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Making my daughter’s bed

01/18/2012 By Deborah Batterman 11 Comments

I just finished making my daughter’s bed. In the normal course of a day’s events, this would not be anything worthy of note, it’s something mothers do, a way of tidying up. What makes it something to write about is the mere fact that she was here for a visit, ten days’ worth. Now she’s gone, back to that place I find myself referring to  as ‘home’.  It just rolls off my tongue. That place she’s lived for three years now, the other coast. Sunny L.A.

This is home, too, always will be in that memory bank of hers, an odd image as I write but one so suitable to what we think of in terms of savoring and squandering. When she first left for college,  back when the notion of her coming and going had a predictable rhythm, people would ask: how does it feel to have an empty nest? To which I quip, ‘My nest isn’t empty, it’s just a little quieter.’ Of course, the dog was very much alive and barking and keeping me busy and entertained in the way dogs do. And the dog’s presence – what she added to that place we call home – was something my daughter counted on more than anything else during holiday or summer breaks.

The dog is gone, a year now, though not my daughter’s relentlessness about my (a.k.a.) her need for a replacement. There is no replacing a dog that lived with you for thirteen years. A dog with her very own personality that any other dog would forever be measured against. There is, though, some sense in some people’s minds that home, by definition and/or suggestion, needs a dog.

My home does not need a dog as much as it needs a daughter. Her cosmetics bag and toothbrush on the vanity in the bathroom. Her clothes sprawled on the floor of her bedroom.  Her complaints about the thermostat being too low.  Her nestling under a fleece blanket to watch TV, flanked by that duo  she used to call ‘’rents.’ Her need for me as she falls asleep, not feeling so great.

Her unmade bed.

* * *

A writer puts down words, intent on expressing some urgent thought, some deep reflection. A week has passed since my daughter went back to that other home of hers. A week during which I read Joan Didion’s exquisitely poignant Blue Nights.  Why I would even choose to read a book ostensibly about a favorite writer’s recalling moments surrounding the life of her daughter, now gone, seems perverse. And yet it makes all the sense in the world.  When we talk about mortality, she writes, we are talking about our children.

Now comes the wrap-up, the thought left unfinished.

I head into my kitchen, daylight nearing its end, the sky a twilight blue artists dream of. The moon, pearly yellow, a lone pendant on a chandelier of tree branches.  I stand in front of the window, completely riveted by its commanding presence.  Everything about this moon on this night, January 8, 2012 (a week since my daughter has gone back to that place I’ve come to think of as her other home), calls to mind a picture book I read to her when she was young, Happy Birthday, Moon. There is a bear, in this delightful story by Frank Asch, so entranced by the moon, he wants to give it a birthday present. Only problem is that he doesn’t know when the moon’s birthday is, or what to get him. He climbs a tall tree, to have a chat with the moon. No response.

Maybe I am too far away, thought Bear, and the moon cannot hear me.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

Filed Under: MISC, Nostalgia, Parenting

Will you marry me, Jennifer?

12/22/2011 By Deborah Batterman 10 Comments

Grand Central Station, the height of the holiday season, you can’t miss it – a banner draped across the majestic staircase – if you happen to be passing through the main lobby at 3:40 p.m. (give or take a few minutes), Friday, December 16th .: Will you marry me, Jennifer?

A tad distracted by my own agenda, not to mention Mrs. Vandebilt running through my head –

What’s the use of worrying/What’s the use of hurrying/What’s the use of anything –

I may be seconds too late to capture the banner but not the blurry spirit of it all.  A young man is proposing to a young woman. He has friends colluding with him. The joy is infectious. What could matter more than stopping to take it all in? A young man has decided to make a display of his love. He has chosen a time and place where hustle and bustle are at its height. Stop the clock. Romance is in the air.

It’s too easy – and there’s every reason – to be cynical these days. The holidays are a reminder of consumerism at its worst;  even the notion of giving seems less about the heart than the pocketbook, much as we try to make it a mix of both.  Those of us with limited resources – and even those with unlimited – reserve those special gifts for special occasions.

