Adventures in Blind Dating, Take Two

Posted on January 30, 2012 by

I talked to my mother yesterday.  Well, I ranted and she listened.

When are you going out on your blind date?

This week.  He wanted to go out on Saturday, but I was on on-call.

(I volunteer in a hospital emergency department, and being “on-call” means I could be called in at any time during the night to work with the patient if I’m on the overnight shift.  The other volunteers and I have a sixth-sense about when a call will come in.  Make plans during an overnight shift, and you are bound to be summoned.)

She asked me some more questions about the fellow we’ll call “Taylor” (because I was set up by my tailor), and I finally ranted:

Mother.  This is why I do not date.  What am I supposed to talk about with him?  Movies?  TV?  The fact that he’s from New Jersey and makes spreadsheets for a living?  Do you know the last time I saw a movie?  1997.  I have never seen an episode of a single current network television series, unless you count a few non-US series of the last five years.  And I’m not even up to speed on those.

My voice was rising into that horrible, shrill I can only respond to questions with questions thing that I do – the way I used to speak to my ex-husband. 

[A beat.]

Well, what do you talk about with your friends?

Current events?  Stuff going on in our lives?  Music?  Travel?  My friends are extremely interesting people.  This guy wants me to go to a restaurant that is like preppy hell, which he suggested only after he first wanted ME to plan the date.  I’m trying to think of a Southern California analogue for this place but I can’t.

But these weren’t even real preps, I thought to myself, the poseur prep types who need to tell you about how preppy they are and have to point out that they’re not wearing socks with their loafers even though it’s January.  This restaurant wants to be a hang-out like the Peach Pit, if Brenda and Brandon Walsh were named Parker and McKay, and the Peach Pit had been considerably smaller, darker and the whole series had taken place in the 06820.

You’re not that weird or different you know.  Just let life happen. It sounds like you’re dismissing him before you’ve even met him. 

In fact, I was.  I was judging a book by its cover, but also by my limited interactions with this fellow.  I’d spoken to him on the phone once; he hadn’t called when he said he was going to call.  Being busy, I’d shot him a message on the day he said he call and I got a blow-off.  Nearly a week later, late at night, I received a barrage of text messages telling me that he’d been sick and he still wanted to go out, did I have anything planned.  Me.  Did I plan anything?

This was, of course, after I’d received a message from Vindy, the tailor, (on the day Taylor finally texted) reminding me that I should go on this ill-fated blind date.

My mother, clearly exasperated with me, handed the phone back over to my father, who changed the subject to our iPads – a topic of which I never tire.

I think the take-aways are these:

1) I’m in my thirties and I spent the whole of my twenties in a marriage and a long-term relationship.  Courting by text?  Totally foreign to me.  Unless we’re corresponding at the last minute, over vast time differences, or under unique circumstances, you can pick up a phone once in a while. 

2) Also, I don’t really understand dating.  I’ve been in relationships, consecutively, since 1996.  When I last dated, use of the internet by the ordinary suburban consumer outside the walled garden of AOL was a relatively new concept.  Apparently, I do not know (or care) how to use the internet to my romantic advantage.

3) I do miss having a companion.  But I don’t miss having a companion enough to have to make small talk during my precious free time, or to let not having someone to walk the dog when I’m hung-over interfere with marathon training.

4) I do not want to see a movie.  Ever.  Though I might agree to watch a DVD if you ask nicely.

5) I am still obsessed with the idea of going on this blind date with someone with whom my insane tailor set me up.  That’s the only reason I’d go out with someone who first blew me off, who then wanted me to plan everything, and then suggested the bloody effing Peach Pit for a date. 

I may be a glutton for punishment for other reasons, but under any less bloggable circumstances, I wouldn’t be wasting a perfectly good evening on going out with someone, when I could be watching Downton Abbey on my iPad from the comfort of the treadmill.

Posted in Adventures, F & B, Rants | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Fire

Posted on January 28, 2012 by

I confess that I have a thing for expensive candles.

These days, I am not sure whether I have many vices, or few.

I am, however, pretty sure that I have always had a thing for fire, generally, and candles, specifically.  Not in the sense of rose petals and tealights.  And not in the sense of black lights and rituals, either.  I’m an Upper East Side wasp.  I have spiritually been this same woman since birth, but have identifiably been this way since I was four years old, when my mother would let me host intimate dinner parties where I begged her to let me use lit candles.  I would serve plain noodles; maybe dry chicken.  Inevitably these affairs ended with me lighting my mother’s tablecloth and several paper napkins on fire.

(The rationale with the paper napkins was: who lets a four year old use cloth napkins?  Not: who lets a four year old host candle-lit dinner parties? If you know my parents, this obviously makes perfect sense.)

Anyway, I always have candles in my house.  I am known for going into Blue Mercury and spending an hour sniffing my way through the various fragrances and ranges.  I had a fit when Oprah “discovered” Lafco candles, because I’d discovered them long before she did.  And I once had kittens over the smoke smell in a hotel room (honestly, what did I expect?), and the general manager promptly sent up a set of very fancy candles that one could only obtain France.  I hoarded those things, until I finally burned down the last one this week.

Fortune cookies.  Flowers.  Expensive candles.  Want to know the way to my heart?  Send me any one of the above.  Now you know 2/3 more about me than my ex-husband ever bothered to find out.

It’s not even just the expensive candles, I suppose.  I own more pairs of candlesticks than any woman probably should and I burn tapers frequently.  Crystal; pewter; brass candlesticks (though I’m not sure where the brass ones are at the moment, and cleaning brass is a nightmare).  I love lighting the tapers on the table, even if it’s only me sitting down to eat.  I love the way things glow; how it all feels like such an intimate experience.

