Black and Sun

We’re in Austin again. For a couple days. Setting the wheels of Change in motion.

I believe those wheels are now set – I expect to find out for sure in the next few days. Den too has found in Austin a well of opportunities, here in this funky little unpretentious hub of music, film and talent. An audio producer’s dream.

I haven’t slept in three days. Which is totally unlike me. My mind whirling, ceaselessly on even as I’m slipping in and out of slumber; grilling myself in dreams; conversations looping in my head. Buck up little girl, my tireless brain says again and again to my anxious heart; if you want Change to happen, you have to make it so. Don’t drop the ball on this one. Like a skipped CD, a tepid pep talk set on repeat. My breath remains shallow; I am doing little to self-comfort or encourage.

I feel like this whole grown-up, professional façade is just something I’m pretending to do. My act is convincing, apparently. Which disturbs me further. I spend the majority of my waking life in this role, but I still have a hard time believing in it. I have this secret hope that Austin may change that. Maybe it’s the cold, judgy northeast that’s the problem. Maybe back South I can be a little more real in my professional persona. I harbor this hope, but really I’m scared. Now that Change is in motion, Change suddenly feels very scary.

It’s 5am. The birds are awake. The street cleaners murmured down Congress Street 35 minutes ago. An hour ago I drew a bath and finished reading my book. Everyman by Philip Roth. Left with us by Den’s grade school friend Beth, after she visited last weekend for their friend Jen’s memorial service. A good book therapy book about death. And life. And the nothing that comes after. Jen was too young to die, and death came upon her too suddenly. All the more reason to face life head-on. Change is good.

I’m now at my computer, trying to be quiet. Den is lying in the dark, with the little alarm clock radio on at a whisper, the local Indy station KGSR cajoling him to sleep; insomnia is contagious in hotel rooms.

Last night after a dinner of tacos and margaritas at Guerro’s, we walked down Congress Street at dusk to the bat bridge, where the colony of Mexican free-tail bats is said to blanket the sky each evening as they fly en masse out from under the bridge and over Town Lake for their evening feast. We only saw a few though, the bat performance never happened. By 9:15 the crowd began to disperse. It was windy, perhaps bats don’t like wind. On the way back we poked our head into the Elephant Room, but it was empty, nothing playing.

And so we returned to our hotel where I crashed, exhausted, hoping to finally sleep through the night. Only to awaken four hours later, feeling somehow removed from my body. My mind taking the lead on kicking Change into motion, my timid psyche hangs somewhere in the balance. Unsure, but charged, bristling, ready to bolt.

Today is my “vacation day.” No interviews, just hanging out. Seeing my Austin friend. Maybe taking a walk to find a bookstore that stocks the little Moleskine notebooks I so love. I think it’s time I begin keeping a journal again. A new adventure awaits.

A serendipitous wind seems to be blowing us south, to Texas of all places. This cool little town, Austin.

Ever since Den packed up his old Saab and drove himself back east to a place he swore he’d never return to (turning his back on career and money in Los Angeles in favor of love, stubbornly rooted still in Boston), he’s been wanting to leave.

And after a while, I started to agree with him.

Boston is a hell of a lot like hard work. Like the way it’s always impossible to find parking, and when you do, the parking ticket you inevitably get costs $50 instead of $15. And the streets are unmarked, so no matter how long you’ve lived there you still get lost. And people try to run you off the road, or if not actively try, just simply don’t care if they do. And they won’t let you merge into the exit lane on the highway, a daily stand-off that repeats itself every single morning and every single evening, except during really bad snow storms, when finally people start to realize that they’re kind of all in it together. But then they go and put lawn furniture in their “claimed” parking spots after they (or someone else) have shoveled out the snow, and will actually go so far as to slash your tires if you move the furniture and park in “their” spot. Even if it’s in front of your house. And how even your neighbors don’t smile at you or say hello when you see them on the street. And people don’t talk to each other in cafés or bars. And when you do make eye contact with a stranger – accidentally – they quickly avert their eyes in some mixture of horror, snobbery or lame embarrassment. Oh, and never mind the fact that with a combined income that places us well in the middle to upper-middle class, we can’t afford to buy the apartment we rent. Tiny condos in the Cambridge/ Somerville/ Arlington area start at $400K. And they aren’t even very nice.

After a while you start to take it all for granted and it affects your worldview. You come to expect that people won’t be kind to you, and so you go out into the world wearing your steely armor and before you know it you’re one of the people not being kind. Who knows how Boston’s famed standoffishness started, but by now it’s just a self-perpetuating cycle.

So Den and I have been talking for the last two years about getting out of Boston. Seattle has been most on our mind, just for it’s sense of place and café culture. But the secondary motivation for a change of scene is Dennis’ desire to break out of public radio, which 15 years into his career he’s up to “here” with, and pursue his real love, film. Of course, we’ve already been through the issue with LA; don’t really want to go there. Ditto New York. Even harder work and more expensive (though, sadly even grizzled New Yorkers are friendlier than Bostonians). But as it happens there’s a third burgeoning film town. It’s called Austin. And it’s cheap, and it’s hip, and people are actually nice. Really nice. Unfortunately it’s in Texas. But Austin is the state’s liberal oasis, where people with brains come to drink.

So after finding out about Austin’s place on the map of film, I presented the idea to Dennis, which he regarded with a certain amount of suspicion given the Texas element. You can take Texas out of Austin but you can’t take Austin out of Texas. Or something like that. However, not a week later he received an email with the subject line: “Greetings from Austin.” Uncanny coincidence? Fate? Should I perhaps believe in god after all? It was from a former Marketplace colleague about a position open at KUT. A position which sounded eerily like his old job at Marketplace. He went down Monday for an interview, and I for five.

Our collective interviews went well, though we won’t know for a couple weeks whether his will come to fruition, and mine are at least a little dependent on the outcome of his. So I ended my three-day visit with the town of Austin with a sense of hope and opportunity mingled with tenuousness. And flying over Connecticut now, soon to land in Boston, I’m confounded by a perversely sentimental feeling, as though I’ve said goodbye to an old friend that I haven’t seen in ages, that I’m not sure when or if I’ll see again.

Weird. How strongly that town took on a distinct persona in those three short days.

