Sara called about an hour ago. It’s official, her husband is out of town and will not make his flight back home tonight.
“I can be there by ten,” she said, “and you won’t even know I’m there.”
So it is that I plant a key under the mat and hope she can find her way to the spare bedroom. By ten I will have long been in bed myself and honestly, if you think about it, this is no imposition. This is just a married girlfriend who is scared to death of sleeping alone in her condo, of spending one night on her own without her husband in residence. Honestly? I don’t mind, knowing that when it comes to me and my friends, my house is their house for whatever they need (short of a meth lab and thank God none of them are into that) even when I don’t see their panic, as in this case. Sara is desperately afraid of being alone, not sure how to handle any intruder who might come in (and having convinced herself this intruder will only come when her husband is gone). I have been there and done that myself, and even have an official ‘bedroom’ at Holly’s when she had the same concern. Still, I don’t get it. After fifteen years of marriage I wasn’t a huge fan of sleeping alone myself but somewhere along the line of doing it I finally got clear on the reality that: The odds of someone breaking in were pretty slim, and even if they did break in, whether I was home alone or not I’d still call 911 and hope for the best and as a back up plan, beat the crap out of them with one pair or another of stilletos. Relying, of course, on Basil to sound ferocious in the interim.
The truth is, almost six years later, I don’t mind sleeping alone, and I actually like it. I sleep, year round, with my windows wide open. Have yet to be accosted. Told this to Sara but she’s still coming over and as I said, that’s OK. Just glad it’s not me, having that difficulty.
Getting ready for bed, I thought about the day, and the news. Tiger Woods, in particular, and how his wife ‘used a golf club to free him from the car’ after his accident, in his own driveway, shortly before three a.m. This was too good. Owen of course espoused a theory. “They were having,” he said, “a little domestic argument, and I personally think she had the golf club in her hand to begin with.” All I could do was laugh at that. “I agree,” I said, “and it explains, doesn’t it? Why even after dating for so long I was never then and am not now quite clear now on where you keep your golf clubs.”
“Mad,” he said, “I think you’d find something, golf club or not.”
Touche.
A man who knows me.
But, still. It will be interesting to find out what the real story is, never mind Owen’s, “you may expect a Teflon coated explanation. Everything in his life needs to be perfect.”
It’s good to know, I’m thinking, that Tiger Woods has domestic disputes that end in vehicles being massacred with golf clubs, and it’s good to know that regardless of the occupancy of my spare bedroom tonight, I have found a way in the last six years to sleep well alone.
Basil remains on high alert, however, knowing that tonight, her person is OK but her Friend from Book Club could use a buddy. At least when she’s missing from my feet tonight I will know where to find her.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Least Of It
No matter the value of absolute honesty there are times when a twist of the truth is an absolute requisite and 99% of the time this is when you’re on the phone with a client as I was this morning. She was heading out of town for the holiday and asked if I had ‘big plans’ for Thanksgiving.
“I’m very much looking forward to it,” I responded enthusiastically, letting her know the hotel expected well over a thousand guests for the annual brunch and that I’d ‘get to’ spend the day seating people and watching little kids pick through their own special buffet at about my knee level. “It’s a wonderful way to spend the holiday,” I finished, and glanced up at my computer monitor.
An email had just come through from Diane:
Subject: Bull
Message: ….Sh*t award goes to you today.
I’m not sure how I finished the call without laughing out loud, but that’s all I could do as soon as I hung up the phone. “Oh come on,” I hollered out my office door, “say it until you believe it, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, “that was pretty good. You almost had me believing it!”
In all honesty, Thanksgiving is kind of fun, sort of like a people parade that goes on for five hours and you never know what you’re going to see, as I’ve noted in previous postings (the man who put the turkey leg in the chocolate fondue fountain and then actually ate it, the year the kids’ buffet caught fire, the time I had to inform the band manager to stop stealing chicken fingers from the kids’ buffet and loading his suit pockets with them). There really isn’t a drawback to the day if you can overlook how sore your feet are at the end of it and having experienced it for so many years now, working with basically the same people, it has a feel of being a tradition although it’s not traditional to work on the holiday. So Diane can joke with me about it and that’s absolutely fine because at the end of the day (and, in all honesty, at the beginning of the day, too) we’re both very, very thankful to be working. There’s just too many people this year who can’t say that.
Which brings to mind things I’m grateful for and I’d have to put that one at the top of the list. Closely followed, now that I’m in keeping with the time of year and considering these things, by the fact that I’m closing out a year with the companionship of the same incredible dog that I started the year with. Factoring in the many close calls she’s had with cars, getting lost, and ingesting things she shouldn’t, I’m lucky to have her. I’d follow that with the new friends I’ve made this year, my incredible Book Club Ladies and the mixed lot of my writer’s group. I’d have to claim complete gratitude for another year with incredible friends I already had, like Holly and Claire, and I’d have to say I’m grateful for the lesson behind anything or anyone I’ve lost and the blessing of any that turned up again later. I’d have to be honest and admit I’m entirely grateful for the people who have come into my heart, even those who didn’t remain in my life, for what they brought to my life. I’d be remiss if I wasn’t thankful to have had the opportunity to be one of the lucky people who knew Trent Babcock, and to have the great memories he left behind. I’d be likewise remiss if I didn’t mention my gratitude for the odd but solid friendship of Brent Babcock as well, and the peace of the first year since we split up that our lives finally felt completely and totally separate and settled. I’m grateful that losses experienced weren’t really all that bad in light of the good that followed them, as in getting to know Lainie even better after she moved from across the hall. I’d have to note even the smallest things the year brought, like the unexpected happiness that can be found in finally getting a county library card and it occurs to me that if I had time available to continue listing everything I’m altogether grateful for this year this would become an endless piece of writing because there’s always something to be grateful for, something in every moment, if you’re open to seeing it.
Something like what I saw this morning, a well-timed email that made me laugh and realize that in the big picture of everything, the condition of my feet on Friday is the least of it.
“I’m very much looking forward to it,” I responded enthusiastically, letting her know the hotel expected well over a thousand guests for the annual brunch and that I’d ‘get to’ spend the day seating people and watching little kids pick through their own special buffet at about my knee level. “It’s a wonderful way to spend the holiday,” I finished, and glanced up at my computer monitor.
An email had just come through from Diane:
Subject: Bull
Message: ….Sh*t award goes to you today.
I’m not sure how I finished the call without laughing out loud, but that’s all I could do as soon as I hung up the phone. “Oh come on,” I hollered out my office door, “say it until you believe it, right?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, “that was pretty good. You almost had me believing it!”
In all honesty, Thanksgiving is kind of fun, sort of like a people parade that goes on for five hours and you never know what you’re going to see, as I’ve noted in previous postings (the man who put the turkey leg in the chocolate fondue fountain and then actually ate it, the year the kids’ buffet caught fire, the time I had to inform the band manager to stop stealing chicken fingers from the kids’ buffet and loading his suit pockets with them). There really isn’t a drawback to the day if you can overlook how sore your feet are at the end of it and having experienced it for so many years now, working with basically the same people, it has a feel of being a tradition although it’s not traditional to work on the holiday. So Diane can joke with me about it and that’s absolutely fine because at the end of the day (and, in all honesty, at the beginning of the day, too) we’re both very, very thankful to be working. There’s just too many people this year who can’t say that.
Which brings to mind things I’m grateful for and I’d have to put that one at the top of the list. Closely followed, now that I’m in keeping with the time of year and considering these things, by the fact that I’m closing out a year with the companionship of the same incredible dog that I started the year with. Factoring in the many close calls she’s had with cars, getting lost, and ingesting things she shouldn’t, I’m lucky to have her. I’d follow that with the new friends I’ve made this year, my incredible Book Club Ladies and the mixed lot of my writer’s group. I’d have to claim complete gratitude for another year with incredible friends I already had, like Holly and Claire, and I’d have to say I’m grateful for the lesson behind anything or anyone I’ve lost and the blessing of any that turned up again later. I’d have to be honest and admit I’m entirely grateful for the people who have come into my heart, even those who didn’t remain in my life, for what they brought to my life. I’d be remiss if I wasn’t thankful to have had the opportunity to be one of the lucky people who knew Trent Babcock, and to have the great memories he left behind. I’d be likewise remiss if I didn’t mention my gratitude for the odd but solid friendship of Brent Babcock as well, and the peace of the first year since we split up that our lives finally felt completely and totally separate and settled. I’m grateful that losses experienced weren’t really all that bad in light of the good that followed them, as in getting to know Lainie even better after she moved from across the hall. I’d have to note even the smallest things the year brought, like the unexpected happiness that can be found in finally getting a county library card and it occurs to me that if I had time available to continue listing everything I’m altogether grateful for this year this would become an endless piece of writing because there’s always something to be grateful for, something in every moment, if you’re open to seeing it.
Something like what I saw this morning, a well-timed email that made me laugh and realize that in the big picture of everything, the condition of my feet on Friday is the least of it.
Friday, November 20, 2009
When You Lack A Green Thumb, Drive A Secret Sleigh
I know the last year has been rough on a lot of people but for my downstairs neighbors it seems (at least to me) it was borderline brutal. It started with his being laid off shortly before Thanksgiving last year and his only working hit and miss more or less, since them. She’s working a part time night job so she can still be home during the day to take care of their kids, a three year old boy and a now one year old girl. About all I’ve been able to do is offer whatever encouragement I can when I see him in the courtyard or pass her in the foyer. It’s tough to watch anybody go through hard times, but it made my annual Secret Santa decision much easier.
I started my sideline as a Secret Santa ten years ago when Brent and I first returned to Utah. That first Christmas we were transitioning from a rental house to the Willowcreek house we’d purchased and neither of us felt like having a traditional holiday. It was Brent’s idea to, rather than even attempt a regular holiday, spend three hundred dollars on toys and deposit them at the Lutheran Church we attended for their gift drive for needy kids. We had a great time shopping and enjoyed it, really, much more than we’d ever enjoyed shopping for each other because when it came right down to it we didn’t need anything. We followed the excursion with an entirely non-Traditional dinner at a local restaurant featuring cliff divers and it wasn’t so terrible, really, if you didn’t mind a very strong odor of chlorine with your meal.
Over the following years someone always came to mind between September and November, and for a couple of those years it was the three small children of a work associate who’d been killed in a car accident returning from a Nevada casino. When Brent and I split I considered disbanding the tradition altogether but that September there was another family in a tough spot so the decision was easy to make and I had to admit, carrying on the tradition made my first Christmas alone feel much better than it would have felt had I not done it. Last year, playing cards one evening at the invitation of my downstairs neighbors, I asked if they’d let me take care of Christmas. That was the first year I made the exception and rather than doing the actual shopping, I gave them cash, instead. Spirits being as low as they were in their household, I thought it was important they go out and shop for their kids, and they did.
This year I was on the fence about what to do but the decision was made for me two days ago when my neighbor let me know that, as if things couldn’t get any worse, his wife’s car had blown a fuel pump and they were looking at a five hundred dollar repair. Not welcome news just before Thanksgiving, and when his hours had just been reduced once more. “I’m sorry,” I told him, and I honestly was. “That’s the worst. But it does remind me…” and once again, I inquired if I could take care of the kids’ Christmas.
“Please let us know,” he said, “if there is ever anything we can do for you.”
What’s hard to explain is that they already do a lot for me, just by being great neighbors. I enjoyed having dinner and playing cards and playing with their kids a lot more than I’ve enjoyed black tie dinners at high end restaurants. The gift basket his mother left on my doorstep last Christmas was one of the best gifts I’d ever received because it was unanticipated, unexpected, and really, really thoughtful. Knocking on wood as I write this, but I’ve been through rough times and they’re just that much tougher to get through at the holidays. Alleviating even a part of the weight of that burden from someone else seems to me to be what the holiday is all about, anyway. Or maybe it’s hereditary, and it’s having grown up knowing once the temperatures dropped, my dad could be found walking through People’s Park in Berkeley in the dark, handing out new coats and sweatshirts to the homeless people sleeping there, every single winter. Or maybe it all comes down, at heart, to Emerson and his unforgettable quote (note I say ‘unforgettable’ but can’t quote the entirety, although it does appear on a large magnet on my fridge) : “…if you can touch another person’s life, or leave behind a garden….this is a life well lived.”
So that’s the rationale. As I struggle to keep even the most basic of houseplants alive and don’t have anywhere to plant an actual garden, at least for the foreseeable future, this particular Secret Santa isn’t going anywhere.
I started my sideline as a Secret Santa ten years ago when Brent and I first returned to Utah. That first Christmas we were transitioning from a rental house to the Willowcreek house we’d purchased and neither of us felt like having a traditional holiday. It was Brent’s idea to, rather than even attempt a regular holiday, spend three hundred dollars on toys and deposit them at the Lutheran Church we attended for their gift drive for needy kids. We had a great time shopping and enjoyed it, really, much more than we’d ever enjoyed shopping for each other because when it came right down to it we didn’t need anything. We followed the excursion with an entirely non-Traditional dinner at a local restaurant featuring cliff divers and it wasn’t so terrible, really, if you didn’t mind a very strong odor of chlorine with your meal.
Over the following years someone always came to mind between September and November, and for a couple of those years it was the three small children of a work associate who’d been killed in a car accident returning from a Nevada casino. When Brent and I split I considered disbanding the tradition altogether but that September there was another family in a tough spot so the decision was easy to make and I had to admit, carrying on the tradition made my first Christmas alone feel much better than it would have felt had I not done it. Last year, playing cards one evening at the invitation of my downstairs neighbors, I asked if they’d let me take care of Christmas. That was the first year I made the exception and rather than doing the actual shopping, I gave them cash, instead. Spirits being as low as they were in their household, I thought it was important they go out and shop for their kids, and they did.
This year I was on the fence about what to do but the decision was made for me two days ago when my neighbor let me know that, as if things couldn’t get any worse, his wife’s car had blown a fuel pump and they were looking at a five hundred dollar repair. Not welcome news just before Thanksgiving, and when his hours had just been reduced once more. “I’m sorry,” I told him, and I honestly was. “That’s the worst. But it does remind me…” and once again, I inquired if I could take care of the kids’ Christmas.
“Please let us know,” he said, “if there is ever anything we can do for you.”
What’s hard to explain is that they already do a lot for me, just by being great neighbors. I enjoyed having dinner and playing cards and playing with their kids a lot more than I’ve enjoyed black tie dinners at high end restaurants. The gift basket his mother left on my doorstep last Christmas was one of the best gifts I’d ever received because it was unanticipated, unexpected, and really, really thoughtful. Knocking on wood as I write this, but I’ve been through rough times and they’re just that much tougher to get through at the holidays. Alleviating even a part of the weight of that burden from someone else seems to me to be what the holiday is all about, anyway. Or maybe it’s hereditary, and it’s having grown up knowing once the temperatures dropped, my dad could be found walking through People’s Park in Berkeley in the dark, handing out new coats and sweatshirts to the homeless people sleeping there, every single winter. Or maybe it all comes down, at heart, to Emerson and his unforgettable quote (note I say ‘unforgettable’ but can’t quote the entirety, although it does appear on a large magnet on my fridge) : “…if you can touch another person’s life, or leave behind a garden….this is a life well lived.”
So that’s the rationale. As I struggle to keep even the most basic of houseplants alive and don’t have anywhere to plant an actual garden, at least for the foreseeable future, this particular Secret Santa isn’t going anywhere.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
On Bonfires, Turkey Legs, Sore Feet, and Teddy Bears: The Holidays Officially Begin
Just when you think the holidays can’t get more interesting you find yourself volunteering to spend the evening after Thanksgiving sequestered away on the top floor of a luxury hotel surrounded by cookies, cinnamon almonds, hot spiced cider and stuffed animals. This happened shortly after nine this morning when Holly emailed the company-wide sign up sheet for our first annual Christmas Festival the evening after Thanksgiving. Diane and I surveyed it in my office, noting available shifts needing to be filled between 6pm and 7pm.
“Let’s do something together,” she said. “Try to find something fun.”
Fun wasn’t exactly the word that came to mind most immediately as I scrolled through the list. Two ‘Writing Letters to Santa’ helpers were needed in the Lobby. Sounded far too crayon intensive. Two ‘Cookie Frosting Assistants’ were needed in the restaurant. Sounded too messy. ‘Gingerbread Town Guides’ were also requested and that sounded as if you’d need to possess knowledge about the actual gingerbread houses other than knowing they came from the pastry kitchen so that didn’t work, either. Other remaining shifts entailed spending far too much time outside where the tree would be lit and cookies would be served from various tents and awnings. Too cold for that. I think we both realized simultaneously there was only one plausible option left and that’s how we wound up filling two empty slots as ‘Teddy Bear Helpers’, even going so far as to recruit Abby to sign up as the “Teddy Bear Greeter”. Surely, we were thinking, it couldn’t be too tough of a work detail and besides, city views from the rooftop lounge were beautiful, so it was the best choice we could make.
Not, that is, that we honestly wanted to make any choice at all. In past years the day after Thanksgiving was a ‘recovery day’ wherein anyone who’d worked as a Greeter/Seater at the Thanksgiving brunch in the ballroom took a day off. Not so much for purposes of reward but more for serious recovery for the feet. Seating 1,400-1,600 people over the course of five hours takes a real toll even if the time passes quickly because there’s always action of some kind to be observed. My personal favorites remain the year the kid’s buffet, a conglomeration of food stations at about my knee level, caught fire when a small boy reaching for yet one more ladle full of gummy bears knocked a chaff of wheat (we don’t decorate with that anymore) into the sterno can under a chafer and started a small bonfire controlled only when a banquet captain dashed over and effectively smothered it with his jacket. The kids were unscathed and probably thought it was a special effect we’d planned for their enjoyment. Also a fond memory is the year one guest walked to the chocolate fondue fountain with a full plate, extracted a turkey leg from the top of his prodigious pile of foodstuffs, thrust it into the cascading dark chocolate and proceeded after removing it to polish off at least half of it on the way back to his table. The next year brought the string quartet’s manager who, under the guise of ‘supervising his client’, idled near the kid’s buffet and continually slipped chicken fingers into his suit pockets. For whatever reason I was designated the person to remind him the food was for paying guests, not for just anybody, and while he was welcome to finish the chicken in his pockets he should really refrain from stuffing any more in there. You never know what you’re going to see and as tough as it can be on the feet it’s not the worst way to spend Thanksgiving Day until about four in the afternoon.
Over lunch today, Holly clarified a bit for me what exactly working with the teddy bears entailed and it doesn’t sound too bad. Between the three of us and the mascot for our NBA team, we should be able to handle touring families and kids through the suites where the bears will be lounging, watching TV, etc, ensuring they remain plumped up and don’t accidentally get knocked to the floor, buried under a cushion, or caught sampling items from the mini bars. It sounds, if you want to know the truth, kind of fun, and as all the bears will eventually be donated to children in need, it’s a great cause and certainly makes my point again that the oddest assignments have a strange habit of becoming part of any ‘normal’ work day. And besides, although I gave them up years ago, I was always a huge fan of stuffed animals, and never met a teddy bear I didn’t like.
“Let’s do something together,” she said. “Try to find something fun.”
Fun wasn’t exactly the word that came to mind most immediately as I scrolled through the list. Two ‘Writing Letters to Santa’ helpers were needed in the Lobby. Sounded far too crayon intensive. Two ‘Cookie Frosting Assistants’ were needed in the restaurant. Sounded too messy. ‘Gingerbread Town Guides’ were also requested and that sounded as if you’d need to possess knowledge about the actual gingerbread houses other than knowing they came from the pastry kitchen so that didn’t work, either. Other remaining shifts entailed spending far too much time outside where the tree would be lit and cookies would be served from various tents and awnings. Too cold for that. I think we both realized simultaneously there was only one plausible option left and that’s how we wound up filling two empty slots as ‘Teddy Bear Helpers’, even going so far as to recruit Abby to sign up as the “Teddy Bear Greeter”. Surely, we were thinking, it couldn’t be too tough of a work detail and besides, city views from the rooftop lounge were beautiful, so it was the best choice we could make.
Not, that is, that we honestly wanted to make any choice at all. In past years the day after Thanksgiving was a ‘recovery day’ wherein anyone who’d worked as a Greeter/Seater at the Thanksgiving brunch in the ballroom took a day off. Not so much for purposes of reward but more for serious recovery for the feet. Seating 1,400-1,600 people over the course of five hours takes a real toll even if the time passes quickly because there’s always action of some kind to be observed. My personal favorites remain the year the kid’s buffet, a conglomeration of food stations at about my knee level, caught fire when a small boy reaching for yet one more ladle full of gummy bears knocked a chaff of wheat (we don’t decorate with that anymore) into the sterno can under a chafer and started a small bonfire controlled only when a banquet captain dashed over and effectively smothered it with his jacket. The kids were unscathed and probably thought it was a special effect we’d planned for their enjoyment. Also a fond memory is the year one guest walked to the chocolate fondue fountain with a full plate, extracted a turkey leg from the top of his prodigious pile of foodstuffs, thrust it into the cascading dark chocolate and proceeded after removing it to polish off at least half of it on the way back to his table. The next year brought the string quartet’s manager who, under the guise of ‘supervising his client’, idled near the kid’s buffet and continually slipped chicken fingers into his suit pockets. For whatever reason I was designated the person to remind him the food was for paying guests, not for just anybody, and while he was welcome to finish the chicken in his pockets he should really refrain from stuffing any more in there. You never know what you’re going to see and as tough as it can be on the feet it’s not the worst way to spend Thanksgiving Day until about four in the afternoon.
Over lunch today, Holly clarified a bit for me what exactly working with the teddy bears entailed and it doesn’t sound too bad. Between the three of us and the mascot for our NBA team, we should be able to handle touring families and kids through the suites where the bears will be lounging, watching TV, etc, ensuring they remain plumped up and don’t accidentally get knocked to the floor, buried under a cushion, or caught sampling items from the mini bars. It sounds, if you want to know the truth, kind of fun, and as all the bears will eventually be donated to children in need, it’s a great cause and certainly makes my point again that the oddest assignments have a strange habit of becoming part of any ‘normal’ work day. And besides, although I gave them up years ago, I was always a huge fan of stuffed animals, and never met a teddy bear I didn’t like.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Interesting Reading: What You Get For $12.99
I haven’t looked at them in three and a half years and I probably wouldn’t have looked at them now if it hadn’t been for Helpful Chipper Spencer at Wells Fargo who sold me on the concept back on the 6th when we had our meeting at the bank’s branch and I set up another savings account. For $12.99, he said, you couldn’t go wrong with the bank’s Complete Identity Theft Package which included a detailed, personalized look at your credit history, including the revelation of your credit scores by the major three credit reporting companies. I had nothing to lose, he said. I’d get the first report free, and he’d call me (he even made a note to do so, right there and then, in his Outlook calendar) before the service renewed, to see if I wanted to cancel. “In this day and age,” he said somberly, “you can't keep too close a handle on your credit scores.” Or too close a handle on your identity, apparently, although I wasn’t clear exactly why anyone would want mine, other than me.
I had to agree he was probably right, considering I hadn’t inquired into my credit since June of 2006 when I bought my place. Before then, I hadn’t inquired into it since Brent and I bought the house in Willowcreek in 2000, and before that I hadn’t given it so much as a passing thought since the Denver house in 1997 and the first Salt Lake house in 1992. I did remember being very pleased with the scores in 2006, as had been my mortgage lender, the same company currently selling me on Identity Theft Protection. So sure, I told Spencer. Sign me up, take my $12.99, and I’ll look forward to receiving the information.
It arrived last night, and looked like a fairly substantial magazine. I was tempted to go through it right away, but first things first. Basil had to go out, and both the new Mad Magazine and this month’s Oprah had arrived in the same batch of mail, so it had to wait an hour or so. My priorities, as you can see, are a little skewed when it comes to ‘prioritizing’ the mail. Twisted humor first (and well worth it, given Mad’s hilarious “Blunder Woman” cartoon based on Sarah Palin, who has, they said, ‘decided to go rogue, rogue apparently being the Eskimo word for stupid’) living my best life with Oprah’s help immediately following. Then and only then, credit scores and reporting.
I have to say I was as happy with them as I’d been in 2006. It was a good feeling to know, in black and white, that they were very good. Which meant that if I needed to refinance a mortgage, get a different car, or take out a loan, my odds were good. Which was great to know, it just didn’t appeal to me at all as a viable idea. I suppose it comes from childhood, back in the days when even as young as 12 my dad had instituted a ‘fund matching’ program on my savings passbook. He’d ‘match’ every $100 I put away, which was huge at the time, considering earning a hundred bucks equated to roughly a hundred hours of babysitting neighbor kids on the weekends. At heart, I’d rather put money away than spend it and I’m glad I’m that way. When the divorce came through and I received my share of retirement investments from Brent, it went immediately into the hands of a financial planner. I’m a huge fan of my 401(k) through work, and have thoroughly enjoyed, in my own strange way, moving money into the new savings account via electronic banking. I’m not entirely sure if that’s due to any zealousness for saving or just being enamored of moving money around with the click of a button, after so many years of writing out actual checks, which I never liked. I guess you could say the only major purchase I’ve made in the last three and a half years was leather furniture, but even at that I did it knowing when you buy leather, you’re set for at least twenty years of use.
I suppose I am the same as Holly described herself, “a little more frugal with my money than most”, although like her, I’m not averse to the impulse buy (most of which have happened in the ladie’s boutique at work, thus explaining my Knight In Shining Armor sculpture and ‘Five Dogs Doing The Cha Cha’ that matched the one found in one of our Presidential Suites), yet the majority of them are marked down substantially (honestly, would anyone but me have bought the shining knight, anyway?) or seriously on sale. I’m more one for bargains than big purchases, even when that means spending an entire afternoon waking through an antique show to find one ring, two brooches, and an out of print book, as I did a few weeks ago. I guess, in thinking about it, I’m glad about this.
It’s good information to have and I owe some thanks to Helpful Chipper Spencer for pointing me in the right direction. I am not, however, at all sure I’m going to renew the service. I like it so far, it’s just the letting go of $12.99 every month that seems a little excessive.
Maybe I’ll keep it if I can get him to discount the rate a bit.
I had to agree he was probably right, considering I hadn’t inquired into my credit since June of 2006 when I bought my place. Before then, I hadn’t inquired into it since Brent and I bought the house in Willowcreek in 2000, and before that I hadn’t given it so much as a passing thought since the Denver house in 1997 and the first Salt Lake house in 1992. I did remember being very pleased with the scores in 2006, as had been my mortgage lender, the same company currently selling me on Identity Theft Protection. So sure, I told Spencer. Sign me up, take my $12.99, and I’ll look forward to receiving the information.
It arrived last night, and looked like a fairly substantial magazine. I was tempted to go through it right away, but first things first. Basil had to go out, and both the new Mad Magazine and this month’s Oprah had arrived in the same batch of mail, so it had to wait an hour or so. My priorities, as you can see, are a little skewed when it comes to ‘prioritizing’ the mail. Twisted humor first (and well worth it, given Mad’s hilarious “Blunder Woman” cartoon based on Sarah Palin, who has, they said, ‘decided to go rogue, rogue apparently being the Eskimo word for stupid’) living my best life with Oprah’s help immediately following. Then and only then, credit scores and reporting.
I have to say I was as happy with them as I’d been in 2006. It was a good feeling to know, in black and white, that they were very good. Which meant that if I needed to refinance a mortgage, get a different car, or take out a loan, my odds were good. Which was great to know, it just didn’t appeal to me at all as a viable idea. I suppose it comes from childhood, back in the days when even as young as 12 my dad had instituted a ‘fund matching’ program on my savings passbook. He’d ‘match’ every $100 I put away, which was huge at the time, considering earning a hundred bucks equated to roughly a hundred hours of babysitting neighbor kids on the weekends. At heart, I’d rather put money away than spend it and I’m glad I’m that way. When the divorce came through and I received my share of retirement investments from Brent, it went immediately into the hands of a financial planner. I’m a huge fan of my 401(k) through work, and have thoroughly enjoyed, in my own strange way, moving money into the new savings account via electronic banking. I’m not entirely sure if that’s due to any zealousness for saving or just being enamored of moving money around with the click of a button, after so many years of writing out actual checks, which I never liked. I guess you could say the only major purchase I’ve made in the last three and a half years was leather furniture, but even at that I did it knowing when you buy leather, you’re set for at least twenty years of use.
I suppose I am the same as Holly described herself, “a little more frugal with my money than most”, although like her, I’m not averse to the impulse buy (most of which have happened in the ladie’s boutique at work, thus explaining my Knight In Shining Armor sculpture and ‘Five Dogs Doing The Cha Cha’ that matched the one found in one of our Presidential Suites), yet the majority of them are marked down substantially (honestly, would anyone but me have bought the shining knight, anyway?) or seriously on sale. I’m more one for bargains than big purchases, even when that means spending an entire afternoon waking through an antique show to find one ring, two brooches, and an out of print book, as I did a few weeks ago. I guess, in thinking about it, I’m glad about this.
It’s good information to have and I owe some thanks to Helpful Chipper Spencer for pointing me in the right direction. I am not, however, at all sure I’m going to renew the service. I like it so far, it’s just the letting go of $12.99 every month that seems a little excessive.
Maybe I’ll keep it if I can get him to discount the rate a bit.
Monday, November 16, 2009
The WTFlu
You have got to be, I thought, reading the news story this afternoon, kidding me.
Apparently a cat in Parker City was diagnosed with H1N1 which was nothing short, according to the reporter, of a cautionary tale for pet owners everywhere. As a pet owner with pets everywhere (or so it feels every night when I come home and am simultaneously meowed at persistently by two cats and gifted with a stuffed animal significantly slobbered upon and duly shaken, by a dog), this was just this side of a mindblower. Apparently animals could get the flu. They could, in turn, give it to their ‘people’, and vice versa.
The smart money, the story read, was on ‘isolating your animals from other people who are sick and if you are sick yourself, you should isolate yourself from your animals’. Bad news for me, again. Short of moving out, on a temporary basis of course, onto the roof of the carport outside my bedroom window, isolating myself from my animals isn’t possible. For another thing, I rely on them when I’m sick. They’re the only ones who can stand me when with every rise in temperature, every throb of the headache, and every shake of the chills makes me cry like a girl (because what can I say, I am a girl) and the last thing I’d want or could stand would be to isolate myself from them.
I guess we’d all have to have the flu together, kind of like my sister, myself, and my dad all had the mumps back in the mid-sixties. I have only vague memories of being bundled into my twin bed, surrounded by balloons and Barbie dolls so it couldn’t have been all bad. We all came out of it OK and my parents didn’t want further children, anyway (although if they had, I’m quite sure playing Florence Nightingale to all of us at once as she did then was enough to change my mom’s mind). So that, honestly, is my ‘plan’ for the flu, being as it seems quite the thing for organizations and individuals to have a ‘plan’ for the flu, at least beyond washing their hands every 1.6 seconds.
Still, I can’t believe it. I would never have thought I could pass a flu to my dog or cat, or vice versa. Ordinarily I’m a fairly articulate person but in all honesty, my only response at the time I read the story and my only response now remains the acronym “WTF?”. I know I’m doing all I can do to prevent the flu, having become a hand-washing zealot of sorts and vowing never, ever, to touch my face (except to wash it, of course, and to add/remove contact lenses although my hand sterilization procedure prior to either is worthy of any surgeon about to perform heart surgery). You can’t be too careful, especially this year when our work-sponsored flu shot clinic was cancelled (no vaccine) and my doctor’s office likewise couldn’t give me a flu shot (no more vaccine).
Both scenarios were a shock, as a flu shot has always been, up to this point, as ubiquitous as, say, a weekly manicure you do yourself because you can’t justify a spa charge even when you have it to spend. I couldn’t understand how in the world we could be so short that we’d be cancelling clinics.
That was before, of course, I read today’s news story and understood it’s the cats and dogs who are also in line for the supply.
Again, the acronym crosses my mind, and I can only hope this year, I successfully avoid the WTFlu.
Apparently a cat in Parker City was diagnosed with H1N1 which was nothing short, according to the reporter, of a cautionary tale for pet owners everywhere. As a pet owner with pets everywhere (or so it feels every night when I come home and am simultaneously meowed at persistently by two cats and gifted with a stuffed animal significantly slobbered upon and duly shaken, by a dog), this was just this side of a mindblower. Apparently animals could get the flu. They could, in turn, give it to their ‘people’, and vice versa.
The smart money, the story read, was on ‘isolating your animals from other people who are sick and if you are sick yourself, you should isolate yourself from your animals’. Bad news for me, again. Short of moving out, on a temporary basis of course, onto the roof of the carport outside my bedroom window, isolating myself from my animals isn’t possible. For another thing, I rely on them when I’m sick. They’re the only ones who can stand me when with every rise in temperature, every throb of the headache, and every shake of the chills makes me cry like a girl (because what can I say, I am a girl) and the last thing I’d want or could stand would be to isolate myself from them.
I guess we’d all have to have the flu together, kind of like my sister, myself, and my dad all had the mumps back in the mid-sixties. I have only vague memories of being bundled into my twin bed, surrounded by balloons and Barbie dolls so it couldn’t have been all bad. We all came out of it OK and my parents didn’t want further children, anyway (although if they had, I’m quite sure playing Florence Nightingale to all of us at once as she did then was enough to change my mom’s mind). So that, honestly, is my ‘plan’ for the flu, being as it seems quite the thing for organizations and individuals to have a ‘plan’ for the flu, at least beyond washing their hands every 1.6 seconds.
Still, I can’t believe it. I would never have thought I could pass a flu to my dog or cat, or vice versa. Ordinarily I’m a fairly articulate person but in all honesty, my only response at the time I read the story and my only response now remains the acronym “WTF?”. I know I’m doing all I can do to prevent the flu, having become a hand-washing zealot of sorts and vowing never, ever, to touch my face (except to wash it, of course, and to add/remove contact lenses although my hand sterilization procedure prior to either is worthy of any surgeon about to perform heart surgery). You can’t be too careful, especially this year when our work-sponsored flu shot clinic was cancelled (no vaccine) and my doctor’s office likewise couldn’t give me a flu shot (no more vaccine).
Both scenarios were a shock, as a flu shot has always been, up to this point, as ubiquitous as, say, a weekly manicure you do yourself because you can’t justify a spa charge even when you have it to spend. I couldn’t understand how in the world we could be so short that we’d be cancelling clinics.
That was before, of course, I read today’s news story and understood it’s the cats and dogs who are also in line for the supply.
Again, the acronym crosses my mind, and I can only hope this year, I successfully avoid the WTFlu.
The Effects of Freezing
It’s officially gotten cold – very cold – and over the weekend white stuff fell out of the sky, covered the ground and basically made walking the dog feel like an experience much longer in duration than it really was. Cold has that effect on time (hence two minutes last week in the main kitchen’s walk-in freezer, jotting down available last minute hors d’oeuvre add-ons for a group equated, in my mind, to roughly two weeks tent camping on the Alaskan tundra). It slows everything down and slows it down every year but I’m never quite ready for it. It’s always a surprise when I wake up on a winter morning and find it takes me three hours to move from my pillow to the shower. Basil requires no less than a week and a half to complete one circuit around the courtyard and the elapsed time between when I get into my car and when the seat heater actually produces anything remotely resembling heat is equal to about two and a half months. Or maybe that’s just how it feels but as they say, perception is reality and my perception is that once the temperatures plummet so does the second hand’s ability to move normally around the clock face.
There’s no cure for it. I suppose you just accept it and understand any activity you have to undertake outdoors (where it’s very, very cold) when you’d rather be inside (where it’s very, very warm) is going to feel like it lasts forever. The best you can do is prepare yourself by basically changing how you dress to go outside. In my case this entails throwing on an additional pair or two of flannel pants, three to six sweaters, a heavy coat, gloves under glittens, one scarf, sometimes two hats, three pair of socks, boots, and if I can find them (because they’re never in the same place at the beginning of a new winter as I left them at the close of the old one), the teal blue ear muffs you can really only get away with in a fashion sense when you’re wearing enough layers to make the Michelin Man look alarmingly anorexic. This slathering on of clothing layers isn’t limited to just me. Basil, being the Alpha Diva she truly is, doesn’t ‘do’ cold, so winter is rough for her. She also doesn’t ‘do’ wet, as evidenced by how she will ‘heel’ not on command but only when it’s raining or snowing and to step 4” from my side would remove her from the protection of the umbrella I’m carrying, as well as by how she will twist her body into some pretty amazing contortions in order to pee on a curb, a tree, or anything else available just at the edge of the grass without actually setting a paw in the grass, as the grass is wet and as I said, she doesn’t ‘do’ wet. Hence her own pre-walk donning of a heavy blue sweater, an extra bandana, and if there’s ice melt in the courtyard (and there is, every day all winter long), the Velcro-adhered dog boots from REI, replete with ‘super grip’ traction on the bottom. Which protects her very nicely and keeps her as warm as possible, even if they do cause her to walk as if she’d just mastered the very minimal basics of it and isn’t convinced she’s got it quite right yet.
As you can imagine, we look nothing short of blatantly ridiculous when we set out for these morning and evening jaunts and there’s no way around it. Some things in life you just have to chalk up as unavoidably embarrassing and try not to think too much about them. Eventually winter will end and summer will come back and you’ll have just the opposite problem, that of wearing enough clothes because it’s much easier to walk directly to the pool in a bikini although it’s recommended that you wear a wrap of some kind because, in all honesty, one resident’s courtyard is everyone else’s courtyard and I’m quite sure my neighbors don’t want to see me in a state of undress any more than I would care to see most of them. Where ridiculous attire can’t be avoided it should be put into a positive perspective and I do this by reminding myself how many years (minutes, I know it’s only minutes but my perception was years) it took, every time it snowed, to run the snow blower and/or handle a snow shovel all the way down a steep driveway and around a corner lot, knowing it would all just pile up again before I got home from work and I’d repeat the process again in the evening when even the cold was cold from the cold, it was so cold. I remember that and I feel almost OK about things. So what if it takes four weeks to walk across the courtyard, through the back lot and to my carport. Set against the memory of pulling out of the aforementioned corner lot’s downhill-facing garage in a brand new vehicle and realizing (too late, of course) that what I’d pulled onto was a sheet of sheer, downhill-sloping ice, remembering that horrendous sounded-like-the-Jolly-Green-Giant-mauling-a-soda-can crunch when the entire front quarter panel of that brand new vehicle was brought to a stop by a brick pillar at the base of the driveway, and blanking out completely the repeat of that giant-sized crunch when Brent, emerging from the house and insisting ‘if I’d just pulled forward correctly that wouldn’t have happened’ persisted in backing the vehicle a few feet whereafter it immediately slid forward again and reconnected with the pillar, thus annihilating anything left of that aforementioned quarter panel. Surely having all your neighbors see and hear you and your spouse seemingly taking turns beating the hell out of a brand new vehicle at six-thirty in the morning is a bit more embarrassing than teal blue ear muffs. As I said, perspective is very important.
