By susan fishman orlins
Recently, while sipping breakfast coffee, I commented on a New York Times article about, among other things, connecting with friends,“The Flight From Conversation” by MIT professor Sherry Tunkle. Her first paragraph goes like this:
“We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.”
Though I am guilty of sacrificing conversation for mere email connection, I too lament the flight from conversation. I commented that being at my laptop feeds the pleasure center of my brain, as any addictive substance would. After I have been out for the day, my heart races to return home and check my email.
I am not part of the walk-and-text culture. I’m barely part of the text culture. As a writer, who lives alone, it’s my laptop that has become one of my best friends.
I still talk on the iPhone, mostly to dear ones who live afar. Indeed, those iPhone convos are more satisfying and memorable than email.
All of this makes me think of my friend, Louisa, who—like me—lives alone; she makes it a point to call at least one person every day.
Louisa saw my comment in on the New York Times Website and emailed me her system for keeping in touch. Fascinated by how effective and detailed her method is, I want to share it with you:
My rule is I have to speak on the phone to at least one non-family-member friend every day. If a friend calls me and I answer the phone, that works.
A few resolutions of the gray areas:
(1) Speaking into someone’s voice mail fulfills the requirement. However, I allow voice mail messages for no more than three days a week.
(2) When outside the US or Canada, I’m excused.
(3) Colleagues count as friends only if I feel close to them and they have voluntarily given me their cell phone numbers. I have four people in that set.
(4) If I do more than one call a day I can carry over the second call for the next day’s credit, but I can do a carryover no more than once a week.
Call me crazy but it works. One of the best lifestyle decisions I’ve ever made.
On a related note, one evening I was at the symphony by myself and the woman next to me, another solo type, noticed I was on the iPhone all the time. She too said that devices are killing the art of conversing in public. I wanted to say that I wasn’t so bad because I was Googling bits of classical music trivia I wanted to know (Is Renee Fleming older than I? What operas did Handel write?), rather than typing emoticons to disembodied friends. But is that really better than texting or Facebooking? No.
Louisa’s method of connecting appeals to me not only for its quirkiness, but also for the human contact it provides; I am a pack animal, who—in addition to living alone—works alone. Still, I worry about keeping up with everyone I care about, a virtual impossibility without email.
 My own rules for human contact are similar to Louisa’s, except I try to get together with someone in person each day: for a walk, dinner, therapy.
Sometimes I become overwhelmed with all those I’d like to remain in touch with; a mental picture emerges of my arms filled with more friends than I can hold, some spilling over, as if I were trying to carry more apples than the skirt of my apron could hold. When I have nothing scheduled, I walk with a friend via cell phone. (Does anyone talk on the phone without doing something else at the same time?)
There are those who are content with a handful of close friends. But I’m greedy. I hoard confidants, the way I’ve saved every letter I’ve ever received, except once when I was cleaning a closet more than a dozen moves ago and threw away armfuls of mail, which I regret.
I reflect on the dear friends I have accumulated since my divorce. Were I still married, I never would have had time to cultivate those friendships. Take Louisa, for example. We met biking on a Backroads trip, something I started doing after dissolving my nuptial vows.
How do you manage to keep in touch? Anyone out there who single tasks while talking on the phone?
Check out my articles on Home Goes Strong:
By susan fishman orlins
With the kerfuffle about Ann Romney having been a stay-at-home mom, I thought I would chime in about stay-at-home moms.
There is no question that it is a luxury to have even had the choice. When my first daughter was born, I was a stockbroker for Morgan Stanley, making more money than my lawyer husband. I began working at home for a few months, keeping my options open, even as I felt in my gut that I just wanted to stay home with my baby.
My husband thought I should continue working. It wasn’t about the money and—funny-peculiar enough—I don’t recall discussing with him why he thought I should continue working.
Was it because my having a big job elevated him in other people’s eyes? That’s what happened with a boyfriend I had after divorcing that husband. Boyfriend Daniel took me to meet his elderly uncle, with whom he was very close.
“What should I say you do?” Mr. Daniel Wrong asked me.
Really? I was doing what I do now, writing, but at that time my free-lance articles appeared sporadically in print, unlike now, when they appear on the Internet three days a week (on my blog and on Home Goes Strong).
He was embarrassed that I did not have a more impressive label than free-lance-writer-who-publishes-occasionally.
Back to stay-at-home Sue. Half-heartedly, I pondered the question of going back to the office. The stay-home deal got sealed one day when I received a visit from a friend, Rita.
“You can always go back to work if you want after your kids start school,” said Rita. “But you will never get these early years back again.”
Of course I’m worried that someone will read that and feel bad, someone who doesn’t have the choice I had. Rita’s words were obvious, but hearing them from her made my choice clear.
That said, plenty of people who did have the choice were happier working than sorting socks and playing Happy Happy Hippo all day.
I stayed home for myself, not for my kids, though in later years they said they were glad I had been there. I know adults who feel the same way about the nannies who raised them.
The best reason I could think of to go back to work was for cocktail parties. When asked what I did, I would be able to respond with something other than the conversation stopper, “I’m a mom.”
Just like, in my opinion, the best thing about going to a name-brand college or university is that, for the rest of your life, when people ask, you get to say “I went to Name Brand.” It’s a short cut way of saying “I’m smart.” You don’t have to work at letting people know.
Similarly, a stay-at-home mom is assumed [fill-in-the-blank] till proven interesting.
I’d love you to share your thoughts and experiences.
Check out some of my Life Goes Strong articles:
By susan fishman orlins Early in our relationship, on warm Friday evenings, my boyfriend Steve (who later became my husband) and I frequently squished onto a Long Island Railroad car to spend summer weekends with his parents. On one such trip a muffled siren began to blare. I turned to Steve and shouted, “Sounds like someone’s portable smoke alarm has gone off.”
His incredulous look made clear he found the suggestion preposterous that anyone besides me had packed a travel smoke alarm. From then on I always removed the alarm’s batteries before placing it in my wheelie bag.
Check out some of my recent Home Goes Strong articles:
By susan fishman orlins 
My starter husband Saul and I began dating the week before I entered college; we married after my sophomore year and divorced during my junior year. I emerged from the husband, the garden apartment and the Impala sedan squinting from the sudden brightness of university life. At age twenty, for the first time ever, I was untethered; even my parents were not near enough to track my moves.
I met Dizzy in the fall of my senior year. Most evenings I found him at the pinball machine in the deli across from my apartment. If I dallied beside him, looking on, every so often he would reward me with a turn at the flippers.
One night, at around eleven, he asked if I wanted to join him and his roommates for their nightly card game. After several days he stopped asking; he assumed I would follow him to his apartment for the game, which included getting high and gorging on the standard fare: potato chips, Oreos, subs dripping with mayo, and pints of Haagen-Dazs out of the carton. Most of the boys had nicknames that were shortened versions of their last names, like Bo, Rose and Stone. Me they called Fish.
Whenever Diz saw me, he greeted me with an amiable jab to the triceps and a “Hey, Fish.” On a bench outside the library, I confessed to Rose my acute attraction to Dizzy, his slender body and smooth, long arms with not too many muscles and his reddish-brown hair, unruly like him, that matched his eyes. Even his thick Brooklyn accent had me swooning. Rose and I hatched a scheme that entailed my “coincidentally” being in New York on a weekend when Diz was going home.
“I’m going to the city on Saturday,” I said nonchalantly the following Tuesday.
“Me too,” Dizzy said. “Why don’t we get together?” It worked!
For the remainder of the week I could focus only on our date: what I would wear, what I would talk about, and how it would feel to kiss Dizzy’s impish, freckled face. If my sister had dropped dead that Friday, I cannot say for certain whether or not it would have tempered my delirium.
On Saturday, at my girlfriend’s mother’s Upper East Side apartment, I applied perfumes, powders, and sprays and then slipped into a skimpy burgundy velour shift with cap sleeves that I had sewn from a Simplicity pattern and brand new matching Pappagallo one-inch heels with grosgrain bows at the toe.
 Beside the door of the Howard Johnson’s at Times Square, I waited for Dizzy, alternately gasping nervously and yanking up my garter belt. He arrived fifteen minutes late. “Hey, Fish. You look nice,” he said, sounding surprised. “Let’s grab a burger here before the movie.” He did not deliver the usual blow to my upper arm, which suggested the evening had promise.
Three hours later, parked opposite a warehouse near Tenth Avenue, we were panting heavily in the back seat of his father’s Cadillac. On the ride back to my friend’s, it was awkward to straddle the cusp between buddy and girlfriend; how was I to act, having gone from one role to the other during a single evening? “Hey Fish, how come you’re so quiet?” Dizzy asked. How I detested that question when I was struggling to come up with conversation.
“I don’t know,” I answered with an uncharacteristic shyness.
With Dizzy’s arm slung over my shoulder, I felt a similar unease at the card game the following Monday, self-conscious, as if I had paraded in with my eyebrows shaved off. The previous week I had been like a fraternity brother; now suddenly, I was a girl. By the following day, though, everyone was used to my being Dizzy’s sidekick. What I could not get used to was being called Fish in bed.
We were in bed a lot. Some nights Dizzy would leap off the mattress we shared in his laundry-strewn room, furious with me for not going all the way. Being abandoned like that, my naked body twisted in those stinking, crumpled sheets, filled me with self-pity. A good time abruptly gone sour that gave the worst kind of letdown.
Having experienced only marital sex, I considered myself a virgin. I remained unyielding in Dizzy’s bed for weeks. One night, for no particular reason, I did not resist. For the next twenty-four hours, wherever he went, I clung to him as if he were still inside me.
Shortly thereafter, Diz admitted I was the first girl he had ever slept with. He also started teasing me about being “used goods,” which was his way of covering up how much it bothered him that I been laid more times than he had. It didn’t bother me. I liked having a category in which I ranked above him; he scored higher at pinball and I had gotten laid more often.
I didn’t know any other couples who were living together in 1967. Cohabiting was not something I had decided to do; rather, it just happened. I never wanted to go back to my place, so I didn’t. This caused one enormous problem for me. Fear of my father’s rage. A few years later living with a boy wasn’t a big deal; but in 1967, for the daughter of Matt Fishman, it was a crime of scary proportion.
There was no such thing as an answering machine, so I would guess when my parents might call, and I’d sit all evening in my room to keep up the charade that I lived there. Most of the time I felt like puking up the guilt and the lies.
Whenever I was about to visit my parents, I had to get a Valium from my girlfriend to calm the tremor in my hands. Sometimes I wished my mother and father would die. I envisioned an instantaneous, painless death. A car crash. That way they would never get wind of my wayward behavior, and I would be spared their wrath and their disappointment in me.
Finally, I could no longer bear the dread that they might find out about us. One Sunday afternoon Diz and I traveled to the suburbs to confess.
Mom, Dad, Dizzy, and I each sat with our hands in our laps on the nubby violet sectional couches in the den. “What part of Brooklyn are you from?” my mother asked Dizzy, interrupting the silence.
“Do you know Brooklyn?” he asked.
“No,” she answered.