Dennis often references the year he spent in Europe, and how for the first time, after having grown up in Boston, gone to school in DC and then moved to NY, he actually felt as though he were a likable human being. Because the east coast cities have a knack for making you feel small and irrelevant. But the Europeans he met in his travels actually expressed a genuine interest in him as a person – caring more about who he was and what he’s all about than what he did for a living, or where he went to school, or who he knows, or any of the other references to pedigree that New Englanders can’t seem to shake.

Austin kind of felt like that for me. I am, after all, from the South. Despite the fact that I consiously rejected it when I turned 18 and went as far North as possible while still staying in the country, vowing never to renturn.

But I remember when I landed in Boston after finishing grad school and returning to the US from New Zealand: it was winter, the tech bubble had just burst, and in six months I only managed to secure 5 job interviews – three of which I was told I was overqualified for, and 1 internship for which I was actually told I didn’t have enough work experience. It didn’t occur to me at the time that perhaps Boston was among the toughest cities to be job hunting straight out of school during an economic downturn and with no established relationships. I thought it was just me, with a big ol’ “L” on my forehead. But how different it felt to effortlessly schedule 5 interviews over the course of 2 days in a city I don’t live in with less than a week’s notice. As to whether anything will come of them, that’s another story. But at least I didn’t feel like shit after each one, as I did back in the day.

Which may have had a little bit to do with the fact that people are really, really nice in Austin. The weather is warm (maybe a little too warm), the living is easy and the margaritas run like water. Made with fresh lime juice, not that syrupy crap. And the Wholefoods mothership is like a theme park, complete with chocolate fountain (I want to move to Austin and live at Wholefoods). And complete strangers talk to you in cafés. And people smile at you on the street. And nobody tries to run you off the road, or honk at you for driving 15 miles an hour while gawking at the giant snowman sunning itself on the lawn of Austin’s largest ad agency. And at least one of the agencies I interviewed at allows employees to bring dogs and babies to work.

And of course, beloved Bananie and her charming Schmelen are Austonians.

Blow south, winds of fate, blow south. I want to go home.

[boston - paris - london - mumbai - jodhpur - jaipur - udaipur - delhi - chicago - boston]

Two weeks in India is nowhere near enough time experience this crazy, massive country. Week One you spend recoiling from and delighting in the incredible otherness and chaos of the place; Week Two you spend annoyed and indignant at the incredible otherness and chaos of the place… Two months might be enough to begin peeling back the layers. Or two years. But in two weeks we just got a snapshot, slightly blurry and off-center.

But really our trip was just about traveling somewhere. Anywhere. Plopping ourselves in an alternate reality outside of the west, beyond the familiar and routine, to see something of the world and to find out who or what we would become when we weren’t at home.

In my marriage vows I recalled an early episode that led to the recognition that Dennis might be someone I could travel with. And if travel is an analogy for how I live my life, I said, then perhaps in Dennis I could find a home.

This was just a gut sense I had, stemming from a summer afternoon early in our relationship, wandering aimlessly around a Waltham graveyard, eating Lizzie’s ice cream and making up stories about Frank the Crow (really he did seem to be the spirit anima watching over the grave of this dead guy, Frank) - though we hadn’t really traveled much together until heading off to India for our honeymoon.

But the analogy is significant, because of my rambling, alternatingly uptight and aimless travel style, a rhythm that’s both languid and trying, much like the way I wind myself through life. A rhythm that would drive most normal people nuts. I travel with purpose but without direction. I loathe anything touristy - mostly in denial that I am in fact a tourist - preferring to seek out the essence of a place and its people. As it turns out, Dennis is pretty much the same. We travel well together.

In India we found a dizzying assault to the senses, a world turned upside down, inside-out, placed in a kaleidoscope and spun in circles; a world of contradictions, counter to everything we take for granted in America.

So much so, that I am at a loss to put it all together. I have a handful of experiences and associations, but I’m missing the glue to make sense of them all.

In no particular order, this is what we found in India:

Smell. The first sensory experience of India is the smell - a pervasive methane sort of smell. It’s not a particularly offensive smell - just kind of odd - making you think of a gas oven that’s been left on and forgotten about. And then, as you enter the city center, the smell becomes a little more distinct, and you become aware of the sewers running down the sidewalks. A not-so-nice smell, but mixed with incense and spice.

Chaos. Hurtling down a Mumbai highway in a tiny pre-paid taxi, horn bleating nonstop, we pass burned-out slums and shanties, billboards in English and Hindi, weave between cars, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, camels, cows and goats. Yes, the cows do in fact lope languidly down the highway, seemingly oblivious to the traffic around them.

Despite the constant overflow of traffic, which at all times included livestock and stray animals, pedestrians, beggar children and motorized vehicles, there never seemed to be any traffic jams. This may have had to do with the fact that there were no traffic lights, stop signs or designated traffic lanes. Traffic flow was mayhem, and yet it always seemed somehow to work.

Auto-rickshaws. The auto-rickshaw is an interesting contraption that appears to be built on the chassis of a riding lawnmower. It has the turning radius of a bicycle, which is critical considering the narrowness of the streets in Rajasthan’s old cities, and presumably is designed equipped with brakes, though we were not able to observe their usage. Hurtling at breakneck speed through the winding streets of Jodhpur, dodging people, cows, goats, dogs, bikes and other motorized vehicles, I was reminded of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World. Odd an association though it was - given it’s been over twenty years since I’ve even been to Disney World - I couldn’t get it out of my head. Every auto-rickshaw we took was the same - speeding down the streets as fast as the 5hpw lawnmower engine could go, spewing black diesel smoke in our wake, a cow would suddenly step into our immediate path; just as it seemed inevitable that we would plow straight into the obstacle, the rickshaw would swerve to the side with it’s impossible turning radius and we’d continue on our way.

Sound. In the mornings we would awaken early to the lovely, haunting sound of the Muslim call to prayer. A sacred soliloquy over loud-speaker, sung to the city. Evocative, beautiful, oppressive. Day 1, in Jodhpur, I awoke to find Dennis on the terrace, standing in the darkness, in his underwear, holding a microphone to the pre-dawn sky.  Everything else is silent, as the city gently rises to pray.

By afternoon the city centers are chaotic and bustling, filled with the sound of frantic beeping auto-rickshaw horns and the put-put-puttering roar of tiny diesel engines as they wind their way through the crowded, narrow streets. And if you’re a tourist, no matter where you go, you can never escape the calls of street vendors, rickshaw-drivers and touts - hello, hello! excuuuse me… yes, hello. yes, yes? for you, my friend, 200 rupees. very good deal. best quality! spices, tea? best in India! nowhere you find better price. I give you Indian price. you buy textiles? best bargain, best bargain! only 5 feet down the street…I show you, come with me…best price!

