The Year Walter Saved Christmas

Read my mother’s Depression-era childhood recollection of a beloved family border below:

In memory of Bruno Walter Kohler, and to all who bring delight to the hearts of children, any time of year.

This is the story mom tells every Christmas. Her father told it before her. She tells it in a formal tone, weighty and reverent, which is different from the way she ordinarily speaks. It’s as if she understands that when she is gone, there will be no one left to tell this story. She tells it to me, her daughter, and her grandson William, as we set up the Christmas crèche with its painted, plaster figurines– this manger, which has been in our family for about as long as this story has been told.

My father Ted, she begins, who was raised in abject poverty during the Great Depression, he never had a Christmas tree as a child. But when I was born, he always saw to it that I had a Christmas tree, and a large one at that.  

William unwinds cocoons of tissue paper, worn with age, and soft as flannel. Small sheep emerge, curled on grass green bases. 

But my father was also thrifty, mom continues, and waited until the very last minute to buy a tree, on Christmas Eve, when the prices came down. Of course in those days, the practice in New York was not to put the tree up, or even to trim it, until Christmas Eve. And then people would celebrate for the twelve days that followed. Which is very different from what it is today, when people throw their trees out the day after Christmas. 

William unwraps a shepherd, and another sheep, this one with neck twisted backwards, looking over its shoulder. I place this lamb, as I always do, backwards, with its hind quarters facing the crèche, and its muzzle craning to witness the miracle of our savior’s birth.

One year, my mother continues, when I could not have been more than six or seven, my father waited, as usual, until Christmas Eve to buy a tree. But when he went out looking, he found that trees were scarce, and actually, there were no trees at all for sale. He did not know what to do. He went home, and I imagine he told my Mother and Walter, who was sitting at the kitchen table, that there would be no Christmas tree that year.  So Walter left for Judges Bar on Zerega Avenue, his favorite watering hole. Lo and behold, a couple of hours later, Walter returned with a cheap bottle of Muscatel, a gift for my teetotaling father, along with two large balsam branches that he had bought from a barfly. My father lashed the boughs together for a tree, and decorated it. And it was beautiful. And I never knew it wasn’t a real tree until I was older and heard the story. So that was the year that Walter saved our Christmas.

Walter, a boarder in my mother’s home, not only saved Christmas that year, but he started a family tradition that endures. Walter bought my mother this manger from a five and dime store. We still erect it every December, no matter how busy we are, and sometimes very late in the season, even adding figures after Christmas Day.

As is the case this December, when we build out our nativity scene on December 26th, which we insist on calling Boxing Day, a British holiday, though we are American. We enjoy this little affectation; a nod to imagined Old World Christmases we have never known. William continues to unwind tissue and I to arrange: Mary and Joseph, the Magi and camels, all crowding the holy crib, and Archangel Gabriel perched atop. But there are also unlikely worshipers, swans and turkeys, dogs and cats–out of proportion china keepsakes, added over the years, collected from boxes of Red Rose Tea and God knows where else.

Walter loved Christmas and would shake the snow globe of childhood memories to mesmerize my mother with sparkling flakes of yuletides past, the Christmas markets, the handcrafted dollhouses, the Christstollen with candied fruit.

William unwraps the last bundle to reveal the central character in this nativity drama. In years when we are not so late in setting up the crèche, we hide the babe behind the manger until  Christmas Eve, when we pop the little light of the world into his straw bed. But now, with Christmas past, I place Jesus right at the plaster knees of his mother, bent and adoring, arms outstretched, hands cupped, as if cradling love itself. 

Bruno Walter Kohler’s own little light kindled into the world in a small town in Saxony, in the late 19th Century. Not much is known about his early years, besides what he shared of those idyllic Christmases. Walter endured the Great War and the severe inflation that followed. He became a merchant seaman out of Hamburg, and in the early 1930s he sailed into New York Harbor and jumped ship, rather than return home, where he might well have been conscripted into the Third Reich.

Walter went looking for lodging and found my great-grandmother, Carmela, who rented him a room in her tenement apartment in East Harlem. It was not uncommon in those days for a divorcee, like Carmela, to rent spare bedrooms. Her daughter Mary lived upstairs on the top floor in the same building, with her husband Ted and my mother, Constance.

An undocumented immigrant, Walter worked seven nights a week tossing back-breaking bundles of The Daily News from a truck onto newsstands throughout the city. He worked all night and slept all day, for years. The Great Depression was still hanging on when my mother was born in 1938. Mary was nineteen and Ted was twenty, and unemployed. It was Walter who bought the milk for little Connie, week after week.

In 1943, the whole family, including Walter, moved from Manhattan to the top floor of a two-family house in the Bronx. One year later, at forty-eight, Carmela got sick and died from something mysterious that doctors at the time didn’t understand. Walter stayed on with Ted and Mary and Connie. While World War II raged in Europe, Ted got Walter off The Daily News paper truck and found him a job as a dishwasher at Schreiber’s, a Kosher restaurant in Manhattan. This was an improvement, or was it? Now Walter worked forty hours a week and had two days off, which he spent, increasingly, at Judges Bar up the street. 

Up until then, no one realized Walter was an alcoholic because he worked every day and never had much time to sit on a barstool. Gradually though, his behavior changed and he became unbearable. He fell down the stairs drunk more than once, and Ted and Mary asked him to leave more than once. But when Walter begged to come back home, they relented, every time, until the last time, when they didn’t take him back. 