If I had a fireplace, I’d light fires.

I suppose I’m not very good at having intimate relationships — but maybe this is all a simulacrum of intimacy.  Or, maybe it’s not that deep at all.  Perhaps I simply like things that are beautiful.  That smell nice.  That shimmer; that are light and warm and a little dangerous.

And that cast golden glow.  Candles are expensive like gold, too.  Oh my goodness, they’re so pricey.  When I was younger, my father would oft accuse me of having champagne tastes on a beer budget!  But guess who has the power of the purse now?

However, the ship of spending money on anything all that interesting has sailed.  For instance, my days of caring too much about the bags I carry are done — I’m not trying to run with the girls in investor relations.  And the fancy shoes era was pretty much over once my interest in marathoning was piqued.  So having champagne taste in such household ephemera as candles is perhaps not the worst thing in the world.

(Yes, it actually is.  If you knew how much I spent today on three candles, you’d be embarrassed for me.  I could’ve bought a really nice pair of new jeans, at least.)

So please, for the love of all that is good, please keep me away from the Diptyque boutique.  Keep me out of Blue Mercury.  Put up some kind of net-nanny that will block me from the Lafco website.  I love fire.  I love things that glow.  I’ll take a bonfire; even a barbecue will suffice.  Tealights are nice, and tapers will do.

But where expensive candles are concerned, I am a moth to a flame.

(Circa mid-1990s.  Axe; log; lighter fluid.  Daughter of the God of Fire.)

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Same Auld Lang Syne

Posted on January 26, 2012 by

I know what you’ve all been thinking, but have mostly been too polite to say: why have you really been writing about Frederic?

At the New Year, Frederic asked me to lunch.  I’d been putting him off since August.  But I agreed and said: Please don’t make me regret this.

Then I put him off for a few more weeks anyway.  The lunch was supposed to be on Friday.  In typical Frederic fashion, he called yesterday to cancel.  He has a history of doing this, of building tension then leaving a cliffhanger; announcing the program will not return in the Spring after the last episode featured a car headed off the dunes.

This is not me trying to be inaccessible or difficult; I’m honestly trying to show you I’ve turned over a new leaf.

I recounted the story of the cancellation to friends last night.  They all rolled their eyes.  They refrained from asking the obvious, which was Will you take a raincheck?  Maybe.  And if I do I will probably regret it.  The lunch will probably go like this:

I will arrive at the appointed time and location, looking like me; feeling like a woman who has felt spectacularly un-pretty since her divorce was final and since her ex-significant other cheated with a much younger, much taller, exceptionally more buxom woman.  Seeing Frederic will not help matters.

He will look at me, and he will say something about how healthy I look which is what people usually say when they see me, which is code for: you don’t look quite so sick anymore.  Unless, of course, I’m seeing people who haven’t seen me in a decade, in which case, they say, Oh my God, you’re so thin! And so blonde!

I will reflect on the fact that the photos of him in the Overshoes series include one in which he was wearing his old wedding band.  The story goes that when he lost weight, and his marriage was on the brink, he’d remove the band. One day he handed a homeless man a pocket full of coins — and the platinum millgrain band went with the silver.

Upon meeting, I will see him his new band.

And I will reflect on the one weird Autumn afternoon I spent near West Point, at a mutual friend’s country house, with Frederic, and his ex-wife, and the woman who is now his wife, and my ex-husband. It was all for the purpose of a wiffle-ball game.  Andrew and I were fighting all the way up to Orange County; continued to fight upon arrival.  Frederic’s then-wife, Rosanette, wasn’t speaking to me, and his now-wife was being manhandled by the aforementioned mutual friend, with whom Frederic had a strange rivalry.  The mutual friend had once been heavy and lost a lot of weight; was more senior in our law firm. Frederic was still heavy; lower on the food chain.

But we were there to play wiffle-ball, and play we did.  The mutual friend put his arms around Frederic’s now-wife under the guise of “teaching proper wiffle-ball technique” and we all shuddered, while the mutual friend’s wife raised a pitcher of martinis cheerily from the deck,  Andrew and Rosanette steeped in hot silence from the sidelines, while Frederic and I played the outfield.

I remember that day with frightening clarity.  Frederic was sweating through his pastel polo shirt, and I was wearing jeans I still have, a cable knit sweater I still have, and a pair of flats that I don’t.  Andrew and I left early and he took me shopping, because in those days we went shopping when things became such that we did not or could not say what we probably should have said.

That adventure took place two weeks after I discovered I wasn’t in love with my husband; the week before my brother went to jail.  That day was literally the calm before the storm, and it seems so strange now that Frederic’s harem should’ve spent it together in the Hudson Valley on the edge of the Catskills, playing wiffle-ball of all things.

I digress.

Sometime during the middle of the meal, he will tell me something rattling – something I should reasonably expect, but that is still hard to swallow.  Like that he and his wife are having a baby.  I will smile and nod and tell him how great that is.  The cognitive dissonance will be deafening.  He recently wrote: What I should have done:  I should have hit the pause button with you; sobered up; should have accepted more readily that my marriage had ended; remained friends; and then courted you. I am not flirting with you or having fun. But what I did instead is, as I say, on a long list of terrible fuck-ups.

And then, face to face, he will say: We’re having a baby!

I will make it through lunch.  Then I will take the long walk back to the office, and before I arrive, he will call me on my mobile and I won’t pick up.

