Lately I've talked to a lot of callers who voice the fear of being hurt again.
Most of us have dated (or been) a person who tried to make a new love pay for the transgressions of a previous love. How often we hear (or say), "I'm scared of being hurt."
Being the hurt person who hangs this over the head of another can feel darn good. It seems to give us the upper hand. And best of all, it seems to give us all of the benefits of being controlling without having to wear any nasty labels. We're not control freaks; we're victims.
This kind of behavior is the easy out, isn't it? Telling a person to respect you not because you deserve respect, but because someone else hurt you.
When we are healthy, we don't have to perceive ourselves as victims in order to feel deserving of respect and kindness.
It takes courage and confidence to say, "Love me because I deserve it," instead of, "Love me because someone else did not."
And a side benefit is this: When you don't market yourself as a victim, you don't attract people who are looking for one.
Remember Rosemary Clooney, one of the best singers of her generation? Not only was she the quintessential 1950s girl-next-door, she was the quintessential 1970s middle-aged woman. She dumped her cheating husband, reunited with the first love of her life, and found new respect and worth in her career.
She was a very funny woman. Her children tell this story about her.
One of her teenaged sons, a wholesome fellow who later went on to become a minister, brought an obviously gold-digging young woman to his mother's holiday party.
Clooney rolled up to the girl, glass in hand, looked her up and down and said, "Where I come from there are only two kinds of women who wear red shoes - and honey, you ain't no Spanish dancer."
It seems to me that at every stage of a woman's life, there is always some smarty-pants guy who says, "Let me let you in on a little secret about how men think..."
This always makes me laugh, because, back in the day, who dated more straight men - me, or the men who said this to me? I knew a little something about men, thank you very much.
Now, this isn't going to be an anti-men rap. In fact, I am going to sing their praises. Men have taught me the following things:
It is perfectly okay to look at a situation and ask, "What's in this for me?"
It is perfectly okay to do the things that make me happy, and to avoid doing the things that do not.
Love is supposed to feel good.
In short, men taught me, by example, how to enjoy my life. I saw them do exactly what they wanted to do, avoid what they didn't want to do, and seek people and experiences that made them feel good. Put in its proper context, that's a fine recipe for happiness!
The men who tried to make me suffer never rewarded me in any truly rewarding way. Finally getting that phone call from a guy after weeks of waiting for it didn't feel like a reward for having suffered. It felt like an acting class. Once communication was restored, I had to watch every word I said (for fear of saying the wrong thing and chasing him away). It didn't feel like a real conversation, one in which I enjoyed myself. (Now that I think of it, it felt more like an etymology exam.)
What was in it for me? Tension, waiting, self-doubt, jealousy? How many men do you know who think they deserve feeling that uneasy? And who among those men would tolerate the experience for long?
I guess what I'm trying to write is this: Men made an honest woman of me. They taught me to speak my truth. They taught me that I was never going to have a solid relationship as long as I pretended that I didn't want one. They taught me the difference between moving on, and the supposedly deadly Fear of Abandonment. Guys left me; I didn't die. I left a few guys; they recovered.
So to the men in our personal lives, and in the media, who wink, "Let me let you in on a little secret about how men think..." I say, Honey, save it. We wrote the book.
But sometimes we need to re-read it.
"How can I get you to stop doing that?" is one my favorite lines from one of my favorite TV shows,
The West Wing. I think it is great romantic advice. Here is why.
In the episode I'm referring to, the president's press secretary is being coached on how to present herself in a trial, on the witness stand.
The attorney asks her, "C.J., is there a clock in this room?"
C.J. glances around, then at her watch, and answers, "No, but it is 12:00."
The attorney sighs, "C.J., how can I get you to stop doing that?"
In other words, C.J. has not been asked for the time, she has been asked whether there is a clock in the room.
I think sometimes women offer up too much information at the beginning of a love relationship. A man can walk away from a second or third date with almost everything he needs to know to keep the advantage in a relationship. He will know just how long he can wait before he calls again. He knows how long it might take for the woman to get bored, give up and move on - and he knows whether she is the type to issue phony ultimatums about moving on. He knows how tolerant she is, and what her boundaries are, if she has any.
