Reunion Readiness 101

So I’m headed to my 25th college reunion in April. I can scarcely get those words out without my head spinning. I swear, I sound like a big geezer, but it seems like it was only yesterday that I was having the time of my life…I mean studying and applying myself…at Duke University, my home from 1980-84. I’m not sure if everyone feels as strongly about their college experience, but as anyone who knows me will tell you, I would gladly chuck it all, ditch my kids, husband, even my dog and skipity-doodle in my time machine right back to those glorious days of yore. A time of learning, personal growth, self exploration, blah, blah, blah (that’s for my parents!) but more importantly, a time of excitement and freedom and unrestricted partying that I will never see the likes of (or have the strength to endure) again. The two best by products of my time at Duke are: 1. the fact that I can say I graduated from Duke which often gives me a modicum of respectability; and 2. the finest and most enduring friendships that anyone could ever boast. Women who I would do just about anything for, who provide a support system for each other on a daily basis and who are STILL looking fabulous after all these years. (Just feast your eyes on this picture—you gotta admit, this crew is holding up nicely!)

In the meantime, I’m just now starting to think ahead to April and am wondering how I’d like to present myself. It’s not so much the aforementioned group of girlfriends I’m thinking about—we get together about once a year anyway, so their faces and biographies are pretty familiar. It’s the rest of the once-every-five-year crowd I’m considering. I have to confess, I’m a little vain, so the phrases “weight loss” and “spray tan” intermittently pulsate through my brain, like those unexpectedly fluorescent sea creatures that float up from the darkest ocean depths. I admire my friends who fly in, obviously just being themselves, nary a special manicure or false eyelash to be found. But I’m not quite so cavalier, though I will be working extra hard to give the appearance that I gave no more thought to my outfit than I did to the choice between light or regular cream cheese on my breakfast bagel. So even though it’s January, I’m starting to take some stock, do a little recon and take appropriate action.

Could January be a worse month for self-assessment? Coming off the gluttonous holidays packing an extra 3-5, skin tone a definite Casper on the “Casper-to-George-Hamilton” scale and constantly feeling like the Michelin man in bulky layers of clothing. I swear, the other day, I had a fingernail that needed to be filed—I just rubbed it back and forth against my cheek, such is the texture of my winter-time skin. But the good news, is that most of these issues can be remedied. The bad news is that there’s the T-Rex in the room that no woman wants to acknowledge and can do nothing to prevent—I’m getting old! I have crow’s feet around my eyes! My upper eyelid flap is starting to droop over my lower eyelid! I have to practically apply surgical clamps at my temples in order to apply eyeliner! And that is only possible with a mirror so magnified I can see the hair follicles on the back of my head! I’m looking for signs of a wattle, launching assaults on random, beard-like hairs on my chin and applying Crisco-esque creams under my eyes! Sometimes, I have to step back from my own self-critique and remember that I didn’t age alone while time stood still for the rest of my classmates. No, in those moments, I cheerfully remember that they’ll all be looking like crap too!

Why do we feel this way about reunions? I’ve gone through the same gyrations for high school gatherings as well, but those are not as important to me. I guess I still see my college friends in my mind’s eye as we were back then—young, unencumbered by jobs, families, responsibilities, optimistic, uninhibited and unwrinkled. I cannot shake the context of our coming together all those years ago; it is frozen in time and therefore, so are they. I don’t see them as people who have grown up and moved on; I see them as the same people I knew, with just a blur of time between then and now. I have noticed that we even try to conjure up some of our old behaviors at these reunions, though in slightly less ridiculously embarrassing extremes. But over the last few years, there have been reunions where 30 to 40-year olds sat around tables, played quarters, passed out in closets, got into food fights at restaurants, urinated in public and puked up tequila shots. And that was just the women! (Or so I have heard…!) Perfectly acceptable—expected even!—in this context alone. When we get up bleary-eyed on Sunday morning, catch our separate flights and return to our families and our communities, the moment passes. We are back to our post-graduate personas, and we recloak ourselves in our established traditional roles.

