Oh, Brother - Where Art Thou?

    My brother, who is turning 65 tomorrow, deserves a sincere and heartfelt apology from me, because I inadvertently left him him off my What-I'm-Thankful-For list. He should now, in turn, be thankful for his younger sister, who clued me in  this afternoon. (Sigh! I need to be kept on on my toes, oh yes I do-oooh...)

    Happy 65th Birthday, Big Brother. May it now, officially, be known to all who read this blog: I AM MORE THAN THANKFUL for having such a sweet, kind, 3 years and 8+ months-older only brother to look up to these past 61 years. 

   Wait just a moment, please - there's more. Not only am I thankful for him - I'm also thankful for my sister-in-law and brother-in-law.

     I hope that just about covers my multitude of sins for the day.

And I Thank You...

And I Thank You...

(don't forget to click above to hear one of my all-time favorite songs)

When I was a little kid in Philly I had to say what I was thankful for before digging into my plate of Turkey Day food. Since I’m not having Thanksgiving with my family this year, I’ve cooked up a list of things I’m thankful for.

Before I drag myself downstairs to the kitchen to make the cranberry sauce and sweet potato casserole I’m bringing to a friend’s house in a few hours, here’s who and what I appreciate this year:

My husband, who sticks around (even though I snore louder than a leaf blower each and every night) and reads aloud to me, even though at first he thought House of Mirth was terrible (he cried at the end!)

My daughter, who calls me on her way to work, Skypes me when I ask, iChats when she has a free moment, and stays connected - even though she lives far, far away in that alternate universe known as Seattle, and her husband, my new son-in-law, even though it’s his fault she moved so far away

My son, for fathering my first granddaughter

My Miami Beach aunt, who talks to me on the phone each week and tells it like it is

My sister, who calls me on her cellphone when she’s in an airport, a car, or upstairs in her attic office (typing on the computer – which she thinks I can’t hear, but, hellooooo, I can)

My friend, Janet Rose, who provided me with friendship, support, and love for 24 years (and continues to, in absentia, since she died an untimely death this past September)

My friends (old and new), who listen to me rant and rave, but don’t hang up, keep emailing, Facebooking, and loving me 

My adopted pseudo-daughters and grandchildren

Yoga, stretch and tone, and spinning classes

My Philadelphia and California family (they’re really my husband’s family, but they’ve been kind enough to adopt me into the fold for the past 40 years)

All the stupid, addictive TV I refuse to stop DVRing, watching, and fast forwarding past the commercials: Glee, 30 Rock, Brothers and Sisters, Modern Family, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Private Practice, The Big Bang Theory, The Geno Auriemma Show, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Bored to Death, and UConn basketball (there, are you happy, now that you officially know some of my dirty, little secrets?)

The brothers across the street who agreed to once again snowblow our sidewalks and driveway

My tinnitus, deafness, migraines, sprained left foot, high cholesterol, fat stomach, psoriasis, poor vision, tight hamstrings, creaky back, drooping jowls, and scarred lips, because they make me what I yam (minus the marshmallows on top)

Stop, Children. What's That Sound?

     This morning I forced myself to go to my first, official ENT appointment in years, in order to consult with a highly recommended professional. I was urged to make an appointment with him after I told my friend about my hearing loss and tinnitus, which I have refused to deal with because my last ENT visit (which took place so many years ago I can’t remember) upset me so thoroughly I blocked out both it and the name of the doctor who claimed I needed to embrace my hearing loss, love my tinnitus, and not worry my pretty little head about things out of my control. I hated being patronized and treated like a moron, but I did what he said, didn’t I? Instead of facing up to the fact that I have hearing problems, then finding a different doctor who would treat me like an adult, I put up and shut up. What a poor, pitiful Pearl am I.

      My friend said it was time for me to face up to my hearing problems, which might be why I told him the ringing had reached such a high pitch that it was no longer easy to ignore or love. I called his beloved Dr. Tinnitus for an appointment, back in September, but I was told I’d have to wait till today to see him. I didn’t tell my friend this, but I temporarily returned to pretending not to have a hearing problem, even though I do (just ask my husband, who yells at me that he’s not mumbling, even though I yell back at him that he is), until this morning, when I reality reared its ugly head and made me push a red button whenever I heard a sound, or didn’t, more often than not.