Asking a woman you love to be your wife in Grand Central Station would be a kick any time of the year. For all I know, maybe it’s her birthday, and I’m making too much of the timing. What I’m not making too much of is the time of year.  Growing up in Brooklyn, the city was always a magnet for me, more so during the holidays.  By the time I was old enough to take the subway by myself, I was off – with my best friends – to Radio City, the spectacle of the Rockettes. If memory serves me well, we’d  line up to get in before noon, when the tickets were 99 cents. I can verify this, if I choose, but why would I want to? Imagination has its hold. And sometimes it’s better than real life. We lined up in the cold, wearing stockings and skirts or dresses (no pants back then).  The shop windows – B. Altman, Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue – were the big allure for me. And Rockefeller Center (duh).  Just being in the thick of it was all that mattered.

Years later I would make the city my home, always managing to walk down to Fifth Avenue, at night, during the holiday season to see the tree, and those people strutting their stuff in the rink below. Old habits – or maybe simple pleasures – die hard.  When you choose to live in the city, you get the right to complain about the tourists who come in droves the minute Thanksgiving weekend arrives and keep coming through the New Year. But it doesn’t stop you from being part of the crush.

Which brings  me to a prior visit, November 30th.  which made it ever so clear that living outside the city, some twenty years now, may have diminished some of my savvy if not my need for its pulse. Police barricades kept me from getting anywhere near the tree and the only way to get across town was to go underground, into the subway.  That’s how thick the crowds were on, yes, the night of the ceremonial lighting. That’s how tight security was. I could berate (or laugh at) myself for not knowing. Or I could simply remind myself: people do this every year.

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Filed Under: New York, Nostalgia

People who live in cars

12/06/2011 By Deborah Batterman 8 Comments

Sunday night, November 27th, fresh off a weekend marked by slow-roasting turkeys and shop-till-you-drop, get-’em-while-they’re-hot super sales, I settle onto the couch, tune into 60 Minutes. With Andy Rooney gone, the segments are a few minutes longer, and Scott Pelley’s “Hard Times Generation: Families Who Live in Cars,” serves as something of a reality check. It’s a deliberately timed story, one of the many that surface in the season of giving to remind us all that, even in better economic times, there is a world divide between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ Those of us that have hopefully give with an open heart. In this ever-more-precarious economic climate, the message is all-the-more urgent, not to mention poignant. Even though I don’t opt to buy into the insanity of Black Friday, I know I can.

A fifteen-year-old girl who looks more child bride than teenager, and speaks with a poise beyond her years, lives with her younger brother and their father in a truck he bought with his last $1,000.  They’ve been living in it for five months. ”It’s an adventure,” she says. They wash up in gas station bathrooms. And when classmates see the truck drop them off at school, they know it’s the closest thing to home for Austin and Arielle.

“It‘s not really that much of an embarrassment,” says Arielle. “It’s only life. You do what you need to do – right?”

According to the report, nearly 25 percent of children are living in poverty.  An eight-year-old girl tells of living in a car with her mom and dad, two dogs and cat for three weeks before they were placed in a motel.  Tears run down the cheeks of a father when he talks about not being able to provide for his family. His wife, who admits she never cried during the weeks living in the car, breaks down on camera.  She talks about feeling helpless.  They were down to a quarter of a tank of gas and one orange when they found a shelter to take them in.

“Poverty is no sin,” wrote George Herbert. It is the line that B. Morrison, a poet herself, chooses to end her account of her few years on welfare as a young mother.  How a middle-class woman, barely two years out of college, found herself in a situation where the only viable option she had was to seek public assistance, would shake the preconceptions from anyone about what it means to be a welfare mom.  It was the seventies, her husband took off, and, encouraged by a close friend in the same boat – and with much admitted reluctance – she applied for AFDC. The experience she chronicles in Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mom – is as much a personal reflection on the circumstances that shape us as it is an eye-opening look at a welfare system that, for all its original good intent, gets bogged down in petty bureaucracy and a collective mindset that pigeonholes anyone seeking aid as one of the ‘greedy needy.’