In Udaipur our hotel room opened onto the lake, filling the room with soft breezes and the constant, rhythmic sound of the washer-women beating their laundry against the ghats. Thwap-thwap-thwap. All day. Soft and rhythmic like a beating heart. In the later afternoon, the thwap-thwap-thwaping mingled with the shouts and laughter of children plunging into the lake for an afternoon bath. When the beeping, shouting, haggling bustle of the city became too much, we retreated to our room and dozed to the tranquil sounds of the lake.

Rooftop Cafés. Our favorite part of Jodhpur was the rooftop café atop our little haveli, where we were served hot masala milk tea and watched as the Blue City slowly, quietly awoke to the new day. Caught in the amber glow of the rising sun, we noticed a gentle, peaceful side to the city, which contrasted to the hectic, chaotic pace it would adopt as the day wore on.

In the evenings the rooftop cafés and gardens were lit up with candles. The little flames danced in the breeze and threw shadows evocatively across the table, creating an impossibly romantic atmosphere for enjoying your Kingfisher and thali.

Lassies. Lassiwala in Jaipur is so famous for it’s lassis (served in terra cotta cups that look like miniature planters) that there are now about four other lassi stalls crammed in right next to it, all with the name Lassiwala painted across the front. Some claim to be the original Lassiwala, others to be the national Lassiwala, but the way to pick the “real” Lassiwala from the crowd is to note the “since 1944” on the sign. And of course, if you’re smart, you notice that one of the many Lassiwalas has a constant crowd of Indians standing in front of it drinking lassis out of terra cotta cups, while the other stalls are all strangely empty.

However, my favorite lassi by far was the creamy, thick makhania saffron lassi unique to Jodhpur that we were served at the grimy but extremely popular Shri Mishrilal Hotel. This is what we ate for lunch each day while in Jodhpur, thrilled by the notion of getting lunch for two for the equivalent of 50 cents.

Haggling. You have to haggle in India. If you do not, the Indians will have no respect for you. Of course, as a westerner, you can never win at this game. But you are expected to try. The thing is, no matter what you pay, you are paying too much - you can tell by the way the merchant smirks at you as he takes your money. But you are still paying a fraction of what you’d pay in the west. And so you start out being generous, making only half-hearted attempts to haggle, knowing that you don’t really mind paying a few dollars too much, until you can no longer stand being laughed at and taken advantage of, and then you find yourself haggling heatedly over 50 rupees because you’ll be damned if you’re going to let another merchant laugh at you for being a foolish tourist. And then when he finally gives in, because you’ve learned that making for the door is a sure way to get your price, and you walk away with your box of tea, or pashmina shawl or miniature painting, you realize you just fought over a dollar. And you realize that that dollar is absolutely nothing to you - who will pay three times that for a cup of coffee at Starbucks - but it’s no insignificant sum to this Indian merchant who, though he smirks smugly at your western naïveté, will be lucky to make three sales today.

There is also a commission system in effect. Which means that if a rickshaw-driver recommends a shop or restaurant to you, you will almost certainly be charged double and he will return later for his share of the commission. This means that every time you set foot in a rickshaw or taxi, the driver will try to persuade you to visit some factory - jewelry, textiles, furniture - where you will be a captive audience as they put on the hard sell. We finally began taking bicycle rickshaws because, as painful as it was watching these frail men - some quite old, and one a skinny child that couldn’t have been more than 12 - physically labor to transport you a mile or two down the road, at least the bicycle rickshaw-drivers would not try to encourage us to visit a factory 5 kilometers outside of the city.

So desperate are the shopkeepers to make a sale, that if you show the slightest sign of interest while browsing a shop or even just looking in the window while walking past, the merchant will draw you inside, beseech you to take a seat, have a cup of tea, and then proceed to unfurl his entire inventory onto the floor in front of you. This is a manipulative tactic intended to make you feel compelled to buy something, even if you really didn’t want a pair of traditional Indian shoes or yet another tapestry. But once you become hardened to the tactic and begin to leave these eager shopkeepers without making a purchase, you notice the crushed expressions on the shopkeepers faces as you exit.

And in these moments you feel the keen contradiction and dissonance that is India twist in your soul. Witnessing the raw desperation of these working poor is anguish, and yet the haughty smugness with which they regard you once they have your money makes you feel dirty and used.

In Jodhpur we got an initial taste - new to the game, we fell for the ruses again and again, each story contradicted by the next vendor we spoke to, until we left the city with some beautiful textiles and our dignity in tatters, feeling like utter dupes. In Jaipur we tried to make ourselves impervious to the tactics but found ourselves so overwhelmed by the soup of desperation and pushy aggression that each evening we’d return to our hotel room feeling a peculiar, uncomfortable mix of angry, sullied and heartbroken. Your compassion is wrung out and turned into hostility and then wrung out some more into a resentful sort of pity. Jaipur is not for the faint of heart.

Poverty. Poverty is probably the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of India. We had braced ourselves for this, and so were not overly surprised by it. More unexpected was our observation, walking through the old city of Jodhpur, of a gentle, almost tranquil quality, resignation perhaps, that the very poor seemed to imbibe. We thought maybe this stems from the caste system (outlawed in 1949 with the adoption of India’s constitution, but still in effect in smaller towns and villages), by which individuals born into the lower castes are denied any hope of bettering their lot in life. If your father was a cobbler, you will be a cobbler, and your sons will be cobblers; if your father was a sweeper, you will be a sweeper. Though the negative effects of such a system are obvious to the western way of thinking, perhaps the flip side of the coin is an unexpected tranquility that comes from the absence of social climbing. When we stop striving for more, we have no choice but to appreciate what we have.

Monkeys. The highlight of Jaipur was the monkey temple. Having momentarily escaped the haggling and hassling and general chaos of the city below, as our disgruntled autorickshaw-driver sat waiting to take us back into the merchant fray, we purchased bags of peanuts and climbed to the temple at the top of the hill, feeding monkeys and goats along the way. The goats jumped up on us, hooves leaning eagerly against our chests like puppies begging for food; the monkeys were initially a little suspicious, but then greed overcame suspicion and finally they were eating out of our hands.

