I met Anny at a wedding reception.
I am not a great fan of receptions, let alone wedding receptions, especially in the US. (I could also write about ten dozen paragraphs about my issues with American weddings, but promised myself I will try to keep my posts shorter).
It’s because I am socially-challenged. Hopeless at small talk. And very-awfully uncomfortable having to make acquaintances that are supposed to last a quarter of an hour.
Anny was an exception.
She was born in France before WWII. Her parents – I assume at least one of them had to be Jewish – emigrated to Argentina, where she spent most of her childhood. Then, in 1947, she moved to the US. “I grew up speaking French and Spanish, that’s why when I speak English, my accent is hard to detect” she said.
Mine is probably easier, but nevertheless she was not able to decipher it (I have no idea why, but it always makes me feel good, when people have problems trying to guess my accent).
Where did you come from? How long ago? What do you do? She was firing questions like from a machine gun and I could see in her shiny, black eyes that she was genuinely interested. I did not have to talk for long. “I know exactly what you are going through” she said after about one minute.
A few hours and many toasts-speeches-hors d'oevres -champagne-and-wine-glasses later, we bumped into each other again. This time it was in a tent where a live band was playing. My daughter who assumed a flower girl duties for the day (do not ask me about a 100 dollar plastic dress she had to done) was dancing with her grandparents. A lot of goofiness and laughter.
“You should be happy that you daughter has such happy and uncomplicated grandparents” Anny told me. “Because she will be able to live a happy and uncomplicated life."
Just as she was saying it, I noticed that the bride parted with her elegant high-heels and was dancing bare feet. One of her elegant braid’s maids donned sneakers and you could barely see a Nike logo from under her long, red satin dress.
Happy, uncomplicated lives. I can't stop thinking about it.
Do I want my daughter to live a happy and uncomplicated life? Or is it more complicated than that?
Happily, it’s probably not upon me to decide.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
Happy IVGLDSW Day!
This morning, I got an email from a friend that made my day. She had received it from another friend in Switzerland, and I already passed it on to a friend in Germany. But I'd like to share it with more Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Women out there, and that's why I posted it here without knowing to whom I owe the copyright - except for the quotes, of course...
Wherever you are in the small world, enjoy!
"Today is International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman's Day, so please send this message to someone you think fits this description.
Please do not send it back to me as I have already received it from a Very Good Looking, Darn Smart Woman!
And remember this motto to live by... Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!
To the Girls !!!
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
(Cora Harvey Armstrong)
Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut the bitch up with cookies.
(Unknown)
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
(Helen Hayes - at 73)
Old age ain't no place for sissies.
(Bette Davis)
Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.
(Caryn Leschen)
I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on.
(Roseanne Barr)
Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.
(Maryon Pearson)
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
(Eleanor Roosevelt)
When life hands you lemons, ask for tequila and salt and call me over!!!"
Wherever you are in the small world, enjoy!
"Today is International Very Good Looking, Damn Smart Woman's Day, so please send this message to someone you think fits this description.
Please do not send it back to me as I have already received it from a Very Good Looking, Darn Smart Woman!
And remember this motto to live by... Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!
To the Girls !!!
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
(Cora Harvey Armstrong)
Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut the bitch up with cookies.
(Unknown)
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
(Helen Hayes - at 73)
Old age ain't no place for sissies.
(Bette Davis)
Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.
(Caryn Leschen)
I'm not going to vacuum 'til Sears makes one you can ride on.
(Roseanne Barr)
Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.
(Maryon Pearson)
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
(Eleanor Roosevelt)
When life hands you lemons, ask for tequila and salt and call me over!!!"
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Suburban Stay-At-Home Mom Horror Driver
On the first October weekend – it was the last hot weekend of this extraordinary summer in the times of global warming -, we went to the beach. We got there by car, an old Daimler of the kind I’ve been driving for the last ten years or so.