On the other hand, I have met men who are downright masterful at withholding information - even inconsequential information. It's just habit!
I once asked a guy, "Where did you get that great hat? At Macy's?"
He said, "No." And that was that.
Some women might have said, "No, I got it at Marshall Field's, and at half price!"
I suggest that the next time a man asks you a question, just answer it.
Will you be home on Tuesday?
No.
Did you do anything on the 4th of July?
Yes.
Do you have a boyfriend?
Why?
Be like C.J. Gregg, and see what happens when you're not the press secretary for your relationship.
If you ever want to be told to give up on a man and move on, go out with your girlfriends and drink margaritas.
"Move on" is easy advice to dish out, but not easy to follow. That's why my Tarot cards and I like to take a more sensitive, thoughtful approach. Why do we become preoccupied with men who ignore us for months on end? Why do the men reappear? Why do we take them back, and follow the same old rules about not mentioning commitment? Why do we go back to pretending that we women don't need love, attention and nurturing?
On the other hand, why do some men behave the way they do? Why are we supposed to believe that they're scared, and to honor that fear scrupulously?
Well, part of this dance is the fear of abandonment. The stakes for displeasing certain men are unreasonably high. When we expect accountability - accountability for anything from a promised phone call to a lifetime commitment, we can be threatened with complete, unexplained, unexpected abandonment.
Why do some men behave this way? And why are we drawn to this behavior? Sure, it's the behavior of only particular men and particular women, but we should consider societal influences, too. In the media, romantic comedies involve, by definition, a conflict, an estrangement and a reconciliation. (As they used to say in Hollywood, "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl.")
Too, I've read where women are being called "girls" well into adulthood again; calling grown men "boys" has always been popular.
But some men mature past this push/pull behavior. They realize that society has sold them a fantasy in which they are supposed to stay alone, yet never feel lonely. They begin to reject society's pressure to avoid commitment at all costs.
And some women mature into a marvelous sense of entitlement. They yearn to unleash their true selves, to expect and accept love. They are no longer excited by the erratic affections of the withholding man. In fact, they become bored.
It's a matter of separating the men and women from the boys and girls. A matter of recognizing those who will never mature, and those who will embrace adulthood with the assurance that they have the right to want, need and desire. That's where the cards can offer insight and guidance beyond a sympathetic shoulder and a margarita.
Happy Mothers' Day!
Every Mothers' Day, I reflect on my mother, who died when I was in my twenties (and she was 62).
Today, with obesity as a national epidemic, I marvel at how, when I was a kid, my mother kept me slender. Why, she was a pioneer in weight control!
For example, she invented the concept of portion control. However, she called it, "Get your hands out of that potato chip bag, and just put a few chips in a bowl. There are six other people living in this house, you know!"
She also invented what is now known as "mindful eating." She called it "Dinnertime! Get in here and turn off that damn TV."
At the table, she encouraged us to speak freely, but she steered clear of even slightly stressful topics. We didn't speak of schedules, grades, or work.
She taught us that food was to be enjoyed in a calm state of mind - not that food created a calm state of mind.
She started almost every meal with the best little salad she could afford: iceberg lettuce and sliced tomato.
When she served a dessert, she very cleverly taught a life lesson about choice. As she built each serving of strawberry shortcake, she would ask each of us, "Would you like a cake? And strawberries? And whipped cream, too? And a bit of sugar?"
My tall, athletic brothers ate the dessert heartily, and she didn't judge or comment. But as she built the serving for her bookish, less athletic daughter, she said, "Rose? Just strawberries for you? Or something more?"
This made me feel different, and special. I was the purist, I thought. I alone liked just strawberries. "Oh, yes, Mom, " I said, in on our special secret. "Just strawberries for me." I was 20 years old before I realized that I loved strawberry shortcake! She had brainwashed me!
We relaxed and ate slowly. "Chew, chew, chew!" she would joke, "Like a choo-choo train!"