With an insulting chuckle, he started naming the streets that intersected Flatbush Avenue in the neighborhood where he grew up.
That’s when I spit out, “We’re living together.”
My father remained mute; for the first time in my life, I wished he would fly into a tirade, one with enough power to shatter the brick I felt in my chest. My mother recited an uncharacteristically emotional speech, saying she would give her life for me to be happy. Why couldn’t she be the silent one? I sat stiffly, digging the raw stumps that had once been my fingernails into my thighs. I prayed no one would cry.
There was nothing else to say. My parents had always told me, “No matter what, you’ll always be our daughter.” They made good on that. No threats or severances. Maybe, in a way, they were relieved. For months they had known from my skittishness that something was up; God knows what they had imagined. At least Dizzy was Jewish. Their sadness was my punishment.
After graduation, Dizzy and I set up housekeeping in a garden apartment in Northern Virginia, not unlike the one I had lived in with my ex-husband, and a ten minute commute to George Washington University where Dizzy attended law school. I took a job as a math instructor at the local community college. Some evenings Diz and I invited Stone, who lived downstairs, for my specialty, Aztec meat pie: a pungent mixture of ground chuck, onion flakes, ketchup, and cheddar cheese baked in a round cake tin. The  highlight of each day was watching Perry Mason reruns before bed.
One Sunday in October my parents visited. Although they arrived in time for lunch and stayed until dark, the only thing I remember about that day is the way they padded past our bedroom in tandem, peeking in as though it were roped off like a museum display. From behind them, I watched in horror as the double bed seemed to inflate, practically oozing into the hallway.
The whole thing felt sickeningly reminiscent of my marriage–the apartment, the cooking, and the monotonous sex. Living at college with Dizzy and his roommates had been so much more fun. Had there been an exact moment that the Q-tips Dizzy left on the bathroom sink, yellow with earwax, began to make me cringe? Why had I been able to ignore them before?
There was also the Robert Zweben problem. Had it been after the luster with Dizzy started to fade that I first spotted Robert in the law library? Or had I already become disenchanted with Dizzy–his pinballs and legal briefs–and, thus, vulnerable to the swagger of someone else’s narrow hips.
It did not help that Dizzy had a practice of squeezing the inside of my thigh, which I hated so much that I would jump if he just touched my leg. When I begged him to abandon the pinching, he ignored me. It reminded me of Mr. Mazza, my piano teacher who used to stroke that same patch of skin to the boogie-woogie beat of the music I played.
After a while, I did not want Dizzy to touch me at all. When I told him I wanted out from the relationship, he promised to discontinue the thigh squeezing if I would stay. But it was too late.
Shortly after I moved into a Georgetown townhouse with three other girls, Dizzy joined a commune where he smoked dope and ate macrobiotic foods. His new girlfriend, a dark Greek beauty named Fern, walked barefoot and wore thin, flowing, white toga-like garments. Later, I heard Diz was living on a mountaintop in California and worked as a financial advisor to the Maharaj Ji.
I’ve always been grateful for my starter marriage; otherwise, Diz might have become my starter husband.
Speaking of living together, see my new article, Living Together: Relationship Tips.
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*Easy Meditation
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*Conversation Starters
By susan fishman orlins My beagle Casey is healthy, spunky and–at 13 1/2–still learning new tricks, like wagging his tail. Yet, today for no apparent reason, I woke up vocalizing a name for my next dog.
 A boy named Scarlet? Maybe it started a few days ago when I phoned the bike store to see if they could fix my flat tire, which occurred right before my car wouldn’t start.
A voice answered, “Hudson Trail, Scarlet speaking.”
Scarlet! I love that name. But a boy named Scarlet?
When we got Casey, I knew I wanted a boy dog. I had gotten divorced some months earlier and the only testosterone in my life, aside from a couple of friends, were my computer guy and my dentist.
So I searched for a boy dog and a male psychotherapist. Casey came to us when he was seven months old, along with his name. My three daughters and I dawdled so long, trying to agree on what to call him, that he remained Casey.
I don’t recall anyone ever asking how he got his name, but I believe that everyone who meets him is thinking, How unimaginative!
 Caseminster Abbey Of course, as you may know, we never call him Casey. My daughter, who was returning from England for the holidays, emailed, “I can’t wait to see Caseminster Abbey.”
I could not adore this boy more, but it is hard not to project into the future, knowing the likelihood of a day when he is no longer here to race me upstairs at night and to spoon with me after lights out.
So I try out names.
I like the name Brad Pitt for Casey. Will I have to meet the next pup to see if that suits him too? Do our names become part of who we are or do our names help define who we are?
So when I woke up, the first thing I did was turn to Casey and try out this new name on him. “Kreplach, time to get up.”
Kreplach are like Jewish raviolis, doughy and cheesy and yummy when you smother them with butter. It’s that East European kind of food that killed my grandparents.
The gutteral “ch” at the end wouldn’t work well for a dog name, but the association let me to Knish. Casey is anything but a Knish. He is neither round, nor knishy squishy. And he’s way too big. Knish is for a little fluffy pup or maybe for a mini dachshund.
 Malibu Ken Names are a funny thing; some seem universally great. I always loved the name Chloe for a girl, for example. But after my French then-mother-in-law nixed it for my third daughter, my then-husband nixed it too. It was one of the few times he said no to me.
We got along well, the ex and I. Each did exactly as we pleased. Most of our values were in concert, so there were never arguments about, say, money; he was thrifty, I hated to shop.
Sometimes I wonder if couples like us, who practically never fight (Did he just give in to everything and then feel discontent?), lack enough passion to care what each other does as they swirl around in parallel universes.
More dog names: Alan, Badger, Barky, Barkley (Tom Hanks’s dog in “You’ve Got Mail”), Boswell (the name of my 5th grade best friend’s autograph hound), Chip, Dodger, Dudley, Dilber (nickname for the nickname of my college boyfriend Dizzy, whose last name much to his chagrin was Silberhartz–get it? Dizzy + Silberhartz = Dilber), Spot (only if he has no spots, which brings to mind other ironic names like Fluffy for a beagle), Dibble, Dobie Gillis (anyone remember him?), Velveeta, Mango Chutney (my ex thought this was a good kid’s name). Qwerty, which I once used as my name on Jdate, so that might be weird.
And then there are words whose sounds I find pleasing, such as Webinar, Koala, Gumbo, Hoi polloi, Ilosone (a cough medicine my daughter used to take; I loved saying, “Ilosone time!”) Ziligengsheng (Mandarin for self-reliance), Ukulele (even though this very word knocked me out of the fourth-grade spelling bee).
I was hanging up Casey’s leash the other day and thought about the name Ken, as in Barbie’s boyfriend. Once Casey and I went to the Bark Ball, costumes required, and I dressed as Malibu Barbie and he went as Malibu Ken, wearing a lei.
And then there’s Mister Personality, which my niece once called Casey, not realizing the extent to which this was one of those ironic names.
Names will continue to pop into my head, because there is a deep track for this in my brain.
By the way, I moved on to cognitive therapy from the psychiatrist, whose name was Fred. Hm, how about Fred for Casey’s successor?
What are your favorite-sounding words? I’d love to try them out for my next dog’s name.
See some of my Home Goes Strong articles:
*Tapas and Crostini Recipes (great meal or appetizers for Superbowl and Valentine’s Day)
*Conversation Starters
*Best Banana Cake Recipe Ever! Chocolate Chips Optional
*Superbowl Party And Potluck Recipes And Ideas
*Thinking About A Valentine Dinner? How About Red, Pink & White . . . & Wine With A Heart?
By susan fishman orlins  Marathon women a decade hence On an ordinary afternoon in 1998, Eliza, my sixteen-year-old daughter, plopped her backpack at my feet, waved a brochure so close it grazed my nose and declared, “I’m signing up for the Marine Corps Marathon. I’ll be running with a group that raises money for AIDS and trains Sunday mornings at seven.”
“Seven a.m. – are you crazy?” Then, pausing for less time than it takes to say “PowerBar,” I added, “Tell you what, I’ll sign up with you.” It was as though, for just this microsecond, I had morphed into Jane Fonda.
Now alone, I began to confront different questions. Was I doing this for myself or for Eliza? Or to bolster my athletic image with friends and acquaintances? Was I willing to risk injury and, in turn, all the skiing and swing dancing that filled the void left by my divorce? Wasn’t there a simpler bonding opportunity with Eliza? And an easier way to meet guys? Would I ever find a sports bra that worked? And why would I give up six months of Sunday mornings to arrive at my weekly training sessions earlier than the newspaper arrived on my doorstep? Surely not because running 26.2 miles with thousands of other Type A’s had always been my dream. More likely, my interest could have been called morbid curiosity.
Nonetheless, I attended an orientation meeting with Eliza where we exchanged motives with other hopefuls. A trim secretary, seated beside me, told the group, “My best friend is dying from AIDS. He can’t run, so I’m going to do it for him.” Ashamed of my egocentric motivation, I sheepishly introduced myself and expressed my desire to regain a sense of focus in my life. When Eliza announced that she looked forward to training with her mom and raising money for an AIDS clinic, I felt exonerated.
At our first weekly training session, our leaders assigned partners and placed us in pace groups. These were the people with whom we would train as well as run the actual marathon. Eliza’s tight-abs pack lined up near the front; despite our neon CoolMax costumes, my partner, Rayford, and I found ourselves in the rear among the less hurried.
In the weeks that followed, the pain of placing one foot in front of the other was eased, ironically, by Rayford’s sagas of his partner’s death from AIDS and living with his own HIV. After we got through a twelve-mile Sunday run by exchanging the ordeals of Rayford’s coming out and the final year of my marriage, we agreed on “single in the seventies” as our topic for the upcoming fourteen-mile run.
If I were still married, I would have bristled at the idea of striding the equivalent of halfway from Washington to Baltimore (or if you compute all the training miles, round trip to Scarsdale). Isn’t it striking how a major life change, like divorce, can transform you into the opposite of who you thought you were? Yet, dim recollections suggested that the marathoner was who I originally was. It seemed that marriage had molded me, temporarily, into someone less adventuresome.
Sometimes I imagined Eliza and myself as two intersecting rings. I worried I was treading on her exclusive territory but I asked anyway, “Would you mind if I try to keep up with your group on next week’s six-mile maintenance run? It might be my only chance to jog with you
 What our cupcakes did not look like. before the distance increases.”
Even before she answered, her response was evident in her bright eyes, lit up the way they did on the trail when her group–in their homestretch–passed me still huffing my way to the halfway mark, and her fellow speed-mates cheered, “Go, Liza’s mom.”
As Eliza and I planned a party for the fundraising component of our marathon, she asked, “Mom, how can I take credit for half the donations? They’ll be mostly from your friends.” I told her that so many of my friends were the parents of her friends and that we were in this together – a partnership. We not only jointly crafted invitations and made cupcakes, but we also explained to our guests what raising money for drug therapies that offered hope to people with HIV/AIDS meant to us. I reminded Eliza that, without her, this expansion of my world would never have occurred.