Camels. Our original itinerary had included a journey into the Thar desert near Jaisalmer where we planned to spend a couple days on a camel safari. But we were dissuaded from continuing on to Jaisalmer - told that the Thar was extremely hot (over 40 C) and Jaisalmer very touristy (apparently after the Indian government began testing nuclear weapons in the Thar desert, most of the locals fled, leaving behind only the tourism industry). So instead we took our camel safari in the Osiyan desert a couple hours outside of Jodhpur.

Perched atop Mr. Raj and Mr. Singh, with a third rambunctious, misbehaving, disgruntled young camel in tow (who our guides referred to simply as “The Newcomer”) we plodded through the sand and brush of the desert. To be honest, once you’ve seen a mile of sand and brush you may as well have seen the entire desert, and we were a bit perplexed by the knowledge that some tour operators offer four-day camel safaris (a day and a half was plenty for us). But the day and a half that we spent plodding through the desert was probably among the most authentic of the experiences we had during our two-week journey. We passed sheep and goat herders - thin old men in giant turbans and children in brightly colored kurtas, their dark hair bleached orangish-blond under the sun. We passed tiny villages of mud-thatched huts. We heard the cries of peacocks. When we stopped for supplies at tiny stalls seemingly in the middle of nowhere (the equivalent of the village convenience store), the school children would gather around with curiosity, staring at us as though we were wild animals at the zoo.

We stopped for lunch at a watering hole with a cluster of trees. As Dennis and I dozed under the shade of the trees, one of our guides led the camels off to drink while the other two prepared a lunch of chapatti and dhal beneath the shadow of the camel cart. After lunch we were offered masala tea and biddis (Indian cigarettes), which we smoked out of politeness and then ended up trading our Coleman lighter, which fascinated our guide, for the rest of the pack. Den wandered off to explore the dunes and made friends with a young shepherd boy, who taught him the word for frog (mandik) and whom he left with the precious gift of a plastic ink pen.

We camped out in the desert, sleeping on blankets laid out on the sand beneath a big sky of stars. We awoke to the sound of peacocks (Dennis, again, holding his microphone to the sky) and the rosy pink sun rising over the sand and brush and dunes. Milk tea for breakfast was made by calling over a shepherd girl, handing her a metal cup, which she filled by chasing down the nearest goat. Fresh masala milk tea is sweet and rich, a meal in of itself. My preference though was for the mint tea, which was made by adding mint leaves to the masala chai - sweet and strong and cooling. Tea was accompanied by potato paratha, which our guide taught Dennis and I to make. And then the camels returned and we were on our way again. And this was about the time I began to get sick - the inevitable “Delhi belly” - which made for a much less pleasant return trip through the desert, and doesn’t bear detailing.

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A couple weeks back home in Boston now, nestled in 1369 on a rainy Saturday afternoon, we’re still trying to digest it all. Did we enjoy India? Would we go back? Did we learn anything at all about Indian culture? Or even just a peek into the human experience outside of the Rich West? Not sure.

But the travel bug is definitely back in force. Next stop North Africa?

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p.s. to see our travel photos, visit Den’s Tabblo pages:

Jodhpur “The Blue City”, India (October 1st-4th)

Thar Desert “Camel Safari”, Osian, India (October 4th-5th)

Jaipur “The Pink City”, India (October 6th-8th)

Udaipur “The White City”, India (October 8th-12th)

I remembered tonight that I have a blog. Or had a blog. That I used to write in. And suddenly felt kind of badly that I’ve been neglecting it. Does anybody read my blog anymore, I wonder? No reason why they should, only to find a new post every 6 months or so…

I remember writing in my blog back a couple years ago, back when I had first started my last job and I was bemoaning the fact that I was still bored - “not being challenged enough, not fast enough, not over-worked enough, why do I still have time to think?” And I think: Well. Be careful what you wish for girl. But my wish was valid, that ache for something more is pretty much gone. And along with it the time to write. The bandwith for longing. The habit of self-indulgence. I feel quite sane these days, if not exactly soulful.

And so by the wayside goes my little blog. If you’ve wondered why my last several posts are all about death it’s because death is the only thing these days that stops me in my tracks and forces my humanity to spill over into words. My work has taken over my life. And it’s not an entirely bad thing, but my ongoing goal is one of balance. Tonight I left work early - 7pm. The fact that this seems early is a little bit of a problem.

But there’s more going on in my life than just work. I’m getting married in 2 weeks. And if I were a normal bride, I’m sure I’d be freaking out. But given that we’re having our wedding in the middle of the woods in, as Den puts it, “North-of-Everything, Maine”- which, by the way, has enabled us to successfully achieve our strategy of making it as logistically inconvenient as possible in an effort to keep the guest list small - there’s really no need to freak out. 30 people. A lobster boil. I plan events for a living…big deal.

I am doing everything in my power to make sure that mine is not the typical wedding. For some unexplicable reason I’m kind of a scrooge about weddings - I’m the only person I know that does not like them. Which is why I am forcing family and friends to go camping instead.

Well, not really camping - we’re having the wedding up in Forest City, which is where my family’s summer camp is. But the wedding won’t actually be on the island. It will be at Wheaton’s Lodge, on the mainland. Think camping out in a tent in the woods, I’m telling guests, and the accommodations will seem plush (hot showers! wood stoves!) The Wheaton’s have ten cozy little cabins that we’re renting out for the weekend. So long as the sun shines, guests will have a weekend worth of lakeside recreation at their disposal. If it rains… Scrabble anyone?

It’s a special place, and it happens to be our camp’s 100th anniversary this year (the island was bought in 1903 by my great-grandfather and his friend, and the house was completed in 1906). And in a way the camp even played a certain pivotal role in my and Den’s relationship… because always in the back of my mind when selecting a potential mate was the question of whether they would adapt to the camp. And in that, Dennis perfectly fit the mold. Which pleases my dad to no end. He now has an assistant for his many projects (dock-building, roof-repairing, outhouse-turning).

Sean Cole will be presiding as officiant extrodinaire, a friend of Dennis’ from the bad old days of WBUR. Having a wedding “produced by Sean Cole” will, in my opinion, be the highlight of the entire event. That and my lovely white silk eyelet Ellie Tahari skirt. (So glad that getting married in the woods precluded the necessity of a stupid fluffy wedding dress.) Though my father only just made the connection of who Sean is while listening to him report his story on prostitutes in Nashville on Marketplace last week. (He reports on other stuff too.)

I’ve been very flippant about this whole wedding thing. I want to use The Penguin Cafe Orchestra for the processional and suggested the annoying telephone song specifically. I asked Sean to address the guests “dearly departed” instead of “dearly beloved.” I was told: Penguin Cafe, yes; dearly departed, no.