All parking lots were full, so we took a residential side street where we finally located a free space. It looked tight, but so what? I only had to squeeze into this parking gap parallel to the sidewalk - something I used to manage in seconds in Cologne or Berlin when I lived there, without even interrupting the conversation I was engaged in.
But this time? I just couldn’t do it. It took me half a dozen attempts to get in there, tires screeching along the curb. I felt so embarrassed I was ready to drive back to P. there and then. Only that wasn’t an option with a slightly mocking husband, the children, swimsuits, and all the toy diggers in the car. So I ignored these people sitting on their porches smirking (as I was sure they were without really daring to look), and shepherded everybody to the beach.
When I later confessed this disgrace to D., she really smirked. “So, you’re finally here! The stay-at-home mom, queen of the suburb! Welcome!”
And it’s true. If you live in a suburb (or, well, a small town) in the US, there’s no necessity of any parking skills. No frantic competition for the few legal parking spots in the streets of your neighborhood when everybody comes home from work in the evening – there is your garage, or your driveway. No circling around the block where your favorite grocery store is located, to virtually make a dash into any space that another car left no ten seconds earlier - there is the shopping mall with its huge parking lot or garage, no parallel parking anywhere, just move in and back out. To cut a long story short: No practice, no skills.
Need more indicators how far I already departed from the city girl? Come to think about it, within my suburban surroundings, I use the car much more often than I used to when we first moved here. Now, public transport is hardly an option, of course. But biking is, at least in this small town of P. where there still is a downtown and, close by, a comparatively cozy shopping center dating from the nineteen-fifties. But isn’t it just so much more convenient to quickly take the car to go there, especially as you could transport two more gallons of milk and wouldn’t have to go again this week? This kind of thought wouldn’t ever have occurred to me in Berlin!
So, what to do to avoid “Death by Suburb”, as Dave Goetz puts it (Subtitle: “Keeping the suburb form killing your soul”)? I may not be religious enough to follow this author with his “spiritual practices” that, as he claims, counter “suburban toxins” like envy of the neighbor’s SUV or more aspiring soccer kids. I’m not there yet, thank God, and P., after all, has quite a few decidedly un-suburban qualities, which might prove soul saving.
But just in case, I should probably start with a reversal of driving habits. No shopping by car this week (even if that means I will have to go twice to fit three gallons of milk and the diapers for my little one onto the bike). But for the next trip to New York I will take the car and not the commuter train, even if I get stuck in the tunnel for two hours, and parking fees will be ruinous.
My big fear about that, though, is that I might already be this horribly dangerous suburban mom driver, knocking about the big city… Maybe I should try Philadelphia first.
All parking lots were full, so we took a residential side street where we finally located a free space. It looked tight, but so what? I only had to squeeze into this parking gap parallel to the sidewalk - something I used to manage in seconds in Cologne or Berlin when I lived there, without even interrupting the conversation I was engaged in.
But this time? I just couldn’t do it. It took me half a dozen attempts to get in there, tires screeching along the curb. I felt so embarrassed I was ready to drive back to P. there and then. Only that wasn’t an option with a slightly mocking husband, the children, swimsuits, and all the toy diggers in the car. So I ignored these people sitting on their porches smirking (as I was sure they were without really daring to look), and shepherded everybody to the beach.
When I later confessed this disgrace to D., she really smirked. “So, you’re finally here! The stay-at-home mom, queen of the suburb! Welcome!”
And it’s true. If you live in a suburb (or, well, a small town) in the US, there’s no necessity of any parking skills. No frantic competition for the few legal parking spots in the streets of your neighborhood when everybody comes home from work in the evening – there is your garage, or your driveway. No circling around the block where your favorite grocery store is located, to virtually make a dash into any space that another car left no ten seconds earlier - there is the shopping mall with its huge parking lot or garage, no parallel parking anywhere, just move in and back out. To cut a long story short: No practice, no skills.
