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.