By susan fishman orlins 
It’s a common occurrence in New York and other cities. You put your key in the lock of your apartment building and someone is about to follow you inside.
What do you do? Usually in the interest of security I ask if the person lives there and then request they use their own key or buzz the person they are visiting.
It happened to me a few days ago. A tall, handsome black man, somewhere around my daughter’s age of 29, follwed me through the first of two locked doors to my daughter’s building in New York City. Several things whizzed through my mind.
Mainly I thought, Will he think I’m a white woman not letting him in because he’s a black man?
Nonetheless, I asked, “Do you live here?”
In a pleasing Obama-like voice he replied, “No, I’m visiting my friend in 5D.”
“Would you mind asking your friend to buzz you in?” I said.
“Not at all,” he said.
And I headed upstairs to quickly drop off my laptop and pick up my jacket before meeting my friend for a day of biking in Queens and Brooklyn. I also wanted to get a snack during my discretionary five minutes.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about that attractive guy in a sweater and down vest and wondering how he felt about my not opening the door to the building for him.
I decided to forgo the salad, chocolate and glass of milk I had counted on scarfing down. Instead, I grabbed my jacket, bounded up to the 5th floor and rang the buzzer of 5D, while running through various permutations of gender and race and how I would have responded to each combination.
I egged myself on, knowing that a story for me to share with you was in the making.
A white guy named Matt answered the door. Still panting from racing up the steps, I asked if I could speak to his friend that a few minutes ago I didn’t let into the building.
“Sure come in,” said Matt.
“Hi, I’m Susan,” I said.
“I’m Shawn,” said Shawn in the soothing voice. “Nice to meet you.”
I handed Shawn my card and told both of them, “I’m a writer and I’m wondering if I can ask you a question about what happened downstairs.”
“Sure,” said Shawn.
I told him I felt bad not letting him in and wanted him know it wasn’t because he was black; I added that I felt bad because, as a black man, he must often run into suspicious white people.
And then I ran through a few permutaions.
“It would have been easier,” I said, “to not let in a white man.” No guilt. I would not have given that another thought.
Maybe I would have let a white woman in without questioning, though the previous day a white woman closed the door on me while I was fumbling for my key.
I later realized I hadn’t mentioned the black woman option; did that omission suggest a bias in me? Would I have admitted a black woman? In general, I’m more intimidated by women, so on that alone I’d be more inclined to let a female in. I wouldn’t want a woman, black or white, mouthing off at me.
 Where Shawn and I are from Shawn said, “I didn’t think about it at all.”
I started to mumble something about living in New York or DC, where my home is, there is so much more blending of races and Shawn said “Oh, I’m from D.C.” and I asked what he did and we three morphed into stop-and-chat chatter.
Already running well beyond my discretionary five minutes, I asked Matt if he knew my daughter, who also lives in the building, and he said, “No, is she single?”
She is. And I wondered whether Shawn was single.
Soon thereafter I had to leave. While pedaling along First Avenue to the Queensboro Bridge, I thought about how rewarding it is to take a moment that could have been nothing more than breezing by a guy in an entryway and make it into a story, in this case, one that challenged my assumptions.
Of course, I’m worried I’ve said something racially offensive here. Sometimes I need to ask a black friend if something I say or think is acceptable, the same way I sometimes have to read New York Times editorials to know what I think.
What do you do when someone is about to follow you into a locked apartment building? Do you act differently based on their gender, race, appearance, smooth voice, etc.?
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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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By susan fishman orlins 
I needed an antidote to worry this weekend, when my bike got a flat tire and then my car wouldn’t start. So here is the latest in my Antidote to Worry Series of food photos and such.
Here’s how I compose this satisfying crunchy salad:
- A base of arugula
- Trader Joe’s Healthy 8 chopped veggie mix, which contains broccoli, carrots, green cabbage, red cabbage, jicama, green bell pepper, radish, celery.
- I add pine nuts; shelled, salted and roasted pistachio nuts; blue cheese; pomegranate seeds and orange muscat champagne vinegar (vinegar also from Trader Joe’s).
And just like that I crunch my worries away!
Btw, I just posted my chili recipe–improvised from a 140-character chili twecipe–that I made with my daughter, another antidote to worry.
How do you crunch away your worries?
Unrelated announcement: See my “most popular” articles this week:
 Orange muscat champagne vinegar, mm
By susan fishman orlins Is it a worrywart trait to seek pleasure on the highest plane? To always be wondering whether–no matter how good something is–it could be better? That’s how it is with me and eating.
It’s a similar quest with family time. When I hear about a family who acts out Shakespeare together or who is always texting photos, I wonder why my family isn’t doing that; competitive and envious I am, even though I’ll never understand Shakespeare, and I cherish every minute with my girls, time typically amid a flurry of knives, cutting boards, skillets and olive oil.
Back to my quest to elevate taste to the max. For a long time now, I’ve been in search of how to best savor food.
 Big bite? Little bite? Chew slowly? Slosh?
- Do I take a bite and slosh it into all the crevices in my mouth?
- Should I slosh savory and sweet differently?
- Ought I study a map of my taste buds, so I can be sure to hit the right ones with the right foods?
- Did you know we have taste buds in our stomachs; how does that work?
- Mindful eating? Benefits of 100 chews? What if the patience required is not in my Ashkenazi DNA?
- Eating with hands? Um, licking plates?
- Do I need to be sitting down, even though biting into a warm, pink, juicy, olive oil sautéed chicken liver, over the kitchen sink fills me with an elation that makes time stand still (I know what you’re thinking and, yes, it is orgasmic)?
- What about little bites or big bites?
I ponder the size-of-bite question regularly as I chomp on my daily ounce of a Trader Joe’s 72% dark chocolate bar (diet tip). A big mouthful is simply more satisfying than a dainty nibble. I stand practically frozen, chewing at my chocolate drawer, concentrating hard on the bittersweet flavor sensation under the sides of my tongue, while Casey at my feet concentrates, waiting for an errant crumb. (Chocolate is not the only food that can poison dogs).
 Concentration by the chocolate drawer It’s the very same delight for me with a mouthful of pomegranate seeds. I’m drawn to the idea of biting on one shiny red seed at a time and savoring that nano-burst of juice, yet I find it impossible not to fill my cheeks, till they bulge like a squirrel’s, with a whole fruits-worth of seeds.
