War Scars

They probably haven't covered this on the Food Network yet, but I can personally testify to the fact that the well-endowed female chef has a significant advantage over her flat-chested colleagues, female or otherwise. For instance, there are times in the kitchen when you have to have a room-temperature egg right now. On Christmas Eve '08, I was in just this predicament. It's not Christmas without home-made dinner rolls, the softish, sweetish kind that Americans are so fond of. But I was running late and I really had to have that warmed egg, so I tucked it under a boob. Cocooned, the egg warmed up quite nicely, in about 3 minutes. Thus the bread was baked in time for dinner. So, as you can see, boobs are useful things in the kitchen.

But you can make do with just one.

***

It was mid-October and I was at my ob-gyn's for my annual visit. We were having a good moan over the economy and were panic-struck that Caribou Barbie might actually swing the election away from the guy we both wanted (it's always nice when the doctor who has seen more of you than your own mother shares your political views). My doctor observed again what she had observed a year before, a thickening in my upper left breast. Not a lump. Not a mass. Just a thickening.

"Look," she said, "I know we added an ultrasound last year, and I'll concede that your mammo still looks perfectly ordinary, but I'd just feel so much more comfortable if our breast surgeon takes a look. If he agrees it's nothing, I'll quit worrying."

I yawned. I love my ob-gyn, but she's the panicky sort. However, I do take these matters seriously. Nearly thirteen years ago, when I turned 40 and had a new baby on my hip, I resolved to do better where my health was concerned. I started flossing every day. I booked my first mammogram. My mother assured me this was crazy. Since breast cancer didn't run in our family, what was the point of getting your boobs crushed in that infernal machine? Like many people, she clings to the notion that some individuals are just marked for cancer. And since she's not marked for it, I can't be marked for it. The discovery of leukemia in the bones of her beloved first grandchild, some twenty years ago, did nothing to change my mother's opinion that patients should diagnose themselves and not listen to anyone with a medical degree.

Being a master at ignoring my mother, I've had my boobs crushed faithfully and largely on schedule, every year. By the time I was 45, the radiologist started seeing little grains of calcium in one breast. Tests were scheduled. Observations were made. I panicked. Nothing ever came of all the scrutiny. So when Dr. Ortique had me schedule the visit to the boob doc, I thought I was humoring her. Again. Just like last year. To me, what my ob-gyn was feeling was just the same old gnarly, fibrous matter she'd been feeling for years.

The hospital's new breast surgeon turned out to be a terrifically nice guy from New Orleans. Dr. Brown wasn't worried by what he felt as he palpated the suspicious area. The tissue certainly didn't fit the disturbing pattern of a roundish but irregular mass. "But let's do another ultrasound," he said. "Just to be sure."

More yawning. More irritation. By now, Thanksgiving is closing in and I really do not have time for this. But dutifully I go to the radiologist for the ultrasound. Anyone who has contact with the medical community knows that radiologists are the odd birds of the medical world. They spend hours a day in a cave, mumbling into recording devices and looking at images of various kinds. People skills aren't a big thing for them, not usually. So when the radiologist planted the ultrasound wand on the same area she had examined a year before, I wasn't sure how to react to her announcement: "What I see is very troubling." She succeeded in making me anxious, though. Of course, she wouldn't be able to do a biopsy for several days, owing to her three-day work week. I'd have the weekend and then some to stew on things.

My husband was away in New York. I didn't want to panic him, so I called up my sister and did my best to worry her, too, though as a former hospice chaplain and the mother of a cancer survivor, she's a professional when it comes to avoiding panic. She kept me sane, a bit, but I worked hard to bring her into the pit with me. I reminded April that the majority of breast cancer patients have no family history of the disease. She countered that, for a radiologist, a good day is one where she does find something and when she can't actually find anything, she'll make do with feeding a patient's doubts and fears. After talking to April, I breathed a sigh of relief, hung up the phone, and went back to my normal routine of bike rides, house cleaning, and the care and feeding of a thirteen-year-old. And I waited for the pages to turn on the calendar.

***

The assistant covered me in goo, waved her wand, took her pictures, and called the radiologist in. The assistant and the radiologist seemed to have an excellent rapport, but damned if I could figure out why it took two of them to study my case. The radiologist just seemed to repeat the technician's actions. My old programmer's eye couldn't stop looking for opportunities to streamline someone else's business. But this useless fog of thought was quickly banished by the radiologist's next words, spoken in her soft Irish accent: "It's cancer we're looking at."

My first question was: Why did my mammograms, which she had been reviewing for some six years now, show nothing? The radiologist declared that this was probably a case of invasive lobular carcinoma. This kind of cancer, which characterizes about ten percent of all breast cancers, can go undetected for a long time. She took three biopsies and immediately made an appointment with the breast surgeon. That's how convinced she was that there was a problem. The appointment would be for the next day, at 2.30. She said she'd probably have the pathologist's report back in the morning.

I didn't totally panic. I knew that until the pathologist analyzed the tissue samples, nobody knew anything. I didn't want to frighten Mike, so I kept my own counsel. I worked in the yard and started a diet right then. At the very least, I reasoned, we'd be looking at surgery of some kind. And I believe in preparing for surgey the way you prepare for a marathon. I knew I'd do so much better if I went in as fit as I could be.

Morning of the next day came and I waited by the phone, my panic growing. "It's bad news," I thought to myself. If it were good news, she'd call. By the time I was back at the hospital and in the surgeon's waiting room, I was convinced that the news would be awful. Dr. Brown came in and announced quickly, "It's not cancer. In some ways, it's worse."

And thus began my immersion in the nebulous world of cancer terminology. Dr. Brown explained that the biopsies showed Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS). In other words, the cancer had not yet invaded any surrounding tissue. This was good news! I kicked myself for reading so much into the fact that no one had called me that morning. I kicked myself for being sucked into the radiologist's sweeping diagnosis of my condition. I was so busy kicking myself that I completely misunderstood Dr. Brown's "In some ways, it's worse." I talked myself into believing that he meant worse in some obscurely technical way, one beyond the concern of mere mortals who'd just been told they didn't have cancer. He cautioned me that now I would have an MRI, and that this was likely to lead to more biopsies, possibly unnecessary ones, because the noise-to-signal ratio of an MRI is so much higher than with ultrasound. I rushed home and read everything I could on the internet about DCIS, my heart feather-light now that I didn't have cancer. I cursed the radiologist for being soooo wrong.

***

And I would come to curse the internet, too. There are people like my surgeon, who only use the word 'cancer' for invasive carcinomas. And there are other people who insist that DCIS should indeed be called "cancer", but cancer at stage zero. Busy as a buzzard on roadkill, I tried mightily to ignore anything I didn't want to hear and paid too much attention to all the benign descriptions of DCIS. DCIS could become cancer, or at least reside right alongside it. I read the testimonies of women who had 'multi-focal' instances of DCIS in the same breast and hence had to have the entire breast removed. Some of these women were informed that small invasive tumors had been masked by the DCIS. I was quite able to read all this and believe that at the very worst, I would have a lumpectomy. I could not possibly be one of those ladies who would have to undergo a mastectomy. Or chemotherapy.

Occasionally, a light-bulb would go off and I would think of Mother and her near-mystical belief that some people just aren't marked for cancer. Despite all my research, I was guilty of the same magical thinking. On the basis of biopsies, which are essentially small samplings of a fraction of the diseased tissue, I had come to conclusions that my surgeon had never encouraged. He had laid out best and worst cases, but all I could hear was his terminology: It's not cancer. Therefore I'd at worst have a tiny scar.

After that first visit to the breast surgeon, I went for an MRI. The results from the MRI suggested that biopsies in the right breast were warranted. This job was assigned to the ultrasound radiologist, who basically balked, unconvinced that the MRI radiologist had spotted anything at all. She referred me again to the MRI radiologist, because the one area she agreed might be worth a biopsy would require her to completely penetrate the breast from one side to the other, and her office wasn't set up for such a procedure. Another delay! And of course the MRI radiologist would have an annual week-long booze-up and conference to attend before he could get back to me. Another ten days passed as I waited for a biopsy with an MRI-assist. And more days passed, waiting for the pathology.