Her personal sense of what was attractive instilled good manners in us. She said, "Yech! Eat or drink, not both at once. Make up your mind. Don't wash things down. Relax."
And speaking of washing things down, Mom's being a bit of a snob helped, too. She thought soda pop bottles were tacky. It was her dinner table, not a bus stop bench. No Pepsi logos! Consequently, we drank water, or milk.
Of course, there was a fair amount of teaching table manners - how to hold a fork, how to break bread before we buttered it, how to pass salt by placing it in front of the person who asked for it, not handing it to him.
Exercise? Well, getting up and clearing the table got us started, and once we were on our feet, she shooed us out to the backyard to shoot baskets. As we got older, we went off to our jobs, or to a play rehearsal, or a baseball practice.
And we always had an open invitation to accompany our dad on one of his very long after-dinner walks. Dad had replaced his ferocious smoking habit with an equally ferocious walking habit. Long after the smoke cleared, the walking stayed. Sometimes all of us trooped along, sometimes just one of us. Sometimes Dad walked alone.
But all of us got up and moved.
She made a point of never rewarding us with food. But I remember one food-related reward. After she saw my one-girl play in the basement, she presented me with a Tony award made out of a peanut butter lid and brown paper: "Best Actress."
But peanut butter itself as a reward? Never.
When people stopped by for a cup of coffee, my mother gave them a great cup of coffee - but not coffee and cake. When someone stopped by for a drink, she gave them good Scotch - but not a lot of salty snacks. Her displays of hospitality didn't involve abundance.
This didn't seem unusual to me until I was a teenager, when attitudes about food were becoming skewed in the United States. Mom and I went to a bridal shower together. The women said to their hostess, "Oh, I hate you for making all of this delicious food! I shouldn't eat this! It's bad. I'm bad for eating it. You're terrible!"
Mom and I looked at each other: Bad? Terrible? Hatred?!
My mother shrugged, "Eat it and enjoy it, or don't eat it and shut up."
As I battle my middle-age spread, I find myself going back to the simple lessons my mother taught me as a child: Don't take too much. Enjoy fruits and vegetables, and take it easy on the processed stuff. Sit up and pay attention to your food. Enjoy it.
Relax and eat; you deserve it.
In a previous blog entry, I declared my love for Judy Garland. Her talent, lightning-fast wit and individuality as a person and as a performer have always impressed and moved me. In the years since her death to an incautious overdose of drugs at the age of 47 in June of 1969, I came to admire her more and more, because the importance of her drug abuse had faded away for me. I was more interested in her talent, and the seemingly endless supply of movies, albums and radio and TV shows she left behind. Someone always seems to be discovering, restoring and re-releasing a new Garland treasure.
There are always new people discovering her from the ground up, of course, and their freshness to the Judy story can be heartbreaking to watch. They are delighted to find (on YouTube, for example), that the Dorothy of '"The Wizard of Oz" grew up to be a woman whose magnetism as a concert artist thrilled audiences and broke attendance records around the world. Then they post the inevitable comments: "She took drugs? She's dead? Really?"
Lately, Charlie Sheen's behavior has brought up some sad memories for me, and perhaps some other Judy fans. I remember Garland's last swing though the three late-night network talk shows. It was the holidays, six months before her death. She appeared shockingly thin, and she sometimes slurred her words, and had trouble making a point. She was always humorous and affectionate. But something was terribly wrong.
As one writer put it, she sometimes annoyed her public during her last years. She appeared on television either looking well, speaking well, or singing well - but never all three at once.
The talk show hosts - Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett - introduced her with glowing words and ridiculous expectations. Even a Midwestern kid like me knew that she wasn't going to live up to those introductions. She wasn't going appear robust and healthy and tear the roof off of the place, as she had at the Carnegie Hall in the early '60s. She wasn't going to tell her hilarious stories about performing in vaudeville, and making movies as a child, with her usual precision. Her enormous vocabulary wouldn't be as accessible; her impressions wouldn't be as uncanny. And we knew, of course, that the show's host wasn't going to ask, "What on Earth has happened to you?"