Now Walter was on the outs, living in a furnished room nearby. He would often walk by the Tratman Avenue house and talk to Connie, playing out front. In the early 1950s, some of the Bronx was still undeveloped. There was open space and marshland for children to explore. Swamps would freeze over, and kids like my mother would lace on their skates and disappear until dinnertime. One such frozen winter day, Ted and Mary got a call from the police that Walter had been found dead in one of these swamps, about two blocks from the house. According to the coroner’s report, the immediate cause of death was heart attack from “chronic ethanolism.” Alcoholism. Walter had no insurance and no savings. My grandfather paid all expenses to bury him.

William and I add the finishing touch: the snowy forest. None of us has ever questioned the topographic accuracy of these snow-flocked, bottle brush pine trees that we plant behind the stable in Bethlehem. I step back to take in the scene. One shepherd’s staff is missing, another’s sandaled foot is chipped. The porcelain turkey squats beside the rhino.

My mother is pleased with how the manger has turned out, though it looks pretty much the same as it does every year. She is thinking of Walter:

There was a great deal of accumulated sentiment for Walter, who had lived with us for more than two decades. There was nobody else in his life, just our family. He was with us when I was born in 1938 until he died, when I was sixteen. I remember one time I passed Walter’s room, I must have been seven or eight. The door was open. On his dresser I noticed a tiny, leather glove. Now we knew that Walter had lost his wife and child in a fire in Germany many years earlier, but that’s all we knew. He never talked about it. There was just that one glove that he kept on top of his bedroom dresser. I remember it to this day.

I count sheep and make sure there are the same number on either side of the stable, because this is how it’s always been done. It’s as if someone, at some point, perhaps Walter himself, figured out that prioritizing visual balance fostered the harmonious effect that scenes like these call for. Everything is as it should be, as the manger figures from the five-and-ten-cent store settle into their roles for yet another season, to reenact the same story, with the same message. An inexpensive set of statues and a pair of pathetic pine branches, bought by a beloved drunk, tell the tale of agony and abiding love at Christmas.

Houseplants

Photo by Author

Not long ago I heard an  interview on NPR on the “consciousness” of plants, which got me worrying that  maybe I was hurting my pot of basil every time I pinched off her leaves  for marinara sauce. So I’ve been digging my fingers below the surface of my understanding to unearth what it is exactly about my new hobby, so  often frustrating and full of fails, that keeps me at it! Read the story below:

After the “smoke event” of June, 2023, when Eastern Canada caught on fire and belched particulates down the Eastern seaboard, reaching as far as Flatbush, Brooklyn, and turning the sky outside my window Creamsicle orange, I did two things to improve the air quality in my one-bedroom micro-environment: I bought a Korean air purifier on Amazon and a small forest of houseplants from my local florist.

Until that point, I had just one imposing snake plant, worthy of any dentist’s waiting room, which thrived under the canopy of my neglect. Now I had a leafy grove with hard-to-pronounce names and confusing care labels poking up from pots.

Like cooking, there is a knack to growing houseplants. A little education in the beginning helps — plant care podcasts and conversations with neighbors are a good start, but as I discovered, you are on your own to save that broccoli sheet pan supper from shriveling into the petrified forest, or that African Violet, when, for no apparent reason, she loses all turgidity in her stems and collapses like a beached octopus.

What I have learned from cooking and caring for plants is that you have to be willing to have your heart broken and to try again. You have to be willing to turn up the heat and sear salmon again, and you have to be willing to compost that Tiger Aloe that you overwatered and then go buy another succulent, just like it.

I have also learned that both the art of cooking and the art of plant care require good timing and just the right amount of attention. Shrimp can go from raw to rubbery in thirty seconds, and a tempermental Rosemary can catch a chill and drop her needless overnight. And if you get too fussy flipping that flounder filet, it flakes into a million pieces in the pan. You have to face failure, accept what isn’t working, and change course.

But most situations in the kitchen and on the sunny windowsill are salvageable. And this is heartening for someone like me, who likes to eat well and surround herself with foliage that continuously pants oxygen into the air.

I recently heard a story on NPR about the consciousness of plants, not a new concept, but revived and expanded in cool ways. Like most stories that I listen to on NPR, I can’t remember the name of the person interviewed, nor the name of their book. So I looked it up: The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger, a staff writer at the Atlantic. The takeaway was this: when plants are challenged by unfriendly forces in their environment they don’t just surrender their fate from their fixed and rooted position, they get creative. Or as Ms. Schlanger puts it, plants have “agency.” “They take an active stake in the outcome of their life,” and have this “lively ability to make choices for themselves.” She goes on to describe this weird way tomato plants can secrete substances into their leaves that are so distasteful to caterpillars, that the fuzzy parasites turn away from feeding on tomato leaves, and turn to munching on each other instead. Obviously, plants can’t always save themselves like this, but they can usually buy themselves some time.

And it is in this grace period, when all plants, including my Peace Lily, when the tips of her leaves turn brown in distress, that they are able to tolerate some pain, and stave off death. And it’s also during this time, when plants are kicking into survival mode, that I can step in and try to save my Anthurium, who is turning pale and folding her heart- shaped leaves inward. I can move her from direct sunlight to bright, diffuse light. She might like that. But lighting is tricky with houseplants and I’m still figuring it out.