If I remember, and can bear to put off masticating that shiny, red heavenly mouthful, I run my tongue over the cluster’s bumpy terrain. And, as above, all sexual inferences you draw acknowledged but not intended. That’s how it is with eating.
The other night I went to see Adam Gopnik talk about his new book, The Table Comes First: Family, Friends and the Meaning of Food.
When I asked about eating technique, he wasn’t able to tell me how to slosh, but my question led him to talk about experiments where wine connoisseurs were asked to taste fine wine with a cheap label.
Their reactions that it tasted just okay were corroborated by MRI’s that showed brain changes, compared to when the subjects saw the accurate wine label.
I don’t like milk chocolate; it’s a totally different food from dark chocolate, and I wonder what would happen taste-wise, if someone were to give me a chocolate bar, milk chocolate in color, though exactly the dark chocolate taste of the one I love eating every day.
As with the wine label switcheroo, would it taste like milk chocolate?
On my way to the book talk I’d been listening to NPR. John Sebrook was talking about his latest “New Yorker” article “Crunch” about a hybrid apple. In the article he says that the sound when you bite into the apple is like “hearing with your mouth or tasting music,” which enhances pleasure.
This leads me to ponder taste buds in my ears and wonder why my music preferences are so limited, which I’ve noted to elaborate on in a future post.
How I’d love to see your comments on how to savor food to the max!
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By susan fishman orlins While shops experience brisker business on weekends, blog traffic slows, at least mine does.
So I’m posting this shortie today, hoping for weekend visitors.
What I’m about to write is one of those things I wouldn’t give a second thought to, were I not examining myself all the time for the very
 gaggle of cups on the kitchen counter purpose of writing about it.
The trick is to catch myself either in the act of something quirky or in the act of something everyone does, but no one thinks to talk about, sort of like how we don’t talk about the conversations we have with out dogs.
So here’s what I think is a quirk, but do let me know if you do this too: I save drinking water. Let me explain.
I have these under-the-sink filters that make the Potomac River potable as it comes through my kitchen faucet. I treat this water with the same respect I give my homemade chicken soup.
For one thing, ever since I went four years without realizing I was supposed to change the filters annually—not realizing they were in canisters that were clear plastic, not brown—I try not to tax those filters unnecessarily.
Plus, ever since I got kidney stoned, I drink buckets of water every day, either hot water with lemon or room temp with nothing in it.
So, if I’ve been out with my stainless steel bottle of hot lemon water and now I want to have regular water in that bottle, I pour the remains of the lemon water into a separate cup for later. This routine leads to a gaggle of cups on the kitchen counter.
 Tablescape, Cafe Matisse in Washington, D.C. It’s a similar look to my place setting at restaurants, where I request a half glass of white wine, half glass of red, tap water, fizzy water and sometimes hot water. Oh and a large glass of ice for my white wine.
That’s it for now.
Oh, by the way, do check out my meaty post, Thanksgiving: Moist Turkey, Vegetarian Recipes, Appetizers, Desserts, DIY Centerpieces, Giving Thanks, Entertainment Tips. Just as with my inability to select one color of wine, one flavor of water, I seem unable to narrow down my titles to something pithy.
Do you do hoard water or other things? I’d love to hear about that and other quirks!
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:
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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?
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By susan fishman orlins The other day, I bike downtown to the Newseum to hear a panel discussion by New York Times columnists. I leave home early enough to swing through McPherson Square, D.C.’s Occupy Wall Street venue.
 Soul Power My immediate sense is a blast from the past, a hippie and flower child commune ambience.
 The Lending Library The Lending Library boasts titles like War and Peace and The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo.
 The Kitchen On a small stove, ground beef is sizzling, almost ready to go into the spaghetti sauce for tonight’s dinner.
 Needs Bengay and Tiger Balm comprise 20% of the Needs, suggesting that occupying Wall Street puts a strain on the muscles.
 The Massage So folks help one another relax.
 The Committees and Meeting Schedule I have been fantasizing about taking my tent and spending a night with this group. Were I in my twenties, I might have moved right in, drawn especially by the camaraderie and excuse to sleep under the stars.
The Committees and Meeting Schedule heighten my envy of this seemingly tight community that contrasts with my comfortable home in a boring, mown-lawn neighborhood.
I would join the Welcome, Comfort and Media committees rather than the Sanitation, Legal and Outreach Committees.
 The Art Table Why isn’t there an Arts or Culture Committee?
 Art Table Yield Signs made at the Art Table are everywhere.
 Music Appreciation There is nothing in the Music Appreciation area–it’s guitar, drums, girls in long skirts, abundance of hair–to suggest this is not 1971.
 The "Red Cross" This medic’s name is Kennedy. He seems to be a regular, but tells me people come to volunteer before they go to work. I ask about toilets. He replies that the protesters are at the mercy of nearby restaurant owners’ generosity.
 Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig speaks Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig encourages the crowd to “invite the grassroots in, take in the Tea Party members who do not have a job … those people who have the same recognition” of the fundamental unfairness . . . . (Quote courtesy of occupydc.org.)
 Media Circus The protest is a media magnet, even the media folks are media-worthy.
 View from the Newseum Roof After meandering through the Occupy Wall Street community, I go to the Newseum, Washington’s fabulous news museum, and listen to opinion pages journalists discuss the current political climate and the 2012 election.
Maybe panelist David Brooks is the one who remarks that the Occupy Wall Street movement is not very organized.
I wonder whether he has seen the list of Committees and the Schedule of Meetings at McPherson Square.
Where do you think the Occupy Wall Street movement is headed?
Related Announcement: Don’t miss my Top Ten Do-It-Yourself Halloween Costumes
 Poorman's Nation such as Poorman’s Nation costume in this photo I took last week at “Wall Street’s” Occupy Wall Street demostration in Zuccotti Park.
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.
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By susan fishman orlins Popcorn is one of my favorite comfort foods. It fills me up, is healthful, tastes delicious and I pretend that eating this overflowing pot of it, sprinkled with sea salt, won’t make me feel squeezed in the waist by my elastic waist pants.
When my oldest daughter Eliza was a toddler, I thought it would be fun to place the electric popcorn maker in the middle of the living room, take off the top and watch the kernels explode all over the floor and furniture. I was right; for excitement it rivaled, hm, well nothing I can think of.
I took the above photo 25 years later in Eliza’s apartment. We became overly zealous with the amount of kernels and this time we were the ones all over the floor, cracking up, wondering when it would ever stop popping.