But I wasn't really concerned. I was already hearing my surgeon's voice: "Right breast is normal. Left breast has this tiny problem. See you after Christmas". Yes, this had all taken so long that Thanksgiving had come and gone and Christmas was bearing down like the Polar Express.

***

When Dr. Brown walks in and says, "Good news! There's no sign of disease in the right breast." I want to get up right there and go back to the Irish radiologist and say "Nyah, nyah, nyah!" to her smart-ass conclusions.

As Dr. Brown continues talking, it's clear that the tidy little lump I've imagined in my left breast doesn't fit that description at all. He has me get up on the table again and again he palpates the suspicious area. "What I'm feeling is what I'm also seeing on the MRI," he says. The lesion isn't lumpish at all. It's a diffuse, fern-like object, a corruption of the milk ducts in nearly 50% of the breast, or more. With a classic lump, you remove it, plus a centimeter of surrounding healthy tissue. But at this microscopic level, it's not clear where the healthy margin really starts. And having half a breast is worse than no breast at all.

Slowly, I realize what he's talking about. Now I understood what he meant when he said, a month before, that DCIS was in some ways worse than cancer. A tidy, stage 1 lump, treated with lumpectomy and radiation has a very high cure rate. But such a large, diffuse carcinoma would have had so many more opportunities to become invasive. And you can't just flick it out with a nail-file. At the very least, Dr. Brown was advising a mastectomy. And the final pathology, if it uncovered cancer in the lymph nodes or tiny invasions into the fat near the milk ducts, might well indicate chemotherapy as well.

Wow. For Dr. Brown, "good news" is clearly a relative concept.

I repeat back everything he says to me, to make sure I understand what's at stake. Unlike many surgeons, Dr. Brown has fine people skills. Instead of making me feel dumb for repeating his information (not that I'd ever fire a doctor just because he made me feel dumb--that would be truly stupid), he says that he does the same thing when people are briefing him. He gently advises that I take time to think about all that he has said. He did not try to hurry me at all and he gave me the feeling he'd sit with me for as long as it took.

I leave his office, my thoughts blurry with fear and despair. I still have to pick Mike up at the airport. He'll be wanting to hear what Dr. Brown said the second he sees me. I think up a statement that is the truth but not the whole truth. I practice the statement while driving in the car.

***

When I picked Mike up, I recited my line: "I'll have to have surgery, but there's no disease in the right breast and no reason to revise the original diagnosis of DCIS." He's all but skipping to get back to the car. Once in the car, I burst into tears and tell him that the surgery we're talking about is a mastectomy. I can't bring myself to tell him the other troubling bit of information, that one of the lymph nodes in my armpit is swollen. The swelling could be just from the biopsies, or it could be the first sign of an already invasive cancer. Nothing will be known until the sentinel lymph nodes and the diseased breast is removed and can be examined fiber by fiber. Mike hugs me and shows no signs of sharing my fear, for which I'll always be grateful. I make arrangements with dear friends to have Jesse out for the evening, so that Mike and I can go have a meal and spend some time together.

The next day, I research what other DCIS patients have to say on the issue of mastectomy. I can't find anyone who has been diagnosed with "multi-focal DCIS" and who is refusing what appears to be the always-recommended treatment of mastectomy. One woman with this type of DCIS says she saw three breast surgeons and all recommended the same treatment. In one of my dumber moments, I wonder why I shouldn't just demand that they do biopsies until they find some evidence of invasive cancer. But isn't the whole point of a mastectomy, in this type of case, to remove tissue before it becomes invasive?

The question finally comes down to one of quantity, of how much tissue it's feasible to remove. If I'd wanted a second opinion on anyone's analysis, it would have been wise, perhaps, to seek out another pathologist. Maybe it's not a carcinoma. Maybe it's just blocked milk-ducts as my mother kept insisting. But I remembered what Dr. Brown had said in that awful and quite long conversation, that because the DCIS had been in my boob for so long without throwing off any of the tell-tale micro-calcifications that radiologists look for (I had some, but in the other, disease-free boob), my case was already being presented to the hospital's tumor board and was already getting a high degree of scrutiny.

And I'd had other surgeries at this hospital and had always been impressed both by the professionalism of the staff and the abundant and effective use of automated record-keeping. My level of trust was very high with this hospital generally and at the end of the day, I'm no more competent to pick one pathologist over another than I'm competent to design a rocket. I'd read enough about breast cancer to know that I would certainly insist on an oncologist who was either a recent associate or a current fellow of one of the major cancer research oganizations -- MD Anderson, Sloan-Kettering, the Mayo Clinic -- but as regards this stage of the disease, the treatment seemed fairly uncontroversial: lumpectomy followed by radiation, and if the disease is multi-focal, all disease-prone tissue should be removed, possibly avoiding the need for radiation at all. Most breast surgeons, I came to conclude, would recommend this treatment.

Twenty-four hours after being informed of my grim choices, I was already bent on getting better, on getting past this ordeal. I talked to one of my oldest friends, Paula, a sharp and very research-oriented nurse by training. We talked about treatment options, about what clothes I should pack, what precautions to take. Such conversations were vital in helping me wrap my mind around the relative safety of what I was planning. Talking to Paula reminded me of how it sometimes feels when I step on a plane. I'm nervous and a little sweaty in the palms, but the sight of the flight attendants briskly moving through their routine reminds me that what I'm about to do is not so extraordinary. Painful, yes. Horrifying on some level, too. But I've seen what it is to lose a child and to have one threatened by disease. Mastectomy doesn't even come close to the terror I'd feel if my daughter's doctor ever so much as mouthed the words: "Let's run some blood work. Just to be sure."

In extreme optimism, I even fasted on Sunday night, hoping the surgery could be organized on Monday. My breast surgeon had said that Monday could be possible. But, you know surgeons. They generally have to share operating theaters with other docs who have their own priorities. Dr. Brown's opinion of what was possible was not the same as the hospital staff's. I hung by the phone, waiting to get a time for my operation, and eventually was told that the surgery was scheduled for Thursday afternoon. I rang my sister, who informed me that her hysterectomy was scheduled for the same hour! Fortunately, we weren't going to be in the same hospital.

It made me think how problematic these lady parts can be. Like most professional women of my generation, it find it offensive to suggest that females shouldn't have combat roles in the military. But I also realize, particularly now, that just being female is soldiery enough for many of us. The estrogen that made it possible for me to do my bit in pulling the species up to the next rung in the evolutionary ladder is also over-binding with other cells and making them go haywire. The scars will be permanent. The task is possibly no less noble than whacking the enemy when he tries to step on your shores. The benefits are just longer term than your average military victory.

***

Thursday arrives and Mike drives me to the hospital. You can have no better partner in life or in a foxhole than my spouse. His manner is perfect. He's not stupidly blithe or overly anxious or hang-dog guilty. He's collected and proactive. And this from a man who lost his own mother to breast cancer! I know that his guts are knotting up, too, on some level, but he's not giving in to it.

We waited in the prep-room while the nurse filled out paper-work and started me on saline. He asked me what meds I'd had in the last 24 hours and I guiltily reply that I'd taken half a miligram of Xanax the night before. "Don't apologize," he says. "I would have taken a whole one." We all laugh. Better living through pharmaceuticals.

I put my iPhone's earbuds in and listened to some David Sedaris readings. As they wheel me in for more fancy radiography (to help the surgeon locate the sentinel lymph nodes he intends to remove, prior to the main surgery), I am laughing a lot. The medical staff look alarmed, but I couldn't help myself. Sedaris' stories of his crazy Greek American parents are too much. When they lower the machines around me, I start to really howl with laughter (Sedaris had moved on to explaining why he serves the Great Jewish Conspiracy at NPR). The startled technician, certain that I was having a claustrophobic fit, hauled me back out. I turned the iPhone off, out of concern for the staff.