Or not.  Maybe it won’t go that way at all.  Maybe the lunch will never happen.  Perhaps I’ll demur then decline outright.

It’s all a bit romantic, like some kind of love song played on late night radio – Manilow, or Paul Simon: Looks Like We Made It; Still Crazy After All These Years.  The titles are deceptive – they sound like the relationships endure – and they do, in a way – but they don’t.  They’re nostalgic; they’re about a place to which you can never go back, about a lover in past-tense.  And that’s the thing: he has regrets; a long list of terrible fuck-ups.

I suppose that’s the beauty of the past-tense for me; I am seeking resolution, not absolution: je ne regrette rien.

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The Art of Scottish Cooking – Yet Another Tutorial From Hell

Posted on January 25, 2012 by

When I get an idea in my head, I am not easily deterred.  Like The Time I Decided I Wanted To Host Burns Night.  Except, a number of us are vegetarians (myself included), and what is Burns Night without a haggis?

Enter the vegetarian haggis.

Yes, I know that this is like going to a restaurant and asking for tempeh sweetbreads.  But you must understand, once I commit to an idea, there is no turning back.  For example, the Time That The Women of Winesday Found Themselves Climbing Mt Whitney.  But that’s neither here nor there.

Vegetarian haggis it was.

I found some ridiculous recipes, before finally settling on a relatively simple-looking one.

Chop vegetables?  Okay.

Done.

Cook veggies until soft.   Easy enough.  Unless you are me, and you decide to “rustic chop” after you’ve given the carrots a reasonable chop, by which I mean, you get aggressive and chop the carrots to hell.

(The vitamins and prescriptions are optional, of course.  Use only if you feel you need to fortify your cooking).

Here’s where things get weird: the recipe calls for ground peanuts.  Not peanut butter.  Not chopped nuts.  Ground.  What’s a gal to do?  Why, go directly to the Cabinet of Forgotten Wedding Gifts, that’s what!  I could’ve dusted off the food processor; probably could’ve even dug out the meat grinder attachment for the Kitchen Aid.

I settled for THIS gem:

Andrew may have gotten the hornspoons.  Let him eat all the caviar he wants up on Carnegie Hill.  Look what we’ve got here — an old-timey mortar and pestle.  Why do people register for this stuff when they marry?  And why do people give it to kids in their twenties, one of whom will probably only even discover she is in possession of such kitchenware once she is divorced, and into her thirties and making vegetarian haggis in the middle of the night?

I digress.

Grind the peanuts until roughly ground, but not peanut butter.

Next, add the rest of the ingredients:

This isn’t a paid spot, but I really love this broth, and adore the single-serving sizes.

Again, not a paid product placement, but these are the lentils I use for everything.  The original recipe called for red lentils.  If you cook with lentils a lot, you know there’s a big difference in the cooking time and consistency between red and green.

Kidney beans, lemon, and soy.  Wait, what?  Peanuts and soy?  Are we making Scottish food or satay sauce here?

Simmer for about 20 minutes.  The original recipe called for 10, but these are different lentils, so the simmer time will be longer.  The recipe also calls for a variety of spices: rosemary, thyme, cayenne, and something called “mixed spice,” which is British for what is essentially cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice.  Since this is Chinese New Year, I used Chinese Five Spice instead, to a result that I liked.

Add oatmeal.  You can use steel cut if you want.  I didn’t.  This, of course, yielded a horrorshow catfood-looking result.  But haggis isn’t supposed to be pretty, is it?

Simmer for about another 20 minutes or so.  You’ll see that this photo above was from the end of the simmer.  You may need to add more water or broth to ensure the oats get a fair cook.

At the conclusion of cooking, crack an egg into the pot and stir the egg into the mixture.   (You can skip this step if you’re going for a vegan haggis, but at that point, why are you bothering?)  Once you’ve mixed the egg in well, transfer the mixture to a baking pan.  I chose a parchment-lined loaf pan.  But I imagine a broth-soaked cheesecloth in a loaf pan would mimic a sheep’s gut fairly well.

Bake at 375 for 20-30 minutes.  Serve.  (I’m serving mine heated later at the Burns supper.)

Voila.  Vegetarian haggis.  That, gentle readers, is what happens when I get hit by a car on my way home from picking up my race number for Scotland Day, then I take some train out of Edinburgh a few weeks later, then I finish out last year and ring in this one in place named for a ship named for a place in Scotland — I wind up making vegetarian haggis in the middle of the night, listening to Auld Lang Syne, wondering what all of this unfinished Scottish business is, and whether Chinese five spice belongs at a Burns supper.

Vegetarian Haggis (adapted from allrecipes.com)

Ingredients:

  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 medium onion, finely chopped
  • 2 carrots, chopped
  • 5 fresh mushrooms, finely chopped
  • 1 cup vegetable broth
  • 1/3 cup dry green lentils
  • 2 tablespoons canned kidney beans – drained, rinsed, and mashed (I didn’t mash them)
  • 5 tablespoons ground peanuts
  • 1 tablespoon soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
  • 1 teaspoon dried rosemary
  • 1 pinch ground cayenne pepper
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons Chinese five spice
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 1/3 cups oats (steel cut or other)

Instructions:

  1. Sautee vegetables in a saucepan over medium heat until soft. Stir in broth, lentils, kidney beans, peanuts, soy sauce, and lemon juice and spices. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, and simmer 10-20 minutes. Stir in oats, cover, and simmer 20 minutes.
  2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Lightly grease a baking pan (or line with parchment).
  3. Stir the egg into the saucepan. Transfer the mixture to the prepared baking pan. Bake 30 minutes, until firm.
Posted in Adventures, F & B, Stuff and Things | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

You Look Stupid and Rich

Posted on January 24, 2012 by

You may have noticed that I’ve been writing more about Frederic lately.  I admit that he’s been on my mind; we’ve been talking more; we’ve been markedly less antagonistic towards each other lately.  I suppose this is why I’m telling these old tales; justifying why I love(d) the man in the first place.

