I AM TIRED OF…

Restaurants that are so noisy, you have to shout at your dinner companion to be heard.

Aggressive salespeople who attack me the moment I enter a store.

Buying produce from fancy food stores, only to open packages of rancid strawberries, mealy tomatoes and tasteless, mushy  blueberries.

Politicians who are genuine clowns

Donald Trump, who is the Clown Prince of Clowns. He doesn’t only act like a clown. He looks like a clown.

Men who repeatedly deny allegations of sexual harassment and illicit affairs,  when they know every allegation is fact.

A culture that pays unlimited attention to Clowns like Trump, the Kardashians, Bethany Frankel, Herman Cain and Mario Batali

Selfishness

Pedestrians who push their way through the crowded streets of Manhattan.

Customer service reps who have no earthly idea what good service means.

I CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF…

The Antiques Roadshow

Meeting new FOFs who are doing exciting new things with their lives

A good night’s sleep

Seeing my kids being happy with themselves and their lives

My nephew Max’s passion for jazz

The friendships of my sisters

Really clever humor

Kind people

Relaxing at home after working 11 hours straight

Combinations of beautiful colors, no matter where they appear…in fabrics, bouquets, packages, paintings, the sky, jewelry

It really saddens me that no one ever goes on blind dates anymore. We can check out almost anything–about  almost anyone–with  a click of the mouse.  My FOF sister, Shelley, met her husband, in 1970, through a computer dating service.  You filled out an application (no essays, psycho-babble and mindless questions about how many martinis you slurp in a 12-hour period) and some gargantuan computer spit out names and phone numbers of potential mates.  Photos not included.  When Shelley opened the door to greet Rusty for their first date, neither of them had the foggiest idea what the other looked like. That was part of the fun and mystery. Even if there weren’t an instant spark, they’d still go on the date and be forced to get to know one another. What a unique concept today: Getting to know someone.

Pages of photos on Facebook, essays on eHarmony, and countless other facts (and fiction) unearthed by Google don’t a person make. We are the sum of our parts and our faces and bodies are only parts of the picture.  “One of our teachers told us that our generation is illiterate, but visual,” said a 26-year-old friend. Indeed, twenty and thirty somethings astound me when they look at one tiny photo and pronounce: “He/she is not my type!”

Monet's Water Lilies

“You can decide whether someone is physically appealing to you by looking at his photo, but it won’t measure your attraction to him,” said Sara, FOF’s wise editor. Think about it: Have you ever met a stunning person who has nothing to say?  B-O-R-I-N-G. You can look at a thing of beauty just so long.  That’s why people don’t stand in front of a Degas or Monet painting, staring at it for hours on end.  Conversely, someone whose photo doesn’t turn you on might captivate you with his wit, wisdom, charm, charisma and niceness.

If only we understood when we were young what matters most.

Famous author, Joan Didion, was interviewed on TV this weekend about her new book, Blue Nights, a memoir about her adopted daughter, Quintana, who died from pancreatitis in 2005, at age 39. I bought the book and read it in a day since it’s a short work. I like the way FOF Joan writes. Her concise sentences paint vivid images, such as the LA fog obscuring her Malibu driveway; Quintana’s nightmares about “The Broken Man,” an evil repairman who had come to lock her in the garage, and the 66 little dresses the baby received as presents.

Joan with daughter Quintana and husband John on Malibu in 1976

Although Joan is a brilliant writer, her book leaves me wanting to know much more about her relationship with Quintana, indeed, about Quintana herself.  Joan writes about her grief, but I don’t feel her loss.  I remember the moving story of Eric, a 17-year-old diagnosed with leukemia, that was written by his mother, Doris Lund.  My heart went out to her and to her dying son. That book was written from the heart; Joan’s seems written from somewhere else—perhaps the brain.  It intellectualizes her tragedy, her concern about her current physical and mental states, what happens when Quintana learns the identity of her “biological” mother.  I wanted to be moved more, but I’m not sure why.

Joan 2011

The worst tragedy that can befall us is the loss of a child.  Joan is most powerful when she writes about losing, not her daughter, but “that sense of the possible.”

“One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day’s mail with real enthusiasm—maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to staying alive—yet the next day we are walking uptown on Madison past Barney’s and Armani or on Park past the Council on Foreign Relations and we are not even glancing at their windows. One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor’s office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the same red sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing. The sun damage inflicted when we swam off the raft in our twenties against all advice is only now surfacing (we were told not to burn, we were told what would happen, we were told to wear sunscreen, we ignored all warnings): melanoma, squamous cell, long hours now spent watching the dermatologist carve out the carcinomas with the names we do not want to hear.

“Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions of the medication that promises to replace the bone lost to aging.

“Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions and wondering why the Vitamin D we thought we were accumulating by not wearing sunscreen failed to realize its bone-building potential.”

I am sorry that Joan lost her daughter and, two years before, her husband of many decades, writer John Gregory Dunne. I am also sorry that Joan feels she’s losing that “sense of the possible.” That is another tragedy for her.

I started to clean out my co-op that will again be my home. My daughter has been living there for the past nine years, but she and her husband moved uptown the day before Thanksgiving, so I’m moving back.

Rediscovering what I had left behind when I left the apartment brought back sweet and bittersweet memories.

I found a box that held lots of photos of Edgar and me, at his house in Connecticut when we first met; on a Mississippi River cruise on an authentic steamboat; at the famous Ascot horse race, which takes place at the famous track, about an hour from London. I even found the hat I wore to the race. Edgar and I had many great times together for 12 years, even though it ended badly because he was cheating with a thrice-divorced neighbor (after cheating with his secretary, his travel agent, and goodness knows who else.) It ended especially badly for Edgar, because he died, at 67, after suffering a stroke. (If he had lived he could have run for President.)

 

Edgar was getting a bit jowly and I was still cute and perky HAHA!

 

 

I also found a box of letters from my dad to me when I was an unhappy freshman at Syracuse University in 1964.  Dad wrote tomes of advice to me, trying to buoy my spirits, but nothing worked. I left Syracuse after my first semester. I hated being away from home; the place was too social for me; the weather was hideous (especially when I had to go clear across the campus in the freezing weather after a swimming class. My wet hair would turn to icicles.)

A 47-year-old letter from my dad, when I was a hysterical freshman at Syracuse University.

I found a silver link bracelet, with tiny, round colored stones, that I didn’t love a decade ago, but love now. It’s tarnished, so I need to get silver polish to shine it up.

I found a stack of oversized pottery dinnerware plates, in beautiful colors, that I always adored and forgot I owned.

A pretty pottery plate

I am not a hoarder (I often go through binges when I throw out bags of possessions), but I’m thrilled that I saved some of the treasures I unearthed. It is stimulating to recall memories, even if some of them are a bit unnerving.