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Sweet Indulgence

June 22, 2011 By Deborah Batterman 2 Comments

I’m sitting in a wide wicker chair, throne-like in the way it ensconces me in a sea of pillows. In the chair next to me is my daughter. She works long hours, the TV/film industry standard. The least I can do is pamper her, a pedicure when I visit. This is her turf, L.A., her salon of choice. They give you a menu here, a cornucopia of temptations tailored to price. I’d be a fool now, wouldn’t I, not to at least go for the dharma add-on, a whopping $4.50 extra for a chakra-charged foot massage. My lotion of choice is citrus-scented, with its promise of creativity. Not that I could go wrong with eucalyptus and rosemary (for centering) or rose oil (love and be loved).

There are some things you just never want to come to an end.

My daughter passes a magazine to me, one of the two issues of Vanity Fair she has brought for us. I watch her riffle through hers, pick up mine, begin reading a poignant piece by Christopher Hitchens on the nature of ‘voice.’ I need to know – right now – if this is something I can retrieve online, bookmark and tweet. I reach for my iPhone, a trusted pet tucked in my purse, at my beck and call.  Only something happens on the way to satisfying this very immediate need of mine.  I glance across the room at a woman getting what would appear to be the royal treatment.  A man sits at her feet, massaging them. A woman sits at her side,  massaging an arm. That leaves one arm free, for reading a magazine. And this is what stops me.

Why would I want to do anything but luxuriate in this moment, the foot massage more transcendent by the minute? I put down my magazine (and the iPhone), look over at my daughter immersed in hers, no words, just shared experience between us. The flat-screen TV on the wall is playing the best of Mike Myers, the very best, I should say, he in his Linda Richards I’m-verklempt, talk-amongst-yourselves mode.  The sound is turned down, proof positive that some things you don’t have to hear to know what’s being said.  I lean back in the cushioned chair, sink into what I do hear, Bob Seger, Against the Wind.  The magic fingers of the woman massaging my foot dig deeper. Bob Seger gives way to Toni Braxton putting me in a trance. I may truly never breathe again.

My mother, if she could see me now, would be smiling, her way of reminding me that nurturing takes many forms and the shift from dependence to independence, with its seismic rumblings, is a two-way struggle. A week earlier, driving down a road near my house on the opposite end of the country, I stopped for a deer and the very small fawn following her. The mother made it up the rock wall, no problem. Her fawn stumbled, turned to look at me staring at her from my car. I’ve seen deer, many of them, with and without their young. I’ve seen the young without a parent. I’ve never heard one cry, and my temptation to get out of the car, help her up the rock wall, was tempered only by good sense and the trust that mama deer,  only a few paces ahead, would be back the moment I disappeared.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

Filed Under: MISC, Nostalgia, Parenting

Commencement

June 3, 2011 By Deborah Batterman 3 Comments

It’s an overcast Sunday in May, graduation day at SUNY New Paltz, a slight chill in the air, typical of upstate New York on the cusp of spring and summer.  The sky is not so much threatening as it is filled with anticipation. At least it’s not raining.

The keynote speaker does what all keynote speakers do well in reminding the graduates that endings and beginnings are all of a piece.  Today is a really, really important day, the beginning of the rest of your life. College was a set-up, at its best the tightrope strung just high enough above the safety net; at its worst the safety net too torn and tattered to even catch an illusion.  When you’re twenty-something, anxious to move on after four (or more) years of studying (and partying), all those speeches and awards, the music and the marching, can feel endless. When you’re sixty-something, a guest at the ceremonies, that sneaky suspicion – if I only knew then what I know now – creeps up on you, demanding that you listen with a little more attention.

There is humor in the keynote speech, an allusion or two to pop culture,  an appeal to always value the importance of art in our lives, and a kicker phrase –

What would you try if you knew you could not fail?

To my niece, and the friends graduating with her, there’s no time like the future, even in a world threatened by a disregard fueled with greed. You can see the way it registers in their faces: I made it this far, what’s to stop me now?

A man puts his hand to his forehead, a salute as the national anthem is played.  In the row in front of me is a family – mother and father,  sister of the graduate standing next to her grandmother.  Everyone wants a better view, cameras at the ready.

I get up, take a break, walk around. An usher hands me a card.  I ask if I need it to get back in. “No,” she says. “It’s for your memory.”  I’m so in the moment I assume there’s something on the card that will help me find my way back to my seat, in case I wander too far.

For my memory.

This is the reason I’m here.  For someone’s memory, even if not my own.  For the bittersweet joy of it all, the shared rite of passage, this one with its ringing reminder that possibility is more a see-saw than an endless sea of hope.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

Filed Under: MISC, Nostalgia

Is Romance dead or is it just sleeping it off in a twin bed?

May 10, 2011 By Elizabeth Cassidy 2 Comments

Is Romance in danger of joining the Tyrannosaurus? Is romance becoming something else we can live without?

A good friend of mine had just seen the musical “South Pacific.” I saw it on PBS about 6 months ago. We both talked about how much it made us cry.  Not because there was a war going on or that Nellie thought Emile might be taken from her. It was the lyrics and the melodies that pulled at our emotions and made us both feel like we live in a world where romance is on life support.

How did that happen?

People say we can’t maintain that level of romantic love. So it just morphs into something else –is Apathy the new Romance of the 21st Century?

If people can maintain angry and craziness without missing a beat, then why can’t they hold romance up there with all those other moods?

How come a bad mood trumps a good mood?

Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughin’,
You may hear her laughin’
Across a crowded room
And night after night,
As strange as it seems
The sound of her laughter
Will sing in your dreams.

Some Enchanting Evening by Rodgers and Hammerstein

Words can change us. And a little melody behind it can transport us back in time to when we could not catch our breaths.

Where did you first meet him? Me – a bar.

What did he say to you? Me – who knows.  It was loud and I was drinking.

How did he make you feel? Me – superior because I had great tickets to see the Rolling Stones and he didn’t.

Okay I may not be the best case study in the romance category.  And this isn’t just about me. It’s about all of us.

I am all for feeling my knees weakening, my pulse racing (and not because of too much dark chocolate) and feeling a tad secretive because I have just the right amount of romance in my life.

I love watching Dancing with the Stars (and I do read the Republic of Plato during the commercial breaks) because there is something so romantic about 2 people playing a dance of seduction. Now if the husband showed up in sequins, I might not be able to maintain a straight face. But I would give him credit for trying. Okay, I am lying. He does not have the body for sequins.

I’m gonna take my time, she gon get hers before I
I’m gonna take it slow (woah woahh), I’m not gonna rush the stroke
If you don’t know by now, Doggy Dogg is a freak freak freeeeaak
I keep a bad bitch with me, 7 days out the week
And all that we ever do is play in the sheets sheet sheeeeettss
Smoke us a cigarette and go back to sleep

Sexual Eruption by Snoop Dogg

I don’t know. Is it me? I will admit I wore latex gloves when I typed in Snoop’s lyrics, but could this be causing the death of romance? I think if I ever woke up and found the Snoop in my bed, I’d take up smoking again.

What’s the solution? Maybe a little of Rodgers and Hammerstein and a pinch of Dogg.

Send a card, make the bed (better yet, change the sheets when they start standing up by themselves), go for a walk, hold hands, remember something cool about each other and don’t keep it to yourself.

Turn off you ipod, iphone, ipad, laptop, computer, bluetooth, blackberry and hold onto someone you like or even love.

We were meant to be touched and not texted.

Filed Under: Entertainment, Humor, Nostalgia, Opinion

Getting the Royal Rush from Will and Kate?

April 28, 2011 By Elizabeth Cassidy 7 Comments

As a young girl, the world of royalty fascinated me. So much so, that I actually told people that I had been kidnapped and was actually a member of Britain’s royal family. Hard to believe, but no one bought into that idea. So I continued to live with this very proper American family. In my heart, I thought it would just a matter of time before the truth came out – that I don’t dabble in reality all that much.

I, for one, love all the pomp and circumstance when it comes to the upcoming nuptial between Will and Kate. You know, that couple from two good gene pools (if you don’t include Charles’ side) who reside across the pond are getting married on Friday, April 29th. That’s right. 4 AM EST. I’ll be up. If I got up for Diana and Charles, I can get up for Will and Kate.  I am looking forward to it because my invite is still lost in the mail.

This young couple, who met at university, dated and sampled life on their own finally realized that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. And then the Queen informed them that they would have to do it front of millions of people who are sitting in front of their TVs attired only in their underwear.  How cheeky is that?

You know how you can look at a couple and proclaim that, “they will be suing each other for divorce in six months?” I am rooting for them to make it to their golden anniversary. And then they can date other people. I’ll be dead. I won’t care.

Quite the love story for our time. No drug arrests, no hookers, no “winning,” and no tweets from either of them.

It’s not to say that being royal (or becoming one) does not come with it’s share of embarrassments – there’s a queen who doesn’t realize that clothes from the 1940s belong in a museum and not in her closet and then there are those wonderful, wacky and witless group of royal ancestors who should get their own show on Bravo: “Real Housewives of New Jersey Lose their Heads over Henry the Eighth.” Please God, I won’t ask for anything ever again.

But Kate and Will have risen above it all and are going to get married. In front of their family and friends and about a billion people. If a billion people are watching the nuptials, then one billion people are not fighting, killing or blowing up anything. How bloody good is that?

So if you don’t like all the coverage – rent a heart.  You can return it on the 30th and the world can go back to being a slightly horrible place again. Bah! Humbug!

But for one day, I’d like to believe that love can push hate into the background. Where is belongs.

Filed Under: Entertainment, Humor, Nostalgia

Keepsake

April 19, 2011 By Deborah Batterman 7 Comments

Memory has a way of magnifying moments from the past, the cherished ones imprinted for all the right reasons (even if colored a little rosy by time), the ones we’d rather forget somehow finding a way to surface when we least want or expect them.

Today, on a day of scattered showers in a month now synonymous with celebrating poetry, memory takes me to a clipping my mother kept in her wallet, the first poem I ever published. I was a young girl and all I remember of the poem was its title, “Raindrop,” and the green mimeographed (anyone remember those days?) school newsletter in which it appeared, and how losing that when her wallet went missing was worse to her than the money and credit cards stolen.  Some things can never be replaced.

It’s always struck me as a little ironic that the very month dubbed the ‘cruelest’ by an iconic poet is the one designated to keep the spirit of poetry alive. Or maybe that’s the point. Poetry works best when it alludes to what’s not so obvious. It’s a way of perceiving the world in less than literal terms. To my thinking, it’s the music of language.  Nursery rhymes – enchanting as ever to read aloud – are only the beginning.

‘I don’t get it.’ ‘It’s too much trouble to figure out.’ In days of old, metaphoric thinking was an assumption. These days it takes some cultivation, although Twitter, with its abbreviated paradigm, has put a new brand on haiku. Like everything else – fashion, music, fiction – poetic forms are tuned to the world that give them expression.

The month of April, with its promise of renewal, happens to be the month my mother died. I read poetry every month of the year; in April, I give it even more attention.  I want everyone I know to hear the echoes I hear when I just look at the cover of Adrienne Rich’s book, What Is Found There, the title pulled from “Asphodel,  That Greeny Flower,”  a poem by  William Carlos Williams:

               It is difficult
to get the news from poems
		yet men die miserably every day
				for lack
of what is found there.

So now, on a day in a month that calls up showers (and the flowers to come) let’s hear it for a little less news, a little more poetry.  Like the best of poems that invite us to tease apart the images, here’s Bess, by Linda Pastan, in which a name “passed like a keepsake” becomes a link that connects a poem recalled, the poet’s mother, and an infant girl.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

Filed Under: MISC, Nostalgia Tagged With:

What I will miss when the world comes to an end

April 12, 2011 By Elizabeth Cassidy 8 Comments

A few weeks ago I wrote about what I wouldn’t miss when the world comes to an end. That Glenn Beck’s Fox show got dropped leads me to believe that I have some power. And I won’t abuse it … Sean Hannity – you are getting very tired.

Someone suggested (thanks DB) I write about what I will miss when the world comes to an end. Good point. I have to say this list might be harder to fill since I am not always feeling the love. And I mean that about myself and the world.  OMG – I am a coach and I just admitted to being human. Hot damn. I just might be able to fill up this list.

1.) Not getting to spend time with my long list of interesting men. And by spending time, I don’t necessarily mean reading by the fireplace. Javier – call me. I hear the end is near.

2.) The possibility of …

3.) Watching kittens get their walking papers. And puppies who ice stake down the hall with wobbly legs.

4.) Putting words in a certain order that makes people laugh or think. Or think about laughing.

5.) Real passionate kisses from men who know how to kiss and don’t look at kissing as a way to wipe off a feature or two off your face. Call me old-fashioned.

6.) The chance to get back into that crocheted dress from the 1970s that I used to be able to wear without a bra. TMI?  Perhaps.

7.) Being able to talk to my darling friend David who left us in 1997. I just think about him and he is all around me – messing with my hair. Hmmmm … maybe we will see each other again? That would be just lovely. Remember David – Karma means never having to miss you ever again.

8.) Linguine and clam sauce.

9.) The ocean. One of the few places where people aren’t staring at me and wondering how I forgot to exercise over the last few years. It happened, people, it just happened.

10.) Yelling at the Tea Party members. Who needs therapy with this crowd around?

11.) The chance to own a closet full Christian Louboutin heels.

12.) Seeing the people of the world living in peace. We didn’t even get close.

13.) Friends who keep secrets. On second thought, they will have to go with me. I don’t think I can trust anyone that much.

14.) My VHS and DVD copy of ‘The Way We Were.” Robert Redford in bed.

15.) Good wine. Bad wine. Any kind of wine.

16.) Giving Donald Trump a Mohawk and telling him “You’re fired.”

17.) Manhattan. You can keep the Bronx and Staten Island, too.

18.) Hearing the late Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

19.) Concealer. Not that I ever needed it.

20.) Laughing so hard.

So what are you going to miss?

Visit Elizabeth’s site,  My Views from the Edge at: My Views from the Edge

Filed Under: Entertainment, Humor, Nostalgia, Opinion

Mind Over Matter

March 22, 2011 By Jessica Safran 9 Comments

In January 1990, my friend Nate and I were enthralled by an intriguing New Zealand tourist attraction: bungee jumping off a 160-foot crane perched over Auckland Harbor. We hung around watching people jump off the crane and bounce around over the water, whooping and hollering with resonant joy.

We liked that sound.

We decided to jump the following day. The entire night and morning of the next day we buzzed with a happy restlessness, anticipating our jumps with nervous excitement.

Nate dove off head first and screamed with abandon, his T-shirt gathered around his neck from the force of the bounce, exposing his pale chest. Five minutes later he was standing next to me, beaming.

“How was it?” I asked.

Although it was overcast that day, his eyes were a dazzling and fiery green with brown flecks ringing his dilated pupils. I looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“Go for it, Jess,” said Nate with the voice of someone speaking to me from the other side of a rite of passage. Who was I to turn down a challenge?

I paid seventy-five New Zealand dollars, and was ushered to the staging area below the crane. Sitting on the floor of a white metal cage, I was outfitted with a harness around my feet that would be attached to a thick latex bungee cord. “My lifeline,” I giggled nervously to the blond, tanned JumpMaster who was tending to me. He winked. As a final check, he expertly locked the bungee cord to my harness and tugged, and then unlocked it for the ride up. I stood. It was time. The JumpMaster entered the cage with me, and it rose slowly into the air. The pounding in my ears was so loud I couldn’t hear the JumpMaster speak to me. Uncomprehending, I watched his lips move.

Suddenly, everything stopped. There was only the insistent beating of my heart.  Animal survival instinct had alarms going off all over my body and was doing everything it could to make me reconsider, including hosting a hemispheric butterfly migration in my stomach, and giving me a severe case of dry mouth.

“I’m attaching the bungee cord to your feet,” said the JumpMaster.

“Ok.”

“I’m going to count down ‘Three-two-one-Bungee’, and when I say ‘Bungee’, that’s your cue to jump.”

“Do I have to jump a certain way?” I asked, my stomach in my throat.

“No, just lean out and jump forward.”

“Ok,” I lied.

“Ready?”

I nodded and gulped. He slid up the door of the cage.

“Three… two… one… BUNGEEEE!”

I took a deep breath, as if I were going to plunge underwater. Fully intending to jump out of the cage and propel myself forward, I sort of stepped off—in a manner closer to falling off.

I was in free fall as the nature around me burned into my retinas and the air automatically exited my lungs in the form of a loud scream. I felt like I was remembering one of the flying or falling dreams I had every so often—only it wasn’t a memory, and it wasn’t a dream. I watched as the surface of Auckland Harbor rushed up to meet me and passionately hoped I wouldn’t break it.

My bungee cord was at that time-stopping standstill point between being stretched to capacity and snapping back. In that moment I faced the water in silent wonder, praying Hello as one tiny drop of awareness should to an expansive water totem. I rebounded into the air, flying. A few minutes later I was back on land, rubber-kneed and giggling, hugging Nate as my flattened viscera slowly decompressed from the top of my thoracic cavity.

I realized I’d subjected myself to something very dangerous—and pointless. Though maybe not so pointless: I’d imposed my will over my animal instinct. The adrenaline high lasted for days.

Filed Under: Humor, MISC, Nostalgia Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How Can I Get Old If I Refuse To Grow Up?

March 14, 2011 By Elizabeth Cassidy 7 Comments

I have been saying for years that growing up, getting old and slipping into sensible shoes is someone else’s future. Not mine. No levelheaded hair styles for me, and while I am at it, lose the “can I help you ma’am?” attitude. If I needed help, I would call upon any one of my admirers once those silly restraining orders against me have been lifted.

So the other day, I am going about my fantasy life and this little ditty shows up in my email box. I asked if the sender wanted to be identified and she foolishly said, “I don’t care.” So, this is Esme, my oldest friend. We have known each other since we were three when I came flying out of my parent’s house to inform Esme and her mother to stay off my property. The police report noted that I spat at Esme, but I think that was a gross exaggeration. At that age, I was still drooling on myself.

“You know what else I hate? Getting ready for bed. Between the going to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, using the water pic, going to the bathroom, removing the makeup- without which I can’t leave the house anymore- cleansing my face, going to the bathroom, applying numerous anti aging moisturizers, layer by layer because I figure if one doesn’t work, there are 10 more on top to cover for it, going to the bathroom, taking all my various medications and constipation remedies, checking the door and going to the bathroom, it takes me an hour and I’m already tired when I started. There is nothing good that I can think of about getting old.


I forgot to mention, I have to wear glasses if I want to see anyone more than 15 feet away from me and even in the last row of the movies, where I have to sit. They’re very stylish- Do you know how freaking old I feel? This is besides the other glasses that I have to wear if I’m interested in reading anything- like the labels on the increasing medications that I take – do you know how freaking old I feel?


Just a thought…….”

My, she does go on, doesn’t she? I have to admit I laughed my butt off and then I had to go the bathroom. The power of suggestion is very strong.

I am not immune when it comes to reaching my next birthday. Several years ago, I had to start to take Synthroid because I have a thyroid that refused to get down and give me 50 sit ups. I asked for how long I would have to take this medication and the doctor said “forever.” I started to cry. So I am not Superwoman. I have to call my doctor out on this one. She told me I would start to lose those stubborn (fill in blank) pounds that were hanging around. Oh, really. Does it say big, fat liar on your diploma?

And I do find it a little insulting when I go to a new doctor and they ask how many meds I am on and say “two.” They look at me as if this poor dear is losing it. How about good genes?

For as long as I have known Esme, and when we are not in a wine induced haze, we are sarcastic, intelligent, humorous, catty and self deprecating. The latter is to keep those aging police from coming to round us up. We kill them all with our charm. Charm doesn’t age. Nor does it get brown spots. And in my world those damn spots are freckles. End of story. Oh, but before I really end it, the two of us can hold our own in a room filled with 30 and 40 year olds. Well, as long as they are men.

I can’t help Esme when it comes to wearing eyeglasses. I just look at them as accessories that keep me from falling down the stairs. Sort of like earrings with radar.

Same goes with constipation remedies. To know my family, is to know that we do not have bodily functions. It was never discussed amongst my people. I see the ads for the whole assortment of things our bodies do or don’t do and wonder who are these people who take such things and why do they not live in my village?

So in closing, I want to say to all…what was I talking about?

Not!

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.
- – - – Coco Chanel

The photo above was taken before everyone started to use Botox. I do miss the waxed lips days. (we do not dress alike -I was living in NY and Esme was living in Italy so there were enough miles between us.)

Filed Under: Entertainment, Humor, Nostalgia, Opinion Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

My writing debut

March 9, 2011 By Jessica Safran 14 Comments

I’m a journalist. That is, I am someone who keeps a journal. My compulsive writing habit started in 1973 when I was seven years old. It was an important writing activity called the Thought Notebook in my Brooklyn public elementary school classroom. Every day we would write a couple of sentences about our thoughts. We could tell a story about something that happened at home or at school, or write about what we were feeling. We could write a message to our teacher who would often write a response on the same page.

On a recent morning, my newly rediscovered Thought Notebook was on my desk where my curious six-year-old daughter noticed it and began to leaf through it, reading it aloud to herself. I was thrilled, since a few weeks before she had started reading to herself without any adult in the vicinity. When I heard her read the pages written by my seven-year-old self, I was dumbstruck.