Especially considering temperatures aren’t due to go up any time soon, which pretty much guarantees I’m going to have to get up at 3:00am to allow enough time to move from my pillow to the shower and get to work on time.
There’s no cure for it. I suppose you just accept it and understand any activity you have to undertake outdoors (where it’s very, very cold) when you’d rather be inside (where it’s very, very warm) is going to feel like it lasts forever. The best you can do is prepare yourself by basically changing how you dress to go outside. In my case this entails throwing on an additional pair or two of flannel pants, three to six sweaters, a heavy coat, gloves under glittens, one scarf, sometimes two hats, three pair of socks, boots, and if I can find them (because they’re never in the same place at the beginning of a new winter as I left them at the close of the old one), the teal blue ear muffs you can really only get away with in a fashion sense when you’re wearing enough layers to make the Michelin Man look alarmingly anorexic. This slathering on of clothing layers isn’t limited to just me. Basil, being the Alpha Diva she truly is, doesn’t ‘do’ cold, so winter is rough for her. She also doesn’t ‘do’ wet, as evidenced by how she will ‘heel’ not on command but only when it’s raining or snowing and to step 4” from my side would remove her from the protection of the umbrella I’m carrying, as well as by how she will twist her body into some pretty amazing contortions in order to pee on a curb, a tree, or anything else available just at the edge of the grass without actually setting a paw in the grass, as the grass is wet and as I said, she doesn’t ‘do’ wet. Hence her own pre-walk donning of a heavy blue sweater, an extra bandana, and if there’s ice melt in the courtyard (and there is, every day all winter long), the Velcro-adhered dog boots from REI, replete with ‘super grip’ traction on the bottom. Which protects her very nicely and keeps her as warm as possible, even if they do cause her to walk as if she’d just mastered the very minimal basics of it and isn’t convinced she’s got it quite right yet.
As you can imagine, we look nothing short of blatantly ridiculous when we set out for these morning and evening jaunts and there’s no way around it. Some things in life you just have to chalk up as unavoidably embarrassing and try not to think too much about them. Eventually winter will end and summer will come back and you’ll have just the opposite problem, that of wearing enough clothes because it’s much easier to walk directly to the pool in a bikini although it’s recommended that you wear a wrap of some kind because, in all honesty, one resident’s courtyard is everyone else’s courtyard and I’m quite sure my neighbors don’t want to see me in a state of undress any more than I would care to see most of them. Where ridiculous attire can’t be avoided it should be put into a positive perspective and I do this by reminding myself how many years (minutes, I know it’s only minutes but my perception was years) it took, every time it snowed, to run the snow blower and/or handle a snow shovel all the way down a steep driveway and around a corner lot, knowing it would all just pile up again before I got home from work and I’d repeat the process again in the evening when even the cold was cold from the cold, it was so cold. I remember that and I feel almost OK about things. So what if it takes four weeks to walk across the courtyard, through the back lot and to my carport. Set against the memory of pulling out of the aforementioned corner lot’s downhill-facing garage in a brand new vehicle and realizing (too late, of course) that what I’d pulled onto was a sheet of sheer, downhill-sloping ice, remembering that horrendous sounded-like-the-Jolly-Green-Giant-mauling-a-soda-can crunch when the entire front quarter panel of that brand new vehicle was brought to a stop by a brick pillar at the base of the driveway, and blanking out completely the repeat of that giant-sized crunch when Brent, emerging from the house and insisting ‘if I’d just pulled forward correctly that wouldn’t have happened’ persisted in backing the vehicle a few feet whereafter it immediately slid forward again and reconnected with the pillar, thus annihilating anything left of that aforementioned quarter panel. Surely having all your neighbors see and hear you and your spouse seemingly taking turns beating the hell out of a brand new vehicle at six-thirty in the morning is a bit more embarrassing than teal blue ear muffs. As I said, perspective is very important.
Especially considering temperatures aren’t due to go up any time soon, which pretty much guarantees I’m going to have to get up at 3:00am to allow enough time to move from my pillow to the shower and get to work on time.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Mandatory Artichoke Beignets with Boursin Mousse and A Whiskey Chaser: An Answer To, “So What Do You Do For A Living?”
Ordinarily, being summoned to the boardroom during the daily two o’clock meeting isn’t a good thing. It means, in general, one of two things: someone in some department has an issue with one of your programs either in house or over the next three days, or you have business in over the next three days you’ve forgotten about otherwise you’d have been in the two o’clock meeting instead of sitting at your desk. Much as I hate to admit to it, I’ve experienced the latter more than once, several years ago when we were so busy it was all we could do to keep track of the next three minutes. So when Casey called me on her cell phone and said I needed to get in there, it was unsettling.
At least until I walked in and discovered the reason for the summons. Petra, our new Executive Pastry Chef, was unveiling her newest creation, something absolutely indescribably fabulous called a Guava Mirage and everyone seated around the board table had a plate in front of them. I took the last one from the rack and found a seat at the end of the table.
“You’re going to eat that?” Casey was incredulous. “You don’t eat sweets.”
“It’s guava,” I offered, as if that explained everything. It also slightly resembled ice cream, which is about the only sweet I will indulge in, although not very often. This, however, I wasn’t going to let pass me by. It was a pale pink/plum colored perfectly shaped half dome the consistency of ice cream and mousse with a paper thin square of chocolate atop a thin flaky pastry base, flanked by three raspberries and parked on the shores of two shallow ponds of white and dark chocolate crème fraiche. My spoon dug into it and it was softer than ice cream, sturdier than mousse. The pastry crumbled perfectly, picking up just a bit of the white chocolate and a raspberry, completing a first bite that made me a firm believer in the Guava Mirage. It was absolutely incredible. Three bites into it, I was already thinking of pitching it to my Chapter Thirteen Trustee group in February and deciding my United Food Retailers Association could make this the signature dessert for their next program. Four bites into it, much of the dome still standing, I had to push the plate away. I’d tried enough to fall in love with it but I knew Petra too well already. There had to have been enough calories in it to constitute an entire meal and unless I wanted my thighs to also be the consistency of mousse it was time to push the plate away.
I was unsurprised yesterday to learn that next week we’re going to Parker City for lunch and to drink whiskey all afternoon and oddly enough, this is also all in a day’s work. We’re looking at carrying this particular vendor’s whiskeys and vodkas on our bars in 2010, so it’s important that we’re all familiar with what they are, how they’re made, and how they taste. There are also several new wines hitting the new menu so an upcoming tasting there is in the works, as well. These events, we have some forewarning on. It doesn’t always work that way.
Last fall I was passing by the banquet office when the Beverage Director waved me over to a bar, set up by the north end loading area. On it were dozens of martini glasses, containing a rainbow of flavored concoctions. “We’re trying to come up with a signature martini for AmNature,” she explained, referring to a large convention due in the next two weeks. “Try these, see what you like better.”
Something only slightly short of seriously tipsy later, we’d settled on two, and I went back to whatever it was I’d been doing, not thinking it strange at all, after doing this kind of work for so long, that I’d drink cocktails at three in the afternoon and just be doing my job.
At this week’s regular Thursday Food and Beverage meeting, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the board tables almost completely covered by trays of tea sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres, and seafood. “New lounge menu,” our Operations Director announced. “We need some feedback from everyone.” So it was that our role in that meeting was to make an effort to sample everything, the result of which was sixteen people seated in front of 16 plates, each one laden with food items which had only one bite out of them. Even at that, by the time the meeting was over I walked out with that “Now I need a serious nap” feeling I generally only get after a particularly good Thanksgiving meal.
The new breakfast menu in our restaurant saw the Operations Director coming through our office at nine a.m., breaking us up into groups of three and telling us we had to find a day that week where we could arrange to go to the restaurant in the morning, order breakfast from the new menu, everyone selecting a different item, and ‘give us some feedback on it’. This didn’t seem strange, either, just another thing to be done and checked off the To Do list.
My boss Liz is now talking about all the new hors d’oeuvres making their debut in the new convention menus and how important it’s going to be that we try them. Not, she said, noting the look on my face just then, all at once as we’d done the previous year (a disaster of gastric proportions. We’d anticipated a regular Food and Beverage Meeting, not a surprise buffet the immensity of which made our annual Thanksgiving Brunch look like a light reception), maybe just one menu item per day during the regular two o’clock meeting. Which would mean we’d basically be having another lunch two hours after lunch, every day for about the next thirty days.
Add to this the regular call from the banquet kitchen to our office, the chef announcing he’s ‘playing around with the risotto cookers, making quesadillas with them trying to design a new station’, or ‘perfecting the new granola pancakes’ and he ‘needs a few people to come down and try them’ and the by now ubiquitous platter of breakfast burritos he deposits in our break room because he ‘made too many’ and you have the perfect logic behind my response to last week’s intern when she asked, “Don’t you get tired of all the running around you do when you have a group in? That’s hours on your feet.”
“Are you kidding me?” I’d responded, “we love it. We love every minute of it.”
Which I’m sure she took to mean that we were all the most dedicated, loyal, incredible Convention Managers she’d ever met and I let her believe that.
When you’re dealing with youthful enthusiasm of that immense proportion, it wouldn’t be right to voice the truth that all that running around is the only way to keep up with the requirements of your job and remain the same skirt size.
At least until I walked in and discovered the reason for the summons. Petra, our new Executive Pastry Chef, was unveiling her newest creation, something absolutely indescribably fabulous called a Guava Mirage and everyone seated around the board table had a plate in front of them. I took the last one from the rack and found a seat at the end of the table.
“You’re going to eat that?” Casey was incredulous. “You don’t eat sweets.”
“It’s guava,” I offered, as if that explained everything. It also slightly resembled ice cream, which is about the only sweet I will indulge in, although not very often. This, however, I wasn’t going to let pass me by. It was a pale pink/plum colored perfectly shaped half dome the consistency of ice cream and mousse with a paper thin square of chocolate atop a thin flaky pastry base, flanked by three raspberries and parked on the shores of two shallow ponds of white and dark chocolate crème fraiche. My spoon dug into it and it was softer than ice cream, sturdier than mousse. The pastry crumbled perfectly, picking up just a bit of the white chocolate and a raspberry, completing a first bite that made me a firm believer in the Guava Mirage. It was absolutely incredible. Three bites into it, I was already thinking of pitching it to my Chapter Thirteen Trustee group in February and deciding my United Food Retailers Association could make this the signature dessert for their next program. Four bites into it, much of the dome still standing, I had to push the plate away. I’d tried enough to fall in love with it but I knew Petra too well already. There had to have been enough calories in it to constitute an entire meal and unless I wanted my thighs to also be the consistency of mousse it was time to push the plate away.
I was unsurprised yesterday to learn that next week we’re going to Parker City for lunch and to drink whiskey all afternoon and oddly enough, this is also all in a day’s work. We’re looking at carrying this particular vendor’s whiskeys and vodkas on our bars in 2010, so it’s important that we’re all familiar with what they are, how they’re made, and how they taste. There are also several new wines hitting the new menu so an upcoming tasting there is in the works, as well. These events, we have some forewarning on. It doesn’t always work that way.
Last fall I was passing by the banquet office when the Beverage Director waved me over to a bar, set up by the north end loading area. On it were dozens of martini glasses, containing a rainbow of flavored concoctions. “We’re trying to come up with a signature martini for AmNature,” she explained, referring to a large convention due in the next two weeks. “Try these, see what you like better.”
Something only slightly short of seriously tipsy later, we’d settled on two, and I went back to whatever it was I’d been doing, not thinking it strange at all, after doing this kind of work for so long, that I’d drink cocktails at three in the afternoon and just be doing my job.
At this week’s regular Thursday Food and Beverage meeting, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the board tables almost completely covered by trays of tea sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres, and seafood. “New lounge menu,” our Operations Director announced. “We need some feedback from everyone.” So it was that our role in that meeting was to make an effort to sample everything, the result of which was sixteen people seated in front of 16 plates, each one laden with food items which had only one bite out of them. Even at that, by the time the meeting was over I walked out with that “Now I need a serious nap” feeling I generally only get after a particularly good Thanksgiving meal.
The new breakfast menu in our restaurant saw the Operations Director coming through our office at nine a.m., breaking us up into groups of three and telling us we had to find a day that week where we could arrange to go to the restaurant in the morning, order breakfast from the new menu, everyone selecting a different item, and ‘give us some feedback on it’. This didn’t seem strange, either, just another thing to be done and checked off the To Do list.
My boss Liz is now talking about all the new hors d’oeuvres making their debut in the new convention menus and how important it’s going to be that we try them. Not, she said, noting the look on my face just then, all at once as we’d done the previous year (a disaster of gastric proportions. We’d anticipated a regular Food and Beverage Meeting, not a surprise buffet the immensity of which made our annual Thanksgiving Brunch look like a light reception), maybe just one menu item per day during the regular two o’clock meeting. Which would mean we’d basically be having another lunch two hours after lunch, every day for about the next thirty days.
Add to this the regular call from the banquet kitchen to our office, the chef announcing he’s ‘playing around with the risotto cookers, making quesadillas with them trying to design a new station’, or ‘perfecting the new granola pancakes’ and he ‘needs a few people to come down and try them’ and the by now ubiquitous platter of breakfast burritos he deposits in our break room because he ‘made too many’ and you have the perfect logic behind my response to last week’s intern when she asked, “Don’t you get tired of all the running around you do when you have a group in? That’s hours on your feet.”
“Are you kidding me?” I’d responded, “we love it. We love every minute of it.”
Which I’m sure she took to mean that we were all the most dedicated, loyal, incredible Convention Managers she’d ever met and I let her believe that.
When you’re dealing with youthful enthusiasm of that immense proportion, it wouldn’t be right to voice the truth that all that running around is the only way to keep up with the requirements of your job and remain the same skirt size.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
The Universe Is On Its Own
So far, as neighbors go, I can’t complain about Reynelle. I’ve decided to ignore the plastic playhouse on the overlook and I’ve disbanded any notion of alerting the HOA to it as the blatant violation that it is, someone having pointed out to me that had Lainie been the one with small kids who had put it there, I wouldn’t say a word. I’ve decided to live with the fake potted palm on the step, even considering it had blown over in the wind last night and effectively presented itself to me as a major tripping hazard this morning. Again, had Lainie been the one to put it there, I’d never have given it a second thought. There’s a lot to be said for the simple fact that perhaps what I’ve been told is correct and the primary reason I’m more skeptical of this new addition to the building than I otherwise would be is that I didn’t want the person she replaced to move in the first place.
There’s also something to be said for the fact that, as it was also pointed out to me, she’s renting. It’s a year lease. The odds of her re-signing for another year, once she discovers how really non-conducive to raising kids the Old Dutch Village is, are pretty small. I should just mind my own business, keep an open mind about her and be very glad she’s across the hall and not directly over my head. Judging by the amount of running, jumping, and yelling I heard through her door when I left this morning, having her as an upstairs neighbor wouldn’t be pleasant.
Things in Lainie’s world seem to be about as settled right now as a flight stuck in turbulence, but hopefully they’ll work themselves out soon. Yesterday she had The Big Discussion with Blake, finally addressing all the oddities in his behavior she thought they’d addressed months ago. The whole phone thing. The secretive stuff. The fact that it’s been eight months now and he hasn’t introduced her to anyone in his family, and they’re all local. The fact that after eight months he isn’t comfortable categorizing their relationship as anything beyond, “We’re dating,” and when she slips up and uses the word ‘boyfriend’ or ‘relationship’ he lets her know he’s ‘not ready to go there yet’, although he’s perfectly fine with spending another night. I don’t blame her for wanting to know where she stands, and I think she did the right thing in asking him about it. Not that she got any answers, really. He needed time to sort things out.
He’s a guy, I reminded her, by way of hopefully cheering her up. The letter was something like three pages long. That’s a lot for him to digest. If he cared about her he’d be back, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be. Pretty simple and pretty universal law of the universe, and I don’t know if it cheered her up or not and probably didn’t but it was all I really knew to say. She’s working a second job tomorrow and Saturday and if she isn’t out of the dumps by Sunday, it’s probably time to corral her over for dinner and a movie. Which is, by the way, a ruse. Dinner happens but the whole movie thing really translates as just sitting around and talking things out, like we used to do on the front steps.
Which, in all honesty, I miss very much. Just not so much that I’d consider doing it with The Odd Girl Downstairs, who, as I said, has been uber-friendly since Lainie moved. Or even Reynelle, although I have the sinking feeling I’d probably like her a lot once I got to know her. Sometimes what you do isn’t about what you’re doing, but more about who you’re doing it with. Lainie is the kind of friend I can just sit on a step with. Holly is the same.
Besides, with the addition of that potted palm, there’s not much room left on the step, anyway, so without Lainie and I to get the job done, the universe will just have to figure itself out.
There’s also something to be said for the fact that, as it was also pointed out to me, she’s renting. It’s a year lease. The odds of her re-signing for another year, once she discovers how really non-conducive to raising kids the Old Dutch Village is, are pretty small. I should just mind my own business, keep an open mind about her and be very glad she’s across the hall and not directly over my head. Judging by the amount of running, jumping, and yelling I heard through her door when I left this morning, having her as an upstairs neighbor wouldn’t be pleasant.
Things in Lainie’s world seem to be about as settled right now as a flight stuck in turbulence, but hopefully they’ll work themselves out soon. Yesterday she had The Big Discussion with Blake, finally addressing all the oddities in his behavior she thought they’d addressed months ago. The whole phone thing. The secretive stuff. The fact that it’s been eight months now and he hasn’t introduced her to anyone in his family, and they’re all local. The fact that after eight months he isn’t comfortable categorizing their relationship as anything beyond, “We’re dating,” and when she slips up and uses the word ‘boyfriend’ or ‘relationship’ he lets her know he’s ‘not ready to go there yet’, although he’s perfectly fine with spending another night. I don’t blame her for wanting to know where she stands, and I think she did the right thing in asking him about it. Not that she got any answers, really. He needed time to sort things out.
He’s a guy, I reminded her, by way of hopefully cheering her up. The letter was something like three pages long. That’s a lot for him to digest. If he cared about her he’d be back, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be. Pretty simple and pretty universal law of the universe, and I don’t know if it cheered her up or not and probably didn’t but it was all I really knew to say. She’s working a second job tomorrow and Saturday and if she isn’t out of the dumps by Sunday, it’s probably time to corral her over for dinner and a movie. Which is, by the way, a ruse. Dinner happens but the whole movie thing really translates as just sitting around and talking things out, like we used to do on the front steps.
Which, in all honesty, I miss very much. Just not so much that I’d consider doing it with The Odd Girl Downstairs, who, as I said, has been uber-friendly since Lainie moved. Or even Reynelle, although I have the sinking feeling I’d probably like her a lot once I got to know her. Sometimes what you do isn’t about what you’re doing, but more about who you’re doing it with. Lainie is the kind of friend I can just sit on a step with. Holly is the same.
Besides, with the addition of that potted palm, there’s not much room left on the step, anyway, so without Lainie and I to get the job done, the universe will just have to figure itself out.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
What Happened After The Minestrone, The Movie, The Asparagus with Hollandaise, The Sauteed Mushrooms, The Bay Shrimp Cocktail, and The Unexpected Kiss
Some things in life have to be acted upon. On tax day you have to pay taxes. On the 4th of July, unless you’re from another planet, you have to feel somewhat patriotic and appreciative of being an American. On your birthday you have to feel a little surprised that another year went by so quickly, and when someone you haven’t kissed in two years kisses you unexpectedly when you’d thought you were just out to a movie and dinner with a friend, you have to acknowledge it somehow. You can’t just do what I seriously considered doing, which was to pretend it didn’t happen.