When she darted in front of the curtains after those introductions, we knew instantly that something was wrong - but exactly what? Her haunted, skeletal face appeared childlike, now that her pedal-to-the-metal lifestyle had burned away her her womanliness. Her hair was short and boyish. Her teeth seemed too big for her mouth. Her eyes, always huge, were bigger still. To the home audience, her appearance was shocking. Yet, because she had been so criticized for being overweight for much of her life, we had become used to people praising her for the slimness she began displaying in 1960. But now she was too thin. Much too thin. And we knew, in those pre-Oprah days, that the host wasn't going to ask her about this, either.
But the studio audiences, nostalgic for Dorothy, or the thirtyish dynamo who had dazzled audiences at Carnegie Hall, were caught up in the excitement of seeing Judy Garland in any condition. Audience members greeted her appearance with roaring delight. They knew the old stories, and laughed where the punchlines should have been. But we at home didn't know what to think, except that she seemed very ill. The less kind among us thought that she was drunk, or phony. After all, Judy herself had once said, "Sympathy is my business."
Her body seemed barely able to support the glittering, heavily-sequined pantsuit that she had been given (or had taken, depending upon which story you believe) from a movie from which she had been fired.
She sang/spoke her new songwriter boyfriend's latest song: "Please stay with me," she whispered hoarsely, "'til after the holidays, then we can say goodbye."
I would like to write, "How little we knew," but indeed, we knew we would probably be saying goodbye to Judy sometime soon. We didn't know everything, but we knew we were watching a human being in deep trouble.
It strikes me as sad that 41 years later, when another celebrity is helplessly and publicly spinning out to the end of his spool, we're still sitting here, thinking, He's drunk, he's addicted, he's playing on the public's sympathies. Or, he is really just acting - he's fine.
Surely we have learned enough about mental illness and drug addiction to realize that the man has had a break with reality. And, as Judy Garland said in the rages she spun into while alone and dictating her (ultimately unpublished) memoir into a tape recorder, "Fie! Fie!" on those who seek to exploit Sheen with their Tiger's Blood beverages and T-shirts bearing his nonsensical catch phrases. He needs help, not an endorsement deal.
When I say that I love Judy Garland. I mean, I love Judy Garland. After her singing, I love her humor best. She despaired as much, probably more, than the rest of us, but she managed to be hilarious. Here is one of my favorite Judy stories.
Jack Paar, who hosted the "Tonight" show in the early 1960s, stopped by Garland's California home to take her to lunch. He arrived at the appointed time, and the maid let him in.
While he waited for Judy to appear, a repossession company came to the house and took Garland's car. Later, some papers were delivered, which put Garland's house in jeopardy.
Finally, Judy joined Jack. The tiny woman was wearing, he wrote, a gigantic silk hat - a "voile sombrero." She was in very good spirits. "I'm ready! Let's go!"
Paar said, "For heaven's sake, Judy, we can't just walk out of here in the middle of all of this turmoil - your car, your house..."
Garland said, "Darling, behind every cloud is another cloud. Let's go to lunch!"
Oprah Winfrey has been touting a book called, "Women, Food and God," by Geneen Roth.
Now, I'm not much of an Oprah fan, nor have I bought into the zillion-dollar industry that is weight loss. However, I read this book, and one paragraph moved me mightily. Here it is:
"So many perfect girls were raised entirely without organized religion, and the majority of the rest of us experienced "spirituality" only in the form of mandatory holiday services with a big-haired grandmother.
...Overlay our dearth of spiritual exploration with our excess of training in ambition...and you have a generation of godless girls raised largely without a fundamental sense of divinity. In fact, our worth in the world has always been tied to our looks...not to the....miracle of mere existence."
The miracle of mere existence.
When I read this, I thought of my own spiritual upbringing, and its unique private quality. I never went to church with a "big-haired grandmother." I went alone.
When I was small, our family couldn't afford a car. We walked everywhere. My father walked to work very early in the morning, and I walked with him to school. When we parted ways to go to our separate destinations, I arrived at my Catholic school so early, it wasn't even open!