Need more indicators how far I already departed from the city girl? Come to think about it, within my suburban surroundings, I use the car much more often than I used to when we first moved here. Now, public transport is hardly an option, of course. But biking is, at least in this small town of P. where there still is a downtown and, close by, a comparatively cozy shopping center dating from the nineteen-fifties. But isn’t it just so much more convenient to quickly take the car to go there, especially as you could transport two more gallons of milk and wouldn’t have to go again this week? This kind of thought wouldn’t ever have occurred to me in Berlin!
So, what to do to avoid “Death by Suburb”, as Dave Goetz puts it (Subtitle: “Keeping the suburb form killing your soul”)? I may not be religious enough to follow this author with his “spiritual practices” that, as he claims, counter “suburban toxins” like envy of the neighbor’s SUV or more aspiring soccer kids. I’m not there yet, thank God, and P., after all, has quite a few decidedly un-suburban qualities, which might prove soul saving.
But just in case, I should probably start with a reversal of driving habits. No shopping by car this week (even if that means I will have to go twice to fit three gallons of milk and the diapers for my little one onto the bike). But for the next trip to New York I will take the car and not the commuter train, even if I get stuck in the tunnel for two hours, and parking fees will be ruinous.
My big fear about that, though, is that I might already be this horribly dangerous suburban mom driver, knocking about the big city… Maybe I should try Philadelphia first.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
on sunday, about saturday– love story validated
I could probably count on my fingers the number of fiction books I have read over the last decade.
There is a huge pile on my bedside table (which I recently got courtesy of D and her handsome husband. It’s been painted gray. The pile can go much higer now that I parted with my cardboard box! Thank you!) which I call a queue.
Books I intend to read hibernate in the queue for a year or so, until one day I decide to clean up my bedroom, and bring them to the “library” upstairs and start a new queue all over again.
There are a few fiction books in the queue right now, but I have a feeling they will probably travel upstairs some time before Christmas (to make room for new ones) and most of them will not have been read…
Saturday by Ian McEwan was a memorable exception. I got it as a present last year and it did not stay on my bedside table for more than a few days. I read it in the span of two or three nights.
I loved it.
One of the reasons why it resonated with me, was the setting. The story takes place in London on February 15th of 2003 – the day of a big peace rally in the wake of the Iraq war. I lived in London at the time, I was in the rally (which was huuuuuuge), and I remember that day very vividly.
I know the square where the main protagonist lives with his wife – my husband and I would sometimes meet for lunch in the nearby RIBA café. (By the way, this wonderful modernist building happens to be one of the best spots for lunch in central London. Food, given its price, is unusually good, at least for British standards. And the bookstore downstairs feels like heaven. Be careful about your credit card!).
It feels nice to read a fiction book which has so many non-fiction details that one finds familiar. In some ways you feel you were allowed to enter the pages and be part of the story.
The book had excellent reviews. Critics praised McEwan’s wonderful writing style. Rightly so. They raved about the composition. I couldn’t agree more. They loved the surgical precision and neurosurgical theme, which I also appreciated.
To me however – and I haven’t found a single review which shared the sentiment– Saturday is primarily a love story. It starts at dawn with two people waking in bed together and it ends late at night, when after a harrowing day, they both meet there again, like in a safe harbor.
Perhaps I read the novel in a way that was not necessarily intended by the author – I had thought -- after all, Observer critics and New York Times reviewers probably know better. Maybe these were my personal circumstances that made me look at this book in that way, I kept telling myself.
I went to see Ian McEwan earlier this week. He came to Princeton to promote his new book – Chesil Beach.
It was great to see an author whom I like.
Bad haircut, wrinkled linen shirt that used to be white and turned very off-white (I bet he wears it every day), wire spectacles that could perhaps find some use in the late 1970s, but that no self-respecting New Yorker would even consider donning today. I miss London so badly – I couldn’t stop thinking as he was reading fragments of the new novel (I even found his British accent to be charming!).