 We were like Lucy and Ethel in the “I Love Lucy” episode when Lucy and Ethel were trying to prove their pioneer bona fides to Ricky and Fred by baking bread. Lucy misread the recipe and used 13 cakes of yeast instead of 3.
You won’t be sorry if you try our fabulous popcorn.
What are your comfort foods?
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By susan fishman orlins You can tell a lot about a person’s life from the files they have open on their browser.
 Too many tabs Eugene, my computer guy, says I shouldn’t keep so many files open. But like with my desk, if I put things away, I’ll forget about them. So I leave them out and layers of other things gather on top of them and then I forget about them anyway.
Just yesterday, while taking my Organizing Challenge, under a pile on my desk, I found a dress I meant to return back in June.
Similarly, on my browser, I keep Sites open, holding onto the fantasy I’ll get around to reading them:
- An article about devices that help you watch your home from afar
- Twitter so I can check every 20 minutes to see if anyone retweeted my Holy Guacamole! tweet as well as see what my daughters are up to.
- Likewise, a tab to my stats that show how popular my blog posts are and, by association, how popular I am.
- “A Pro Confides his Best Tips for Painting Exteriors” I hope will help me figure out the best painter from the six I’m interviewing.
A tab with a “Consumer Reports” report on point and shoot cameras is open, so I can compare the one I just bought to the ones I didn’t buy. Is it a worrywart thing to seek opportunities for regret (and then regret having done so)?
Also open is Adam Gopnik’s piece about dogs in the “New Yorker.” It’s reassuring to know it is only a click away. But also anxiety-provoking; the tab is a steady reminder I don’t make time to read.
The “New Yorker” Festival Site is open with events ranging from a tasting walk in Greenwich Village with Calvin Trillin to Malcolm Gladwell waxing about The Virtues of Obnoxiousness. If I weren’t commitment averse, I’d buy tickets and close this tab.
Instead, I entered the limerick contest to see if I could win some tickets, which takes the matter out of my hands:
- A writer of wee note I became
- But my dream in this role was not fame (false, but here for the sake of rhyme and meter)
- Nor a view of the High Line
- Nor a New York Times byline
- But on New Yorker Fete’s slate my name.
(Hm, I worry they (and you for that matter) will not get the last line, my dream to be a featured writer in the Festival.)
I could make a file of these links, but I worry I’ll lose my place in the dog article if I close it and who needs one more file to keep track of?
Plus, as with newspapers that pile up, well, you know what happens, I chuck them on recycle day, and then I feel guilty I haven’t read them as well as worried I’ve missed something great.
Eugene is always telling me to reboot my computer more often for it to run its best. So once in a while I summon up the discipline to bid my tabs good-bye, and I log out only to start accumulating all over again, knowing I’ll never remember there was once a really great dog story I didn’t finish.
I’d love to see in the comments below what your open tabs say about you.
Check out my Home Goes Strong articles.
See my latest Huff Po post New York has The Moth, DC has SpeakeasyDC.
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 There’s something serene, along with a sprinkling of smug, about people who practice yoga. They laud the benefits—“Doing yoga has saved my back.” “I’m no longer stressed.”
 Self Portrait With Bike If I had the patience to do yoga, I’d also have the attention span to meditate, read the New Yorker and maybe even drive more.
On the other hand, I’m like the yoga folks when it comes to bicycling. I too often wax smugly about the thrill of breezes in my face and never having to deal with rush hour traffic or the search for a parking space. I stay fit and it takes barely more time to get anywhere by bike compared to auto, sometimes less.
Admittedly, biking requires a degree of flexibility about arriving at your destination with wet circles on the underarms of your shirt.
In the winter, when the temperature is in single digits, many bikers hang up their handlebars and I find myself among a reduced population of peddalers.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “You would ski in this weather as well as sit motionless on a ski lift.”
 Chill, not chilled, on a ski lift As for environmental benefits of biking, I accept praise for my smaller footprint, though I confess it has much to do with my disdain for the experience of being behind the wheel of my car, whose battery dies and underbody rusts as a result of remaining stationary in front of my house.
The only drivers I can sort of relate to are those who have soothing rides during which they listen to books on tape.
But I then I remember I have no patience for keeping track of a book’s multiple cd’s or even uploading cd’s to my iPod and then figuring out how to find where I last left off.
Instead, while biking, I listen to NPR and learn things like, you should salt your food right before eating for maximum flavor, because salt releases aroma that enhances taste. If you salt while cooking that aroma disperses into the air rather than into your olfactory senses.
How did I get to salt from where I started with smug yogis and biking? It’s like that game where you start with a word, say, “bike.” And you change one letter at a time—bile, bale, sale—and end up with “salt.”
I used to phone my mom while biking. We’d chatter during a 40-minute ride about the news, the family, Oprah and books, while I pedaled home up a long dark hill after making dinner for my friend whose leg was shattered when a car knocked her off her bicycle in broad daylight.
Sometimes I call a friend while biking, who says, “You shouldn’t talk on the phone while biking.”
I’m careful, I say, I ride on the sidewalk and I pause to look both ways at driveways. Plus my bike and I are a Christmas tree of reflectors and blinking lights.
If I think about how I could get hit by a car while biking, my stomach flips, but once I mount the seat I feel as calm and free as a yogi.
How do you achieve a biker’s high, a yogi’s calm?
Unrelated announcement: If you like Avocado, don’t miss my article with tons of fabulous ways to use them from on pizza to on your face, as a masque or as shaving cream! Fried bacon anyone? Avocados go great with that too!
Wondering what to make for dinner tonight? Check out my new post In the Kitchen With my Daughter.
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 China Baby
Last week the daughter of friends in Beijing wrote to me about her baby:
My baby is more than four months now. She is very healthy and very happy. Recently, I made haircut for her. In China we cut all the hair from birth, in order to grow better. Generally these hair be used as writing brush with the baby’s name and birthday for keepsake.
I wanted to share that bit of charm with you, especially because I have more to report on deer. If, like me, you are sick of deer talk, you may want to look up from your smartphone at this point and join the meal conversation that is going on around you or, if you are crossing the street, pay attention and look both ways.
Hm, that makes me so curious to know what you were in the middle of when you began reading this. Work? Other Websites? Work? Studies? Kids? Work? I’d love you to take a minute and let me know in the comments.