So I got into the habit of going to the church next door to my school, and enjoying the very brief weekday Catholic Mass. Every school day for eight years, I spent 20 quiet minutes alone in a small, modest, immaculate church. I don't know why, but I paid attention to the Mass. I read every day's short lesson. I listened. I thought about God. I prayed in a relaxed manner. No one dictated to me how I should feel or think about God, or how I should pray. God was my early morning friend. We had a private relationship, and a regular date.
Then, as an adolescent, I didn't understand why my peers said things such as "I hate my face/weight/thighs/hair." Hate, hate, hate. They hated so many things about themselves.
I cringed every time I heard the word "hate." I still do. Why would I hate myself? I needed myself. I accepted myself. I wondered why I felt this way, when my peers claimed to hate themselves.
Then, when I read that paragraph that book, I was given the answer. My love for God gave me a love for myself.
I can no more hate myself than I can hate God.
I have too much respect for the both of us.
Have you ever had a woman friend do something ridiculous with a man, and then lie to herself and you about it?
How about the woman who bought a cell phone for her negligent boyfriend, so she could call him and announce, "We're through!"?
I asked her why she did this, and she said, "Well...he has to have a phone."
If she were truly through with him, why would she care?
Doesn't it stand to reason that if you can spot a woman lying to herself, her boyfriend can, too?
I wonder how often a man hears, "It's over!" and thinks, "Oh. This again. Ho, hum. She will talk herself out of it and call me if I stop calling her." Then he spends time with friends, or another girl. When his girlfriend finally calls again, she doesn't dare mention what made her mad. He scared her by not calling her, and she is ready to snap back into line.
In that gray area between "I love you" and "We're through!" is what's known as a woman's feelings. It takes a lot of guts to proclaim, "I feel ignored, and I won't accept it," or, "I want us to be exclusive," or any of the other many emotions we feel in a relationship.
I think men sometimes depend on our sense of the dramatic, and our fear of expressing feelings that imply entitlement and deservingness. We're either all in or all out (or so we announce).
Make 'em do some of the work. Give them a problem to solve. Speak up.
You're entitled.
When Frank Sinatra died, people sent me sympathy cards.
I'm not kidding. That's how crazy I was, am, and have always been about Frank Sinatra. As a gag, I used to claim that Mr. Sinatra was my real father.
When I was a kid, I wrote and and sang a parody of the song "Witchcraft," in which I explained my logic.
When young and playing games
My mom, like lots of dames
Met Frank and that's why my name's
Sinatra
So there I was on May 14th, 1998, receiving phone calls from people expressing their sympathy for the loss of my father. Later I received hilariously serious cards. It was all great good fun.
And then, suddenly, my father died on May 29th. It was one of those strange losses where everything became instantly clear to me. For the first time in my life, I understood his intentions and his motivations. The arc of his life was as clear and as beautiful to me as a rainbow.
My friends were funny, saying, "Oh, not again! It's only been two weeks!"
My thoughts turned to the million funny little things that he had taught me. He wasn't very good on the big stuff, but he knew the little things. Never buy a green suit, he said, on a limited budget, because every Wednesday, you'll be the schmuck in the green suit.
Soon after my mother died, he married a stranger. These things happen to widowers. They spend one Saturday night alone and boom - they're married before the next weekend.
A few weeks after the wedding, we were sitting around the house, doing nothing, when Dad said, with characteristic exuberance, "I'm bored! Let's go dancing!"
I quickly agreed. My father had taught me to Jitterbug, Waltz, Charleston, Polka, and by getting me out on the floor as a kid, he had given me the confidence to dance any dance with anyone.
His new wife said, "Oh, no! No dancing! I don't know how to dance."
Dad stared at her for a long while and said, "You don't know how to dance? Why not? Didn't you have a dad?"
So Mr. Sinatra thought it was his obligation to teach everyone to appreciate American popular music, and my dad thought it was every father's obligation to teach his daughters to dance. Every May 29th, I miss them both a little more.
I love to eavesdrop, but only in restaurants, where every conversation is fair game.