The training distances mounted, I began to believe I could actually make it to the finish line. New queries surfaced. Would Eliza wait on marathon day until I completed the course? Wasn’t it backward – shouldn’t the mother be the one to soak up her little girl’s I-did-it grin as she crossed the finish line? Or was this one of those role reversals dealt to us by the passing years? On my birthday, Eliza hauled out a cake she had baked and shouted, “Yay!” when I extinguished all the candles in one blow.
And on marathon day, there I was sailing by on my merry-go-round as I cried, “Look at me!” Eliza jumped and waved and cheered my victory – hers, mine, ours.
What have you plunged into with unexpectedly satisfying results?
EXCITING NEWS: Coming soon my new book Confessions of a Worrywart: Being a Mom, Having a Mom
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*BEST SPAGHETTI SAUCE EVER!
By susan fishman orlins When I, always the initiator, smile at a stranger and the stranger smiles back, it puts a musical note in my step. Or in my pedal, as was the case on Christmas Eve day.
I was on a long bike ride from New Jersey to Staten Island and, when a driver stopped to allow me to cycle across the street, I smiled.
He smiled back, and when I mouthed “Merry Christmas,” his grin broadened, then he wished me the silent same.
Maybe it was due to the season to be jolly that our connected smiles filled me with an extra dollop of glee.
 The demi-smile Sometimes, upon passing a stranger on the street, I exhibit the demi-smile. If the stranger does not return the greeting, then I’ll appear to have been deep in thought or to have been pressing my lips together as part of a squint on a sunny day.
The demi-smile is also useful on social occasions, as it helps smoothe out upper lip lines, lift the jowls, and minimize Howdy Doody creases that flank the mouth.
When my youngest daughter was in high school, she wrote an essay called “Smiling Stranger,” about how she loves to go jogging and smile at everyone she passes and how it cheers her when they respond in kind.
She, typically of limited memory, recalled a joyful moment more than a decade earlier when she was in the single digits, agewise. We were in Hong Kong, and we passed a bus, and she locked eyes with a passenger on that bus, and they both smiled.
It may seem counterintuitively sunny for a worrywart like yours truly to seek every opportunity to exchange smiles with strangers. But a friendly encounter with someone unknown to me is uncomplicated and distracts me from whatever worry I’m dwelling on, if only temporarily.
I have a fantasy of being like a lady I read about, who made coffee for her burglar and convinced him to mend his ways.
(But not like the woman who turned up in a Google search: “Woman captures Burglar, Makes him a sex slave, Fed him Viagra and water for 3 days, ‘until he learned his lesson.’”)
 About to be sipped Here’s how another friendly fantasy goes: I own my own coffee place and every morning I greet my regulars with a smile. Problem is I stay up late and could never get up that early. So maybe I could just get a job in a coffee place. But I might not want to go every day. Then I always arrive at the same conclusion, that I can just go to a coffee place and sip a cappuccino.
Studies say married people and those with pets live longer. It’s the interaction with other living creatures. A writer spends a lot of solitary time, which pleases me, and I believe that a snoozing hound balled up against my hip, as well as an encounter with one friend or another every day, will extend my life.
And on the days I don’t see a friend, I’m counting on smiling strangers to help me outlive actuarial predictions and get my face on the Smucker’s jelly jar for living into triple digits.
How do you interact with strangers? Are you a smiler? A schmoozer? An avoider?
See my latest Home Goes Strong articles:
TOP 10 WAYS TO WIN AT SCRABBLE AND WORDS WITH FRIENDS
ORGANIZING YOUR AFFAIRS BEFORE YOU DIE: ADVICE FROM A 29-YEAR-OLD ORPHAN
BEST SPAGHETTI SAUCE EVER!
By susan fishman orlins ‘Tis the season to obsess . . . about gifts. For someone like me, who gets overwhelmed by choices, and–even when the options are narrowed to two–can’t decide, this can be a hard time of year.
So I resort to creative gift-giving, like ice cream sodas for the third night of Hanukkah. Making placemats for a homeless shelter for the fourth night. And saving polar bears for the fifth.
I guess that’s why so many Jewish kids envy their friends who celebrate Christmas.
I think I’ve passed along to my kids the notion of non-traditional gift-giving.
For her birthday, Christmas day, my oldest daughter Eliza requested that I find and supervise someone to hang the curtains and rods she bought two months ago for the apartment she has lived in for two years.
Presents on the “day of” are not expected in our endlessly mobile, sometimes indecisive, family.
Our Christmakkah gift shopping goes like this: My three daughters and I start out with $60 to spend, half provided by me. Then we each spend $20 on the other three: one “big” present for around $15, and one small for $5.
This year one of the shopping-spree presents I gave Eliza was a $6.99 “as advertised on TV” pair of foot scrubbers, consisting of two plastic sandals with brushes that suction to the bathtub. The selling point here is “Wash your feet without bending.”
I bought it, even though the foot bath I’d bought her years ago sits in a corner of her room, having never experienced so much as a toe.
But everyone knows I feel good about clean feet.
Eliza and I have a history of foot baths. We used to bond, sitting on the edge of the tub, soaking our feet in bubble bath and then applying scrubs, oils and toenail polishes.
Two days after I gave Eliza the foot scrubber, she gave me a present on my birthday: a foot scrubber, just like the one I’d given her; great minds think alike!
Then I realized it was the one I’d given her. I loved the re-gift and the creativity it took to think of giving me this. Plus, it would be one less thing for her to New York with all her other presents and her dog.
“I love it,” I said. “The gifts a person gives are always a clue to a gift they themselves will like.”
The following day, I went to New York with my other two daughters and brought the foot scrubbers so Eliza and I could try it out together. I’ve decided to leave one for her and take one back home with me, re-gifting her re-gift to me.
 New earring! Not every gift has such re-gifting qualities. On my birthday, Sabrina and Emily, the two other sisters, and I found ourselves in a holiday market. I loved a pair of earrings and was about to buy them when Emily said she wanted to buy them for me.
Aww, they were expensive–$56—so I said I’d split the price with her. But she wanted to give me $40 for them.
As Henry Higgins similarly pointed out when flower girl Eliza Dolittle offered to pay him a shilling for an elocution lesson, Emily’s $40 is the equivalent of my thousands of dollars, based on our relative net worths.
Sabrina bought me–from a vendor of old books and prints–a book I adored from my childhood, Five Little Peppers at School, with a cover so charming it doubles as an object of art.
Though in recent years planning gifts ahead of time has not been part of the script, the first December after my ex and I separated, Emily, who was 7, knew I loved Charlotte Church singing Christmas songs whenever the commercial appeared on cable TV.
That year, before the kids went to Tortola with their dad and I went to Sun Valley alone, Emily gave me the Charlotte Church CD.
I was so touched by this gift from my daughter, at a time that I was feeling so keenly the loss of holidays with my children, that I could barely listen to it as my plane flew over the Rockies.
[cheesy alert!] It can still bring a teardrop to my heart.
As for gifts I received from my parents, I can see my mom and dad in the light of the menorah, glowing in anticipation of my pleasure as I opened the angora sweater set I secretly wished had been a Villager brand wool cardigan, like all the tweedy girls at school wore, from a real store, and with the authentic label still attached to the sweater, rather than having been cut out the way the discount stores we shopped at removed the labels.
And, oy, I can still feel the guilt whenever my mother pointed out, “Susie, you haven’t worn your new sweater set.”
The gifts I gave my parents were not much better. They took us each year so we could shop at our Uncle Ben’s pharmacy. I remember buying my dad a carton of Camel cigarettes and for my mom, a bottle of toilet water. I now realize she wore Chanel No. 5 all her life. I wonder how she felt every time she looked at the bottle I assume was unused.
Happy, Merry Christmakwaanzakah, a time to celebrate that soon we’ll have 7 whole weeks until Valentine’s Day, 50 days we won’t have to think about giving or receiving any gifts.
What are some of your gift-giving traditions, horror stories, etc.?
See my articles about gift ideas, recipes, relationships, ugly sweater parties and more on Home Goes Strong.
By susan fishman orlins 1955
After a swallow of dinner, I dirty my face with burnt cork and, on my shoulder, rest a broomstick with a bundle of rags tied to its end. I then prepare for the battle with my mom over not wearing a coat.
I step into the hallowed night, wondering which house has the apples with razor blades.
Nervously, I take the shortcut home through waist-high weeds that surround a haunted house whose creaky steps I’ve mounted on blue-sky afternoons.
On the kitchen table, I dump my bag for my mother’s inspection. It’s a disappointment that nothing sharp turns up in the apples.
1966
In college I feel stupid dressing up in costume, and I feel stupid if I don’t for a Halloween party where everyone else is in disguise.
1979
Halloween becomes fun again once I get married. Six weeks after Steve and I exchange vows, we move to Beijing. With the enthusiasm for holidays that comes from being separated from one’s roots, we invite our new friends to celebrate with us.
The Hungarian journalists have sewn their own clown suits and a partner in Steve’s law firm dresses as a flasher with a sausage attached to boxers under his raincoat.
We provide umbrella hats for our Chinese friends who wear only their Mao suits, obligatory attire for locals in 1979 China.
Only Steve’s Chinese-American secretary creates a stir. The room becomes silent when she enters dressed as a Red Guard. She stands in that arched-back pose you see on posters, with Mao’s ubiquitous red book in her raised hand.
The wounds from the Cultural Revolution are still too raw for people to accept reminders of that holocaust.
1992
Through my children, I re-live the thrill of my own childhood autumns, the season of crayons that still have their points and blank composition books. We convene on our front stoop to decorate the door for Halloween.
Steve tells us he heard on the radio that witches and hobos are politically incorrect, so I craft my witch as an ethnic-neutral with paper-bag
 Noodle Pudding hair, and a newspaper face.
After we go trick or treating, I tell my four-year-old goblin, “Nobody likes the raisins–those we’ll give to Grandmom for her noodle pudding.”
Emily’s blue eyes, bright as light bulbs under normal conditions, are on high wattage tonight.
“This one’s bad for your teeth, Sweetheart,” I say. Then I drop an appallingly puny Almond Joy into the “throwaway” pile that will go on the high shelf in my closet where I hide my gum.
A pack of Soda-Licious fruit snacks that really will play havoc with the molars, I place into her pile. I don’t like the flavors. Halloween does this to me.
1993
Each of my grade-school daughters accepts my offer of $10 to buy their Halloween candy in my effort to protect their dear little bodies from all that sugar. Soon they regret it; no such transactions occur ever again.
1996
Emily, age 8, writes in her school journal, “I like Easter because it is fun and I get a lot of candy. My mom doesn’t let us eat our candy so I save it for so long that it gets rotten and I have to throw it away. Eliza eats hers anyway.”
2011
Ever since my kids flew the coop, I’ve become a Halloween Grinch. I don’t want to keep jumping up to answer the door, so I go out to dinner.
After years of grappling with the temptation of leftover Reese’s peanut butter cups, this year I give out individually wrapped Lifesaver mints, which I leave in a bowl on my front stoop.
The following week over coffee, friends inform me that no kid likes peppermint Lifesavers. I had wondered why the bowl of mints had not been emptied.