Think of it as a come as you are party, which reminds me of the Come as You Are party I had in the Seventies and my dear friend–who is now a big shot talking head, MacArthur Fellow, lauded by Clinton and others–loves to remind me how I’d invited him with a phone call at 7 am. So on the evening of the party, he arrived wearing only a towel around his waist and shaving cream on his face. The rest of us were dressed suitably enough to at least go grocery shopping.
I need to post more below on the deer to clarify/correct some tips on ticks.
BEFORE YOU GO, CHECK OUT MY DESSERT RECIPES, including Coconut Rice with Mango and Mango Sorbet that is fit for an Emperor. And a Cheesecake that I can’t even think about without salivating. There’s also a Fruit Salad that is a work of art.
Baby Deer: Corrections and More
I received this email after my previous post Deer Update With Deer Tips:
There is, in fact, a species known as the deer tick and, although they do pick up Lyme disease from white-footed mice, they spread it to deer and, thus, to other ticks which spread it to people and pets. Lyme disease contracted from deer ticks is very painful and treatment lengthy.
My experience with deer and other wild animals (think ducks, geese, rabbits and squirrels) is that you can put out all the commercial food you want and they will still prefer your shrubs and plants.
. . . Be advised that Chronic Wasting Syndrome among deer has been confirmed in Maryland. This is a horrible illness that causes deer to waste away no matter how much they eat. There is no cure or treatment. It has been around for many years but has only recently been confirmed in this state. Judging from the size of the fawn pictured, it has not needed to be nursed for some time. Perhaps the mother is recovering from the ordeal of raising twins.
I have been rehabilitating wildlife for over 24 years and have attended numerous classes and conference and done much reading regarding wildlife and the problems facing them. Through networking with other rehabbers in Maryland and across the country, the rehabbers at Second Chance keep abreast of new developments and treatments. We are in the process of using a specific drug to combat West Nile Virus in crows and hawks which has had good results in trials.
 Mama deer keeping cool under my deck
Christine Montuori, Founder/Director Second Chance Wildlife Center
And below is from David Stang, also at SCWC:
I may have misspoken about deer ticks when I said “no such species as deer ticks and in fact, the most common way to get ticks is from mice.” What I should have said is this:
Black-legged ticks can carry Lyme disease and some other diseases that can affect both humans and animals. This tick is sometimes found on deer, but adult black-legged ticks also feed on white-footed mice, chipmunks, shrews, raccoons, skunks, opossums, and other mammals. When deer are scarce, ticks don’t necessarily become scarce, because they have alternative hosts. Lyme disease can be found where there are no deer, and there are areas in this country that have deer but no Lyme disease. Deer can travel farther than a mouse, so can transport a tick farther… but we have many more mice than deer, and mice are the likely vector for most of the ticks we come upon.
By susan fishman orlins The fawns scamper across my backyard like teenagers off to a pep rally. Despite a few scares–days when I didn’t see the
 Mama Deer emaciated-looking mom in my yard–Mama deer has been here too.
But I’m still concerned about her.
After I wrote “Oh Dear, My Deer” about how worried I was for the little deer family, readers’ comments rivaled the debt ceiling negotiations in their diverse perspectives.
On my Facebook wall, one friend wrote “I am so DISTRESSED” and went on to say she hoped I’d been serving milk and cookies to the deer (or something like that; I spent 20 minutes searching for her exact comment.)
By contrast, my friend Jane wrote on my blog:
I can’t believe I’m trying to find ways to keep deer away from my hydrangeas (just bought coyote urine) and my brother never wears short sleeves or short pants because he worries so much about deer ticks and you are encouraging them so close to your house. Deer bring nothing good. Get rid of them! Soon!
Another comment, from my friend Lise, confused me at first: “What is the deer-equivalent of matzoh ball soup?” I thought oh, she wants me to make deer soup. Ew.
But now I realize she was suggesting I make deer-friendly matzoh ball soup to help plump up the malnourished-looking mother deer.
I did not make soup, but I did place in the yard a pan filled with water.
Even though I haven’t seen my dears today, I phoned The Second Chance Wildlife Center, believing that nearly a month is long enough for the deer to be in residence at my residence.
Happily, David Stang answered my call and I couldn’t wait to share the 411 with you!
David first tip is is no such species as deer ticks and in fact, the most common way to get ticks is from mice. I don’t like cats, but I like ticks even less. Is it time to get a kitten?
Also, if you want to keep the deer from eating your azaleas, try feeding them deer chow, which they may like better. Just buy a bag for $10 and scatter it on your lawn.
David had great news for Casey, who has been banned from even the front yard, because it has deer droppings that he likes to eat. Deer droppings, according to David won’t hurt him. “It’s like putting some hay in the blender,” he said.
Severa; deer wizards have advised me to leave the yard gate open so the deer will leave. I asked David what he thought about leaving the gate open. He replied, better to keep it closed; they can jump the fence if they want and the closed-in yard will protect them from dogs (and I’m thinking coyotes).
David noted he would be pleased if a deer family like mine were to settle in his yard.
 one of the teen twins; blurry I know--I have a tremor So I can sit back and enjoy my deer, though now I’m worried they’re off to greener pastures, as I haven’t seen them all day 
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: SEE MY FAVE HEALTHY RECIPES
By susan fishman orlins  [- Oh deer, my dear A year ago, I woke up and peered into my backyard and saw a mother deer and what appeared to be her two newborns clustered behind my azalea bushes. The young ones were trying to stand but then they would collapse, their spindly legs unable to support them. By afternoon, they were walking.
The following day I looked for them but they were gone, which would have required them to leap over my picket fence.
Again this year I have a mom and 2 baby deer in my yard. The difference is that they have been here for more than 2 weeks. And now, I’m worried.
Each day the mother deer, though she grazes on my weeds, looks more and more bony. Her ribs are showing, the area around her hips is sumken and her face is gaunt, as though she has been starved in a concentration camp.
The spotted babies look so huggable and sometimes I talk to them in a high voice, the way I say to Casey, “Who’s such a goody-good boy?”
“Who are such goody-good deer?” I repeat a few times and, honestly, I perceive that they wag their little white Bambi tails.
 "Goody-good deer" I’m worried if I phone animal control that a big man will come and take the mom away, separating her from her babies, and that would be worse than anything.
I realize the deer ticks must be having a carnival back there, but I’m not too worried about that. Casey, who used to run in the backyard, has lost privileges because he rolls around in the deer droppings and eats things too gross to mention. Also he once got loose and chased a deer.