***

More waiting. The dyes they've injected me with are slow to diffuse. The technician asks me to "manually manipulate your left breast with your right hand." What, you want me to do it? That's not part of the service? Who do these people think they are?

As instructed, I jiggle the mass of flesh and try, instead of saying goodbye to it, to focus on how much worse it would be to lose the use of a hand, or a leg, or an eye. This is one of the bodily objects you can stand to lose, I remind myself. And besides, after an upgrade on the other boob, I'll be able to wear spaghetti straps again. If I get out of this without having chemo, I'll be dancing, but not bouncing, and that's a good thing.

More waiting. I'm wheeled back into pre-op but the word is that the prior surgery went on much longer than expected. That's okay, because in the gap the phone rings. It's my daughter, my dear thirteen year old, calling up to say she loved me, something she did completely unprompted. She'd even remembered to take her cell phone to school, a rarity, just so she could make the call. How did I do so good? To have such a child? I have no inclinations towards magical thinking, but every parent, even embittered non-theists like me, must sometimes feel that there is some Universal Heart/Mind that has obviously spent eons thinking up exactly which fetus would be the right one for you. Nothing I could have consciously done could have made something so wonderful as Jesse appear.

The anaesthiologist comes in and says that Dr. Brown wants to get the surgery underway before the radioactivity in my nodes subsides, thus making them harder to locate. Dr. Brown comes in, meets Mike for the first time. I've told Mike to really listen to how people from New Orleans pronounce "aureole". It's truly bizarre! Like "Areeler". Dr. Brown, when he explains to Mike what the surgery involves, does hazard upon the quirky pronunciation, but Mike is too concerned to notice. I want to tap him on the hand, to alert him, but what would I say? Why do I find this so fascinating? I'm trying not to smile. Dr. Brown must think I've had more Xanax than I admitted to.

An hour more and someone arrives to hang a bag of happy juice on my IV pole. It is time. I get that triple-tequila feeling, and vaguely note that one of the op nurses is older than I am. Things go black for awhile.

***

I'm not awake but for a minute when Dr. Brown appears at my side. I don't think he's much of a poker player. He seems visibly relieved. The nodes seemed entirely ordinary, not enlarged. I'll learn later from Mike that Dr. Brown went so far as to say that he thought it wasn't cancer, a sweepingness of statement that I'd never heard from him. But I know until the pathology comes back, we don't have very much. The lab trumps everything. Dr. Brown marvels, not for the first time, at how fit I am. I take his hand. I'm wondering just how unfit his average patient is. I mean, sure, I biked 50 miles in Blanco county recently (those hills are nasty), but I was surrounded by many who pedalled faster. It's all relative.

***

I'm old enough to know that the post-op is the killer. I'm in a cold room, with two drains that look like hand-grenades dangling from my chest. I marvel that I can see my rib cage without the benefit of a mirror. How queer. It's 7 pm or so and I've been twenty four hours without food but I'm not hungry. Mike brings Jesse to see me and she gives me as much hugging as is possible given my fragile state. I am happy again. She leaves and the long night just keeps coming. I never really fall asleep. Just watch episodes of "The Closer" that I've downloaded on my Iphone. Nothing really hurts that much, but if I could sleep, I'd accept a little pain in return.

***

Next morning, I think: let the recovery begin. I realize that the mobility in my left arm is not that bad and I instantly wonder if I should ask about getting back on the bike. What if I don't like the answer? Better not to ask for advice and just do what I want. Dr. Brown arrives and says I can leave anytime, that he didn't normally approve of releasing a patient so quickly, but with my superb stats, there was simply no reason to keep me. Mike arrives and we wait to be released as soon as the nursing staff can get to us.

***

On Christmas Eve, six days after the surgery, we return to Dr. Brown's office to get the pathologist's report. He appears congenial and unhurried, and must surely know that we're almost uninterested in what he first occupies himself with, that is, studying the hand grenades attached to my chest, where all the fluid from the wound has been accumulating. His preoccupation with answering the question of whether or not the drains can come out today is, we both think, a sign that the news is bad.

"I have mixed news," he says, to the inner sound of my sinking heart. I remembered the last time we began with the "good news"; how much worse will it be beginning with the mixed news? But the good news, this time, is very good. There's no cancer in my lymph nodes. At worse, we're looking at a stage one diagnosis, very curable.

The next news is ambiguous, he admits. The pathologist is patiently going through the breast tissue, and is leaning towards a diagnosis of non-cancerous DCIS but wants to get a second pair of eyes involved. And it being Christmas Eve -- "The pathologists are all drunk and under bridges right now," Dr. Brown declares -- it could be several days or even weeks until we know more. I let go of the breath that I've been holding on to for the past two months. It could still be cancer. I could still have to undergo chemo, which I'm terrified of, but my prospects are pretty good. This isn't some weird, aggressive cancer that's going to shut me down in six months.

Dr. Brown calls that night, while we're rushing around preparing our annual Christmas Eve feast, that this year will begin with crab salad in a puff pastry. I tell Dr. Brown to get his own self home, which he promises to do, but he wanted to let me know that the tissue samples will take a while to process, because they've been sent off to the Mayo Clinic! I think the pathologist is having a hard time deciding exactly what she's looking at and wants to bring in other doctors who may have seen these exact types of cellular deformation before. There is doubt, but the doubt hovers between a stage zero and stage one diagnosis. He verifies that I've already made an appointment to see him, in a fortnight's time.

I ring off, stirring a sauce, thinking how much nicer the sauce would be if thickened by an egg. But I'll need it quickly. And warm.

Last of the Summer Whine

After Mike and I enjoyed our own Babette's Feast in NYC, there came a week of saying goodbye to Long Island. This was a daughter-free week in which I got to suit myself, supposedly, though some of my time was spent getting the Wee Cottage ready for hand-over to the sole occupant, Mike. He would be staying behind for a couple of months. It seemed unfair to stick him with a dirty refrigerator and the strewn personal effects of two disorderly women. Not that Mike isn't looking forward to at least visiting our home back in Texas. There, he has some form of male compansionship in one of our dogs. The shih-tzu is not much of an ally, or even much of a dog, but he is all male.

During that last week on Long Island, I made myself drive to the end of the "North Fork" in order to rent a bike and see the scenery. The tip of Long Island makes a wishbone and the southern part gives you the Hamptons and the northern part gives you wineries and sea-side neighborhoods and much less congestion. Tho, as far as I could tell, just a converted garage in the area goes for a half-million.

Driving the 60 or so miles from Huntington to the to the bike rental shop was perhaps too easy. My GPS, "Agatha" as we like to call her because of her British accent, masterfully steered me to Greenport, a very pleasant little seaside village a few miles past the Sea View hotel. I thought as I passed this long, low establishment, hugging a terriffic view of the sea, that it would provide the best spot for a late lunch by the water. "The Sea View" I muttered over and over again, to fix the name in my memory. I knew I'd be back.

But first, some cycling! The bike shop was in the heart of Greenport and the lady behind the counter was assisted by the largest, most gigantic Great Dane I have ever seen (you'd need a team of landscapers to deal with that big boy's poop). She showed me the bike and implied that any fool would take the ferry to Shelter Island rather than riding to the tip of the North Fork. "There's a lot less congestion on the island", she said. And any fool could find the ferry, she assured me. "Just keeping going until you see a fat sign that says 'ferry'. There's only one."

I had never heard of Shelter Island but if you look at a map, it's the big blotch of land in between the North Fork and the South Fork. About 15 kilometers square, surrounded on three sides by smallish waterways, you'd think the Big Fat Ferry in the Small Village would be easy to find. But, my sense of direction now throughly eviscerated by Agatha the GPS, I had to ride around a few streets before I stumbled on all the signs of ferryness: a conspiciously marked lane and something vaguely like a large ticket booth for a toll road. And there was the ferry! Don't panic! The Great Dane Woman had said that it was a half-hour round trip at most. I stood the bike against the booth and fumbled with the machine long enough to find it didn't work.