So, while we’re together, I’d like to be part of that illusion that we’re really back at Duke. The one that’s created through the group effort to recount and/or recreate our youthful exploits. It’s getting harder every reunion to pretend we can hold up the same standard, especially for us women. The additional physical maintenance—at least for me--will shortly approximate the story of the little Dutch boy holding his finger in the dyke. Pretty soon, the whole dyke is gonna blow. But for now, I’m still optimistic that I can pull it together. With a little help, the march of time will reverse itself for one weekend and I’ll see the world—and it will see me--through a hazy, melanin-enhanced filter.

Surviving the Pet Parade

Like a lot of Americans, I went to see Marley and Me over the holidays.  Since I had read the book, I was skeptical—as I always am—that the book would live up to the written word.  And in this, I was not disappointed.  The Marcy Martin Movie Ratings Scale goes from “Better than Shawshank” on the high end to “I’d rather sit through Power Rangers: The Movie” on the bottom.  Marley and Me falls somewhere in between.  But I’m not here to critique the movie—that’s obviously been done to death.  I am here to share my own animal love story, let’s call it “Kirby and Me”.  And before that there was “Peanut, Sugar and Me”.  And “Spanky and Me” and let’s not forget the others—“Tigger, Daisy, Maggie and Tutty and Me”.  (Sorry fish—you don’t get a marquis.)  They all have come into my life and left their imprints—some more profoundly than others—and taught me some lessons.

 

The current animal kingpin in my house is my Westie, Kirby.  Because I have all daughters, Kirby gets to qualify as my son. (Although, I don’t want you to think I have elevated him to the same level of consideration that I reserve for my actual human offspring.  There are a lot of people who take pet-worship just a little too far, and at the risk of losing my PETA audience, I find that a little creepy!! )  Kirby doesn’t have anywhere near the makings of a whole book as Marley did, much less a motion picture.  He’s just too damned relaxed and normal.  And I did not grow up with dogs, so I was not that anxious to commit to one.  By my husband canoodled me into it (“For the kids!”) seven years ago, and now I’m all ready dreading the day he chases his last chipmunk. 

 

Though Kirby is our only pet at the moment, we have had some pet overlap in the last few years.  Let me just say that if I were drawing a Venn diagram that represented the total set of our family pets with each circle drawn labeled as a single pet in the Martin household, there wouldn’t be much overlapping of the circles; but where there were intersections, there was generally gnashing of teeth (and I’m being literal here!) and wailing (generally from me and/or one of my children).

 

Take Christmas two years ago.  My youngest, Claire, had asked Santa for a hamster.  My husband, the pet promoter, caved in on this request and ran out on Christmas Eve to get the hamster and one of those 5000-piece Habitrail plastic cages.  After the kids went to bed, “Santa” set up all the gifts under the tree including the hamster in its cage on top of some boxes.  As we collapsed exhausted in a heap “for our long winter’s nap”, unbeknownst to us the hamster began her nocturnal routine, blissfully running on the wheel in her cage beneath the festively adorned branches of the tree.  She could have run noisily away until Christmas morning and the story would have had a happy ending but for one canine Grinch, his superior auditory senses and the instinctual call of his rodent- hunting ancestors. By the time I came down early on the 25^th to organize the cooking before everyone woke up, I was greeted by an unusually perky Westie, wagging his tail with abandon and eyeing me expectantly at the bottom of the stairs.  Immediately a chill went down my spine.  As he darted into the living room, I knew before I even got there—standing in triumph, waiting for me to give him a treat and an attaboy, was Kirby, nose pointing at a soft, caramel-covered lump on the floor.  Holy Mother of God—where am I going to find another hamster at 7:00 a.m.on December 25?  As it turned out, the hamster was not actually dead, but severely crunched and traumatized.  I laid her back in her cage and by the time Claire came bounding down to see what Santa had brought, we had to ‘fess up about the Kirbenator.  Claire named her Sugar, and we placed the poor little gal in her Habitrail up high on Claire’s dresser where no stumpy-legged dog could have access.  Sugar took about a week to start really looking lively again, but she did seem to have a miraculous recovery.  The story should finally have had a happy ending from there, except that Sugar obviously had a death wish.  She somehow escaped from her cage—don’t they always?—managed to parachute off the dresser whereupon at some point Kirby found her scuttling around the house and crunched her again, but good this time, depositing her in triumph in front of the fireplace.  Her adventurous two weeks in our household came to an end, though she was quickly replaced with a surrogate hamster that Claire named Peanut.  Peanut is also now deceased, though admittedly she was a geezer at the ripe old age of 18 months.

 

Previously, Kirby had to interact with Tigger, a stray cat we had adopted about a year before his arrival.  Tigger took some time to acclimate to domestication, living at first on the perimeter of our house, and eventually working her way inside.  By the time Kirby arrived on the scene, Tigger was pretty much living large at casa Martin, though we had to endure her Wild Kingdom stage for awhile. (The cat actually set up a game preserve within our home, bringing in live mice, chipmunks and rabbits to run around freely while she leisurely hunted them down…ick!)  Tigger seemed to be okay at first, but after a while, her behavior started to go downhill.  And frankly, we began to realize we were getting more out of the dog relationship than we were from the cat/wild game relationship.  Even though Kirby never really attacked Tigger, she hated him and began to occasionally take her frustrations out in urine—peeing on a pillow, a rug, some laundry.  It got to the point that we had to kick her almost completely outside except to be locked in the laundry room at night.  Eventually, we had to “volunteer” her for euthanasia I’m afraid.  Topped off by the fact that my husband developed some cat-related asthma along the way—allegedly!—I think we’ve seen the last of the feline persuasion.

 

And there were others—our first impulsive attempt to get a puppy when my first two daughters were 3 and 5 was a spectacular failure.  We adopted Maggie as a surprise from the Easter Bunny.  I think I gave more consideration for the ramifications of the color of pantyhose I was wearing than to the characteristics of this dog.  She was half German Shorthair Pointer and half Australian Shepherd—a beautiful combination—but we came to realize that we were not the hearty sort needed for high-maintenance pets.  (As I watched Marley and Me, I thought of Maggie and knew that I would have never gone the distance with a dog like Marley—I really just value the interior of my home too much.) So two months in with Maggie, after numerous garbage bags had been torn to shreds, my kitchen table had become an occasional toilet and my backyard looked like someone was digging a swimming pool, we packed her off to more tolerant owners.   Try explaining that to two simpering little girls watching their first and only pet sent packing in some stranger’s pickup truck.  And so we did the guilt march to the pet store and came home with not one, but two compensatory substitutes, Spanky the parakeet and Daisy the guinea pig, both also now deceased. 

 

I’ve learned a lot watching my kids care for their pets and suffered their pain when they inevitably left us. Some were better caregivers than others, but all were pretty hands on masters with their little charges. In the end, it’s pretty hard for a parent to get worked up over a parakeet that goes toes up, but it is not hard to ache for the child who nurtured that bird.  I’ve also learned not to overcompensate for these events, resisting the urge to run out and replace that hamster or goldfish.  Time will pass and other interests will fill the void.  But the relationship with my dog Kirby might be a little different.  There’s so many upsides to a good dog—unconditional love, companionship and total devotion.  I definitely was not getting that from the guinea pig.  And it’s a little different investing 15 years of your life to a dog or cat versus a year or two to a rodent or fish.  A dog’s tenure could amount to 20% of your lifespan. And I marvel at the people who run out and buy an instant replacement when their dog dies, often insisting on the exact same breed.  I don’t think that will be me.  When Kirby goes, I’ll cry real tears, not parakeet tears. I’ll grieve for him probably as much as I grieved for my grandmothers, I’m ashamed to say.  But like all of us, I’ll find something to fill the void.  I’m guessing by then that I, and my lint roller, will really need a break.

Scene from the Rearview

I asked for it and I got it. My oldest child got her driver’s license this week. 17 long years of minivan-facilitated conveyance has come to an end. I should be celebrating—bring on the Mini Cooper convertible! But I am conflicted. What I first viewed as a freeing of the shackles, I am now seeing as an opportunity for the further graying of my hair. Nonetheless, I celebrated this milestone the other day on my Facebook page:

Marcy is excited that her daughter, Lauren, just passed the test for her driver’s license!