Last weekend we went to NY to pick up my ring. I designed it myself based on a deco/art nuveau ring of my grandmother’s, and, after much questing, found a very cool jeweler in the East Village that was willing and able to make it. Even though I wasn’t supposed to, I wore it home to aquaint myself with the look and feel of it on my finger. Bonding with my ring, Dennis said. My new tattoo.

The weekend before we went up to Burlington, VT to pick up Dennis’ suit from Michael Kehoe. “Bespoke,” it’s called, I tell him, pleased that I know this word (meaning hand-tailored). He’s not impressed with my haute coture vocab. But more to the point is that for $1000 he now has a suit that he can get married in, interview for jobs in, go to funerals in and be buried in. A good value if you think of it that way. Though before we left MK, I accidentally bullied him into buying a $250 shirt to wear with it. Actually the bullying was quite intentional - I just didn’t know it was $250.

This weekend we will buy the rest of the wine and beer. And the makings for white sangria and pomegranate martinis. And we will print programs and paste on pretty little borders from Paper Source. And Dennis will pick out a poem to read. And I will write my vows. Actually, that’s what I’m meant to be doing now. I’m procrastinating. Because this is the part that kind of spooks me.

I have to be honest, I’m still not sold on the concept of marriage. Lying on the carpet in Dennis’ office last Thursday night, I hashed through the whole thing all over again. What is the point of marriage? It doesn’t change our current relationship (does it?), nor does it promise to hold a relationship together. It gives us a few rights, but it doesn’t get us lower taxes (we can expect to pay more taxes next year, I’m told). It feels dishonest to me. As the day draws closer (2 weeks!!), I feel split in two - one half is playing a long, curious to see what’s around the corner, keeping an open mind, knees bent, ready for whatever; the other half feels as though it’s being dragged kicking and fighting, not wanting to conform, not wanting to do something that doesn’t feel authentic to her being. I know which half will win. I don’t have a solid enough belief against marriage to outright reject something that is such an inbred social norm. I just wish I didn’t have this nagging feeling of being untrue to myself. Or, more to the point, untrue to us.

Lying on the carpet in Dennis’ office, smelling dust and cat hair in my nose as I roll to the side and crack my back, thinking that I really need to vacuum, Dennis and I talked about all this. And arrived at nothing really. Except that, if there’s any consolation, at least I’ve found that one other kindred soul, the one who, like me, is battling for freedom of the individual while tenuously trying not to completely disrupt the balance of life around him.

Sweet dreams Jim.

I hope there are mountains to hike in heaven. And that the Old Man of the Mountain will greet you there.

There’s a dead bird in our kitchen vent. It wasn’t always dead. In fact a couple weeks ago it was making quite a ruckus. I woke up one morning to find Marley perched on the stove looking earnestly at an incessant scratching sound coming from the vent. More excitement than she’s had in weeks. When we got home later the noises had stopped, but we turned on the fan and feathers flew out. The scratching didn’t come back and we assumed the critter had found its way out. That was a few weeks ago.

Apparently not. This morning I found maggots on the stove.

The thing is, the maggots are gross, yes, but the bird is making me incredibly sad. There’s a slight odor coming from the vent, but oddly it’s not the smell of death and decay. It’s a warm, yeasty animal smell. The smell of life and birth. I think it must be the smell of the nest.

Wherever I go, I smell that nest. We cleaned out the vent, but the bird is haunting me. Because this week, Dennis’ friend Jim is dying.

Such a strange concept, dying. I don’t think I really understand it. Died, dead, I get that. Sick, has cancer, I understand. I don’t understand dying.

This is my limited experience with human death:

René, the kid from my homeroom, who was hit by a drunk driver while riding his bike and drowned in a ditch. Mike Bass called me while I was at my college orientation and told me:“Hey, remember that kid you used to study trig with? He died yesterday.” 

Marco, my swim team boyfriend, who was killed in a car accident – flew out the sunroof and broke his neck. We only “went out” for a few months. The most beautiful boy I ever knew, body like a Greek god, the perfect boyfriend, perfect friend, perfect son, perfect brother, never should have been him… Clem called me in Vermont and told me. It was after graduation, the following Fall I think. I was living on Crombie Street with Jay and Karenina, our crazy supermodel husky-shepherd freakshow of a dog. I think it was October. For months after he told me I couldn’t get the image of Marco’s hands out of my mind – a tiny nearly invisible scar near his thumb.

My Grammy. While I was in New Zealand. Found out in a matter-of-fact email from my mother that I received at work. “Grammy died peacefully in her sleep. Don’t worry about flying home for the funeral.” I had only been at my job for a week and remember looking around for someone to share my shock and grief with. There was no one. I burst into tears awkwardly and went home.

My Grampa. A year and a half later, still in New Zealand. This time my father warned me. And so I went out and bought a pretty card, even though my grampa couldn’t see, and described the image on the front for him, along with some kind words and fond memories, knowing someone would be kind enough to read it to him, my little goodbye from the other side of the world. And the day before he died the nurse reported that he had been sitting in his chair smiling, and when asked why, he said: “I’ll be seeing Ginny soon.”

My Poppy Sid. Not long after our last visit in September. A merciful parting. “I’m falling apart,” he said to me mournfully. And he was – he’d aged so much since the last time I’d seen him – his teeth too large for his bony face, his skin papery, his hair like floss, like gray frizzy corn husk, his voice not working properly, his dignity in shambles. That last visit I watched my Poppy looking helplessly out at me through this old man’s face as if to say, how does life come to this? So when we heard he’d died, we knew he’d gone with relief.

My Nana… is still here. Sort of. So far-gone she hardly knows her name, but still full of fire as ever, yelling “Piss Off!” at the nurse who tries to help her after she falls out of bed.

But these – these deaths are either sudden and shocking or long expected. None of them were dying. They were alive and then they were dead. There was no mortal verb used in the present continuous tense.

But Jim will probably die this week. Bethany says. And tomorrow I will go with Dennis to visit him one last time. If he makes it through the night. Dennis says. We make plans for the weekend aware that they might have to be re-arranged, should there be a funeral. But he’s still here. When he’s lucid, he’s still here.

