Knitters-Knitters

Last Exit to Where the Tree Grows

When I love something I tend to name it multiple times.  One of my children, for example, has been called everything from Sausage Rumpus to Buggy to Meat Feet, and has now accepted that she's going to be Cream Cheese for the duration.  Our deal is as long as I don't slip up and call her this in public, she gives me the continued right to use it privately.

I named this baby sweater many times while I was working on it. After knitting two scarves which were mind-numbing soul-killing exercises in self-control, I wanted to make something where I did everything exactly the way I wanted.  This meant Rowan Kidsilk Haze and Aura, it meant lots of colors, it meant ruffles, and it meant using the antique Czech buttons that LB's mom gave me for Christmas. 

It looks like there's quite a lot of fussy buttonry on this 6 month-sized sweater, but I wanted to use all the buttons that came on the card.  Each button is different, and they look more beautiful together than they do apart.

Whenever I do something in exactly the manner I want, I jump through flaming hoops of self-justification to validate that decision.  I realize this sounds beyond silly, as if I expect one of the bus drivers in the Keshet parking lot to look at me sternly and say, "You're not fooling anyone -- that project could easily be made with Manos of Uruguay you already own instead of Noro you had to buy."  But it's one of the knitting games I play with myself: like not allowing myself to open a box of yarn I've ordered until I've blocked the project I'm currently finishing.  Or making myself do ten rows on a "have to" before allowing myself a large block of time for the "want to" project.  I'm guessing I'm not the only knitter who does this sort of thing.

The beauty of knitting for a baby you've never met is that you have no idea of her preferences. What I do know is that her mother is a very conscious mother.  By that I don't mean she reads tons of books on various parenting philosophies and attends workshops and symposia on the mothering experience.  I mean that she pays attention to that inner voice that tells her what feels right and what feels instinctual, and does not allow the pressure of current trends to influence her.  I think we can all agree she'd want me to knit her baby a sweater in which every single choice, from the colors to the yarn to the buttons, was based on what felt pleasurable to me. 

This is the Annabelle Lee sweater (loosely based on Elizabeth Zimmermann's February Baby Sweater).  Because this sweater, ...she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me.  More pics and details can be found here:

Hold It

It's hard for me to look at Clover these days without remembering LB's paternal grandma -- elegantly feeble with just a faint tinge of rancor -- who died in 2002.  She was not grandmotherly in a hand-braided rug sort of way: she was mid-century modern, pouring over the entire newspaper, every day, with her giant magnifying glass. 

Having grown up essentially without grandparents, it was easy for me to call LB's grandmother Grandma, in the same way I had called the ex's grandmother Grandma.  Both women were from the South, but there the resemblance ends.  Ex's grandma had always been very kind of me, but even when the ex and I were together, it was clear she was uncomfortable with my...multiculturalism.  She would have preferred I was just plain Jewish.  That might have been odd and hard to get used to, but it would have been a tidy, one-word answer to the question what are you?

I was apprehensive about meeting LB's Grandma because you know that older generation: they can get hung up on little data points like that their eldest treasure, their first grandson, is heavily involved with a woman who is still technically married to someone else.  But LB's grandma was a clean slate person, and I felt no judgment from her.  She seemed to take me as I came: this young woman Joe is seeing who --go figure -- makes him smile.  When we left her house that evening, she took my hand, leaned in and said, "I'll see you again."

It didn't worry me much that both our families had been a little reluctant to get too cross-attached to either of us since we looked for all the world like a rebound relationship, one in which LB was playing the role of Soft Place to Land.  I knew that time would tell, we'd get married, we'd have children, years would pass, and everyone would figure out that I wasn't going anywhere.  But it felt good to have someone whose opinion mattered verbally acknowledge that it was safe to get to know me.

Second memorable quote, two years later: I'm in the hospital having just given birth to Sabina, and Grandma has called to congratulate me.  She did not ask if They knew what caused the missing hand, or if They had ideas on what should be done about it.  What she said was, "Oh, and about that left hand?  Don't worry about it.  What does a person need a left hand for, anyway?  I may just have mine removed, now that I'm thinking about it."

Quote the third: LB and I are are visiting Grandma in her retirement home with four children in tow, all ages four and under.  It is our last visit before we move from the Bay Area to Wisconsin, and though we don't say it, we're all pretty sure this is the last visit to Grandma, period.  As we are about to leave, Grandma says, "Now, Jen?" like she's just remembering something.  "Jen, you do whatever you want." 

This quote spoke volumes.  Our decision to move to Wisconsin when LB's entire department at LS&Co. was "reorganized" out of existence was, as you can imagine, not a popular one with his California-based family.  There were practical reasons to go to Wisconsin: it's a much cheaper place to be unemployed, and since LB was going to start a new career, one we had no idea would "take," his Levi's severance would last a whole lot longer in Wisconsin than it would in the Bay Area.  But let's not overlook the obvious: we were going to my stomping ground, to be near my parents, my brothers, my Great Lake, my hometown, and my gastroenterologist.  Grandma's advice showed that not only had she heard a few things about the Sullivan Opinion on this decision, but that I should ignore it.

I like to think Grandma did whatever she wanted, and this picture of her reclining with bon-bons makes a convincing argument.

This afternoon when I brought Olive home from school, I found Clover perched atop the dirty clothes pile.  She gave a small wag of her tail and looked at me as if to say, "I could come aaalllll the way over there and greet you.  Or you could just be a love, spare me the labour, and reach in here to pet me." 

I remembered the last time I spoke to Grandma on the phone, shortly before she died.  I asked her how she was feeling and she said, "Jen, at my age, you find yourself a comfortable position and just hold it."

The Pivotal Role of My Sister Lo

After that clandestine week in Los Angeles during which LB spent quality time with me his Aunt and Uncle, certain truths became inescapable.  First, this had not been a flash in the pan sort of, "Could it have worked out between us?" week that ended in sheepish handshakes all around.  Second, I did not have the stomach for living a double life. Since LB and I began writing to each other, my ileum had been having regular out-of-body experiences.  I know some people claim to have felt their soul or their consciousness hover just them and that it was an amazing, fascinating sensation.  And I don't doubt this.  It's just that I believe all portions of my digestive tract perform better from the inside.

I thought it would be wise to get away for a little bit, to a neutral location, so that I could think about whether I was going to stay in this marriage.  Perhaps someplace near friends or family.  Is it my fault that my sister and her family just happened to live in Menlo Park, a stone's throw from San Francisco?  I could -- and have --wasted precious hours wondering if I would have gone to visit Lo if she lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio.  I didn't go visit Lo just to see LB, but I also didn't go visit her to not see him, either.

It was not hard to get away for a week to "think about things."  Soon-to-be-ex was not blind to the fact that we fought tooth and nail, and more than one argument had ended in a silence full of animosity yet oddly free of anger.  I'm not a ranter by nature.  I don't shout: if anything, I'm a soft talker. I don't throw things, I've never doused someone with Diet Squirt, and I have never chased a person down with a can of bug spray, threatening to starve him to death by never making his lunch again (hi, Mom!). 

But I have shut down, stared hard at something in the distance and walked away.  When I told ex I wanted to leave and spend time with my sister to "think," he did not argue.  He did not know about LB; what he knew was that over the past week, I had stopped fighting back and the silence was unbearable.

To understand the way this week in Menlo Park went down, you have to know a few things about my sister.  She's not just a soft-talker; she's a seldom-talker.  Thus, everything she does say is heavy with import.  The one time I accompanied her to book group, I noticed that on the few occasions she made it clear she was about to comment, every other member of the group stopped talking as if their switches had been flicked off and waited in breathless anticipation. 

I have spent most of my life trying to think of appropriate adjectives for my sister and come up scratch.  Suffice it to say, I was not entirely correct when I said that I have two kinds of relatives: the kind that get right up in your face and demand to know your business, and the kind who are dead.  Lo is her own category.  She didn't ask many questions those first few days.  I accompanied her on walks with my little nephew, we took him to school, we went out for lunch at "Late for the Train."  I told her I was not happy with my husband, and she did not ask for much elaboration.

It was her idea to go into the city one day, and I asked her if she'd mind if I visited a friend of mine from Brown, this guy named "Joe."   I explained that he lived alone in San Francisco, and that I knew him from the writing program at Brown.  She asked, "Is he gay?"

This was too easy. 

I said, "Well, he and I have never really discussed it (true) but...you know...single fiction writer living in San Francisco..." also true!  I spoke to LB on the phone that night to tell him when our train was coming in and said, "Oh, and in case it comes up: you're gay." 

He was unphased.  "That's fine, I've passed for gay before."

LB met us at the train.  After brief hellos, Lo and my nephew went to... the aquarium?  The zoo?  I have no idea.  LB and I got on a bus and went to his apartment.  That part I remember.

For someone who had never considered herself a risk-taking, law-scoffing liar, I was disturbingly good at it.  This is not to say I didn't feel guilt: I did, but in surprising situations.  The guilt I felt toward my husband was nothing compared to the guilt I felt toward my family, and the fact that I had made them unwitting accomplices.  It came in waves, like that evening when Lo's family and I went to a Mexican feast prepared by our cousin Amy (all the Gonsier cousins live in the Bay Area), and she had left the cilantro on the side because she'd heard I didn't care for it.  And even that was nothing compared to how I felt when my cousins gave me a late wedding present on that same evening.  Ouch.

The morning before I was due to go back to Los Angeles, Lo suggested to me that I try to stick it out one complete year.  From a legal standpoint, leaving at one year is no more difficult than leaving at seven months.  And if it hadn't been for LB, I might have taken Lo's advice.  The future ex and I had been fighting for the last six years -- what difference would a few more months matter? 