I picked up my phone twice. Put it down twice. Thought about picking it up again four times. Didn’t. Finally got tired of the whole process, took a hot shower, and crawled into bed, where I tossed around for a good half hour (much to Basil’s dislike, as she’d settled comfortably against my legs) before I decided to send an email. Saying what, I didn’t know exactly but that didn’t stop me from sitting down to write one.
As it turned out, Owen beat me to it. Apparently moving from a dial up connection to high speed Internet has done wonders for his communication skills. He’d had a great evening, he’d written, and thanked me for going. He’d always, he wrote, enjoyed my company very much. And he was sorry, he said, for kissing me. It’s just that he had the same strong emotions he’d always had, that apparently not kissing me was the hard part when he saw me.
I had to read that last part a couple of times, realizing what he’d written is that maybe, when we stopped seeing each other (and why was that, exactly? He spent too much time golfing, for one. He wanted to go out to dinner three or four times a week, and that had been a problem for me because there were a lot of nights I’d just wanted to go home, and for another thing…I was drawing real blanks there, coming up only with the things that hadn’t been a problem. We had the same outlook financially, professionally. We were both avid readers. We both loved the beach, we were both natives of California although his southern California beaches were much warmer than my fogged over bay beaches, we had the same affinity for our families without requiring constant contact, we definitely had the same sense of humor, and taste in movies, and the same love of music, everything from Wyndham Hill collections to Collective Soul to electronica. He was a creature of habit to the extent that Monday was unequivocably grocery/library night, Tuesday was racquetball league, Wednesday was winter racquetball or warm weather golf, and at least one day of the weekend was skiing, all winter long. At the time, I’d found it predictable and restrictive. That was, however, well before I discovered my own routine of Monday book club, Wednesdays with Holly, and Thursday writer’s group. So what if he didn’t eat tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, any dressing other than Caesar or Ranch, and wouldn’t touch a brussel sprout unless he was starving. I wasn’t big on pancakes, French toast, jelly donuts or anything else remotely ‘spongey’, and looked at in the light of a few years apart, these things certainly seemed very insignificant, almost in the category of what my dad had called them when I’d let him know I wasn’t seeing Owen any longer. “Don’t lose a man like that,” Dad advised, “over little things you bicker over like a married couple might, not when you could be so fortunate as to become the married couple who did.” I was only, he said at the time, going to throw away the two years we’d invested and wake up a few years later and realize, everybody’s got foibles. Just hold them up against the whole picture and see how small they really get), he’d gone on feeling the same way about me.
I’d have to have been stupid not to see it, and stupid I’m not. It explained a lot. The email, several months ago, pictures taken the last Christmas we’d been together. I’d just opened something – maybe those boots I’d worn for the lunch at The Cajun – and he’d taken a couple of pictures. “This was the happiest day of my life,” he’d written. “I have never been more in love with someone. I keep trying not to think about you but it isn’t working. I hope all is well in your life.”
I hadn’t responded to that, but I had called after finding the gift bag and card on my doorstep when I came home on my last birthday. “It’s nothing,” he’d said, “I just thought you should know people think about you on your birthday.”
“Owen, I’m seeing someone –“
“I know that. But it’s still your birthday, right?”
I wound up reading his old emails on my computer and after about an hour of that, I went to bed, without responding to the email because I wasn’t sure exactly what to say. I talked with J about it the next day after work and her take was ridiculously simple: “So you’ve known this guy for eight years,” she said, “as a colleague, and as a friend. Then you dated for two years, and when that didn’t work out, you stayed friends. I mean, really friends, like the kind who can just yuck it up over trivial stuff, and be comfortable with each other and if I’m getting this right, he morphed from someone who wouldn’t let your dog on his furniture to giving your dog free reign through the whole house. And then you go out to a movie and a dinner and he kisses you, which –“ she glared at me then but just because that’s who J is. Even when she’s giving you good news she adds an element of the dire, “you couldn’t have disliked because as you said, that whole area was never a, um…source of discontent, and you’re telling me you don’t know what to say? Madeleine, get serious. I can see saying no to the Guy Who Doesn’t Love Dogs Enough, but to say no to your very own Harry? That’s just nuts.”
“Harry? You lost me.”
“No I didn’t, you idiot. Harry as in When Harry Met Sally, or isn’t that still your favorite movie of all time? You’ve got your very own Harry on your hands here, girl, and I wouldn’t wait for some sad New Year’s Eve to figure that out, like in the movie. I can’t believe you let him go the first time.”
“There was one thing,” I said in my own defense although it sounded a little flimsy. “You know he’s nine years older than I am, I told you he grew up in Southern California, and he’d talk about retiring there which, given his financial condition he’ll do a lot sooner than sixty-five, and—“
J held up a hand to silence me. She’s one of the few people who can actually do that and produce, well – silence. “And when you told him that bugged you, years ago, the idea that he’d move off to the beach and you’d have done nothing but wasted years with someone who was going to move off and retire somewhere else, anyway, he said what?”
“J, come on –“
“Girlfriend, he not only said what, he put this same what in an email?” She could be like a dog with a bone sometimes, she really could.
“He said, ‘Do you really believe I could be any kind of happy at all if you weren’t with me’”
“Point made. And honestly, Mad, being as you’ve been such great friends and all that, do you really think he’s been any kind of happy for the last two years? Maybe he was, that’s why he offered to watch your dog all the time. Yep, when you’re absolutely done with somebody the first thing you want is semi-custody of their animal so you’ve got a reason to see them on a regular basis. And how many calls at work, asking questions about future contracts? Are you the only CSM there, or aren’t there three others he could have called, being as it was all ‘only professional’?”
J’s not an attorney, she’s a nurse, but she’d have made a great attorney. You couldn’t win an argument with her.
“Harry, huh?”
“Ask yourself, did you really mind so much that he kissed you?”
I didn’t have to answer the question. Mine is not a poker face, or can only be if I try really, really hard and wear very heavy dark glasses obscuring my eyes completely. I wasn’t trying at all and I wasn’t in the habit of wearing sunglasses in the house.
So I emailed him back. With the truth. I’d had a great time, a really enjoyable evening, and I’d enjoyed laughing so much, too. And don’t ever apologize for kissing me, Owen. It hadn’t bothered me a bit and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if it ever happened again. I then added a bunch of other stuff, my thoughts, really, on the past couple of years and, well…like I can get when I get a little, maybe…too analytical.
Of course he wrote back. Like I said, this whole high speed thing has been a huge leap forward for him. “You think too much (as evidenced by your email). Me, I just know how I feel and I know when I’m with you it feels right (and also very good). Sleep well, and think of me.”
As if that was going to be a problem.
I picked up my phone twice. Put it down twice. Thought about picking it up again four times. Didn’t. Finally got tired of the whole process, took a hot shower, and crawled into bed, where I tossed around for a good half hour (much to Basil’s dislike, as she’d settled comfortably against my legs) before I decided to send an email. Saying what, I didn’t know exactly but that didn’t stop me from sitting down to write one.
As it turned out, Owen beat me to it. Apparently moving from a dial up connection to high speed Internet has done wonders for his communication skills. He’d had a great evening, he’d written, and thanked me for going. He’d always, he wrote, enjoyed my company very much. And he was sorry, he said, for kissing me. It’s just that he had the same strong emotions he’d always had, that apparently not kissing me was the hard part when he saw me.
I had to read that last part a couple of times, realizing what he’d written is that maybe, when we stopped seeing each other (and why was that, exactly? He spent too much time golfing, for one. He wanted to go out to dinner three or four times a week, and that had been a problem for me because there were a lot of nights I’d just wanted to go home, and for another thing…I was drawing real blanks there, coming up only with the things that hadn’t been a problem. We had the same outlook financially, professionally. We were both avid readers. We both loved the beach, we were both natives of California although his southern California beaches were much warmer than my fogged over bay beaches, we had the same affinity for our families without requiring constant contact, we definitely had the same sense of humor, and taste in movies, and the same love of music, everything from Wyndham Hill collections to Collective Soul to electronica. He was a creature of habit to the extent that Monday was unequivocably grocery/library night, Tuesday was racquetball league, Wednesday was winter racquetball or warm weather golf, and at least one day of the weekend was skiing, all winter long. At the time, I’d found it predictable and restrictive. That was, however, well before I discovered my own routine of Monday book club, Wednesdays with Holly, and Thursday writer’s group. So what if he didn’t eat tomatoes, mushrooms, olives, any dressing other than Caesar or Ranch, and wouldn’t touch a brussel sprout unless he was starving. I wasn’t big on pancakes, French toast, jelly donuts or anything else remotely ‘spongey’, and looked at in the light of a few years apart, these things certainly seemed very insignificant, almost in the category of what my dad had called them when I’d let him know I wasn’t seeing Owen any longer. “Don’t lose a man like that,” Dad advised, “over little things you bicker over like a married couple might, not when you could be so fortunate as to become the married couple who did.” I was only, he said at the time, going to throw away the two years we’d invested and wake up a few years later and realize, everybody’s got foibles. Just hold them up against the whole picture and see how small they really get), he’d gone on feeling the same way about me.
I’d have to have been stupid not to see it, and stupid I’m not. It explained a lot. The email, several months ago, pictures taken the last Christmas we’d been together. I’d just opened something – maybe those boots I’d worn for the lunch at The Cajun – and he’d taken a couple of pictures. “This was the happiest day of my life,” he’d written. “I have never been more in love with someone. I keep trying not to think about you but it isn’t working. I hope all is well in your life.”
I hadn’t responded to that, but I had called after finding the gift bag and card on my doorstep when I came home on my last birthday. “It’s nothing,” he’d said, “I just thought you should know people think about you on your birthday.”
“Owen, I’m seeing someone –“
“I know that. But it’s still your birthday, right?”
I wound up reading his old emails on my computer and after about an hour of that, I went to bed, without responding to the email because I wasn’t sure exactly what to say. I talked with J about it the next day after work and her take was ridiculously simple: “So you’ve known this guy for eight years,” she said, “as a colleague, and as a friend. Then you dated for two years, and when that didn’t work out, you stayed friends. I mean, really friends, like the kind who can just yuck it up over trivial stuff, and be comfortable with each other and if I’m getting this right, he morphed from someone who wouldn’t let your dog on his furniture to giving your dog free reign through the whole house. And then you go out to a movie and a dinner and he kisses you, which –“ she glared at me then but just because that’s who J is. Even when she’s giving you good news she adds an element of the dire, “you couldn’t have disliked because as you said, that whole area was never a, um…source of discontent, and you’re telling me you don’t know what to say? Madeleine, get serious. I can see saying no to the Guy Who Doesn’t Love Dogs Enough, but to say no to your very own Harry? That’s just nuts.”
“Harry? You lost me.”
“No I didn’t, you idiot. Harry as in When Harry Met Sally, or isn’t that still your favorite movie of all time? You’ve got your very own Harry on your hands here, girl, and I wouldn’t wait for some sad New Year’s Eve to figure that out, like in the movie. I can’t believe you let him go the first time.”
“There was one thing,” I said in my own defense although it sounded a little flimsy. “You know he’s nine years older than I am, I told you he grew up in Southern California, and he’d talk about retiring there which, given his financial condition he’ll do a lot sooner than sixty-five, and—“
J held up a hand to silence me. She’s one of the few people who can actually do that and produce, well – silence. “And when you told him that bugged you, years ago, the idea that he’d move off to the beach and you’d have done nothing but wasted years with someone who was going to move off and retire somewhere else, anyway, he said what?”
“J, come on –“
“Girlfriend, he not only said what, he put this same what in an email?” She could be like a dog with a bone sometimes, she really could.
“He said, ‘Do you really believe I could be any kind of happy at all if you weren’t with me’”
“Point made. And honestly, Mad, being as you’ve been such great friends and all that, do you really think he’s been any kind of happy for the last two years? Maybe he was, that’s why he offered to watch your dog all the time. Yep, when you’re absolutely done with somebody the first thing you want is semi-custody of their animal so you’ve got a reason to see them on a regular basis. And how many calls at work, asking questions about future contracts? Are you the only CSM there, or aren’t there three others he could have called, being as it was all ‘only professional’?”
J’s not an attorney, she’s a nurse, but she’d have made a great attorney. You couldn’t win an argument with her.
“Harry, huh?”
“Ask yourself, did you really mind so much that he kissed you?”
I didn’t have to answer the question. Mine is not a poker face, or can only be if I try really, really hard and wear very heavy dark glasses obscuring my eyes completely. I wasn’t trying at all and I wasn’t in the habit of wearing sunglasses in the house.
So I emailed him back. With the truth. I’d had a great time, a really enjoyable evening, and I’d enjoyed laughing so much, too. And don’t ever apologize for kissing me, Owen. It hadn’t bothered me a bit and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if it ever happened again. I then added a bunch of other stuff, my thoughts, really, on the past couple of years and, well…like I can get when I get a little, maybe…too analytical.
Of course he wrote back. Like I said, this whole high speed thing has been a huge leap forward for him. “You think too much (as evidenced by your email). Me, I just know how I feel and I know when I’m with you it feels right (and also very good). Sleep well, and think of me.”
As if that was going to be a problem.
Something More Than Minestrone: It Started With A Bowl of Soup
I guess you could say it might have started with that bowl of minestrone at The Cajun last week (I almost drove into a pole,” he admitted this week. “Honestly. I almost hit a pole trying to drive out of the parking garage, just watching you walk away.” To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never had that effect on anyone just by having a bowl of vegetable soup with them).
I suppose you could say it started when what came next was my taking him up on his offer to throw Basil over his fence en route to work the next morning, let her enjoy a day running through the yard with his yappy dog Spam and sunning herself on the deck. Dropping her in the morning meant picking her up at night and as she was inside the house when I arrived instead of stationed near the gate in her usual place, that meant I came in and invariably visited for a minute.
The next evening after leaving her there, I stayed more than a minute. I stayed long enough to have a beer with him and talk about work stuff and local news items from the Tribune and the respective books we were reading, which isn’t terrifically unusual for us. The next night when I came to pick her up, he was re-reading an article in the paper, and waved it at me.
“Look what’s out,” he said as I took the paper from him. It was a review of the new movie, “Gentlemen Broncos”, by the producers of “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre”, both of which we’d seen and laughed all the way through because they contained the kind of dry, over the top and oft-underappreciated humor that appealed to us both.
“I’ve got to see this,” I said, more observation than anything else.
“When do you want to go?”
And there, really, is where I guess you could say it started.
We saw the movie over the weekend. He picked me up at five and we saw it at a theater in the south end of the valley, alone in the theater except for 14 guys who arrived in two groups and took up almost the entire row in front of us. As I mentioned, the humor of the movie’s creators is pretty generally under-appreciated.
It wasn’t quite seven when we left the theater. “Let me take you to dinner,” he said, “being as you wouldn’t let me buy the movie tickets.”
“I’m the one who brought up seeing the movie,” I said, and then agreed to dinner but only if he chose the place. We were surrounded by them in the theater’s vicinity, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
“Let’s go somewhere closer to home,” he said, suggesting a restaurant I hadn’t been to in six months, where it had been the location of a first date with someone I wound up seeing for six months. I started to suggest somewhere else, then decided it was stupid to judge a restaurant by a memory and besides, I’d eaten there many times in the past with Brent, as well as with Owen, so stop being ridiculous and superstitious. Feeling good about that resolve, I felt even better to note, once we arrived, the place was packed and there was a twenty minute wait.
“Some place else?” Owen suggested, and we wound up at the steak and seafood place near the golf course. “You realize,” he observed, pulling into the lot, “we’re repeating our first date.”
“Not really,” I corrected him, although our first date had been a movie (The Prestige) and dinner at this very same restaurant. “Back then I had slacks on because I wasn’t sure if I should dress up around you or if you’d be OK taking someone out in Levis.”
The idea of worrying what I wore around Owen was pretty ridiculous now. Over the past eight years, between work and personal time, he’s seen me in everything from suits, hair buns and eye glasses to little black dresses, little red dresses, sweatsuits, ponytails, swimsuits, beachwear and, if I thought about it (I decided not to) even with and without pajamas. Funny to note how long it had been since I felt any kind of self-conscious around him. That first date, I suppose I was still a bit too aware of the fact that the man taking me to dinner was the same sportscaster on Channel 4 I used to watch religiously every night on the news even though I cared nothing about sports, a fact that wasn’t lost on Brent at the time. “Why,” he’d said more than once, “don’t you just call the station and ask if you can have him? Or should I just dye my hair black?”
No, I wasn’t uncomfortable around Owen and imagining ever feeling that way made as much sense as my ever feeling uncomfortable around Lainie, or anyone else I was good friends with. Comes a certain point you just enjoy each other’s company and nobody cares, really, what you’re wearing, and you don’t have to censor what you say, either. Or do, come to think of it. To put it simply, Owen was someone I was just as comfortable with at a black tie event as I was having a barbecue on his deck and letting out an unintentional beer belch.
I expected the standard operational Chicken Salad order from him, but he had clam chowder. Unable to decide on anything (the popcorn in the theater had been more than I’d needed, anyway) I opted for semi-healthy and ordered appetizers we could share. Asparagus with hollandaise, bay shrimp cocktail, and sautéed mushrooms. I had a glass of Pinot Grigio and he had a beer and he reminded me of the stop in Reno on our last trip to California, how the room service attendant had delivered what appeared to be liter-sized glasses of wine for only $4 a piece, much different than the ‘thimble full’ you’d be served in Utah. I guess that prompted the reminiscing about the last trip to the Wyn in Vegas, where I was up $275 on a penny machine on an initial $20 investment, and he’d lost $50 at the craps table in under 10 minutes, which made him less of a believer in craps and more of a believer in penny machines as I was up another $20 by the time he returned to my end of the casino. And we talked about the movie, recounting favorite parts, laughing again at the funniest lines, and it was, I realized, probably the most relaxing and enjoyable meal I’d had since….well, since a bowl of minestrone at The Cajun.
Which is probably honestly where it got started.
He drove back to my place and dropped me outside the courtyard at my request. “You don’t have to walk me in,” I said, thinking that would make it feel more like a date and this hadn’t been a date, just two friends seeing a movie and what the heck, we’d always had the same taste in movies, and turned in my seat to thank him for a really fun evening.
That’s when he kissed me.
Yes, my we’re-only-friends Owen kissed me. And I suppose what I’m going to have to say is that it shocked me so much, it was completely so unexpected, it had been nearly two years since I’d kissed Owen, that I never did get that ‘thanks for a nice evening out,’ just a, ‘gosh, thanks…’ that I hoped he understood conveyed my appreciation for dinner and a movie.
So I walked through the courtyard (I don’t know if he almost hit something driving out, as had been his luck in the parking garage) thinking, ‘well, we sure didn’t repeat our first date’. I’d worried through most of that first date that he’d try to kiss me and he hadn’t. That had come on the second date, when my parents were in town for the weekend and he’d taken us up the canyon to a little log cabin restaurant for brunch, then planted one on me as we walked Basil in the courtyard, my dad settled in front of the TV and my mom rearranging my kitchen cabinets. I hadn’t expected that one, either.
But then again, I thought, leashing up Basil after walking in my door and heading out with her for a pre-sleep walk, what did I know. A week ago I’d thought I was having a bowl of soup, and apparently there was a little more to it than minestrone.
I suppose you could say it started when what came next was my taking him up on his offer to throw Basil over his fence en route to work the next morning, let her enjoy a day running through the yard with his yappy dog Spam and sunning herself on the deck. Dropping her in the morning meant picking her up at night and as she was inside the house when I arrived instead of stationed near the gate in her usual place, that meant I came in and invariably visited for a minute.