I’m afraid Mother deer will die in my yard. If Mama isn’t sick, why are they still here?
And I guess if she dies I’ll call animal control to cart her away. But as I write this I’m beginning to worry about disease and how I will know if she died; there is a considerable growth of weeds in which to hide and then die and decompose.
Just as I am about to publish this, my daughter (who is home for a few weeks before setting off to grad school) tells me she woke up to something that sounded like the wail of an animal dying. Is she imagining things based on my anxiety?
Will a deer carcass attract rats?
So far today, I have seen only the toddler deer.
I welcome your thoughts and suggestions.
SEE MY LATEST POST on Home Goes Strong: Easy Summer Dishes and Sides
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 Saturday, July 2, 2011
Mother died today. I am not trying to channel Camus, just trying to make sense of how it feels to suddenly become a 65-year-old orphan in New York while my mom’s cold body lay in Philadelphia.
I’m sitting in Union Square, one of my favorite places to work when I visit New York. The usual bustle is going on around me: a pair of Boston terriers rollicking in the dog run and the farmer’s market actively trading consumables, like the quart of organic skim milk in a glass bottle I bought to go with the chocolate chip banana cake I brought here in my bike basket.
A church group on a neighboring bench is painting their faces red white and blue for their annual pamphlet giveaway to promote patriotism and Christ. We take a picture together, my first thought being I can’t wait to show Mom, even as I know from my brother’s phone call an hour ago that, with her hand in his, my mom had just taken her last breath.
I so wanted to be there with her, but one never knows when the end will happen. I knew she was in the homestretch and, though I saw her last week, I figured she would hold tight until my visit tomorrow.
It’s comforting that I spent so much quality time with Mom, yet would a better daughter, knowing she was rapidly failing, have rushed to her side? Would it have mattered to her in her remote state or would that have been only for me?
A few weeks ago when I kissed her good-bye before heading home to D.C., I said “See you next week,” and she asked “Why?”
Although mid-week her eyes began to be closed more than open, I had planned to read to her the picture book of her life stories, which I made 2 years ago for her 90th birthday. It was my fantasy that she would then slip into death while I was there, with her hand in my carbon-copy, arthritic hand.
So, now who will enthrall to what I do every day and to the photographs I take?
Proceeding with today as planned seems odd. At the same time, it’s as though in a way my mom died after we moved her from Florida to Philadelphia, when it dawned on me she would never again be talking on the phone with me from her club chair, the one my dad had sat in for so many years until he died in 2006 and she inherited the throne.
I can just see her now, the books, magazines, newspapers piled on the table beside her, the remote control in her hand, watching the TV in her mirror-backed wall unit with the Lladro figures and other pretty things she had collected reflecting sunbeams while Chris Matthews ranted about the Republicans.
She wielded that remote with the facility of a man half her age.
I meet my friend Anita at Joe for a cup of joe. When I say, “My mother died this morning,” her expression of shock is far greater than mine was when earlier I had seen my brother’s name pop up on my phone and answered it with, “Mommy died.”
After coffee, Anita and I proceed as planned, pedaling into Brooklyn for a look at the local culture and lunch.
Mom would have loved hearing about the Chasidic family I passed on the Willaimsburg Bridge, the gaggle of kids and the man in a long black coat that flapped as he walked, white tights and a big fur hat (she would know the Yiddish term for this).
 salade niçoise We stop for lunch at Fada, reported to be the only authentically French bistro in the area. Happily there is nothing pretentious about this place that feels as though it’s been here since the invention of French fries.
We sit by a counter on high stools in the front that, being on a corner, is open to the street on two sides. My appetite has not faded with the loss of my mom. Rather, as I dig into my salade niçoise, I feel a numbness that friends have reported feeling after their parents have died.
My mom’s was a life well-lived and filled with love that ran its course with no regrets. How many people can say that? This doesn’t minimize how much I will miss our leisurely nightly calls and monthly weekends together. Her laugh, her insights, her contentedness that set the bar high, yet provide a great role model, for when I reach my walker years, if I do.
Pedaling back toward the Manhattan Bridge, I pass an African Arts Festival and shops shuttered for the Sabbath with names like Schenkel’s Fish Market, just the kind of travelogue Mom would have loved.
[Cheesy alert!] On the bridge, high over the river, I feel a bit closer to the clouds, closer to Mom.
My Worrywart feels self-serving linking to/promoting my other articles as I write this about losing my mom, yet she would be all for it! She loved hearing about my writing, both the substance and the successes and even the flops. And, we had so much fun writing a number of my Home Goes Strong articles together:
MY MOM’S DO-IT-YOURSELF DECORATING TIPS
DELIGHT YOUR GUESTS WITH MY MOM’S PARTY GAMES
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE JEWISH TO MAKE GREAT CHICKEN SOUP
EASY, ELEGANT ENTERTAINING: MY MOM’S PARTY FOOD
By susan fishman orlins Only eight weeks ago, I was on a half-hour bike ride home, all uphill, when I called Mom for our daily shmooze. We caught up on
 Mom looking at photos as we sped North on Rte. 95 political scandals, Sarah Palin, literature, Oprah and Mom’s latest Bingo game. While we talked, mounting the hill was effortless.
Shortly after that, her doctor determined she could no longer live alone, so my daughter and I flew to Florida, where she was living, to accompany her to a nursing home in Philadephia near my brother’s family.
In a hospital bed, Mom sat propped up like a queen looking at photos on my laptop as our medical coach, a converted 42-foot RV, sped north on Route 95. After an hour of eating pretzels and giving commentary, I needed a break. A bit later Mom fell asleep and soon my daughter Emily and I began laughing as we read email responses from the rest of the family to my “Rte. 95 Travelogue.”
Mom opened her eyes and asked “What am I missing?”
So Emily and I climbed into her bed and we all read and laughed together. After the emails, Mom said she wondered how well off her family had been when she was growing up. She concluded they were pretty comfortable, given that her mother was always able to give away coal and still have enough for the family.
My mom has always loved conversation. But now her 92-year-old body is shutting down. Sometimes she is fuzzy from the morphine being administered for discomfort related to her heart condition; and some of the time her mind is good.
One of many frustrations is that she can’t seem to vocalize. We can tell she wants to express something but nothing comes out.
My sister tried giving her pencil and paper but Mom didn’t want that. Plus her hands are very shaky.
