My father found this apartment in The New York Times, and begged me to take it. I felt out of place until I realized most people on the side streets were more eccentric then me. Life was incredibly inconvenient then.

My first years were the heady ones of “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Subway service was erratic, at best. For weeks there would be a 7:55 A. M. Double R train, and then it would no longer be in service. When I worked in downtown Brooklyn, and had to be at work, promptly at 8:30 A.M., my commute took almost an hour.

Con Ed and the phone company never took special circumstances into consideration—such as walking around with the envelope for a month. A person paid her bill or didn’t. There were two ways to pay a bill—by mail, or at a service center. It helped to be unemployed to do the later as the hours were 9-5, and the lines were long. I wasn’t unemployed, but I was young and disorganized and many times would fear coming home to the dark without a phone.

There were no Duane Reades’, and no Korean groceries. Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I had my choice of an expensive Gristedes that stunk of roasted chicken, and the rip off store where they never got my phone orders right, but delivered what they thought I needed.
I was always standing on line. Lines were common at the pharmacy, and in those pre managed care days only certain pharmacies had lower cost prescriptions. Aspirin, Tampax and all the other necessities of life cost me more in 1985 than they I pay for them now. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to look for Liquid Plumber in a pharmacy. That belonged in WG Lemmon or Gracious Home, the two neighborhood hardware stores. I love movies, but they were a hassle. Standing, on long lines, in the ice cold or bitter heat, and praying for a good seat, was never my idea of fun.

I was always trying to modernize and improve my space. When I moved in it had a refrigerator that was one step up from an icebox. The kitchen floor hadn’t been changed since 1950, nor did it look as if it had been cleaned too often. My electricity was always on the blink, and I lost the little light I had to the shadows of the (then) new ATT and IBM Buildings

The nearest laundry was at my nearest friends building. I wasn’t above taking a suitcase to my parent’s house on Long Island. No, my mom wouldn’t do it for me. I dreamed of owning a washer and dryer.

No matter how good the apartment cleaner was, it never seemed clean enough. I would paint, and then paint again. Still dust settled everywhere. I called it Trump White in honor of the person who was causing so much of the dust.

Whenever I bought something that had to be delivered from a store, I avoided giving my address until the end of the transaction. I had learned early that the price of linoleum, bought in Astoria, would be jacked up ten percent as soon as the sales person heard the names of the cross Avenues. The first time I saw a Home Depot I cried. It was inconvenient for city people, but Home Depot spelt equality to me.

I grew to hate all parades equally. It began with the St Patrick’s’ Day Parade. I lived a block from the grandstand. My block would always be cordoned off. Every old lady, in a lime green polyester pants suit, would be waved into the street by the police. My hair was usually one of forty shades of red. By birth I’m half Irish. I never wore orange, but I always wore black. I was your average American IRA terrorist, just waiting for the opportunity to bomb whoever the Cardinal was.

I would be asked for ID. My ID would never be good enough. Even a passport. I didn’t like being treated as an interloper on my own block, and would tell the police that. They would escort me to my building, to make sure, I really lived there. Once at my building things would go from bad to worse. Most of the people in my building had never learned to use the intercom and would buzz everyone in. That’s when the police would smile and tell me that getting into my apartment was my problem.

During the worst years people would be in my building lobby—smoking anything, drinking beer, and peeing. Most of my neighbors were ineffectual characters who had learned years before that St. Patrick’s Day was an occasion to stay home and drink and drug themselves into even more of a coma than they were usually in.

When I brought up the idea of hiring a security guard for the day, they laughed. I lived on the lobby floor, they didn’t. My first floor neighbors then were a crazy psychiatrist who later killed himself, and the first kept woman I had ever knowingly met.

One year a woman rang my door bell. “Can we use your bathroom? We’re with the parade.” Did I care? I looked out the hole and saw a woman with at least ten kids in full marching regalia. When I said sorry, the woman cursed me out.