I thought about telling Lo about LB, I really did.  But by this point I had 1) used her house as a home base while I went to visit my inamorata in San Francisco 2) led her to believe LB was gay and 3) signed a document stating that if anything happened to her and her husband, I would raise my nephew.  Let's just say the timing felt... awkward.

I told her that I could not, would not stay a year, and she sighed in exasperation.  Brat! I could hear her thinking.  She grabbed the most recent issue of The New Yorker and wrote out a hasty time-line in the white spaces on the cover.  It included telling the ex I was unhappy in the marriage, going to a few sessions of obligatory marriage counseling, getting a job, and moving out.  In this time-line, I'm sure she imagined I'd be moving someplace within L.A.  Then, she drove me to the airport. Luckily, she did not offer to wait with me at the gate.

I missed my flight back to Los Angeles.  This can happen when one sits firmly rooted on the vinyl bench and ignores the first, second and third boarding calls.  I've heard that flights from SF to LAX depart almost hourly, but I could not get on another flight that night.  Again, that's what happens when instead of going to a ticket agent and booking another flight, you go to the payphone, call LB and invite yourself to spend the night.  After that, I must have called the ex and told him I was spending another night with my sister: I honestly don't remember.  The lies were flowing so fast and free by that point I could barely keep up with them.  And as for Lo, I let her assume I was back in Los Angeles already.

When I did get back to Los Angeles I lasted two and a half weeks: two and a half weeks which I will not describe except to say this.  It matters not how verbally abusive a person is in his marriage.  The person who leaves is the villain, then and forever, and the sooner you can eat up all that blame with a spoon, the faster you can get out the door.  I admitted to everything except the fact that I was involved with LB: I was the failure, the quitter, the immature one, the embodiment of bad faith, the third gunman on the grassy knoll, and at one point I conceded that yes, it's possible I was really a lesbian.

I probably would have left sooner, but at that time plane fare was exorbitant without two weeks' notice.  Then I moved in with my friend C.Y. and her husband, who lived in Sunnyvale (another stop on that train that goes from Menlo Park to San Francisco).  A week after that, I had my own apartment just on the border of Nob Hill and the Tenderloin (I believe Herb Caen called it the Tendernob) and a temp job at U.C. San Francisco. 

The rest is just logistics.

But wait!  I see hands waving in the air.  There's a loose end: when did Lo find out LB wasn't gay? 

This part of the story I don't like to tell because it makes me look really, really bad.  You know, unlike the rest of the story where I come off like Mother Teresa. 

I had been living in San Francisco for a few months, and didn't see Lo all that often during this time.  She was busy: first she went to Jamaica.  Like a good sister, I went to her house every other day to feed her dang bird cockatiel.  Then Lo took all the pressure off (if you know my family, then you know there were a lot of worried phone calls during my seemingly rash departure) by conceiving a child. 

A tonic!  Something else for Perlmans to talk about!  I don't think I've ever been so relieved to see someone get pregnant.

Now, children; there existed a time before voice-mail and before cell phones when all we had were answering machines.  The more broke among us had the kind you could not check up on remotely.  By this time LB and I had developed a sort of pattern.  I stayed at his place on Thursday nights, much to Ruthie the dachshund's chagrin.  Then, since he only worked half-days on Fridays, LB would go straight to my apartment after work, walk Ruthie and play with her for a little while. 

One Thursday evening, Lo called me and there was no answer.  She called again late Thursday night, and still no answer.  She called again Friday morning: no answer.  By this time she was Worried and drove all the way into the city (this involves crossing a bridge--something that terrified her) and got the manager to let her into my apartment.  There she found Ruthie, alone after LB had walked and played with her, and then gone back to his place.  I was still at work.

When I got home late Friday afternoon I had many messages, as you can imagine, and had no choice but to call Lo and let her know I was having more of a social life than one would expect at this point, post separation.  I used the "your mother is on the roof" approach.

"You remember that friend of mine, Joe, from Brown?"

"Yes...?"

"Well, it turns out I was wrong about him being gay."

Jen and LB in Sunnyvale, CA circa March, 1992.  Photo taken by C.Y.

The Timeline of an Unfamous Person

Amelia of Duyvken wrote in her comment on Friday's entry: Well, I am glad that you went to USC because I am assuming that facilitated the meeting with LB?

No, Amelia; that would be too easy.  I'm sure you never intended this, but you've given me an excuse to write an exhaustive time-line chronicling the story of LB and me.

1965 Jen is born.  She's the 4th in a family of 4 children.  Though her siblings are 8, 11, and 14 years older than she, they all have the same parents.

~ C   H  I  L  D  H  O  O  D ~

1983 Jen goes to Cornell.

1985 Jen meets who will eventually become her ex husband. He is a year ahead of her in school, and is graduated later that following spring.

1987 Jen graduates and moves to Long Beach, CA to be with future ex:  an aerospace engineer who works on the MD-11.  Jen learns that the MD-11 and the M-16 are very different things.

1987 Jen takes ill.

Explosively, painfully ill.

Late 1987: Jen is diagnosed with Crohn's and spends the next 6 months on 60 mg of prednisone daily.  The less said the better.  Jen feverishly completes grad school applications while sick, a superstitious insurance policy against being ill in the fall of 1988.

Spring, 1988 Jen has a bowel resection.  It's considered elective at the time, though surgical findings include an enormous abscess that had at most ten days left in it before it could be expected to rupture.  Phew.

Late Spring, 1988: Back in Long Beach, detoxing from Prednisone.  Jen and the future ex are in a stalemate that will continue until 1991, through their collective post grad education at Brown, USC and Berkeley: they fight about why they are not married.  He feels they should not marry because they fight too much.  She feels if they were married, they'd have nothing to fight about. 

Future historians have approached this stalemate as a potential PhD thesis and then abandoned it, all arriving at the unanswerable question of why prestigious universities were willing to not only admit but give funding to two such elementally stupid people.

Fall 1988: Jen leaves for Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island.  There she begins a platonic, yet fraught with romantic tension "friendship," with Joe Sullivan, a fellow fiction writer in the grad program.  At first meeting she renames him Lawn Boy, or LB, given his resemblance to the boy who used to cut her parents' (and your parents') lawn when she was growing up. 

The name sticks.  The Artist Formerly Known as Joe likes it.  If there's any injury to his pride at a nickname that implies harmlessness, it is replaced by joy at the very act of being named.

But LB commits several unpardonable mistakes: he is too nice, too polite, and has a bad haircut.  He writes Jen letters and mails them, even though they live less than a mile apart.  He leaves letters at Jen's place of work, embarrassing her.  Finally, she confronts him (over the phone) and asks what he wants.  He says, "I would like to try a relationship with you." 

Jen has more words at her disposal now, but at that moment, the only one she can come up with is weenie.  It sounded weenie.  Back in Long Beach she is hip deep in marriage roulette, and here in Providence, someone is inviting her to a penny ante poker game. 

She makes LB an applesauce raisin loaf and thrusts it in his hands when he makes a move to hug her good-bye, before Thanksgiving break.  For the rest of the semester, she and LB do not speak.

January, 1989: Jen has a horrific meeting with Robert Coover where she learns that her primary role in the Brown MFA program is to fund the TA-ships and scholarships of the students Coover does like.  Shattered, she walks the mile back to her apartment.  As she passes the intersection of Waterman and Thayer, she sees LB heading into a bank with another girl.  He looks animated and solicitous, as does the girl.  Any lingering doubt about leaving Providence that Jen may have had is gone in a poof of gold medal flour.

About a week later, Jen transfers to USC.  She moves in with her future ex husband and his poor sod of a roommate who did nothing to deserve being thrust into the middle of a fight to the death between two rabid weasels.  One evening, the three of them watch an episode of Cheers where Carla poses the question: Hey Frasier, can I ask you something? When you and Lilith wake up in the morning which one of you is the first to to scream "What have I done?"

The roommate looks at Jen and future ex slyly to see if they're finding this sitcom moment eerily familiar, but they are too deep in their battle of wills to notice.

Fall, 1990: Future ex is admitted to the Haas School of Business at Berkeley.  Jen stays at USC.  For you Aussies, this move puts them about seven hours apart by car.  Neither of them is willing to put their education on hold to follow the other.  A marriage proposal would make such a sacrifice well worth it to Jen, but no proposal is forthcoming.  Briefly, Jen breaks up with the future ex.

During this time she writes a letter to LB.  She's not sure he ever wants to hear from her again and she dislikes the ambiguity a lack of response would give, so she includes a self-addressed stamped envelope for him to return.  Sending this envelope would mean, "Letter received -- no further contact desired."

LB writes back and uses his own envelope.  It turns out that he got the graduate student spot on the literary journal -- the one freed up by Jen's departure -- and he's now dating Maxine, the editor that Jen stood up.  LB and Maxine will go through three years of on-again off-again torture, but that's their story to tell. 

As Jen and LB continue to exchange letters and frustrating phone calls, Maxine comes up with a special nickname for Jen: That Slut from L.A.  Yes, she renamed Jen, and it's a name that acknowledges how dangerous she is: how could Jen not love it?

June, 1991: Jen and the future ex marry.  Every atom in the universe tries to let them know this is a bad idea, including but not limited to Jen's colon.  They rent an adorable house in the Miracle Mile district.  By now Jen has her MFA, and future ex has his MBA and a job. 

Oddly enough, being married has not decreased their fighting one bit.  During games of Pictionary, idle discussions about celebrities, and musings over why certain cities observe Trick-or-Treating on days other than Halloween, they prove that there is no topic that can't become a source of contention.  They bet on fights in which neither of them has a dog.  Speaking of which...

August, 1991: Jen and future ex get a dog: Ruthie, the noble miniature dachshund.

November, 1991: Jen and the future ex drive to a pet supply store to buy a dog carrier, so that Ruthie can accompany them on the plane when they go to Milwaukee for Thanksgiving.  Since there is no place to park in front of the store, Jen runs in and makes the purchase while future ex drives slowly around the block. 

As Jen waits for his car to return, she has a thought: do I leave now, or do I wait until my parents are too old to help me get out of this?  This thought seems to come from nowhere, and for a moment, Jen is paralyzed and does not notice her future ex, parked right in front of her, angrily honking the horn.

Thanksgiving, 1991: Jen and the future ex go to Milwaukee, to spend the holiday with Jen's family.

Back in the dark ages, frequent flier miles were fairly new and came with all sorts of strings attached.  One big string was "black-out dates."  Namely, the miles could not be used on any day when you could possibly need them, like the days surrounding all major holidays.  For that reason, it was decided Jen would stay in Milwaukee until the following Tuesday, so that her return ticket could be paid for with miles.  Since the future ex had to work, he had no choice but to return on Sunday.

The Monday after Thanksgiving, 1991: Jen is at her parents' house, and she hears the mail come through the slot in the front door.  At one time there was a little metal box that would catch the mail, but it fell off years ago and now the mail just lands on the floor.

OFD, Jen's dad, has a quirk about the mail.  He likes for someone else to pick it up from the floor, and then organize all the envelopes in one pile, face down, on the red table in the entryway.  Periodicals go on top.  Mail not addressed to him should be removed from the stack before he goes through it.  All this is because he enjoys the elaborate ritual of going through the mail, carefully feeling the front of each envelope to see if there's a plastic window (boring: probably a bill).  No window means it could be a check from an attorney: at that time he did a lot of expert witness work.

When Jen picks up the mail from the floor and begins the sorting process, she see her name on an envelope in familiar handwriting.  It's from San Francisco.  She and LB have not been in contact for close to two years at this point, and he does not know where she lives.  Thus, he wrote her at her parents' house.  Amazing, that this letter arrives at a time when she is at her parents' house but her husband is not.  Also amazing: she is the only one present when the mail falls to the floor that day.

Letters are like nicknames.  It doesn't matter what the letter says: the important thing is that it was written and mailed at all.  The letter could contain statements like, "I'm over you," or, "I never think about you," or, "I don't even know who you are anymore," or, "I'm guessing you're married by now and could care less about hearing from me," and it would be the same as if the writer had written, "I'm still in love with you," over and over again.  We don't go through the trouble of writing letters to people who aren't on our minds, and we don't bother renaming people who we don't see as lasting characters in our personal story.

This letter was so full of bluster and huffiness that Jen tells her husband about it on the phone, and offers to read it to him.  She doesn't like keeping secrets, and the level of animosity the letter expresses will put the future ex at ease (he's heard enough about that guy from Brown to be wary).  Right?

But Jen's husband is no idiot.  He says, "I don't need to hear the letter.  The important thing is, he's back in our lives again."

* * *

There's a line at the end of When Harry Met Sally where Harry says, "...when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible." 

Emerson said roughly the same thing about a hundred years earlier: "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."

Thanksgiving, 1992:  Jen's divorced, LB and Jen are engaged and he comes to Milwaukee with her, to celebrate the holiday with her family.

They return to San Francisco on the same plane.

Hasty Exits

Today I called Clover's vet to order refills of one of Clover's medications. Clover takes four different pills for her heart: three which we get directly from the vet and one that we receive through mail order (the vet faxes in a prescription). The faxing/mail order thing is complicated because the company that sends the pills is slow and feeble, and it usually takes several fax attempts and phone calls from the vet's assistant to make it happen. For this reason I've gotten in the habit of always working with the same assistant at my vet's office (we'll call her Brandy) since she knows the ins and outs of dealing with this mail order company. But when I called this morning and asked for Brandy the assistant who answered the phone said, frostily, "Brandy does not work here anymore."

I'm just enough of a narcissist to feel a flash of, "It was me, wasn't it? She left because she really could not take one more exchange with that nervous little owner of that nervous little spaniel." But I'm level-headed enough to snap back and remind myself that in all likelihood, this hasty exit is about something going on in Brandy's life and has nothing to do with me.

I've made a few of these hasty departures myself. When I left Brown University for the graduate program at USC, I did it in a big hurry. My departure was so sudden that it took a long time for my subconscious to catch up. For weeks I dreamt I was going to the back lot of supermarkets to pick up empty boxes, then dreaming of packing those boxes, then shipping them and unpacking them in the Huntington Beach apartment I'd already been living in for over a month.

The spring semester had just begun at Brown, and each of the students were to meet with Robert Coover, who taught that semester's fiction workshop. During our one-on-one, he told me that I was not one of the applicants he had "pushed for." He told me that his son was now attending my alma mater, and one of the professors who'd written me a letter of recommendation had made a bargain with him. She told Coover that if his son wanted to be in her workshop (she was a popular teacher and admission into her fiction class was very competitive), then Jennifer Perlman needed to go from the "maybe" to the "yes" pile. While I was taking this in, Coover mentioned another of the recommendation letters in my file. He said, "He spoke so highly of your work, and I just don't get it because he and I tend to agree about everything."

Then he put down my file, looked at me very earnestly and said I should know that while some people feel that writing is their best mode of communication, there are others who come to realize they can better express themselves through skiing.

Back in those days, I did very different things than I do now. I went to school, and I worked thirty hours a week at a surprisingly cozy basement Kinko's copy shop. On weekends I went to pretentious poetry readings (some may call that redundant), drank bourbon (neat) and smoked Dunhills. I had friends who were not as deeply psychologically damaged as they liked to imagine they were. If I encountered a mentally challenged person, which happened rarely, I averted my eyes. But one thing was as true about me then as it is now: I did not ski. I do not ski.

I asked Coover what he didn't like about my work, and he said it was too traditional, linear, and reader-friendly. He preferred more innovative work. I asked if he was talking about subject matter: for instance, maybe he liked things like Kafka's Metamorphosis or Ionesco's Rhinoceros. But no, he meant he liked things that were actually experimental in format. He extolled the virtues of generative fiction, and his favorite novel was written without use of the letter E.

There was no question that I had to leave the program.

That might sound dramatic when we we're talking about the opinion of just one teacher, but it was a grad program of eight students and maybe four professors in total. Coover was the teacher. Him not only disliking my work but being ideologically opposed to it meant bad things for my future at Brown, both practically and emotionally. It could very well mean no T.A.-ship in my second year: something I'd been counting on. Worse still, there was the potential that I would start to believe him.

So I called my dad. OFD has never been capable of ordering a pizza over the telephone, and replacing the ink cartridge in his fountain pen is an iffy maneuver fraught with danger, but he could always make things happen. It turned out he knew a guy who knew a guy who ran the MFA program at USC. Because of the first guy's respect for my dad, he recommended me to his friend even though he'd never personally read my work. And in turn, so great was the second guy's respect for my dad's friend that he was willing to accept me into USC's program via referral alone.

I knew absolutely nothing about USC beyond the moniker "University of Spoiled Children," and I hadn't even known they had a graduate writing program. But when I heard that Richard Yates was on staff, that was all the information I needed.

Five days later I was on a plane to Los Angeles. Mid-flight, I remembered something: a week earlier, before that horrific meeting with Coover, I had a long phone conversation with the girl who edited Brown's undergraduate literary journal. We'll call her Maxine. Because the journal was an undergrad enterprise, only a limited number of grad students were allowed to work on it and it was very competitive, the right to spend hours slogging through fiction submissions without being paid. Several classmates of mine had unpleasant meetings with Maxine when they assumed that of course they could work on the journal and were then told, with less tact than they felt was appropriate, that they could not.

In my case, the conversation went well and I was almost sure I'd get to be on the journal's staff. The longer Maxine and I spoke on the phone, the more I knew that the face-to-face interview we scheduled for the next week was clearly a formality. Maxine was impressed that I'd been the editor of an undergrad literary magazine when I was in college, and since my undergrad education had taken place during the Pleistocene age, I came with secret knowledge of lightboxes and non-repro blue pencils and grueling, manual paste-up sessions to make the large, gridded pages "camera-ready." By 1989 none of these old-time skills would be required for working on any literary journal outside of the Amish community, but it scored me coolness points with Maxine nonetheless.

Maxine and I had spoken on the phone for a long time. Too long. She was so sure that she would be offering me a position and that I would be accepting it that she did something I'll blame on her youth: she told me about classmates of mine who had submitted stories to the magazine and gotten rejected, and she named names.

By the end of the conversation I wasn't so sure I wanted to work on the literary journal after all. The conversation with Maxine had, ultimately, left a bad taste in my mouth. But the next day, I had my meeting with Robert Coover. All thought of Maxine and the journal blipped from my consciousness, not to return until I was on an airplane Los Angeles-bound and realized I was, at that very moment, standing up Maxine.

I'm sure she heard within days that I had left Brown suddenly and permanently. But on that day, when she sat in the literary magazine office and I didn't show, did she take it personally? Did she wait long? Did she replay the conversation in her mind and wonder if it was something she said?

Twenty Years of Pix and LB

There's always the potential for disappointment on those "loaded" holidays like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and MLK, Jr. Day. This 20th anniversary of our first date did not disappoint. It's hard to complain about a day that begins with sleeping until 11 a.m. while LB takes the littlest child to her school, which, happily, does not acknowledge any holiday created A.D. Olive had school as usual but LB had the day off: like a lunar eclipse, this happens about once a year.

LB and my first stop was the Northbrook Court mall, to return the Miss Dior perfume LB got me for Christmas and to see if we could find something more appropriate. We did not have to use the store credit in the same department, but it was in the clerk's best interest for us to do so and she tried to ply me with wrinkle cream and "something for the lines under the eyes." First rule of sales: do not insult the customer! I had been considering a new eyeliner or lipstick, but instead, I found it strangely easy to give her a chilling gaze (under-eye bags and all) and move on.

We wandered to another department where we saw the most beautiful dress in the world, but which I did not think to photograph. After we got home, I regretted this lack of evidence -- I wanted to show it to all of you -- and searched for the dress online with no success.

I called the store where we saw the dress. The bored clerk transferred me to a phone that rang and rang and never went to voice mail.

Then LB called the store: totally different experience. The clerk who answered treated him like a prince, agreeing to search the racks for "more information" about this dress (you know, its favorite colors, its political affiliations, if it enjoys long walks on the beach...) and then call him back. Five minutes later she called back and claimed the dress had just been sold, but gave him the name of the designer, the line and the SKU. Armed with this new information, we went back online and again, got nowhere.

Apparently this gray, short-sleeved, jersey, scallop-hem dress by Fendi exists only in my imagination. I'm wondering if LB and the clerk were even talking about the same dress, because I find it hard to believe that it actually sold between noon and 5 p.m. today. At any rate, at $1600, my imagination is the closest I will ever come to this dress. Perhaps the Interwebs know this and for that reason, will not allow me to bookmark it and gaze upon it longingly.

We found this little number from the J. Crew "Crew Cuts" store and snapped it up immediately. It's for a certain little Spectaculan who loves bright colors, and it was half price. Washable, adorable, and suitable attire for walks in the woods during hunting season.

Next we went to P.F. Chang's, where I had never been. I may just be the last person on earth who had never had their lettuce leaf roll-ups. Very yummy.

Then, naturally, my cellphone rang. It was the Keshet nurse--Olive had exceeded the daily diarrhea limit. The nurse was very kind and said Olive could spend the rest of the school day in her office (I suspect she knew it was our anniversary, since I'd mentioned it to another Keshet staff member in response to why we could not attend the sibling support group), but we finished our lunch and picked up Olive just before 2 p.m. Beata came at around 3:30, which was when LB and I did all our dress-hunting phone shenanigans.

It was fun, this ridiculously thorough yet completely unproductive search for a garment we had no intention of buying. Usually when we have a date-night or some other situation where we can be alone together, I feel pressure to accomplish something. But this anniversary, the theme was lack of completion. A return of an item with no compensating purchase. A lunch cut short. A dress not found.

I took our picture while we were at P.F. Changs. Here we are being all in love and on a date and all.

And here we were, on our first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, twenty years ago.

Sled

Look what I got for Christmas from Sacramento Grandma and Granddad! Am I not totally awesome in my sweet, new ride?

Clover and Pam are too small to be effective sled dogs, but I have a more than satisfactory substitute.

I clap when I want to go faster.

Sometimes I like to close my eyes and pretend I have been seized as a capitalist political prisoner by the Russians, and exiled to the wilds of Siberia. Or at least Skokie.

Notice my special panda hat? A present from my beloved Beata. All my other hat are now dead to me.

Home, Jeeves.

A Happier Olive

For the past month or so, Olive has been in a special program at her school where she has at least one outing a day. She goes to places like Target, grocery shopping, pet supply shops, bowling, delis, and to the gym. These outings serve the dual purpose of inhibiting some of her impulsive behavior through change of pace and venue, and giving her peers a chance to do some work themselves. Olive has come to love and expect these outings, and the staff often sends me pictures of on-the-road Olive. Here she is, all ready to go and full of happy expectation.

Bowling is definitely a preferred activity.

This photo was sent to me yesterday, after Olive's gym class. Apparently, she is very fond of kickball. As a child the things I dreaded the most in gym were kickball and dodge-ball. But then, I did not have Olive's biceps or thighs.

This photo was sent to me today: Olive attended an inclusion luncheon at Bagel Country. Clearly, Olive enjoys being a lady who lunches. (You can see her picture exchange communication cards on her left.)

Here's Olive with one of her besties, J. The amazing thing about this photo is that Olive is not clutching handfuls of J's hair. Her medication has decreased the amount of hair-pulling she does by about 85%.

And here's Olive with her beloved Beata, eating Polish chocolates. Beata gets kisses without even having to ask for them.

A Meme, for Old Time's Sake

Did memes go out of style? I feel like I haven't seen one in a long time. Memes are more fun to write than they are to read. Being tagged is iffy: sometimes it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy to be called out by another blogger, and sometimes it's just pure burden. With that said, consider yourself tagged if you're in the right mood for it. Here are five things about me of minimal importance but which I don't think I've yet told you.

1) I will wear mom jeans until the day I die, regardless of my weight and level of fitness, because I live in fear of raising my arms to reach for something and having my stomach exposed. My sister does not have this fear, and it is perhaps one of her more glamorous traits. She goes about her day sitting, standing, reaching, bending over to pick something up, and it shows that she does not care if her stomach shows. I've tried to do this once or twice -- sit down without reaching behind me to make sure my top is covering every bit of lower back, or lift a child up high without a glance downwards to make sure all is covered in the front, but I can't. It shows that I care if it shows, and there's nothing less glamorous than show-phobia.