It may also be the fact that I watched “Love Story” for the ninemillionth time, and *swoon* Ryan O’Neal!  But also, it got me thinking about love in retrospective.

That said, there was one exchange that stuck out in my mind as the Quintessential Frederic-and-Meredith moment…the Overshoes Incident:

Puddle Jumper (19 Sept 2007)

“I bought these nice shoes,” said Frederic, “And I need to buy some boots or something to wear over them to protect them in bad weather.”

“Don’t wear them in bad weather,” I said, balancing the phone on my shoulder as I shuffled papers.

“No,” he said, “I need, like, thin rubber boots that go over the shoes.  But not galoshes.”

“Just put the shoes in your briefcase,” I said, “And then put the shoes on once you get to work.”

“Perhaps you are not hearing me…I don’t want to carry my shoes,” he said.

“Buy some galoshes,” I said.

“Perhaps you are not hearing me…I don’t want to buy galoshes.”

“How about overshoes?”

“Is that what they’re called?”

“The thin rubber shoes that go…over your shoes?” I said pointedly.

“Yes, yes!” he said excitedly, “That’s exactly it!  How do I find them?”

“Google overshoes?”

A beat.  “Oh no.  I am not buying overshoes at www.heelingtouch.com.”

“Then don’t.”  I was laughing too hard to talk.

“Okay,” he said after a long pause, “I am going to email you a few links.  I want you to look at them and tell me which overshoes you think will best protect my Gucci loafers from the elements.”

He sent me links to the “Executive Halfzip” overshoe for $22.99, and then to a more economical, more rugged accordion style, nameless “boot” for $12.99.

“Which one do you think will go over my shoes better?” he asked.

“I have no idea.  Why don’t you just buy both?”

“Yeah, but the Executive Half Zips are nicer.  I don’t want to go marching around the city in those ugly things, but I think the accordion style will go over my shoes better.  I’m just concerned about protecting my shoes in the elements,” he whined.

I was laughing too hard to respond.

“What?!  Why are you laughing??  What would you do?”

“Put my shoes in my briefcase and change shoes when I got to work?” I offered helpfully.

“But I don’t want to look like an idiot walking around the city!” he protested.

“Seriously, would you rather come into work with ruined shoes and damp pants, or would you rather come into work with your dry shoes in your bag and your pants protected by galoshes?”

“Right.  That’s why I asked you.  You’re going to make fun of me on your blog now, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

 Executive Half-Zips (4 Oct 2007)

Frederic called me, a few days after our initial conversation about his overshoes.

“They sent me the wrong ones!” he complained.

“What did they send you?” I chortled.

“You have to see.”

I dragged myself out to have a look-see.  They had sent him what was essentially a pair of injection molded…Santa shoes.

“I ordered a size 14,” he said, “Thinking that if I ordered a size large enough, that they would just…work.  But then they sent me these…things…and now I don’t know what to do.”  His voice, by that point, had crescendoed into a plaintive wail.

“I told you that you should have just ordered both sets of boots,” I said, laughing so hard I was sobbing.

“What should I do?” he asked.

“Perhaps you should just carry your shoes to work in your bag?” I said, arching my eyebrows into my hairline and offering up my sensical suggestion for the umpteenth time.

“No,” he said firmly, “I think I’m just going to go with my gut, like I should have the first time, and order the ‘Executive Half-Zips’ from the other website.”  He had clearly resolved to go through with this overshoe experiment, despite the fact that all signs pointed to its abject failure.

“Well, good luck with that,” I snorted, “Santa.”  He gave me a look like it was taking an incredible amount of restraint to keep himself from throwing one of the aforementioned Santa shoes at my head.

Since that exchange, Frederic has stopped soliciting my advice on matters of pedary importance.

Pedantic: A Three Part Mini Opera Comes to an End (28 Oct 2007)

Frederic called me the other day.

“Come over to my office and have lunch,” he said.

“Fine,” I said.  Legs and her boyfriend were in town, but she had taken the red-eye and was still asleep, so our lunch plans had been scrapped.

What I found when I went to his office was more than I ever could have hoped for.  I give to you photo documentation of his gumshoe saga.

mk

The man and his boots

IMG_0975

Boots.

IMG_0980

The executive half-zips.

IMG_0979

The santa shoes.

IMG_0978

Hey, Santa.

IMG_0976

Santa shoes, the money tree, and the north star.

After letting me take several artistic shots of the man and his boots, Frederic said, rather nastily, “Well, that was fun, but I still don’t know what do to about my shoes.”  As if it were somehow my fault he had ignored the suggestion I had been making all along that he simply carry the shoes in his bag and wear sneakers or galoshes.

Men.

(These posts were taken from my old blog and lightly edited)

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Slouching Towards Reykjavik

Posted on January 23, 2012 by

Frederic and I have been talking more, in a manner reminiscent of how we spoke when we were Just Friends.  Can men and women ever be friends?  Does the sex part always get in the way, as Billy Crystal once suggested?  I don’t know.  I know nothing about men – not the American ones, not the European ones.  And the thing that truly escapes me is why they inevitably move on from me to someone more Nordic.