I hated leaving my building during a parade. Every Sunday for about three months a year, I would walk out to my stoop which would be filled with people who really didn’t want to move for me. Then I would try to cross Fifth Avenue with my bike. Give up on the bike, bring it into the building, and then try to cross again. I would have to wait for at least three minutes as people in the parade took precedence over neighborhood residents. It sounds stupid, but I felt violated. This was my neighborhood, my house and I had fewer rights than people who didn’t live there. One year, at exactly noon, I woke up to hear Telly Salves sing God Bless America in Greek. I would have enjoyed that had I not been incredibly hung over and in need of much more sleep.

Don’t get me started on production shoots. It was my street, and some P.A. would stop me from entering my building. Usually I really had to go to the bathroom or was waiting for an important phone call Producers learned to never cross a woman who needs her bathroom.

I knew as soon as I saw my first Duane Reade that my life would be changed forever. Unfortunately, my Duane Reade was on 58th Street between Madison and Park. Leaving my quiet street for midtown was never one of my favorite things. The crowds grew larger and more obnoxious, every year, and each street seemed closer to midtown. Every man acted as if he had a direct link to Donald Trump; every woman acted as if she owned the street when it was obvious I did.

I learned the best time to go to Duane Reade was eight AM. Saturday morning as it wasn’t open 24/7 then. I couldn’t believe the things I bought—before Duane Reade I would have to go to four stores to buy the necessities of life. And I would pay three times the amount.

Then Korean groceries opened. They were open 24/7. Madison and Lexington had been dead at night except for some restaurants. The brightly lit Korean groceries made the neighborhood feel safer. They sold fresh flowers, and other nice things. Life gradually became much easier in New York.

In many ways my ‘hood was extraordinarily convenient. I could walk almost anywhere in Manhattan within an hour. Nobody ever refused an invitation to my apartment. My woman’s group would meet there every Saturday because it was equidistant to the Village, the Upper West Side and Queens. Biannually, I had huge parties. It was the perfect party apartment. Drinks in the kitchen, food in the large archway, and dancing in the big room.

The doormen at The Pierre would ask me if I wanted to come in and make big money dating a resident. At the time I thought this was horrible. I never even asked how much money I would make, what type of resident I would date or what I would have to do. When they finally stopped asking me years later, I would spend hours at the mirror looking to see if I had suddenly gotten fat, and wrinkled.

My neighborhood was on a short downside when I moved. I was the first person to go to work in the morning and there would be people sleeping in the lobby. If I would wake them I would apologize and tell them to go back to sleep. One day I realized that they could have been crack addicts or just crazy and this could be dangerous. I would count the cheap ale bottles on my way to the Lexington Avenue Subway. I didn’t leave because I was ready to leave.

I left because the new owners had succeeded in making it truly inconvenient. My new next-door neighbors presented themselves as models, but everyone thought they were cheap prostitutes. I thought that the doorbell rang too often for three women to actually have the time to begin and complete any act. Since then I’ve learned more about prostitution through films, ($10 hookers, Monsters Ball) and have come to realize they could have been prostitutes. Whatever they were this wasn’t a healthy place for me to be living.

My hair cutter moved to 64th Street between Fifth and Madison less than a year after I left the neighborhood. I have watched my building become a showplace. I walk up the street and think—I lived here, I really lived here for sixteen years.

Stumble it!

Until recently I thought of myself as a critical mass of ADHD, OCD, disorganization and other major learning disabilities. If people could have scanned my body they would have seen a map with all the disabilities marked instead of body parts.

My disabilities weren’t diagnosed until I was in my 30’s and in retrospect I’m not sure that it was the smartest thing to go for testing. I had lived 36 years without knowing what was wrong with me, and had basically a great life. But….

I wanted to know why my balance seemed to be out of sync with the rest of the worlds. I wanted to know why I could read and understand almost anything, but couldn’t spell, and could only put my thoughts together in a coherent organized manner because I didn’t write creatively but was a technical writer where I just knew how things should be written.

I would (and did) apologize to a lamppost for bumping into it. I had lucked out in the looks department and knew it. I honestly thought that was the only reason why people wanted to befriend me. I had no idea why men wanted to marry me, let alone be my boyfriend.

I was diagnosed when ADHD and OCD were just being discovered. The testing psychologist who would watch me begin a test and then say “you really can’t do it can you?” told me that if I worked with him I would be his first adult patient.

I was very angry and walked out. I talked endlessly to my two other therapists about the differences between coping (which is what the testing psychologist said that I had been doing) and compensating (which is what he said I should strive for.)

I’ve always been an idiot savant when it comes to vocabulary. Ever since I was a small child I’ve been able to understand minute differences in verbiage. I knew that to be a successful project manager in large scale litigation projects I had to have been more than coping. My two therapists agreed. Unfortunately they had no ready answers.

I had always been angry but had never expressed it. Now I let the anger out. I began to think of myself as a brain damaged person who had never received the proper rehabilitation.

Why I couldn’t think of myself as a person who had overcome tremendous obstacles is beyond my comprehension. I cut everybody but me a break. Now I wonder why my big name shrinks hadn’t suggested that.

I kept on challenging myself to learn new skills and take on new and consecutively more difficult and depressing careers. It was as if I were punishing myself for having had been adopted by parents who loved me, having had friends, and men who loved me.

(I won’t get into the adoption equals ADD theory as I believe that to be rubbish in my case. I spent half my childhood, and young adulthood, in therapy arguing with therapists about being a “happy adoptee.”)

I have tried most anti-anxiety drugs, depression drugs and everything else. Nothing worked. Well, Prozac was great for PMS but I was a bitch the rest of the month. Zoloft made me feel like my brain was asleep and I gained an inordinate amount of weight. I forget which drug made me want to leave someplace as soon as I got there. I have a list on my computer of drugs and my reactions to them.

Computers made me seem organized. If they had been around in their present form 30 years ago I could have been anything. But they weren’t and I am glad they are here now.

There was a magazine article about ADD in the work place. I wrote a response to that and sent it to the author. She replied with a name of a coach. I have a therapist’s license; I have spent my life seeking out help. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that since most therapists I saw did more harm than good as they were looking at the wrong problems, I didn’t want any help. And all I could do was picture the testing psychologist taunting me as I sat at a child size desk and took the damned tests.

I was fast forwarding commercials one night when I saw one for Strattera. I rewound the commercial and watched it. The woman said that life looked out of perspective until….I had learned not to pin my hopes on anything but I had a doctor’s appointment that week. Before I could say anything he suggested it.

The changes were minimal at first. I did feel happier and calmer. As time went on I felt even more calm. This was new for me and could have been because I began true peri-menopause. I dared not hope.

After awhile I realized that nobody had yelled at me on the street for sometime for bumping into them. I was, despite myself, more conscious of my surroundings. I began to notice that I could take the time to do things properly. Then I saw that I had become more organized.

I’m only about fifty percent there, and while I’m hoping that this is the miracle, I’ve always longed for, I’m not betting on that yet. I do feel wonderful: Calm most of the time; happy at least half the time. I no longer feel the need to scream or be angry at times.

2004 is the year I reinvented myself–with a lot of help from Strattera, my friends, family and my doctor.

Stumble it!

Friday, November 26, began my least favorite time of the year. It’s the time that reminds me I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, and have never really understood the frenzy that accompanies the season.

While I have tried not to define myself as a Jew, it’s hard because everybody in New York is a hyphenated something and most Jews come from families that were distinctly not allowed citizenship in the country that the family originated in.

When my father asked my grandmother if she wanted to go to the former Soviet Union for a vacation, she spat. While that might have been a classless act, it was an understandable reaction. In Russia/Poland (the borders were constantly changing) she wasn’t allowed citizenship, to own land, or to go for further education.

My other grandmother was chased by a group of Cossacks and had to hide in a friendly Christian’s cellar for a week while her parents didn’t know if she was alive or dead. She was eleven.

Until recently I thought that America was a safe place for me not to practice my religion. Since I’m Jewish, my religion is also my culture and that’s where the problem begins.

I’m proud of my religion and its history. Until the end of World War Two and the establishment of Israel we were forced to survive on our brains alone. Israel, I was always told, provided the muscle.

I’m a Rabin Jew. His assassination was the saddest day in Israeli history because it began a new era of fighting. I don’t like or agree with Sharon; I wish that the lands had been given back years ago.

