I woke up about six weeks ago and realized it was my birthday. Not only did I get the year wrong, I got the decade wrong–sorta. I’m exploring my age category now because I don’t see much in blogs about middle age besides jokes and menopause–one subject that won’t be explored.
I wrote this post prior to getting the words. Hotel was already in the post. The other two were more difficult to put in than I would have thought without changing the story too much.
I wrote it late at night and made a truly stupid mistake no life long New Yorker should make in my only reference to the city. Fixed it.
Dinah stood at the door. She didn’t want to walk into the restaurant. People were laughing. People were sitting in large groups or worse that oddest number of all to the solitary traveler, two. It would be different if she were on a business trip or in Europe. People accepted the solitary woman business traveler or solitary woman abroad. She didn’t know why, but she felt the difference.
Dinah took a breath, looked in the window of the restaurant to casually inspect herself, walked in and smiled at the hostess:
Dinah Brenner.
The hostess shot her just a glimmer of the weirdest look:
Just one? This is a classy restaurant? Where’s the hon, after just one?
Yes, she smiled, one like the reservation says, bitch.
Dinah had a don’t mess with me look that she had perfected in her 20’s when she desperately needed it. The aura that surrounded it now was tinged with friendliness. People thought her complicated, though really she was simple. She had learned what was needed to live a successful solitary life. She did things with people, and did most of the same things alone.
She didn’t want to go to some obscure restaurant or a diner where solitary people came to be among other solitary people and not find pleasure in one another or life.
When she wanted to see a movie, play, any type of concert, and couldn’t find anybody to go with, or didn’t want to ask anybody she just went. If she wanted to go somewhere on vacation and nobody was available or wanted to go to the same cruddy resort for the tenth year in a row she went off alone.
Dinah had always known people. When she was younger she had known many people in entertainment. She had more boyfriends who knew people who counted than were good for her. She got used to being coddled. Nobody would reject an invitation to see Baryshnikov from the house seats, go to the VIP lounge at a disco or club. She didn’t often go out alone then but sometimes she would want to dance, and walk to a country club about ten blocks south and five Avenues west from her old apartment. One dance alone and she would be surrounded.
Even then she would vacation alone once a year because she needed to breath, and be away from everybody she knew. Maybe that’s a bad trait. Maybe being satisfied with ones own company is a supposed ideal that nobody really believed in. Maybe she had become too independent.
Truly she remembered what older unmarried women were thought of when she was a small child. They were laughed at, scorned, assumed to be a lesbian, pitied, no matter how successful. And who remembered the old maiden second cousin ten years after she died? Dinah didn’t want to be forgotten.
She feared becoming obscure if she didn’t stay involved in life outside her job or her apartment. She feared suddenly looking and acting old. Dinah wasn’t sure when she would become old or how she would know, but she believed that if she didn’t keep challenging herself to learn new skills and do new things, she would become old quickly.
She wasn’t a group person. Dinah didn’t understand people who went on tours with other single people just for the company. Yet the truly strange thing was that she had been doing things alone for so long, and almost never felt completely comfortable. But she had been married twice and had never felt completely comfortable married.
Sometimes just sometimes, she felt jealous of younger women. They had been brought up to expect so much, and when life didn’t always go their way, many complained bitterly, sardonically, sweetly or stupidly, and in print. They didn’t seem to understand there is a learning curve. Or they had never learned or had forgotten history.
Dinah wanted the accolades younger women seemed to get every time they did something solitary. But really she was too old to be breathless about it. She couldn’t see herself announcing to a group,”last night I did this by myself.”
Her generation claimed to have changed all the rules. But she remembered the stampede to get married the year the men shortage was announced. Suddenly biological clocks were clicking in tandem. The media had encouraged that. She refused to give in just because it was expected.
The night the levees broke she had seen Light in the Piazza by herself. It was one of her favorite childhood books and nobody she knew wanted to see it.
As she was silently crying for the levees, the twelve more than slightly tipsy Georgia peaches behind her whispered rather loudly. She couldn’t really hear them but was convinced that they were talking about her. She knew how dumb that was, but….
This night, almost two years later, she still felt that people were talking about her as she walked in the restaurant. Fortunately no maitre de had ever tried to put her in a table near the kitchen, unless the kitchen was an integral part of the restaurant. Dinah didn’t think she had the class her mother had, but she must have had something as when she changed tables and she did that on principle at times, she was always treated with respect. She hated being so skilled at doing solitary things yet really still feeling a bit or more of fear.
There was a club she used to go to often. Most times she took a friend or group of friends, and everything was wonderful. When she went alone, she would find herself walking past the club. The bouncer would see her from the door. The owner would send somebody out to greet her, and she and the owner would sit for hours talking. She had always felt dumb about her heightened state of anxiety at the club when she knew the owner was in love with her. Of course that might have been part of the reason.
Dinah really wasn’t the calm secure person so many people took her for. But she was a lot better than in club days. Life wasn’t as serious as she had once thought. The world wasn’t going to cave in if she made a little mistake.
After dinner she went to a cabaret alone. It took her ten minutes after she arrived to walk in. Dinah had an almost full blown anxiety attack, she couldn’t catch her breath. She was afraid she was going to begin hyperventilating, the street would begin to spin and she would faint. None of this happened, of course. She knew how stupid her anxiety attack was. At worst the night would be mediocre.
Cabarets meant people in love, people in lust, people out to spend money. She wasn’t planning on buying a bottle of anything or more than two $20 drinks. The $120 cover charge was steep enough. But Dinah wasn’t in the mood to go to a solitary hotel room or take a solitary river walk or tour or anything solitary. She wanted to be among people, if not quite with them. The singer was rather well-known, and the piano player’s name was familiar. She was looking forward to hearing songs of love lost and found.
Dinah was given a table near the stage. It was a good table, and she suddenly didn’t mind being alone. When the piano player walked to the piano she felt a pang. It was him.
Would he recognize her? Did she want him to? The last time she saw him was 89. She couldn’t remember exactly why she walked out of one of the sweetest relationships in her life. Ambition had played a role. She liked men who were go getter’s. Charm, he had in moderation, not in spades as she once desired. He had an OK sense of humor. Better than OK. It just wasn’t the New York irony, a language she spoke as she had spoke no other.
Did any of that matter now? She had been such a bitch. Dinah wasn’t sure that she wanted a relationship, but he had been so low maintenance. Low maintenance men had been an oxymoron to her then. They seemed so inviting now. Was he ever going to look at her? Should she leave? Fall through the floor. If she requested a table further away, he would see her and that way it would be awful. He saw her.
He stared at her for about 30 seconds before he smiled, a small but very real smile. Suddenly a solitary life didn’t seem so bad after all.
My fiction is usually about women in their 20’s and 30’s because they’re fun to write about, and it comes easily to me. My memoir is about my late teens–very early 20’s and much as I loved it, I would only go back if I knew the same people to start, well in college, not my high school boyfriend, and had the knowledge I have now. Not necessarily of the situations and specific people but of people.
When I hit 40, I seemed to get the go straight to old age card as my life became immersed in it for a decade. I happen to love middle age. It feels much freer in many ways. But it’s hard when you have spent your life getting acolodes for just being. I don’t feel invisible; don’t have that kind of personality. I’m not the flower on the wall type. There are many times now and more times earlier I would have liked to because I was insecure. But I got used to being a centerpiece. I’m not anymore. People don’t really discuss this stage of life in blogs. Tell funny stories.
My fiction, last week tomorrow and in the following weeks will be exploring that stage. More people were born in 1957-58 than any other years. There are so many of us. But we tell funny stories. Or talk about menopause. Frankly that later one is a plus in my life. Just can’t say “lose weight” and it will magically come off. I think middle age is something that needs to be discussed in blogs. Old age, everybody is pro that, and has charming stories. but middle age brings perspective. It brings so much, and people just don’t talk about it
I have never cried as I cried over Katrina. Oh I shed many a tear over 9/11 and my parents. But Katrina, it wasn’t mine. It didn’t hit me where I lived. By the time Katrina happened I had lost all faith in our government. It wasn’t hard for me to believe that people had a moral responsibility both to help and to cast blame.
I had been blogging long enough to have faith in the people of this country.
For some reason Fats Domino being missing and then found hit me the most. Maybe because I love music so much. Maybe Katrina hit me so hard because it is the true magical musical city, and all my associations are of good food, good music and good friends.
I was prepared to cry when I clicked this video. Maybe it was seeing a man, not Fats, somebody more associated with David Letterman, with dark not gray hair. Maybe it was seeing Fats in the 60’s. Maybe crying time is over, and it’s time for all of us to help with the rebuilding.
The river was about fifteen degrees cooler than up on the streets. We stood at the 70th Street pier breathing in the river and estuary breezes when a hot wind smelling of asphalt and concrete came in from the East, the smell of the city streets hit the Hudson with a wham. Continue Reading »
Grace Paley was an amazing writer. With her death, my parents generation of women writers, arguably comes to a close
In the 80’s writing workshops were different. They focused more on good writing and less on marketability. I actually enjoyed them. There wasn’t the competitive aura there is now. I had a much published workshop teacher who was always pushing me to submit to the many prestigious lit magazines that seem to have disappeared. Continue Reading »
The best and only true Boho family recounts their adventures coming home to San Francisco. MizB is, well some day I’m going to publish one of our rants about the state of the world in general. We rant perfectly together and not even about blogging
The sidebar posts can always be found in the category “250 word rant.”
My BIO posts seem to have disappeared. I’m hoping that it’s a snafu, as when I click “contact BIO” i get the same message. I don’t have copies or screen shots–one hard drive ago. They were an important part of my blogging experience and I’m proud of those posts. They took a long time to research and write. This isn’t one of my better weeks. That was my hopeful side.
I am in a foul mood. I need sunshine and warm weather in August. There is a new fiction post beneath this. It’s long so I didn’t put it in 3WW. It’s good.
Esme stood in the corridor. She didn’t know what to say. The world belongs to the young and the beautiful and she had a longer than average run. Logically she knew that. Logically she knew that she wasn’t ugly, wasn’t somebody that people would turn away from in the street. Logically she knew that people liked and respected her.
Life isn’t logical. Esme knew that also. She couldn’t look in the mirror anymore. She didn’t want to be photographed. When had she gone from ingenue to serious young middle age heroine to character actress? She didn’t want to have character. She didn’t want to be a character. She wanted to be the person she had been for so long.
What was that advice people were always giving her when she was young? Don’t linger too long. Get out when you still have your dignity. Esme had usually ignored advice, and won anyway. Usually, just not when it really mattered. Then she listened and lost
She could tell from the subtle way that people were turning away from her she wasn’t truly welcome anymore. Of course people wanted her to be around. Her name guaranteed press coverage. But they didn’t want her to actually stay or be a part of the party.
The party was in a huge room off the corridor. She stood to a side watching people walk into the room. They were laughing. Forcing themselves to pretend to have a good time whether or not they really were. The host was important. Nobody had ever really liked him. His tongue was too biting. That in itself forced people to bend to his will
Esme never could stand him. Then why had she married him three long decades ago? She had been young and in love with somebody unsuitable. The era of the studio telling you who to marry was over but suitability still played a role. The marriage hadn’t lasted long. Jeremiah had come to terms with his sexuality. Esme had always been good at getting men to admit that they were Gay. It wasn’t a trait she was particularly fond of.
He had found true love with a younger version of himself. Esme flitted from man to man. The one she had always wanted was now happily married. So he was a grip, not a star. Should she have cared?
She was in love once more. After five marriages she wasn’t about to get involved with anybody even if he was suitable. Even if nobody cared had he not beenif he wasn’t suitable? a proper mate? David was everything she had wanted for too long. Funny. Bright. Just a few years younger. Handsome. A columnist who made her think. For the first time she didn’t dare dream. She missed the girl who dreamed so much.
She had to quit feeling sorry for herself. She had to create a new life. One that involved a nunnery. She had to get out of here. Too late. Jeremiah came to the corridor. She braced herself for some cutting remark, but he only said:
Why do you linger so long, Esme? Will you please come to the party.
Jeremiah took her by the shoulder. Why was the room suddenly dark? She had watched people walk in. She looked at Jeremiah in bewilderment as the lights went on and hundreds of people, most everybody she knew screamed: Surprise. Happy Birthday.
All she could think as she saw David on the side smiling at her that this was the only subtle gesture Jeremiah had ever made.
I didn’t ask The Daily News photographer to take such a perfect picture of me. Really.
Bone hasn’t gotten the words yet. Was hoping that he would be early as I have to work on my book tomorrow and have a life at night. Can’t even think of a title or know if the story will work if I don’t edit to three words I don’t know yet. Well, I’m sure they’re in my vocabulary, but–let me stop–I get silly at night++
Anissa needed a theme. The search for themes to life in song lyrics and magnets was futile. While many spoke to her and some gave her signs, none said exactly what she needed. Not even the ones written specifically for her. Or about her. Especially those.
Ophelia, the daughter she had named because the song was playing at the moment of conception–a woman knows–and at the moment her water broke, was looking for mental institutions or nursing homes to put her in.
She feared for Ophelia. A woman could get by on her looks for 40-50 years, 60 if she was extraordinary, then she needed a sense of humor. Had she been so busy looking for a unifying theme to her life that she neglected her most important parental duty? Nurturing Ophelia’s sense of humor? It did take an infanthood, toddler years, pre-K through forever.
School, friends, a sense of compassion, all of that was second nature to Ophelia. She was only doing the pretend nursing home things because her friends all did. They had been looking for institutions for their parents since they could first read. A few had learned to read by looking at Internet lists of institutions and nursing homes.
But Ophelia had never really gotten the joke. She was literal. She thought people really wanted to put their parents away and had been mortified by that as a child. Now that her friends did it as second nature and a true joke, Ophelia thought of it as a job. Anissa’s search for a theme was an obsession of Ophelia’s.
Mother, lives don’t have themes. There are roles you play at different stages in life and in different areas.
Ophelia, honey*, I’m the one with the graduate education in sociology. My teaching, my books have given you the means to live in luxury with all your designer clothes and bags. If I want to look for themes….
Daddy is super rich. Your looking for signs gave me the name Ophelia.
Would you have preferred Chastity?
How do you think Savannah feels because you’re convinced she was conceived in Savannah? Savannah might like it because she’s so hippie-dippy like you, but mine hasn’t been an easy life. Yes, because of my mother. The person who is acting like a total idiot and thinks she’s funny.
Ophelia, honey, a good mother embarrasses her children. Savannah is constantly embarrassed by me. If my daughters would only talk to each other.
Mother will you quit saying honey like it’s part of my name….
For the tenth zillionth time it’s your true middle name. Your father only consented to Ophelia if Suki was your middle name.
Yes, I know. That’s how I became Ophelia Suki Sussman. Will you quit throwing me off track and let me be angry at you.
Ophelia, you don’t do anger properly. How can I not let you do something you can’t do?
How can I not do anger properly? You’re always saying that I’m pouting.
Pouting isn’t anger. Anger is ranting. Anger is reaching for your dark side and showing it…. Continue Reading »
I’m not a parent but a post I wrote on being adopted and being a teenage rebel won a hottest of the hot award. Would like to thank gnmparents for that honor.
Day Two. She who shall remain nameless sent it to all our friends, former friends, and their children. I stopped answering the phones for awhile because all I would hear was “He,he,he,ho-ha,” etc. Even the politically correct children couldn’t stop laughing. My own sister loved it. I just updated my will and funeral or memorial instructions so as to make sure that’s not the photo used–well it can be but not as the primary one.
I don’t think that I have ever said here that I did act in college underground films, because I have a face of a thousand expressions.
When the photo was taken, two haircuts ago, I was a year younger–it was in the beginning of July–my sister wants that known.
The last time my picture was in something official I was in some video–in my 30’s playing the older ingenue. Now it’s character time. I can live with that–really.
I just had to listen to my best friend laugh for five straight minutes. She’s sending it to everyone we ever met. She who shall remain nameless designed the wall unit. There are even pictures by me as a kid in the background, and my favorite book in Kindergarten: Westwood Ho The Wagon My Dad could recite the book from memory until his last day on earth. Not that he did. It was the first movie outside of Charlie Chaplin Films I saw in a theatre. Fess Parker was the star but I was much more interested in Karen and Cubby from The Mickey Mouse Club.
My hair looks weird–which very coincendentally I had cut the day, and dyed the day before–those are very expensive highlights that look….
This is me in 1988, and me this past winter
According to The Daily NewsI’m a cord cutter. According to me I’m an image blower. However I do have my picture in the Big T–Technorati and Blogalog, the thing that keeps putting me in communities. It is another version of the fruit cake gift. Always get jolted when I go to a blog and see my picture. No, it doesn’t belong here. Please, take it out…..
Sometimes I think if I sit here long enough a publishing company will find me. I know. I know. That’s like sitting and waiting for Prince Charming to walk through the door. I have done that and found many toads
Oh God, I look so stupid. I can’t stop looking at myself and laughing.
The photographer was truly sweet. Two great journalistic minds trying to think of something to do to show a cord cutting household.
If you like Courting link to it and let me know. I will never ask for your money for this blog. Might ask for your vote. Will ask for you to buy a certain book later. Buy Diesel’s book now. He’s funny. This blog is a labor of love and sometimes just labor. .
Lucia calls me the original “um” girl. This article explains it.
Bliss is going to meet friends in Riverside Park and sitting on new half chaise lounges at an outdoor cafe. As the afternoon turned into evening, and the sun was setting, Guy Davis began to play. With each song he became more assured and better until we were totally under his blues sway.
This isn’t were I say I used to casually run into his parents Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis in Sag Harbor back, oh ten or fifteen years ago, when Azurest in Sag Harbor was a most Black area. Though I’m White, people let me stay anyway. The Hamptons were much more fun then. Statusy and a scene but nothing like it is now. Now even Montauk is becoming part of the real Hamptons. It does break my heart. But in less time than it takes to get there I can be in North Myrtle Beach and really shouldn’t say that
I went back to take pictures but it was a perfect day so I walked the new Riverside South Park until I ran into a convention filled with people who casually stroll. No New Yorker would ever casually stroll. I became impatient and walked home.
I have long known the statistic that New Yorkers, despite our harder lives, live longer than the average American. I didn’t know it was because we walk faster until I read this article.
This part was written last Monday and put in draft. This Sunday the weather is yucky and I have a migraine. Fortunately the first half of the weekend was picture perfect except for the fire coming from downtown.
I deleted the second half of this post on the grounds that I have had a migraine since yesterday. Made worse by the incessant drilling at the penthouse next door. The school across the street has construction on Sundays, other buildings on Saturdays and we have it Monday through Friday.
I understand that for a city to prosper it must have construction, but it must have sane residents. What that article didn’t say is a main reason we walk so fast is to run from cranes, drills and other things.
It’s a damp and dreary day. I really don’t want to be forced to go to Starbucks where tourists hang out because it’s just like home, or the cupcake cafe a block further where the wifi is free but you have to buy a cupcake and I really really don’t want to face temptation in the face
No I couldn’t see the fire from here. I was sort of downtown Saturday night where it could be seen
We really don’t need more memorials to firemen
I was missing my mommy when I wrote that one. She was one beautiful lady, in every sense. I’m not taking the post down as it is well written with good sentiments, she says modestly.
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I tracked part of my parent’s family. Both my grandfather’s came on the same boat. Couldn’t find my paternal grandfather. Knowing that side of my family, he probably used another name, just because. But I will never be able to find half my birth family, and there are questions I would like answered. As long as all adoptees are considered children in the eyes of the law adoption will always be a mystifying experience–if your adoptive parents weren’t told the truth either. My parents told me everything they knew, and didn’t try to make it into a “your birth parents died in a car crash the week after you were born” thing. I adore and love them for so many reasons. They were so unselfish in their quest to help me find my birth family. They were honest with me. I was honest with them–except the rebel years which my father considered necessary for emotional growth. Continue Reading »
There is a new one beneath this post. The post on the sidebar is about 9/11 being an event that should never be trivialized. And stop politicizing it.
Dear Mommy,
It’s become easier. It truly has. I can think of you and smile or laugh, not cry. I try not to remember the 3:30 AM phone call telling me that you fell in the bathroom and didn’t make it. In two months it will be six years.
Mommy you always had the best timing. Sometimes I can almost laugh about you, the most careful person I have ever known, dying a month after….You died the month New York ran out of empathy. There was only so much to go around and that had to be reserved for the families. I understand that, always did, but just wanted to feel that I had a right to be in mourning also. Because I love you so much, and could always count on you to speak truth yet be there for me. That was a combination I will always be grateful for and strive to be like myself. But nobody can be you.
You were the first person I knew to voice the impossible. “Is it retribution, do you think, and Pia, you’re the only person I can say that too.” I was so shocked; so damn patriotic I thought you had become demented over night. I’m glad that I didn’t treat you as if you were demented but I so wish I had been able to say “maybe.” At least that. So many people now believe….
I know it was your shock over everything that made you careless. I know had 9/11 not happened you could have had some good years left.
In some ways I’m glad that you and daddy aren’t here anymore. Our city, the city we all were born in, has become a wealth machine. The small stores, the distinctive neighborhoods that made Manhattan so wonderful are almost all gone now.
They say that Brooke Astor, who died the other day totally demented, was the last lady. I didn’t know her. I knew you, and you were the last true lady I knew, except for your best friend who is still going strong at 91. She drives, dances,works in her field, interior design, fully participates in life and forgive me, mommy, when I see her it’s wonderful, but it’s so hard to make myself. Reminds me too much…. Continue Reading »
I'm Pia Savage. Just a writer with a blog title few people truly get. I suppose my destiny has taken me from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Myrtle Beach as I barely heard of it eleven months ago. My email is Pia(dot)talks@gmail(dot)com.
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