If I am alert and adaptable, like the plants in my care, I can see trouble coming and demonstrate agency myself. I can be more attuned to the heroics of my house plants as they bend, discolor and curl in order to live. I can watch and intuit their needs. I can notice when my Kalanchoe fails to thrive and pinch her back hard, then mist her well.

My Heart of Jesus keeled over today. He had been ailing for weeks and I had tried everything. I will take him back to the florist tomorrow, and I’ll let the florist scold me for what I did wrong, and I will buy another Caladium, just like him. And I will try again. I will take him home and care for him and not over water him. And if his leaves start to drop anyway, my new Heart of Jesus and I will both demonstrate agency to try to turn things around. And maybe this time it will work out all right.

This Very Good Time

Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash

“This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

For years now I’ve puzzled over this quote taped to the inside of my spice cupboard, alongside other inspirations. I’ve always liked it, but now it’s starting to make sense too. It’s a call to action of course, but one that demands thoughtful, precise response — nothing sloppy. In the last few weeks, humans young and old, from all walks, here and abroad, have shown me that they know what to do with this time. It’s heartening.

Another saying that isn’t attached to the inside of my cupboard, but taped in my brain instead is this: “Children don’t listen to what you say, they watch what you do.” This holds true for the two male adolescents in my care. With these two mottos in mind, I keep going back to one powerful memory — a choice my mother made — more than fifty years ago. As it turns out, that was also a very good time.

New Orleans, circa 1969

I did not eat a single grape for what felt like my entire childhood but actually, I was only deprived of my favorite fruit for the first few years of my privileged life. The Delano Grape Boycott started the year I was born, in 1965, and ended victorious in 1970, when the growers agreed to union contracts that gave workers better wages and working conditions. I missed grapes badly. Mom would roll our cart straight past the plump green globules in the produce aisle of Schwegmann’s. She’d explain that by not buying grapes we were helping Mr. Chavez and the migrant farm workers who picked those grapes, way across the country in California. This made zero sense to me. My appreciation for the purchasing power of money was limited to my understanding that, with the right combination of coins from my change purse, I could purchase a large cola ICEE from the corner store. It was impossible for me to understand how reallocating the family budget from table grapes to bananas could possibly help. Yet my small sacrifice, added to that of countless others around the world, brought those vineyard bosses to the bargaining table: grape pickers were finally allowed to take water breaks and collect unemployment insurance.

The concepts of conscience, sacrifice and solidarity were modeled for me at a tender age, by a women’s libber in oversized sunglasses and head scarves, who went for peaches and pears over grapes. These three ideas stuck in my scalp at age five, much better than the plastic barrettes forever sliding off my baby-fine hair. Conscience, sacrifice and solidarity. I remember these three right now, at this very good time.

Is It Still Okay To Be Picky In Your Fifties?

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Are you too picky in choosing mates? It’s good to ask this question at any age. Explore possible answers to this one, and nine other related questions.

Is it still okay to be picky in your fifties? I think so. But then I’m still single. And I’ll be the first to admit I’m a work-in-progress when it comes to functional intimate relationships. Still, I think I can scatter some seeds of hope, harvested from six years of post-divorce dating. And I do think it matters to this conversation that in all those other ways humans interact—ways that don’t engage prolonged mouth-to-mouth contact—relations with friends and family, with my kids’ teachers, the letter carrier, the super—those are all skipping along quite well. I have a thicket of friendships that needs regular watering, and gets it. And at fifty-four, I’m not devoid of self-awareness—a working romantic partnership does feel within reach. Close enough anyway, for me to share some thoughts—not advice—on dating for the long-term. I toss these questions out with humor and heart, to take to your own heart, or to ball up and toss in the single-stream recycling bin.

Are you being picky or just choosy? It’s a good question to ask, whether you’re deciding on peanut butter or people. Where should you compromise, and where should you hang tough? At the supermarket or on the dating site, there’s a difference between being hyper-critical and just discerning—which are you? I personally like someone with good teeth and well broken-in boots—and arty. But in New York City, those are easy items to check off your shopping list. Apart from these quirks, I don’t really have a type—yet I still seem to harbor some illogical deal-breakers that may not help my chances of finding love.

Take the guy who was allergic to garlic, onions, leeks and pretty much everything else in the allium family. I asked two friends and got two answers. From the one who didn’t cook: “No big deal.” From the one who did: “Next.” But he was a great guy: smart, stable, empathetic and gainfully employed doing meaningful work he loved. And he treated me well. That all counts for a lot. I passed on no-garlic guy because I couldn’t accept that I’d never feel free to slather garlic butter on bread in our someday home. 

Is there a workable solution here?  As I’ve puzzled losing good men for bad reasons, it’s never helped matters to make mean faces in the bathroom mirror—or worse, when I’ve fallen into that manhole of fearful thinking, shouting at my reflected self: You’ll die alone. I find comfort when I remember that, while we humans share space on Earth for a few revolutions, we all enter and exit this world alone. This is usually enough to pull me out of my funk and into more productive reflection: Yes I bailed, now how valid was my complaint? Have I ever actually shared a bag of garlic knots with someone? Would this be an especially meaningful shared activity? And thinking back to the one before: Did he really have to love David Bowie, or was it enough that he babysat my purse and didn’t hustle me off the dance floor?  Before I roll my cart past another good guy, could I take a closer look at the first five ingredients? A friend recently used this question to help her decide between three candidates she’d been dating: If I lock my keys in my car at one a.m., which one is going to show up to help me fish them out? 