What does that have to do with my life in New York? A lot. Many people can’t understand why non-religious Jews, or cultural Jews, still partially define themselves as Jewish. Because it’s our history; because we were raised to respect it and all religions. Because I feel comforted by certain rituals and prayers even if I don’t understand all of it as I never went to Hebrew school and my parents wouldn’t let us learn Yiddish as they wanted my sister and I to be 100 percent American.

Because the Evangelical movement is growing rapidly in America and won’t be satisfied until all Jews convert. I forget the names of the best selling series of books in America but I’ve read enough about them to know that they are a call to arms.

Because Bush believes that his small popular vote victory was a mandate and he feels that he can do anything as president including screwing with The First Amendment–the Amendment that allows me not to practice my religion and feel comfortable with that; and to say anything that I damn well want to say.

Jews are two percent of the population of the US, yet our mere presence seems to incite people to hate. Hey, I didn’t start the mess in the Mid East. It really began when no country including this one would let survivors in after World War Two. We took the survivors, put them into displaced persons camps and treated them as if they were the criminals.

Our big punishment to the Germans–we didn’t let them have an armed force so they could put all their resources into creating goods and a vibrant economy.

But this isn’t about Israel or how much I disliked it the one time I was there.

It is about assumptions. People assumed that my dad had help going to college and that’s why he became successful. Nobody helped him. He had to drop out of day school, lose his basketball and math scholarships, work during the day and take courses at night. When he finally graduated, at the top of his class, he saw classmates who barely graduated join large accounting firms. Same for his friends who graduated law school.

Since the large prestigious firms were closed to them just because of the size of their noses and their religion, they created their own firms. That is, I believe, the American way. Though when newer groups began coming up they made room for them in their firms because that’s the honorable way. They would take on lost, unpopular causes that might run contrary to their own views because every person deserves a good defense, or in my dad’s case a good accountant.

We’re not a religion of Shylock’s–money lending was one of the few professions open to us during medieval and later times.

We don’t control the media though we are represented in larger numbers than our two percent of the population. Is there shame in striving? Nobody complains when we give large gifts, endowments, and other things to more disenfranchised groups.

No other group feels the need to apologize for having made it. No other group, except perhaps Muslims and Sikhs, feels the need to apologize for having certain views.

When I was a teenager I almost killed my father for bringing home Allan Sherman’s “Jewish American Princess” album. I still think it was stupid, but as I grow older I understand how proud he was in having raised two princesses.

Our religion and culture might not be soulful, hip or too cool for words but if anybody has denigrated it, it’s been us. Woody Allen’s the first of several hundred examples that spring to mind. We satirize both our weakness’s and our strengths; we make fun of everything.

Hundreds or thousands of years of living as oppressed people has made us wary of our luck. In our collective unconsciousness we know that it could end at any moment. Only Jew can think that too much happiness is a bad thing. Only Jews can think that guilt is a very useful and good defense. So we joke to chase the evil eye away. Kinehora.

Stumble it!

Thanksgiving turned out to be wonderful. My sister’s birthday was the day before and she, fave-bro-in-law, and fave-niece went to one of the Island’s pricier restaurants for her birthday dinner.

I looked at them, sighed, and said: “you’re my only family.”
“No” they said in family synce, “we’re ALL your family.”

Then I told them my plan to find my birth father’s family. I know his name, his ethnicity, the approximate year he was born (very approximately) as my birth mother was very vague on details, the approximate (more fixed) year he died, the number of children he had, and the approximate years they were born. Every-thing’s very approximate.

I think that I know the actual town he was born in and the town he died in. The historical society in that town lists births and deaths beginning with the seventeenth century. I love scanning lists and wish that this information was on the net. As it’s not, I’m going to have to take a long trip to New England to see the records.

All my family offered to come with me and make it into a family thing. I’m pondering the offer. Life’s a bit different than it was sixteen years ago when I met my birth mother almost by accident. For many reasons it wasn’t a successful meeting. One of the big outcomes was me feeling like a failure because I hadn’t lived the life she had envisioned for me when she gave me up.

I always realized that was stupid because it had nothing to do with me the person, but me the fantasy. But as she had kept me for three weeks in the home for unwed mothers and called the agency for two years for progress reports until they told her she wasn’t allowed to anymore, I felt somewhat responsible for not living up to her fantasy.