Anything can change on a dime.   The early snowstorm that wreaked havoc in the Northeast sent one of the largest trees on my property, a majestic white oak, toppling across my driveway. It wasn’t the only tree we lost but its sheer magnitude, ever-present weeks after the clean-up, is humbling. Had it fallen in a different direction, I’d be writing a different story. I’m reminded of that possibility every time I pass by that uprooted tree.

Visit Deborah’s website here.

Filed Under: MISC

Dear Diary

11/10/2011 By Deborah Batterman 4 Comments

Tucked away on the very top shelf of my closet are two lidded boxes, gray cardboard trimmed with metal.  Inside the boxes are documents and trinkets I need to know still exist even if I hardly ever look at them,  journals I peek at occasionally, for their reminder of something no longer at my fingertips. There’s the leather and hand-made paper one (Il Papiro, Firenze),  the cloth-covered one with a musical staff on the cover, the abstract black-and-white vinyl one, echoes of Keith Haring.

Each one has its own beginning and end; one begins Sat., July 6, 1991, “three weeks in our new home,” and ends Fri., May 14, 1993, the day my daughter loses a front tooth.  Days earlier we celebrated Mother’s Day, the first without my mother, who had died a month earlier. “Here is the sum total,” I write. “I am my mother’s daughter . . . and my daughter’s mother.”  Unlike other diaries I abandoned, empty pages left blank, for the sake of a fresh beginning, this one is its own slice of time, filled up cover to cover.

Ones that predate these are lost to me, tossed away for some of the very same reasons Dominique Browning spells out in a New York Times essay that cuts to the heart of her decision to burn 40 years’ worth of diaries.

I didn’t want anyone else reading my diaries, ever, she writes.

My very first was powder blue vinyl, a girl’s figure embossed on the cover. In my memory, she has a touch of Veronica (the dark-haired love of comic-book character Archie) or possibly Betty Boop. There is a lock and key enclosure on the diary, as there would be on the next one I would get, the teenage years, a honey brown leather.  I took them from apartment to apartment, house to house, their secrets known only to me. I always knew where the keys were.  What struck me most when I last opened them was not the dearth of meaningful entries (no Anne Frank exposing my heart and soul to that silent listener; just a maudlin preteen/teen mostly careful about what I put down). Yes, there were one or two that touched me – a great aunt died and I thought I would never be the same;  a boy who had a crush on me could not understand why I had a crush on someone else.  But what struck me most was the handwriting that never changed.  A lefty’s awkward script, always trying for a slant it would never have.  Scribbling in a rush to get it all down as quickly as I could, or maybe scribbling just for the sake of itself. The deeper I went into myself, the less decipherable my handwriting would become.

It was the same with each new diary, the clean fresh pages begging to be filled.  I would start out with a neat, slow hand. Invariably the scribbling took hold, a coded reminder, in a way, that there are things intended for my eyes only. Forever.  Reference points, in my own hand, that can instantly place me at some moment in time worthy of reflection. Cards and notes and newspaper clippings tucked between the pages. And who else would really care? A few weeks ago, Britton Minor wrote a very moving piece about intimacy and solitude.  Doesn’t get much more intimate than writing to yourself.

Dear Diary:  Something has changed. God knows I love being alone with my thoughts. Walking keeps them spinning. Meditating slows them down. My iPod drowns them out.  But more often these days it’s a place deeper than words that draws me when I’m not hard at work on the stories and essays spawned and nourished, no doubt, by years of opening myself up to you.  Suffice it to say this – it’s me, not you.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

Filed Under: Nostalgia, SoCal

Pandora (yes), Pete Fornatale (way better)

10/06/2011 By Deborah Batterman 6 Comments
I love music, I like cooking, I hate ironing, no secret there.  Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Lady Gaga, Springsteen, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the Stones, the Dead, Sinatra, Fred Hersch playing Jobim, Chopin (yes, I’m a woman of eclectic tastes)  — they add spice to cooking, take the monotony out of ironing. Don’t need a rocket scientist to tell me why or how.

When I got my first iPod, I considered sending a letter to Apple, offering myself for a commercial. Wouldn’t it be cool – someone well over the age of twenty-something dancing around with her iPod? Making playlists is something I love to do.  Doesn’t take a genius. All it takes is a certain patience and passion and appreciation for the art of the segue.