Today I heard, but could not see, a woman in the next booth. She spoke incessantly, and I swear to you, I never heard her companion say a word. Her talkative friend's idea of socializing was going to a good restaurant with a good friend and talking endlessly and negatively about herself.
I heard the young woman say that she "hated" this about her body, and "hated" that about her personality, intelligence and talents. She went on to describe how anxious she was because she knew everyone stared at her because she looked like such an "idiot." After she warmed up, she started saying things that sounded scripted, rehearsed and stale: "I have always been the kind of person who is nervous around others because of the way I look and act. I have never fit in. I have always been the kind of person who can't take criticism because I already know what a dummy I am."
Listening to her made me think about the scripts we write for ourselves, and how as we recite them over and over, they become truer and truer.
It's kind of a corny, old-fashioned thing to say, but had that woman been talking about another woman, I would have thought she was a bully. As it was, she was talking about herself, and indeed, she was a bully.
All of us know people like my fellow diner. They're hoping to be contradicted in some magical way that will make everything suddenly okay. It's not enough for them to hear, "You're not a dummy!" Or, "Stop putting yourself down!" They're told these things every day. Admonishments are the elevator music of their lives.
When we're told to Face the Truth about ourselves, we look at our worst qualities. The Truth has really taken a bad rap over the last few decades. The Truth can also be positive. If our social interaction must include these little speeches in which we categorize ourselves, why not include our good qualities? For example, I happen to think that I'm a good singer. Saying so is boastful, so when the topic comes up, I'll announce that I am "musical." I can't paint, so I never mention that. Why would I? To put myself down? I don't make a big speech about what an untalented clod I am, and how I wish that I could paint, and how I tried to paint a few times and produced terrible canvases.
May I suggest that the next time you're applying your make-up for a night out, you think about all of your fine qualities, and how you can mention them modestly, if the topic comes up. Give it a try. "I'm a pretty good dancer," or, "I did well in school." Personally, I love to boast about being able to do the things other people boast about not being able to do.
"I can't cook!"
"Really? I can."
Anything! Think of any positive, interesting, funny thing about yourself and get out there and charm somebody. The author Truman Capote, once a very popular and charming party guest, used to call this, "Bringing a little something to the party."
(I forgot to mention that I finally got up and walked past the booth of Miss Negativity, and she was an extremely petite, absolutely beautiful young woman with long brunette hair. Her friend was a wrung-out, tired-looking lady who was concentrating much too intently on her salad.)
Lately, there has been a lot of talk in the media encouraging women to make lists. What kind of lists, you might ask? Shopping lists? "To do" lists?
Oh, no. Women are supposed to make lists of all of the qualities they want in a mate. One woman produced a list of 300 qualities! Honeh, I've never met a man who had 300 qualities!
The idea bugged me, but I couldn't figure out why. Finally, one day when my husband almost pulled a so-called "deal breaker," I realized why I objected to a Perfect Mate List.
It was because making a list takes the natural progression out of a relationship. In my own case, if my list had included "lavishly talented" and "not stingy," my artist husband and I would never have had a first date. I had always been attracted to talented men - musicians and writers, for example, so being attracted to a painter made sense. When we combined that with his appealing appearance and the fact that he dug me, we had what used to be called chemistry.
Later, when we weren't wearing our First Date Faces anymore, and it became apparent that he was cheap, his cheapness wasn't a deal breaker. As the years went on, that quality was inconvenient, but it still wasn't a deal breaker. Had generosity been on a list, his behavior would have been a deal breaker. As it was, his cheapness was a flaw in a person I loved and admired. Just a flaw.
The chemisty and love we had by then helped us to live with each other's flaws. Heaven knows what would have happened to me if he had had a list that read, "Not fanatically neat," or, "Must have an advanced degree," or, "Can't be a night person."
I think that some of the positive qualities that we look for in one another simply cannot be revealed on those dates that feel more like job interviews. And some of the negative qualities cannot be revealed until the other person feels safe and relaxed.
I guess it comes down to dating instead of interviewing.
I watch reality shows, and I don't apologize for it. As I've explained before, I live in a tiny mountain town; I have to grab my entertainment where I can.