I’m not sure what to expect when I see Jim. If I see Jim. I didn’t know him well – a couple barbeques and dinner parties. A handful of hikes. When I try to conjure his face I can only see him grinning. This fifty-something-year-old guy with bad knees and a lung and a half, trekking up the mountain keeping pace with the best of us. Laughing at Den’s goofy jokes. Having a grand old time.

So what is this dying?

All day I’ve had the smell of the nest in my nose. Not unpleasant, but haunting. The smell of life intermingled with the knowledge of death. The smell of birth mixed with the knowledge of a little life that sat dying in our kitchen vent as we cooked dinner and joked and laughed and played with the cats and lived.

When I was seventeen I wrote my college application essay on “the meaning of the Oscar Wilde quote ‘wisdom comes with winter’” combined with William Wordsworth’s “the child is the father of the man” – because I couldn’t do anything simply, and the Wilde quote seemed too obvious. As the man lies dying in the cold, sterile white January, a baby is born.

And so life imitates art. Sitting in 1369 Sunday, my phone rings as Dennis is telling Kelly about Jim. It’s my old childhood best friend Sonja. Friday morning, Vivienne was born.

Five years ago I set myself the goal of earning a black belt in a martial art. I set this goal because my friend Jared, drunk on whisky one night, pointed out with uncanny perception and searing honesty, that I have no self-esteem. He told me that he hears me talk about all these things I’ve done, and that I talk about them as though I know other people think they’re really cool, and as though I think I ought to think they’re really cool, but that it’s obvious that I don’t actually believe any of it.

Which is true. I don’t. As a matter of fact, I devalue every achievement I’ve ever achieved. I swam butterfly at State in high school, but I didn’t place. I took half the prizes in the Deep South Young Writers’ Contest, but the other contestants were lame. I had a 3.7 GPA, but all I did was not skip classes. I got a masters degree, but at a university overseas that didn’t require me to take the GRE. I suck. I suck for thinking like this.

So the very point of this new goal, which I set upon returning to the US from New Zealand and setting up camp in Boston, shortly after my weekend visit with Jared, was that I would not be able to devalue the achievement of a black belt. Right? This should be a tangible goal.

And this was what I answered Sunday at the black belt test, in a sort of rambling, round-about way, when one of the senior ranking black belts asked me what getting my black belt would mean to me. The question was asked after the test, and I was feeling remarkably confident, having done far better than I had anticipated. In fact, I felt proud. A sensation I’m not very accustomed to. As I answered the question, I felt as though I had achieved my goal just as I had set it, no shifting bars, and no slippage this time.

So it’s ironic that tonight Mr. Hwang managed to raise the bar on my goal after I thought I’d achieved it. He told me that although I may have tested well, and earned my black belt, that I am not as good as I was a year ago when I was testing for red belt. And that that’s the reason he didn’t want me to test yet.

I’m sorry I disappointed you, I said, with eyes on my feet, feeling the corners of my mouth twitch.

No, you didn’t disappoint me, he said. You did fine. It’s just that the standards of the school have been decreasing over the years.

What a fucking bummer it was to hear that.

Because it’s not about the belt, and it’s not about how high my wheel kick is, or how much power and snap is in my form. It’s not about the taekwondo. Or the standards of the school, for that matter. It’s about what it represents. In my own head.

So it seams that taking – and passing – that black belt test wasn’t the achievement of my goal after all. Whether I let that comment ruin it for me is.

Results not yet in.

Poppy Sid died last night. My grandmother doesn’t know, and we all agree it’s best not to tell her. She has alzheimer’s - doesn’t know today from yesterday from 30 years ago - and she’s drugged to the hilt to manage the mood swings that inevitabily arise from sitting around in a nursing home all day bored and confused. Old age in this civilized society of ours is so fucked up.

But she lived a good life, and so did Poppy Sid.

Poppy wasn’t my “real” grandfather, but as a kid it didn’t much seem to matter. He and my grandmother were married just after I was born, and even though he had two granddaughters and a grandson of his own, he was my Poppy, who called me “Kiddo” and gave me money for my birthday and made sure that I always found the hidden motzah on Passover. He was a New York Jew, wise-guy know-it-all. As a kid, whenever I saw All In the Family on TV, I thought Archie Bunker was the same person as my Poppy Sid. The adult meaning of the show went right over my head, but the gruff-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside character struck me as familiar.

Poppy Sid was color blind, but always a snazzy dresser, said my grandmother, who obviously had a thing for tall men in plaid golf pants and pink sport jackets. He picked out shirts with epaulets for my father that he would never wear, along with “Rolexes” from China. On weekends he and his other in-the-know pals would troll the flea markets for deals. He once gave my dad a digital watch that played Happy Birthday and Christmas carols and other random melodies we couldn’t identify.

Poppy Sid liked his brisket well-done. Burnt really. Which was good, because my grandmother liked to overcook things. He introduced me to bagels. And motzah ball soup.

Poppy had a heart-attack once when I was visiting my grandmother. I think I was 8. He had to be taken to the hospital. Waiting in the hospital waiting room reminded me of the Madeline book in which Madeline is taken to the hospital when her appendix bursts. Poppy was okay, but my grandmother was shaken, and said something about not wanting to outlive another husband, which stuck in my brain until I was older and was able to understand what she must have been feeling. She doesn’t know it, but she has now outlived her second husband.

Poppy’s heart was a source of constant worry for my Nana. He wasn’t supposed to eat shrimp or other foods high in cholestorol. On the bathroom mirror there was a note that said “Sid - remember to take your pills - I love you - Claire,” written in my grandmother’s upward sloping handwriting. The note was still taped there the last time I visited the apartment, when we were taking away all of my grandmother’s belongings, just before Sid joined Nana in the nursing home.

As an adult I began to understand the distinction between a blood relation and what Sid was. Although he treated me as a granddaughter, I was really Nana’s granddaughter, and Missy, Stephi and Henry were his. More importantly, he was not my mother’s father, and their relationship was awkward. He was different in every way from my mother’s father, Joe, who apparently was a depressed, hen-pecked man who disappointed my grandmother by not turning out to be the successful businessman her father had been. Their marriage had been unhappy, my mother said, and my grandmother would have divorced Joe had he not been diagonsed with a brain tumor and died 6 months later. Sid, on the other hand, made her happy. In his brash, brazen New York Jew kind of way. He was a tall, handsom man, who knew everything, or so he’d have you think, and he made my grandmother laugh, right up to the end, even amidst the disorientation of alzheimers.