The small ferry was still waiting. With peeling white paint and decking, it was big enough for a half-dozen cars and a few passengers. I rolled my bike on, wandering what the penalty was for passengers without tokens. The bored fare collector didn't even want to hear my apology! He grunted, gave me a slip of paper, then moved on. The crossing really was barely fifteen minutes, with passengers either staring out at the brilliantly green island rising from the water or yakking into their cell-phones. Once again, I thought on how much I loved northern light; how much I don't miss the skull-crushing blankness of a Texas afternoon.

We docked and I rolled my rental off, then spent ten minutes futzing with a way to anchor my purse to the handlebars. With the purse strapped down within an inch of its life, I looked around me and discovered that the town on the Island side of the ferry route, was comprised of a few streets of pretty, 19th century houses, on modestly sized lots. This house, a little large for the area, was situated on the village green and was pretty typical of the architecture.

I started off, grateful that the bike, unlike the one I'd had in Central Park a few weeks ago, at least had gears. And brakes. I really like brakes on a bike. The town, Shelter Island Heights, had a community feel, which I fear was just a consequence of the dainty architecture and the fact that some do-gooding busy-bodies won't let the properly well-off come in and knock everything down for sprawling estates. Good on them. They've even put up a historical marker noting the founder of the first European settlement, a sugar merchant from Barbados. Wiki says he paid James I for the rights to settle the island, and confirmed the sale with local Indians. No doubt, the Indians would have preferred to be actually paid, but Wiki says nothing more on that subject.

Once out of the village, the traffic was indeed muted and there were plenty of bike lanes and plenty of cyclists around. Judging from the map, I determined it would be an easy matter to cross the town, then get out to a little side road that would afford a view of the sea. From there, I would make my way around to the Atlantic side of the island, where I hoped to see some actual waves. I discovered that I had an image in my head of riding for a good while with the sea on one side at all times and with the wind at my back. As it happened, I had to be content with seeing the backsides of houses that faced the sea. Very infrequently, I glimpsed something vaguely blue. I blame all the new, swaggeringly big architecture eclipsing view of the sea, and on Agatha's damage to my internal direction finder, for the fact that after riding several hours, I found myself pretty much back where I started. I cleared a ridge and saw the ferry making its way across the sound. And the bike was due back at the shop in an hour. No matter. It had been very green and very quiet. I'd just have to find another place for long, seaside rides.

Back on the mainland, I got into my car, determined now to drive the eight or so miles to the tip of the North Fork. I wouldn't gaze at the waves for awhile, then turn around, find the Sea View Hotel again, and have lunch there. That was the plan, anyway. I didn't turn on Agatha. How hard could it be? This is a long, very skinny island. You just keeping going in the direction you came in. If your tires get wet, you've gone too far.

As it turns out, I completely misunderstood the sun in the sky and drove for 45 minutes, thinking that surely my tires should be wet by any minute, only to finally get Agatha out and realize that I was in fact, almost back to the start of the Long Island Expressway. I was well off the North Fork and on to Long Island proper. I was so convinced of the correctness of my heading that when I saw another hotel, also called The Sea View, I determined that there had to be two Sea View hotels on the island. "How unimaginative," I thought. Certainly, it was beyond my imagining that I could have, again, gone the wrong direction in Yankeeland.

Clearly, I'm not safe to leave the house in any place but Texas.

This past weekend, we were supposed to go on an evening cruise around Manhattan, courtesy of the company that Mike is currently working for. But he forgot to RSVP them a few weeks before the cruise, an oversight that probably had something to do with the fact that the cruise was scheduled for the same day that we'd be putting our Jesse on the plane to go back to Texas. He didn't expect to be very happy that day, and doubted he'd be in the sort of lighthearted mood a party requires. So to take our minds off of the sudden lack in our lives, we booked a room in a nice hotel in Manhattan and reserved a table in a restaurant offering a six-course French meal, something Americans call a 'tasting menu' and which the French call 'dinner'.

Getting Jesse and her friend Holly onto the plane was not painless. I faithfully kept all of my confirmation numbers for all the flights I booked with Jet Blue this summer, hoping to make use of their express kiosk check-in service, but it didn't matter. The automated kiosks never recognize the numbers I give so, once again, I found myself wanting to kill something as I stood in the one-hour queue to get to the service desk. And then there was a half-hour queue in another line to get the visitor's pass I'd need to escort the girls to their gate, where they were due to get an 'unaccompanied minor service'. Jet Blue's staff didn't think to tell me that I was supposed to wait with the girls at the designated gate. Thinking that even these young ladies couldn't screw up walking to the gate not ten feet from their hulking selves (Jesse, anyway, is getting quite tall), I left them fifteen minutes before departure. Two minutes from departure, when I was solidly outside the security area, I got a panicky call from Jesse, saying that the attendant would not accept her and Holly onto the flight, not without me to sign the papers I'd never been told about. I knew that the security line was running at least 30 minutes at the time, so I indulged my own thoughts of panic while the attendant changed her mind and decided to let the girls through anyway. Panic over: now, what else can go wrong?

We navigated the subway to a station about six blocks from The Alex, where we were booked to stay. Emerging onto East 52nd street, we realized what a glorious day it was: low seventies with a pleasant breeze. Cheered, we walked to East 45th, mainly along 3rd Avenue, and were delighted to discover that there were plenty of modestly priced eateries and ethnic restaurants and diners.

We checked into the hotel. The concierge uttered those magic words: "free upgrade". Excited, we took the elevator to the 30th floor (Mike, er, "treated" me to a brief lecture on queueing theory, a subject I've had to be familiar with in my former life as a computer programmer but he seems excessively inspired by the subject). We stepped into our room and there it was:

Not only had we been upgraded from a single-room accomomdation to a two-room suite, we had a wonderful view of the Chrysler building, a true beauty. From another window we could see the East River, which I can never think of without remembering the penultimate scene in Rear Window, when the detective announces that the villain is going to take them on a tour of the river, to show off the various spots where he dumped various pieces of his dismembered wife.

And the hotel room was nice, too, even though the decor was all Swedish modern and 50 shades of taupe. I'm not complaining. In fact, it was almost a shame that the too-gorgeous weather was crying out for a long and slow stroll around as much of Manhattan as we had the energy to cover. We left the soooo comfortable room and gorgeous view and started with a lunch across the street at the appropriately named Comfort Diner. I had a hot pulled-pork sub on typically delicious, not-too-crusty local bread. Then I took Mike to see Grand Central station and the Rockefeller center and the Chrysler Building's interior, taking snaps all the way.

So where are these pictures? Well that's when the other thing happened, as in the 'what else can go wrong now'? We had our walk, made it back to the hotel. I had a delicious bath (the Wee Cottage has an ancient 50s American-style tub, meaning it's just big enough to drown a rubber duckie) and we headed out again for another quick walk to the East River. Then it was off in the taxi to the restaurant, the Fleur de Sel, which would exceed every expectation. Returning to the apartment after dinner, I wanted to take another photo of the now gloriously lit-up Chrysler building. But where's the camera? Mike kindly called the restaurant but it wasn't there. I tore the rooms apart, several times, but there was nothing for it. It was gone. I hate screwing up like that. Like my mother, I'm a little too inclined to declare Black Depression at the tiniest set-back, especially where money is concerned. As cameras go, this was a nice, but quite modest little Casio. But it was a Ken Rockwell recommendation and it suited me perfectly. In a somewhat gloomy mood, all I could do was plop on the bed and watch The Fugitive again. I was sure we'd fall asleep, but Mike had never seen it and it's pretty hard to be bored by one of the better Harrison Ford movies. We amazed ourselves by staying up way past out bedtimes.