Chesil Beach (which I still haven’t read in full) treats about a couple on a failed wedding night -- seventy pages or so, about their inability to consume their newly formed marriage (both are virgins), struggles to find each other, express or understand what they feel and think. It's about love and patience, he reportedly said in a recent interview. “Does it reflect your own difficulties?” someone asked as he finished reading a few passages. Only on an American campus a question like that can be posed without a trace of hesitation. And only someone as British as McEwan can answer with such virtuosity – understatement, good humor, mixed with polite but firm “mind your own business” message.
For me, the most important thing during that meeting however, was him briefly mentioning Saturday – also in response to a question from the audience.
“I got in trouble with the reviewers for this book” he said. “It’s about two people, who are married and who love each other. As simple as that. Reviewers these days find it very troubling.”
Thank you Mr. McEwan!
There is a huge pile on my bedside table (which I recently got courtesy of D and her handsome husband. It’s been painted gray. The pile can go much higer now that I parted with my cardboard box! Thank you!) which I call a queue.
Books I intend to read hibernate in the queue for a year or so, until one day I decide to clean up my bedroom, and bring them to the “library” upstairs and start a new queue all over again.
There are a few fiction books in the queue right now, but I have a feeling they will probably travel upstairs some time before Christmas (to make room for new ones) and most of them will not have been read…
Saturday by Ian McEwan was a memorable exception. I got it as a present last year and it did not stay on my bedside table for more than a few days. I read it in the span of two or three nights.
I loved it.
One of the reasons why it resonated with me, was the setting. The story takes place in London on February 15th of 2003 – the day of a big peace rally in the wake of the Iraq war. I lived in London at the time, I was in the rally (which was huuuuuuge), and I remember that day very vividly.
I know the square where the main protagonist lives with his wife – my husband and I would sometimes meet for lunch in the nearby RIBA café. (By the way, this wonderful modernist building happens to be one of the best spots for lunch in central London. Food, given its price, is unusually good, at least for British standards. And the bookstore downstairs feels like heaven. Be careful about your credit card!).
It feels nice to read a fiction book which has so many non-fiction details that one finds familiar. In some ways you feel you were allowed to enter the pages and be part of the story.
The book had excellent reviews. Critics praised McEwan’s wonderful writing style. Rightly so. They raved about the composition. I couldn’t agree more. They loved the surgical precision and neurosurgical theme, which I also appreciated.
To me however – and I haven’t found a single review which shared the sentiment– Saturday is primarily a love story. It starts at dawn with two people waking in bed together and it ends late at night, when after a harrowing day, they both meet there again, like in a safe harbor.
Perhaps I read the novel in a way that was not necessarily intended by the author – I had thought -- after all, Observer critics and New York Times reviewers probably know better. Maybe these were my personal circumstances that made me look at this book in that way, I kept telling myself.
I went to see Ian McEwan earlier this week. He came to Princeton to promote his new book – Chesil Beach.
It was great to see an author whom I like.
Bad haircut, wrinkled linen shirt that used to be white and turned very off-white (I bet he wears it every day), wire spectacles that could perhaps find some use in the late 1970s, but that no self-respecting New Yorker would even consider donning today. I miss London so badly – I couldn’t stop thinking as he was reading fragments of the new novel (I even found his British accent to be charming!).
Chesil Beach (which I still haven’t read in full) treats about a couple on a failed wedding night -- seventy pages or so, about their inability to consume their newly formed marriage (both are virgins), struggles to find each other, express or understand what they feel and think. It's about love and patience, he reportedly said in a recent interview. “Does it reflect your own difficulties?” someone asked as he finished reading a few passages. Only on an American campus a question like that can be posed without a trace of hesitation. And only someone as British as McEwan can answer with such virtuosity – understatement, good humor, mixed with polite but firm “mind your own business” message.
For me, the most important thing during that meeting however, was him briefly mentioning Saturday – also in response to a question from the audience.
“I got in trouble with the reviewers for this book” he said. “It’s about two people, who are married and who love each other. As simple as that. Reviewers these days find it very troubling.”
Thank you Mr. McEwan!
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