We visited just last month. For my grandmother’s birthday. But really I was more concerned about Sid. Unlike my grandmother, Sid’s mind was still very lucid, and he was painfully aware of his body’s decline. “I’m falling apart” he said saddly, as he struggled to stand from his chair. His hair had changed - turned into a sort of grey fuzz at the back of his head, what was left of it. And his grin had become just a little more skelatal - his teeth somehow too big for his thinning lips. But the fact that the grin was still there at all was something at least. Poppy Sid was still perfectly recognizable.

We wheeled him into my grandmother’s room so he could brighten her day. He said he needed to go to the bathroom, so we started to look around for an attendant, but he said he’d be fine on his own. Dennis tried to help him, but Sid shooed him away, always a prideful man. A moment later we heard a crash, and Sid was cursing, belowing “help me, goddammit somebody help me!” We ran into the bathroom and found him on the floor, head caught under the sink, pants down around his knees, his pinky finger broken, bent at an odd angle and bleeding. I didn’t know whether to try to help him up, or to avert my eyes to preserve his dignity. So I ran for a nurse. Nurse and aids cleaned him up, tsked him for attempting to use the toilet alone, and took him to the hospital. On the way out he asked my father to fix his watch - the strap had broken during his fall.

The next morning he was back at the nursing home, his finger fixed with 20 stitches and a little grogy from his cocktail of painkillers. He knew what he wanted to say, but his mouth wouldn’t work properly to get the words out, and his voice sounded funny. Which distressed him. “Listen to my voice,” he said. “This isn’t my voice.” We found my grandmother sitting in the dining room eating breakfast for a change, and wheeled Poppy in to see her. He looked dapper in his red shorts and striped polo shirt, but grumbled about how long they made him wait at the hospital the night before, the quality of care, the fact that nobody knows anything anymore and other petty annoyances that we couldn’t make out. Pretty much back to normal.

Then he brightened a bit and asked “so what are you driving these days?” Such a “Sid” thing to say. We talked about cars for a while. He approved of both Volkswagens and Saabs. My dad gave him back his repaired watch. And then we had to say goodbye to catch our planes.

“Be good, kiddo” he said as I kissed him goodbye.

I guess I couldn’t really ask for a better farewell. I’ll miss Poppy Sid. I don’t think anyone will ever call me “kiddo” again.

Saturday night. We’re back in Burlington. Driving down Route 7, headed to meet Merry Moses for coffee and music in Middlebury. Passing through road construction, the traffic slows, as one car after another veers to the left, going around something in the road. In the headlights, a ball of orange and white fur. A little animal was just hit. A little cat. Poor little cat…my heart in my throat. But as we drive by, I see her head lift. I bolt from the car. Heather, the rescuer of little furry animals. The cat whisperer.

I crouch over the frightened little creature. Her eyes are wide and staring, pupils dilated, and I know she’s probably beyond saving. Her little mouth opens and shuts in soundless meows. Her paws reach out, trying and trying to get up.

Have you ever seen a life prepare to leave a living body? I haven’t. It’s tragic beyond words. And beautiful, in a way. A sacred moment. But so, so sad. All the needless death in the world, you might think a cat in the road would go unnoticed. And often it does. But a life is a life is a life. And a wasted life is tragic. A soldier in Iraq, a kitten hit by a car… it isn’t predation or the natural order; it’s just stupid and sad.

Another car stops. And another. And suddenly a community has formed around the little animal. Dennis is on the cell phone trying to find a vet. I stroke the little cat. She’s going to die, someone says. Can someone take her to a vet? One woman lives an hour from here. The other has a car full of kids. We will, I say. She’s in shock, says one of the women, cover her up, she could die of shock. I take off my jacket and put it over her. A velvet shroud.

Briefly, the silent cries become more frequent, and I can’t help but notice the sharp, healthy little kitty teeth and white-pink gums. The pale gums mean shock, and that the end is near. Someone puts down newspaper, a piece of cardboard, an Ann Taylor bag, so we can pick her up and transport her to the vet. The little cat winces as we move her onto the makeshift gurney. Her paws have stopped reaching. It’s too late, one woman says. No, no there’s still a heartbeat says the other. Are you sure? Yes, there’s a heartbeat. I keep petting her, trying to keep the life from flowing out. I look up to see a police car pulling over. He’s sympathetic, just wants the humans out of the road. But when I look back down, a tiny red trickle of blood is seeping from her soft, pink nose. She’s gone, I say. And my eyes fill with tears. She’s gone.

We four hover over her for a moment more, as the police officer stands watch. I had an orange cat that got hit by a car when I was a little girl, I say. So did I, said one of the women. Somewhere there’s a little girl who’s looking for her cat. A very sad little girl.

Dennis and I carry the cat over to the grass, place her beneath a fir tree. The two women go back to their cars. We continue on to the Coffeehouse to meet Merry Moses and listen to Australian folk music.

We see a good show, Ian Campbell Smith, the so-called “Billy Bragg of Australia”…though Dennis is probably the only one in the audience who knows who Billy Bragg is. We tell Merry about the cat. And she is appropriately sad. And then the conversation turns to other things. Like a book Merry bought for Dennis, called “Marley, the Worst Dog In the World.” Marley is Dennis’ cat. Who has a reputation that precedes her. We have a good laugh. And attempt to go elsewhere for a beer, but give up after finding the Inn is closed. Our heart isn’t in it anyway. We’re emotionally drained after our little roadside experience. We turn around and head back to Burlington.

I tell Dennis about a series of dreams I’ve been having, in which I’m trying to save little dying animals. A piglet that looks up at me knowingly and swallows, fearful but resigned to its death on the butcher block, as I cradle it helplessly in my arms. A tiny squirrel run over by a car before I can rescue it from the road. In each dream I sense that I am somehow responsible for the suffering, despite my efforts to nurture and console. And now this little cat presents herself as the actualization of these strange dreams. Why? What does it mean?

I insist we stop when we get to the place in the road where the construction begins. I get out of the car and approach the fir tree, hoping that somehow she would have gotten up and walked away between then and now. But there she is, stiffer than we left her, and damp with dew. I pluck a branch from the fir tree and a couple hardy yellow flowers and place them in the crook of the little cat’s neck. So that whomever finds her will know that someone was there when she died, I tell Dennis. And then burst into tears. I am eight years old again, crying over my dead orange tabby cat. Dennis calls the animal shelter and leaves a message in case anyone is looking for a little orange cat.