 Participants in D.C.'s high-heel drag race On Halloween night I go to a bistro in Georgetown with my friend Daniel. Last week, we went to D.C.’s annual High Heel Drag Race, and now I want to see more costumes, the Georgetown scene.
Daniel says, “It’s not safe, so let’s eat a bit farther up, then walk down.” I say, “You’re being a terrible worrywart.”
But Daniel is right. We zigzag to skirt around thick crowds of made-up young adults who exude no merriment.
The next day I learn that 15 minutes after we left the area, a 17-year-old boy suffered a gunshot wound in the head.
This makes me long for the days when I was a politically incorrect hobo for Halloween.
What are your memories of Halloweens past?
Get ready for next Halloween:
For awesome eats, check out my recipes:
By susan fishman orlins  Mom had often complained that I'd thrown away her bag collection when I helped her move. So, for her birthday, we gave her a gift of gift bags . . . and she cracked up. I’m a saver. Every time my inbox mounts to the limit of 4,000 emails, I move a few thousand to random folders I doubt I’ll ever find again; and then I’m set for another few weeks of not deleting messages, mainly from the likes of Sock Hop Sundays, Hot Tub Works and Book TV Alert.
Aside from reminding me of my hedonistic tendencies, keeping these emails relieves the fear I’ll miss something, even though I have never opened a Book TV Alert and I went to Sock Hop Sunday only once.
Someday, after I finish watching all the Oprah episodes saved on my DVR, I may just want to check out Book TV. The emails will serve as a reminder.
Plus, I don’t want to waste time deleting emails or unsubscribing.
The first time I surfed to Book TV, Isabel Allende was speaking about the death of her daughter Paula. She referred to the remarkable ability of the human spirit to rise above adversity. I was going through a divorce at the time and it helped to say to myself, if she can rally after such a tragedy, then surely I can deal with this divorce.
With phone messages, it’s different. I so fear accumulating my kids voices, which are much more precious than emails, that I delete them right away so as not to tempt any hoarding instincts.
A few weeks ago, while visiting my 28-year-old daughter, Eliza, in New York, I listened (except when she made me hold my ears) as she transferred to her computer 20 special voice messages she had saved over time. She was preparing to trade in her Blackberry for an iPhone.
I heard the message from me, singing happy birthday. And then the room filled with the voice most familiar to me, the one I heard for hours every week during long conversations about our lives.
Lizie, it’s Grandmom. The book you sent me, I never laughed so much! (laughter) I laughed out loud the whole time I was reading it. (laughter) I just loved it . . . It was so funny! (more laughter) . . . .
It was only 7 months ago that Lizie asked me to take Shopoholic to my mom in Florida, “I think Grandmom will like it,” she said. Four months later, in early July, my mom died. On Christmas Day my mom would have been 93, the birth date she shared with Eliza.
I didn’t cry when my mom died, just as she didn’t cry when her mother died. My mom and I were/are not criers.
But as each day passes, I miss her more. How she would have loved to hear the details of my interview with TLC’s Georgetown Cupcake sisters about their bakery and their lives!
No one gets excited about what I do each day, the way my mom did.
Every adventure I have, every picture I take, I wish I could share with my mom. Hearing her voice and that laugh—so real, so hearty, so alive—was like having her right there on the sofa with us, making me feel so happy, so sad.
Now that I have this recording of my mom’s voice, I’m wondering whether I should start saving the voicemails of everyone I love. Oy.
What do you do about saving voicemail? Email?
Check out my recent articles on Home Goes Strong:
For links to my latest articles, follow me on Twitter @susanorlins
By susan fishman orlins When I’m in New York, I like to hang out and write at Jack’s, a coffee place in the West Village with a patina that suggests long afternoons of sipping lattes and tapping on laptops. The overall look is shades of brown, like paper bags and coffee.
Jack’s is so small it has no bathroom. The other day, I had to pee, so I walked up the block and stopped at the first restaurant, a dark Villagey place called Low Country, another brownish space, where I was greeted by–as you can see from his picture–a fit, attractive bald man with smooth, mahogany-colored skin, wearing a dark t-shirt and black blazer.
With a dip of my right eyebrow, a sort of pity look, I asked “Would it be okay if I used the bathroom?” in the way that, when I was in my twenties, got me anything I wanted.
The man responded with a broad white-toothed smile, “Of course.”
In the bathroom, which was papered with pages from a Faulkner paperback, I began thinking about all the kind restaurant hosts who have welcomed me into their bathrooms.
And one who didn’t. It was a few years ago in D.C., up the block from the White House, a mediocre wannabe kind of place with white linen on the tables, where the maitre d’ rejected me. Admittedly, I was mid-bike ride in shorts and sneakers and with sweaty helmet hair.
I then crossed the street to the Bombay Club, an upscale restaurant with fine Indian food, a favorite of the Clintons and some of Washington’s elite journalists.
The maitre d’ welcomed me warmly and led me to the rest rooms. When I returned to thank him, he walked me into the bar and told the bartender to give me a drink.
I must have look pretty pathetic. When I left, I over-thanked him and mentioned, to show I wasn’t just a bathroom moocher, that I had eaten there and that I would be back. The afterglow of his kindness lasts to this day.
Back to Low Country. On the way upstairs from the Faulkner bathroom, I decided to tell the host how much I appreciated his hospitality.
He again graced me with his sparkly smile and introduced himself. We began talking and I told him I was a writer and that I blog, and he said he had recently started blogging. We exchanged cards.
The following day he emailed me:
| Susan,
It’s your new friend Chad from Low Country. Your blog looks really funny! I can’t wait to read some, especially religion.
It was nice meeting and chatting. Let’s meet for lunch sometime and share life. I love meeting new interesting people.
Cheers and make today an amazing day!
Chad
P.S.
Here’s the link to my first blog post! http://www.africa.com/blog/blog,hip_hop_saves_lives_an_introduction,418.html |
He wasn’t hitting on me; he is somewhere around half my age of 65.
Chad and I are different. He’s writing to help people in Chad and Sudan, and my blog is a platform for my white girl worries, which I mentioned when I gave him my card. As for religion, he’s a believer and I get nightmares about the 23rd Psalm.
But back at Jack’s I was sitting on the bench outside when Chad came along to unlock his bicycle, which was parked right next to mine (technically my ex-husband’s that I borrow when I’m in New York).
I’m a schmoozer and a reacher-outer and I love the way Chad wrote “I love meeting new [ahem] interesting people,” expressing his wish to get together. I am going to use that next time I email a maitre d’ or someone else I’m eager to know better.
How do you reach out?
What are your experiences with using restrooms in restaurants where you are not a patron?
If you or someone you know likes cupcakes, don’t miss my article TLC’s Georgetown Cupcake Sisters Share a Chocolate Cupcake Recipe & Their Recipe for Success!
By susan fishman orlins Public Service Announcement: Help my article “Dear Customer Service: Thoughts While on Hold” go viral, so companies get the message! Please tweet, comment on it, share!
 Mom as a little girl at the shvitz w/ her mom, getting beaten with fans Up until I first got my period, I was Susie. In high school, I was Sue. After reinventing myself in college, I became Susan.
My mom and, hence, other relatives continued to call me Susie.
My dad called me Sooze, (pronounced Sooz, not Soozie) starting when I was 20 and began selling my cutesy pen and ink and watercolor pictures, the kind homeowners hang in their bathrooms. In order to further cuten up the faceless creations (gag/blush), I signed them Sooze.
This quadruple-split in my moniker causes angst when signing an email; frankly, I’m wiped out by the time I’ve figured out whether to write XO or what.
It would feel preposterous to sign “Susie” in an email to my cousin. She knows I’m now Susan. Yet it’s like she’s referring to someone else when she leaves a voicemail, saying, “Hi Susan, it’s your cousin . . . .”
This has been going on for years with Cuz and it’s too late, not to mention too weird, to say, “Please call me Susie.”
 Sue CHS '63 I’ve trained myself to sign Sue on emails to my Cheltenham High School peeps, with whom I correspond sporadically.
It would simplify matters if I were to sign S on all emails, but I’ve tried and just can’t bring myself to represent myself as a single letter. I’m not knocking anyone who does: lots of friends sign just an initial.
In fact, I don’t know any single-initial signers who use upper case. Are they saving time bypassing the shift button?
I, myself, am guilty of pondering whether typing one space or two after a colon or period takes more time; it requires effort to unlearn typing two spaces. Other time-wasters I seem unable to sidestep include proof-reading casual emails and correcting typos.
If I can’t sign S, there’s no way I could sign s. Do I think so highly of myself that a small s just won’t do? Or, am I so insecure that I need a great big SUSAN to prove how unimportant I am NOT?
I cannot even talk about my email exchanges with Kay, a dear, brilliant, creative woman who has helped me part-time for 15 years, cleaning, paying my bills, dogsitting, catering parties and sharing family stories.
When we first met, she called me Mrs. Orlins, and I didn’t say right away “Call me Susan.” Then it became too late to change.
If it’s impossible to sign Susie, S or s, similarly there is no prospect I could sign Mrs. Orlins when writing to K, so I don’t sign anything.
Unable to call myself anything, reminds me of 1965, when I was unable to call my first set of in laws anything. Back then it was de rigeur to marry and overnight convert the in laws from Mr. and Mrs. Fiance to Mom and Dad.
My niece sends me emails without any name. She starts right in, and I always wonder whether her salutation-less emails mean she’s not sure what to call me.
 Brad Pitt
All that said, I like the friendly sound of nicknames; I call my kids Lizie, Beanie and Emy. And I call my beagle-basset, who’s name is Casey, everything from Casemaster General to Caseminster Fuller to Cary Grant.
Speaking of names, is there a point at which you transitioned from what you called your parents as a kid? Is it infantile that, even in my sixties, when speaking with my siblings, I refer to my parents as Mommy and Daddy?
How do you sign emails? With angst, like me?
XO
Angst
AS MENTIONED ABOVE, VISIT “DEAR CUSTOMER SERVICE: THOUGHTS WHILE ON HOLD” VENT AND SHARE!
CHECK OUT SOME OF MY OTHER EMAIL PONDERANCES:
How do You End an Email Thread?
Worried What You’ll Think
TIS THE SEASON TO TRY THESE AWESOME PUMPKIN SEEDS:
PUMPKIN-CARVING TIPS AND RECIPES FOR ROASTING PUMPKIN SEEDS!
By susan fishman orlins “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”
I’ve been thinking I should get a medical alarm button to wear like the one advertised in the campy Life Alert “Help! I’ve fallen!” commercial. My mom wore one until she died at age 92.
Otherwise, how would I contact someone if I were to fall, unable to move?
Every time I take a shower, along comes the imaginary falling scenario: Warm water cascading over me turns icy cold as I lay motionless on the tub’s white porcelain. Casey, my beagle-basset, hears my wails and sprints to rescue me, like the cat I once read about who dialed 911. Or maybe it was a toddler.
 This no-solution thinking scares me, so I switch my ruminations to the day my life-saving, rectangular white pendant in the mail.
I slip it over my head for the first time and, BOING, white curls spring from my scalp.