The dinner at The Fleur de Sel had been unforgettable. My palette is hardly what you'd call educated, but I can appreciate when a dish has layers of flavors. And being a cook, I can sense the effort that goes into not only preparing food of this caliber but in finding and nurturing sources for the very finest of ingredients. I'd forgotten how the very best multi-course dinner, despite being multi-course, should still have the feeling of a symphony and should suggest a conductor behind it all, in this case the conductor being chef Cyril Renard (whom I'd never heard of and suspect is just another chef in a city of very talented chefs). The flavors, as they should have been at this level of play, were related to each other across the courses. Citrus was the theme, with a very light use of tomato flavors.

When we stepped into the restaurant, a tiny crack in the wall, we suspected we were in good hands. We arrived a little early, but the table was already waiting, a good clue to the restaurant's expectation that the table would not be turned. There would be no pressure. We could just sit back and enjoy. The menu at Fleur de Sel is appropriately small and the 'tasting menu' offered very limited choices indeed, but what choices! The first course was dubbed a 'liquid canape'. It was a chilled soup, served in a large shot glass, and was a flawless puree of liquids and tastes: cucumber, orange, a slight hint of tomato, and strawberry. And there was a hint of lightly toasted, but not burnt, garlic. I would never attempt to make something that had to be so perfect in each element. The soup was served with a sprightly rose from Provence.

The next course, paired with the same rose, was a lovely little lobster salad, again with bits of orange, and served with watercress and slivers of avocado, in a light, orangey vinaigrette. It was perfect, and perhaps a little old-fashioned, in that it reminded me of the days of nouvelle cuisine, a super-light kind of cooking. Perhaps, like bell-bottoms and those wretched hip-huggers that overly upholstered American girls are spilling out of these days, nouvelle cuisine is back?

We chatted a bit. We waited with bated breath for the next course and were duly gratified that the wait staff, unlike staff in snobby restaurants we'd been to before, did not prattle on about the chef's personality and preferences for this and that. The waitress seemed to be aware that for most people a meal like this is a rare event. She didn't fawn and she didn't condescend. It was all I could do to keep from leaving her my email address, in case she wanted to, you know, talk or read my blog.

Mike and I yakked and waited for more, thrilled to our bones. Mike gave up on queueing theory and moved on to the Russians. A duck croquette appeared, served with an Alsatian pinot blanc that I just loved. Although all the pairings had been great (at least to me) until now, this was the first one where the food and wine seemed to modulate each other. Instead of eagerly expecting the next course, I was a little sad to see this one pass so quickly.

The next course was a monkfish served with baby vegetables so perfect I didn't recognize them, so unused am I to a perfect baby vegetable. I finally came to realize that it was baby fennel with the monkfish, but fennel where the licorice flavor was quite muted (for which I was grateful). The sauce featured a re-appearance of orange and grapefruit. The fish, served with a Pouilly Fuisse that Mike wanted to go out and buy a case of, was followed by a lamb loin that was absolutely courageous, or it would be in Texas. The lamb was quite rare, as it should be when it's this flawless, and served with a Californian pinot noir that the protagonist in Sideways might have envied. This is a hard concept for some diners to get their heads around, but a truly great meal is not always a question of what you prefer. Sometimes food, especially meat of such a superb quality you can't even buy it privately, is a question of what is right. It would have been an offense to god and nature for the chef to have cooked that lamb any longer. As it was, the meat almost melted on the tongue. The dish was bathed in a citrus sabayon with pearl onions.

I really am going to become a vegetarian. One day.

I have prattled on too long about this meal, but it really was my own Babette's Feast (I can't believe it took me 20 years to finally see that movie; I can't believe my gall in telling you that you have to see it if you want to remain my friend). Yes, there was a cheese course next, with perfect American cheeses that reminded me of how cheese is really a local product and how it's better to have a great local cheese than one from far away, especiallly one that's sat on an airplane for who knows how long. The dessert, an orange-and-cream sorbet in my case and a chocolate and raspberry tart in Mike's case, was lovely, the equal of all before it. We left the restaurant in the highest of spirits. Maybe it was on the cab that followed that I left the camera.

The next morning, we finally got around to visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I'd heard that the museum was Really Big and that the wise visitor will focus on no more than a couple collections at a time. We decided to stick with the European Art wing and then the American Art wing. The decision was no sooner firmly and decisively made than it was dropped. We could not just walk past the classical and Egyptian antiquities section. No one could. Unless they lived here and could favor themselves with such sights whenever they liked. I ask you, how many ladies look this good without their heads?

And how's this for a bathtub? It's actually a sarcophagus but if you ask me, it's too good for dead people and would make a fine water feature.

After tooling around the Met for a few happy hours, we found a place to eat pizza (in New York, this is not hard. It's hard to do it only once a day). We collected our things from The Alex and headed home, for what is my last week in the Wee Cottage. Highs in the low 70s and that is music to this Texan's diminishing hearing.

Less Whining, More Pictures

Did I say less whining? I didn't mean it. I took the girls into NYC yesterday, our first order of business being a bike ride around Central Park. It should have only taken us an hour and a half to get there, but I managed to take us, after much indecision, naturally, to the wrong platform in Penn Station. So off we went in the wrong direction. Then, when we got to Central Park and managed to have our bike ride, I took us -- wait for it -- the right way across the park to get to the Natural History Museum. But somewhere in the park, in a place of great mystery called The Ramble, I lost my orientation and ended up bringing us, 20 minutes later, back to the wrong side of the park. This meant we had to cross the park twice (the width, not the length, thank goodness).

The bike ride was very pleasant, tho the rusty, brakeless wonders you can rent in Central Park perhaps made for more excitement than I would have liked.

Eventually, we arrived at the American Museum of Natural History and had a marvelous few hours at the Rose Center, where the planetarium is. I particularly liked hearing the booming voice of Maya Angelou as the mysteries of the Big Bang unfolded to a whirling of galaxies on the floor of the museum's theater. Holly seemed particularly impressed by the old-fashioned dioramas.






We ended up at the M&M's store on Times Square. I have no idea why girls like that place, but it's on Jesse's Must See list whenever girls visit. I just sat down, exhausted, in a corner and played games on my new I-phone while they toodled around the place. I reallly, really suck at Cube Runner.

But I love the I-Phone. Had I deployed it sooner, I might not have gone the wrong way across the park. It certainly guided me to the nearest Starbuck's, a vital function when I needed it. My dear and wonderful husband insisted I buy it when my old cell-phone decided that the cruel world was too much for it. Ordinarily, I resist going high-end, but that's a silly habit I'd like to get over. One day.

More Girls

The parade of girls continues. Last week, it was my niece followed by my daughter's oldest friend since daycare, Alexa. This week, we are visited by a rising soccer star, Holly. What can you say? The girls are full of secret smiles and sub-vocal giggles. I'd be paranoid about it, if I thought any of the giggles were about me. But girls at this age think about us crinklies only rarely. I do get some great hugs and galling wonderment that my hair isn't more gray.

Having Holly with us was a great excuse to take Mike as well as our new visitor to Port Jefferson. Port Jeff, which I've blogged about before, is about 35 minutes from the Wee Cottage and is a homey seaside town.

The day began with a visit to the Avalon Foundation's nature preserve, a 90 acre spread in Stony Brook. The preserve is a very informal garden of sorts, covering a hillside, offering many paths and the odd bridge or rough fence or sculpture. The main effort in the plantings has been in the removal of non-native species and returning some plots to wild plants. The effect is gorgeous. The park was dedicated to a local resident who died in his 30s about a decade ago. I hunted long and hard for the details of Paul Simons' death. He was an avid cyclist (there's a memorial ride for him every year), but I couldn't find any other information on him, either in local paper archives or in Wiki. If anyone knows anything . . .





We arrived at Port Jeff, going first to Danford's for lunch and drinks by the harbor. Danford's is probably my favorite dining place on Long Island, so far. We had a civilized glass of wine and a half-dozen local oysters (which seem sweeter to me than Gulf Oysters). Holly and Jesse were allowed to go roaming the town independently while we finished our drinks. We miss the baby we had, but there's a definite upside to this growing-up thing.