      I hated failing those tests, so maybe that’s why I argued with the audiologist after I was through flunking myself. I told her that the test couldn’t have been conclusive, since the room I was sitting in wasn’t soundproof. I told her it had been hard for me to concentrate on the sounds she was supposedly making in my ear, because the loud voices from the women shouting and laughing in the room across from my testing room mixed with the high-pitched ringing in my ears from my tinnitus, and masked sounds I might’ve gotten right. She said it didn’t really matter – that my hearing loss was what it was, so I continued to try to convince her that the results would’ve been different had the conditions been more optimal. She pooh-poohed me, then attempted to read the results to me, but since I was too upset to comprehend what she was talking about, I stopped listening.

      She handed me a pink copy of my test, which was a waste of time, because I couldn’t decipher it on my own, and told me to return to the waiting room to wait for Dr. Tinnitus, the expert. He turned out to be nice, but his lilty Irish-accented voice lulled me away from paying attention to his long, involved explanations comparing the hairs inside my ears to broken piano strings. Even though I was unable to absorb his technical explanations, I was able to understand that he has tinnitus, but that he’s a lucky duck, because it doesn’t interfere with his life one iota. Well, bully for him. It’s making mine a living hell.

      He must’ve sensed he was losing me, so he launched into another long story about the time he got progressive lenses, and they made him so dizzy he reeled all over the place until he got used to wearing them. Obviously, he thought sharing his personal stories would make me feel better about how noisy and upsetting it was going to be to wear hearing aids, so I interrupted him and said that I never had trouble wearing my progressive lenses. He kept talking, instead of changing his tune because, after all, he wasn’t all that interested in me – only himself.

      He ended up offering me a few alternative therapies if I didn’t want to wear hearing aids – but one I refused outright was Zoloft. I told him strong drugs and I don’t mix, and that I wasn’t even going to think about trying Zoloft, an antidepressant, as an off-label tinnitus inhibitor. He went on and on, extolling it, but I blocked him out until he wound down, and launched into a different riff on how wearing hearing aids will make it possible for me to hear so well I’ll hear myself crunch on things (he mentioned apples) when I eat, and when I’m done crunching, they’ll mask my tinnitus. He told me that like progressive lenses, I’d need to wear the hearing aids at all times in order to get used to them. But, if I’m hearing myself crunch, how can he expect me to want to wear them? Crunching drives me crazy, I told him – but he just Kanga and Baby Roo-ed me (maybe because he ran out of stories about himself) and told me to make a hearing aid appointment at the front desk.

      Here’s the very best news of the day about those two hearing aids he said I will need. I have to pay for them out of pocket, since insurance doesn’t cover them. Boy, oh boy, I can’t wait to fork over $6-8,000 so I can hear myself crunch and think, but I’m worth it, right? Please, tell me what the upside of this bargain will be, because I have two weeks to chicken out of returning to the very same audiologist I most probably alienated (after questioning her testing conditions), who’ll probably sell me two left hearing aids as payback.

     I’ve become that deaf, dumb, blind kid, minus the mean game of pinball.

       Ding.

      What? Didn’t hear the sound of one hand clapping when my striped ball went through the flipper? Chalk it up to celestial interference, that damned tree falling in the forest, or my husband, who whispers and sometimes lip syncs – I swear he does.

Food, Glorious Food

            Did you know that I’m so food obsessed I read cookbooks like they’re novels, and obsessively trawl Chowhound and Yelp before, during and after traveling in order to discover the best of the best while I’m away from home?

Did you know that I’m considered unnecessarily food crazed, here in West Hartford, CT, where palates are more Puritan-centric than not?

Or that eating at nearby restaurants turns me more cold than hot (except for Bricco’s, the only place I return to over and over)?

Or that I feel the need to stand at the stove and stir up my Jane Brody-influenced 10-minute oatmeal with milk (and a half an apple, later sprinkled with roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds and a splash of agave syrup), while also cooking up what to make for dinner?

Or that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, probably because it’s the only holiday my secular, Jewish family celebrated?

Or that its menu sounded like the lyrics of a song, at least to me?

Roast turkey with Pepperidge Farm stuffing

Giblet gravy made from scratch

Homemade cranberry sauce from the recipe on the back of the Ocean Spray bag 
Southern sweet potato pudding baked with marshmallows on top

Tossed salad with homemade Italian dressing

Fresh, steamed green beans

A small bowl of Jumbo canned, pitted black olives

Apple crisp from the Settlement Cookbook

And a big Panama with a purple hatband.

Over the years, I’ve tinkered (Brussel sprouts, creamed baby onions and peas, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, lemon squares, mashed potatoes, and one year lasagna instead of turkey – which my son still hasn’t forgiven me for), but there’s no need, because my family’s old timey, totally American-centric menu is so solidly engraved inside me that it’s a relief to let down my foodie guard and stir up the past. 
       I know they say you can’t go home again, but I do, every November 26^th (except for the year my husband and I went to St. Thomas to follow the UConn Huskies’ Thanksgiving Tournament, leaving our adult kids to fend for themselves).

                Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh.

What Am I Living For?

FYI: the title of this blog entry comes from a song, because I'm a song-lover who likes to use lyrics to speak for me, now and then (mostly now, though)


This morning I asked myself what, exactly, was the point of spending so much time obsessing about things that are wrong with my rather ordinary life.  Come on, I told myself, isn’t it about time to be thankful for having two grown, healthy, employed children and an adorable granddaughter? I chose not to answer back with my usual zap of negativity.

Instead, I talked myself into facing up to the fact that since I stopped teaching freshman composition, I’ve turned my paper-marking, curriculum-developing, too-busy-to think-about-you-or-me self towards the dark side, filling up too many now-empty teaching spaces in that migraine-y head of mine with full-to-bursting closets-full of obsessing, kvetching, and moaning.

Come on, I urged myself, turn over a new leaf (after all, there are so many to choose from in both front and back yards). Let yourself fast-forward and fill each day with joy, instead of spending so much time dancing like a dervish at all those pity party orgies you seem overly addicted to.

What this means is that this heavy hitter has officially declared today, November 12, 2009, her first day of uncontested peace. That’s right - I’m going to open myself up to experiencing more love supreme and fewer I’m-gonna-get-you-sucka moments.

I’m tired of being overdue, in a rabbit stew.  

I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

Dear Sharron,

     So, how was your 3-day visit to Philadelphia? Did you totally relax in the quiet car on the train from Hartford to Philadelphia’s 30^th Street Station? Did you have fun schmoozing with your husband’s Philadelphia and California relatives, eating each and every meal at a different restaurant or relative’s apartment, taking the cousins for a stroll through Center City, and being ignored by your mother-in-law? Did you enjoy using your friend Janet’s FLIP camera to record as many relative events as you could, even though people gave you a hard time for videotaping them by snapping at you and yelling things like, “O.K., stop! That’s enough?” even though they continued to mug for the camera? 

     How was that subsequent trip to New York City? Did you enjoy taking your husband’s cousins for a long, wet, soggy walk through Central Park, in the rain? Did you pat yourself on the back for scoring discount tickets to Brighton Beach Memoirs, which you thought was excellent (even though the next day the New York Times reported that it was going to close), Finian’s Rainbow (which you loved, maybe because you were named after the main character by your mom, who saw the play a few days before giving birth to you), and Fela, which was funky, loud (I heard you wore ear plugs during some of it), dance-centric, and Afro-beatish? I know you were disappointed in The God of Carnage, which everyone you’ve every talked to or read raved about, because the actors weren’t up to snuff, your hearing device didn’t work, and you had to pay full price for the tickets. I hope you didn’t complain too much about it, because it wasn’t worth either the money or after-play analysis. 

    I bet you loved winding your way through the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim (and melting in awe over his later work and his work on paper), tromping on the hard floors of the Met to ogle the Oceania and Robert Frank exhibits, standing in front of Klimt’s glittering, glorious Adele Bloch-Bauer 1907 oil (in silver and gold) at the Neue Gallery, and strolling through MOMA twice to revisit all your favorites. What I don’t understand is how you could eat the same lunch at MOMA both times you visited. What happened to your adventurous foodie spirit? 

     I’m going to bet you that you didn’t tell your husband how much you spent at Babette for the hip, edgy, unusual black skirt and white top you bought (after trying on at least 20 different articles of clothing), or about the brunch of Eggs Benedict you inhaled at Balthazar, where you opted to sit at the bar instead of waiting for an hour for a table for one, because the place was overrun with young couples and their children (and their strollers). I won’t tell anyone you ate the potatoes that came with the eggs, because I know you claim you aren’t eating potatoes, white rice (which is part of the sushi you ate for dinner one night) or any other “bad” carbs, even though you do when you think no one is looking. 

     Did you enjoy eating dinner with your husband at a different restaurant each night? I hear you had Vietnamese banh mi @ Xie Xie, Middle Eastern/Mediterranean @ Taboon, Thai @ Wondee Siam, Japanese @ Gari Sushi 46, and New American @ Dovetail. I bet you also enjoyed eating macarons from Bouchon Bakery, and bread, pastry, and brioche from Sullivan Street Bakery. Again – I won’t tell anyone about the carbs you snuck into your supposedly carb-free body. I bet your scale will know, though, once you step on it after you’re back home. 

     I’m sorry to hear that you fell off your left Dansko clog on your last night in the city, right in the middle of the street, also scraping your right knee (aren’t you glad you wore that old pair of pants instead of the new ones you were thinking of wearing). I heard you twisted your left foot so severely that you could barely walk, so you decided to take a cab to the restaurant. But, it turns out you had to get out of the cab you hailed, because the New York Marathon let out and all cars were at a standstill. How did you manage to walk 23 more blocks without giving up and lying down on the sidewalk like a ragdoll? Wasn’t it nice of the restaurant manager to bring you a huge bag of ice, and let you use the staff bathroom, so you wouldn’t have to hop down 3 flights of stairs to the customer bathroom? Who’d have thought a restaurant manager and waiter could be so caring and solicitous? 

     What I’d like to know is why you decided to walk back to your hotel (Ink48 – where they changed your room so you didn’t have to hear those loud people next door’s every, single word), after dinner, instead of taking a cab, like any other normal injured person would think to do. I know you stopped at CVS to buy an ace bandage, which didn’t do a thing to stop the pain, but why you soldiered on and kept walking is a mystery to me. You must be a glutton for punishment. 

     I hear you walked (Again, walking? What is wrong with you?) to Penn station, dragging your luggage behind, limping up a storm, because it was your last day in the city and you wanted to get in one more hour of walking in before the long train ride home. I didn’t realize you were such a city-loving kind of gal. 

     I’m glad you got your own seat on the train trip back to Hartford, even though your husband’s seat didn’t have a working light, and the man sitting in front of you screamed on his cellphone for 45 minutes. (Weren’t you lucky that those earplugs you wore to Fela were still in your backpack?) How serendipitous was it that when you changed trains in New Haven that you sat down next to a neighbor and old friend’s daughter, who used to be friends with your son – and that since her dad was picking her up in Hartford and there would be room in his van for you, you didn’t have to pay for a cab? There is sometimes such a thing as a free ride, isn’t there? 

     I hear you and your husband had a lot of luck finding pennies and dimes on the streets of Philadelphia and New York City, and that you made a lot of wishes on those random coins. I hope your wishes come true – and that you don’t contract any serious, lingering diseases from handling such filthy things. 

    Welcome home. I suggest that you prop up your bad foot and watch all those DVR’d programs that are taking up all the space on your TV’s hard drive. I also suggest that you pack up your sorrows, because in a few days you are going to have another opportunity to turn back into your old self – Ms. Happy Husky Fan. Your UConn basketball-watching mania is going to quickly take up so much space in your migraine-prone head that it will displace all your negative, obsessive thoughts, making you forget you ever had them in the first place. That’s right. Help is on its merry way. 

      Goooooo Huskies!