A few nights ago I had a scare. I was home alone with my pooch Casey, and I heard the front door shut. I immediately phoned my daughter, who lives only a few miles away, so she would be on the line with me when I confronted the burglar.
(Do you ever wonder, the way l do, what you would do if, when you go to check, someone wearing a ski mask is actually there?)
Probably no one had entered.
But just in case, that night I locked the door to my bedroom. I was too scared to check all the rooms in the house.
I imagine the intruder having taken up residence on the third floor, which I still have not checked. I picture him pulling peanut butter sandwiches out of his backpack and sitting cross-legged as he picnics on the bed or al fresco on the roof.
If I’d had a Life Alert, I could have pressed the button and emergency help would have arrived to scare off the burglars.
On the Life Alert Site, a video shows a woman taking a bath when an intruder enters her home.
She hears a sound, presses her Life Alert and reports a break-in to the man who answers. His deep voice then announces over a speaker, “You have been detected. Leave now!” At that, the burglars skedaddle.
In the next video sequence the deep voice wakes the woman, “Sharon,” he says, “We have received a smoke signal coming from your kitchen. Get out now.”
 I love the personal touch. Sometimes on a Sunday it’s too quiet around here. Wouldn’t it be nice to push my button and talk to the nice gray-haired man. He would call me Susan.
They also have a video of helping poor Sharon after she falls off a ladder.
Shouldn’t anyone who lives alone have a medical alert system? Maybe I can order one for each of my kids.
Friends say, “Just keep a cell phone in your pocket.”
I prefer a button to push when someone in a ski mask is pointing a gun at my nose.
Not to mention the cancer risk of carrying a cell phone centimeters away from my ovaries.
I just called Life Alert for my free brochure and already my hair is turning grayer.
Can you think of any good reason not to get the help button?
Take advantage of my research and check out the 411 on how to find Emergency Response Systems for yourself or aging parents, including red flags.
While you’re at it, check out some of my home security articles:
By susan fishman orlins My very first Mr. Wrong told me, “Susie, what you need is a purpose.” That was in ninth grade. George, now a retired psychiatrist, was right. The benefits of having a purpose were never more obvious than after I launched my blog.
 Blogging The irony of blogging about being a worrywart, is that it keeps my mind so occupied with what I plan to write that little room remains for maladaptive thoughts.
And blogging has made me aware of so many things I hadn’t previously thought about . . .
* When I saw my niece the morning of my mom’s funeral, we hugged and I said, “I miss you so much!” She replied, “I don’t miss you; I read your blog.”
* My friend Sue, author of the thoughtful interfaith blog On Being Both, told me correctly you’ll spend 1/3 of your time writing, 1/3 of your time posting and 1/3 of your time getting the word out via social networks.
I spend another 1/3 of my time checking my stats: How many visitors to my blog? Did they like me enough to stay for a couple of minutes? Did they come from Twitter or Facebook or Sarahneedsajob.com?
I’ve learned that obsessively checking my stats soothes the same pleasure center of the brain as, say, an addictive numbers game . . . and worry.
* I have learned to let go of the last 15% of time it would to make things “perfect,” otherwise I would never have time to post anything. I learned this 15% rule when my then-husband ran for U.S. Congress.
* One thing leads to another. I launched my blog in June 2010. In July 2010, a friend who liked my blog introduced me to Huffington Post where I published my first Huff Po piece, Travel Tips From a Worrywart.
A month later an editor read on Huff Po my article Turn Chores Into Family Fun and offered me a (paying!) job blogging for NBC’s Home Goes Strong.
* If you can write, you can write about almost anything, as in Composting It’s Easier Than You Think, The Avocado!, as well as people’s personal stories, like Death of a Husband, One Woman’s Story series.
* Some of the thousands of thoughts that go through a person’s mind each day make great opening lines. You just try to be good at catching them.
* Blogging is less lonely than writing for print. Readers comment and I comment back. On twitter, my tweeps retweet or send me messages. For non-virtual human contact, I figure I can always go to the dry cleaner.
* I posted a piece that that offended a friend whose cousin had commited suicide; in the post, Worry Orgasm, I failed to show empathy when someone delayed my train by throwing himself in front of it. An editor might have pointed that out and urged greater sensitivity.
Instead, I made amends in my next post, “Worry Orgasm” Regrets. It was so raw, so non-virtual, this personal experience with my best friend playing out on my blog.
* I don’t know what I would do without my brilliant writing group. In addition to their encouragement (Diane regularly envisions a movie coming out of my blog stories, with Susan Sarandon in the role of me!), they help me write by consensus. If 4 out of 7 don’t like something, I cut it.
* Oy, the things people search for! I am able to see what searches have lead visitors to my blog. Yesterday one search term was “porn yoga” and, today, “I’m worried I have warts.” The interest I have in reading these search terms make me wonder, Am I a Voyeur?
* Because I tweet links to my blog posts, old friends have turned up, like an author whom I French kissed, when I was in 9th grade and he was in 7th.
I look forward to another year of blogging and send gratitude to my readers who make it so damn much fun! XO
I’m told I need to post at least 3 times a week or readers won’t return. I simply don’t have the time to do that. I’d love your comments on this and anything else.
Check out my recent Home Goes Strong posts:
Family Vacation With my Ex and Our Daughters, How we Do it
Bobby Flay’s Upcoming Cookbook, a Preview
By susan fishman orlins
 Season 8 of “The Family Vacation” has ended. Back from The Hamptons to their everyday lives are “Family Vacation” stars: the exes—since 1998—Steve and Susan (yours truly) and their three twenty-something daughters, Eliza, Sabrina and Emily.
Let’s take a look back at Season 1, Summer of 2004.
“The whole family’s in the pool,” my oldest daughter observes in a tone as sparkly as the cool water after I ease in to join her, her two sisters and their dad, Steve.
Even though Steve and I divorced in 1998, the five of us are in East Hampton, New York on what we call The Family Vacation.
It started that summer of 2004, when camps, trips and jobs allowed only 9 days that all three girls were available at the same time. Steve called me to discuss how to divvy up the time.
I searched my mind for a way to get 5 days to his 4.
But then I had a eureka moment and suggested that rather than each of us taking a mini holiday with the kids, all 5 of us could go away together for twice as long. Without hesitation, Steve agreed.
I relished the novelty. Steve and I had both recovered sufficiently from the bruises of our union and its dissolution. And we each had new love interests; neither of us was pining for the other.
Even during the worst moments, we had managed to compartmentalize our differences and problem solve whenever issues arose regarding the girls. In fact, I was often secretly grateful for a crisis, so I could experience the fuzzy feeling of good will between Steve and me.
As soon as I enter the rented house on the first day of that first family vacation, I scurry to check out the bedrooms and stake claim to the one that best suits me.
Steve cares about quiet; I care about openings to the outdoors. He is happiest in a room away from the kitchen and girls’ rooms; I like the pj-party atmosphere when my room is near the kids.
Steve avoids bickering; I am a better bickerer.
In the Season 1 house, I bicker better and get the bedroom farthest from the kitchen, the quietest but also the one nearest the girls’ rooms and the only one with a door to the outside. Steve ends up in the room closest to the kitchen and the morning rumpus.
We go to the beach every day no matter what. Steve has Weatherman in his DNA and sometimes he has us set out while it’s still raining, but by the time we step on the sand with our folding chairs, the sun is peeking through, as he’d predicted.
On such weather days, we are practically the only ones at the water’s edge. We are all alike in our fondness for slouching in beach chairs and reading. Everyone loves the ocean, except for me. I dislike the feeling of water on my face and I’m afraid of waves.
Once when Steve and I were dating, we ventured into the water together and the surf was bigger than I’d thought. One after the other waves washed over us, never pausing long enough for me to get out, the same way, when my labor was induced for my first child to be born, the contractions came back-to-back, no break, no exit strategy. Bang, bang, bang.
At night we like to cook and eat in, only occasionally venturing into the town, which is dense with city folk clad in expensive sports clothes. We go only to prowl the bookstore, get ice cream cones or see a movie.
Most nights we line up in front of the TV after dinner, each of us with a laptop perched on our thighs. It’s the 2004 Olympics and Steve and the girls like watching the competitions. Steve gets teary during athletes’ personal stories and when unexpected victories and heartbreaking losses occur.
I don’t mind watching the Olympics, though it makes me sad that kids are packaged into mono-track lives that deprive them of their childhoods. No one agrees with me. I’m a Debbie Downer when it comes to the Olympics.
The only thing that feels odd over the 9 days, is that it feels so normal to all be together. Everyone agrees we should do this again next year.
This is such a win-win-win-win-win situation for our family. I wish more divorced families would vacation together. Please share this; maybe it will inspire others to try. Of course, it takes 2 willing parents.
SPEAKING OF SUMMER, CHECK OUT MY HONEST-TO-GOD, SECRET, ONE-MINUTE WAY TO STOP A MOSQUITO BITE FROM ITCHING
By susan fishman orlins At first it all seemed like a big adventure: stepping into Hurricane Isabel at one am with two pajama-clad teenage daughters and one dog in tow, basking in mini-celebrity the following morning when neighbors gathered in small clusters to gasp at the damage, and moving in with my ex, which surely interrupted whatever sameness had existed in my day-to-day life.
The forecast had been known for days, so it was no surprise Friday night when the power went out and the house went dark at ten o’clock.
“We might as well go to sleep,” I said to my kids, Sabrina and Emily, whose older sister Eliza was safely away at college. “I want you girls to stay in my room tonight just in case.”
They knew what I meant, as it was not the first time I had expressed concern about the monster poplar tree outside of Emily’s bedroom. Sabrina arranged a pile of blankets on the floor at the foot of my bed and Emily climbed in next to me, where her father used to sleep before our divorce five years earlier. Casey, our beagle-basset, wedged himself between us.
We fell asleep to the crackling sounds of falling trees that had been going on all evening. At one point I woke up to a loud bang and thought, That must’ve been a big one. Casey and the girls were in sound slumber and I fell right back to sleep.
Within what must have been a minute, I awoke to the siren-like whine of our smoke detector. Too drowsy to fully digest the potential danger, I stumbled into the hallway and saw it was all smoky. Although at some level I was aware the scent of smoke was oddly absent, I  /media-credit]calmly said to the girls, “Get up. We have to leave. There’s a fire.”
Casey got up too and when he arrived at the bottom of the stairs and noticed me reaching for his leash, he did what he always did: he ran in circles around the dining room table with me chasing behind until finally I caught him.
Then, due to a lifetime of having it branded on my brain that when there is a fire, you leave everything and get out, I knew to leave my purse. So it did not occur to me to actually take my purse rather than what I did, which was to spend precious seconds rooting around in it for my cell phone.
I guess my urge to communicate trumped my instinct to save myself from what, for all I knew, was a house in flames.
The moment we ventured outside, I looked to the right and up, where that ancient tree had towered for a century, maybe two; now, only dark sky and a huge yawn of open space glared back. A strange feeling of amputation washed over me. Something that had been such a presence was simply gone.