Totally irrational but that’s the world of closed adoption records. It makes people irrational because when you’re cut off from knowing about your genes, you’re cut off from understanding your beginnings. Everyone needs that road map to origins.

My parents had always been honest with me. They shared whatever knowledge they had with me, and my father was totally into the search. It was beyond his comprehension that the law would stand between me and my roots.

I think that every birth parent who doesn’t want an open adoption (and I can understand that) should be required to write a letter to the child to be given to her when her parents think she is ready explaining who she is, what her background was like, who the father is and his background. I think that both parents should be required to follow-up with yearly health reports for as long as they live.

The child should be allowed to write letters to her birth parents and at certain ages ask if the birth parent(s) want to meet her. While this sounds like too much work, it could prevent many problems. Because every thinking person goes through a “who am I” stage, but none go through it like people who have no idea about their genetic roots.

My adoptive parents were my real parents and I was happy to adopt their roots. But I went through my teenage years wondering about what generation of my parents’ grandparents stopped being mine. Was it my great-great grandparents since my parents had never known them?

Minor questions that occupied major amounts of time.

I always knew that meeting my birth mother wouldn’t make me feel complete. I didn’t know that it would make me feel empty; devoid of who I had spent my adult life becoming.

People in the adoption movement then said that the meeting was enough to make you feel complete; now they say that it’s just the beginning and that you should work at getting to know one another. Trust me, I thought of that then.

She would never have gone into counseling with me. She wouldn’t even meet in neutral territory. We had to meet at her house where I wasn’t allowed to walk around in case somebody saw me. (We look nothing alike.) Once I realized what the weekend was going to be like I should have left.

But I had gone knowing that my instincts told me we should have met in a motel in some town where neither of us were known. The playing field would have been more level.

She accused me of playing with her head when I called and had her nephew to back her up when I told her that I was sorry for having paused for too long in between my name and my birth date. I know, I know–that’s totally irrational. I thought so too but what was I supposed to say? I paused too long. I’m sorry. Usually I speak way too fast. I suppose that I was trying to compensate for that.

After the long horrible weekend was over, we corresponded for awhile. Her letters were filled with admonitions and lists of cities for me to move to that had nice Jewish men. Dating was not one of my problems.

A year or so prior to the meeting I had been diagnosed with an alphabet soup mishmash of problems and learning disabilities. While I had compensated for my problems, I was getting older (late 30’s) and scared that I wouldn’t be able to compensate as well when I hit 40. I had an amazing life, but it was one that I assumed was held up by mirrors and smoke.

I spent my early 40’s working at the most difficult job I could find. Then I went to grad school–all to prove to myself that I had a working mind. My dad died suddenly; my mom became frail; my sister and I became care givers. The difference was that my sister had met fave-bro-in-law the summer before my dad died and had a daughter. My sister had new life around her. I was a gerontologist who was constantly surrounded by old age and death. It was very depressing.

Now that I no longer work in the field I feel a thousand pounds lighter.

I didn’t feel entitled when I met my birth mother so I played the game her way. I should have felt entitled. I was raised to feel great about myself. But the synapses in my brain never allowed me to feel good for too long.

About eight months ago I went on Strattera. It began working slowly. Little by little I began noticing changes in my attitude and behavior. For the first time in my life I feel at peace; I also feel entitled. Entitled to a good life; entitled to have fun; entitled to joy; entitled to laugh when people say that ADD is a byproduct of being adopted. I know that for many reasons that I will be writing about, but I knew it mainly because Strattera wouldn’t have had such a dramatic impact on my behavior and thought patterns if I hadn’t needed it.

One day in the not too distant future all of my family is going to go to some small town in the inner depths of New England. If I can get my naturally bubbly sister to promise not to tell anybody why we’re at this historical society as my birth uncle is still involved with it. His (mine?} was the first Jewish family in town.

I’m going to find the names of my three half siblings. They might be grandparents by now as they were born soon after I was. They might be dead; they might be bums. I don’t know what type of expectations I’m putting on them.

I know now that I expected my birth mother to love me unconditionally. That was wrong as only my real parents could or would love me unconditionally, and they loved me so much it hurt.

On Thanksgiving my sister (born to them) and I forgot to listen to the family song “Alice’s Restaurant,” but we talked about it, and how our dad recorded it and would make people listen to all 22 minutes. We talked about the parking ticket he got from Officer Opie–on purpose of course.

We talked about the Thanksgiving dinners our mom would put together from scratch (using many convenience foods) for 35-40 people. Only my sister shares my whole past; she was jealous when I went off to meet my birth mother, but understands now that even if I decide to meet my half-siblings, she will be my only true sister.

My niece told me that she was mad that she never got to meet my dad. So was I and I told her so. But I told her that she was named for him and it’s a great name and I feel comforted by her having his name. She smiled for she loves her name, and is old enough at ten to understand what I was really saying. My parents live on through her, the stories we tell her and she devours.

Though our Thanksgivings are different now they are still the best of all holiday’s, the time we put aside our differences and celebrate our intertwined lives in the USA, still with all its problems, the best of all countries.

Stumble it!

When did Red become the symbol of Conservatives rather than Communism? It seems wrong somehow, however….

Tomorrow we’re going to be equally divided between Blue and Red people. (That reads like some bad sci-fi.) The Red are going to be smugly ignoring their less-than-a-mandate-victory, for about a half an hour. Then they’ll talk about it.

I’ll let them gloat. It’s probably the last time they will be able to in the next four years. They’re going to end up just as scared and sad as the rest of us. But us Blue’s will be able to think: we didn’t vote for him; we worked against him.

Before we go to the Red’s house, I’ll be at the Blue’s. At noon, we’ll listen to “Alice’s Restaurant,” and I’ll tell my niece about her grandfather who she never met and was named after. I’ll tell her about how he recorded the song and made people sit through all 20 minutes of it, and how when my parents and their friends were in Stockbridge, my dad sought out Officer Opie the only way he knew how to, by getting a parking ticket on purpose.

My sister would have told her about the Thanksgivings held in that house when we were growing up. (My sister bought my parents house.) There would be 30 to 40 people all talking all over each over; each person with his/her own opinion. It didn’t matter what subject we were supposed to be talking about. Put 35 of us in a room, and you heard 49 different opinions, and different stories. It was comforting; it was the sound of holidays at home.

Now we’ll be at the Reds where everyone has to talk in turn, and while I’ll be longing for the Thanksgivings of yesterday, I’ll look at my niece and melt. She’s what we have in common; for her we’ll become colorblind and put aside our differences or maybe even shout them out so that she can have her own memories. Different than ours; but hers to hold onto. One thing that she’ll know for sure is how much she’s loved.

Maybe people don’t have to talk on top of each other to have a Thanksgiving conversation. I wouldn’t know as I’ve never tried it. Maybe Thanksgiving could be a good holiday with just ten people at the table. Maybe.

Stumble it!

I had to go to the dentist. My dentist’s office is on Fifth Avenue, two blocks from where I used to live there. Going there always leaves me feeling strangely nostalgic. It was humid and I was tired; I decided to take a cab home to the Upper West Side.

Historically shift change for cab drivers has always been between 4:00 and 5:30, just when they’re most needed. This was supposed to have changed when they received a recent much needed, but hurtful for the customer, raise.

I was going to give up and walk which I should have been doing anyway, when I saw a woman getting out of a cab. I ran. The cab driver was a handsome Asian-looking man. Fifth Avenue, further down, was a mess of news trucks and people.

“Oh, the snowflake,” I said, “they’re finally changing the snowflake, and putting it up tonight.”

The cab driver didn’t understand what I meant. He thought that I was a tourist who wanted to see Fifth Avenue. I explained that the snowflake was hung over Fifth for the winter.

The cab driver asked me to explain what a snow flake is. I’m still trying. How do you explain the brilliance of one fleck of snow?

The cab driver turned out to be from Nepal and we spent the rest of the ride chit chatting. Just normal conversation; nothing sparkling; nothing out of the ordinary.

When we arrived at my building he refused my fare.
“You can’t. Nobody ever refuses my money.”
“You have soft voice. You very nice. You good to talk to.”

Then he rode away.

Sometimes life is a wonderful thing.

Stumble it!