2) A lot of my clothing comes from a company called Soft Surroundings. If you've ever seen their catalogue, you are now snorting with derision. At first glance, it looks like an apparel line designed for the woman who find Chico's too risque and who eats Activia in public with the hopes of running into Jamie Lee Curtis and getting to appear in an ad. But if you peruse the pages, there's some cute things and it is directly aimed at me: the woman who doesn't want her stomach shown. And the woman who wishes she were in her pajamas. I'm wearing one of their tops in this early morning photo with newborn Henry:

Speaking of little Henry, here he is in the sweater I made him. The blanket was made by Miss Susan:

3) I'm frightened by hummingbirds. You knew about the echidnas and skinks, but I don't think I've shared the hummingbird phobia. To me, they're a cross between a flying insect and a rodent. When I lived in Huntington Beach and worked the breakfast shift at the Old World Espresso Bar, I had to walk through the heavily-landscaped pathways of the apartment complex at around 7 a.m. At this time of day, the L.A. "burn off" hasn't occurred yet and the foliage was alive with hummingbirds. I'd walk to work very fast, looking down, with my arms folded across my chest. If anyone saw me they probably assumed I was embarrassed at being seen out and about in the St. Pauli Girl outfit I had to wear, but it was just the hummingbirds.

4) I miss Regis almost as much as I miss Charlie Sheen. For the past several days, Kelly's co-host on Live! with Kelly have been "football analysts" and a NASCAR driver. Know your audience, ABC! I have discovered that I dislike Boomer Esiason almost as much as I dislike Bob Costas, and that's saying a lot.

5) Speaking of Charlie Sheen, I did give the new Two and a Half Men a chance. I watched several episodes and found it creepy. Weird. Inexplicably unnatural. Maybe even -- yes, I'll say it -- a sin against nature. Now I only watch the reruns.

A Long Time Ago...

... a million years B.C.

LB had a girlfriend and this girlfriend wasn't me.

LB hadn't yet met me, it being 1986 and all. He's a patient man, but wandering the earth while he waited for the unknown but essential ingredient that was me, well, he got lonely. And he dated a young woman who shared his enthusiasm for classical music, specifically his fondness for violin music. I know it pains at least one of you (Tamara) when I say this, but to me, the sound of a violin is and will always be an assault on my ears. I am not sure why this is. I love how the cello sounds and I don't mind the viola, but the violin? I confess, I have on numerous occasions taken advantage of the fact that violin rhymes with cacophonous din, just to bug LB.

This is my "I'm about to go hear violin music" posture.

Me and a coupla of my best gals, right before LB and I left for the chamber music concert last Sunday.

So anyway, this girlfriend was very fond of him and wanted to make him a scarf, but as she was neither a knitter nor a weaver, this presented some problems. Undaunted, she purchased him a Brooks Brothers scarf. Then she took a small oval of muslin, carefully hemmed it, and hand-embroidered a violin on it and the name "Joe," (that's what she called him; she was a bit of an odd bird). Finally she sewed the oval patch onto the scarf. LB wore this scarf long after the break-up because he liked it, and because he did still love the violin, and his old girlfriend had the (conscious? unconscious?) foresight not to sew her own name on it.

This scarf gave me very mixed feelings. It's a nice scarf, and her embroidery was so painstaking, so earnest, that it was hard for me not to feel fond of her. And yet, since everyone who knows us knows that I knit and sew, many people assumed I had embroidered the scarf and that bothered me.

With LB's consent, I carefully removed the oval from scarf and put the oval patch someplace safe. Unfortunately, we've moved seven times since I removed the patch, so its whereabouts are currently unknown. But it's somewhere safe. Indeed, somewhere safe from us.

Now we had a new problem: a large oval "clean spot" on the scarf. As I do with most conundrums, I called Miss Susan.

She said, "Mail me the scarf and I'll fix it." Susan does machine embroidery, and she adorned the scarf thusly:

As you can see, LB has worn this scarf so many years hence that the "clean" spot is long gone, and one would never know that at one time it had a much more subtle and gentle declaration of affection.

At that early point in our marriage I would not have had the courage to make so bold a statement (and in such a feminine font!) and expect LB to wear it to work. But hey, Susan put that embroidery on there, and who am I to argue with Miss Susan?

LB was fine with the scarf's new tone of authority. Remember, we're talking a man who at one time wore burnt orange jeggings that made him look as if he should be holding an empty gruel bowl and asking, "Please, Sir, may I have some more?"

It's still a good scarf, but it's begun to pill in places. And since I've gotten a lot more serious about my knitting than I was way back when, a new scarf was in order this year. I've complained about the tedium of knitting this particular scarf, but it is finally finished.

I used Isager Alpaca 2 for this scarf, and knit it on 2.5mm needles.

The scarf also contains, as you can see in this photo, a not insignificant amount of spaniel fur. Nothing says "I love you" like embedded spaniel fur.

Pictures of LB in the new scarf will go up over the weekend: that's when I get to see him in natural light.