Maybe I attract it.  I too love all things North Atlantic.

I think it began in March 2005.  It was the day after my birthday, and the Washington Post published a travel article about one writer’s quest to explore Iceland.  He had driven the Ring Road; visited many of the country’s public swimming pools.  I read the article three times that night on the paper’s website.

Darling, I said to Andrew, Let’s go to Iceland.  You know how I love to swim.

Iceland is cold. You don’t like the cold, he reminded me.

I let it drop.  But I never forgot about Iceland. It was a private obsession; a fantasy land where there were no cats, and the streets were paved with cheese.

Fast forward to the Autumn of 2007, and the world was ending while Frederic sort-of propped me up.  I would say to him, Let’s go to Reykjavik. I’ve never been.

We’re married to other people, he’d remind me.  We’d sit in our offices – on the 41st and 42nd floors of the MetLife Building, respectively – and dream.  In those days, I had an unobstructed view all the way up Park Avenue.  On a clear day, I’d swear I could see to Westchester.

We’re friends.  I just want to go swimming.

Iceland became one of the many things we were going to do: run the New York City marathon; travel to the Caribbean; buy a house in New Jersey where we could both write; take that trip to Iceland.  It was all an escapist fantasy

But things couldn’t hold; the center fell apart – our marriages failed; I travelled and moved away; time passed; the best parts of us lacked all conviction and the worst parts of us were full of passionate, furious intensity.  Perhaps we should’ve been angry at ourselves; our former spouses; liquor; food.  Instead, we acted it all out on each other.

We angrily kept in touch as I made my way through China where I prayed in Buddhist temples and made wishes on Tibetan bells; through Africa where I held the hands of kids thin and bloated with the things that would soon kill them.  We sent hateful messages as I travelled around California and drove canyons, rode horses, tried to write and feel relevant again before I finally gave up and stopped smoking.  I remember one of my last cigarettes, with my arm slung out the window of the car of my college roommate, Legs.  We’d gone to dinner in Cole Valley, maybe?  Clad in skinny jeans and fleeces, we looked like California girls – she was, I wasn’t.  And on the way back to her apartment, I leaned out the window of her car and puffed, while Meatloaf sang “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” and Frederic ignored my messages for the first time in years.  So Legs and I changed plans and drove around Pacific Heights instead, smelling salt air and trying to forget.

Frederic and I sort-of talked when I moved to Washington and I resolved to run a marathon, facts of which I don’t think he was ever fully aware.  At some point during my adventure, he took up with our Danish ex-colleague, a fact of which I wasn’t ever fully aware either, at least, not until it was too late.

By the Autumn of 2009, I was back in California on a deal when I messaged Frederic (in typical, antagonistic fashion): I’m running the New York City Marathon.

He replied: I thought we were going to do that together.

Don’t.

The exchange smacked of loss – what had I expected!  I crumpled against the support of the awning covering the path leading to the lobby of the hotel in which I was staying.  What was done was done.

I needed a shock to the system.  I needed a swim.  I had a run instead; it was my first marathon – New York City.  I crossed the finish line, and for 20 minutes, I knew the meaning of life.  But I still craved the water.  A week post-marathon, I was back in California; back on the deal.  My roadwarrior friend (the one who always meets me in airports) and I drove down to Big Sur and we walked along the shores of the cold Pacific.  We strode barefoot along the beach as the strong current sucked the sand out from underfoot.  It was dizzying; my head spun; I needed to be steadied.

The deal ended.  At the end of that trip, my friend and I drove up the coast and had dinner in San Francisco before our respective flights out of SFO.  I could still feel the sand sucking out from under my feet, even as we sat on Market Street eating sweetbreads.

Go back to New York.  Sort things at home, my friend advised.

I went back to New York.  Time passed.  There were airports and hotels; lounges and lobby bars.  Frederic became a ghost, a shadow.

I never forgot Iceland, though, and one day I saw an advertisement for an Iceland Air deal.

By then I was dating Bill, and I convinced him to join me on the adventure.  We arrived in Reykjavik on a cold December morning, under cover of the Northern Lights.  Have you ever seen the green in the sky, or borne witness to the barren volcanic landscape?  Have you ever experienced the short, short days, or the dim daylight?  Iceland in real-time was better than what it had been in my head.

And the pools!

It had taken years to get there, but I was swimming in Iceland.  I wanted to drink the water; I wanted to suck up the steam.  I wanted to stand naked in the shower for the rest of my days, being born again with each pulse of the faucet.  I never wanted to leave.  I wanted to stand with one foot on either side of the continental divide – North America and Europe – and remain forever.  (Though I didn’t know at the time how prophetic that longing would be.)

Bill and I flew home to New York, and within a few months, Frederic called out of the blue to say he was getting married.  I was promptly hit by a car, and within so few days they could be counted in hours, I found out about Bill’s indiscretions.  Then I flew out to San Francisco for Legs’ wedding, where my roadwarrior friend met me at SFO for an hour or two before I drove back down to the place where we’d once walked along the cold Pacific together, and I tried to steady myself.

It was a second coming of the things that had happened before; two years in a circle; turning and turning in the widening gyre…

At some point, between then and now, the world began to right itself.  Bill, for his part, is apparently dating a woman who used to live in Reykjavik.

The other day I said to Frederic, Do you remember that time we thought it was a good idea to go to Iceland? While we were both still very married?

We wanted to run away, he replied.  From all that, and together. 

I mused: I spent the last few years, in fits of rage, doing many of the things we said we’d do together.  Iceland was…breathtaking…

I was there last May, he said.  Thought of you.  It ruined things a little bit.  Ruined things “a little bit.”  Funny, but I mean them both, both the “ruined” part and the “little bit” part.