Back at the B&B I take a bath and climb into bed. Dennis holds me tight in his arms as I continue to whimper, a heart full of ache, the little cat representing all the pent up loss my soul can hold. Loss of life and loss of love, loss of all that is precious and out of my control, gone forever, all that is unappreciated until it’s too late. I sniffle and blow my nose and feel grateful for the strong arms that hold me. And for the two healthy cats waiting for us to return home. And for the fact that we both still have humanity enough to be touched by the passing of life, however small.

We should give the cat a name, Dennis says. Because in the end she was ours.

Little Orange Cat.

Little OC it is, says Den.

Goodbye, Little Orange Cat. We knew you only briefly, but you gave four strangers pause, and when you left, we had four stories to tell.

A couple weeks ago Dennis and I went home to Lafayette for my old friend Clem’s wedding. We flew into New Orleans to save money and my parents dutifully drove down to pick us up. I insisted we go into the Quarter for lunch at The Gumbo Shop. We all ordered gumbo and salad and white wine. And, as I held my breath and tried to act nonchalant, Dennis picked up his glass and made a toast “to the engagement ring on Heather’s left hand.”

Really? Are you serious? Really? my father kept saying. And when I went to the bathroom, Dennis later told me, my mother wouldn’t stop hugging him.

I state this all matter-of-factly because the engagement itself actually occurred 6 months ago, on my birthday, after a blizzard, over avocado smoothies and bubble tea at the only restaurant open in Cambridge. I hadn’t told my parents until just a couple weeks ago because I wanted to tell them in person. They’d waited this long, I figured, it wouldn’t hurt them to wait a little longer. Everyone I mentioned this to thought I was nuts, but, whatever. Plus, for quite a while now they’ve really, really wanted to hear that I’m settling down and getting married…and I’m a stubborn and ornery child. I don’t like to do what other people want me to do.

And also, because I hate the giddiness and shrieks that ensue when I tell people, which we’ve been doing in a completely random and nonsensical fashion. For example, we’ve been telling people for the past 6 months that Sean Cole will be marrying us, only to finally tell Sean last weekend when we bumped into him at Peet’s. We aren’t really big on the whole announcement thing. So formal.

To be honest, I’m not really sure what I think of marriage. And this isn’t news to Dennis…we’re kind of of like minds on the matter. Which I guess is why we work together. Dennis says he used to associate marriage with death. Myself, I associate it with something grown-ups do, not people like us. And more than that, I see relationships as fluid, not something that can be defined by law and society. But it’s a rites of passage, and there’s nothing wrong with a good party.

And to my father’s point, there is something to be said for making that commitment. Like now I can say to Dennis that if he really hates being back in Boston, in a few years time if he wants to move to a new city I’ll go with him. And the whole notion of children starts to seem a little less abstract. Not much, but a little.

However, my terror of the suburbs has only increased. It’s as though being single into my 30s was to be my one last defiant streak of rebellion and now it’s gone. And our little counter-culture rebellion is doubly at risk because now we too are on the real estate investment bandwagon. Not so much because I really want to be a homeowner, but because I want a cool bathroom with a clawfoot tub. And I want a piece of Cambridge to call my own before we get completely priced out for good.

We saw a great 2-family property right in Central Square last week – Dennis’ friend Orrin dropped him a note from LA to let us know his cousin is selling his house and to offer us first dibs – we went by after work Thursday and then had dinner at River Gods right around the corner and fantasized about how cool it would be to live there and for River Gods to be our neighborhood bar …and then I tossed and turned the whole night, spreadsheets and mortgage calculators floating through my dreams, crunching impossible numbers we could never afford.

Have I mentioned being an adult sucks?

And Friday I came home from work and Dennis mentioned he’d picked up a real estate guide and to take a look it’s on the coffee table and how about Stoneham it’s a lot cheaper and isn’t so far outside of Boston… and I burst into tears.

I WILL NOT MOVE TO THE SUBURBS!! (for if I do, the SUV-driving, bad hair-wearing, 30-pound-weight-gaining, latte-sipping soccer mom alter ego will surely chase me down and kill me!)

We have this friend, Mitch. He’s an old acquaintance of Den’s from years back when he was working at a bar on Huntington Ave. We crossed paths with him a few months ago at the Philosophy Café and have since woven him into our eclectic social network. Mitch is brilliant and interesting and extremely odd and we enjoy his company because he provokes and challenges us with esoteric questions and references to volumes of books we’ll never have time to read. Yesterday over coffee Mitch asked me what it’s like to be a genius. I love this question because (a) I’m so clearly not a genius and (b) it vindicates me of my dirty little secret that back in high school I got lower SAT scores than almost anybody I know. Around here (meaning the intellectually elitist “what school did you go to” northeast) people think I’m smart because I wrinkle up my forehead a lot and don’t talk much — generally because I don’t know what to say. Everywhere else they just think I’m weird.

But I do rather like the genius angle. It’s a very lofty notion. And it lends itself nicely to this pet fantasy that I harbor at times – such as when I’m playing at being an adult, which, as I’ve mentioned really sucks – that I’m destined to be, among other things, a brilliant investor.

Friday night, in my discouraged stubborn child I-will-NOT-move-to-the-suburbs pouting funk, I sat on the floor in front of our bedroom bookshelf and looked for a book I hadn’t read yet. There are a lot actually, because now the bookshelves contain all of Dennis’ books, in addition to all the books I buy and then forget to read. We have a lot of environmental books that Dennis acquired from working at Living On Earth, and we have a lot of travel books acquired from Savvy Traveler and a lot of money and investing books from Marketplace. (Now you know – where normal employees get stock options, National Public Radio employees get left over books.) I pulled one of the investing books off the bottom shelf and adopted it for the weekend.

For no other reason than because the author describes himself as a “stewer” with an almost limitless capacity for brooding and pondering and dwelling and hemming and hawing, re-examining and reconsidering and revisiting and just generally being as neurotic as me, I arrived at the conclusion, Aha! You see I am determined to be a brilliant investor, and here’s my plan…! And I then proceded to phone my father to tell him about my plans to invest the money he’d surely see fit to loan me to buy a house in Cambridge with a clawfoot tub.

And guess what? I’m really not a genius or a brilliant investor, I’m just a simpering little girl and I really, really, really hate this stupid grown-up thing. (Nope, my father didn’t see much sense in my vision, and we’re back to the old wait-and-see game.)

But hey, I’m getting married next year, and it’ll be a good party. What comes next is anybody’s guess.