A few Saturdays ago I turn on the radio, one of my favorite stations, WFUV (live from Fordham University). It’s around 6 p.m. I’m in the kitchen, revving up for dinner, on comes a tune that, in an instant, transports me back to my teenage years, Diana Ross and the Supremes, “Stop in the Name of Love.” Soon another song, “Bus Stop,” the Hollies, and my curiosity about the theme of the set list is piqued.  As D.J.’s go, it doesn’t get much better than Pete Fornatale, with his ‘Mixed Bag’ of a program. His voice, recognizable in an instant, is a welcome reminder of the early days of FM radio, the freshness of it all, the boldness to play music without commercial interruption. There are several D.J.’s I like on WFUV, but Pete Fornatale makes a bridge of music, past and present a seamless ride.

So happens that this particular Saturday, September 3rd, is the birthday of Lester Farnsworth Wire, who happens to be the man credited with inventing the traffic light.  What better way to celebrate Wire and his invention than a set list of songs around the theme: Stop. Look. Listen? Or, in my case, listen while I chop.  The “Look” segment has me smiling all the way through, singing along:  “Misty” (yes, Mathis himself), “The Look of Love,” “Turn Around/Look at Me,” “The Way You Look Tonight” (Sinatra-style), “Wonderful Tonight” (duh), “Look in My Eyes,” and a touch of J. Geils (“Looking for a Love”).

This is no simple longing for things the way they used be, the voice of nostalgia yearning to turn the clock back, hitch a ride with Michael J. Fox, do that one thing differently in the past that might alter the course of events. This is all about the reminder that, yes, Pandora gives me what just I ask for – blues guitar legends, jazz essentials, solo piano – but it takes the human touch to give me that much  more.   Someone thought about something unusual on this day, a song popped into his head, maybe a theme that he could have some fun with.  With all the music at his fingertips, and beyond (and maybe with the help of some equally passionate interns or assistants), he gave thought to a string a songs that would be linked in ways far beyond facile categorization.  I imagine, too, he thought about those listeners who’d never heard of Lester Farnsworth Wire and the few who might relish this bit of trivia passed along on radio waves. Maybe one would happen to be married to a man with a head full of bits of information she marvels at. Lester Farnsworth Wire  — ever hear of him? she asks the husband. He takes all of a minute to answer:  Isn’t that the guy who invented the traffic light?

Photo courtesy of Sara Dolin.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

Filed Under: Entertainment, Nostalgia

That Don’t Make It Junk

09/19/2011 By Deborah Batterman 11 Comments

My husband takes a peculiar pleasure in characterizing certain pieces of mail (mostly mine) as junk: solicitations from organizations I support (and those making claims on my support with letters of thanks for donations I never in fact gave);  promotional postcards for anything from Broadway show discounts to spa giveaways; flyers from Target and Kohl’s and his favorite supermarket, ShopRite.

A few weeks ago I read about a close call in outer space, 8:08 a.m. Eastern time, June 28th, a supersize piece of “space junk” coming within 1,100 feet of the International Space Station. An astrophysicist quoted in the New York Times article had this to say:  “It’s getting kind of dangerous.” According to recent estimates, more than half a million pieces of “human-made detritus” now clutter what we think of as outer space. Picturing those astronauts scurrying to take refuge in their “lifeboats” (i.e., space capsules) until the danger passed takes me right to that closet crammed with, yes, junk that comes hurtling down when the door is opened.

Junk – “old or discarded articles considered useless or of little value”; “worthless writing, talk, or ideas” – somehow it accumulates.  And in so doing, it takes on meaning (literal and metaphoric) sometimes a far cry from the original.  The Middle English jonk from which the word is derived was a nautical rope or cable that actually served a good purpose.

One person’s junk is another person’s treasure. The Supreme Court recently put the imprimatur of (some) redeeming value on video games by conferring them worthy of the same First Amendment protection given to books, plays, movies (which, themselves, took some time catching on an ‘art’). In his analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision, Seth Schiesel, who knows his video games well, acknowledges that most games are “insipid junk.” And yet, he writes, those who actually play games knew, a long time ago, “that the most important video games were not merely matters of technology or neuromuscular coordination, but of finding new ways to explore and think about both human relationships and the wider world around us.”