Are you making excuses for bad behavior? The problem is, historically speaking, I forget to ask myself this question going in, and also to re-ask it regularly, throughout the relationship. While my friends may be drawn to qualities in mates that don’t matter to me, there is one thing we can all agree upon: we want to be treated well. Who doesn’t? The following questions, when asked then answered honestly, might help clarify things: Is he checking in regularly, or do you do most of the reaching out? Does he pay you an occasional, well-timed and authentic compliment? Or does he drop hints that he’s not really looking to be in a relationship?  Does he wash your pots? When you turn in at night, is there a fresh glass of water by your side of the bed? Does he ever show up to your place with three ripe avocados and a lime?  Taken alone, no single gesture is essential, but all together they add up to this: an appreciation of you.

Is this relationship more fun than work? Does the person you’re seeing plan fun dates? If you’re like me, a single working parent head-of-household, your bandwidth is stretched microfiber thin. You love your kids, but you also look forward to those Saturday night dates. In relationships established on equal footing, combing the weekend calendar of events is a joint effort. I’m always happy to suggest a walk in the park, followed by a stop at a taco truck.  I won’t lie though, it feels good when someone comes up with something to do that would never occur to me, but that feels like something I may want to do every Saturday for the rest of my life. 

Is this relationship more work than fun? Relationships “require work.” We know this. But how much work are you willing to put in? I’m full of bright ideas to fix other people’s lives. But now, before I push up my sleeves and overdo for others, I’m asking myself: is this person basically together? Do they have friends and take fairly good care of themselves? How bad are their vices? I don’t want to come off as judgy, I for one can’t kick the caffeine habit, not even close, but I don’t think my trenta matcha latte is going to prove too burdensome for someone else. And their idiosyncrasies or indulgences shouldn’t feel too heavy on my back either. 

Is he officially de-coupled, or almost there?  Where is he at with his ex?  Are they at least on civil terms? Are they too close? Ideally, I hope to see signs of a clean, dispassionate break. I once dated someone who had a polaroid of his ex in plain sight, in his bedroom. I still don’t know how I feel about that. Okay, I do. I feel weird about that. 

Is he open to trying new things in bed?  How willing are these men I’m dating—men pushing sixty or past it— to leave their comfort zones and change up their games between the sheets?  When they discover new glitches in their lovemaking—or mine—how enthusiastic are they to explore new paths to mutual pleasuring?  Can they lighten up and still find their sexy?  Or do they just get defensive and roll towards the wall?  Can I lead them along to a sex shop where we’ll take suggestions from some smart, sex-positive consultant, thirty years our junior? And if they aren’t already sold on tantric sex, are they now willing to look into my eyes, share breaths and try the modified lotus position? 

How much time do you want to give this? That’s a big one, isn’t it? For me, it’s until I have clarity. And until then, I take it one-date-at-a-time. Despite advancing age, I embrace my relaxed philosophy, even when my shrink doesn’t. He’ll say: “I think we both see the writing on the wall.” Maybe. But I’ve got to play this out. The heart wants what it wants. This is not orthopedic surgery, where sometimes you have to re-break broken bones that had already started to knit together poorly on their own. Doctors do this all the time. They break bones and realign them, so they fuse together straight and strong. But repeated break-ups and make-ups with men have led me more often to mangled relations and hard feelings than to warmth and wellness. Today I’d rather sit in ambiguity, for as long as it takes.  

Do you really want to be in a relationship? My son’s barber, a widower whose marriage was unfortunately cut short somewhere between the silver and golden mark, asked me recently: “Are you happy?” In my defense, I rattled off  my “list of goods”: “I’m good. My sons are good. My parents are still good—thank God. Things are good with the ex. Work is good. The car is still good. And the weather! Wow! The weather is so good!” The barber waited to respond until I  gave him what he wanted. “Oh and I’ve been dating a little.”  “Aha! Good! Good!!...”  Do I look miserable? I thought. I don’t think so. Sure, on most nights I’d rather spoon a warm body than three wedge pillows, but I still think I’m good. Yes, I’m good where I’m at right now. Which brings me, perhaps, to the most important question: Am I happier being alone today, than I’d be if I were in the wrong relationship? The answer there is yes. 

14 Valentine's that Remain Close to my Heart

I invite you to celebrate some different ways in which we express and receive love, in 14 Valentine’s that Remain Close to my Heart, my own love letter to the holiday we celebrate on February 14.

14 Valentine's That Remain Close to My Heart

Christmases past make me think of my father standing on a ladder, cutting corners by zig-zagging the pre-LED lights back and forth on only the forward-facing side of the ten-foot Douglas fir. And my mother, bracing the ladder below, making him take them all down and start over, going round and round clockwise, taking care not to leave any back branches bare of colored bulbs. Same Advent drama, year after year, and in the end, same glorious, trimmed tree.