The next evening after leaving her there, I stayed more than a minute. I stayed long enough to have a beer with him and talk about work stuff and local news items from the Tribune and the respective books we were reading, which isn’t terrifically unusual for us. The next night when I came to pick her up, he was re-reading an article in the paper, and waved it at me.
“Look what’s out,” he said as I took the paper from him. It was a review of the new movie, “Gentlemen Broncos”, by the producers of “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre”, both of which we’d seen and laughed all the way through because they contained the kind of dry, over the top and oft-underappreciated humor that appealed to us both.
“I’ve got to see this,” I said, more observation than anything else.
“When do you want to go?”
And there, really, is where I guess you could say it started.
We saw the movie over the weekend. He picked me up at five and we saw it at a theater in the south end of the valley, alone in the theater except for 14 guys who arrived in two groups and took up almost the entire row in front of us. As I mentioned, the humor of the movie’s creators is pretty generally under-appreciated.
It wasn’t quite seven when we left the theater. “Let me take you to dinner,” he said, “being as you wouldn’t let me buy the movie tickets.”
“I’m the one who brought up seeing the movie,” I said, and then agreed to dinner but only if he chose the place. We were surrounded by them in the theater’s vicinity, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
“Let’s go somewhere closer to home,” he said, suggesting a restaurant I hadn’t been to in six months, where it had been the location of a first date with someone I wound up seeing for six months. I started to suggest somewhere else, then decided it was stupid to judge a restaurant by a memory and besides, I’d eaten there many times in the past with Brent, as well as with Owen, so stop being ridiculous and superstitious. Feeling good about that resolve, I felt even better to note, once we arrived, the place was packed and there was a twenty minute wait.
“Some place else?” Owen suggested, and we wound up at the steak and seafood place near the golf course. “You realize,” he observed, pulling into the lot, “we’re repeating our first date.”
“Not really,” I corrected him, although our first date had been a movie (The Prestige) and dinner at this very same restaurant. “Back then I had slacks on because I wasn’t sure if I should dress up around you or if you’d be OK taking someone out in Levis.”
The idea of worrying what I wore around Owen was pretty ridiculous now. Over the past eight years, between work and personal time, he’s seen me in everything from suits, hair buns and eye glasses to little black dresses, little red dresses, sweatsuits, ponytails, swimsuits, beachwear and, if I thought about it (I decided not to) even with and without pajamas. Funny to note how long it had been since I felt any kind of self-conscious around him. That first date, I suppose I was still a bit too aware of the fact that the man taking me to dinner was the same sportscaster on Channel 4 I used to watch religiously every night on the news even though I cared nothing about sports, a fact that wasn’t lost on Brent at the time. “Why,” he’d said more than once, “don’t you just call the station and ask if you can have him? Or should I just dye my hair black?”
No, I wasn’t uncomfortable around Owen and imagining ever feeling that way made as much sense as my ever feeling uncomfortable around Lainie, or anyone else I was good friends with. Comes a certain point you just enjoy each other’s company and nobody cares, really, what you’re wearing, and you don’t have to censor what you say, either. Or do, come to think of it. To put it simply, Owen was someone I was just as comfortable with at a black tie event as I was having a barbecue on his deck and letting out an unintentional beer belch.
I expected the standard operational Chicken Salad order from him, but he had clam chowder. Unable to decide on anything (the popcorn in the theater had been more than I’d needed, anyway) I opted for semi-healthy and ordered appetizers we could share. Asparagus with hollandaise, bay shrimp cocktail, and sautéed mushrooms. I had a glass of Pinot Grigio and he had a beer and he reminded me of the stop in Reno on our last trip to California, how the room service attendant had delivered what appeared to be liter-sized glasses of wine for only $4 a piece, much different than the ‘thimble full’ you’d be served in Utah. I guess that prompted the reminiscing about the last trip to the Wyn in Vegas, where I was up $275 on a penny machine on an initial $20 investment, and he’d lost $50 at the craps table in under 10 minutes, which made him less of a believer in craps and more of a believer in penny machines as I was up another $20 by the time he returned to my end of the casino. And we talked about the movie, recounting favorite parts, laughing again at the funniest lines, and it was, I realized, probably the most relaxing and enjoyable meal I’d had since….well, since a bowl of minestrone at The Cajun.
Which is probably honestly where it got started.
He drove back to my place and dropped me outside the courtyard at my request. “You don’t have to walk me in,” I said, thinking that would make it feel more like a date and this hadn’t been a date, just two friends seeing a movie and what the heck, we’d always had the same taste in movies, and turned in my seat to thank him for a really fun evening.
That’s when he kissed me.
Yes, my we’re-only-friends Owen kissed me. And I suppose what I’m going to have to say is that it shocked me so much, it was completely so unexpected, it had been nearly two years since I’d kissed Owen, that I never did get that ‘thanks for a nice evening out,’ just a, ‘gosh, thanks…’ that I hoped he understood conveyed my appreciation for dinner and a movie.
So I walked through the courtyard (I don’t know if he almost hit something driving out, as had been his luck in the parking garage) thinking, ‘well, we sure didn’t repeat our first date’. I’d worried through most of that first date that he’d try to kiss me and he hadn’t. That had come on the second date, when my parents were in town for the weekend and he’d taken us up the canyon to a little log cabin restaurant for brunch, then planted one on me as we walked Basil in the courtyard, my dad settled in front of the TV and my mom rearranging my kitchen cabinets. I hadn’t expected that one, either.
But then again, I thought, leashing up Basil after walking in my door and heading out with her for a pre-sleep walk, what did I know. A week ago I’d thought I was having a bowl of soup, and apparently there was a little more to it than minestrone.
Monday, November 9, 2009
The Arrival of The Inevitable: Someone New Across The Hall
Some time ago, about the time I discovered Lainie was moving out from across the hall and Chad was moving out upstairs, I made a resolution: I will not meet any more neighbors in The Old Dutch Village. It’s simply too time consuming. Even with Lainie gone (well, not gone, just not across the hall. We still talk and text just about daily and get together when work schedules permit) and Chad no longer emailing me writing samples to look at and driving me nuts with his parade of ridiculously young women traipsing through the stairwell at exactly the same moment I’m struggling with laundry baskets or groceries, there’s still The Probation Officer whose dog I walk every morning, The Odd Girl Downstairs who’s taken to showing up from seemingly nowhere every time I’m outside or in the foyer and asking, “Hey, how’s it going?”, the Social Worker going through a nasty divorce whose woes I volunteer to listen to just about every other evening, all the ladies in Book Club, Bill and our year-round a.m. banter as I leave for work and he walks back to his place from the exercise room, and at least a dozen other people I’ve met because you can’t help but meet people when you’re outside as often as Basil requires.
It was inevitable and it happened on Saturday, as I was leaving for work. I opened the door and immediately was nearly thrown back into my place by a large bookshelf on its way into Lainie’s old place. The new tenant had arrived, and from the initial looks of things, arrived with at least as much furniture as I had three years ago before I came to my senses and started giving away little things like ginormous china cabinets, antique cupboards, and ottomans I couldn’t place unless I suspended them from the ceiling. As it turned out there was a man behind the bookcase and he stepped around it long enough to apologize for taking up the hallway.
“Not a problem,” I said, somehow wedging myself past it and down the stairs. “Welcome to the building.”
“Oh, it’s not me,” he said, assuming I’d seen the new tenant when in fact I hadn’t yet, “it’s just her and the kids.”
‘Her’ appeared on the step a moment later, trailed by Bryan, the condo’s owner. He gave me a big smile and made a quick introduction. “Madeleine,” he said, “This is Reynelle. Reynelle, Madeleine’s the best neighbor we ever had!” From anyone else this would have sounded, well, cheesy. Coming from Bryan, it was probably heartfelt. As I remembered it, I was about the only person in the building they spoke to, and the only one they gave cookies to at the holidays.
“I’m happy to meet you,” she said. “I am SO lost! I don’t know where the store is, I don’t know where the school is, I don’t know where ANYTHING is….”
“She’s not from here,” Bryan explained, at which point she quickly interjected that she was from a very small town in the southern end of the state. “Don’t worry,” he added, reaching for his keys in a clear sign he needed to go soon, “Madeleine can help you out with anything you need.”
Except, I thought but didn’t say, anything personal. I just don’t want to get into another Best Neighbor Best Friend thing.
“Well anything,” I told her honestly, “that can be fixed with duct tape and a butter knife. And if my dog,” I added, gesturing over my shoulder to the faint sound of sporadic yips from Basil, who had clearly discerned some sort of gathering outside and her unjust absence from it, “is too loud, let me know. She’s generally not home if I’m not, but still.”
“No problem!” Reynelle said, “and if my boys are too loud, let me know.”
“You have kids?” I remembered Bryan mentioning something about that, having shown the place to someone with kids. It was unusual only because you just don’t see many kids in the Old Dutch Village. Very few, actually. The handful of bicycles around are ‘weekend bicycles’, basically left at Grandma’s or Grandpa’s house for weekend visits.
“A six year old,” she said, “and a two year old.” She rolled her eyes. That’s when I surveyed her a bit more closely, doing the math on Lainie’s boys, 11 and 13, and her own age of very early thirties. Reynelle did not, by any stretch of the imagination, and even with a plastic daisy haphazardly stuck into a brown ponytail trailing just past her shoulders, look to be in her thirties. She looked, I thought, at least my age. And she had a two year old, which meant (I quickly did some very ridiculously basic math, the only kind I’m good at) that at the point in life when most women have completely let go of whatever baby urges they’d ever had, knowing full well it might be possible but it would be exhausting, she was just getting started. Either that or she’d succumbed, as many do, to the notion that perhaps having another baby would save a marriage. From the looks of things, she was doing the whole parenting thing alone, which as I knew from objective observations wasn’t an easy thing at all. This made me feel a bit compassionate for her, dangerous because that meant I’d probably want to befriend her, and get to know her.
“I’m divorced,” she said, offering up, as women do, way too much information in the first two minutes of talking with another female. “Very friendly, though. He’s helping me move in.”
“Happens to the best of us,” I agreed. “I’m glad he’s helping you. My ex actually painted the whole place after I bought it,” I said. “That wasn’t a fun job.”
“It’s good to be friends.”
I nodded. “Brent and I are the kinds of friends who talk on the phone every once in a while, are around for emergencies and that’s really about it. It’s easier that way, all around.”
“No kids?”
“One,” I said, gesturing again, “and from the sounds of things, I’d better get back to her. Her name’s Basil and please, don’t hesitate to let me know if she bugs you.”
“Oh honey,” she said, with a broad not unpleasant smile and a twist of an accent I caught momentarily but couldn’t place, “with all the chaos in my life your dog could give birth to a litter of puppies on my doormat and I wouldn’t even notice.”
A sense of humor, too. I was relieved to have to get inside and get ready for work. Already I had compassion for her situation, appreciated her sense of humor, and even, in my own way, liked that she was the kind of person who obviously understood that when life gets chaotic the best you can do sometimes is throw a plastic flower into your ponytail and roll with it. As far as neighbors went, she might not be so bad.
I hoped I wouldn’t find out, though. One more person to visit with every time I step outside is going to immensely cut into any available time in my day. I needed to stick to my resolve against forming additional friendships….or maybe, I thought, when she gave me a smile and a wave, face the inevitable, get up earlier and stay up a bit later, to add more time to my day.
It was inevitable and it happened on Saturday, as I was leaving for work. I opened the door and immediately was nearly thrown back into my place by a large bookshelf on its way into Lainie’s old place. The new tenant had arrived, and from the initial looks of things, arrived with at least as much furniture as I had three years ago before I came to my senses and started giving away little things like ginormous china cabinets, antique cupboards, and ottomans I couldn’t place unless I suspended them from the ceiling. As it turned out there was a man behind the bookcase and he stepped around it long enough to apologize for taking up the hallway.
“Not a problem,” I said, somehow wedging myself past it and down the stairs. “Welcome to the building.”
“Oh, it’s not me,” he said, assuming I’d seen the new tenant when in fact I hadn’t yet, “it’s just her and the kids.”
‘Her’ appeared on the step a moment later, trailed by Bryan, the condo’s owner. He gave me a big smile and made a quick introduction. “Madeleine,” he said, “This is Reynelle. Reynelle, Madeleine’s the best neighbor we ever had!” From anyone else this would have sounded, well, cheesy. Coming from Bryan, it was probably heartfelt. As I remembered it, I was about the only person in the building they spoke to, and the only one they gave cookies to at the holidays.
“I’m happy to meet you,” she said. “I am SO lost! I don’t know where the store is, I don’t know where the school is, I don’t know where ANYTHING is….”
“She’s not from here,” Bryan explained, at which point she quickly interjected that she was from a very small town in the southern end of the state. “Don’t worry,” he added, reaching for his keys in a clear sign he needed to go soon, “Madeleine can help you out with anything you need.”
Except, I thought but didn’t say, anything personal. I just don’t want to get into another Best Neighbor Best Friend thing.
“Well anything,” I told her honestly, “that can be fixed with duct tape and a butter knife. And if my dog,” I added, gesturing over my shoulder to the faint sound of sporadic yips from Basil, who had clearly discerned some sort of gathering outside and her unjust absence from it, “is too loud, let me know. She’s generally not home if I’m not, but still.”
“No problem!” Reynelle said, “and if my boys are too loud, let me know.”
“You have kids?” I remembered Bryan mentioning something about that, having shown the place to someone with kids. It was unusual only because you just don’t see many kids in the Old Dutch Village. Very few, actually. The handful of bicycles around are ‘weekend bicycles’, basically left at Grandma’s or Grandpa’s house for weekend visits.
“A six year old,” she said, “and a two year old.” She rolled her eyes. That’s when I surveyed her a bit more closely, doing the math on Lainie’s boys, 11 and 13, and her own age of very early thirties. Reynelle did not, by any stretch of the imagination, and even with a plastic daisy haphazardly stuck into a brown ponytail trailing just past her shoulders, look to be in her thirties. She looked, I thought, at least my age. And she had a two year old, which meant (I quickly did some very ridiculously basic math, the only kind I’m good at) that at the point in life when most women have completely let go of whatever baby urges they’d ever had, knowing full well it might be possible but it would be exhausting, she was just getting started. Either that or she’d succumbed, as many do, to the notion that perhaps having another baby would save a marriage. From the looks of things, she was doing the whole parenting thing alone, which as I knew from objective observations wasn’t an easy thing at all. This made me feel a bit compassionate for her, dangerous because that meant I’d probably want to befriend her, and get to know her.
“I’m divorced,” she said, offering up, as women do, way too much information in the first two minutes of talking with another female. “Very friendly, though. He’s helping me move in.”
“Happens to the best of us,” I agreed. “I’m glad he’s helping you. My ex actually painted the whole place after I bought it,” I said. “That wasn’t a fun job.”
“It’s good to be friends.”
I nodded. “Brent and I are the kinds of friends who talk on the phone every once in a while, are around for emergencies and that’s really about it. It’s easier that way, all around.”
“No kids?”
“One,” I said, gesturing again, “and from the sounds of things, I’d better get back to her. Her name’s Basil and please, don’t hesitate to let me know if she bugs you.”
“Oh honey,” she said, with a broad not unpleasant smile and a twist of an accent I caught momentarily but couldn’t place, “with all the chaos in my life your dog could give birth to a litter of puppies on my doormat and I wouldn’t even notice.”
A sense of humor, too. I was relieved to have to get inside and get ready for work. Already I had compassion for her situation, appreciated her sense of humor, and even, in my own way, liked that she was the kind of person who obviously understood that when life gets chaotic the best you can do sometimes is throw a plastic flower into your ponytail and roll with it. As far as neighbors went, she might not be so bad.
I hoped I wouldn’t find out, though. One more person to visit with every time I step outside is going to immensely cut into any available time in my day. I needed to stick to my resolve against forming additional friendships….or maybe, I thought, when she gave me a smile and a wave, face the inevitable, get up earlier and stay up a bit later, to add more time to my day.
The One Non-Negotiable: Notes on a Sunday Matinee
Even if yesterday turned out to be a bit of a strange twenty-four hours, I’m glad it happened as I am now free to enjoy book club this evening, assure J and A they’ve done their collective part to remake my life, and spend an hour or so discussing ‘The Cure for Modern Life’. I’m about 160 pages into it, thanks mainly to getting so involved in it around 11pm Saturday night I didn’t realize how long I’d been reading until I looked at the clock and noted it was 1:45a.m. Reynelle, the new neighbor across the hall, was just coming in about that time and from the sounds of things, lugging more than a few boxes. I don’t wish moving on anybody. I found Basil already in the bed, and I think I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, dreaming (of course) about a research scientist and Big Pharma. What can I say…you dream what you read for almost three hours before you go to bed.
As I had work scheduled on Sunday evening, I’d only reluctantly agreed to the ‘early matinee and late lunch’ with Evan, J and A’s purported answer to my universe. I met him at the theater and the movie wasn’t terrible. Nothing with George Clooney can ever be terrible. The late lunch was at the European bakery just down the block, the one that used to be just up the road until expansion and construction pushed it down the street. We sat on the patio and talked more than we ate, really, as we’d fairly evenly shared a large popcorn in the theater. Movie theater popcorn is to me what chocolate anything is to the ladies I work with: something you may want, with all your heart, to say no to but are never able to.
I’d like to say it was the most interesting conversation I’d ever had, but I really can’t. Evan was, as the book club ladies promised, quite attractive, quite intelligent, over 6’ tall, divorced amicably with grown kids, settled into his career and old enough to be older than me but not so much older we couldn’t intelligently discuss the Saturday morning cartoons we watched as kids. From one vantage point (just looking at him), Evan appeared to be, as the ladies had presented him to me, ‘absolutely perfect’. With one exception that honestly, if you want to know the truth, ruled him out completely.
“I really don’t like animals,” he admitted when the coffee was served. “Of any kind. I didn’t when I was a kid, and I never had pets growing up.” He must have seen the subtle shift of my expression then, perhaps the way my smile disappeared altogether, because he hastened to add, “I mean, I don’t mind that other people have them, so long as I never have to be around them.”
Which meant, I decided right then, that we were about to prove to be as compatible as the ocean and all its inhabitants and the next major oil spill.
The thought of seeing anyone who would never want to see Basil wasn’t conceivable, as she and I were together 99.8% of the time. By my rough calculations, I’d be somewhere in the neighborhood of 54 when she went to dog heaven, so maybe then. Although I doubted it. In the last nearly twenty years I’ve never been without a dog, and can’t see myself changing in that regard any time soon.
As I said, I had plans to go into the office later, so the ‘date’, as it were, wrapped up pretty quickly and I got the hard part over with when he walked me to my car and asked if he could call me again. I wanted to be polite and I wanted to keep an open mind but I also wanted to be, and had to be, honest.
“I’m kind of a big dog person, Evan,” I said then. “I’m just not sure how comfortable you’d be with that.”
He hastened to assure me that, as he’d said, he didn’t mind dogs just didn’t want to be around them ever and would really enjoy seeing me again. When the dog wasn’t around.
“Basil,” I explained, “is always around.” ‘The Kid Stays In The Picture,’ is what I was thinking, but didn’t want to resort to verbalizing an old line from Hollywood.
I was getting ready for work when J called, as I knew she would. I let her know I appreciated it, really, her efforts and A’s efforts, and Evan really, really was a very nice and certainly a handsome guy, it’s just that I didn’t think, given his stance on Basil, we would be heading for anything other than a derailment if we saw each other again.
“Are you kidding me, Madeleine? Are you seriously telling me you’re going to let your dog decide your love life?”