My daughter took it upon herself to put “Angry Birds” on my iPad.  I was skeptical, if not a little charmed. It takes a certain finesse of the finger to get that slingshot trajectory just right, the question being, how much do I want to invest in this particular skill set?  Add to that question the discovery that a growing number of physics teachers (one at the very high school my daughter attended) are using the game as a study tool, and, I admit it, my curiosity is raised a notch (‘Angry Birds’; happy physicists).  Maybe not high art; but not exactly junk, either.

WikiHow, a site that makes me smile for the titles alone that pop up  (“How to Give a Cat a Medicine” among my favorite) is a treasure trove of advice for the junk-laden, from the obvious  — “How to Organize Your Junk Drawer,” “How to Cut Down on Junk Food” (if not quit it or enjoy it) – to the resourceful – “How to Recycle Junk Mail into a Paper Sculpture,”  “How to Swing a Bat at Junk Balls.”   Of course, there’s always the music cure, as in Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells turning a torch song into an upbeat hit (“I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”) or Leonard Cohen’s mix of melancholy and wit (“took my diamonds to the pawnshop/but that don’t make it junk”).  And if nothing else works, all you have to do is picture our astronauts in outer space smack in the trajectory of some very angry birds.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

Filed Under: Humor, New York

The Big Screen

08/30/2011 By Deborah Batterman 8 Comments

The last time my husband and I bought a new TV was 1995.  Thirty-six-inch Sony, pre- flat-screen/high-definition days.  We had just moved into a new house and the size was predicated on the room, coupled with the design aesthetic of my husband (a designer by trade). I have a very strong memory of the salesman trying to sell us on an even larger TV with this pitch: you never have to leave home.

Little did he know he had the wrong customer.

I love going to the movies – the smell of popcorn the minute you walk into the theatre, the scramble for the perfect seats (or whatever is available),  the settling in once the lights start to dim, the enveloping darkness, the shared escape from the world as it exists to the one that lures us with technological wizardry, three dimensions (even more these days) captured on a very large flat screen, a blurring of lines between observer and participant.  I can still remember the sense of awe that carried me through The Ten Commandments, the mesmerizing hold of Lawrence of Arabia, the tension that gripped my body the first time I saw Jaws. Used to be a more majestic experience, I admit. Double features. Glorious movie theatres (the Loews the king of them all) with bathrooms the size of NYC apartments.  Not so much anymore.

And yet, even with state-of-the-art home entertainment systems and DVDs and the immediate gratification of streaming a film, up close and personal on your laptop the minute it’s available, very little beats the cool relief of a movie theatre on a sweltering summer day or the inviting warmth on a frigid winter night.  Doesn’t take a Don Draper to tell you why Hollywood makes most of its money on summer blockbusters and winter holiday fare.

Say what you will, Mr. Salesman trying to sell me on private screenings in the comfort of my home, some movies demand being seeing on a very big screen. And I’m not just talking about the stupendous 3-D experience of Avatar, which may have raised the bar in movie making but was proof positive – based on the mediocre copycat follow-ups – that it takes a certain vision and art to know when that extra dimension is best left out of the cinematic experience and when it is oh-so-wizardly employed, as in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.” Just the word – CinemaScope – suggests something a little larger than life. Give me My Man Godfrey or Casablanca or Strangers on the Train on the telly anytime. E.T.? I’ll take it (especially once the boxy outdated Sony is replaced by the affordable flat-screen LED we’re holding out for) but nothing will ever beat the experience of watching it at an outdoor screening on a summer night. And it wasn’t just the ‘bigness’ of the screen.  It’s the shared experience of it all, the reminder of the time when we didn’t have everything at our beck and call.

I’d be the last person in the world to romanticize the waiting in line, the overpriced candy, the scramble for seats, the smirk you can’t resist when the seat you got – dead center, unobstructed view – becomes less than ideal once the six foot man sits squarely in front of you.  And I’ll be the first to applaud that sensation, unabated joy, of sitting in a packed movie house, everyone simultaneously laughing out loud.

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Filed Under: Entertainment, New York