So I've found the new season of "The Real Annoying Housewives of New York City" deadly dull. We're three episodes in, and so far the housewives haven't kicked up enough dust to warrant breaking out the Pledge. The "controversies" involve two women who have lost all confidence in themselves because someone insulted them. They're defensive and weepy, and they repeat the childish insults like mantras. They cry to their husbands, their friends, the butcher, the guy at the newsstand...
Crying? Over an insult? I tutor fourth graders who shrug off a dozen insults before lunch! I did it myself the day a young tutor asked me if I had a grandchild in class. (She is out of the hospital now, and has dropped the lawsuit.)
The thing that gives me pause is this: Whenever one New York Housewife insults another, the insulted woman says, "I thought you were my friend!" She immediately doubts the validity of the entire friendship, and puts the relationship, and her friend, on the chopping block.
How ignorant of the human condition, to imagine that a friend who has made a mistake was never your friend at all. And how insecure.
Whatever happened to the idea of true friends who simply screwed up? And friends who offer apologies - I mean real apologies. (Don't you love it when someone is obviously livid, and her friend says, "I'm sorry if I offended you"?) And whatever happened to truly accepting apologies? I can't stand to hear people say, "I'll forgive, but I'll never forget." Where is the forgiveness in that nasty sentence?
The New York Housewives' behavior made me think of two women I knew. I had two elderly aunts, sisters, who owned a successful catering service all their lives. They knew everyone in their world, and threw fabulous parties. They went to a lot of parties, too. I envied the social life they had in their seventies! These girls worked hard, and played even harder.
One time, one of the sisters was invited to a posh party, and the other was not. She told me, "I was hurt for a little while, but now I'm over it." And she meant it. No bitching, no grudges, no badmouthing of the hostess. She moved on with a smile.
She didn't say, "I thought we were friends!" And she didn't try to blackmail her sister into not attending the party. She knew who and what she was, and there wasn't a snotty hostess in the world who could make her believe she was anything less.
I thought about those resilient old girls. Whatever happened to getting over things? When did that become unfashionable? When did we start waiting for the forgiveness fairy to tap us with her wand, and magically take away the offense and the regret?
When did we stop saying, "I'm sorry," and "Oh, forget about it."?
I don't know. I'm just thinking too much about a TV show.
Sorry.
Did anyone ever teach you how to drink? I mean, how to drink sensibly? How to drink like a responsible adult?
No one ever taught me. No one ever said a word to me about alcohol. Booze was a complete mystery. When I first began drinking as a teenager, I thought everyone drank until they blacked out. Honestly, I thought that was the alcohol experience. I took foolish risks, and experienced hangovers that I'm surprised didn't kill me. Thank the good Lord I couldn't afford a car.
Then I saw some old "Thin Man" movies, in which the characters Nick and Nora Charles drank, and became charming and adorable. Hmm. What was this, I wondered. They don't black out. They don't get sick. What kind of booze are they drinking?
So I stopped altogether. Obviously, I had no idea how to drink. Apparently, like driving a stick - it was something I just could not do.
Many years later, when I was middle-aged and a good cook, having a little red wine with my fettucini sounded like a nice idea. I had a glass. Tasty! I had a second glass, and felt relaxed and cozy. Then, halfway through a third glass, I developed a headache. I also thought I was absolutely fascinating, which was a big clue to my altered state.
Eureka! I had discovered my limit. Two glasses of wine, preferably one. It seemed so simple. I should have known my limit when I was 14. I wished someone had sat me down many years before and explained how booze works. The cost, the risks, the right way to enjoy it. Now I have a glass of wine once in a while, always in good company, and with a meal. Booze is a friendly, harmless presence in my life. It doesn't threaten my behavior, my health or my finances. It isn't the deadly villian it was when I was a kid.
I think today's parents are doing their kids a great service by talking with them about booze. It's a subject that should be filed under "Personal Safety" as far as I'm concerned, right after "Bicycle Helmets" and before "Knife Skills" there should be "Booze Talk."