She read the entry from Sept 10, 1973. “School is nice. I like it.”

There were many similar entries following the winning formula I like X because X is nice. Luckily, my vocabulary eventually got bigger.

Then my daughter came across the excellent entry about my second grade teacher, Mrs. Allen. “I like Mrs. Allen!” I declared, to which Mrs. Allen responded in bright blue felt tip letters: “I like Jessica! And I would like Jessica to write a lot more! Right now!”

So I did.

Little did Mrs. Allen know that I would go on to fill up fifty journals between the ages of eight and forty. Which might actually sound somewhat impressive, if they were all brilliantly written as well as legible (pick one).

I made my daughter an offer. “Would you like me to read you my journal tonight before you go to bed instead of a chapter book?”

“Yes!” she said, the look of joy on her face one of those indescribable parental pay-offs.

I read the entire journal to her as we lay next to each other in her bed. We both agreed we would’ve been friends had she been in my class.

Then we came across this entry from March 11, 1974: “I want to help the animals who are in danger to survive.” Mrs. Allen wrote in response, this time in red ballpoint pen, “That’s very nice, Jessica. We will talk more about what we can do to help them.”

I turned to my daughter. “My entries are getting better, I think.” She nodded in agreement.

It took a while to get her to bed that night. She was so excited to the point of restlessness, having met Mommy as a seven-year-old by reading my first journal. The outcome of this is that she now wants to start her own Thought Notebook. She will write down her thoughts, and I will write my responses to them. It will be our first written collaboration, and I imagine in thirty-five years we will reach the reader who is our target audience: some first or second grader who will somehow be related to us.

Filed Under: Nostalgia, Parenting

Playing the Piano

March 7, 2011 By Deborah Batterman 7 Comments

I learned to play piano on a cardboard keyboard.

Three panels that folded in on themselves, easy to tuck between the books and notebooks I carried back and forth to school, spread out on the table at home when I needed to practice. This is not the voice of nostalgia, just simple reality, the way it was.  Piano lessons were being offered at school, in the mid-1950s. I wanted to learn to play, so we met every week, a group of like-minded music lovers, taking turns sitting at the piano in the auditorium, the real deal, ivory in place of cardboard. If I showed enough interest, maybe I’d get a piano one day.

A good friend of my father’s had a son who was blind. It amazed me to listen to him play, sound and touch rolled into his fingers, nothing he needed to see, except what he pictured in his mind. He was musically gifted. I would practice hard, become good enough. One day, maybe months into my lessons, I came home after school, no expectation that it would be a day different from any other, a snack before homework. Certain surprise moments are indelibly imprinted, this one as vivid in memory as the day it happened, an upright piano, a gift from my grandmother, imposing itself in the living room.  The upright would one day be replaced by a spinette, more compact and richer in sound.  A small plaster bust of Beethoven would sit on the piano, a reminder not only of genius but also of poignancy and the power to imagine. If I could not fathom composing music without actually hearing the notes, all I had to was look over at the statuette.

Practicing scales on the piano in a small Brooklyn apartment takes more courage than one might imagine.  Hard to pretend you’re not being listened to. “Play ‘Pagliacci,’” my mother would call out, by which she meant “Vesti La Giubba,” the heart-wrenching aria about the clown crying inside/laughing on the outside; and this from my father, a regular comedian: “Do you know ‘The Road to Mandalay’? Take it.” Nobody had to ask me to play Chopin, my favorite. And all bets were off re: who’s listening? when my brother began playing drums.

I left the piano behind when I moved out on my own, the apartment I first lived in too small and my distractions too great.  The time would come, and with it the space, a larger studio, when my spinette, unplayed for too long would find its way back to me.  My mother would rather have shipped me the Baldwin baby grand she was forever beating herself up about not buying when the opportunity came her way.  The price, a deal if ever there was one, was no match for her daughter’s resistance to a large piano in a small apartment.

Marriage, a child, another move, it was all too much for the spinette. And yet, irony of ironies, one day I walk into my house, no expectation that it would be a day unlike any other, to find a piano – a Baldwin baby grand, to boot – in the alcove where it was always meant to be.

Sometimes when I would sit down to play, my dog would come over, place her two front paws on the piano bench, lift one to my arm.  What sounds beautiful (to me) is too much for her sensitive ears.  So maybe I don’t play as much as I like to, but I do play. The dog is gone now, yet somehow I still feel her paw on my arm.

Visit Deborah’s website here . . .

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