The people in Port Jeff walk around with lobsters on their heads. It's not natural. And it's the first place -- since the mid-70s, I think -- that I've seen a nun in full regalia, with the wimple and the surplice and all the rest of it. Sadly, I couldn't manage to subtly take a picture of the sister, which I wanted to do to prove to my doubting husband that it wasn't really a gay man in drag. Tho, with that wimple thingy obscuring the Adam's apple, how can you be sure?








The other cool thing about Port Jeff is all the British phone boxes around the town. They even have that authentic drunks-pee-in-it look to them. I completely endorse Bill Bryson's call to shoot whatever British apparatchik moved to retire these wonderful old phone boxes in Britain.













Girls collapso. After having been made to run up a hill in Port Jefferson.

London's Whining

This is how I always expect NYC to play out on any given day for me, a London/Texas hybrid. I will get jostled in an un-southern like manner. I will get sweaty and miserable. I will get confused and worry about early-onset Alzheimer's. Unable to remember what train stop to get off at, I will instead remember, in the habit of old people everywhere, days from decades ago, when I negotiated London's transit with ease.

Having spent all that lovely free time back in Austin (see picture of the recently self-named Jesse Hussein Coldsmith screaming on the plane), I was bracing myself to say goodbye to my vacation. From now on, it would be all NYC all the time, with several different teens. For some reason, touring around the gardens of the North Shore just doesn't appeal to the younger set.

My direst predictions about Teens in New York were, I'm delighted to say, not met. Though I did find myself remembering London fondly (reasons why to come later). Our first foray, just a few days ago, began with the usual panic. I'd left plenty of time to get to the local Long Island Railroad station. I knew exactly when the train would stop for us (10.04 am). I was in control. Until, suddenly, I was all at sea. The parking lot sign at the train station said "Lot Full". The cars sitting right in the mouth of the garage had quite noticeable green permits in their windows. Ah, yes, I'd forgotten about permits.

(My niece Blythe, looking relaxed in Central Park)

So I drove briefly around the choked local streets, getting a little irate and panicky. Then I remembered how, only the day before, a Whole Foods employee in Glen Cove had told me, not two aisles from the beer case, that the chain had stopped selling beer. Now, I don't think that Long Island has any more clock-watching donut-eaters than Texas has, but it had seemed that the indifferent employees who'd made my life difficult over the last few months, could, on this occasion, help me out. Perhaps the "Lot Full" sign was something no one hurried to update whenever a car left the lot. So I took a chance and re-entered the lot.

Sure enough, I found an empty spot. I felt fairly certain that whoever had failed to change the sign was also not going to waste needless foot-steps walking the tower to check permits. Confidently, I parked and herded Jesse and my niece onward.

Once again, the L.I.R.R. was perfectly on time. I tortured more wool while the landscape went past for an hour. The girls, true teens, seemed indifferent. Why do teens make you do things they then subsequently pretend not to care about?

Once we arrived at Penn Station, I found I could decipher the needlessly complex Metro diagram just enough to get us to Grand Central Station, where we were to meet up with Jesse's pal since day care, Alexa. Grand Central itself is a truly beautiful building, cathedral-like. It feels far quieter than it should. The vast distance above your head seems to dampen the ambient noise. The white stone and marble everywhere, the fabulous moldings of the arches a hundred feet above your head, made me feel reverent, for the usual two minutes. Then it was off to the food court.

Grand Central's food court, in my view, is the dream food-court you would wish to find in the local shopping mall. There was a stall for Indian food, the thing I always look for first. The dishes reflected the usual American preferences. Chicken Tikka Masala has truly become the Indian version of General Joe's chicken. The Rogan Josh, a dish that's too exquisite to risk having just anywhere, looked overly-creamy, but the chana massala was great. Blythe picked out a terrific steak hoagie from a sandwich vendor. Jesse and Alexa got stodgy-looking bagels and swore they were content. That's the scary thing about kids: they really did look happy with their choices. Bari, Alexa's mum, watched, having eaten earlier.

Having dined, we pressed on to the Chrysler building (famous elevator door at left) and then to the New York Public Library. Blythe was delighted. She couldn't get enough time in the library so we left her to enjoy it on her own for awhile, as the rest of us found a deli with iced coffees and Asian salads and American sandwiches. I mean, we were impressed by the library, too, but our stomachs were calling again.

After collecting Blythe, we decided to walk uptown on 5th Avenue, just to see some fancy shops. Instead of noticing the shops, we found ourselves just enjoying the stroll. We admired molding and brick-work and pretzel smells (Bari, being an architect by training, is just the person to be with on such expeditions), in the wrong direction. Bari pointed out that the best brick-lay patterns force you to look at every brick. After talking to her, I wanted to go home, demolish the tedious brick outside my house and re-lay it all. Meanwhile, where were the fancy shops? There were stores aplenty. The girls pulled us into a couple of shops where you could, well, let's face it, dress up like a tart for less than $20. It was the sighting of the Flatiron building that let us know we'd gone in the wrong direction. We spotted a train station and, after some errors, managed to head back to Times Square and the various candy-dedicated stores that Jesse and Alexa were so keen on.

Did you know that you can fill three stories with M&Ms consumerabilia? With M&Ms pillows. And M&Ms back-packs. Socks. Key chains. Thank heaven there were no thongs.

We made our way then to Greenwich Village, to meet Bari's friend Elaine who bought us a lovely meal and sadly had to press on to the show that she and Bari had booked. We hailed a cab back to Penn Station, cheap at $12.

We made it back to the car in the Huntington Station garage's parking lot. I'm not sure if the lack of a parking ticket on the windshield means that we escaped unscathed or not. Maybe they just take down your license plate number and get a ticket to you with the same speed they got my subscription to Newsday to me (which was never, despite repeated phone calls). Or maybe I'll get hauled off in hand-cuffs in a few days. It won't matter because the sights and energy of New York City was worth every irritation.

As a final note, let me join the legion of London Whiners traveling in NYC. The London underground map, posted in every crevice of every tube station in London, is purely schematic. The designer, a minor deity in my view by the name of Harry Beck, figured out in the 1930s that the kind of knowledge you need to get from Charing Cross station to Richmond is completely different from the knowledge you need to find the Thames once you've arrived at Richmond. New York's subway map tries to relate the trains to the geography and general city layout, forgetting that once you've arrived at a station, it's precisely the general city layout you no longer care about. Getting around New York using that wretched map and stepping on trains free of signage challenged all our powers of de-cryption. There's now software available to help you, while you're still at home, to figure out the train changes you'll need while in New York. No such software exists for the London underground, so far as I'm aware. The map tells you all you can usefully know, prompting me to think that software is what you need when graphic design fails.

The Vampire's Coffee House

One of the things I really missed in Long Island -- and have reveled in while being back in Austin -- is bakery-cafes. Other than the little place in Oyster Bay that I mentioned last time, the North Shore of Long Island offers expensive dining establishments at one end and Starbucks at the other, with little in between. The local economics don’t seem to permit a place to sit while indolently munching on a croissant. The delis are similarly table-free.

So, yeah, during my week at home, I've spent a fair amount of time at Mozart's and Upper Crust. I had the intention, when I so abruptly booked the flight back home, of organizing a few belongings. Truly, it makes me happy to put old things in new places and call it an improvement (it was the third time I moved the cutlery that Mike threatened homicide). But one night of lying in my old bed made me less ambitious. I started thinking how nice it would be to not take care of anybody. We've had many family trips over the years, some of them spectacular -- like my 50th birthday trip to Britain -- but it's rare that I or any full-time mom has a vacation where she isn't looking after anyone. The vacations we can typically afford involve me and a kitchen.

So as soon as my kid departed to north Texas with her friend, I started the endless grueling regimen: ride bike, bathe in jacuzzi, visit Mozart's, back home for a bit of internet surfing courtesy of my neighbor's unsecured wi-fi, then watch a movie while torturing yarn (one sock finished!). Despite all this opulent time-wasting, I've found one way in which I can still be a good mommy, even though Jesse is far away. I've been reading a book that she was lukewarm about but which she wanted me to read because “all the girls” were reading it these days. It has vampires, she told me. And didn’t you write horror fiction once, Mommy? When Mr. Taft was still in office?