Valentine’s Days past do not call to mind any such ritual, however. Apart from those 15 years of marriage when I received, without surprise but still with appreciation, one dozen coral roses on February 14, it’s been different every year. I am an unblushing opportunist on this day of doily hearts and boxed chocolates. Depending on circumstances,  and the people who happen to populate my little off-axis world at the time, I reinvent the meaning of love each year to suit the situation. I make the throbbing best of it, with or without the male protagonist. In fact—not to sour the sweet—-but some of my best Valentine’s Days have been spent loving friends, not lovers. Which is a good thing to remember as I face Cupid’s arrow this month as a single mother in her mid-fifties. 

Here are fourteen stand-out Valentine’s Day recollections, not “sensual”  but “scent-ual” experiences all, twinkling GIFs in my ever-growing text thread of memory, leaving behind a trail of heart-eyed smiley emojis.

1.  As a teen, receiving a single truffle heart from Teuscher Chocolatier in Rockefeller Center, in a keepsake box from my first man, Daddy. I have probably eaten a heart-shaped bathtub full of chocolates since then, but that one, wrapped up all on its own, from one father to one daughter, is the one I remember the most

2.  Also as a teen, in the kitchen with mom, unmolding individual coeur à la crème crustless cheesecakes from French porcelain heart-shaped molds, then spooning strawberries on top. We used the wedding china and the real silverware that Valentine’s night I’m sure. The texture, I recall clearly, more like cottage cheese than New York cheesecake, felt continental to my teenage tongue. And now this strained dessert, involving cheesecloth and imported custard cups, has come to symbolize the love and creativity my mother has always put into getting dinner on the family table for fifty-eight years of marriage.

3. As an eight-year-old, at the dining room table, addressing small envelopes enclosing Peanuts valentines to my classmates in Miss MacIntosh’s third grade homeroom, then sealing them with heart stickers. There was something about working in miniature this way—small hands, small cards—that felt just right. The anticipation of giving each one out, then getting 25 odd ones in return, of spreading the love and having it returned exponentially to my class cubby, well it’s up there with waiting for Santa, or the first day of summer vacation.

4. As a freshman in college, obsessed with a senior who was, in turn, obsessed with Dylan, I took a skein of blue yarn and went at his dorm room, tangling it up in blue, from ceiling light fixture to dirty tube sock under the bed. He didn’t know what to make of it, or of me, but I remember how happy it made me while doing it.

5. In my early twenties, showing up on my boyfriend’s doorstep—La Petite Coquette— in only black bra, garters and fishnets, to which I’d rigged pink bows, while holding a giant heart of Russell Stover caramels, bigger than his Greenwich Village studio apartment. I was ravished. 

6.  In my late twenties I started sending Valentines to friends and family by way of Loveland, Colorado, where volunteers would intercept each envelope and postmark it with a Valentine verse. My valentines still go this circuitous route as volunteers are still ready with the red stamp to add an original stanza every year like: 

St. Valentine started the trend —

A special day to reach out to friends

Loveland, Colorado picked up the cue,

Sending heart-felt messages to you.

7. As a new mother, my thoughtful sister-in-law gifted my then husband and I  with a certificate for a dinner out. Our toddler son sucked buttered linguine and tugged at mylar balloons tied on the backs of every chair.  

8. With the birth of our second son, my then husband presented me with a golden locket holding photographs he’d hand-colored of our boys, posed in chubby-cheek profile. Here they were, finally birthed at thirty-eight and forty-two, after years of false starts and fertility treatments, twin hearts facing one another, now nestled against my breast bone. Not made of pure gold, but gold tone instead, the locket’s surface has dulled with wear, but not the contents. 

9. As PTA mom at a Valentine’s Day Bake Sale, standing behind a bridge table, in heart-shaped deely boppers and smeared to my elbows in pink frosting, selling all those damn cupcakes to second-graders waving dollar bills in my face. I remember my toddler sat beside me on a folding chair, well-behaved for hours, content or catatonic, through a patina of rainbow sprinkles. That was a good day, standing shoulder to shoulder with parents who had kids in my son’s class,  selling silk roses that would go home in backpacks, then be presented to other mothers that night

10. As a forty-four-year-old at the dining room table, experiencing deja-vu with my first-grader, as we sat addressing Snoopy valentines to all his classmates in Ms. Lombelino’s first-grade classroom. Among other things, I remember thinking, this is what I’m meant to do with my life.  

11. As a fifty-year-old divorcee, when both sons come home from their school bake sales with gifts for their first sweetheart: a Valentine’s mug and a duck plush which still sits on the dashboard of the KIA. That duck has fallen to the floorboard and been returned to the dash too many stoplights to count

12. As a fifty-one-year-old, redeeming a soon-to-expire gift certificate to a storefront massage parlour, for the best deep tissue kneading of my lifetime. My then boyfriend, and still friend, gave me the voucher because he knew he’d never use it himself. I still meet up with this man at white elephants and book fairs, where we swap stories on raising teens. I remember leaving that spa limp all over, in such a good way.

13. As a fifty-three-year-old, dabbing my pulse points with a  scented oil that my next boyfriend, and also still a friend, had blended for us at a legendary fragrance shop in lower Manhattan. Based on his description of our personalities, the perfumer mixed up a unisex roll-on that really did suit us both. That perfume lingers in my olfactory receptors, and this man and I, both foodies, swap recipes and alert each other to good deals on avocados today. 