It took me a few days, but it finally occurred to me that he was married last May.  He must’ve been married in Iceland.  But his wedding day was the day I’d taken a train from Edinburgh to London.  So that had been a beginning, not an end.  And for me, Iceland was still unspoiled.

Posted in friends, home, musings, My Life in Airports, On the road again, relationships | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Year of the Dragon

Posted on January 22, 2012 by

It’s almost the Lunar New Year, I reminded my mother on Friday night, did you get your haircut?

We are not Asian, for what it’s worth.  But we’ve spent a lot of time in Asia.  When my parents were in China at one point, they brought back a vase — I forget which dynasty — and in all of it’s blue-and-white beauty, the vase got its own seat on the airplane.  It fell off a high ledge in their house in California during the ’94 earthquake, (the anniversary of which we recently celebrated) and the vase was crushed into a powder by the force of the fall on to the hardwood floor.

And when I was little, and my very tall, very Anglo father was a 6’3″ guilo in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, he had at one point come back with (among other outfits) a pink qi pao for me to wear.  I preferred the blue silk pyjamas, but my mother loved the little pink dress.  Of all the childhood clothes of mine that she kept, that was the one she preserved.

(My brother, of course, couldn’t have given two shits about any of this.  He just likes Chinese food.)

I got my hair cut last week, my mother said, interrupting my walk down memory lane.  And Dad got his cut on Thursday. 

We talked a while longer, with my mother reflecting on the various Chinese zodiac signs under which we were all born.

I’m a tiger, she said.

I laughed, To think I have a tiger mother!

In some ways, Mums and Dad had both been tiger parents.  They’d pushed and pushed; they’d been gone a lot — and when they were home they’d had a lot of expectations and often, not a lot of patience.  I couldn’t begrudge them having had their own lives.  But having grown up with perfectionists and being one myself had often been a volatile combination.

And speaking of volatile, it hovered somewhere between an unfunny joke an a credible threat that I was going to run off to China after Andrew and I split.  I always say that I knew The Moment when things were done, but it was a series of moments, really, the first of many taking place at the Intercontinental in Hong Kong.

It was the day after he’d drawn me a diagram of how he loved me — demonstrating how he loved me only when I was behaving properly.  I have always been unlikely to behave.  (I still have the diagram, but am loath to post a photo of that.  Even in parting, there are some things that are strictly between husbands and wives.)

The next day we went out to Repulse Bay, and I took off my shoes and went in the water…

…When I came back on to the beach, I announced my intention to stay.

Eventually, of course, I had to go back — to New York, to our life, to the mess for which I always blamed myself, but was really the fault of us both.

I showed up at family weddings later that year in a new qi pao, much like the one I wore when I was little, but this time in orange.  And everyone could see that something was different, but they didn’t quite know what had changed.  Maybe they knew that it was a throwback to the little girl in pink, who wanted to be just like her daddy when she grew up.  Or maybe they could see that when a woman comes back from anywhere looking like Eve who has eaten the apple, then she probably knows more than she knew before she left.

(That’s me with my brother — the one who couldn’t care less about any of this, except for the Americanized Chinese food part.)

Within a year, I’d left for Washington; within a few months, Andrew and I were separated, and as the oft-told story goes, I was on a call to Hong Kong the same day.

It’s all a circle, you see, which is what I didn’t know the first time around.  That Chinese zodiac diagram someone once gave me shows that everything moves in an infinite cosmic circle.  Some days it feels as if I’m just now wrapping my head around how things that happened three or four years ago fit into how my life works in the present.

I never quite understood how sticky and greasy the past was; how easily stuck one could become, and how things that had happened greased how we move forward.

Regardless of all that, it’s a new day, and the dawn of a new year.

Posted in Adventures, relationships | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Past Tenses

Posted on January 20, 2012 by

In the event you wondered (or didn’t recall) the Meredith-Frederic Juice Fast Saga ended with a whimper, not a bang:

Cleaning House — Epilogue (13 Nov 2007)

I met Frederic for lunch yesterday.  In a post juice-fast world, we were both jonesing for nasty vegetable juice.

“Where are we going to get it?” I said, glancing around furtively.  Like we were looking for smack.

“Equinox,” he said with confidence.  He had clearly thought long and hard about life in a post-juice fast world.  The gym we both belonged to had a juice bar, where the muscle-bound lunch set frequently got its fix.  Why couldn’t we partake, too?  Brilliant.

We arrived at the juice bar, and discovered that they could handily fulfill our needs.  There was a veritable plethora of vegetable matter stacked around a spin-top juicer.  I had worked at a juice bar once.  It was actually one of my most enjoyable jobs.  The spin-top juicer was an incredible bitch to clean.

“I’m going to have the spinach, kale, romaine, parsley apple,” I said.

“No apple!” Frederic said, with a touch of Swiss guard in his voice, like the “No foto!” they scream in Vatican City.

“Why not?” I asked, crestfallen, “Our drinks had apple in them.”

“They did?” he asked, placing the emphasis on the did, like Scooby Doo might have.

“They even had cashew oil in them,” I said, twisting the knife.  I realized that Frederic, over the past week, had taken on a sort of Jack LaLanne fervency, and had developed, in addition to his reverence for his own body, a dire fear of the dreaded kilocalorie.

“Did you drink the cashew nut milk juice?” he asked, semi-changing the subject.