As her voice began to fade, so did her expression. There was no inflection in the little she was able to say.
When I go to see her this weekend, I thought I would try some yes and no questions, beginning by asking if she even wants to try to communicate, say, by lifting her hand for yes or wagging a finger for no.
Yet, that may be a total flop. I’m hoping some of you, my readers, can help. Any suggestions for how to assist my mom in expressing herself?
Maybe you know someone who has been through this. I’d love to hear from you and if I do get a variety of responses, I’ll write an article for Huffington Post or Home Goes Strong, so I can share what I learn with a broader audience.
Thanks for any help!
X
O
By susan fishman orlins
Hobogies-add oil, vinegar, soy sauce, wrap in foil and grill
Welcome to my periodic series: Antidote to Worry (oh dear, is that now a commitment?), in which I highlight food I ate over the weekend.
Consider it a “Worry Break,” as in one of my Tip Day tips.
Plus, much to my pleasure and surprise, I turn out to be a food writer, among other things on the NBC Website Home Goes Strong, my specialty being recipes that are generally quick, easy and healthful–often but not always vegan or vegetarian–with not a lot of ingredients and no lemongrass or other stuff you wouldn’t find at the average A & P.
Also, whenever possible, I subscribe to creative measuring.
This weekend my daughter and I made hobogies, whose ingredients you can see in this photo. You can read how to make them on Home Goes Strong. The fun of preparing hobogies, especially with friends, as well as eating them is today’s Antidote to Worry!
Pair your hobogies with drinks from my new post Refreshing Summer Drinks for July 4th Parties or Anytime.
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: See my recent post CARING FOR MY DYING HUSBAND AT HOME: BETH’S STORY (AS TOLD TO ME)
By susan fishman orlins
 Bathtub buffet
Bathtub snack: Ham, aged gouda, fresh multi-grain bread, spinach, arugula, mushrooms and strawberries.
And to wash away any lingering woes, red wine from Chile.
Before your bath, why not work out at your treadmill desk? Burning calories aren’t the only benefits!
For more great ideas for bathtub buffets, try some of my delicious healthy recipes with fat-burning foods.
By susan fishman orlins 
Unrelated Announcement, my new article: CAN SEPARATE BEDROOMS SAVE A MARRIAGE? Weigh In!
It wasn’t like I had a choice when, at the breakfast table, my then-21-year-old daughter Eliza presented me with documents to sign. The whole family had to swear to confidentiality or the plan was off for her to be a contestant on “Survivor.”
If I refused to sign, the plan was off for her to continue being my daughter. So I signed.
Her father, my ex-husband, reassured me “CBS makes too much money from the show to let anything happen to her.”
But I had seen the episode where a contestant fainted and fell forward while huffing to augment a campfire. Cameras rolled as he lifted his face from burning logs with the skin hanging off his hands.
I tried to be excited for her. After all, I would have applied for the likes of “Survivor” when I was her age. But I kept thinking up things like What will happen to Eliza’s teeth if she goes six weeks without flossing?
The closest I ever got to TV fame occurred when I was 22, during a micro affair with Chuck Barris, creator of “The Dating Game.” He offered me a gig to go to Colorado Springs as a “Dating Game” chaperone. My training consisted of one instruction: Make sure the girl doesn’t get pregnant.
Worry is relative. My daughter’s 26-hour trip on three flights to get to her “Survivor” destination, including one on Air Vanuatu, would have been enough to make me go on a hunger strike. But the idea of her starving on an island, one I’d never heard of, trumped the aviation rumination.
Thankfully it was pre-tsunami.
I got through it, perhaps calling on the same resources that help me worry less now that my daughters no longer live at home. Although they go out in cars and subways till all hours among drunks (themselves at times driving sleepy, which is the same as driving drunk), I can at least pretend they are snug in their beds when I turn off my bedside lamp at night.
How do you cope with worrying about your loved ones?
By susan fishman orlins Call me Ms Memory, with 2 recent articles:
21 WAYS TO REMEMBER PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING!
11 EASY WAYS TO REMEMBER PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING
But last week I go upstairs before my dentist appointment to change into something cooler. I take off my sweats, pee, and then head downstairs to get going on my bike. Halfway down the stairs, I realize I forgot to put on my pants.
Should I be worried about my memory?
SEE MY LATEST HOME GOES STRONG ARTICLE: 27 Awesome Ways to Dye, Decorate and Display Easter Eggs
By susan fishman orlins Are the doors locked? Am I on the right train? Is there spinach in my teeth? 
There’s spinach in your teeth; but isn’t it too late, too awkward to tell you now that we’ve been talking for 20 minutes?
Have I re-read the email I wrote enough times to hit “send?” Should I send it to myself first and double check it later?
Did I remember to put water on my night table? What if I’m in captivity and can’t have water by my bed? Do I need to break the habit now? How?
And if I am captured, how will I distract and occupy my mind? Should I memorize a list of things to think about, now while I still can, to keep me from going crazy in such a case?
What if I fall getting out of the bathtub and can’t get up? Should I get one of those necklaces with a button to summon help, like my 92-year-old mom wears? With that button around my neck, is it worth feeling old in order to feel safe?
What if Casey dog needs an operation to save his life? How much would I spend? What’s the cutoff?
What if I get a boyfriend and soon after he gets a terminal illness? Would I have the patience to sit with him in doctors’ windowless waiting rooms?
What if I get a terminal illness (knock wood or whatever)? Will I have the patience to sit in windowless waiting rooms? (NO)
Will I be as afraid of something bad happening if I take my (as yet unborn) grandchildren outdoors as I was to take my daughter’s Yorkie for a walk when I was his sole caregiver for a week, so I didn’t?
Ought I never again experience the joy of a plump raw oyster in case I get a bad one?
Do you know that for each worry I write, I have a dozen more? And that I’m afraid if I write them they’ll come true?
What if I run out of worries to write about? Is that even possible?
Possible or not, it worries me.
POST-POSTING RUMINATIONS: Is this post good enough? Too long? Too boring? I’ll make some phrases bold. Do the bold phrases help? Or distract? Will faithful readers ditch me? This is my 33rd update of this post. What does that tell me?
What are your what if’s?