One of my friends helpfully responded:

Excited? Are you crazy? It’s January!

Thanks for putting the best possible spin on that one, homey.

But I can’t deny the benefits. All of a sudden, no task it too menial. Out of dog food? I might as well have offered to take my daughter for a mani/pedi, such was the zeal expressed at embarking on this errand. Little sister needs to be picked up at school? No problem for the novice driver. And why not throw in a detour to Starbucks on the way home? These little opportunities continue presenting themselves. I did have to dash her spirits a bit earlier this week. The night before the inauguration, she bounced in at dinnertime, all youthful confidence and spirit and laid out her “Obama Inauguration Day Concept”. I didn’t really get too far into the “Concept” once I heard that it involved her packing one of our cars with friends and navigating to Washington from our home near Philadelphia. Parking nightmares aside, I had a premonition of car keys being inadvertently flung from unsecured pockets in the celebratory melee, the humanity of the SOS phone call from tearful, stranded teenagers and the extreme grumpiness of my husband pressed into service as my daughter’s personal AAA. No, these are not the kind of liberties you take 1 week A.D.L (After Driver’s License, our new way of measuring the passing of days). Nor am I naïve enough to think her newfound freedom will only be spent on benign excursions to get coffee or dog food or pick up siblings.

For this reason, I have to confess I have been eyeballing those ads for tracking devices that you can attach to your car, so that if your car is stolen (or simply wayward!) you can track it down. If my daughter knew I was even considering this possibility, I’m sure she would never speak to me again. (Until she needed the car keys…or money.) And I have to admit I feel a little conflicted about this technology, although I can rationalize it based on my concern for her safety. And I know whereof I speak. When I was in high school, my friends and I made some pretty questionable road trips unbeknownst to any of our parents. The most obvious destination for those of us growing up in northern New Jersey was the big City, New York, of course. And I can remember some pretty harrowing drives in and out, music blaring, windows down, seat belts extremely optional. And of course, cell phones were only dreamy figments best conceptualized by watching reruns of the Jetsons. At any given time, no adult had any concept of our whereabouts beyond the sketchy “check-in” call that could as easily have been made from a payphone at the local mall as from the Blarney Stone Restaurant and Bar in Times Square. How we made it out of high school in one piece, I can only credit a higher power. Thinking back, it’s best our parents didn’t know. I’m sure that with improved driver education and the sage parental advice and counsel I have offered through the years, my daughter’s driving excursions will be much more sober and considered.(?!)

The truth is my daughter has just passed one of those great milestones in life that, for a time, fill the field of vision to the exclusion of everything else, and then in an instant are like specks in the rearview. And can’t we all string our lives along on these events, like telephone wires hung from post to post? Driver’s license, graduation from high school, then college, our first job, our wedding, our first child, first baby steps, child goes to kindergarten, then high school, then gets driver’s license. The circle is complete. (Of course, I left out a few more like grandchildren, retirement and death, but work with me here). There’s always something on the horizon--to look forward to, to dread—that looms large and passes us by. Would we want it any other way? Imagine if our lives were a desert of sameness? How tragic and sad. And the teenage to young adult years seem to have a high concentration of these moments. That’s why I often look back on that time of my life with such longing and pleasure. The quality and quantity of life-altering and affirming moments condensed into such a brief time could not possibly be sustained in the ensuing years. And so, we become accustomed to a slower pace, and try to savor more fully each opportunity to embrace what is in front of us. And we live vicariously through our children’s experiences, living their joys and pain.

So I’m sharing my daughter’s excitement but I’m waiting for her rearview moment on this driving thing, which I’m sure won’t come for a few more months. The lure of independence provided by access to the open road is too powerful. It’s one more step toward adulthood and the fracture of parental shackles. And certainly, the days that she will do my bidding and run my errands will quickly come to pass. The next milestone will soon fill the void—college and what lies beyond. Her days of being under my thumb are few and far between. But I’m not worried—there are more milestones in my future. My next recruit gets her driver’s permit in June--another post ready for stringing.