“I’m just telling you, she’s a big part of my life and it doesn’t make sense for me to cut her out of it to accommodate any other part.”
“We’re talking an animal here, Mad.”
“We’re talking something very key to my world,” I said.
“So if he’d been a dog person, then, you’d see him again?” She was incredulous. “I really can’t believe you.”
“I’m just saying,” I said, “I appreciate the set up, but I’m not interested in seeing anybody who’s anti-dog.”
She repeated again that I was crazy, difficult, and unlike anyone she’d ever met, and I agreed she was probably correct on all counts but at that moment I had to throw a suit on and go to work. We could, I said, continue the discussion at Monday night’s book club if she wanted to, although The Cure for Modern Life was actually so good already, I’d rather discuss that. It was very well written, the characters entirely believable, and the story line pulled you in from the first page and refused to let go at any point.
It was, I said, in an effort to lighten the conversation and probably also just because I had to get the last word in, probably written by someone who had a dog.
As I had work scheduled on Sunday evening, I’d only reluctantly agreed to the ‘early matinee and late lunch’ with Evan, J and A’s purported answer to my universe. I met him at the theater and the movie wasn’t terrible. Nothing with George Clooney can ever be terrible. The late lunch was at the European bakery just down the block, the one that used to be just up the road until expansion and construction pushed it down the street. We sat on the patio and talked more than we ate, really, as we’d fairly evenly shared a large popcorn in the theater. Movie theater popcorn is to me what chocolate anything is to the ladies I work with: something you may want, with all your heart, to say no to but are never able to.
I’d like to say it was the most interesting conversation I’d ever had, but I really can’t. Evan was, as the book club ladies promised, quite attractive, quite intelligent, over 6’ tall, divorced amicably with grown kids, settled into his career and old enough to be older than me but not so much older we couldn’t intelligently discuss the Saturday morning cartoons we watched as kids. From one vantage point (just looking at him), Evan appeared to be, as the ladies had presented him to me, ‘absolutely perfect’. With one exception that honestly, if you want to know the truth, ruled him out completely.
“I really don’t like animals,” he admitted when the coffee was served. “Of any kind. I didn’t when I was a kid, and I never had pets growing up.” He must have seen the subtle shift of my expression then, perhaps the way my smile disappeared altogether, because he hastened to add, “I mean, I don’t mind that other people have them, so long as I never have to be around them.”
Which meant, I decided right then, that we were about to prove to be as compatible as the ocean and all its inhabitants and the next major oil spill.
The thought of seeing anyone who would never want to see Basil wasn’t conceivable, as she and I were together 99.8% of the time. By my rough calculations, I’d be somewhere in the neighborhood of 54 when she went to dog heaven, so maybe then. Although I doubted it. In the last nearly twenty years I’ve never been without a dog, and can’t see myself changing in that regard any time soon.
As I said, I had plans to go into the office later, so the ‘date’, as it were, wrapped up pretty quickly and I got the hard part over with when he walked me to my car and asked if he could call me again. I wanted to be polite and I wanted to keep an open mind but I also wanted to be, and had to be, honest.
“I’m kind of a big dog person, Evan,” I said then. “I’m just not sure how comfortable you’d be with that.”
He hastened to assure me that, as he’d said, he didn’t mind dogs just didn’t want to be around them ever and would really enjoy seeing me again. When the dog wasn’t around.
“Basil,” I explained, “is always around.” ‘The Kid Stays In The Picture,’ is what I was thinking, but didn’t want to resort to verbalizing an old line from Hollywood.
I was getting ready for work when J called, as I knew she would. I let her know I appreciated it, really, her efforts and A’s efforts, and Evan really, really was a very nice and certainly a handsome guy, it’s just that I didn’t think, given his stance on Basil, we would be heading for anything other than a derailment if we saw each other again.
“Are you kidding me, Madeleine? Are you seriously telling me you’re going to let your dog decide your love life?”
“I’m just telling you, she’s a big part of my life and it doesn’t make sense for me to cut her out of it to accommodate any other part.”
“We’re talking an animal here, Mad.”
“We’re talking something very key to my world,” I said.
“So if he’d been a dog person, then, you’d see him again?” She was incredulous. “I really can’t believe you.”
“I’m just saying,” I said, “I appreciate the set up, but I’m not interested in seeing anybody who’s anti-dog.”
She repeated again that I was crazy, difficult, and unlike anyone she’d ever met, and I agreed she was probably correct on all counts but at that moment I had to throw a suit on and go to work. We could, I said, continue the discussion at Monday night’s book club if she wanted to, although The Cure for Modern Life was actually so good already, I’d rather discuss that. It was very well written, the characters entirely believable, and the story line pulled you in from the first page and refused to let go at any point.
It was, I said, in an effort to lighten the conversation and probably also just because I had to get the last word in, probably written by someone who had a dog.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
What Came From Book Club Finale: a.k.a., I Give In To Literary Pressure and Agree To A Sunday Matinee
J, on the phone, semi-frantic: "So you haven't heard from him in how long?"
Me: "Saturday, in the email."
J: "You responded?"
Me: "Yes, three times"
J: "So...no answer at all?"
Me: "What part of I haven't heard didnt you hear?"
Pause
J: "Well, then you're going this weekend."
Me: "I'd rather not."
J: "Look, girlfriend, your best efforts have gotten you where, exactly?"
Me: "Hey, I'm not in a bad spot if that's what you're saying..."
J: (Cutting me off, as good friends do) "Your best efforts saw you blowing off your book club to be with some guy who allows the whole thing to end without even ever seeing you face to face --"
Me: "I didn't exactly leave that an option, but--"
J: "Bullshit, Mad. Didn't Brent show up in your carport? Didn't Owen leave roses, several times if we all remember right, on your foyer? This guy just rolled over and said OK, I thought I loved you but now it's over so good enough for me via email?"
Me: "Are you deliberately trying to make me feel like crap or is this just unintentional tough love?"
J: "You're going, this weekend. A matinee. A late lunch. It won't kill you. And so help me, if you don't go --"
Me: "What, you're recommending another Chabon for next month's book club?"
J: "Worse"
Me: "OK, I'm going."
J: "And you'll enjoy yourself."
Me: "Yes. Like a root canal."
Dial tone.
I knew I was in trouble thinking for a minute that J and A in Book Club were serious, and having resigned myself to not Internet Dating, I'd hedged a bet and agreed to go out with a real live person they'd set me up with.
I'd bail on the whole thing right now, except for two things.
1) J. makes a solid point
and
2)From everything I've been able to discern, we're about ready to move more back into the Tom Wolfe selections, and I'd really, really, not want to miss out on those and therefore have to quit Book Club Altogether.
Me: "Saturday, in the email."
J: "You responded?"
Me: "Yes, three times"
J: "So...no answer at all?"
Me: "What part of I haven't heard didnt you hear?"
Pause
J: "Well, then you're going this weekend."
Me: "I'd rather not."
J: "Look, girlfriend, your best efforts have gotten you where, exactly?"
Me: "Hey, I'm not in a bad spot if that's what you're saying..."
J: (Cutting me off, as good friends do) "Your best efforts saw you blowing off your book club to be with some guy who allows the whole thing to end without even ever seeing you face to face --"
Me: "I didn't exactly leave that an option, but--"
J: "Bullshit, Mad. Didn't Brent show up in your carport? Didn't Owen leave roses, several times if we all remember right, on your foyer? This guy just rolled over and said OK, I thought I loved you but now it's over so good enough for me via email?"
Me: "Are you deliberately trying to make me feel like crap or is this just unintentional tough love?"
J: "You're going, this weekend. A matinee. A late lunch. It won't kill you. And so help me, if you don't go --"
Me: "What, you're recommending another Chabon for next month's book club?"
J: "Worse"
Me: "OK, I'm going."
J: "And you'll enjoy yourself."
Me: "Yes. Like a root canal."
Dial tone.
I knew I was in trouble thinking for a minute that J and A in Book Club were serious, and having resigned myself to not Internet Dating, I'd hedged a bet and agreed to go out with a real live person they'd set me up with.
I'd bail on the whole thing right now, except for two things.
1) J. makes a solid point
and
2)From everything I've been able to discern, we're about ready to move more back into the Tom Wolfe selections, and I'd really, really, not want to miss out on those and therefore have to quit Book Club Altogether.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Me And My Shadow: At Least Today Nobody Was Naked
It’s been another day in the paradise of the unexpected. Having survived yesterday’s trauma of over-exposure to the naked bodies of strangers, Wednesday’s mistreatment of our receiving dock and the surprise of every other minute since the Essential Oil People arrived in my work life, I anticipated today would be relatively ‘smooth sailing’. Clearly we’d experienced every possible snafu. I expected today to be relatively calm and mentally forecasted clear skies with only a slight chance of the unexpected, thereby proving true the old adage, ‘She who expects should know better.’
The day began with Sally, a fresh-faced, chipper, entirely too optimistic intern very much interested in pursuing a career in the hospitality industry. She was to be my ‘shadow’ for the first two hours of the day, wherein I was to hopefully give her a pleasant overview and inspire her to one day become…well, me. I’d originally thought having a ‘shadow’ during a large program such as this one would be a great learning experience for her and had mentally put together an agenda of items we’d cover. Again, I should have known better.
Not two minutes before her arrival, the relative insanity which has been the program since its arrival continued. The client called semi-frantic, as they’d filled every one of the six hundred seats they’d ordered in the ballroom and needed, ‘a few more’. I dispatched Banquets, only to have them call me back moments later to tell me the only space left to add another table was perhaps to dangle it from a chandelier. I set off for the ballroom, Sally in tow, trying not so effectively not to burst out laughing at her enthusiastic, “Oh, a problem! Great!”
Problem was an understatement. Additional tables wouldn’t be a possibility and the chairs the client requested along the perimeter walls wouldn’t work, either. I didn’t need to be the Fire Marshal to understand leaving absolutely NO access to the exits was a bad idea. Never, however, one to say there’s no solution, I cornered the Set Up Manager, directed him to make all the tables, currently crescents of 8, full rounds of 10, thus adding about 100 additional seats. After doing this and placing groups of ten and twelve chairs only in the corners of the room, we’d added about 150 additional seats, which just about accommodated everyone.
“I’m so sorry,” the client apologized. “We’re a little over on our count.”
Yes, about 25% over.
That problem resolved, we started out on the tour I’d had in mind for the grinning Sally. The Main Kitchen, the Banquet Kitchen, the Pastry Kitchen, Stewarding, Receiving, Security. I think we’d managed about ten steps into this when my cell phone rang and we doubled back to the north lot to sign for an unanticipated red carpet delivery for the group from a local decorator. Which wasn’t a problem except that a group of servers had set up an assembly line near that entrance to roll silver for the day’s luncheon, so, with Sally in tow once more, we squeezed past the table, signed for the delivery, and continued on our way, stopping first to notify the kitchen that we’d just added an additional 150 chairs to the ballroom so we’d probably be at least that many over what we’d expected for lunch, and detouring back to the Banquet office to let them know the carpet which we hadn’t been notified the group had ordered had arrived and was sitting by the back doors.
In all honesty, I have to say two things: 1) I truly enjoyed the time with Sally. We covered a lot of ground, she asked a lot of questions, and most of them, I felt I was able to give a fairly competent answer to without scaring her away from the occupation completely. If she asked me any question that threw me, it was this one, “Can you still have a personal life in this kind of work?”
I hate to admit anybody can render me speechless, but with that inquiry, she kind of did, and I could only be honest. “I think you can have as much of a personal life as you want to have,” I said, “you just have to make it a priority. There’s times, if you have a program in for 14 days, that’s your life for 14 days. You schedule vacations around your contracts, and you make your plans in pencil, most of the time. But,” I added, because she was, at that point, making more notes in the steno notebook she’d been jotting notes into all morning, “I think the only people I’ve seen this not work for are those with small children.” It was hard enough at times, I thought but didn’t say, for those with small high maintenance dogs like Basil.
2) I am very glad that I turned her over to Casey and Diane for their part of the ‘shadow day’ before my group broke for lunch. As I said, when instructing an intern, it’s best to shield them from realities that might scare them off the occupation altogether. Surely the sight of 750 guests converging en masse on three double sided buffets (placed in the ballroom hallway as after the group’s extensive and unplanned set up in the reception foyers, it was the only space available) and loading plates as if they’d never eaten before in their lives and wouldn’t eat again, might have dampened her enthusiasm for her future occupation. I have never seen food disappear so fast and once more marveled at the ability of the Banquet Kitchen to send more. As the Banquet Chef told me later, they’d gone through the entire vegetable order for not only this group but the one following it, and desserts had run out completely, explaining the Executive Chef’s barked orders to, “Send out the moon pies!” that at the time, I hadn’t understood. Now, I do. My group not only demolished their own desserts, they made a significant dent in the dark and white chocolate moon pies planned for an event tomorrow.
I was relieved to note there was no evening function and as I had an appointment with another chipper, overly enthusiastic person at five (Spencer from Wells Fargo, who stood ready and anxious to help me set up another savings account and whom I agreed to meet with mainly to put the kybash on his weekly, “Hello! It’s Spencer from Wells Fargo and as you’re a valued customer I’d like to take a few moments to tell you how we can better serve you!”), to note that I would be leaving early. There’s just one more day to go.
Tomorrow Sally will be back, and there will be another intern with her. They’ll be arriving at 2pm, which will give me a couple hours to settle in (and hopefully handle any snafus which might deter them from their future career choices) before their arrival. We’ll be together until 7pm, at which time my 750 Essential Oil Enthusiasts will settle in for their gala dinner, awards presentation, and dancing, at which time I can turn them over to Banquets expertise and go home.
Monday morning, there will be no more cloud of lemongrass/sage/rosemary/thyme/cinnamon/lemon essential oil blanketing the entire east end of the building, and life will be calm once more. Calm, that is, until the arrival of the next group. I’m not telling the interns that, though. I was once every bit as young and optimistic as Sally, and I’m not taking that away from anybody.
The day began with Sally, a fresh-faced, chipper, entirely too optimistic intern very much interested in pursuing a career in the hospitality industry. She was to be my ‘shadow’ for the first two hours of the day, wherein I was to hopefully give her a pleasant overview and inspire her to one day become…well, me. I’d originally thought having a ‘shadow’ during a large program such as this one would be a great learning experience for her and had mentally put together an agenda of items we’d cover. Again, I should have known better.
Not two minutes before her arrival, the relative insanity which has been the program since its arrival continued. The client called semi-frantic, as they’d filled every one of the six hundred seats they’d ordered in the ballroom and needed, ‘a few more’. I dispatched Banquets, only to have them call me back moments later to tell me the only space left to add another table was perhaps to dangle it from a chandelier. I set off for the ballroom, Sally in tow, trying not so effectively not to burst out laughing at her enthusiastic, “Oh, a problem! Great!”
Problem was an understatement. Additional tables wouldn’t be a possibility and the chairs the client requested along the perimeter walls wouldn’t work, either. I didn’t need to be the Fire Marshal to understand leaving absolutely NO access to the exits was a bad idea. Never, however, one to say there’s no solution, I cornered the Set Up Manager, directed him to make all the tables, currently crescents of 8, full rounds of 10, thus adding about 100 additional seats. After doing this and placing groups of ten and twelve chairs only in the corners of the room, we’d added about 150 additional seats, which just about accommodated everyone.
“I’m so sorry,” the client apologized. “We’re a little over on our count.”
Yes, about 25% over.
That problem resolved, we started out on the tour I’d had in mind for the grinning Sally. The Main Kitchen, the Banquet Kitchen, the Pastry Kitchen, Stewarding, Receiving, Security. I think we’d managed about ten steps into this when my cell phone rang and we doubled back to the north lot to sign for an unanticipated red carpet delivery for the group from a local decorator. Which wasn’t a problem except that a group of servers had set up an assembly line near that entrance to roll silver for the day’s luncheon, so, with Sally in tow once more, we squeezed past the table, signed for the delivery, and continued on our way, stopping first to notify the kitchen that we’d just added an additional 150 chairs to the ballroom so we’d probably be at least that many over what we’d expected for lunch, and detouring back to the Banquet office to let them know the carpet which we hadn’t been notified the group had ordered had arrived and was sitting by the back doors.
In all honesty, I have to say two things: 1) I truly enjoyed the time with Sally. We covered a lot of ground, she asked a lot of questions, and most of them, I felt I was able to give a fairly competent answer to without scaring her away from the occupation completely. If she asked me any question that threw me, it was this one, “Can you still have a personal life in this kind of work?”
I hate to admit anybody can render me speechless, but with that inquiry, she kind of did, and I could only be honest. “I think you can have as much of a personal life as you want to have,” I said, “you just have to make it a priority. There’s times, if you have a program in for 14 days, that’s your life for 14 days. You schedule vacations around your contracts, and you make your plans in pencil, most of the time. But,” I added, because she was, at that point, making more notes in the steno notebook she’d been jotting notes into all morning, “I think the only people I’ve seen this not work for are those with small children.” It was hard enough at times, I thought but didn’t say, for those with small high maintenance dogs like Basil.
2) I am very glad that I turned her over to Casey and Diane for their part of the ‘shadow day’ before my group broke for lunch. As I said, when instructing an intern, it’s best to shield them from realities that might scare them off the occupation altogether. Surely the sight of 750 guests converging en masse on three double sided buffets (placed in the ballroom hallway as after the group’s extensive and unplanned set up in the reception foyers, it was the only space available) and loading plates as if they’d never eaten before in their lives and wouldn’t eat again, might have dampened her enthusiasm for her future occupation. I have never seen food disappear so fast and once more marveled at the ability of the Banquet Kitchen to send more. As the Banquet Chef told me later, they’d gone through the entire vegetable order for not only this group but the one following it, and desserts had run out completely, explaining the Executive Chef’s barked orders to, “Send out the moon pies!” that at the time, I hadn’t understood. Now, I do. My group not only demolished their own desserts, they made a significant dent in the dark and white chocolate moon pies planned for an event tomorrow.
I was relieved to note there was no evening function and as I had an appointment with another chipper, overly enthusiastic person at five (Spencer from Wells Fargo, who stood ready and anxious to help me set up another savings account and whom I agreed to meet with mainly to put the kybash on his weekly, “Hello! It’s Spencer from Wells Fargo and as you’re a valued customer I’d like to take a few moments to tell you how we can better serve you!”), to note that I would be leaving early. There’s just one more day to go.
Tomorrow Sally will be back, and there will be another intern with her. They’ll be arriving at 2pm, which will give me a couple hours to settle in (and hopefully handle any snafus which might deter them from their future career choices) before their arrival. We’ll be together until 7pm, at which time my 750 Essential Oil Enthusiasts will settle in for their gala dinner, awards presentation, and dancing, at which time I can turn them over to Banquets expertise and go home.
Monday morning, there will be no more cloud of lemongrass/sage/rosemary/thyme/cinnamon/lemon essential oil blanketing the entire east end of the building, and life will be calm once more. Calm, that is, until the arrival of the next group. I’m not telling the interns that, though. I was once every bit as young and optimistic as Sally, and I’m not taking that away from anybody.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Naked from Eight-Thirty Until Six: Just Another Day At The Office
I’ve said before, you work in the hospitality industry long enough and you’ll be able to say with no small amount of confidence that you’ve seen everything. Today has convinced me that even though as early as this morning I thought I’d seen everything in the past nearly eight years, I was absolutely and completely wrong.
My first inkling of this probably should have become apparent when I was first assigned the contract for this group, a multi-level marketing conflagration of 600 people dealing in ‘essential oils’ purported to do everything from taking ten years from your looks to adding twenty to fifty years to your life. Not only could they accomplish that, they could relax you just by inhaling them and were even used in massage therapies. A few were ingestible and our Chef was incorporating them into the group’s menus although by his own admission, “You open that rosemary or sage and man, it knocks you over. You have to leave the room.”
Therein lie the rub, no pun intended. “So you’d like,” I attempted to clarify two months ago, standing in an empty ballroom with four members of their planning committee, “to use this space – “ I gestured rather vaguely at the nearly 11,000 s.f. we were standing in, “for a massage center?”
“For aroma touch therapy,” their apparent leader corrected me. “For the first day of the program, we provide aroma touch therapy, then we move into General Sessions for the weekend.”
I considered that. Didn’t see a problem, actually. I mean, so long as they didn’t spill anything on the carpeting. For the record, that’s all people in my position are ultimately concerned with. We’ve got all kinds of rules, regulations, policies and standards but everything’s open for negotiation if the revenue’s right and you can accomplish your purposes without messing up the carpet. Couldn’t be much different than what our own spa did when they offered seated chair massages, is what I was thinking.
Yesterday, as the program rolled out, I was reminded that my own thinking is not always to be trusted. Rather than the ‘demonstration chairs’ discussed, which were to be unloaded at a very convenient lot on the north end of our property, what was delivered – unscheduled – to our receiving dock several stories below the main level of the hotel and absolutely not of a size to accommodate such a surprise for too long – were no less than nine pallets, each approximately 8’ high, of shrink-wrapped boxes, each one containing a full size massage table.
It’s been my week, apparently, to work out my receiving dock karma because once more I found my way down there, having remittent flashbacks to the Fed Ex Tube Debacle of the tail end of last week which saw me down there several times. I called the client, explained the situation, and they promptly admitted it was their error, or rather the error of their shipping company. They’d send some of their people right over to move the pallets. I then explained they couldn’t do that because at this point we’d received them and I couldn’t, for liability reasons, allow guests in the dock area, or to be moving freight. What I could do, and what I did do, was contact our Set Up staff to move the pallets to the ballroom, at a substantial ‘handling’ (read: this is heavy and it hurts) fee, which the client agreed to immediately as they’d no sooner have it paid than they’d bill back their freight company for the error.
That accomplished and my dock manager somewhat placated (what could I say except I’m very, very, very sorry it was my group that took every square inch of your available space this morning when all you really wanted was somewhere for the food deliveries to land) I finished the day checking on members of the group who had by then arrived to disassemble the towering pallets and set up the massage tables. Everything looked fine when I went home. It was a ballroom of massage tables, water stations, and observation chairs.
It was really quite ordinary, I thought, and I thought that until maybe an hour after the ‘aroma therapy meeting’ got underway because it was at this point that the overpowering aroma of their ‘essential oils’ had permeated every square inch of a very substantial ballroom hallway and all the meeting space on the first floor. An area, to give you a perspective, exactly equal to the east side of a building set squarely on ten acres.
It’s OK, I assured just about everybody, as everybody I encountered had a comment about the heavy eau du lemongrass/patchouli/ spearmint/ rosemary/ sage/ cinnamon/ grapefruit that hung over the atmosphere like one of our worst winter inversions. They’re being very careful, I was quick to point out. Nothing was getting spilled on the carpet. This last seemed to placate just about every inquiry. We’re all alike, in this industry.
With a cell phone call from the group’s planner roughly every two and a half minutes, I went through the day alternating between the cell phone, the dispatch radio, and conversations explaining why our luxury hotel now smelled like the inside of an overloaded herbal sachet. Things finally quieted down early into the evening when I decided to walk by the ballroom again and just assure myself that, if nothing else, the carpets were still unscathed.
“You have naked people out there,” my boss observed, as I passed by her office.
“I’m sorry? I have what?”
“Naked people,” she said, more calmly than my former boss would ever have managed. She, of course, had done my job for years before taking hers so she was a bit less easily surprised. “You know, walking around in those little paper gowns. Without bras or anything.”
Another small detail left out of the group’s specs. Another small detail that made this meeting much, much different from those seated chair massages our spa provided.
“Great,” I said, thinking of the other two programs in the ballroom space and how much time we had between the end of the aroma touch meeting and the arrival of guests for other programs who probably wouldn’t want to encounter…well, people without bras in paper clothing wandering the halls. “I’ll go take a look,” I assured my boss.
“Many of them,” she observed drily, “really need to have a bra on.”
A few minutes later I walked into our ballroom ladies room, a sprawl of marble and limitless stalls you could put my condominium into no less than four times. What had once been a pristine and true ‘powder room’ replete with its own seating area was now an upscale rendition of, well, the ladies locker room in your basic Gold’s Gym. The first thing I saw (and I truly wish it hadn’t been) was a pile of discarded blue paper gowns, very much like what you get to wear at the doctor’s office, only not fabric and certainly not imprinted with fall leaves or something equally cheerful. They were wedged into the counter openings designed for the linen hand towels, every single one of the counter openings. The second thing I saw (and I’m still trying to get the image out of my head, trust me) were four women without bras, two of which did not, at that point, actually have any manner of underthing on, and one of which was cupping her breasts in her hands and surveying them in the floor length mirror with an interest level that should never be displayed in a public restroom. Even if it did, at that point, more or less resemble a gym.
Sometimes all you can do is look away, wash your hands so it appeared you had a purpose to be in the bathroom at all, return to your office, give a heads up to housekeeping that they’d need to pull a lot of paper dresses out of places they’d only ever expect to find linen hand towels, and be happier than you could express that you were mere minutes from going home for the day.
Which is exactly what I did.
“So was I right?” my boss asked, and I just shook my head, not stopping as I headed to my desk. “I’ve just seen more naked female flesh than I ever wanted to see in my life,” I observed, which my cohorts in the office seemed to find hysterically funny.
“Oh come on,” Casey called out, “I had the lactation station with that pharmaceutical group.”
“And I,” Diane reminded me, still laughing, “had the breast exam room. Remember how many Set Up guys offered to refresh the water stations in there?”
“I had the six foot replicas of private parts,” my boss chimed in, “remember that gynecological seminar?”
That started the whole Mortified Memories Lane thing in earnest, and the last few minutes of the day were spent swapping horror stories of events past that, in hindsight, really weren’t that bad and someday would even be funny. Really, they reminded me. This isn’t the worst thing.
Easy for them to say. They’re not the ones who have to somehow, between now and ten o’clock when they go to bed, shake that whole bathroom visual out of their heads.
My first inkling of this probably should have become apparent when I was first assigned the contract for this group, a multi-level marketing conflagration of 600 people dealing in ‘essential oils’ purported to do everything from taking ten years from your looks to adding twenty to fifty years to your life. Not only could they accomplish that, they could relax you just by inhaling them and were even used in massage therapies. A few were ingestible and our Chef was incorporating them into the group’s menus although by his own admission, “You open that rosemary or sage and man, it knocks you over. You have to leave the room.”
Therein lie the rub, no pun intended. “So you’d like,” I attempted to clarify two months ago, standing in an empty ballroom with four members of their planning committee, “to use this space – “ I gestured rather vaguely at the nearly 11,000 s.f. we were standing in, “for a massage center?”
“For aroma touch therapy,” their apparent leader corrected me. “For the first day of the program, we provide aroma touch therapy, then we move into General Sessions for the weekend.”
I considered that. Didn’t see a problem, actually. I mean, so long as they didn’t spill anything on the carpeting. For the record, that’s all people in my position are ultimately concerned with. We’ve got all kinds of rules, regulations, policies and standards but everything’s open for negotiation if the revenue’s right and you can accomplish your purposes without messing up the carpet. Couldn’t be much different than what our own spa did when they offered seated chair massages, is what I was thinking.
Yesterday, as the program rolled out, I was reminded that my own thinking is not always to be trusted. Rather than the ‘demonstration chairs’ discussed, which were to be unloaded at a very convenient lot on the north end of our property, what was delivered – unscheduled – to our receiving dock several stories below the main level of the hotel and absolutely not of a size to accommodate such a surprise for too long – were no less than nine pallets, each approximately 8’ high, of shrink-wrapped boxes, each one containing a full size massage table.
It’s been my week, apparently, to work out my receiving dock karma because once more I found my way down there, having remittent flashbacks to the Fed Ex Tube Debacle of the tail end of last week which saw me down there several times. I called the client, explained the situation, and they promptly admitted it was their error, or rather the error of their shipping company. They’d send some of their people right over to move the pallets. I then explained they couldn’t do that because at this point we’d received them and I couldn’t, for liability reasons, allow guests in the dock area, or to be moving freight. What I could do, and what I did do, was contact our Set Up staff to move the pallets to the ballroom, at a substantial ‘handling’ (read: this is heavy and it hurts) fee, which the client agreed to immediately as they’d no sooner have it paid than they’d bill back their freight company for the error.
That accomplished and my dock manager somewhat placated (what could I say except I’m very, very, very sorry it was my group that took every square inch of your available space this morning when all you really wanted was somewhere for the food deliveries to land) I finished the day checking on members of the group who had by then arrived to disassemble the towering pallets and set up the massage tables. Everything looked fine when I went home. It was a ballroom of massage tables, water stations, and observation chairs.
It was really quite ordinary, I thought, and I thought that until maybe an hour after the ‘aroma therapy meeting’ got underway because it was at this point that the overpowering aroma of their ‘essential oils’ had permeated every square inch of a very substantial ballroom hallway and all the meeting space on the first floor. An area, to give you a perspective, exactly equal to the east side of a building set squarely on ten acres.
It’s OK, I assured just about everybody, as everybody I encountered had a comment about the heavy eau du lemongrass/patchouli/ spearmint/ rosemary/ sage/ cinnamon/ grapefruit that hung over the atmosphere like one of our worst winter inversions. They’re being very careful, I was quick to point out. Nothing was getting spilled on the carpet. This last seemed to placate just about every inquiry. We’re all alike, in this industry.
With a cell phone call from the group’s planner roughly every two and a half minutes, I went through the day alternating between the cell phone, the dispatch radio, and conversations explaining why our luxury hotel now smelled like the inside of an overloaded herbal sachet. Things finally quieted down early into the evening when I decided to walk by the ballroom again and just assure myself that, if nothing else, the carpets were still unscathed.
“You have naked people out there,” my boss observed, as I passed by her office.
“I’m sorry? I have what?”
“Naked people,” she said, more calmly than my former boss would ever have managed. She, of course, had done my job for years before taking hers so she was a bit less easily surprised. “You know, walking around in those little paper gowns. Without bras or anything.”
Another small detail left out of the group’s specs. Another small detail that made this meeting much, much different from those seated chair massages our spa provided.
“Great,” I said, thinking of the other two programs in the ballroom space and how much time we had between the end of the aroma touch meeting and the arrival of guests for other programs who probably wouldn’t want to encounter…well, people without bras in paper clothing wandering the halls. “I’ll go take a look,” I assured my boss.
“Many of them,” she observed drily, “really need to have a bra on.”
A few minutes later I walked into our ballroom ladies room, a sprawl of marble and limitless stalls you could put my condominium into no less than four times. What had once been a pristine and true ‘powder room’ replete with its own seating area was now an upscale rendition of, well, the ladies locker room in your basic Gold’s Gym. The first thing I saw (and I truly wish it hadn’t been) was a pile of discarded blue paper gowns, very much like what you get to wear at the doctor’s office, only not fabric and certainly not imprinted with fall leaves or something equally cheerful. They were wedged into the counter openings designed for the linen hand towels, every single one of the counter openings. The second thing I saw (and I’m still trying to get the image out of my head, trust me) were four women without bras, two of which did not, at that point, actually have any manner of underthing on, and one of which was cupping her breasts in her hands and surveying them in the floor length mirror with an interest level that should never be displayed in a public restroom. Even if it did, at that point, more or less resemble a gym.
Sometimes all you can do is look away, wash your hands so it appeared you had a purpose to be in the bathroom at all, return to your office, give a heads up to housekeeping that they’d need to pull a lot of paper dresses out of places they’d only ever expect to find linen hand towels, and be happier than you could express that you were mere minutes from going home for the day.
Which is exactly what I did.
“So was I right?” my boss asked, and I just shook my head, not stopping as I headed to my desk. “I’ve just seen more naked female flesh than I ever wanted to see in my life,” I observed, which my cohorts in the office seemed to find hysterically funny.
“Oh come on,” Casey called out, “I had the lactation station with that pharmaceutical group.”
“And I,” Diane reminded me, still laughing, “had the breast exam room. Remember how many Set Up guys offered to refresh the water stations in there?”
“I had the six foot replicas of private parts,” my boss chimed in, “remember that gynecological seminar?”
That started the whole Mortified Memories Lane thing in earnest, and the last few minutes of the day were spent swapping horror stories of events past that, in hindsight, really weren’t that bad and someday would even be funny. Really, they reminded me. This isn’t the worst thing.
Easy for them to say. They’re not the ones who have to somehow, between now and ten o’clock when they go to bed, shake that whole bathroom visual out of their heads.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
That Time of Year End Again: The Perils of Flexible Spending
It’s an odd problem to have, really.
Finding yourself in a position where you absolutely positively have to spend exactly $890 before the year is over, or the government gets to keep it (which is unthinkable as you know they’re going to get enough from you in April). It’s a problem I was warned about when I first enrolled in Flexible Spending, that handy payroll program whereby you can withhold money for allowable medical expenses and healthcare, tax-free. This reduces your taxable income (and therefore slightly reduces the amount the government can take from you in April) and allows you to reimburse submitted medical expenses also tax free, on your paycheck. Sounds simple and it basically is and it worked like a charm last year. This year it’s not working well at all.
The difficulty this year is, I haven’t been as conscientious about it as I was last year. This year, rather than adhering every receipt from every prescription purchase to my refrigerator with a magnet, I’ve chosen instead to ‘file’ them in my wallet. Note: Anything filed in my wallet is guaranteed never to be seen again until the end of the current year and the closure of the grace period for submitting receipts for reimbursement. Last year, every receipt for contact solution, aspirin, band-aids, allergy medication, doctor visit co-pays and over the counter drugs went on the fridge, stayed on the fridge, and was promptly and effectively reimbursed. This year, they’ve either vanished into the veritable black hole of my wallet or been tossed away with the grocery sack because I had my mind on something else. Basically, I’ve been regularly throwing money away since January.
Not a good problem to have.
Reviewing my Flexible Spending balance today, I decided there would be no better use for my lunch hour than to drive to Midvale and buy contact lenses, as many as my eye care provider would let me have. This amounted to eight boxes, an entire year’s supply, and came to a grand total of $205.15. A thorough search of my wallet uncovered receipts for Christmas gifts in 2006, 3 business cards of people I can’t recall, a post it note with “I love you” scrawled on it someone once tucked inside a lunch they’d packed me (that, I kept) 1 book of matches from a restaurant I’m quite sure I never visited, and one receipt from my eye appointment in September, along with the receipt for the purchase of a Three Year Eye Care Plan, which added another $115.40. This claim completed and dropped into the outgoing mail, I calculate what I now have to spend is a grand total of $569.45.
I’m not (knock on wood) due for another physical until the spring, and even if I remembered to submit claims for the one remaining month of prescriptions I have to fill this year, I’m only down to $519.45. To save this amount from the evil clutches of the IRS (they can wait until April, they’re not getting a dime any sooner), I would need to buy…well, eight pairs of glasses, because America’s Best prices are so good you can get two pairs for only $69.
There are a few reasons I don’t harbor any desire to have eight pairs of glasses. Number one, I don’t wear glasses that often. Number two, glasses pique Basil’s gastronomic interests more than, say, fresh bacon. She actually salivates over them. We’ve been lucky enough with the three pairs she’s ingested over the past five years. I’m not going to put the temptation of eight optical appetizers in her path. I might go four pairs, and then lock them up somewhere out of her reach. That would reduce the amount I had to go through to about $381.45.
The only option, at that point, is to purchase yet another year’s worth of contact lenses (it’s highly recommended you replace your contact lenses with a new pair every three weeks. I’m thinking if that’s a good idea, replacing them every three days should be even better) and just to mix it up a bit, I’ll make them the colored contact lenses. I used to wear those, in a gray/green shade that actually wasn’t much different from my own, just made them a little more green. It was subtle, and slight. It would reduce my spendable balance down to about $176.30. I’m thinking I could knock that out by asking one of the girls in the office with a Costco card to pick me up 15 of those $12 bottles of contact solution on their next shopping venture. It’s recommended you soak your lenses in fresh solution at least once a day. I’m thinking if this is a good idea, an even better one would be to soak them in fresh solution every three hours or so.
This accomplished, I will successfully have thwarted the efforts of the IRS to take back tax-free money that I frankly don’t want them to have. I have roughly two months to get this done, and have already slated all purchases into my Blackberry so it can faithfully send me reminders and keep me on the straight and narrow with this.
“Are you going to sign up for Flex again for 2010?” Diane asked yesterday. “It’s only open enrollment until the 30th.”
“I am,” I said. “Same as this year.”
She looked at me like I was nuts, which is not an unusual experience for either of us. “Are you joking? Weren’t you really short this year?”
I was, I admitted. Very short. For several reasons, all beyond my control. Number one, I stopped going to my eye doctor and stopped buying my glasses from her, came to my economic senses and started using America’s Best, thus reducing my cost per pair of glasses in excess of $325 and the cost of my eye appointments, at least for the next three years due to my purchase of the Eye Care Plan, by 100%. I also was the victim of an allergy medication that, without consulting me or the effect it would have on my Flexible Spending budget, the FDA chose to make over the counter, thereby eliminating that reimbursement. Basil fell down on her commitment to the program’s success and did not ingest or mangle so much as one pair of glasses this year, setting me back a good $600 (assuming, as I had at the time I signed up, I’d still be buying them from my old eye doctor), and I’d had no medical expenses that were by any means uncovered by my insurance or reasonably unforeseen. “I’m going in with the same deduction,” I told her then. “Just to be on the safe side.”
Call me superstitious, but I feel if I reduce it, I’ll be tempting fate and at the end of next year, I’ll have more expenses and not enough to reimburse them. The worst thing that can happen if I hold to plan and repeat last year’s deduction is I’ll have a surplus of contact solution and change my contacts every forty-five minutes.
It’s what we around here call a crap shoot, but I’m going to shoot it. At least until the government evolves what we really need: A Flexible Spending Plan for hair appointments, nail appointments, make-up, hairspray, Oprah Magazine, over-priced perfume and the purchase of nylons and stockings. Nobody would fall short on that kind of plan, and we’d all have so much ‘pre-tax’ earnings, the IRS would be writing a reimbursement to us.
Finding yourself in a position where you absolutely positively have to spend exactly $890 before the year is over, or the government gets to keep it (which is unthinkable as you know they’re going to get enough from you in April). It’s a problem I was warned about when I first enrolled in Flexible Spending, that handy payroll program whereby you can withhold money for allowable medical expenses and healthcare, tax-free. This reduces your taxable income (and therefore slightly reduces the amount the government can take from you in April) and allows you to reimburse submitted medical expenses also tax free, on your paycheck. Sounds simple and it basically is and it worked like a charm last year. This year it’s not working well at all.
The difficulty this year is, I haven’t been as conscientious about it as I was last year. This year, rather than adhering every receipt from every prescription purchase to my refrigerator with a magnet, I’ve chosen instead to ‘file’ them in my wallet. Note: Anything filed in my wallet is guaranteed never to be seen again until the end of the current year and the closure of the grace period for submitting receipts for reimbursement. Last year, every receipt for contact solution, aspirin, band-aids, allergy medication, doctor visit co-pays and over the counter drugs went on the fridge, stayed on the fridge, and was promptly and effectively reimbursed. This year, they’ve either vanished into the veritable black hole of my wallet or been tossed away with the grocery sack because I had my mind on something else. Basically, I’ve been regularly throwing money away since January.