14. At 54, this upcoming Valentine’s Day is already making sweet-smelling memories. They say the pre-war bathtub is the poor woman’s spa. A Google search didn’t pull up this expression, so I must have invented it.  I’ve been mixing up batches of bath bliss for those I love, and have already started hand-delivering my bath salts. My dermatologist seemed startled, then smiled: “You know I hate Valentine’s Day.”

I get it. For some, it’s a loaded day of filled chocolates and full of regrets. For a spate in my twenties it was that for me, too. But this year, just like these thirteen heart days which precede it, I’m not biting into Valentine’s Day and returning it to the box, disappointed.  I love this day. A time when we fully experience the well of a love which surrounds us. With luck and a little focused attention, we carry this goodwill into the spring. But not the cynics, who believe this holiday is confined to the borders of a romantic love which eludes them, nor the forgetful, for whom this loving feeling only lasts until midnight on the fourteenth day of February, until the tree comes down in their hearts. I bought a two-foot living tree with a root ball this past Christmas. I’m not forgetting this year. My dermatologist’s surprised smile helps me remember. 

Slay Me With Your Art

Charcoal Drawing by William Fahey

What is it about artists? Why do creatives consistently capture my heart and lay me low? I invite you to explore the profound sex appeal of arty types.

Slay Me With Your Art

By now I’ve either dated, dallied with, or been in an actual relationship with an artist of one ilk or another: actor, cartoonist, cinematographer, filmmaker, lighting designer, musician, photographer, poet, stand-up comic, writer.

I’m a sucker for a right hemisphere dominant guy. But why? Why do I prize crazy-talented over all those other hyphenated adjectives which may be better predictors of long-term love—you know them: self-aware, emotionally-available, highly-empathetic, health-conscious, fiscally-responsible, mentally-stable.
Here’s why: 

Art ignites: Let’s start with the obvious: art is passionate.

Those sparks of creative expression that reach my eyes and ears kindle fires deep inside me. A love song, a sonnet, a canvas painted in gold leaf, a sweeping pan of a waterfall, a hand-colored photograph of a girl in a slip perched on the edge of a bed. Beauty, rage, anguish, despair, hope, love, oneness. These things move me, and move in me, from my head, to my heart to my hips.  And now there’s a name for what happens to me: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Like a steamy washcloth, an ASMR both invigorates and relaxes at the same time. It’s the crisp scent of 99 44⁄100%  pure ivory soap bubbles in my grandmother’s bathtub, and the sensation they create as they break against my skin. It’s my scalp pulled tight as nana twines my wet hair into a turban, then it’s those follicles relaxed, blood flowing back, as I’m walked outside, unbound, and set to dry in the sunshine. Now that I’ve connected my own engagement with art to personal rapture,  I chase ASMRs any chance I get. And dating artists—as well as just hanging with artists— does set me up to experience this wellness euphoria more often.
Art excites: “God bless the child that's got his own.” Lady Day had it right. When a guy I’m seeing has something going on that lights his fire, it’s dynamic, living, forward moving. And it’s not about me. And that’s good. These men are not retired in their own minds, they’re evolving, growing. They’re dreamers, always dreaming, and  that’s dreamy. It’s a creative mindset that I’m drawn to wherever I encounter it, and not just on dating sites, but on the subway platform, in a steel drummer whose lost in the concave surface of his drum, oblivious to trains arriving and departing. Or in a painter friend’s apartment, watching her at the canvas, a brush in her right hand applying Naples yellow, and six more brushes in the left, jutting out at all angles like a star burst. She’s lost too. Gone! Wholly unaware of me, just five feet away.  If someone I’m seeing is not sometimes lost pursuing his passion, I find I’m not falling that hard. Shallow? Maybe. But my heart likes what it likes. 

Is it also shallow to admit that I’m sometimes the dreamer too, imagining the person I’m with enjoying a splash of celebrity, where I get to throw on a little black dress and hang on his arm at a screening, or an opening, or I dance my ass off to his bright brassy notes on Lincoln Center Plaza, barefoot and wet in fountain spray? It’s sexy to me. It’s also embarrassing to confess to this not liberated mid-twentieth century fantasy of displaced female ambition. (Even while I dream of seeing my own name added to the masthead of P.S. I Love You.)

But honestly, while my collection of little black dresses hang mostly unworn, the reality of my experience dating artists has been pretty great. It’s been enough to just witness someone’s process up close, and sometimes, to even be thrown into their mix of muses, singing back up to their Terpsichores and Calliopes. To experience someone’s art in the making, in the mistaking, and then in the actualization. Well that sends tingles up my fishnets. 
Art challenges: I’m a literal thinker, a literal writer, and a planner. My google calendar is color-coded by family member. I come from a line of women who don’t flake and don’t tolerate “fart brains.” I cut to the chase and break things down into understandable parts. Sometimes this is good. But often not. When it comes to appreciating art, I often miss that point. I try to force meaning in an unappreciative way. Art is a barbed-wire enigma, not to scale recklessly with mock heroics or to throw yourself against, like an inflatable bouncy castle. Dating artists has taught me that. To be fair, artists I haven’t dated have also expanded my thinking here. In my youth into my forties, if I didn’t get a painting or a poem, I just gave up. Walked away.  But knowing more artists has challenged my approach. Sylvia Plath may elude me to the grave, but I’m doing a better job of letting all that’s non-figurative and freely-versed just wash over me. I’m giving meaning-making a rest. And by extension—I’m letting more things in life float by me,  unscheduled and unresolved. And Lord it’s easier. 