COMING SOON ON CONFESSIONS OF A WORRYWART: STARTER MARRIAGE, THE MINI-SERIES
Unrelated announcement, see my new articles:
PAELLA: MY ALL TIME FAVORITE ONE-DISH RECIPE WITH VEGAN OPTION
11 EASY WAYS TO REMEMBER PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING
By susan fishman orlins Each time Casey and I come home from a walk, he barks for a treat. And each time I throw a kibble in the air for him to catch. He never does. After he roots around in the wrong direction, I telll him when he’s getting warmer and finally he finds it. Then I always say, “Wow, good job, good job!!”
 Casey all ready for his walk in the rain This reminds me of the time my oldest daughter, maybe 5 years old or so, accused me of deceit because I raved about every mark she ever put to paper.
Today it occurs to me that maybe, given all the praise I shower on Casey in order to boost his self esteem, he thinks he’s supposed to miss the little brown kibble when I throw it. And then he thinks he’s supposed pretend to look around, puzzled, heightening the excitement for me, even though all the while he knows it’s under the hall table.
You can read about Casey’s nicknames, whether he’s bored, mayhem with a squirrel in the house and more.
Also check out my slide show, Elizabeth Taylor Family Photo Album, Rarely Seen Domestic Scenes.
I’d love to know other games to play with Casey (fetch is not in his vocabulary) . . . suggestions anyone?
By susan fishman orlins There’s a lot to learn during 10 days in New York.
I learned I can go far north or south on dedicated bike lanes. And once a day someone grouses at me for wheeling crosstown on the sidewalk, not that I blame them.
But I do blame the guy who tried to push me off my bike as I pedaled up the sidewalk one night on E. 92nd St.
“What the f*uck was that for?” tumbled out in an involuntary scream, as I regained my balance from the mound of trash bags he’d shoved me into.
“Get the f*ck off the sidewalk,” he shouted back. I responded with the equivalent of what you say to an aggressive toddler, “Use words!” adding, “You didn’t have to assault me!”
I told this to my friend Alice, who shared safety advice from a male poet she’d met in Paris: Never say anything to a strange man that makes him think of his penis. Any dirty word starting with P or F is dangerous. “Don’t tell him to piss off,” the poet had advised.
Adding to my biking concerns my friend Pam asked, “How old is your helmet?” After falling off a bike, her friend became partially paralyzed due to helmet fatigue. Her helmet had been either more than 5 (some say 3) years old or compromised by previous impact or heat exposure.
What I love about NYC is all the worrywart material I pick up from neurotic friends. Over sushi, I asked my pal Mike to borrow a pen. He answered, “I have a silver pen I love, but I’m too afraid of losing it, so I never take it out of my office.”
This very same worrywart imparted advice to never order spicy tuna. He told me it’s likely to be less fresh, since it’s chopped and spiced. “But Google it to be be sure,” he said.
“Even if there’s nothing about stale spicy tuna on Google,” I replied, “that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.”
Mike added that New York restaurants now get ratings from the health department. He dropped one place because they only got a B. What a dandy opportunity for bribes to the health inspectors; an A could really be a C . . . or worse!
 - sarah needs a job On another note, if I ever need a job I can take a tip from someone named Sarah whose fliers on West 14th Street’s lampposts read “SARAHNEEDSAJOB.COM.”
To boost my readership, I considered doing the same with fliers that say CONFESSIONSOFAWORRYWART.COM.
But then I looked around and, like in a horror movie, where the handsome young man grows fangs before your eyes, everyone coming my way morphed into vampires.
Finally, I learned from a fellow who’d traveled to Antarctica that there is a barber pole, marking the South Pole, and that if I go there and get sick, they have Medivac service.
Note to burglars: I’m home now, so no funny business.
What ideas do you get from your friends to worry about?
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: Do you have trouble remembering names, etc.? See my article “21 WAYS TO REMEMBER PRACTICALLY ANYTHING.”
By susan fishman orlins
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: See article 7 Easy, Delicious Aphrodisiac Recipes.
A variety of search terms leads Googlers to my blog, some weirder than others. My voyeuristic pleasure from reading a daily list of these terms is infused with a measure of guilt.
Generally, we Google in the privacy of a bubble that envelops only ourselves and our computer screens. No one, except a snoopy or untrusting lover or someone sitting next to you on the Acela, is likely to see what you look up.
Even when I read a search term that is not kinky, like the recent “bungee in chicken suit,” I feel like I’m invading someone’s personal zone. Did the searcher get to the part of my post “Photophobia” that meandered to all that can go wrong when you bungee jump?
 In the history of Google, I wondered whether anyone else had ever put those four words together. A search yielded 28,100 results, including a 7-minute youtube video of a fellow named Tom, bungee jumping in, duh, a chicken suit.
Sometimes there’s a pattern. For instance, ever since I posted “The SNL Hug, What Up With That?” Sundays arrive with variations of “what’s with the weird snl hug?”
I thought I was original to come up with a post wondering how does an atheist pray. Yet searches turn up all the time, phrases like “atheist misses praying,” “can an atheist pray,” and “prayer is totally useless.”
The search “jewish dog names” proved I’m not the only one who had something to say about that. Actually it was my father who gave Casey the Jewish name, Chaim. I added Goodman for when he is good. (This week, though, he is Bad Branman after eating nearly a whole box of shredded wheat with bran.)
In one post, I referred to a picture taped beside my teen bed of Ricky Nelson in a cowboy suit with a bulge in his crotch. So I’ve gotten a lot of “bulge” hits. “Greg Kinnear bulge” was the first one; I thought it meant he’d gained weight. Other bulge-searchers have sought “cowboy bulge,” “daddy suits men crotch bulge,”and indeed “ricky nelson bulge.” Who are these people?
Confessions of a Lowbrow brought visitors looking for “lowbrow poetry” and ”monica lewinsky confession,” since I had written that I understood how a young girl would hold onto a blue dress with the President’s cum stain.
And on Valentine’s Day it was only natural to have someone search “please do not touch stroke lick or mount.”
Here are some likelier terms that linked Googlers to Confessions of a Worrywart:
What are some of your best search stories and/or search tips?
By susan fishman orlins (Whether you are my age or pre-memory loss, please share this with parents and friends who’ve crossed the line.)
What was I was just thinking to write about? Oh yeah, memory loss.
That sounds like a bad joke, but it’s what I actually said to myself when I opened this file to write about my forgetfulness.
Already this morning, I knew I needed to go upstairs but couldn’t remember why (to turn on the humidifier). And there was something else. Oh yeah, I went to my laptop while preparing my shredded wheat—and I knew there was a reason. After a minute I remembered it was to stream NPR while preparing my shredded wheat.
The first time I looked up Alzheimer’s (and it’s cousins senility and dementia) was shortly after I gave birth to my oldest daughter. I attributed my diaper brain to, well, diaper brain.
Still, I needed to put memory triggers into place. So before leaving our New York apartment, in addition to taking the diaper bag, I ran through my mental checklist: Keys, Tissues, Aspirins, Gum, Money. (Memory Tip #1)
 That didn’t help the time I forgot to take my daughter out of a taxi; she wasn’t on one of my checklists. Since I’ve never been a fan of purses, I continue to use that same mental list. Except now I include reading glasses and Medicare card.
I’ve grown to accept the Trivia game I play with my mom. We both do it (I saw whatshername on Oprah, y’know the one from California. Maria Shriver? That’s it!).
When I was in 7th grade my dad took a memory course and would come home after each class and teach me what he learned.
For example, using that mnemonic system I still recall the phone number of my piano teacher, the one with slick black hair and  pointy shoes to whom I took a bus downtown from my junior high school. I would mount the steps to his third floor apartment and learn to play “Tears on my Pillow.” To the boogie woogie beat of “Beat me Daddy Eight to the Bar,” he would rub my bare thigh faster and faster closer and closer to my panty line.
Though it was as creepy as it sounds, it never occurred to me to tell my mom and I didn’t want to be impolite and ask him to stop. Funny how my distant memory is sharp as cheddar cheese.
On the other hand it’s almost a cliché to say I can’t remember whether I took my vitamins five minutes ago or whether I was just thinking about it. Yet, I lack the patience to fill one of those day-of-the-week pill holders.
So, after I take my morning vitamins, I separate out the one I need to take at night. And then after I take the vitamin at night, I put it back with the others for the morning. (Memory Tip #2) (Another morning pill I keep with my toothpaste so I remember to take it (Memory Tip #3).)
Then at night I go through my closing up the house mental checklist (Memory Tip #4): Doors (make sure they’re locked), Water (refillable bottle to take upstairs), Phones (ringers off for the night), Thermostat (turn down), Vitamins (as mentioned above).
 As for memorizing, it’s not so easy. But the benefit is that it trumps all other worries for a month while you work on it, as I wrote in my post Speak Easy about my stand-up performance in a Valentine’s Day show.
Thank goodness for photographs, because without them my whole life might be as ephemeral as a shadow. Maybe this is why I cling to the notes my girlfriend and I passed in Mr. Ashcom’s 10th grade history class and to letters I received nearly 60 years ago and all the time in between. Though I’m sad about the lost art of letter writing, the Internet has at least saved my Letters Received file and my fireproof memory box (random bonus tip) from bursting.
Agatha Christie’s lexicon decreased significantly as she aged, while her use of vague phrases such as “all sorts of” increased. Scholars believe she probably suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Generally, though, when writing I feel less challenged than when bumping along in the rest of my life. But do let me know if you notice me slipping into all sorts of uninteresting words and phrases.
What worries me most is that I can’t remember what happened in the short story I was reading when I paused ten minutes ago to refill my cup with hot water. Or when I can’t tell you anything about the movie I saw last week. There’s no checklist for those.
Anyone out there have other memory tips or creepy old man stories?
UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT: See my latest Home Goes Strong posts (they’re packed with tips!)
By susan fishman orlins Unrelated announcement: See my latest Home Goes Strong article, LOOKING FOR A WARM COMFORT FOOD MEAL? WARM RECIPES FOR CHILLY NIGHTS.
Like me, does everyone become as frozen as Michelangelo’s David whenever they think of all their photographs fading in plastic bags, on sticky non-archival album pages, and loose in various boxes, chests and drawers? Not to mention all those out-of-control digital photographs?
Recently I wrote a series of three articles for Home Goes Strong in which I encouraged readers to Take My Organizing Challenge, taking an hour each day for 5 days organizing this and that.
I gave dozens of organizing tips and I too took the Challenge. It now takes me only half as long to find a pair of socks.
The most rewarding part came when I returned a call to my daughter.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Home,” she answered.
“What are you doing home?” I asked. “You’re never home on a Saturday.”
“I’m taking The Organizing Challenge!” she exclaimed. Later that day she texted me a photo of her miraculously empty-ish desktop.
[  [ Lizie's desk I’m always rooting around for ideas for my Home Goes Strong column. While rooting around unsuccessfully for a picture of Casey, I decided to lauch my Photo Organizing Challenge.
My Photophobia (*dictionary meaning, I just learned, is extreme sensitivity to light) has become so intense that I hesitate each time I’m about to capture an image, knowing it will add to the digital heap. My prayer is that the Challenge will help get my photos in order; plus, I’ll end up with another series of articles. A two-fer.
Photos pose a much greater challenge than drawers and random piles of mail. I just timed myself at my expected speed of going through photos, not allowing extra minutes for reminiscing or decision-making.
Twelve photos took 30 seconds, which translates into my 3,000 pictures taking 20.83 1/3 hours, if I don’t dilly dally.
The thought of jumping from prints into my thousands of digital photos is so scary I might as well be attached to a bungee cord, jumping off Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls Bridge.
Okay I didn’t mean to learn about all that can go wrong if you bungee jump, but I was looking on Wikipedia to find the above example and became morbidly curious about the risks:
- Harness fails.
- Elasticity is miscalculated and you suffer a fatal bump to the head.
- Cord not properly connected to the jump platform.
- Upper body intravascular pressure can lead to eyesight damage, the most common result.
- Whiplash.
- Broken neck.
- Stroke from getting tangled up in the cord.
- Increased stress (duh).
- Decreased immune function.
All these incidents involved young, healthy adults in their twenties and thirties.
Oh dear, I try not to be morbid. However, I have a number of readers in their twenties and thirties, and in my role of universal mother I aim to dissuade some or even one from ever taking the bungee plunge.
On the other hand, adrenaline junkies may be all the more inspired.
Have I ever told you how, after seeing the Imax film “Adrenaline Rush,” I realized so many of our choices are motivated by our personal level of adrenaline craving?
Oh my, I’ve strayed from Photophobia. But isn’t that what a phobic is supposed to do?
That said, I’m dying to get any and all advice on how to organize my photos, print and/or digital, including time-saving shortcuts.
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