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No Room to Let (Dowager Chic)

November 22, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, City Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters, Past Matters

2002 me

This is a blunt story–which of mine are not?– and it probably deserves to live somewhere besides a blog post. But as is so often the case, I will begin writing it to the audience that exists in my head when I write here–namely, sensitive, smart, and roughly my generation, at least psychospiritually.

Four years ago I began a battle to establish my apartment’s rent stabilization. I’d moved into the building in 2002, a few months after September 11 had dashed my dreams of being a wife and a mother (a separate post; a separate book, really). There was a markedly different group of tenants  because back then third stop on the L Train did not mean hipster. It meant working-class families of mostly Italian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent. I was the only woman on the block living alone–definitely the only blond wannabe writer from Boston. Mostly I got along with everyone–oh, there was the time I got in a fight with a mafia princess over a parking space and her father came after me with a baseball bat screaming YOU FKING WHORE-but having grown up in Newton’s The Lake I knew how to hold my ground. Sort of. Continue Reading →

Vegans Need Not Apply

November 19, 2019 in Age Matters, Etiquette Matters, Past Matters, Queer Matters

My personal ad, posted October 4, 2019

My grandmother Alice was an exceptional woman. Though she received very little formal education she was an autodidact par excellence and well-versed on topics ranging from train engineering to transcendentalism. But what I loved most about her was her great equanimity. Though she lived most of her life in an especially intolerant corner of Massachusetts and died in the Reagan 1980s, she was brilliantly open-hearted when it came to matters of race, sexuality, religion, gender, class. Her only true bias was against Presbytarians, whom, for whatever reason, she found ridiculous. When I’d ask about that, she’d shrug. “Everyone has a bias,” she’d say, “and that’s mine.” Well, I’ll be super super honest. When it come to dating, my only true bias is against vegans. As far as I’m concerned, a romantic connection that works on many levels is so rare that it’s ridiculous to rule anyone out on the basis of gender or age (within the realm of decency) or race or class or physical type.* But I will never date a vegan again. Life is too short to maw impossible burgers when there’s sirloin to be had.
*I have my preferences, but that’s for a different post.

The Blue, Blue Bridge of Twelve Novembers

November 18, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, City Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Queer Matters, Spirit Matters

blue tears, white hat

I carry so much loneliness that sometimes I forget this is not how everyone moves through this thing called life.

I carry so much loneliness that sometimes I forget it’s there at all.

Then something comes along to amplify that loneliness–to sharpen it so acutely that it stops my breath and squeezes my heart–and I simply can’t bear it by myself.

That’s how this last month has felt. First because I was in so much immobilizing pain that it prevented me from doing many things myself.

And so I reached out to people I assumed were cross with me only to discover I’d read their momentary frustration as something far more damming. I reached out to people with whom I’d been out of touch for years only to discover a great sympatico between us still. I reached out to people I hadn’t known well until my need, primal and pure, deepened our connection. And I reached out to people whose hearts I steadily hold but had kept afar while I malingered on this bridge called my book.

Thus warmth flowed and it helped.

And then I opened a channel with a woman I’d admired online for months—a woman beautiful and butch and kind-hearted and quick-witted. And, lucky me, warmth flowed from her too and we found ourselves moving from friendship to something far more molten and engulfing.

And that helped a lot. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy