Damn Hippies

I was a surly 14 year old. I would have rather stayed home, but she insisted I go with her. I don’t even remember where we were going. I think it was to meet Dad at work for lunch and to do something scintillating like grocery shop, or worse, shop for clothes for Dad.

It was summer, and I would rather have stayed home. I would have liked to sit out on the deck in the sun, listening to Rush, and trying to get tan. I’d just bought a copy on cassette of “Hold Your Fire” which I was *thisclose* to wearing out. But no, that was not to be the plan.

I scowled as I sat in the passenger seat. I slipped off my sandals and put my feet up on the dash in just the way that annoyed her. She raised her eyebrows, and I think she was counting to 10. I defiantly stared back.

Mom’s second language was English. She often said things incorrectly. Like I said yesterday, she thought that “junk” had a plural. We drank milk chocolate sometimes, instead of chocolate milk. She measured things with a measure tape. I think at one point she’d even used towel paper to wipe up a spill on the counter.

But her arch nemesis was the hippies. Mom didn’t really know who the hippies were, though. To her, hippies and hoodlums were synonymous despite my efforts to explain who hippies were. She pointed out the window at the trash can that was left at the curb. The garbage trucks came through that morning.

“Hey, bring that garbage can back to the house before some hippie steals it,” she ordered. I burst out laughing. (Years later I relayed the story to Todd and he said “Yeah, because hippies are always looking for things to put their recyclables in.”)

She asked me what I was laughing at, but I was too far gone to explain. I got out of the car and dragged the bin back to the house, and then got back into the car.

A few years later Mom came home with a blue bin that said “Western Massachusetts recycles.” We didn’t live in Western Massachusetts. But she beamed as she set it in the garage, “Look at this great bin I found on the side of the road.”

I flashed her the peace sign and went back into the house.

Rushing Out the Door

What a crazy couple of weeks it’s been. Welcome to busy season! For the last 2 autumns I have been consumed by work. This year I am trying like hell not to work at all hours like I have the last two busy seasons. It’s hard not to remain glued to my seat. I force myself to log out and get the hell out of dodge at 5. I force myself out, regardless of the emails falling on me like an avalanche from clients wishing to book their flu clinics, change their flu clinics, talk about their flu clinics or have their hands held for just a few minutes.

My eyes ache from rolling them as I speak to clients on the phone and endure their silly questions. My shoulders ache from clenching them tightly as I watch the unopened email count tick higher as precious minutes are wasted on the phone. The shoulders clench again as I watch the “New Voice Mail” number on the display on my phone tick higher as I plow through my inbox.  I know that it will end.  I know that I've only got 2 hands with which to do all this work.  But it's hard to keep myself in check.

But I am not going to complain. I was speaking to a client just today who I’ve become friendly with. Normally when we start a conversation I ask her how she’s doing and she launches into her complaint du jour. It bums me out when ever I talk to her, but I try to be upbeat. “It could be worse,” I once said to her, “You could be on fire.” She said that being on fire would put her out of her misery. I guess some people can’t be cheered up, no matter how much you try.

Today she said to me “I love talking to you, you’re so upbeat. I just don’t have it in me.” I asked her why not, and she said she just didn’t. I said “I dare you to try it for one day. Just be positive and don’t let work drag you down for one day. You’ll see how much better your day will go.” She was not convinced. I guess some people cannot be saved, no matter how much you try.

But that’s OK. I don’t need to be saving whiny clients. Know why? Because I am in full-on-post-awesome-concert-bliss mode. Last night we schlepped up to Boston to see Rush in concert.

I cannot describe how wonderfully awesome the show was. They’re calling this tour the Time Machine Tour, and it truly was like going into a time machine. They played a lot of the old favorites… Spirit of Radio, Time Stand Still, Presto… Tom Sawyer, Limelight, YYZ, Free Will… Closer. To. The. Heart. Need I say more? And of course, the gratuitous Neil Peart drum solo. As you guys might now, I’ve been nursing a mild obsession with Neil Peart since I read his books last spring. I clutched my closed fist to my mouth and watched his show in silent reverence. Only Neil Peart could make a drum solo sound melodic. It wasn’t as melodic as “The Rhythm Method” solo from ‘A Show of Hands,’ but still… damn, Neil!

Now I will take off in a time machine of my own. The last time I saw Rush in concert was in November 1991 in Hartford, Connecticut. It was my senior year of high school and I went with my boyfriend whom I’ll call Pedro (only because if he’d ever read this he’d look at me and say ‘Pedro? Really? Come on, now!’) Pedro was a few years older than me, and I tried like hell not to look and act high school-ish around him. But really, we had nothing in common. We spent way too much time in his basement watching really bad action movies with his National Guard buddies, with whom I also had nothing in common. (“Escape from New York” is not a good movie. At all. These yahoos were totally into it.)

It was an awkward relationship in which he never really said anything about how he felt about me. He completely ignored my 18th birthday, and every makeout session was an exercise in agony where it would take the entire night to get up to the point where he’d kiss me, and it was just so uncosmic and uncomfortable when he finally did. And did I mention that he was shorter than me? It was so hard to feel like I could be myself around him. After all, I am 5’8”, broad shouldered, and felt like I towered over him. I am boisterous. He’s quiet. Yet, I chased him. And looking back I really wish I knew why.

So, Pedro and I went to the show. We sat off to the side. Pedro wasn’t much for expressing anything at all, like I mentioned. So we just sat there and watched the show. It was a really great show, I remember that. But I felt stupid about getting up and dancing. So I didn’t. I felt stupid about cheering with abandon, like I normally would. So I didn’t. Just sat there with him watching.

I drove him home after the show. We’d been hanging out together for months at that point and never managed to kiss. But that night I held out hope. I got out of the car, it was cold. We stood in his driveway under the glow of the security light over the doors, and didn’t talk. There was no “Man, that was an awesome show.” Silence. I kicked at a pebble on the driveway and shivered under the leather jacket I’d borrowed from my sister. I looked up at him. He looked back at me. There was no leaning in toward each other, no music welling up in the background. Nothing. I cleared my throat. He looked down.

Then he threw his arms around me. And it was the world’s longest hug. I totally blew my curfew standing there with his arms wrapped around me for some ungodly length of time. I ended the night by telling him I liked him. He didn’t say anything back and went in the house. It was a few weeks later when his brother asked me “So, what’s up with you and Pedro?” I asked him what he knew and he told me “After the Rush concert he came inside and said ‘She likes me’ and I said ‘You’re just figuring that out now? She’s been pretty clear about that for months.’” I just shrugged. And then he shrugged. And the “That’s just how Pedro is” passed between us. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.

So, the Rush concert started the hug stage of our relationship. This dude would literally hug me for 20 minutes at a time while standing on his damn driveway at his parents’ house. This nonsense went on for months without him making a move beyond that. I would go home and search my face in the mirror to see if there was some booger lurking in my nose that scared him off.

After the next summer I went off to college. He wrote me letters, careful not to tell me how he felt about me. I wrote back and told him what a fun time I was having. He called up my dorm room, upset about how I was basically moving on without him. And I was. I met new friends who actually, you know, spoke. I met a boyfriend who liked me and told me so.

During winter break he’d look for me at work. I would spot him; hide behind the displays until I could safely stash myself in the stockroom where JCPenney civilians were not allowed. And thus ended the huglationship I’d endured for way too long.

Years later Pedro and I became friends. He learned how to communicate and we actually had a really great time hanging out that summer before I moved to Boston. I didn’t know he could talk that much. That summer I couldn’t get him to shut up. And it was fun. We also made out a lot. And that was fun too. Turns out, back when we were together when I was in high school he had very deep feelings for me (Is that why I saw him pace and glance at his watch when he attended my high school graduation?). Since then he hadn’t been able to listen to a Rush song because his heart was so broken after I’d went to college and moved on. (Sorry Neil, I cost you a fan.  Forgive me?)  He’s married and has 2 kids now. And I am happy for him. And I wonder if “Tom Sawyer” or “Limelight” on the radio is still intolerable for him.

But last night was different. Todd’s not much of a Rush fan, but he tolerated me bouncing up and down in the car seat on the way to Boston. He smiled patiently at me as I practically skipped through the parking garage on the way into the venue. He didn’t complain when I slapped his arm repeatedly with an “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!” every time the band played one of my favorites. And I did that a lot last night, because it was a fantastic show where they played a lot of my faves. I cheered loudly without caring. I sang along to “Time Stand Still”, which is my favorite Rush song, and he cheered right along with me after every song. And he totally made out with me after the show was over too.

It Must Be Love

In my single years I was a very intolerant girlfriend. I ended relationships on a whim, and often badly. You don’t call me enough? You’re outta here. Call me too much? See ya. You’re wearing that in public? Sayonara. You sing off key? Adios, muchacho,


Don’t even get me started on bad table manners, or bad manners in general. It is not OK to agree to go to a family function with me on a Sunday, but just have your date from the night before leave moments before I arrive to pick you up in the morning. And don’t go to a frat party when the last you heard from me was my voice on your machine saying “Hey, I’m stuck in Johnston, my car broke down. Can you please come and get me?” And don’t be surprised if I get really mad and leave a dozen messages on your machine calling you an asshole and my future ex-boyfriend for doing just that. And then don’t be equally surprised when you actually do become my ex-boyfriend the very next day.

A Google stalking session revealed that the boyfriend in the first scenario above married the woman who left his place that Sunday morning. The other boyfriend in the second scenario never understood why I was so mad at him, and I wonder if he’s ever told that story to his wife and I wonder whose side she took.

But marriage is different. Well, for starters I didn’t marry a man who has ever even thought of doing the above. There is something encompassing about marriage. The things that once annoyed the crap out of me about ex-boyfriends now don’t bother me so much because the man I married is so much more than the habits that once drove me up a wall.

For example, when I go to bed before my husband does, he routinely comes clomping up the stairs loudly talking to the dogs and wakes me up just after I’d managed to drift off. On the rare occasion that I sleep later than he does, he whistles the M*A*S*H theme song while he gets ready for work, and he does it loudly.

But there are so many great things that he does, that it doesn’t matter that he wakes me up. I mean, he talks to our dogs as they are all getting ready for bed and often covers Griffen with his t-shirt so he won’t be cold. He whistles the M*A*S*H theme song while getting ready for work. How endearing is that? Never mind all the other zillions of little things he does to put a smile on my face.

I spend my entire days at work gazing at pictures of Todd and missing him horribly, even though I’d just seen him in the morning and will see him in the evening. It used to be that going to work was a break from my relationship. But now it's an interruption.  A three day weekend is looming, and I am so excited that I will get to spend every minute of it with Todd. Friday afternoon cannot come soon enough.

So those other boyfriends? They were just practice.

Where I Was

This morning I heard on NPR that it was 15 years ago today that the bombing in Oklahoma City happened. It was the kind of event that demonstrated to Americans that we are not even safe from ourselves. It’s easier to be outraged at a foreign entity bombing something on our soil than it is when one of our own does it. We ask ourselves how something like this could happen, and how one of our own citizens can build a bomb and destroy the lives of other Americans with it.  And we never seem to come up with a good enough answer.

I was 21 when it happened. I hadn’t given much thought to anything in Oklahoma City. I’d never been there. I didn't know anyone who lived there.  It’s one of those cities in a part of the country that I hadn’t spent any time in. It's the kind of place that is far away, and that I'd end up reading about in the paper.

I was in Tasmania on the day that it happened. I had just returned to the city of Hobart after spending a few days at Mt. Field National Park, just outside of Hobart. The night before I’d spent the night in a picnic shelter in the park, on a mattress I’d borrowed from the ranger’s station. I was out of money, and woefully unprepared for the fact that the hostel I’d stayed in the night before didn’t accept Visa. I paid cash for the one night in the hostel, assuming that I’d find an ATM in the morning. The closest ATM was 16 km away, I’d learned the next day. I had $8 in my pocket, precisely enough to get the bus back to Hobart on the day after that.

I decided that I’d rather spend the day exploring the park and figure out my accommodation situation later on, than walking the 16 km to the bank. I’d met the park ranger, who allowed me to borrow the mattress. Just before sunset I made camp in the picnic shelter, and turned down a ride back to Hobart from people who may or may not have been perfectly normal people. I made a fire. I ate some food I had in my pack. I set my travel alarm clock for 7 so that I would have plenty of time to wake up, clean up and catch my bus.  I was woken up in the middle of the night by a wallaby plundering the nearby trash can.  Other than that I slept peacefully. 

When I returned to Hobart the next morning, I wandered into a café for breakfast. It was over a bagel and hot chocolate that I learned the news of the bombing. Another patron had left a copy of a newspaper behind and I read it while I ate. The picture of the Murrah Building stretched over the front page, a cut away view revealing all of the building’s floors. I stared at it in awe, and then read the article. While I was exploring a beautiful park, a bomb had exploded in my country.

Oklahoma City was ten thousand miles away from Hobart. Even though I didn’t know anyone who lived there, I numbly shuffled through the streets anyway with a feeling like my country had just changed for the worse.

Later on, in the hostel, I met a German woman who had asked me what I thought about the bombing. I asked her “Well, what would anyone think? It was a horrible thing that happened.” She nodded and said that it was a silly question, and she apologized for asking it.  Even though it didn’t impact my life directly, I felt very cold-hearted when I thought of it that way.  Almost as if I was thinking "Well, it has nothing to do with me... la de da."  Well, what did I think of it?  A silly, yet loaded question.

To a lot of people I’ve never met, today is the anniversary of the day they lost a loved one in a senseless act of violence and stupidity. To those people it was the end of a life.  But now I look at this event and all I can think is “Now, what the hell was that for?”

All Aboard

I was doing a bit of data entry at work today and stumbled upon the date September 29, 2009.  As I mindlessly typed my mind wandered to the movie "Sliding Doors."

In the movie, Gwyneth Paltrow's character got fired from her job.  As she is going home from the office she missed the subway train by a matter of seconds.  At that point the plot splits into two story lines--what would have happened had she made it onto the train, and what would have happened had she missed it. The Gwyneth who caught the train caught her boyfriend in bed with another woman.  The one who missed it was mugged as she was trying to catch a bus, and none the wiser about the cheating boyfriend.  The one who caught the train threw the boyfriend out and started a brand new happy life.  The one who missed the train slogged along, picking up a job as a waitress, and was miserable.  It's one of my favorite movies, and really made me think of all those little moments at which the plot of my life could have split. 

The date I mentioned above got me thinking of this because on September 29, 1989 my high school boyfriend and I had gotten together.  Had I stayed with that boyfriend, I would have been with him for 20 years.  Our breakup, sometime in the spring of 1991, was probably one of those Sliding Doors moments for me. 

This boyfriend, Leonard, (he looked like Spock so I'll call him Leonard) married the girl that he'd dumped me for back in 91.  We had broken up twice.  The first time was a few months before, and I had learned that he asked out this girl, Olive, (she looked like Olive Oyl, from the Popeye cartoon) but she'd said no.  Rejected, Leonard used his mind meld technique and managed to get me back.  We stayed together for a few months, but his mind was on Olive.  She flashed him a green light, and he dropped me in a second flat.  (Then he posted some lousy thing in the yearbook "Thanks for the memories, Beej, but I am much happier now."  It must have been all the pesto that Olive Oyl served up.  Pfft!  Whatev!)

I've heard from mutual friends that Leonard and Olive are married.  They had gotten engaged when I was in college.  I saw them at the movies one night when I was home for a weekend.  I was about to go up and congratulate them, because I heard the good news.  They spotted me and quickly turned away; at that moment I vowed not to buy them a Misto for a wedding gift. 

They live in the town next to our home town.  They never really left our hometown.  I don't know what he does for a living, but I guess that it's some unimaginative gig.  My friend saw them in Walmart a few years back and said "I saw Leonard, Olive and their monkey child" so I know they have at least one kid.  (And I love that my friend, still loyal years later called their progeny a "monkey child.")

But I caught that train in 1991.  I sat down and stared out the window as it took me to college out of state.  Then it took me overseas to Australia.  It took me to the open mic night where I met the people who led me to Todd.  It took me to get my Masters.  It took me underwater.  It brought me to my sailboat.  Then my dogs boarded somewhere along the line too.  There is no limit to where this train will go.  The track has no end, and the ride has been fabulous.

Thanks for the memories, Leonard.  But you know what?  I am way happier now than you could have ever made me.

The Boobie Dry Cleaner

The way she leaned against the counter, it pushed her boobs into display even more. That’s the thing I never liked about going into that dry cleaner, was this young woman behind the counter. She was pretty enough, but she shoved her big ol hooters up and out of her shirt on display. I wonder if she ever had the chance to know what eye contact looked like.