Don’t get me wrong. I was not sorry to see it go. Two days earlier, knowing the storm was headed our way, I had spent a half hour on the phone with my mom, discussing the anxiety I’d had ever since moving in six years earlier that the tree would fall and, in particular, that it would fall and crash into Emily’s bedroom.
I concluded that, even though I would miss its shade and proud, broad, leafy branches, I would overcome my resistance to paying the price of a small car to end up with less rather than more; I would have the tree cut down the following week. I had written “tree” in my day planner.
Why hadn’t it occur to me to do something about that tree before the most destructive hurricane ever to hit D.C. arrived? Would I really have followed through if the tree had withstood the storm? Aside from the thousands it would have cost, it gave me a grumbly stomach to imagine anyone traveling up that high to take it down.
Fortunately, my friends Lorraine and Joel lived around the corner, and I knew that I could rely on Lorraine, who was always sending emails in the wee hours, to come to the door when I rang.
Given that there was no choice about being out, I did not fret at the level of which I am capable about the dangers of sagging power wires and falling trees as we trudged against the fierce winds.
Rather, there was something enchanting about the debris swirling around us, and the sense we might get lifted up and blown to the Land of Oz, like Dorothy and Toto.
ARE YOU PREPARED IF A TREE HITS YOUR HOME?, my post on Home Goes Strong.
By susan fishman orlins With President Obama on the verge of crossing the half-century line, age-wise, I recall my own (embarrassinglynarcissistic) 50th birthday party on Home Goes Strong. I thought I’d share with you the invitation I’d sent.
Author’s note: I no longer pee a droplet whenever I sneeze.
YOU’RE INVITED (TO MY FIFTIETH)
I’m changing colors like autumn trees.
I pee a droplet whenever I sneeze.
My schnozz has grown, I’ve lost a tooth,
Even my earlobes have started to droop.
Errant whiskers sprout overnight;
They’re hard to spy with failing eyesight.
All my hormones are nearly gone
While my daughter’s rage like a summer storm.
I moisturize with religiosity.
I’m awaiting hot flashes with morbid curiosity.
Octogenarian sex no longer sounds odd.
I’m turning fifty! Oh my God!
“You still have your looks,” my mother stated.
Ma, you like how my upper lip’s corrugated?
I guess I actually do look young
When I’m at her Florida condominium.
Although for decades I have seen
That I’m older than models in Seventeen,
Still, I had always been confident
That I’d never be older than the President.
But, listen, it’s not my aging anatomy I dread,
It’s having more time behind than ahead
Worried about my imminent burial,
I consulted tables actuarial
To find out how many waking hours remain
For me to write a book, ride the train, complain. . .
The average American of fifty years
Has thirty-three point one more before she disappears.
From my pre-school age lop off half,
Add six point nine for renouncing decaf,
Compare waking hours since ’45,
With total anticipated till 2035.
(Don’t forget to include the excess–
As you get older you sleep much less)
That’s how I solved the riddle
Of how fifty is only the middle.
Though I turn forty-nine and five-twelfths in May,
I’m having a fete for my fiftieth birthday.
(At this point what’s seven months, more or less, anyway?)
Friday, May 19 join Steve and me to celebrate.
Or if you prefer, we’ll commiserate.
Since my memory’s practically shot,
Can you recount incidents I’ve forgot?
Some trouble I’ve caused–if you’re inspired
(Although I won’t object to hearing what you’ve, ahem, admired).
Enclosed are all the details you could possibly desire.
YOU CAN READ ALL ABOUT MY 50TH BASH ON HOME GOES STRONG
UNRELATED: ALSO READ ABOUT EVERYTHING TOMATO: RECIPES, STORING, FREEZING, PEELING, HARVESTING AND MORE.
By susan fishman orlins  Why put a cold, hard fork between me and my dinner, when the visceral experience of eating, the intimacy between me and my green beans is so enhanced by pinching the bean between thumb and forefinger and depositing it into my mouth?
Yes, I’ve had boyfriends who find this offputting and I understand that it looks out of the ordinary when I pick up a piece of lettuce between my fingers and lay it on my tongue.
I guess on a first date I should try to use a fork.
Using a fork instead of my hands feels so removed, like hearing about sex second-hand rather than having it myself, though I realize that’s an overstatement since, unlike with hearsay sex, I do get to finally make contact with the food when using a fork.
As for soup, I have neither the patience nor dexterity to balance a microliter of liquid in the bowl of a spoon and get it to my mouth without any drips. I prefer to drink soup out of a mug; in restaurants I order something like finger-friendly shrimp cocktail instead.
After a recent foursome dinner, I emailed one of my co-diners to acknowledge my fork was clean at the end of the meal.
She wrote back:
This used to be an issue for me. I love and do the same thing. There were men (dates) who were really turned off (we’re talking 70s, 60s, not sure still true) when I ate with my hands. I always did and always will. I am totally with you on this. And everyone else either does it - or (more likely) is WRONG. I am not tolerant of intolerance on this issue.
Jewish girl thing?
In a follow-up email she wrote:
we’re sensual women and free spirits . . and everyone else is uptight.
Y’know, then I got thinking, wondering how I’d react if I were out with someone who picked up a lamb chop with his hands (which I don’t do until it gets to the bone) and getting all greasy in the face. Ick, that would be bad. I think if someone were picking delicately at a salad it wouldn’t bother me.
Come to think of it, whereas it’s commonplace to eat watermelon without utensils, I like to cut watermelon. As with lamb chops it’s less messy with a fork and knife.
A good middle ground for me is chopsticks; I like picking at my peanuts with wooden sticks.
I’d love to know your take on the finger-food universe. How can I enjoy eating without utensils without being offputting?
Do you ever eat with your hands either when you are out or home alone? What other eating habits are you willing to share (drinking milk out of the carton? licking your ice cream bowl? Etc.?)?
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT:
See my Easy Chicken Dinner With Green Beans Amandine and Corn.
TECH APOLOGIES: Two odd things occurred this week. I accidentally hit publish for this instead of draft a few days ago, before it was finished. I unpublished it right away, but the link went to subscribers, but it led to an error page.
Also to my subscribers, an old post (A Week in the Life of Me and My Imagined Live-Along) may have shown up today in your RSS feed or email, and I have no idea why. Sorry 
By susan fishman orlins  Mom always looked great without a lot of fuss Grief: keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; painful regret.
At the cemetery, my sister and brother stand teary over our mother’s coffin with their arms around each other’s backs. Dry-eyed, I step up next to them, completing our sibling trio. Yet we are two plus one, a double and a single, a duet and a solo.
After standing there for a moment, unconnected–not part of their mood, not feeling their pain–I step back to allow them their moment.
We all adored my mom and felt a closeness to her that any mother (or offspring, for that matter) would envy.
So what’s with me and this numb reaction to her death?
Like my mom, I’m not a crier, except when I get divorced and have to agree to living 9 consecutive days a month without my kids. But that was years ago, and Mom was right when she told me I would eventually come to make the most of those 9 days on my own.
Though I can get weepy if I accidentally turn on the evening news, I strive to avoid sadness and pain. A mother’s death is one of the Big Boppers of loss and maybe I’ve put up a wall to block that. Or is this just a psychobabble idea from spending too much time talking to shrinks?
On a similar note, maybe I am in the denial phase; though after my father died, I also wondered why I never crumbled with grief.
 Mom and Dad aboard the Queen Mary Mom often said she wished she had been able to cry when Daddy died. Nonetheless, her loss was palpable after 66 years of marriage in which each considered the other before themselves.
Though it feels counterintuitive to prance around with my life the same as I did before Mom died, the fact that she and I shared the dry-eyes trait pleases me.
Her life ran its course over 92 years and she had no regrets. I celebrate that, and despite my jolly demeanor, I am aware that Mom’s death leaves me with a permanent empty space, an amputation.
Mom was the only person in the world (except me) who thought I ought to be on Oprah; Oprah, who–by ending her show–also left a hole in my life.
Mom timed her death nicely to coincide with the Oprah loss. Now, I won’t have to watch an Oprah show about, say, octogenarian sex, and then ache to phone and discuss it with Mom.
The truth is I lost my mom 2 months ago, a few days after we moved her up North in a medical van to be in a long-term care facility (she hated the term nursing home) near my brother’s family.
It was the most awesome road trip ever during which my mother said it felt surreal, as though she were traveling to Heaven, even though she didn’t believe in Heaven.
Then reality struck. Her new room–where we hung her favorite paintings and piled up personal things like the book of drawings and tales of her life I made for her 90th birthday and the quilt with family photos my sister had lovingly sewed for her–embodied all the railroad clichés: the final stop, the terminus, the end of the line.
She didn’t want to live after that and I was her cheerleader. She reminded me how I always said I’d help her pull the plug. Of course when it came down to it, I couldn’t do any such thing without the approval of my siblings, the ones who know how to cry.
A few weeks after my mother became downhearted, her body began to shut down. Her meds increased and, though she was still coherent, she became non-reactive, the opposite of the mother I always knew, who thrilled to everything from reports of my high school friend appearing as a frequent guest on MSNBC to the article I wrote about Choosing my Parents.
Another upcoming loss is likely to be my beagle Casey, given that he is 13 years old. Like Mom he has lived a long life with no regrets, except he probably wishes I’d have taught him to fetch. What if he dies and I can’t stop crying?
After all these years, my heart still goes pitty pat when I look at that boy. And even though he doesn’t have much to say about the debt ceiling, he is great company day and night. If I weep for him, not having wept for my mom, what kind of griever am I?
 Last picture of Mom and me together I’m told people grieve differently, and I’ve seen friends react similarly to me when their elderly parents died, so I’ll try to stop worrying that my heart isn’t swollen with grief right now, right after my beloved mom died.
What unexpected reactions have you had to loss?
RELATED ANNOUNCEMENT:
See my article Last Week my Mother Died; This Week I Celebrated Her Life.
SEMI-RELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: For more on death, see my series about Beth, who was diagnosed with breast cancer the same week she had to tell her husband that he had an inoperable tumor and that he would die.
After my Husband Died, Dealing With his Possessions
Caring for my Dying Husband at Home
My Husband’s Final Days and Funeral
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT:
Keep cool, read my article 12 Ways to Refresh With the Miracle of Lemons
By susan fishman orlins The going-into-treatment excuse didn’t work as well for Anthony Weiner as it had for me.
Though now I’m a compulsive truth-teller, in tenth grade I considered myself an adept liar.
Early one week, I had accepted a Friday night date with Joe. Then Artie called that very Friday to ask me out for the same night. I could never refuse Artie of the sky-blue eyes, so I said yes.
When Joe phoned during dinner to say he would pick me up at 7:30, my father heard me lie to Joe that I was being punished for fighting with my brother and couldn’t go out.
After I hung up, my dad said breaking dates was not permitted–if I did not go out with Joe, then I could not go out at all.
“Okay, Dad,” I said, “I’ll call Joe back and tell him I can go.”
Instead, I ran to my room, locked the door and phoned Artie. Since my parents knew Artie, I asked him to have his friend, whom I would introduce to my parents as Joe, come to the door to pick me up. The scheme worked, or so I thought.
When I came home from my date with Artie, my father was waiting. “Where were you?” he boomed.
It turned out that after I’d left, Joe dropped by to see how I was doing, at which point my father left the house and spent the rest of the evening cruising between The Hot Shoppes and Carol Yaffe’s house, the two hangouts he knew about, trying to track me down.
I had no choice but to acknowledge the deception.
“I think I need to go to a psychiatrist,” I said.
It was the only way I could think of to weasel out of my predicament; otherwise, I was afraid my father would confine me to my room until graduation.
In the case of Anthony Weiner, the going-into-treatment excuse didn’t work and he was forced to step down. But the going-into-treatment excuse worked well for me.
It also worked for my parents in that I made an effort to stay out of trouble, because I felt guilty about all the money they were spending to send me to therapy.
Do you agree that the going into treatment is, at least partially, a convenient excuse for these infamous texters and sexters and twexters and Tiger Woodses?
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: Share my post with the sandwich generation and others, Driving Safety for Teens, College Students and the Elderly (and just about anyone else)
By susan fishman orlins 
I’m drowning in junk, buried in boxes, suffocating with stuff. It doesn’t surprise me that all these metaphors point to an untimely end.
There would be great irony in getting snuffed out by my stuff, since one of my biggest worries happens to be that I’ll drop dead and my children will have the burden of sorting through everything.
I know what I’m talking about, because even though my 92-year-old mom has downsized several times and has already given some of her things to her children and grandchildren, my sister and I recently had to dismantle her apartment. I spent $300 to mail my share of her chotchkes from Florida to D.C.
Of course you could hire someone to hold a tag sale or find a charity to just haul everything away. But how could you resist going through everything, hunting for treasures that reveal in some cases more than you might want to know about your parents.
After our father died, my sister and I sat on the floor pulling things out of his night table drawer. Crossword puzzles, two pairs of glasses, an old watch and . . . What’s this long thing wrapped in a paper towel?
We looked at each other with clenched teeth fearing the most ghastly kind of sex toy as I gingerly unwound the paper towel.
Until . . . what revealed itself was . . . a toothbrush!
Whew! But that got me thinking what might reveal itself in my night table drawer if I were suddenly to get decapitated by a ceiling fan.
My night table drawer is where I always stored my valentines. Out of sheer laziness, I have never moved them to my “letters received” file, though it is nice to glimpse a red envelope occasionally when I reach for a PostIt and remember that men used to send me valentines.
It occurs to me my kids might think I still hold a torch for the previous Mr. Wrong. Yo kids, uh-uh, he’s just a friend.
Condoms? My kids are cool enough to be cool with that, except no one wants to picture their parents having sex. In this case my girls can actually imagine me not having sex, since the condoms expired in 2009.
I’ve strayed from exploring suffucation by stuff, so look for more of that in a future post.
Unrelated announcement: See my article Easy, Elegant Entertaining: My Mom’s Party Food.
By susan fishman orlins The other day my youngest daughter sent an email to her sisters, her dad (my ex) and me to say she would be receiving a prize for her senior thesis on the day before graduation. She asked who of us would be there in time for the awards event.
I wrote my response to the “family,” hitting “reply all” as we often do. As I was about to hit send, I began to worry about my enthusiasm and whether I should temper it, given the contrast with her dad’s email, which he had already sent to the rest of us.
It’s not that he is not equally pleased and proud, he just has a different way of showing it.
From her dad:
Em,
My plane lands at 4pm so I will try to make it.
Love,
Dad
From me:
Oh my goodness!!!! How fabulous!
My train gets in at 3:40, so I should be there 
Congratulations!!!!
XXOO!!!!
I began to delete some exclamation points, but then decided to leave them and ask what you think I should have done.
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: See these unique mosaics, including urns for your pets’ ashes, personalized with photos imbedded under glass.
By susan fishman orlins What if I meet a guy I like?
Monday: He gets up. I want to stay in bed but now I can’t fall back to sleep. Or, I get up and he wants to sleep, so I can’t turn on NPR.
 Ah, breakfast! I make myself French toast and a cappuccino and just as I’m about to sit down and enjoy reading the Times, he trots in and says, “Mm, that smells good.”
So I offer him some of my breakfast because otherwise I’d feel guily, but now I just feel hungry and my peaceful breakfast with newspaper indulgence is spoiled.
I walk the dog then return and set up outdoors to work on my laptop.
He asks if I want to bike along the river with him. I’m conflicted because a bike ride sounds great but so does my routine of working outdoors. Either way I’m screwed; I’ll regret that I may have made the wrong choice.
The day rumbles along like this with either interruptions or too many choices. Lord knows there were enough choices before he came along. On the other hand, some of the choices I used to enjoy, like walking with friends, have been reduced because of the time I spend biking and being with him.
Nighttime draws nigh and there’s the usual discussion of what, when and where to eat. He feels like going out. I always feel like eating home. He’s hungry now and wants real food; I’m not and I don’t; I just ate a chunk of dark chocolate, a handful of almonds and a large glass of milk, which you may recognize as my favorite diet tip.
I long for the Monday nights before he came along when the second I got hungry I could stand by the kitchen TV watching “The Bachelor,” while whumping down a salade nicoise.
After dinner, he wants to settle in with cops and robbers or the local news on TV, but I don’t like scary TV. Casey, who used to rest his head on my lap, jumps onto his lap.
A while later, one of us is ready to go to bed; the other isn’t. One of us wants to have sex; the other doesn’t.
He raises the thermostat. After his breathing shifts into slumber, I lower the thermostat.
Tuesday to Friday: It’s the same. (He is retired.) Except Wednesday nights I watch “Survivor” and he sulks.
Weekends aren’t all that different, but after a lifetime of conditioning, they feel different. On Saturday night, he wants to go to dinner and/or a movie. I hate noisy eating and crowded theaters. It’s a perfect night to be cozy at home.
There must be reasons people pair off into living spaces, but I can’t remember what those reasons are.
I suspect I’m missing something here. Do weigh in!
SEE MY NEW POST, ESPECIALLY THE PHOTOS: WHAT FALLEN 9-11 HEROES WOULD HAVE WANTED YOU TO KNOW
By susan fishman orlins Sometimes I walk down the street and look around to see if there is a guy I’d like to have as a livealong and I almost never see one who sings to me.
I like that my life offers freedom to do exactly as I please, whenever I please, get up when I like, go to sleep when I like.
As for a sleeping companion, I’ve previously written that ”I stopped caring whether someone with hairy legs was sharing my bed. In fact, sharing my bed with my hairy beagle, Casey, is as pleasurable in it’s own way and in other ways a lot less bother. For example, I can blow my nose loudly in the night and Casey barely raises an eyebrow.”
Of all the things I worry about, finding a mate is not one of them unless you count the worry that I will meet someone I like. Then what?
Sometimes I ruminate about a week in the life of me and my imagined live-along.
My friend Marian’s experience bolsters this notion that I am better off living as a singleton.
Marian divorced, downsized, dated Jay for 2 years, and then Jay got cancer and died.
Read about Marian’s journey “Divorce, Downsizing, Dating & Death” on Home Goes Strong.
I’d love you to visit the Site and share your thoughts and/or advice in the comments box.
By susan fishman orlins
Passover chicken with potatoes, shallots and rosemary ready for the oven
An eclectic group, this year’s seder in my daughter’s Beijing apartment included non-Jewish participants from Ireland, Argentina, England and Massachusetts as well as my Chinese-American Jewish daughter, her father (my ex, also Jewish) and me.
What at home would have cost $50 for fruits and vegetables, cost less than $5 at an outdoor market. What at home would have cost $50 for chicken, horseradish, nuts, herbs, flourless chocolate cake ingredients and more, cost over $100 at a shop in Beijing called April Gourmet.
With the matzoh meal I had brought from home, I made my best matzoh ball soup ever, maybe because I gave up trying to skim the fat. On my daugher’s 2-burner stove in a kitchen with literally no counter space, we chopped, baked and roasted all afternoon.
Over raw veggies (washed well) and hummus, we discussed seders past. I realized I’ve spent 5% of my Passovers in China. When we were ready to begin the seder, I spread the crisp white tablecloth I’d borrowed from my hotel on the wooden table that usually held my daughter’s aquarium, now in the bathtub.
My daughter, sitting on her night table in her small living quarters with limited seating, led the seder during which we passed around the one haggadah I’d brought from home. We dipped our pinkies into cabernet sauvignon ten times for the ten plagues, while my ex translated the plagues into Mandarin on his Blackberry.
On the whole perhaps not much different from the seder my friends were having at my home in DC, where they are staying with my beagle Casey, who no doubt was lurking under the dining room table in search of falling charoset crumbs.
In the spirit of the season, I have posted a slideshow of awesome Easter eggs and ideas for dying, decorating and displaying them.
What were the highlights of your seder if you attended one?
By susan fishman orlins UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: See my article Interfaith Seders & a Heavenly Flourless Chocolate Cake. Join the convo at the site with comments!
Here’s what triggers a mighty sadness for me: Juxtapostition of happy-sad. If on a normal day in March I hear about a young boy’s bike getting stolen, I’m sad but probably won’t need to watch a Seinfeld rerun to cheer myself up.
If, however, it’s Christmas and a brand new bike that the boy has been dreaming of gets stolen, well, it’s so hard to take that I need to distract myself with a bike ride of my own.
So imagine how I felt years ago on a visit to my kids when they were at their dad’s house. My daughter dashed upstairs all excited to show me her new Spice Girls poster. As she ran downstairs with the large paper poster billowing, it tore.
Her face crumpled, my heart shattered and all these years later I feel a rock in my chest when I think about that moment, which I do more often than I eat ice cream.
Needless to say this is completely inconsequential compared to other happy-sads, one obvious example being the plane crash in which John F. Kennedy, Jr. and 2 others died just as his cousin was about to get married.
Vacations offer myriad risks for happy-sad, which is one reason I often choose instead to hang out at home with the dog. (One friend calls family vacations an oxymoron.)
I agree with a friend who said, “You can’t be happier than your least happy child.”
I wish I could have protected my daughter from the torn Spice Girls poster and every other hardship life has to offer. All I can do though is tell myself these experiences build character and hopefully prepare them to deal with real problems.
Any other suggestions for coping with these kinds of white girl worries?
By susan fishman orlins If you’ve read my post “Choosing my Parents,” you know how much I adore and admire my 92-year-old mom.
Nonetheless, now that I’m 65, you would think I wouldn’t get annoyed when she talks to me in a tone. Not an unpleasant tone, one that’s off-putting only to me. As in What? You haven’t had breakfast yet?
Admittedly I have an eating schedule different from hers. She goes to dinner shortly after I’ve finished breakfast. At 11 p.m. when Mom and I have our daily phone chat, I’m often starting to broil a pork chop. Sometimes she’ll ask what I had for dinner.
“Pork chops,” I lie.
It’s the same kind of thing when I’m visiting her. On the day I’m leaving for the airport at 11:30, I head out at 9:30 for a half hour walk. “You always have to fit everything in,” she’ll say.
Fitting everything in was true when I was in my teens, 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, so I can see how she thinks that.
“But Ma,” I say, “I’m 65, I don’t do that anymore.” I know she’s thinking, “Yeah, like fun.”
(Do you know that expression “like fun?” I never hear it anymore. It has a similar sarcastic meaning as “Yeah, sure.”)
And as I’m packing up, she’ll ask, “You’re wearing that?” It’s the bookend to the welcome greeting “What’s with your hair?”
To my mom’s credit, she doesn’t seem to care whether I get married again. She can see I’m happy . . . even when I’m not.
- In what ways do your parents persist in annoying you?
- In what ways do you persist in annoying your kids, whether you mean to or not?
- In what ways to you persist in annoying your parents?
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: See my latest post on Home Goes Strong, “DOES YOUR BED MAKE YOU HAPPY? A GUIDE TO BUYING A BED, BEDDING & BEYOND.”
By susan fishman orlins 
The quest for happiness is popping up everywhere these days: in books, college courses, blogs and on Oprah. In the same way my oldest daughter, when she was little, shared her life with invisible companions Sibby and Babby, Worry and Quest for Happiness accompany me wherever I go.
Like sibling rivals, they argue constantly, vying for my attention. Happiness tells Worry, “If you’d vamoose, I could have her all to myself.”
“With all the bad things she thinks up, she needs me,” retorts Worry. ”So I’m not about to skedaddle anytime soon.”
Okay guys, quit quarreling, you’re both right. Worry, it’s true you get in Happy’s way, yet I do feel safer knowing you’re there to dwell with me when scary thoughts sprout.
 Nonetheless, I’m realistic enough to know that Worry can’t control everything on my list: world peace, my daughters’ safety, polar bears, homelessness, the budget deficit, sneezing while driving, driving, the Supreme Court, decapitation by ceiling fan, for instance.
Even though Worry follows me wherever I go, I have experienced happiness peaks: being a stockbroker in the
 Seventies alongside guys who made every day feel like a party, living in China back when the whole place looked like a black and white movie, raising kids, campaigning for my ex’s Congressional race, for instance.
Then along came my divorce to prove I was not immune to big setbacks. I spent a year writing nothing except lengthy faxes to my lawyer. Yet I continued to enjoy happiness pockets (funny how “pockets” showed up here compared to “peaks” above), like snuggling on the couch watching “Gilmore Girls” with my girls. And having romances with a smattering of Mr. Wrongs.
Among other joys reaped after my marriage ended, I count friendships I never would have had time to cultivate had I remained married. And having time to write, despite it’s solitary nature, gives me the pleasure of engaging with strangers.
But am I happy enough? Dan Buettner, author of Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way, told Oprah that the happiest people get 8 hours of social interaction a day. Can I amortize all the social interaction from the first half of my life? Does watching Oprah count?
 Last week someone said to me, “If you say you’re happy people just get jealous.”
It’s true. Recently I had to stop following a well-known author on Twitter, because she was always off to do this reading or that book talk and constantly tweeting about the hilarious fun she was having with her micro pigs.
Not that I begrudge anyone else their successes or their pets, nor would I want to stand in anyone’s knock-off Uggs except my own, but still it’s more comforting to pretend nobody’s having a better time than I am.
After finding myself single again, I began searching for Susan Fishman, my free spirited twenty-something self, who did things like crash the star-studded opening of the Barbra Streisand film “Funny Lady” at the Kennedy Center. How different we are/were. She played Scrabble for fun; I make a recording of all ninety-six two-letter words as well as u-less q words and vowel dumps, like qwerty and looie, to memorize during long walks.
I’m a smidge embarrassed to admit it wasn’t until recently that I accepted the idea of what made me happy in the 60’s and 70’s is not what makes me happy now. The last thing I want to do is don a long skirt, and sneak in somewhere (or even pay) to gawk at and be ignored by glitterati.
 My ideal day now consists of putting on elastic waist pants and writing, biking, watching Oprah on Tivo while I broil a pork chop. And watching a Larry David rerun while I take a hot bath. All with Casey by my side.
In 1989, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” won a Grammy for Song of the Year. For me, it’s not one or the other; both Worry and Happy follow me like ducklings imprinting on their Mama Duck.
But is it a sign of age when Content in Mom Jeans has become the new Happy in a Long Skirt?
How do you measure your happiness?
Semi-related announcement: Divorce, Downsizing, Dating & Death . . . One Woman’s Story If you read the article, I’d love to hear your thoughts and advice in comments there.
Unrelated announcement: See my new post with mouthwatering Vegetable Salad recipes.
By susan fishman orlins UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: Check out my article, FOUR 4-INGREDIENT ENTREES . . . QUICK, EASY, DELICIOUS & HEALTHFUL!
A few days ago I went into the basement (scary basements, a whole topic unto themselves) to put away an old file and came across an article I wrote while deeply involved in my X’s 1992 race for U.S. Congress against Peter King, who has been in office ever since. It will come as no surprise that I multi-minutiae-worried my way through the campaign.
:
My husband, Steve, sets up headquarters to launch his Congressional campaign. I worry about everything from strategy to stamps. When I notice mailings going out with the standard American-flag postage, I am chagrined.
“I-I think they look patriotic,” stammers Lawrence, one of the few employees.
“Patriotic doesn’t have to be unimaginative,” I say and continue in what I now recognize to be an annoying campaign-spouse tone. “I want you to go to the post office and get samples of all their commemorative issues.”
First I eliminate the “Comedians” series. Although when Steve and I were dating, he had told me his dream was to be a stand-up comic, I don’t want his supporters to think he’s going into politics to fulfill the fantasy.
And not the “Voyages of Columbus” series. Might be perceived as anti-Native American.
I’m willing to compromise on self-adhesive stamps, considering the convenience. But after trying a sheet, I realize the waste created by their backings could cost us the Sierra Club’s support. Better to make a safer choice and lick.
I ponder the Elvis postage, but then realize even Elvis won’t do–subliminally unsuitable since Steve’s opponent is named King.
The Olympics series is a standout, with strong colors and athletes engaged in wholesome activity. Perfect. Until we run out and so does the post office. The remaining selection is disappointing.
Then one morning Lawrence phones. “I found the greatest stamps,” he says. “You’ll love them.” Steve brings the new baseball stamps home. Gorgeous.
Uh-oh, though. “What’s happening here?” I ask. The player pictured is on the ground, apparently sliding into home plate. “Is he safe? Or out? Because if he’s out, you don’t want to be associated with this guy who’s down and out. Better go with something less risky. Like the D.C. Bicentennial.”
Months later, I learn that politically perfect stamps don’t win elections. On the other hand, maybe D.C. was the wrong message. Too many politicians using tax dollars to send junk mail. . . .
By the way, Happy Chrismahanukwanzamas!
In case anyone actually reads this (while hanging out with/ignoring your family), I’d love to hear your New Year’s resolutions.
By susan fishman orlins Unrelated announcement: How I Organized my Home, De-Cluttered my Life & Learned 21 New Tips
Some call the holiday season Chrismukkah, others say HanuKwanzMas. Then there’s Festivus with its unadorned aluminum pole, miracles and airing of grievances.
I say Hanukkah simply on its own can cause confusion, starting with: which of the 16 permutations do you use to spell it: H or Ch, n or nn, k or kk, a or ah?
Moreover, who knew that in their wisdom the rabbis of old gave us candle-lighting choices? According to Wikipedia, the Talmud says:
- The law requires only one light each night per household,
- A better practice is to light one light each night for each member of the household
- The most preferred practice is to vary the number of lights each night.
Waddaya know, turns out I’ve been following a “better practice” all along, each of us lighting our own menorah, creating our own Festival of Lights and puddles of dripped wax on old baking sheets.
Along with so many other December anxieties, comes the worry about wobbly Hanukkah candles in the wax-caked menorahs reducing our home to ashes. My rule is, when leaving the room, blow out the candles. Should I feel guilty about that?
There’s always this chatter about Chanukka being a minor holiday and, regardless, ought not be thought of as the “Jewish Christmas.” I agree. Plus, Hannukkah provides a smorgasbord of it’s own distinct joys.
I think of Christmas as a razzle-dazzle of lights and sparkle. My oldest friend summed up my lifelong enchantment with colored lights on evergreen trees as, “Well, you’re shallow and attracted to tinsel.”
I struggle to understand what offends some Jewish friends about an agnostic member of the tribe like me partaking of Christmas’s rainbow colors, cinnamon-y smells, tinkly carols, peppermint-y tastes and scratchy pine needles . . . in my home.
Sharing my family room with a colorfully lit tree (a custom that’s only a handful of centuries old) by the blazing hearth makes me feel warm, cozy and cheery on cold winter nights. To me it’s nothing more than a splendid tree.
On the other hand, if someone were to ask me to display the most exquisite creche imaginable, even one made of evergreen sprigs and dotted with lights, I’d say no. To me a creche is indeed a religious symbol, though I wouldn’t judge another Jewish person for displaying one. (See my friend Sue’s article “Some Jews Love a Christmas Tree, But a Creche? Oy” on her intriguing blog “On Being Both.”)
On a similar note, should Christians and those of other religions disallow dreidl in their homes? Simply because a lighted tree in my home makes me smile, does it affect the integrity of my or anyone else’s religiosity?
How about carols—are they any different? Where do you draw the line? Is it okay to bring Frosty the Snowman into the home? I like listening to O Holy Night.
Suppose my kids and I hang stockings and exchange trinkets. Would it be more palatable to the naysayers if we were to hang goody-filled pillow cases . . . and did so on, like, March 3rd?
Is it okay to celebrate Chinese New Year in my home? All the times I’ve done that, I never turned into a Chinese person nor felt treasonous (though I acknowledge this to be a weak and not religious example).
If I were not Jewish, no doubt I’d ache with envy of those having 8 dinners outdoors in a sukkah during the autumn harvest and, as the season changed, I’d be drawn to menorahs, lit with twisted candles in a garden of colors. And, oy, those crisp, potato pancakes! I would yearn to dance the hora and exchange gifts every night for 8 nights!
When I was a kid, I begged for a tree. My mom, who–like my daughter–was born Christmas day (an aside: my mom’s parents’ were Joseph and Mary) just told me that the one time she allowed me to have a tree on the third floor, she never told my dad. After that, she always said, “When you get married, you can have a Christmas tree.”
Then, at age 19, I got married and my husband would not allow a tree on the grounds we were Jewish. So I hung tinsel on the clothes tree and colored balls on kitchen cabinet knobs and from my ears. That January, after 6 months together off and on, we separated.
Posting this post-hannukkah seems in keeping with our family tradition of doing things not according to the calendar; rather, we celebrate events when we can all be together. One year we had a Passover seder in July so we could enjoy it with my parents.
I wish I believed in a higher authority who would answer all my prayers, because then I’d no longer need to worry. If I ever attain my quest for greater belief in religion, maybe I’ll want to give up my tree. Till then, Hapry, Merpy Hanumas.
I’d love your thoughts about someone Jewish
With tree lights of red, green and bluish.
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