Art collaborates: For years, I teased hair and applied false lashes on models for my ex-husband’s photo shoots. Before marriage, I’d held microphones on long poles, revised scripts, dressed sets, and stood perfectly still while a director of photography tinkered with clamp lights. And post-divorce, a conceptual artist had me look over what he drafted to run alongside his latest work. I felt privileged. I’d only blogged about dead pets and consolidating breakfast cereals in my pantry. I knew zilch about attaching words to visual art, much less to those  less “accessible” artworks. But here I now was, curled on his Indonesian daybed in my tag-sale kimono with my red pen, up inside his head—thinking about his art, then with him on the page, holding his words like thin-shelled eggs, those chosen words, pregnant with meaning, pointing them with crimson arrows to paragraphs above and below. Very cool, and, very sexy. Stretched my thinking and opened me up to new experiences with non-figurative art.  Maybe grew my own writing too?

Art gets at truth: Great art isn’t phony. Even artists who play with illusion are going for something real below the gesso surface. And it’s that truth that touches some spot beneath my solar plexus. It’s the thrill that kills me every time. The artists I have known in the screening room as well as the bedroom have shone bright stars that light the way to something pure, beyond description, but deeply felt.  

When it ends, am I upset? Devastated.  Our light goes out. But then it flickers and flares up into a parting gift: a song, a poem, a painting, a photograph. A memento to mark the commonalities that we shared. The truth of their art remains, as does our connection. I mattered to them, then and now, as they did, and still do to me. And their art matters to me, it’s on my wall, or in my playlist or on my bookshelf, or on a scrap in my bedside table. The art that artists and I have experienced together—as givers, receivers, collaborators—it lives on. And that’s killer.

Surfing Love Sites as a Single Mom

courtesy of rockawave.com

For a few tide changes now, I’ve been a girl on the curl, surfing online dating sites for that one Starkist Tuna. Sorry Charlie, to make you tread water until I drift into your current, but while we wait, know that I’m sharing the waves with some terrific tunas who are teaching me to be no Chicken of the Sea, and to enjoy riding this one long wave to you… Read how I’ve been handling the board while balancing work and home. Thanks for the read.

Surfing Love Sites as a Single Mom

Disclaimer: Why write another “How To” on charting the choppy waters of online dating? Especially tips targeted to single moms, who may already feel judgy eyes on them when it comes to how they enjoy their shards of time not spent at a desk, in the produce aisle, or on the soccer, softball or football field? That’s the last thing unattached moms need—a faceless freelancer telling them how to date. 

So why bother? Well, because this writer is in the same boat—single parenting while trawling dating sites, off and on, for a few years now. She’s made mistakes and she’s also made friends. 

“A wise person learns from other people’s mistakes,” my mother likes to say. If true, then at fifty-four I’m still dumb. With the help of a smart therapist however, and gal pals who continue to pry my fingers off the IG accounts of hopeless causes, I am starting to learn from my own mistakes. 

Here are some takeaways from time spent dropping my line on Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid and, say, Episcopaldating.com (the weirdest by far.)

Be discrete

I get it now, but I didn’t at first. It matters who I invite over to dip into the popcorn bowl on family movie night. One ex-boyfriend met my kids right away and two didn’t. Guess which break-up was messier than the other two?  As I see it, it’s a lose-lose set-up for Mr. Maybe to meet my sons before I know he’s Right-on. If the guy is kind of jerky towards mom, kids see that, or if he’s a keeper, but for whatever reason doesn’t keep, then kids—and boyfriends—experience that. Messy. For now I don’t have the head space or the counter space for that blender model. I’m sticking to the every-other-weekend man plan, until I get the internal memo from heartquarters to move forward. 

Enjoy meeting people

Five years post-divorce and surfing the riptides of online dating with a better feel for the board, I’m starting to have real fun with it. It began when I chose to ride that wave of gratitude. Think about it, how else would an over-fifty single working mom in the bowels of Brooklyn, meet eligible bachelors? I don’t even drink anymore, not that meeting males in bars ever worked out that well (except I did get fourteen good years, a set of Wedgewood, and two shining sons out of that last pick-up.) Where else, but within the glowing rectangle on my palm, could I be thrown into conversation with an accomplished man who can teach me a thing or two about some cool profession or unusual past time? In the small talk which comes before pillow talk, I’ve learned how to scramble a super fluffy egg and new strategies for experiencing conceptual art. I now know who Ram Dass is, where Cyprus is, and how to light a menorah. I know how to crash a Christie’s auction and act nonchalant as bids spike over a Basquiat. I’ve discovered a weather app I like more than the default that came with my iPhone. 

It’s not a popularity contest 

When I bemoan an empty inbox, my shrink reminds me, “You’re going for quality over quantity,” then drops his not-so-scorching term: “life partner material.” Last December, my friend met who-she-thought-was-a player, on what-she-thought-was-a-hook-up, and wound up joining the June brides at the altar. She likes to point out that “it only takes one.” So I’ve learned to be less afraid of the ones that fall off. I no longer noodle why some threads—despite batting my lashes with my best banter—break free anyway. After my autopsy on a dead thread comes back clean, I move on. 