I went to that dry cleaner every other week while I had the dive shop. It was on the way, and was the last one nearby that I hadn’t yet boycotted for some ridiculous reason. I did that a lot back then. I had a mental list of the dry cleaners I didn’t want to ever set foot in again, and now I cannot remember the reason for any of them. Over the time I’d been going to the “Boobie Dry Cleaner,” as I’d begun calling it, I became friendly with Kayla, the one with the boobs.

I went in one night on my way home from the shop. Kayla didn’t smile. Her boobs stood at attention, but she didn’t smile like she usually did.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked.

“My boyfriend and I just broke up,” she sighed.

“Oh no! How long have you been together?” I asked. She told me it had been a few weeks. I tried to smile sympathetically, but couldn’t seem to muster one up for a 20 year old girl who had broken up with her weeks-long boyfriend.

She went on to tell me that she had such a great time with him. He was older; I gathered that he was at least in his thirties or maybe forties. He took her to all the “right” clubs. He bought her jewelry. And now she’d need to find another guy to do all those things for her. It was catastrophic.

I couldn’t resist. I asked her why she needed all that in her life. What was so great about going to the “right” clubs if she couldn’t get along with the guy who brought her there? She looked at me with a puzzled look on her face.

“The way I see it,” I paused to choose my words carefully. “If you really like a guy then it doesn’t matter where you guys go together. No matter where you go, it will always be fun.”

She considered for a moment while I told her about the dates that Todd and I had been on when we were first together. He was 20, I was 23. We were flat broke and our idea of a date was cooking dinner together in my apartment. There was a supermarket a few blocks away. We’d walk there and spend Saturday afternoon wandering the aisles, picking out the ingredients and laughing. He really knew how to make me laugh, too. I have a very vivid memory of him speaking French to a cantaloupe. I have no idea what he said to it, but it was funny as hell as he tapped the top of it and held it to his ear. It’s those memories that make me smile still, 13 years later.

Kayla raised her eyebrows at me incredulously. “And you married him after that?”

Maybe I Did Have a Weird Childhood

Even though I have four siblings, I spent a lot of time on my own as a child. My brothers are 4 and 8 years older than me, and my sisters are 5 and 14 years older than me. While the age difference is nothing right now, when we were kids, it was a great divide that screamed “You and I have nothing in common!” There were no kids my age in the neighborhood, which contributed to my not-really-an-only-child-but-kinda-an-only-child life back then.

When I was 4 years old, my oldest sister was graduating high school and heading off to college, while my brother Kaz—4 years older than me—was entering the 3rd grade and playing on the “Major League” little league team. I was barely hitting the ball off the tee. (See above, great divide.)

Throughout my childhood we played endless hours of wiffle ball in the summer, and of course Kaz and the boy next door could hit the ball way further than I could. They would round the bases while I scrambled to field the ball and try to tag them out. The games that my siblings played were all too old for me, and I constantly lacked the skill to compete. I was the little sister that tagged along, yipping at the heels of my older siblings. My choices were yipping or staying home. Staying home meant helping Mom with the cleaning or ironing, and who wants to do that?

Then someone, I don’t know who, took pity on me and bought me a set of jacks. I remember the plastic molded jacks were in a plastic-y drawstring bag with a rubber ball. There were no instructions with the game, and I had no idea how to play jacks. I studied the contents of the set with a scientific fascination. The jacks certainly looked interesting. Why were some prongs rounded while the others were pointy? I didn’t know. I twisted them around in my fingertips, and then tried to spin one of the jacks on its end on the surface of the coffee table. I was disappointed that they wouldn’t spin the way a coin would spin. It would have been cool to see how many I could get spinning at the same time. No dice. I couldn’t stack them on top of each other like blocks, or lean them against each other like I would when building a house of cards.

I lined up the jacks end to end on the length of the coffee table and examined them. They didn’t look like they would be that much fun to play with as they uselessly tilted on their axis; I couldn’t get them to balance so that they looked like plus signs. I left them on the table and bounced the rubber ball against the picture window. I left a perfect round smudge on the glass. I wiped it off with the curtain, so Mom wouldn’t see it and then turned my attention back to the jacks in formation on the coffee table.

“What the heck am I supposed to do with these things?” I puzzled. There was no Internet, so it’s not like I could anonymously look it up and learn. I didn’t want to ask anyone how to play for fear of looking stupid. Even I knew that everyone knew how to play jacks. Well, everyone except for me. Was it some sort of childhood instinct that I lacked?

And now it’s an adult instinct I lack. If I understand it correctly, you’re supposed to bounce the ball and see how many jacks you can pick up before the ball hits the table again, right? Where’s the fun in that?? Who thought of that? I’ll bet it was someone who wanted to make cleaning up the toys a game, so the kids would tidy up after themselves. I can picture some misguided and frazzled mom, “OK, kids, I am going to bounce this ball. Let’s see how many things you can pick up before it lands…. Ready??? GO!!!”

Exposed Nerve

On Sunday it’ll be 8 years since Mom’s been gone. The last six weeks of Mom’s life did not at all represent who she was. Her cancer spread, and the tumors compressed her spinal cord and she lost all feeling and ability to move from the waist down. My sisters and I dropped out of our lives for those weeks and took turns taking care of her. I blew off work for most of that time, and only went 1-2 days per week.

I never really let myself fully absorb what was happening at that time. I slipped into denial robot mode and shielded myself from the possibility of losing Mom. Everything I did during those six weeks was done with the sole purpose of making her live. My mind assigned extreme importance to every little mundane task I accomplished every day. My first thought in the morning was how making her favorite breakfast would make her live. The laundry, done just so, would make her live. I concocted protein shakes with fresh fruits blended into them to make her live. I was careful not to get shampoo in her eyes, because one sudsy splash would tip the scales in the wrong direction. Any little thing could make her live, and denial robot had to perfectly execute every chore so not to risk causing her demise.

The denial robot mode fully took over. Nobody could talk about any other fate than Mom surviving around me. There was no other option for the denial robot. Mom dying simply did not compute. Period. It was exhausting. But when you’re a denial robot you never get tired. You push and push because nothing else matters. (My sister and I watched the 9-11 attack on TV, then simply turned the TV off and bathed and dressed Mom so we could get her ready for radiation treatment in Hartford.)

I vividly remember her wake, when my cousin Anna had said to me “It gets easier.” Anna’s dad had died when we were seniors in college. Later on that night my cousin Theresa said, “You just have to live through the pain.” Her dad died when she was in her early 20s and I was only 7 or 8.

And it’s true. They were both absolutely right. I’ve said the same things to other people I know who have lost their parents. “The first 6 months will completely suck. Just get through them and you’ll be OK” I told them. Later on they told me I was right.

But my first six months were riddled with spontaneous sobbing at inopportune times and vivid nightmares. The denial robot’s battery ran down and left me to deal with what actually happened in those six weeks. Mom’s health gradually degraded until we were all with her when she took her last breath. And none of those things I did, that would surely make her live, worked. In those six months I waited for the answer to be revealed to me, but of course it never was. There wasn’t a chore I missed that didn’t make her live. It was the cancer that didn’t make her live.

Now here it is 8 years later. And while the pain of losing her has subsided, there are times when it bubbles to the surface. It's usually something entirely random that triggers it. Today a client at work called me from Bristol, Pennsylvania—where Mom lived when she first came to the United States. I’ve only visited Bristol when I was a kid. It wasn’t a part of my childhood—but I knew the story of Mom taking the train from Montreal, Canada to Bristol when she first arrived on this side of the pond. I spent the rest of the day walking around feeling like I had a stone in my stomach and I randomly burst into tears in the car on the way to dinner at a friends’ house tonight.

And that’s what nobody prepared me for when they were trying to comfort me at her wake. That it never fully goes away.

Hurt

What is it about a song on the radio that brings back the memory of something I hadn’t thought of in years?

I was driving to work the other day when the song “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails came on the radio. I sat there with my elbow propped against the door and tapping on the wheel with my thumbs as I listened.

The first time I heard the song was on a mix tape that my first post-college-just-moved-out-of-home-to-a-new-city boyfriend made for me. I met Marcus at one of my favorite bars, and we clicked right away. Marcus was in a “transitional” phase. He didn’t have a job and was living off the savings account he’d had since he was born. We talked on the phone a lot; we spent a lot of time together. Then he randomly ended it after a few weeks. He claimed to be depressed and wanted to be just friends.

I agreed to be just friends, because having him as a friend was way better than not having him at all. He made me the mix tape in a “Let’s be friends” gesture, and he recorded “Hurt” onto it as the ultimate depiction of his depressed and tortured soul. He told me some bullshit story about how he didn’t want to wreck the person that I am by getting me mixed up in his messed up life. He came to see me play at the open mic, where I played “Untouchable Face” by Ani DiFranco, and bravely stared at him through the whole thing.

At the time I ate the whole “I’m so depressed” thing up. I was convinced that he wasn’t depressed when he was with me, and I was helping him somehow. Until I learned about what was really torturing this guy’s soul. He came over to my apartment one night, and I made stuffed shells for dinner. He was telling me about a woman he’d just started seeing after he dumped me.

“The thing is,” he swallowed his mouthful of ricotta, “I don’t really like her that much.”

“Then why are you hanging out with her, then?” In my mind I asked him, “Yeah, here you are having a conversation about life with me, but you won’t call me your girlfriend? But you call that tramp your girlfriend? What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Because she knows how to please,” he replied in his deadpan honesty that I’d gotten so used to.

I rolled my eyes and said “Oh please, that’s not the only reason you’re hanging out with her.”

And I was right. He was a horrible boyfriend and a lousy friend. He was hanging out with that particular sex goddess because she didn’t challenge him to be a better person like I did. This is what caused Marcus’s “depression” and his acceptance of the song “Hurt” as his anthem—he just didn’t feel like working for something worthwhile.

A few weeks later I broke off our friendship. I couldn’t take his confiding in me about other women. I was liberated as I left his apartment. I barged in and said “I can’t be friends with you. I want to be more than friends and you don’t. This isn’t working for me. Goodbye.” Then I stormed out of his apartment just as fast as I’d barged in. He chased me down the stairs and asked me to talk to me. I silently continued down the narrow stairs, my knees were shaking.

Our paths crossed a few more times here and there in the months and years after that. We’d swap emails now and then, but it was always the same old thing with him and I quickly grew tired of hearing from him.

One night, after Todd and I moved in together I met him out for a beer. We had a very nice conversation that lasted very late into the night. At the end of the night he asked me if he could kiss me and I said, “Well, I live with my boyfriend. I’ve got a good thing going here. No thanks.” He shrugged and said “Fair enough.”

He tried to stay friends, and I made excuses. He’d invite me to parties at his apartment, and I’d write back with a simple “No thanks, we have plans.” It was after Todd and I had gotten engaged that he wrote to me to ask me how I was doing.

“Hi Marcus,” I wrote. “Life is really good. I am engaged, getting my Masters, and restoring a 41’ sailboat. Take care, Beej.”

After that I never heard from him again. I came across a picture of him when I googled him out of curiosity about a year ago. But other than that, I haven’t thought about that soap opera for more than a decade now. The mix tape has long been lost or thrown away.

But it all came flooding back, just from hearing that song. I wonder if he thinks of me when he hears that song by Ani DiFranco.

Fired Like a Clay Pot

It was a strange week at work last week. A co-worker had gotten fired on Wednesday, and management hasn’t said anything more on the topic other than “She doesn’t work here anymore.”

The remaining employees are whispering to each other in the cubicles, speculating about what had happened to my colleague. I gather that the firing occurred at the very end of the day, when the rest of the staff had gone home. Her office is empty, and the feeling at my workplace is sad and strange.

It brought be back to the time I had been fired from a job. At the time that it had happened, 10 years ago, I was completely humiliated by the experience. I didn’t tell my friends I’d been fired. I didn’t tell my family. I didn’t tell anyone, yet here I am telling you on the Internet. It was a horrible experience that took me several years to fully get over. I had nightmares about it, and fantasized about what I would say if I had ever bumped into my former boss.

I was working for one of those “next big thing” dot coms back in the summer of 1999. They just secured a crapload of venture capital money, and were supposed to be all the rage. (They closed their doors a year after I’d been let go.)

I was called into a meeting where I sat across from the VP of my department and the guy from human resources. They told me to bugger off, and I stood up and numbly left the room. I went back to my desk to pack up my belongings. It was an open cubicle setting, so it was rather obvious that I was leaving. I held it together reasonably well, until a co-worker helped me take my things out to my car. (Which I appreciated so very much at the time because I wouldn’t have to make a second trip back to my desk. A humiliating second trip.) At that point I burst into tears in front of a woman I barely knew over a job I’d had for a month or two. She, obviously and understandably uncomfortable, wished me luck and hightailed it back into the office.

I always wondered how my firing was handled on the day after. Did they have a staff meeting to explain my absence? Did they send out an email? Did they take advantage of the space that once was my desk and put the photocopier there? Or an espresso machine?

The day after I was fired I had to go back to the office. I had a personal package Fedexed there, and of course it arrived the day after I’d been fired. I couldn’t stand to go back in there one more time, so I waited in the car while Todd went in to get the package for me.

It felt like it took him an awful long time. I sat behind the wheel, the window down because it was a hot summer day. One of my co-workers came out of the building, spotted me sitting in the car and came up to say hi. I didn’t work too closely with him, he was the VP of Business Motivation, or some other bullshit dot com era job title.

He leaned against my car and expressed his condolences to my boobs. I thanked his face for his concern; he told my boobs that they’d be sure to find another job soon. Pretend Me sat up straighter, lifted the front of her tank top and said, “Do you want me to just show them to you so we can settle the mystery?” Real Me warned, “Don’t even think about it, you’re gonna see this jerk again. It’s a small world, and you are looking for a job.”

Real Me won and I kept my shirt on. Real Me seethed about how this man’s 15 year old daughter was a summer intern in the office, yet there he was ogling some 25 year old in the parking lot. Real Me wishes she had the courage to lift her shirt that day and humiliate that guy as badly as he’d done to me.

Petty Vandalism was my MO

I was in high school in the early 90’s, back when MC Hammer was telling us that it was Hammer Time. I was a goody goody in high school, ever drank (except for once), got good grades, participated in school activities, and all that two shoes stuff. But I had a weakness. I was a petty vandal.

I carried a sharpie around with me, and scrawled occasional random bits of graffiti. Most of it didn’t make much sense. I didn’t care to tell anyone when I had visited that particular bathroom stall. Instead my contributions of the graffiti world consisted of things like song lyrics, stick figures in a “Walk like an Egyptian” pose and the like.

I was driving home from school one day, and stopped at a stop sign somewhere in Enfield, Connecticut. I cracked up as I read the sign. First it said STOP, but then somebody scrawled underneath it “Hammer Time.” Brilliant! I had just stumbled upon a new vehicle for my writings. I was thrilled at the prospect of my obscure scribbles being exposed to more people than those who used the bathrooms at school. I grew excited at both genders getting to view my artistic contributions.

I raced home and called my friends, “Guys! This is it! We need to come up with some phrases incorporating the word ‘stop’.” The next night, armed with a fresh sharpie and friends packed into my 85 Olds Calais. We cruised down Newbury Road in East Windsor, an isolated road in the middle of nowhere which would serve as the perfect place to test out an installation of my art. I pulled up to the stop sign, leapt out of the car, and dashed to the stop sign on the side of the road. I scrawled “Polka time” under the word “Stop” on the sign—an homage to my roots.

Soon I became more brazen. Dozens of stop signs in East Windsor were defaced with the words “Polka time.” Worn out sharpies littered the floor of my car. The buzz about the weird “Polka Time” stop signs grew at school, and all fingers pointed at me. My classmates shook their heads and said “I am not at all surprised it was you.”

Tonight I was picking up pizza from Wicked Good Pizza. I stopped at the stop sign before leaving the parking lot and saw that someone else created their own stop sign art installation. The words “Don’t” and “Believing” were written in black sharpie on the sign, so that it read “Don’t Stop Believing.” I applaud this stop sign graffiti artist for taking it to the next level, and actually saying something a more hopeful and meaningful than my asinine “Stop! Polka time!”

Who ever you are, thank you for making my day. Oh and don’t STOP making people smile.

Can I Take That Back?

Recently I saw an article on cnn.com about workplace embarrassments. Luckily, I haven’t had any major embarrassments at work (or if I did, I've blocked them out). I’ve done stupid things like send the wrong document to the wrong client, and stuff like that. But nothing really humiliating that has made me not want to go into the office again, ever.

But I know someone who did. And it was big. And juicy. When I was in my 20s I worked for a variety of dot.coms in the Boston area. It was an interesting environment to work in. The big thing about the late 90’s workplace was that the management was younger and more laid back. People didn’t dress up for work, yet they worked with a cult-like devotion. At more than one of these places I worked I heard the phrase “We’re onto something big here, I can feel it!” uttered about whatever people-will-never-live-without-it service that the company was touting on their site. Ultimately many of the companies I worked for at the time failed. Despite the fact that they were “onto something big,” they lacked a revenue generating business model.

At the dot.com I worked for when I was 24-25, the management went through a radical change. One CEO was told where to go, and another was brought in. The new CEO brought in a devoted group of his followers, and the company that I had liked working for turned into a club for the new CEO’s cronies. The new VP of Sales was the CEO’s best friend, and actually had performed the wedding ceremony when the CEO married his wife. Yeah, they were tight. Meetings with these people left me feeling like I needed to shower afterward, and the people who were not in “the club” were left uninformed and “out of the loop.” And because of my penchant for not wanting to be “one of them,” I had intentionally stuck myself on the outside of this exclusive club.

One day the CEO and his best friend the VP had interviewed a woman for some bullshit VP position. I cannot remember the exact title, but it was something ridiculous like “VP of Business Motivation.” (These were the dot.com days, remember? Job titles were made up in an effort to make one workplace cooler than any other.) The VP of Sales sent around an email to announce that this woman would start in this new position in the coming weeks, and that we were to all make her feel at home.

The CEO replied to the email, intended for his best friend to read it, but stupidly clicked on the “Reply to All” button.

The first thing to arrive in my email inbox was an Outlook request from the CEO that said he wanted to withdraw his email. I deleted that. Then the actual email from the CEO came through a second later. Naturally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I wanted to know what CEO said that he so desperately wanted to withdraw.

Then I heard it. A gasp from a co-worker on the other side of the cube wall. An “Oh my God!” from another down the row from my desk. A giggle from another cube on the other side of the hall after that. I opened the email, which left me with my mouth hanging open:

“Hey Bob,

What a great ass on her! Imagine getting a piece of that!”

The CEO never left his office for the rest of that day. The VP of Business Motivation started her job a few weeks later, and I wonder if anyone ever said to her “Don’t worry if you make a mistake on the job. Just bend over and shake it, and all will be forgiven.”

Beejutante

“Doesn’t he know you at all?” Brent asked me on the phone and laughed. I returned to my dorm room senior year of college, and called my friend to tell him about my dad’s hare-brained request from that morning.

I had gone home for the weekend. I didn’t go to church with my parents, and they returned from 8:00 mass to have breakfast with me. My parents are very religious, and attended a mass said in Polish every Sunday morning at the very same church in which they were married. Dad still sings in the choir, as do my uncles, and over the years he’s made friends with the people he’s sung with since before electricity.

Dad sat across from me at breakfast and said, “I was talking to Mrs. M. this morning after church. She’s organizing the Polonaise Ball this year. She wants you to be in it.” The Polonaise Ball is kind of like a debutante ball for eligible Polish girls. Supposedly being asked to be in it is some big honor. But it was an honor that made me bristle as scooped up scrambled egg and spread it onto my toast.

“A debutante? Me? Are you kidding, Dad? There’s no way…” I sat across from the table and tried to get Dad to recognize me. I am his youngest daughter. I hold my high school record in the unfeminine shot put event. I had stopped shaving my legs in some rebellion against “The Man” and was probably clad in a pair of men’s jeans, a humongous flannel, and faux Doc Martens. I was the daughter who ran a drill press in his shop when I was on breaks from school.

“What the hell was I supposed to say to her?” he asked, as if the concept of saying “My daughter’s not really into that kind of thing” was such a foreign concept. “And now,” he added “I will have to face her every week. How am I supposed to say no to her and see her at church every week?”

“Wow, she must be pretty hard up for girls, if she’s asking for me,” I snorted. “Dad, just tell her I am not interested. Please. There’s no way I am doing this.”

“No, I will not tell her. If you don’t want to do this, you’ll have to do it yourself. But don’t just ignore her request. I don’t want her asking me about it every week,” he growled at me.

I found Mrs. M’s number in my parents’ address book, wrote it down and shoved the piece of paper in my pocket. I drove back to school, an hour and a half away in Rhode Island, and tried to come up with a reasonable excuse as to why I couldn’t possibly be included as a Polish debutante. Most of the excuses that I rehearsed in the car started with “Are you fucking crazy? Have you seen me lately? At the moment my hair is magenta! Surely we can agree I am not Polonaise material.” I knew I had to do better than magenta hair.

I walked into my room, and picked up the phone and dialed. “Mrs. M? Hi, it’s Beej. How are you?”

“Oh, honey, how are you? I haven’t seen you in so long!” she replied, excitedly. I was sure that the last time she’d seen me was at the choir picnic when I was 10. I had skinned knees from playing too hard. As a senior in college I had skinned knees from falling down after partying too hard.

“Listen, I am calling about the Polonaise Ball…” I began. I don’t remember how I worded it. Nothing I rehearsed in the car sounded right. I decided when I dialed the number that I would just wing it. I think the words “painfully shy” came out of my mouth, and the words “couldn’t possibly stand up in front of a room full of people while wearing a gown…” also popped out. At least feigned shyness couldn’t be covered over with hair dye, and couldn’t be shaved off my legs.

“I wish you’d reconsider,” she said, soothingly. “There are so many benefits you’ll miss out on of you don’t go. You won’t be introduced properly to the Polish society as an eligible young woman…” I bit my tongue hard to keep in my disdain. My brain was pounding with ‘You mean I’ll miss out on the chance for my life to revolve around making cabbage-laden food for some Polish guy who wears sandals with black socks? Oh damn!’

“Thank you for the opportunity, but I think I will have to pass. Thanks for thinking of me,” I quickly blurted before hanging up the phone. I stared at it for a few minutes, as if it grew a layer of mold in the time I was talking to Mrs. M.

I dialed Brent’s number and heard him laugh. "Hey, you're lucky I am not doing this. I would probably make you go with me, and you'd have to wear a tux," I laughed back. Then he stopped laughing.

Feed the World

When I was a kid, my Uncle George (the only uncle I have whom I’ve ever addressed with his English name) had the best record collection. He had a stereo in the basement, where my brothers, sisters and cousins would all hang out when we were visiting the great old Victorian that they lived in.

The basement was fully furnished. One side, if you turned left at the bottom of the stairs, was set up with a bar, and he had lighted Tuborg beer signs on the light wood paneled walls. Bench seats were built into both sides along the walls, and the center of the room was left empty—plenty of room for a bunch of kids to bounce around as they danced to George’s Rolling Stones and Beatles records.

The other room, a right from the bottom of the stairs, was the stuff of imagination. The only source of light in the room was recessed into the walls, to illuminate whatever he had displayed on insets in the walls. There was a huge drafting table on the far wall, and that’s where the stereo and the records were stored. We had to stand on a chair to reach the record player to change the record, or to move the needle back so that we could play the same song over and over again.

To the right, just as you walked into the room was a small work bench with shelves above it. On the shelves were numerous beakers, a Bunsen burner lighter (you know, one of those squeeze-y things with the flint in the metal cup), test tubes, and a vial with litmus papers in it. I still have no idea what Uncle George was doing with all this stuff; I suspect that these items were just a part of his eclectic collection. At the time I pictured Uncle George wearing a lab coat and swirling some unknown liquid in a beaker on the days when we weren’t visiting. He’d take the rubber stopper off a test tube and sniff the contents of the test tube, then dip a piece of litmus paper in it and examine the paper under the short fluorescent light that hung over the bench. Then he’d frustratedly pour something else into the beaker and swirl it around again. Then, disgusted, he’d put it all away and go upstairs for dinner.

He also had old army stuff on display in the room—old helmets, a gas mask, and a huge military radio system in the middle of the room about which we used to fight over who got to be Radar when we were playing M*A*S*H. Next to George’s vinyl collection, the military radio--complete with headphones, and numerous cords, switches, and plugs—was the coolest thing in the basement.

But his record collection still held the number 1 spot for coolest thing in Uncle George’s basement. On one visit Uncle George held up a record for me and explained that all the better songs were on side A, while all the other songs that the band didn’t like as much were on side B. I recited all the Rolling Stones songs that I liked, and he concurred with me on most them. He wasn’t entirely convinced that “Ruby Tuesday” was the world’s best song, but said he understood why I thought so.

When I was 10, I saw the video to Band Aid’s “Feed the World” which was the British pop singers equivalent to the “We Are the World” that the American pop stars put out sometime around 1984-1985. I declared “Feed the World” way cooler than “We Are the World,” and found vindication when the record showed up in George’s collection. I was visiting one afternoon when my cousin Joanna put the song on. Then we listened to it a dozen times more, and tried to identify the names of the singers. We easily picked out Boy George and Simon LeBon, and we tolerated Bono as he sang. (I wonder if now Joanna, just like me, tolerates Boy George and Simon LeBon and smiles when she hears Bono’s voice.)

Every year I look forward to hearing “Feed the World” on the radio at Christmas time. It brings back the excitement when I saw it in Uncle George’s collection and the afternoon I spent with Joanna listening to the song. But it also makes me a bit sad every time I hear it. The song is actually quite a sad song, designed to make the listener feel guilty and donate to the cause of feeding the world. The first time I hear the song every year, without fail, I start to cry. I call myself a big dork, and laugh as I brush the tears off my cheeks.

Today I was in my car doing the last bits of Christmas shopping. I endlessly pressed the scan button, looking for “Feed the World.” I lamented hearing the “War is Over” John Lennon Christmas song, I rolled my eyes at “Santa Baby” and I gritted my teeth against that piece of crap “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” and once again wonder how nobody has yet gotten around to destroying every copy of that song in circulation.

Just as I got back into my car, I heard the familiar chimes . I squealed in delight and cranked the volume up, and was instantly transported to Uncle George’s basement.

Tis The Season to Hoark Your Guts Out

Picture it. Christmas 1997.

Todd and I had been going out for six months. For the holiday I went home to Connecticut to see my family for Christmas Eve. During the day I babysat my niece Maggie (then three years old) and nephew Krystian (then 1.5 years old) during the day while my brother and sister-in-law ran a few last minute Christmas errands. They dropped off Maggie and Krys at my parents house and I watched them while Mom cooked the Christmas Eve dinner. I changed a few diapers on Krys in that time, wiped a nose or two, and of course hugged, kissed and cuddled the stuffing out of my niece and nephew. I was thrilled to be an aunt at Christmas. I was also thrilled to be going to Vermont the next morning to see my boyfriend for Christmas. The plan was to do Christmas day with his family, and then we’d ski for another day of the long weekend. Life was good.

I left for Vermont from my Uncle Joe’s house, where my insanely huge Polish family congregated for Christmas breakfast after church that morning. “Merry Christmas!” I called out as I put my jacket on before leaving Joe’s house. “I am going to Vermont to see my boyfriend now!” I cranked up the radio and headed north up interstate 91 as fast as the snowy conditions would allow. I arrived in Vermont, and was greeted with hugs, kisses, an “I really really missed you” and a beautiful ruby ring from my boyfriend. We sat down to a lovely Christmas dinner that his mom made. I was still a vegetarian then, and I sampled the non-meat options from the table. We sat around and spoke about what we are all thankful for, we toasted, and we began to dig in to dinner.

Then I felt it.

The quease in my stomach.

The sour taste in my mouth.

The sudden loss of appetite.

The need to just lie down flat for a moment.

I excused myself from the table with barely two words and made my way through the house to Todd’s old bedroom. Instead of the bedroom I stumbled into the bathroom, kicked the door shut, planted my face into the toilet and proceeded to get violently ill. I remained in the bathroom for the duration of Christmas dinner and I am sure that hearing me hoark my guts out completely killed everyone’s appetite at the table.

Puke Fest ‘97 continued well into the night. Of course the bathroom is right off the living room at my in-laws house. Of course they could hear every retch clear as day as they sat in the living room trying to watch a movie. Todd wiped my face and brushed the hair off my forehead. The room spun around me. I was sweaty and peeling off my clothes, only to shiver and blindly pull them back on again. I held onto the bathroom floor with all my remaining strength, praying that the house would stop moving for just a damn minute.

Around midnight Todd drove me to the emergency room. He patiently waited while I answered the barrage of questions from the nurse. Then I was checked into a small room and given something to settle my stomach, which I promptly threw up, so I was given it again, just to throw it up again. Finally I managed to feel the drowsy side effect of the drug. The nurses turned off the light in the room so I could rest. But then I’d deliriously scream Todd’s name. He came into the room and sat with me until I dozed off again, just to have to come in again when I started to scream his name again. My boyfriend sat in a pitch dark room for hours on end and held my hand as I slept. I have no recollection of any of this happening.

I was discharged from the hospital at an hour I can only describe as a million o’clock. Todd drove me home, and followed the doctor’s instructions to the letter. I was forbidden from drinking anything more than a sip of fluid, for fear that I would just throw it up again. I begged for the whole glass of water, but he only fed me a spoonful at a time. I swore at him, and probably called him a Nazi, yet he spoon fed me water despite my insults.

I managed to sleep, and to hold in more and more water. Todd ventured out the next day to rent a movie and to get me some Gatorade. He made some toast for me, and set me up on the couch. He left the toast on the ottoman. I dozed off without eating it. When Todd came home the toast was gone, and he asked me if I managed to keep it down. When I told him that I didn’t eat any of the toast, the dog began to lazily thump her tail on the floor.

By the end of the day, I was able to form a more coherent thought. I called home to see if any of my other family members were sick. It turned out that a stomach bug plowed its way through my family. My brother Kaz and his family were driving to Rochester, NY and both kids ended up sick in the car on the way. My brother Walter’s infant twins got it too, first one and then the other.

And somehow, after our glorious first Christmas, Todd still wanted to spend another eleven Christmases with me.

A Trip Down Amnesia Lane

There is a woman I work with, a part-time temp who is in college and has an internship in Providence. She’s in her early 20s and can only be described as vivacious and spectacular. She came into work wearing a suit and learned that she had a job interview that day. I asked her where she interviewed, and I was brought back to a job interview I had gone on when I was in my early 20s.

I was fresh out of college and trying to start up my career. I was trying like hell to move to the Boston area, and several times per week I drove to Boston from my home state of Connecticut for interviews. Talking to this woman at work about her interview yesterday brought me back to the summer of 1996 when I went on an interview that sounded exactly like what she had described.

I was 22. I drove to Woburn, MA, just north of Boston, to meet with a prospective employer about a marketing position. I must have struck a chord with the hiring manager, because I was invited back that Friday for an “Observation Day.” On Friday morning I donned my periwinkle blue silk suit, purchased on the cheap from the Chadwick’s catalog. I put on an off-white shirt underneath it, and threw on a pair of off-white heels that matched the shirt perfectly. I examined my reflection, ran my hands through my hair, removed the small silver hoop I still wear near the top of my left ear that my mother warned me about. “They’re going to think you’re weird if you show up there with that thing. They’ll never hire you with that on. Take it out, please.” I pulled the car out of the driveway and headed east until I arrived in Woburn.

I looked around the reception area at all the eager faces attached to bodies in suits. I assessed the competition as I sat down. I was called into an office and introduced to Manny. Manny had been with the company for several months, and was promoted to a training supervisor position. Also in the room was a shy looking girl named Jen who wore a long, floral print skirt and sensible shoes. Jen was already hired to work for the company and would spend the day getting trained by Manny while I would observe.

We piled into Manny’s car and rode to Lowell, Massachusetts, about 20 miles northwest of Woburn. On the way to Lowell, Manny briefly explained how the company conducts its “grassroots marketing” campaigns. He was careful not to divulge any details as we drove to Lowell.

He parked the car on a street, and pulled a stack of brochures out of his trunk. Jen and I walked behind him; at that point I don’t think I’d yet heard her utter a syllable. We followed as Manny walked to the front door of a house and knocked. A woman answered the door wearing a loose fitting tube top, a faded tattoo on her arm that may have been a picture of an anchor, fried hair that had been bleached several months before, and a silver tooth in her mouth. It was then that I learned precisely what “grassroots marketing” was. Apparently grassroots marketing is a fancy way of saying “door-to-door” sales. Manny finished his pitch for the pager service he was selling. The customer at the door raised her eyebrows, and then reached down the front of her tube top to retrieve her own pager. They compared pager plans, and she signed up for the one that Manny was selling.

We went on to the next house. Then the next. The sun began to climb in the sky, and the August heat began to settle in. I felt the sweat drip down my back, and down my legs. My feet began to swell in my high heels that I’d begun to regret wearing. After half an eternity we ended up at Subway for lunch. Jen still barely spoke, and I began to seethe at the idea that I had been duped into following Manny around as he sold beepers door to door. I decided that I would just keep my mouth shut and blow off the company at the end of the day as Manny was my only escape at that point.

We walked up and down the streets of Lowell. Lowell has some scary looking streets with a variety of riff raff lounging on the porches, staring uninterested at Manny as he recited his pitch over and over. Finally we made it back to the car, Manny had managed to sell a half dozen pagers. Jen tried her hand at a sale or two, but her pitch was barely audible as she uncomfortably mumbled it to her prospective customers. We piled into Manny’s car, and headed back toward Woburn.

“So, what do you think of what you saw today? Are you ready to hop aboard?” Manny asked, eagerly.

“Um, no,” I said politely.

“Are you sure? Once you pay your dues you’ll get promoted to management and you’ll make six figures in about a year,” he pressed.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Beej, with every job you have to pay your dues. You might as well pay your dues at one where you’ll get something out of it. You will get promoted to management after a year,” his eyes glazed as I wondered how much Koolaid he’d been drinking.

“And what will you do when you’re a manager? Send other people to Lowell to sell pagers? And while you are waiting to be made a manager, what are you doing for money? How much could you possibly be making doing this?” I asked.

“Hey, do you mind if we pull over. I know that Jen wanted to run an errand on the way back,” he pulled the car off the street. Jen got out of the car and stood at the side of the road as we pulled away. “I’ll come back and get her. No sense in keeping you when you know that you don’t want the job.” I looked back at Jen, who stood on the side of the road and watched Manny’s car pull away.

We didn’t speak as we drove back to Woburn. He left me in the parking lot, smugly wished me luck in my job search, and then pulled out of the parking lot on his way back to where he’d left Jen.

Today the woman at work had her “shadowing day” for the company she interviewed. I am 99% sure that it’s the same sort of scenario that I had encountered back when I was 22. Since then I’ve honed my crap filter and learned what questions to ask when seeking a job. Yes, I did once end up in the back row at a hotel ball room listening to some clown convince me and a room full of people to sell water filters—but I stood up and walked out after listening for five minutes.

I imagine that the girl at work is honing her crap filter tonight as I write. And I imagine that Manny is probably living off the grid with a group of “brothers and sisters” that have re-named him “Moon Shadow.”

Who Was that Woman?

Just today at work I was walking out to go to the ladies room in the hallway. We keep the doors at work locked at all times, and we all have the swipe card things that we use to get in. I was walking out at the same time as a co-worker, and a woman walked in as we were walking out. I looked at the woman as she passed me, and watched her wander over to a cube. I assumed she belonged there, but it kind of bothered me that she didn’t look at me and say hello, and my spidey senses began to tingle.

“Hey, who was that woman?” I asked my co-worker in the hallway.

“I don’t know. But she looked familiar,” co-worker replied.

Instantly I was reminded of the time when I worked for a dot.com in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The building where I worked was an 18 story building, but nine of them were for parking. I worked on the tenth floor, which was the first floor that contained offices. We had the same set up, where the bathrooms were outside of the locked doors of the offices, and we all had swipe cards that we used to get in. We were strongly discouraged from propping the doors open for any reason, just as we are at my current office.

One afternoon an email circulated from HR which said that a number of my co-workers had their wallets stolen from their bags at their desks that day. Their credit cards were used on Newbury Street in Boston, which is kind of like the Rodeo Drive of Boston and houses expensive boutiques like Versace. I opened my backpack and saw that not only my wallet was still there, but my debit card was still in there as well. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued to read the email.

The Boston Police department had apprehended a woman who had stolen the wallets of my co-workers on the same day. The email, again, warned us about letting strangers into the building. I listened to my co-workers rumble about not having recalled letting anyone in. But I had to laugh when the Boston PD described the woman, and the description was relayed in the email.

Ahem.

She was a black woman who stood six feet tall.

She wore yellow, turquoise and orange clothes.

Yet nobody in my office recalled letting her in. That’s what happens when geeks don’t look up from their computers, or look beyond their pocket protectors.

I’m New Here

Over the course of my career I’ve worked for many different companies. All of these companies were different, but there’s one thing each of these companies has in common. Everyone sitting in the cubicles and offices has a first day. First days are great in that you can claim ignorance about any question you are asked “I am not sure about that, you see, it’s my first day working here…”

It constantly amazes me how first days differ from company to company. I remember when I started my first job out of college. On my first day I was taken out to lunch by my co-workers, I was shown around all day long, and I got to know the people that I ended up working with for the next year and a half. It was such a welcoming atmosphere and in my mind it set the expectation for how first days in the corporate world are supposed to go. At my second job I didn’t pack a lunch because I was 23 and I assumed that I’d have the same sort of reception as I’d had at my first job. Boy was I wrong; in fact I don’t recall ever being taken to lunch again on my first day at any other job I’ve held.

But it’s not just the social interaction that takes place on first days that is different from company to company. It’s the actual orchestration of the first day. Will I go on a new hire orientation on my first day? Will my office supplies be laid out on my desk when I get there, next to the stack of paperwork I need to fill in as a new hire? Will I be handed an overstuffed file folder with all the relevant information of my first project and be told “have at it”? Will I be left alone while everyone else rushes through their day because they don’t have time to say hello to me, let alone train me? Everywhere I have worked has done it a bit differently, and I am always thankful to see that some thought had been put into my arrival on my first day.

In the late 90’s I worked for a series of dot.coms in the Boston area and I vividly remember my first day at an online technology news magazine where I worked for two years. I was the first person to be hired in that department by a man who clearly did not put any thought to the fact that he’d have a new hire starting. My boss said “Here’s your office, there’s the ladies room, have a good day.” Then he turned and headed for his own office. That was it. There was no “Hey, why don’t you go to this file on the server and familiarize yourself with this project I am going to have you work on.” There was no “Hey, take a look at this site and let me know what you would propose to make the user experience work better.” All I got was “Here’s your office, have a good day.” At least he showed me my desk and didn’t just leave me in the lobby—I mean, really, can I complain?

I sat in my office for an hour or so, thinking he’d come back to talk to me about my job. So I surfed the company’s web site and got more familiar with it. I roamed the hallways and introduced myself to people who weren’t so engrossed in their day that they looked up to say hello to me. I lurked outside my boss’s office while he endlessly droned on the phone, never beckoning me to come in and wait or never holding his hand over the receiver to say “I’ll come to your office in a bit and we’ll talk.”

I called Todd, to give him my new work phone number and he asked, “How’s your first day going?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s weird. My boss just kinda left me in here with nothing to do. I am looking at the train schedule in my purse trying to decide if I should leave here right at 5 to catch the 5:40 train, or should I wait and catch the 6:15? I am so bored!”

“I think you should wait for the later train, it will make a better impression,” he suggested. I stared longingly at the pencil on my desk, wanting to stab myself in the eye with it rather than stay for a minute longer than I had to.

I waited around the office, and my boss finally came and talked to me at 5:30 or so. He didn’t mention leaving me alone for the entire day. He didn’t mention any plans for working with me the next day. He asked me how my day was.

“Well, I think that tomorrow I would like to sit with you so I can get my hands on my first project,” I replied with what I hoped would be a display of my motivation. Instead it probably came out like “I am bored out of my fricken skull, will you please give me something to do or I am going to break the window and jump out of it merely for something that would occupy my time for a few hours.”

The next day came and went just like the first. Before I knew it a month went by, then another. I was given a project, but it was so slow going I didn’t have enough work to occupy me. The boss hired another employee to work in the same capacity I’d been hired for, but he worked on different projects. At the time I had no idea that this guy was as bored as I was. We both took great efforts to look busy, probably afraid that the other would pull the job out from under us. After working there for about six months, our department was being disbanded and we needed to find jobs in other departments. The company was big enough that this was possible. Finally this co-worker and I had lunch one day, before we both went our separate ways in the company, and we laughed about how bored we’d been, how ignored by the boss we’d felt, and how pressured we’d felt to maintain this semblance of being busy. At least he had an office where his back wasn’t to the door so he could look busy on his computer when he was really surfing and shopping online. I sat in a cube, and constantly checked my back when I was surfing for non-work-related items online.

Most of my days spent at that company were spent like my first day there—bored and trying not to look bored. I’ve since learned that how I spend my first day on a job will set the tone for how the rest of my tenure there will go. At my first day I socialized, and I spend my time there socializing with some of the nicest people I’d ever met and some first days had been spent going over the company's systems and policies, which sets the tone for how my work will be completed.

So, it is true—first impressions are almost always the correct ones.

Little Debbie Can Suck It

My blog pal, the Taoist Biker, got me thinking about childhood. His wife brought home some Little Debbie snack cakes, and TB was instantly returned to the time when he was young and his mom used to bring Little Debbie home to play. Then I got to thinking about the things my mom used to make or bring home when I was a kid. It really is amazing how the taste, the smells, the textures bring me back to being a little kid.

My Mom, as I may have mentioned, emigrated to the US from Poland in 1961. She used to tell me stories about growing up on a farm in post-war Poland. She told me stories about how she and her classmates at school would line up to get a daily dose of fish oil when meat was scarce. She milked the cows, she chopped the wood (and subsequently took the butt end of the axe to her own forehead at age 9), and she harvested the crops with her brothers and sisters. My grandfather would store meat in snowmen in the winter because there was no refrigeration in their home.

Usually she would tell these stories when I complained about the lack of Hostess, Little Debbie and Oscar Meyer products in the house. My cousins had these foods, but we didn’t often have them in our house. The boys who lived next door snacked on Slim Jims while we snacked on homemade kielbasa that was smoked in my Grandfather’s basement smokehouse. Hot dogs were bought from the deli case, burgers were made of ground beef and contained hunks of onion instead of the preformed burger patties, and we didn’t eat Oscar Meyer bologna, we ate Gem Polish Loaf from the deli case instead. Of course Mom would tell me how they didn’t have a deli in Poland, and how I should be glad I wasn’t slaughtering the cow, roasting it and cutting it up myself just to have a sandwich.

When I was in kindergarten Mom brought in paczki (pronounced PUNCH-key) for my birthday. Paczki are the Polish equivalent to the donut, only it’s spherical, is filled with marmalade, and weighs about a metric ton when ingested and mixed with saliva. Most of the other moms at Warehouse Point School would bring in clever looking cupcakes baked into an ice cream cone, or sugar cookies cut into this shape or that depending on the season. Of course, kindergarten me was completely mortified at the mound of paczki she brought in. She carried them in a gigantic white enamel bowl that she would use to kneed dough. This bowl was something you’d see on the set of M*A*S*H and the enamel was faded from overuse. The pile of paczki was barely contained by this bowl, so she covered the pile with a dish towel to keep any paczki with ideas of escape from hopping out, rolling down the hall and out the doors to the freedom of the playground. Just the week before Mom brought in the paczki, Mrs. Sheldon brought in her sugar cookies, in the shape of letters of the first name of every kid in the class. I ate my “B” shaped sugar cookies, which were brought in on a platter covered in saran wrap and not in a stainless steel bowl covered in a towel. Yet, my Mom proudly held out this bowl, proclaiming that the paczki would be the best thing Mrs. Burg’s kindergarten class would ever eat.

There are certain things that instantly bring back memories of my Mom when I was a little kid. The smell of cinnamon bread brings me back to when Mom would bake it from scratch, and the loaves cooled lined up on the counter. Her cinnamon bread was such a treat, and she would even make it for me when I’d go home from college for the weekend. I’ve since made cinnamon bread, and am instantly reminded of Mom kneeding dough, and giving me little lumps of it to play with.

A few summers ago one of my customers at the dive shop, a Polish man, brought me some blueberry pierogi (pyeh-RUG-ee), which are kind of like ravioli, but are half-moon shaped. That night I ate them and tears streamed down my cheeks as I remembered Mom making my favorite, blueberry pierogi, on a summer day. The chewiness of the dough, the tartness and sweetness of the blueberry, the sour cream and sugar I mixed and put on top melting in the warmth of the pierogi, stained purple from the hot blueberry filling oozing out from where I just cut into the dough with the side of my fork. Blueberry pierogi aren’t just a food, they are an experience to be had—especially when your mom makes them because she knows they are your favorite. I ate the pierogi that some other Polish mother made and I was instantly transported to childhood, when Mom said “If you go outside and pick the blueberries, I will make you pierogi tonight.” And I grabbed the colander and raced out to our bushes and sat in the sun frantically plucking the berries off the bush, an equal number of berries landing on the bowl as were stuffed into my mouth.

Little Debbie and Oscar Meyer still are not staples in my home. I tried a Little Debbie snack cake not long ago and was largely unsatisfied with it as I felt like all I could taste were the chemicals that Debbie uses to make her cakes last for years on the shelves. But I have blueberry bushes that I cannot wait to pick this summer, and my sisters have Mom’s pierogi recipe.

And now that I think about it, now I would give up all the “B” shaped sugar cookies in the world for one of Mom’s paczki.

Bullet Dodged

I am a Google stalker. I admit it. I look up the names of people I know, people I used to know, co-workers, relatives and anyone I have come into contact with to see what they’re up to online. Occasionally an old boyfriend will cross my mind, so I’ll Google him to see if there’s anything interesting about him (interesting meaning that his life took a serious downturn since he dumped me oh so many years ago.)

This morning I was eating breakfast and goofing around on Google, trying to come up with a name of someone to Google stalk. The name of a guy I dated for a few weeks when I first moved to Boston crossed my mind. I met him at a bar when I’d lived in the Boston area for all of five minutes. I was 22; he was 23 and impossibly handsome. We quickly began to spend all of our free time together, and I was instantly head over heels. After a few weeks of having a great time together, he broke up with me claiming that he needs some space to work out some issues in his life. We decided to be friends, which of course was agony for me because I wanted to be more than friends. But I was a good sport, and I went along with this “just friends” nonsense. One night he came over to my apartment and we cooked dinner together. Over the meal he proceeded to tell me, in excruciating detail about a woman he’d begun to sleep with—you know, because that’s what friends do to people who want to be more than friends over dinner. I decided at that moment that he could be more of a casual acquaintance than friend, after I’d grinned through dinner. I didn’t call him all week, and felt this heaviness descend on me. I couldn’t function as his friend, and my co-workers were so sick of hearing about it.

The following Saturday morning I got a box that he’d mailed me that contained a CD that he bought for me and book he’d been dying for me to read. I looked around my apartment and saw similar gifts and a few articles of clothing he’d left at my place. I scooped all of them up, tossed them into my car and high-tailed it to his apartment. I burst into the front door, didn’t bother with pleasantries with the roommates, barreled into his bedroom and dumped the armload of stuff onto his bed with a disgruntled “I can’t be friends with you. I want to be more than friends, and you want me to be your friend. This isn’t working for me,” and I turned on my heel and walked out.

He chased me down the stairs, as I carefully navigated them because my knees were shaking so hard I thought for sure I’d fall down the stairs and make a complete fool of myself—which didn’t make for a quick and dramatic getaway in which I could look cool.

“Beej, wait! Would you please just talk to me?” he called after me. I ignored him and focused all my attention to the bottom of the stairs and ran through the front door of his apartment building, trying hard not to cry and to control my rubbery knees. He managed to catch me by the shoulder, spun me around and he hugged me. He told me how much he valued our friendship, while I held up my hands between us and told him that I didn’t want to be just friends. I wriggled free of his grasp and headed for my car.

I got into my car and drove off toward home, taking deep breaths to calm my racing heart and still shaking knees. I thought for sure I’d feel entirely heartbroken and unable to continue existing. But no, actually a sense of relief came over me, with a surge of confidence. I knew my life would be great without him; after all it was great before I knew him so it only stands to reason that it would continue to be great after I knew him. And I was right. My life has been great without him; even greater than I imagined as I drove home that Saturday afternoon. I have an awesome husband, whose hair glows red in the sun and who makes sure that everything I could possibly want out of life is brought to me. He makes me laugh every single day, and makes sure I know I am loved.

It’s been almost 12 years since that fateful Saturday when I went to this guy’s apartment to return his things, and it’s been 10 years since I’ve actually seen him. He tried to remain friends with me for a few years, and would occasionally invite me to a party over email. I politely declined every invitation and asked “So, how are you?” He would write back about some “meaningless” relationship he was in (his word, not mine) and basically how he wasn’t really doing much with his life. He stopped emailing me invitations once when he’d asked me “Enough about me, how are you?” I wrote back, “Let’s see, I am engaged, just started graduate school and am restoring a 41’ sailboat. Life is awesome.”

I haven’t thought about him in ages, except for this morning when I Googled him and saw a picture of him on a web page. In the last 12 years this impossibly handsome guy has taken on a John Belushi on the morning after kind of a look.

I cannot imagine how different life would be had that relationship worked out so many years ago. As much as I hated hearing “Everything happens for a reason,” from my friends at the time, it really is true. Everything does happen for a reason.

I consider it a bullet dodged.