While I'm not the kind of mum who feels obliged to dog her offspring’s literary footsteps, it did seem that my kid was trying to haul me out of the mire of unfashionability. So I decided to meet her halfway, by reading Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer.

Let me repeat with obnoxious parental pride that my kid was lukewarm about this book. She liked the ending, but thought the heroine a simpleton. Twilight, as a tale of teen-meets-vampire is not bad, if you set the bar so low the dogs can’t dig it back up. And I say this as someone who often likes popular fiction. I read Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. I feel appropriate awe at their skills and don't begrudge them a penny in their bank accounts. Twilight is so mediocre I can’t bestir myself to take the novel itself seriously. But that leaves the vexing question of the novel’s popularity.

Sometimes, a writer can tap into a fantasy so profound that mere competence and a tiny bit of innovation is all that's called for. Remember The Bridges of Madison County, a dreadful read that nonetheless effectively mined every mother’s fantasy of glorious and noble self-sacrifice. At its core, Twilight is every bodice-ripper you’ve ever read or heard of, even if no bodices actually get ripped. The story is classic: a little nothing of a heroine, in whose rib-cage beats the heart of a lioness, meets the equivalent of the lord of the manor -- in this case a divinely hot vampire who’s passing for human in senior high. Edward, isn’t just hot, he’s the guy you’d kick Adonis out of bed for. Whenever he looms, the heroine’s heart beats quicker (let’s just call her Polly because she’s so vacuous I can never remember her name). It would appear that Polly is having urges of a non-spiritual nature.

But if Twilight were just a bodice ripper dressed up with some internally consistent fictions about vampires, it would maybe net an $8,000 advance and a 3-week tour on the bookshelves before dying among the remainders. Clearly something else is going on.

If you read the gushing Amazon commentary, it would appear at first glance that the draw for Twilight is just Edward himself. Every chapter dwells longingly and lovingly on the muscles in his chest, his marble skin, his weirdly alternating eye coloration (which would suggest corneal cancer to me but those teachers in high-school don’t seem to be alarmed). Edward is so much the scene stealer, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of Twilight’s biggest fans are unable to remember Polly’s real name, too. It’s all Edward, all the time. He’s so gorgeous that in bright sunlight he actually sparkles.

(By the way, the sparkle means that Edward has to live in dim places. Cloudy places. Northern places. Sometimes, even cloudy and northern places. I think Meyer was trying to make some point about northern light being weaker than equatorial light. Fortunately, she caught herself before she might actually have to commit to a real-world fact, like the planet being tilted on its axis and revolving around the sun. I don’t think Meyers much cares for a mechanical view of the universe, and it shows).

Edward may be bonny but he has some very particular ways in which he is not a normal man and I think its these traits that have so beguiled the Twilight series’ adoring fans. First, there’s the way Edward fell in love with out heroine. Being without equal in beauty, and being decades old, urbane and knowledgeable, whatever would he see in the guileless and under-achieving Polly? Your ordinary bodice-ripper has to resort to some pretty fancy foot-work in order to persuade the reader that His Lordship would fall for the homely governess. In the vampire myth, Meyer has found a sledgehammer to crack that particular nut. She posits that vampire aesthetics are not the same as human aesthetics. Edward, we’re told, is very sensitive to smells and the heroine smells really, really good to him. Her scent, her fragrance – pick any olfactorial noun you like but “odor” -- has made him have feelings that are, well, of a non-spiritual kind. These feelings are notably involuntary and unconditional.

And Edward’s love is complicated by another invention of Meyer’s. Have you ever fallen in love and then awakened one day, a few weeks or months later, only to realize that the boy of your dreams is really a boob? What once seemed like his barely controllable passion for you now looks like the incessant pestering of someone who, just as your mother always warned you, has only one thing on his mind. That was great when you also had only one thing on your mind. But now you’ve moved on. And he’s a jerk. Well, Edward will never do that to Polly, not only because of the involuntary nature of his love -- it’s just a sniff thing -- but because his love must be chaste. You think Ironman is strong, but that’s nothing compared to Edward’s speed and ferocity. And just as Edward has no control over his taste for Polly’s scent, he can’t claim much control over his own strength. It seems that vampires, while licking the sweat off your brow, can accidentally put a tongue through your brain. It's all fun until someone puts out an eye. Our chiseled male vampire and our squishy female human will have to confine themselves to some pretty ginger cuddling. Forever.

And another thing about Edward’s love: it’s very, very protective. There’s a long paragraph, not long after he and Polly have declared their undying devotion, where the ever-clueless Polly, when confronted with a complicated seat-belt in Edward’s SUV, gives up trying to strap herself in (Polly is truly an idiot). Anyway, Edward, with the barest hint of tender exasperation, reaches over and buckles his girl in, tightly constraining her for the journey ahead: remind you of anything? If you’ve had a baby and then a toddler in your life, the image of the car-seat will be all too familiar. Thus we have a boyfriend whose love is more like that of a father: involuntary, unconditional, chaste and all-protective. And the innocent Polly is apparently not a near-woman in late adolescence, but a baby.

This novel is anything but the coming-of-age story that is at the heart of the best Young Adult novels. Twilight is instead the anti-Harry Potter. Rather than learning to grow in skill and in mastery of herself, Polly swoons into the arms of the most appalling regression fantasy.

It’s certainly understandable why the young women of today might want Twilight’s vacation from a hyper-sexualized culture. But not every vacation is healthy. When I was young, I was told that sex without benefit of clergy imperils the immortal soul, which meant that any girl -- funny how the focus was always on girls -- who succumbs to passion was basically killing herself, marking her soul for the clutches of Beelzebub. The message was very plain: have sex and you die! Meyers, in setting up a fictional universe where this is literally true, isn’t doing her young readers any favors. While Twilight might promote under-age chastity by raising a girl’s standards -- after Edward, that pimply, satchel-fannied dweeb plucking away at Guitar Hero is going to look pretty pathetic -- it says nothing about the basic merits of just growing up, of learning to say no not because Daddy wants it or because you fear the clutches of the Horned One, but because you’re a human being with goals, goals that can be put at risk by drugs, drink, or hormones, toxic ideologies or superstitious creeds. Poor Polly. Perpetual psychological infancy may ensure perpetual abstinence, but I think she pays too high a price.

Little Tours of Hell

I offer the title of this post with apologies to the splendid writer, Josephine Saxton. "Little Tours of Hell", one of Saxton's finest short-stories, tells of a distraught mother who, at some time in the 1970s, gets the crazy idea of going to Algeria with her family on a camping vacation. Although Algeria had some tourist-friendly and very cheap campgrounds in those days, it was still, well, Algeria. The wine sucked, the food was scarce, and the climate was disgraceful. The story is the sad tale of a visit to the ladies' facility provided by the campgrounds. The heroine hopes to have a quiet and private moment, but discovers that the "toilet" is a filthy, brimming hole. While squatting over this Dante-esque nightmare, the clasp on her sandal gives way and the shoe promptly drops into the swill. The heroine looks down and groans. Remember, this is the 70s. The local bazaar has gourds, not cheap flip-flops from Wal-Mart. Our heroine can now either go barefoot on the hot sand or she can fish her sandal out of the mire. She walks away in the stinking shoe, the other campers glowering at her for her little groan of dismay -- the British on holiday can despise the camper without any pluck. The heroine laughs madly, grimly, when she catches sight of an enormous scorpion, stinging itself to death. It is the perfect metaphor for the never-perfect vacation.

So let me say what, about my "vacation", has brought me to this recollection of a much-loved but nearly forgotten short-story I read three decades ago. It's the motherflusteringblasted weather here! Yes, it's a beautiful 82 degrees. Yes, the breezes are lovely. But the Wee Cottage is too damned energy efficient. The house holds onto heat the way an old maid in church holds onto gas. The feeble little window units make more noise than coolth. I thrash the sheets all night. I pray for release. I'm making an unscheduled trip to Texas, so I can just collect my strength and loll about in some A/C for awhile. This is an awful thing for me to do, me, a greenie and a bunny hugger. But I don't care. If the planet tilts 90 degrees from everything and sinks into a black hole as a result of my defection, I'll pop a cold one and whistle a tune. Because I'M GOING HOME!

At least for a few days. Jesse and I had a splendid afternoon at Sagamore Hill, which was Teddy Roosevelt's winter palace while he was in office. The best part was a little wooded walk down to a pebbled beach on Long Island Sound. The water was actually fairly clear and not too cool. And there was no one around. Any beach that Americans have to walk more than half a mile to is bound to be beautifully private (for what we are becoming see Wall-E. Don't read this, just go see it. I may go see it again to teach myself not to whine about the Wee Cottage's amazing capacity for heat retention.)

Our walk to the beach was followed by a great lunch in Oyster Bay Cove's 'Bakery Cafe'. I'm not sure why they chose so generic a name for their establishment, but the salt and pepper shaker was certainly unique.

The drive to and from Sagamore Hill was surreal. I thought Cold Spring Harbor was impossibly upper-crust, but at least Cold Spring's mega-mansions vaguely suggest the kind of money that someone might have earned. But Oyster Bay Cove, the next enclave, challenges the whole notion of just desserts. Off the main road is an endless stream of 'Private Roads' with minatory signs to warn off the idle tourist. The estates have gone from the miserly 5 acres at Cold Spring to so many acres you could train an army of jihadis back in those groves. In Oyster Bay, you can't imagine any occupation, other than 'Founder of Microsoft', that justifies the whispering towers one glimpses behind the massive oaks. Free-born smarties, making their own money in their own lifetimes just don't earn this kind of lucre. No keen engineer or tireless plastic surgeon, working 24-7 on boob-reduction could explain such placid excess. At least I don't think so, not from the quotes I've been getting :)

Daughter Jesse paddling in Teddy Roosevelt's beach

Coldsmith Family Values

We're not Happy until You're Not Happy

Long Island: we're still here. We still miss friends, house, family, dogs. And Central Market. And Mexican food. But whenever I'm down, I just go looking for someone who is truly miserable and then I feel better. Let me explain by digressing further.

Last Halloween, my then twelve-year-old daughter, Jesse, upon hearing the door bell go off, scooped up the platter of healthy crudites that the adults were eating and appeared at the door first, offering the veggies to the astonished children. This was hardly the Kandy Korn they'd been demanding. After torturing the kids a bit, Jesse brought out the candy and sent them on their way. Her smile was as big as the one in this picture ( we were waiting for the ferry to take us from Port Jefferson to Connecticut).

Mike, my husband and a reluctant expert on Coldsmith Family Values, announced after Jesse's return from the front door that somewhere her grandfather must be smiling. Jesse's giddiness was another example of the Coldsmith family motto: We're not happy until you're not happy. My dad's love of tormenting others expressed itself mildly, but frequently. He was the kind of dad who would wait until dark to send his kids out to get the trash. Then he'd sneak into the bushes and jump out just when we'd convinced ourselves that there was nothing to fear. Or if we were watching a scary movie, he'd have us hide our eyes until it got really intense and then he'd tell us to drop the pillow. It was safe to look up, he'd insist. Really. Of course, we'd drop the pillow or afghan just in time to see the monster devour the unsuspecting scientist or whatever. Of course, these moments always ended in gales of laughter. After the initial terror had passed.

My memories of the Coldsmith Motto came floating to the top when, a few days ago, I found myself holding my sides while trying to complete my morning Olympic walk, a walk that sometimes takes me into one of the more affluent parts of Long Island. Pricey neighborhoods tend to make for less traffic and Cold Spring Harbor provides a positively monastic sort of walk. To get an idea of just how affluent the 'hood is, consider the shabby abode in this photograph. I don't know how those people hold their heads up.

So I was on my morning walk, heart pumping, headphones on, listening to talking heads. Dressed in dry-core running shorts from K-Mart, I'm sure I looked frightful, but hardly criminal. As I passed yet another sprawling mansion, then another, the thought came to me: "You know, wouldn't it teach me a lesson to see something completely unexpected, like a bunch of non-Caucasian kiddies and their white nanny tossing footballs in the road? This is New York, after all. It's cutting edge."

Well, that's not what I actually saw when the next mansion hove into view. Yes, it was three decidedly Nordic kiddies playing in the 'driveway' (something you or I would refer to as a 'country lane' given the size of the estate). And, governing the three kiddies, was a decidedly non-Nordic nanny, herself within a few feet of a non-Nordic housekeeper bringing the trash-cans in.

Maybe the housekeeper didn't like my pitying look. She looked to be in her 50s and hauling those cans up her to her employer's Way Big House could not be easy. She was not touched by my sympathy. Instead, she glared at me like I was the town pedophile, coming to scope out the best time to scoop up the kiddies. I ignored her and continued on my merry way. Two-hundred yards later, I glanced behind me to make sure no one was barreling down in his Lexus. The housekeeper had by now abandoned her chore and was standing in the middle of the road, glowering down at me as if I could not be trusted to quit the area. Before I even had time to think about it, I waved frantically, with a maniacal grin. She seemed somewhat chastened but I wasn't satisfied. I started dancing a jig, hopping from foot to foot like the Mad Leper of Jerusalem.

It took me some time to explain my elation to myself. But it hit me. I'm a Coldsmith. Clearly, the housekeeper wasn't happy. If you can bring a little misery or at least self-doubt to a complete stranger, so much the better! The first Coldsmith to arrive to these shores in 1770, a German Pietist named Johannes Kaltschmitt, would have called it 'schadenfreude'. And I want to recommend it to everyone. Whenever I'm low, I think about that housekeeper, or my dad's leaps from the bushes, or my daughter and her veggies for trick-or-treaters. For us, that'll have to do as the circle of life.

The Madwoman in the Lighthouse

Even Texas Robins flee the heat

Sorry for the darkness of this picture. Mother Robin got quite irate at my flash and I didn't dare try again. She has nested outside the Wee Cottage, she and her three chicks, not ten feet from our door. Further research showed that, whatever Texans may think, she is not a Texas Robin, but an American Robin. The birds pause for a week or so in Texas every year, before deciding that Hell comes soon enough to us all and then breezing their way up to pleasanter climes.

Fiber Artists Rock

Long Islanders talk about the Montauk peninsula, it's two centuries old lighthouse and its crashing waves in gushing terms. I'm happy to report that the enthusiasm is well deserved. And visiting Montauk provided one of those Teaching Moments for my daughter and I. When we walked into the museum part of the lighthouse, the male docent was talking about some woman with an evident lump in his throat. "She was in her 90s when she passed away a few years ago," he said. "How I wish I could have met her."

Another Great Woman Hidden from History? I thought. Well, she didn't cure the pox or invent quantum mechanics, but Giorgina Reid apparently did save the Montauk lighthouse and peninsula. An Italian immigrant who had been a textile designer, she retired with her husband to a small cabin by the sea, not far from Montauk. Within a few years, the beach at the foot of their cabin was eroded away by the steady grind of the Atlantic. Without any background in civil engineering, Reid came up with a terracing process, which she later patented, for saving her own beach front. The process, which came out of her experiences growing up in Italy, where those gardening geniuses have been terracing hillsides for millenia, became the source of her book, "How to Hold Up a Bank". She approached the Coast Guard with her ideas and stayed in their face until they basically did what she wanted, reversing their own plans to simply demolish the lighthouse. The Coast Guard's own attempts to stem the erosion had failed. The peninsula is healthy today, thanks to Reid's efforts. Her tombstone is engraved with the words, "Keeper of the Light".

The waves crashing at Montauk, against the boulders that Giorgina Reid made the Coast Guard haul to the foot of the peninsula:


Hydrangea madness

If we do end up living in the north east, I'm going to grow beauties like these: