Second Half

We laughed, we cried, we sang along. Add the Hannas to the growing list of “Mamma Mia” fans.

I wasn’t that keen on going. I’ve never owned an ABBA album. I don’t automatically start swaying when “Dancing Queen” comes on the radio. And I sometimes have trouble keeping a straight face when characters burst into song in the middle of a conversation.

I never miss a Meryl Streep movie, however–even the dreadful one she did with Goldie Hawn where her head twists around 180 degrees.

Meryl and I have a lot in common. She is smart, talented, and beautiful. I am all three of those when I am dreaming that I will turn into Meryl Streep when I grow up.

My idol worship began when I saw “Kramer vs. Kramer,” still the biggest tear-jerker of all time, except for her next film, “Sophie’s Choice.” Maybe it was the connection I felt to her characters as a mother.

When I was a young mother back in Indiana, I knew Meryl Streep’s sister-in-law, Sherry Gummer. Sherry was married to the brother of Don Gummer, Meryl’s sculptor husband. Once, Sherry showed me a picture of Meryl with her new baby, Mary Willa (nicknamed “Mamie”). The snapshot was taken right after Meryl had given birth, and she was, as you might expect, disheveled but still perfectly gorgeous. I kept hoping to run into her during one of their visits to the Gummer hometown, but, alas, it never happened.

But enough about my dubious connection to Hollywood.

Keeper and I were in the mood for a little mindless entertainment last Saturday, so we headed for the 4:30 showing of “Mamma Mia.” For the next hour and 48 minutes, we sat entranced, stupid grins on our faces.

The story itself is barebones. Donna (Meryl) is the former lead singer of the girl group Donne and the Dynamos. She runs a hotel on a Greek island, where she has raised her daughter by herself. The daughter is getting married and longs to know the identity of her father. She reads her mother’s diary and discovers three likely candidates. She secretly invites them all to the wedding. Improbably, they all drop what they’re doing and travel to this remote island.

Myriad misunderstandings ensue.

In true movie musical fashion, the high points are punctuated by the lead actors singing their feelings. As she demonstrated in “A Prairie Home Companion,” Streep has the chops to pull this off. Her version of “The Winner Takes it All” is a showstopper. (To be fair, maybe it’s the spectacular setting.) Her love interest, played by Pierce Brosnan as one of the “three Dads,” should have opted for lip synching.

The story is not the point of the movie. Neither is the quality of the individual voices. The movie is about celebration. It celebrates beauty, love, friendship, music, and life itself.

There is a lot of dancing, some of it up and down stairs. For a broad of 60, Streep is remarkably agile. It is reassuring to us Baby Boomers to see our contemporaries rocking out, as Donna and the Dynamos do in the movie encore.

I know this sounds hokey. I’m not an easy sell, believe me. Ask Keeper. I can sit dry-eyed through any sappy fare that the Lifetime channel has to offer. But this movie was Joy itself. We wanted it to never end. Three days later, I’m still in a good mood.

Give it a try. You don’t have to sing along. In fact, if you sing like Pierce Brosnan, I recommend that you don’t.

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How do we humans name our offspring? The easiest and most common method is to name them after ourselves. If our name is a good one, our baby boy may become a II or III. It works for girls, too, although without the fancy numeral. For example, I was named after my father. His name is Christian; my middle name is Christine. My first name is Mary because I was born in a Catholic hospital and Mom wanted to ensure that I’d be a crowd-pleaser from Day One.

 

I didn’t have a daughter to pass the name along to, so my sister named her only female child Mary Christine. She used to be Little Mary until she passed the 6’ mark.  The name was a bit old-fashioned for my niece’s taste, however, and when she was a teenager, she rebelled by spiking her hair, wearing black eye shadow, and signing her name “mari” with a circle over the “i.”

 

In the not-so-distant past, people were giving their female children names that were gender-neutral, meaning that the name wouldn’t give them away as being a girl. “Madison” is one of the most popular names that’s supposedly gender-neutral, although every Madison I’ve ever met has been a girl.

 

Now, the pendulum is swinging back toward girly names. According to the Social Security Administration, the top five names for newborn girls are Emily, Isabella, Emma, Ava, and the afore-mentioned Madison, who refuses to let go.

 

For boys, the fashion is decidedly Biblical. The top five are: Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua, and Daniel (he of the lion’s den).

 

A few parents pick out the names of their children before they are even conceived. I waited until I was pregnant. This was back in the day when the sex of the baby was a surprise, so my sons Jason and Tom had the prenatal names Emily and Melissa.

 

For some, the naming process is scientific. Relatives are consulted, polls are taken, and books are checked to unearth any hidden meaning of names that would inadvertently put a curse on their little bundles of joy. By the way, it’s critical to consider what the initials spell, as Ashley Suzanne Smith will tell you.

 

Sometimes the chosen name is a loser, and little Percival or Seneca has to endure playground beatings ad infinitum.

 

Often, the name just never seems to fit. I suggest new parents do what new dog owners do: live with the critter for a few days and pick a name based on looks and personality.

 

In the world of dog-naming, human names continue to dominate, according to a company that sells engraved dog tags. The top five male names are Max, Jake, Buddy, Bear, and Bailey. For females, dog owners prefer Maggie, Bear (the gender neutral name of the dog world), Molly, Shadow, and Lady.

 

With dogs, you can play it straight, or play it for laughs. After all, the dog won’t care. You can name your 6-pound Chihuahua “Killer” and your 170-pound Mastiff “Tiny” if you choose. If you don’t appreciate irony, you can name your dog for his personality. Consider “Chewbacca” for a furniture gnawer, “Snugglepuss” for a lap dog, or “Psycho” for a dog that runs laps around the house when the doorbell rings.

 

If new parents waited until they saw their children before they picked a name, there would be fewer Thurstons in this world. No newborn looks like a Thurston. Or a Schuyler. Or a Savannah. They all look like a Bitsy or a Pinky or a Chunky.

 

If you decide to use the “wait and see” method of child-naming, you must be cautious. Your wrinkled, screaming little fist-waver may look like a Raisin, but you might want to choose a name that she won’t outgrow so quickly. Like “Lady.”

 

 

Walking a dog should not be dangerous.  Aside from the occasional unleashed retriever or disoriented skunk, Corky and I never encounter peril on our daily walks.  Until yesterday.

 

There we were, ambling along.  Well, I was ambling.  Corky, with her 6-inch Frenchie legs, was trotting. We were having a chat about whether the boxer who lives on our street would finally manage to break the picture window in his house.  He invariably announces his disapproval (or maybe it’s just excitement) when we pass his house, by throwing himself at the glass, which shakes and rattles in an unsettling way. 

 

The glass held on this particular day, and we continued on our way, toward the patch of ivy that is the neighborhood bulletin board for dogs.  Corky spent a good three minutes deciphering the messages left in the ivy before I grew impatient.  I moved her along before she could make a deposit.  I hate reaching in there to scoop.  I’m afraid I’ll encounter a rat or a snake.  Or a rat snake. 

 

We were on our way back home when it happened.  There is a house for sale on our street, and it being a Tuesday, it was being looked over by every realtor within a 20-mile radius.  One of them almost ran us down.

 

I try to keep close to the side of the street, as we have no sidewalks and the street is winding and narrow.  I was carefully skirting a BMW parked at the “for sale” house, when a Mercedes flew past me, almost hitting Corky, and screeched to a halt in front of us, at an angle that blocked us in between the cars.  I was stunned, and stumbled forward, trying to squeeze between two garbage cans.  I promptly fell on my face.  Or rather, on my bum, catching myself with my left hand, which was now scraped and bleeding.  Corky, seeing that I was in licking range, promptly starting kissing me.

 

From my seat on the asphalt, I looked back toward the house, where well-dressed people with clipboards were entering the tasteful foyer.  A woman with anchorwoman blonde hair poked her head out and asked, “Are you okay/?” She popped back into the house before I could answer, “Well, I was a lot better before you almost ran me over.”

 

She didn’t hear me.  She was focused on seeing the features of this new property on the market and assessing her chances of making a hefty commission.  I’m guessing the spec sheet described our narrow street as and “charming” rather than “treacherous.”

 

I didn’t mean to write another rant so close on the heels of my “Oh, Behave!” column.  But seriously, it’s hard to think of anything else when you’re nose-to-nose with the grill of an S-Class Sedan.  This driver was in need of the kind of scathing lecture only I can provide, but I was robbed of the opportunity.

 

Corky and I limped home.  Well, I limped, she again trotted.  As I washed the blood off my hand, I fantasized that the huge boxer down the street would break through the plate glass just as the Reckless Realtor stopped to admire the pavers on the driveway.  I’d like to see HER try to get past the garbage cans in those high heels.

 

 

My friend Zelda was loaded for bear.  During a 10-minute phone conversation she unleashed a stream of complaints against everyone from a driver holding a cell phone who almost backed into her, to a co-worker (A Master’s in English candidate) who, like, talks, like, you know, this.

 

When she had vented her spleen, Zelda and I discussed our role as elders in our society.  Should we take it upon ourselves to correct people who are not measuring up, or should we keep our mouths shut?  If we don’t uphold the standards of language and behavior that we see steadily eroding, who will?  Are we fated to become a society that can’t speak or write properly, won’t obey simple traffic rules, and thinks manners are old-fashioned?

 

Traffic offenders are a particular thorn in my side.  I carry on a one-sided conversation with them every time I’m behind the wheel.  It goes like this: “Did you not notice that stop sign?  You might if you put down your cell phone and got the dog off your lap… Seriously, are you passing me on the right?  Interesting choice…You idiot!  Stop honking at me!  I’ll turn when the guy in the wheelchair is out of the intersection!…Sir, would you like to pick a lane and stay there? I don’t think you’re allowed to straddle like that.”

 

While I love to correct people from the safety of my Subaru, I know better than to honk and yell.  These people aren’t ignorant of the traffic laws.  They just choose to break them.  A reminder from me would not be welcome.

 

I don’t confront people and try not to make gestures (although I am furiously shooting them the bird out of sight under the dashboard).  If someone does something particular egregious like forcing me to slam on the brakes so they can cut in front of me, I may involuntarily throw up my hands or slap my forehead.  Oh, and I swear like a sailor when provoked.  Just ask Keeper.

 

When it comes to grammar and syntax, I sometimes have to speak up.  After all, I do have some expertise in this area. Zelda and I have our own unit of the Grammar Police.  Zelda, who has a PhD and never ends a sentence with a preposition, corrects people on their language.  As an English teacher, this is her job.  I am more stealthy about it.  I send anonymous e-mails to companies whose web sites have embarrassing errors on them.  I once wrote a letter to a Fortune 500 company that ran an ad using the wrong form of “its.”  They did not acknowledge my letter, nor did they correct the ad.  Maybe I’m the only one who noticed.

 

Why bother? Because someone has to uphold some standards.  It is an increasingly thankless job.  Some younger people are unaware that there are rules about these things.  Others, whose parents raised them to question authority, are scornful of rules they see as unnecessary. (Who cares how I spelled it?  You knew what I meant, didn’t you?)

 

Here’s a plea from your elders: please try to follow the rules.  It’s not that hard, and it makes life so much easier for the rest of us.  If you must rebel, do so with your wardrobe and your music, like we did. 

 

 

Keeper came home from work and asked me how my day went.  I burst into tears.  I couldn’t get any work done at all, I moaned.  I spent four hours on the couch watching a marathon of Project Runway re-runs, I told him, and kicking myself that I was not as clever or creative or hip as the fashion designers on the show.  Then, I downloaded some songs from iTunes and listened to them while I tried to write and failed because I have no talent. Furthermore, I hadn’t made anything for dinner, I told him before he asked, because from where I sat in my pit of despair I couldn’t image living until dinnertime.

 

Keeper was at a loss.  After making a number of suggestions and not being greeted by gratitude for them, he retreated to his den and stayed out of sight.

 

Over the weekend I felt ambitious.  I read a book about nuns in the 15^th Century and listened to my new tunes. Then I took a 4-hour nap. 

 

Monday morning, my friend Tom called me.  “Hi,” I said.

 

“What’s wrong?” he said. Over our 20-year friendship, he has learned to read my moods based on how I say “hi.”  It’s amazing, really.

 

I answered his questionnaire.  No, I was not sick.  No, nobody died.  No, I had not been robbed.  No one had even been cross with me.  Why do men have this compulsion to pin down every problem so they can solve it?

 

Poor me.  I had the nothing-is-wrong-but-still-feel-bad blues.

 

I was listening again to my ‘recently added list” on iTunes when I realized what was wrong.  Every song I had downloaded was a downer.  They were about death, heartbreak, or broken dreams.  Some weren’t sad per se, but were so exquisitely beautiful that they made me cry.

 

I had put together a soundtrack for my life as if it were an unrelenting tragedy.  No wonder I was bummed. Here’s the list of mournful songs and their singers that put me in Pity City:

 

1. My Life – Iris DeMent (“My life, it don’t count for nothing”)
2. For a Dancer – Jackson Browne (“cryin’ while they ease you down”)
3. Gulf Coast Highway – Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson (enough said)
4. Calling My Children Home – Emmylou Harris (“I’m lonesome for my precious children”)
5. I Know You By Heart – Eva Cassidy (“I still hear your voice on warm summer nights”)
6. Calling All Angels – Jane Silberry (“then you’d miss the beauty of the light upon this earth”)
7. Take It With Me – Notes From the Edge (“Ain’t no good thing ever dies; I’m gonna take it with me when I go”)
8. What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong (“The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night”)
9. Over the Rainbow – Eva Cassidy (it’s not so much the song, but the fact that she died tragically young)
10. Naked As We Came – Iron & Wine (“one of us will die inside these arms”)

 

There you have it.  If you want to feel like a truck ran over you, put this playlist on your iPod and set it on “repeat.”  Just make sure you have the number of the suicide hotline handy.  As for me, I’m switching to Motown.

 

 

You don’t need a calendar to know that school is out. Teenagers, once confined to education institutions until at least 2:00 every day, are suddenly everywhere. They are crowding the streets, the parks and the malls, being their boisterous, hormonal, mischievous selves.

 

In the distant past, I was also a teenager. An email from a high school friend reminded me that next year is our 40th reunion, an event I couldn’t picture in my wildest dreams when I was 16. I admit to my former teenageness to assure you that I have been in the shoes of those who are sudden sprung from prison and have too much time on their hands.

 

Too much time and not enough to do is perhaps the reason that teenagers have, in the past month, both vandalized our car on two separate occasions. One was an egging and one was a break-in. The egg washed off with no damage to the paint.

 

The break-in, however, severely damaged Keeper’s psyche. It was clearly a prank or a dare. They left the CD player, but stole the faceplate, rendering it useless. They popped the trunk and re-arranged things but took nothing. The worst part, at least to Keeper, was that they stole an old pair of tennis shoes. “I LOVED those shoes!” he whimpered when he discovered the loss. For my part, I was irked that he had found someplace to hide a pair of sneakers from my annual household purge of worn-out footwear and vowed to be more thorough in my search for the various tattered and smelly shoes that Keeper collects.

 

Car vandalism happens every summer when the hooligans are released from their classrooms. We did it in my day as well. Not I, of course. I just heard about it.

 

We did spend a lot of time plotting, however. My friend Barb and I were walking around the high school building one summer day and discovered an open window in the basement. She was all for going in. Ever the good girl, I worried about it going on my permanent record. Instead of trespassing, we went to the Frostee Freeze and fantasized about what we would do if we had the empty school to ourselves. We didn’t want to destroy anything or make a mess. We wanted to look in the Boy’s Room and peek into teachers’ desk drawers-naughty stuff like that.

 

Mostly, during the summer, we read Glamour magazine and worked on our tans in the backyard. Sometimes we’d go to the city pool and pick out which boys we’d talk to if we had the nerve. Then we’d jump back in Kathy’s mother’s car and cruise Mr. Happy Burger.

 

Whenever I find myself saying the words, “Kids today…” I think about an old colleague of mine. He was totally down-to-earth and had the dry wit common to former newspaper reporters such as himself. Although in his thirties at the time, he would sometimes catch himself being a curmudgeon. Then he would stop in mid-sentence, purse his lips, shake his fist and say in his best grumpy-old-man voice, “You kids get off of my lawn!”

 

At the risk of sounding like a killjoy myself, I say, “You kids stay out of my car!”

 

 

 

Keeper would add, “And bring back my sneakers!”

 

 

I do love my gadgets. I was one of the first to get an iPhone, because I was blinded by lust for its touch screen. Of course, I felt like a chump when Steve Jobs lowered the price, upped the gigabytes and opened up the elite iGroup to the masses.

 

One gadget I couldn’t justify until now was a GPS device. GPS stands for Global Positioning System, which essentially connects your dashboard with a satellite that tracks your every move. I think what bothered me was the fact that somebody, somewhere would be keeping track of me every time I left the driveway. Maybe I watch too many James Bond movies.

 

I was ready to sacrifice my privacy after getting totally lost in an undesirable part of San Francisco. As I drove around, frantically looking for “to 101 South” signs, the story of my friend’s carjacking kept running through my head. She and her husband had lost their valuables, their car, and their peace of mind when a gang of thugs jumped into their vehicle at a stoplight when they took a wrong turn after attending a Giants game.

 

I knew that my safety would be enough to convince Keeper to buy a GPS device, but with gas going for nearly $5.00 a gallon, there was an economic reason as well. “Just think!” I told my husband. “Every time I get lost and have to double back, it costs us at least $2.99!” For the record, I do get lost often, but it would take more than 100 wrong turns to justify the price of this doohickey.

 

We got the new toy on Saturday, and on Saturday night plugged it into the cigarette lighter and told it where we wanted to go-a theater on Sutter St. in San Francisco.

 

I also asked it to look for a parking garage and programmed in our address so that it would know where “home” was.

 

Off we went, the digital screen showing our progress and the pleasant but authoritative voice saying things like “Continue on U.S. 101 for 7.2 miles.”

 

Keeper was enthralled. “Look! You can see the bay!” He meant on the screen, not out the window on the right, where we usually see it.

 

Truth be told, part of my reason for getting the GPS was to replace Keeper as my navigator. He’s the kind of co-pilot who unfolds the map all the way and manages to make a lot of noise doing so. Plus, he doesn’t recognize the importance of folding it back up the right way. To top it off, when I ask, “Is this the right exit?” he replies “Give me a minute” while the exit goes whizzing past.

 

Our friendly GPs won’t let me miss an exit. I get a warning that it’s coming up, a reminder when it’s time to turn, and a preview of my next turn.

 

If I do miss an exit, it says “recalculating” and gets me back on track. It does not swear or tell me that I have no sense of direction, like the voice that speaks in my head.

 

Once we found the theater (or rather, the theater was found FOR us) we made our way to the parking garage, guided by the disembodied voice coming from the dashboard. I unplugged the device and tucked it out of sight.

 

After the play and some excellent paella, we got back in the car and asked our new friend to guide us home. She had a little trouble locating a satellite, so we headed blindly downhill, following the “101 South” signs. At the stoplight on Mission St., we achieved satellite linkage. I pushed the buttons called “home” and “go.”

 

By this time I could see the freeway. However, the device, which we had named Margo, instructed us to make an immediate right. She spoke with such authority that I turned abruptly. “She must know a better way!” I said to Keeper. Such a clever girl, our Margo!

 

We continued following her directions and noticed that the neighborhood was looking familiar. There was Union Square. There was the parking garage. Yes, we were listening to a machine that didn’t know where “home” was. She had taken us back to the theater.

 

I still love Margo, but she has to learn who’s boss.

 

 

 

Most of us are not getting enough sleep at night-we need 6 to 8 hours–and our bodies try to make up for it during the day.

 

The National Sleep Foundation’s annual survey found that one-third of us have fallen asleep or become sleepy at work in the past month. I dispute those findings. Everyplace I’ve worked has had at least a 75 percent sleepiness rate. Walk around any workplace at 3:00 in the afternoon. Those who are at their desks are nodding off. Those who are not at their desks are at Starbucks ordering double shots of espresso.

 

Whatever the rate of drowsiness in the American workplace, employers are starting to understand that it affects productivity and something needs to be done to counteract it. Access to a “nap room” is the latest (and greatest, in my opinion) employee perk. People who study these things tell us that a 20-minute nap in the afternoon measurably increases productivity for the rest of the day.

 

Nobody knows this better than Keeper. For years, he has reserved the last 20 minutes of his lunch hour for a little nod-off. He leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, and pretty soon his chin is bobbing toward his chest. When it snaps backwards, he is done. The rest of the afternoon he is focused and productive.

 

When I used to complain about being tired at work, he asked me why I didn’t just take a nap after lunch. Besides the fact that the employee handbook listed sleeping on the job as grounds for dismissal, there was no place to catch a few winks. Keeper had a lock on his office door. Not only did I not have a lock, I had a boss who, when he remembered to knock at all, did it as he was flinging the door open. The constant threat of sudden office invasion wasn’t exactly conducive to napping.

 

At a previous job, I was once overcome with fatigue after a lunch of leftover lasagna. I asked my secretary to knock on my door and wake me up in 20 minutes, at 1:00. I put my head down on my desk and drifted off. At 2:30, I woke up with a start. I was disoriented, I had drool on my shirt, and I was late for a meeting. My secretary offered a lame “oops” when I charged out of my office. Waking me up wasn’t the only thing she had forgotten to do. We found out when we finally fired her, that she had forgotten to file anything for 6 months.

 

Even though it has been proven that a little nap during the day is refreshing and restorative, there is still a stigma against it. Fortunately, in my current workplace (my home office) there is a pro-napping policy. A comfy couch and a canine napping buddy are provided.

 

If your workplace is not so enlightened, let me clue you in on a trick I learned in college: it is possible to sleep with your eyes open. It takes practice, and you must take care not to blow it by bobbing your head or snoring. I once slept through an entire semester of Existentialism. Of course, I wasn’t taking the class for a grade-it was pass/fail.

 

I’m guessing your job isn’t pass/fail. Here’s another idea: use your lunch hour to catch 40 winks in your car. Just make sure you set the alarm.