“Oh my god yes,” I said, my eyes glazing over with the memory of my dulcinea of the past few days; the one thing I had looked forward to at the end of each of the long difficult days of cleansing vegetable juice.

“I wound up throwing most of it away,” he confided, “I took one sip and realized that I would have suckled on it like like a baby nursing on mother’s milk.”  He smiled broadly with self-deprivation, as we stepped up to the juice counter to order our drinks.

“No juice,” the guy behind the counter said, “Smoothies only.”

“No juice?” Frederic half-shrieked, making the face he sometimes made that can only be described as looking like the first cousin of Fire Marshall Bill.  “Where can we get juice?” he looked at me in desperation.

“I know where,” I said.  I guided him out the door to the nearest Jamba Juice.  They had no vegetables, save for carrots, which had far too much sugar for him.

We settled on a double-shot of wheat-grass each, which we each gagged on, and proceeded to burp up diesel-fuel for the remainder of the afternoon.

********************************************

Back in the Present Day, in an unrelated-but-still-pertinent-to-this-topic conversation, a friend asked me:  Surely there were good times [with your husband]?

And I replied: Of course!

I went on to detail things I had loved about my ex-husband, and why those good times had mattered.  The difficult stuff of the last few years had blown away the days spent kayaking on the Potomac; the time we drove to Toronto in the middle of the night just because; the ways we loved to travel together; the fact that I’ve been a terrible sleeper my entire life but in my marriage, I always fell asleep first.

But I didn’t want to forget all that.

It got me thinking more about Frederic, too.  Frederic had been my very dear friend — really, the only person who could get near me for a while — when my brother was in jail, and my family was falling apart, and I was so very sick.  My husband didn’t want anything to do with me — it was all very sticky, messy, dirty.  He wanted neat resolutions, and then he’d be happy to resume our life together.

But life doesn’t work that way, does it?

Instead, Frederic had been with me in the trenches: making me laugh; juice fasting with me; listening to me talk about anything but the subject at hand.  No one wanted to be around me in crisis.  Disaster sometimes feels contagious, virulent — like a flu or a skin condition — and my life was the pink-eye of Tribeca in those days.  Frederic, in his own screwed up way, made me feel a little less like I was in social/emotional quarantine.

It’s easy for me to forget.  It’s easy to forget that my ex-husband was a fallible man; it’s easy to forget that Frederic was a human being and not an anecdote.  It has been easy to lose sight of having been the puppetmaster — of having created characters and caricatures of these significant people.  But I am telling you they are real; they exist.  I loved them, and they hurt me, and life went on.

For better or for worse, we existed.  But the verb-tenses changed, and we all moved on.

Posted in F & B, relationships | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Recalling a Clean House

Posted on January 19, 2012 by

I was talking with a colleague the other day about cleansing.  You know, juice fasting; Blueprint; Organic Avenue — all of the green juice-based yuppie shit that I love.

But this reminded me that there was a time when I was new to juice, and the juice world was new in general.  It also got me thinking about the time when Frederic and I were merely dear friends — friends who had each other’s backs during a horrible time in life and in the world.  It seemed strange and foreign that such a time would have been intertwined with…juice fasting.  But it was.

It seemed weirder that such a time ever existed — that Frederic and I ever were friends; that we ever were married to our respective former spouses; that we ever did wonderfully weird and supportively silly things together.

But we did.  It all happened.  And I wrote about it as it unfolded:

Cleaning House Part I (08 Nov 2007):

I am almost through Day 1 of a three-part master cleanse.  It is only mildly unpleasant.  I had been toying with the idea for a while, and been investigating the various options when a friend’s discovery of a company that actually makes and delivers a juice-fast further fomented my cleansing fury.

Because I am a damn fool, I mentioned the idea to Frederic, who recently discovered healthy living.  Prior to his discovery of healthy living, he had been something of a bit of hedonist, and complete trainwreck when it came to his health.  He was the kind of guy who would take an entire stick of butter and smother a game hen with it, and stuff the hen with bacon, and call it dinner.  “It’s okay, it’s French,” he’d say.  Then he found the personal messiah of the South Beach Diet, and got on the bandwagon working out a couple of times a week, and his cholesterol dropped about 100 points, and he instantly began preaching the gospel of Saint Not-Eating-a Stick-of-Butter Wrapped-in-Pork-Fat-at-Every-Damn-Meal.  Amen.

“Jackie did a cleanse,” I said, “I am thinking about doing it.”

“That’s disgusting,” he said.

“You don’t even know what a cleanse is!”

“I bet it’s gross.”

“I think I’m going to do it,” I said, “It gets all the toxins out of you.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.  Don’t be foolish.”  His tone was borderline hostile.

“Just check out the website,” I suggested.  Now I was being challenged.  I sent him an email directing him to the website.  “Did you open the email?” I asked.

“This looks ridiculous,” he said, “I see no benefit to this.  This is stupid.  You pay people a bunch of money to serve you fruit and vegetables?  This is so stupid!”

I sighed.  “Well, I think I’m going to do it.”

“I have to call you back,” he said, then he hung up abruptly.  Chances were, he was intently investigating all things relating to the master cleanse.

The next day, my office phone rang.  “What level cleanse would we do, if you were going to do it?” It was Frederic.

“I don’t know?  Level II?” I guessed.  I hadn’t thought about it.  Since when was this a “we” project?

“No!  If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this right.  We’re going to go all out.  We’re going to go all the way.  We’re going to do the Big Dig.  We’re going to do Level III.  What’s the point if we’re not going all in?”

I was stunned into silence by his intensity.

“Well it says here, the next available start date is November 7th for the Level III cleanse,” he continued, militantly.

“I’m not sure I can do a Level III cleanse,” I wavered, “Have you ever had wheat and barley grass juice?  That stuff is…ferocious.  Jackie couldn’t even get that down.  She had to skip the green drink, and that is ALL the Level III is.”

“Meredith, this isn’t worth it unless we go all in.  You’re going to regret it unless we do this all the way.  We’re going to keep each other accountable.  We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do this right.  Does the 7th work for you?”

“Um, I guess?”

“Okay then.”

And that was how I managed to get co-opted into doing an entirely green, wheat-and-barley grass cleanse.  I had intended to do a cleanse all along, but I had perhaps not intended to sign myself up for what the company’s website calls “The Big Dig.”

A few days later, my office phone rang again.  It was Frederic.  He had called the company, and was calling to conference me in to place our order.  He had done a full 180 in the span of about 5 days, and had gone from skeptic to militant.  I had no choice.  I just whipped out my credit card and patiently read off the numbers.  We hung up with the company.  “Thanks,” he said, “Now, you’re going to have to take delivery and deliver it to my office, because I’m unavailable the day delivery is to be taken, and well, I didn’t tell Rosanette that I’m doing this.”

“Why didn’t you tell your wife that you’re doing this?”

“Well, don’t you think this seems weird?”

“What?”

“That we’re…cleansing together?”

“Well, when you put it that way, yeah.”

“Did you tell Andrew?”

“Of course.  He was going to see my credit card statement anyway.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed hysterically.”  He did.  He thought it was the most ludicrous thing I had ever told him.

“Oh.”

Over the next few days, I prepared for the cleanse by phasing meat and dairy out of my diet, and by giving up diet coke.  Frederic confessed today that he prepared by eating half a London broil last night.  The juices are less foul than anticipated, and are sweeter than expected.  They do, however, have a bitter and lingering aftertaste that is almost impossible to get rid of.

I think, over all, this first day has been a very, very good experience.  We are what we eat, and I just needed to hit the reset button.

Frederic, however, is hoping to cleanse his colon, lose seven pounds, and manage to keep the whole project from his wife…

One wonders if he wouldn’t be better off back at the shrine of St. Butter ‘n Bacon…

Posted in F & B | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

First Dates

Posted on January 17, 2012 by

My tailor is trying to set me up.

Scratch that.  My tailor has successfully set me up.

I should back up.  I was in to have a pair of trousers hemmed last weekend, and my tailor inquired about Bill’s whereabouts.  I sighed and recounted the Sad Tale of What Happened With Bill.  Granted, I could’ve simply said, We broke up.  But what would be the fun in that?

He’s an asshole, Vindy said.  Vindy being the tailor.

You must understand, I have weird relationships with everyone.  I can talk to a tree stump.  This made my ex-boss extremely uncomfortable, because I was notorious for talking to people in airports and obtaining their life stories.  I finally had to stop travelling with him because I like talking to strangers — especially in airports.  While I am notoriously misanthropic, I enjoy having conversations with people who I never have to see again.

It’s intimacy that makes me itchy.

Anyway.  Vindy frequently texts me weird messages about tailoring and dry cleaning, and I respond or don’t respond.  But as she stuck pins into my ankle that morning — remarked over and over that Bill was an asshole — she began asking me about my taste in men.

Would you date someone who is divorced?

Sure.  That’s exactly what I’m looking for.

I have someone you should go out with.  Can I give him your phone number?

Yes.

I didn’t need to ask any questions.  The novelty of being set up on a blind date by my tailor was too enticing.  First, I had never been set up on a blind date.  And second, you guys, being set up on a blind date by my tailor!!  It’s either the perfect romantic comedy plot or excruciating pain — either way, writing fodder for months.

She finished fitting the pants, and sent me on my way.  Then she spent the entire day texting me weird messages about my intended.  Predictably, this fellow had a name that was as laughably fresh-from-the-United-Kingdom as all the rest, and this further fed the myth of my Anglophilia — which I most definitely do not have.

Around 7pm: I’m going to go pick up dry cleaning at his house tonight.  OK if I call you from there and just put him on the phone?

Sure?  I replied.

She did just as she said, and the poor kid got on the phone and told me how much he’d like to take me out (clearly she had a gun to his head), and I was therefore obligated to accept.  We made a date for this coming weekend.

I go on a lot of first dates.  I do not go on a lot of second or third dates.  I’ve found that the men I go out with are looking for a woman who looks like me, but isn’t me — she’s a woman who has my “pedigree” but is looking to “retire.”  All these men are the same; they’re all variations on the theme of my ex-husband.

Is it something about me that’s attracting them, or is it just something about men?

I find being single to be excruciatingly boring, but I put zero effort into dating.  (Possibly less than zero; and am perhaps committing dating suicide by even writing about it.)  Additionally, because I find I am most attracted to mildly-to-severely messed up men aged between 40 and…dead, they tend to be set in their ways, and I tend to be set in my ways, and in a nod to Joni Mitchell — it all winds up looking a lot like America and Russia, and that can get to be a cold, cold war.

(Stop with the messed up men! shouts my mother, It’s not interesting! You don’t want that! Why do you want that?!)

Additionally, I do not date because I find that things always end with men lying, cheating, revealing themselves to be someone completely different than the person they presented themselves to be at the start, and showing a preference for someone a) markedly younger; b) demonstrably bustier; c) much more Scandinavian.

I have experienced a ton of disappointment.  I think I’m scared to try.

Posted in Adventures, musings | Tagged | 3 Comments