Not a good problem to have.
Reviewing my Flexible Spending balance today, I decided there would be no better use for my lunch hour than to drive to Midvale and buy contact lenses, as many as my eye care provider would let me have. This amounted to eight boxes, an entire year’s supply, and came to a grand total of $205.15. A thorough search of my wallet uncovered receipts for Christmas gifts in 2006, 3 business cards of people I can’t recall, a post it note with “I love you” scrawled on it someone once tucked inside a lunch they’d packed me (that, I kept) 1 book of matches from a restaurant I’m quite sure I never visited, and one receipt from my eye appointment in September, along with the receipt for the purchase of a Three Year Eye Care Plan, which added another $115.40. This claim completed and dropped into the outgoing mail, I calculate what I now have to spend is a grand total of $569.45.
I’m not (knock on wood) due for another physical until the spring, and even if I remembered to submit claims for the one remaining month of prescriptions I have to fill this year, I’m only down to $519.45. To save this amount from the evil clutches of the IRS (they can wait until April, they’re not getting a dime any sooner), I would need to buy…well, eight pairs of glasses, because America’s Best prices are so good you can get two pairs for only $69.
There are a few reasons I don’t harbor any desire to have eight pairs of glasses. Number one, I don’t wear glasses that often. Number two, glasses pique Basil’s gastronomic interests more than, say, fresh bacon. She actually salivates over them. We’ve been lucky enough with the three pairs she’s ingested over the past five years. I’m not going to put the temptation of eight optical appetizers in her path. I might go four pairs, and then lock them up somewhere out of her reach. That would reduce the amount I had to go through to about $381.45.
The only option, at that point, is to purchase yet another year’s worth of contact lenses (it’s highly recommended you replace your contact lenses with a new pair every three weeks. I’m thinking if that’s a good idea, replacing them every three days should be even better) and just to mix it up a bit, I’ll make them the colored contact lenses. I used to wear those, in a gray/green shade that actually wasn’t much different from my own, just made them a little more green. It was subtle, and slight. It would reduce my spendable balance down to about $176.30. I’m thinking I could knock that out by asking one of the girls in the office with a Costco card to pick me up 15 of those $12 bottles of contact solution on their next shopping venture. It’s recommended you soak your lenses in fresh solution at least once a day. I’m thinking if this is a good idea, an even better one would be to soak them in fresh solution every three hours or so.
This accomplished, I will successfully have thwarted the efforts of the IRS to take back tax-free money that I frankly don’t want them to have. I have roughly two months to get this done, and have already slated all purchases into my Blackberry so it can faithfully send me reminders and keep me on the straight and narrow with this.
“Are you going to sign up for Flex again for 2010?” Diane asked yesterday. “It’s only open enrollment until the 30th.”
“I am,” I said. “Same as this year.”
She looked at me like I was nuts, which is not an unusual experience for either of us. “Are you joking? Weren’t you really short this year?”
I was, I admitted. Very short. For several reasons, all beyond my control. Number one, I stopped going to my eye doctor and stopped buying my glasses from her, came to my economic senses and started using America’s Best, thus reducing my cost per pair of glasses in excess of $325 and the cost of my eye appointments, at least for the next three years due to my purchase of the Eye Care Plan, by 100%. I also was the victim of an allergy medication that, without consulting me or the effect it would have on my Flexible Spending budget, the FDA chose to make over the counter, thereby eliminating that reimbursement. Basil fell down on her commitment to the program’s success and did not ingest or mangle so much as one pair of glasses this year, setting me back a good $600 (assuming, as I had at the time I signed up, I’d still be buying them from my old eye doctor), and I’d had no medical expenses that were by any means uncovered by my insurance or reasonably unforeseen. “I’m going in with the same deduction,” I told her then. “Just to be on the safe side.”
Call me superstitious, but I feel if I reduce it, I’ll be tempting fate and at the end of next year, I’ll have more expenses and not enough to reimburse them. The worst thing that can happen if I hold to plan and repeat last year’s deduction is I’ll have a surplus of contact solution and change my contacts every forty-five minutes.
It’s what we around here call a crap shoot, but I’m going to shoot it. At least until the government evolves what we really need: A Flexible Spending Plan for hair appointments, nail appointments, make-up, hairspray, Oprah Magazine, over-priced perfume and the purchase of nylons and stockings. Nobody would fall short on that kind of plan, and we’d all have so much ‘pre-tax’ earnings, the IRS would be writing a reimbursement to us.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
J and A: What Came of Bookclub, Part Deux
So I left Book Club tonight, thinking about the whole ‘my personal life is separate” but it really isn’t, because these are The Girls who busted me with the whole ‘sixty minute man’, or more on target, the guy who was seeing me exclusively, and was at the same time active on an Internet dating site.
Sad but redundant. We’ve been here before.
“So OK,” A. said, as I left, “your take is what, to do nothing?”
“No,” I said. “If you mean, am I going back to Internet dating, no thanks.”
J. exchanged a significant glance with A. then,“So, let us set you up.”
“Like you do,” I said, “with something like a Michael Chabon novel (I’d hated every page) like The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Pulitzer prize or no.”
“Yes,” they replied, in unison so much it scared me.
“Whatever,” I said, and meant it.
The week has only begun and it was scary to think where it may wind up, if they were serious.
Maybe I, like they said frighteningly in unison as I made my way back through the courtyard, need to buckle up and hold on, girlfriend, and just let them figure it out.
It has to, they insisted, beat the alternative.
“Ladies,” I said, “Leave a lady alone.”
My hope is they take that advice but no bets being hedged, at this point.
Comes a certain point, it’s got to be better, being alone.
Sad but redundant. We’ve been here before.
“So OK,” A. said, as I left, “your take is what, to do nothing?”
“No,” I said. “If you mean, am I going back to Internet dating, no thanks.”
J. exchanged a significant glance with A. then,“So, let us set you up.”
“Like you do,” I said, “with something like a Michael Chabon novel (I’d hated every page) like The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Pulitzer prize or no.”
“Yes,” they replied, in unison so much it scared me.
“Whatever,” I said, and meant it.
The week has only begun and it was scary to think where it may wind up, if they were serious.
Maybe I, like they said frighteningly in unison as I made my way back through the courtyard, need to buckle up and hold on, girlfriend, and just let them figure it out.
It has to, they insisted, beat the alternative.
“Ladies,” I said, “Leave a lady alone.”
My hope is they take that advice but no bets being hedged, at this point.
Comes a certain point, it’s got to be better, being alone.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Much Appreciated Minestrone: Thoughts on an Unexpected Lunch
I emailed yesterday morning and said thanks again for the sheets (which sounded funny but really wasn’t. They work nicely as tarps and that’s what he always uses them for, which made sense if you’d been operating out of the same linen closet for over twenty-five years and had a bountiful supply. I’ve been operating out of the same one for only three years now and regret didn’t stock it to the extent I should have at the time) I’d borrowed on Friday, to throw down on the floor while I tackled those three pieces of furniture I mentioned earlier. The painting project completed early into the day, I dropped them into the washer and sent the email. Once out of the dryer they went into a Rite Aid tote bag, accompanied by a pipe wrench and a crescent wrench. “I’m happy to drop these on your front deck (the depository, as it were, for items borrowed/returned, etc. when their pick-up / drop-off time window occurred when he wasn’t home or would be uncomfortable to find me at his door) on my way home tomorrow,” I wrote, “and thanks again! I’ve once more done my personal best to keep Rustoleum stock right up there where it belongs.”
This last was a joke between us as for several months some years ago, no matter what was suggested to me as an activity or something to do when I had an actual free afternoon, whether it was dinner, a movie, shopping or a show, I was busy painting something. With, without fail, Antique White Rustoleum high gloss.
I didn’t get a response but thought nothing of that, either. Owen was a sporadic email checker and always had been, although since he (joined the current century) and got high speed Internet several months back, he’s been better at it.
His email came through to my office this morning. He had to be in the area, across the street, actually, checking on a contract today. He could save me a trip if I liked, pick up the sheets then, and if I was free for lunch that would be great. So it was that we wound up at The Cajun, just up the street. It was the first time either of us had been there since you no longer had to produce a membership card to be allowed inside, and it looked much the same, just a few lunch customers scattered throughout, something I’ve never understood. The food is good – really good, and not terribly expensive, and it’s very convenient to get to. Maybe the fact that it was sandwiched in beside an empty warehouse that used to be an antique store and flanked by more than one taco cart didn’t help.
I’m sure the Tattoo parlor directly across the street doesn’t provide much curb appeal, either, which was too bad because as I said, the food was very good and the service never anything short of stellar.
He ordered a Chicken Caesar salad and I gave The Look but only because that, too, was somewhat of a joke between us. You could set a beautiful steak or platter of foie gras in front of Owen, and he’d order a Chicken Caesar salad. We once went out to sushi (only because it was my birthday) and he ordered, or tried to, a Chicken Caesar salad. At the governor’s dinner at the Capitol, black tie notwithstanding, he’d ordered the Chicken Caesar salad. Beachside in Malibu, best seafood in the world readily available, he’d gone for the Chicken Caesar salad. I had a bowl of minestrone soup and it was fabulous. Obviously freshly made. You can tell, with minestrone. You don’t have to be Julia Child to know fresh tomato from canned, and the squash floating around in there obviously hadn’t seen the inside of a freezer in its life. Having myself just made a crock pot of Vegetarian Italian Pasta-less Goulash just the day before, slicing and wrestling with twelve fresh (well, as fresh as they can be at this time of year) tomatoes and having the results for dinner, the difference jumped right out at me.
We talked about the same old things. His son was, at the current time, keeping his grades way up and his interest in girls way down. His dad was still old, much to the irritation of his much-younger wife. Basil was still always welcome and should really, he noted, be dropped over the fence for a day or two in the sun before the weather turned again. Had to be more fun for her than a day at daycare, he insisted (I considered that, and I’m not entirely sure. At daycare she has a whole range of canine friends. In Owen’s yard, she has one pint-sized pedigree to deal with all day. Not the same, and much fewer structured activities. Still, a nice alternative for her). As I’ve just, as I mentioned earlier, jumped through hoops to reinstate/replace a county library card, we exchanged notes on which libraries were good and which were too limited, and the one nearest me topped the list of most limited. Unless, of course, you were looking to be surrounded by kids of all sizes and ages, and miles upon miles of kid fiction when all you were really after was the latest T. Jefferson Parker. He asked if I was still with the financial planner he’d set me up with a few years earlier and I said I was and very happily so, as he seemed to have found a way to make money make a little money instead of shrinking/disappearing altogether, which was more my personal specialty when left to my own devices. Likewise I planned to use the same tax man and no, I still hadn’t adjusted my deductions but was hoping this year I wouldn’t get dinged as hard because as, by my rough calculations, I’d made a bit less.
I suppose we ran the gamut of all subjects in general, and bypassed the personal completely because, in hindsight, that’s what we do. Which is probably why we’re friends. Which is probably why it was a very nice, companionable bowl of minestrone.
The meal drawing to a close, I brought up the subject of business, and we discussed this in some real semi-depth for a few minutes, covering the remainder of this year and what was out there or not, and briefly touching on next year and what might be out there and what may not be. He asked about a few dates next month when our office might be available for the annual holiday lunch his company always took us to somewhere downtown, and I said we were pretty much available for everything from Acme Burger to Macaroni Grill to that new Italian place, any time. Nothing about ‘free lunch’ is a hard sell to our team.
He beat me to the check (I wanted to take it as I had, after all, been the recipient of a favor that had I not been, I’m quite sure I’d have gotten as much paint on my floors as on the furniture. He beat me to it because, as he’d asked it was a given and besides, we’d talked about work so it was a business luncheon in its own way), and he dropped me at my car in the lower level of the parking garage. I wrestled the sheets and tools out of the tote bag (I didn’t think he’d be caught dead carrying an Earth Friendly Reusable Rite Aid tote bag and it always came in handy for me to keep one in the car) and deposited them in his backseat, depositing myself back in the front, something that got me a bit of A Look, but I explained that when a person was walking around all day in heels an inch higher than they generally wear, a short walk is best and he could drop me at the elevators.
“They look nice on you,” he said, addressing my boots. That was the only uncomfortable moment because, to tell the truth, until then I’d forgotten they’d been a Christmas gift a few years back. From him.
“Thanks,” I said. “I mean, I really like them.”
As I said, we don’t discuss the personal.
Casey, in the office across from mine, looked up from her keyboard as I came in. “How was lunch?”
“It was good,” I said. “Fantastic minestrone at The Cajun.”
“Hmmm,” she said, eyebrows raised. “The Cajun. That sounds like an Owen lunch.”
“It was.”
“Hmmm….”
“Absolutely not that kind of luncheon,” I said honestly. It had been a spontaneous, completely unexpected bowl of minestrone. With a friend. Which, given my life circumstance, broke no rules, shattered no standards of behavior, and was probably pretty OK with the universe in general. In the past, the totally spontaneous beer at The Cajun offer after an event at work has been put out there and my answer had been an unequivocal no. It wouldn’t have been appropriate, then.
It was odd, for a moment, to digest once more how appropriate it was now, but as a pilot once told me, there’s no rear view mirror on a 737. Not that I’m a Boeing or anything, but sometimes, an unexpected bowl of minestrone and a break in your routine is like a little gift from the cosmos to let you know sometimes that’s all in life you really need to think about and don’t really even need to think about it much, just appreciate the simple pleasure it honestly was.
This last was a joke between us as for several months some years ago, no matter what was suggested to me as an activity or something to do when I had an actual free afternoon, whether it was dinner, a movie, shopping or a show, I was busy painting something. With, without fail, Antique White Rustoleum high gloss.
I didn’t get a response but thought nothing of that, either. Owen was a sporadic email checker and always had been, although since he (joined the current century) and got high speed Internet several months back, he’s been better at it.
His email came through to my office this morning. He had to be in the area, across the street, actually, checking on a contract today. He could save me a trip if I liked, pick up the sheets then, and if I was free for lunch that would be great. So it was that we wound up at The Cajun, just up the street. It was the first time either of us had been there since you no longer had to produce a membership card to be allowed inside, and it looked much the same, just a few lunch customers scattered throughout, something I’ve never understood. The food is good – really good, and not terribly expensive, and it’s very convenient to get to. Maybe the fact that it was sandwiched in beside an empty warehouse that used to be an antique store and flanked by more than one taco cart didn’t help.
I’m sure the Tattoo parlor directly across the street doesn’t provide much curb appeal, either, which was too bad because as I said, the food was very good and the service never anything short of stellar.
He ordered a Chicken Caesar salad and I gave The Look but only because that, too, was somewhat of a joke between us. You could set a beautiful steak or platter of foie gras in front of Owen, and he’d order a Chicken Caesar salad. We once went out to sushi (only because it was my birthday) and he ordered, or tried to, a Chicken Caesar salad. At the governor’s dinner at the Capitol, black tie notwithstanding, he’d ordered the Chicken Caesar salad. Beachside in Malibu, best seafood in the world readily available, he’d gone for the Chicken Caesar salad. I had a bowl of minestrone soup and it was fabulous. Obviously freshly made. You can tell, with minestrone. You don’t have to be Julia Child to know fresh tomato from canned, and the squash floating around in there obviously hadn’t seen the inside of a freezer in its life. Having myself just made a crock pot of Vegetarian Italian Pasta-less Goulash just the day before, slicing and wrestling with twelve fresh (well, as fresh as they can be at this time of year) tomatoes and having the results for dinner, the difference jumped right out at me.
We talked about the same old things. His son was, at the current time, keeping his grades way up and his interest in girls way down. His dad was still old, much to the irritation of his much-younger wife. Basil was still always welcome and should really, he noted, be dropped over the fence for a day or two in the sun before the weather turned again. Had to be more fun for her than a day at daycare, he insisted (I considered that, and I’m not entirely sure. At daycare she has a whole range of canine friends. In Owen’s yard, she has one pint-sized pedigree to deal with all day. Not the same, and much fewer structured activities. Still, a nice alternative for her). As I’ve just, as I mentioned earlier, jumped through hoops to reinstate/replace a county library card, we exchanged notes on which libraries were good and which were too limited, and the one nearest me topped the list of most limited. Unless, of course, you were looking to be surrounded by kids of all sizes and ages, and miles upon miles of kid fiction when all you were really after was the latest T. Jefferson Parker. He asked if I was still with the financial planner he’d set me up with a few years earlier and I said I was and very happily so, as he seemed to have found a way to make money make a little money instead of shrinking/disappearing altogether, which was more my personal specialty when left to my own devices. Likewise I planned to use the same tax man and no, I still hadn’t adjusted my deductions but was hoping this year I wouldn’t get dinged as hard because as, by my rough calculations, I’d made a bit less.
I suppose we ran the gamut of all subjects in general, and bypassed the personal completely because, in hindsight, that’s what we do. Which is probably why we’re friends. Which is probably why it was a very nice, companionable bowl of minestrone.
The meal drawing to a close, I brought up the subject of business, and we discussed this in some real semi-depth for a few minutes, covering the remainder of this year and what was out there or not, and briefly touching on next year and what might be out there and what may not be. He asked about a few dates next month when our office might be available for the annual holiday lunch his company always took us to somewhere downtown, and I said we were pretty much available for everything from Acme Burger to Macaroni Grill to that new Italian place, any time. Nothing about ‘free lunch’ is a hard sell to our team.
He beat me to the check (I wanted to take it as I had, after all, been the recipient of a favor that had I not been, I’m quite sure I’d have gotten as much paint on my floors as on the furniture. He beat me to it because, as he’d asked it was a given and besides, we’d talked about work so it was a business luncheon in its own way), and he dropped me at my car in the lower level of the parking garage. I wrestled the sheets and tools out of the tote bag (I didn’t think he’d be caught dead carrying an Earth Friendly Reusable Rite Aid tote bag and it always came in handy for me to keep one in the car) and deposited them in his backseat, depositing myself back in the front, something that got me a bit of A Look, but I explained that when a person was walking around all day in heels an inch higher than they generally wear, a short walk is best and he could drop me at the elevators.
“They look nice on you,” he said, addressing my boots. That was the only uncomfortable moment because, to tell the truth, until then I’d forgotten they’d been a Christmas gift a few years back. From him.
“Thanks,” I said. “I mean, I really like them.”
As I said, we don’t discuss the personal.
Casey, in the office across from mine, looked up from her keyboard as I came in. “How was lunch?”
“It was good,” I said. “Fantastic minestrone at The Cajun.”
“Hmmm,” she said, eyebrows raised. “The Cajun. That sounds like an Owen lunch.”
“It was.”
“Hmmm….”
“Absolutely not that kind of luncheon,” I said honestly. It had been a spontaneous, completely unexpected bowl of minestrone. With a friend. Which, given my life circumstance, broke no rules, shattered no standards of behavior, and was probably pretty OK with the universe in general. In the past, the totally spontaneous beer at The Cajun offer after an event at work has been put out there and my answer had been an unequivocal no. It wouldn’t have been appropriate, then.
It was odd, for a moment, to digest once more how appropriate it was now, but as a pilot once told me, there’s no rear view mirror on a 737. Not that I’m a Boeing or anything, but sometimes, an unexpected bowl of minestrone and a break in your routine is like a little gift from the cosmos to let you know sometimes that’s all in life you really need to think about and don’t really even need to think about it much, just appreciate the simple pleasure it honestly was.
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