Limit It

I hop on about eleven, and I’m off before midnight. 

It’s the last thing I do before smoothing on that face oil and reaching for the bedside light switch. Late night works for me. Because getting into it on my lunch hour with a Redwood timber tycoon—who may not turn out to be a Redwood timber tycoon—didn’t. 

Get clear on what you want. 

If I’ve learned anything riding the high seas of romance on the world wide web it’s this: people want different things. Setting aside the crazies, who can’t weave words into sentences that make sense, most folk will tell you where they’re at—if you bother to ask.

I no longer assume everyone is on the same long board when it comes to friendship, love and sex. This goes for female surfers too. My gal pals surprise me all the time. It’s taken lots of doggy paddling and a couple of wipe-outs to drift closer to how I really feel about things. News flash: people, however they may self-identify, have different attitudes and priorities, which can change over time. Just how long ago the ex rolled off the California King and moved out of the house is a question worth asking. I’m pretty clear now that I’m looking to make friends first, people who value my company, no matter the outcome, as I value theirs.  Eventually, I hope to ride that one long wave into shore... 

Find a Surfing Buddy

I have two gal pals jumping the waves with me right now. Looks like one may have found a real starfish, but even if she disables her account and shimmies off into the sand bar with him, she’ll still want me to float my prospects by her. Which is good. When it comes to the hapless heart, reality checks from real friends help filter the silt out. 

Keep Doing You 

“Patience is the key to paradise…” or so the Turkish proverb goes. If you’re at the point where you’re trawling deeper waters for this “life partner material” (who is still super hot in his own way) then this could take a while. Or not. (like the friend who married “the one” only seven months after they met on that innocent hook-up.) 

It takes what it takes to lure true love, so for now, after I check off childcare, chores and chasing at-risk teens back into their classrooms as a teacher’s aide, I’m buoying my bark during the long trawl by making time for what that matters to me. Like putting up pots of squash soup, and bending that morning bod with perky mid-life Aussie Amazons on YouTube. And with all the waves I’ve made over the years to keep bad romances afloat, instead of funneling that energy into my own writing, well, I could have written my debut novel, its prequel, and six sequels. Today I’m writing daily.

So until I catch the same current with that big-hearted sailor whose got both oars in the water, and who causes me to bite my wrist involuntarily at the sight of him in a full-length leather coat—you know the type— the one for whom I find myself doing Crest white strips before every date, while I’m  just treading water, waiting for that one to join me in the jet stream, I’ll just keep doing me. 

When I Knew I Was a Writer

Some people seem born into their callings: priests, doctors, fire fighters, social workers. From the time they can form words, they can tell you what they want to be when they grow up, and how they’re going to help out around planet Earth. That was never me, until now. But hey, better at 54 than never! Here’s an inspirational read for all late-bloomers.

When I Knew I Was a Write

for Julie Martino, CPA

Some people start writing with seashells in the sand at age four, or in secret journals with padlocks at about twelve. Some people just seem to know from day minus one that they want to be writers when they grow up.  But that’s not me. It actually didn’t hit me until I was 53. You’d think a strong personal essay that bumped me off the wait list and into my freshman class at college would have clued me in. Or the B-movie screenplay I wrote in my twenties. (That actually convinced me I couldn’t write.) Or maybe when I went for that Masters in creative writing, because something was missing in my thirty-something soul, and discounted degrees were a perk of working for a nonprofit. But that second diploma didn’t stamp “WRITER” on my forehead either. And in my forties, when I started mommy blogging at night because I just had to spill about head lice and classroom pets that died under my watch over summer break, did I see myself as anything more than a sleepy parent and animal killer then? NO. And not when I found my little story on the cobbler from Uzbekistan in print in the local paper either. Not even when my tips for surviving heartbreak sober were published in a nationwide recovery journal. The comments on that story were encouraging. And by now I had a fan base of friends and family who didn’t unsubscribe to my monthly newsletter.  Nope, none of this helped me buy into my writer status.  

Instead, I have a phone call from my accountant to thank for moving “freelance writer” up to the first line under my job description on LinkedIn. Last March, while preparing my tax return, she called to ask me about a 1099 for six hundred dollars that she’d pulled out of a clasp envelope, along with my W-2 from the City, for working as a teacher’s aide in a high school. “That was for a story I wrote for Bklyner on Marine Florists,” I explained, “plus a piece on a muscle parlor in Flatbush and one on a CrossFit in Red Hook.” “Did you drive to those interviews?” she asked. “Yes? Why?” I asked back. “About how much would you estimate you spent on gas?” “Gas? I dunno. Maybe five bucks?” She went on to ask about my expenses for electricity, wi-fi, print outs, pens and paper. She was treating my writing seriously, like a business, and me like a writer. Of course I was never serious. 

But now I am. And here’s how: 

I’ve gotten an agent. I asked my poet friend and former editor to be my agent. I started calling her by her surname and promised her a fat dinner out for the next piece published. We’re having fun with it, meeting weekly to edit, strategize and eat everything bagels, for which I keep the receipts. 

I write any chance I get. Whenever I can steal a moment during the day, I’m in a google doc on my phone, or jotting a story idea on a paper cup, pressed against the steering wheel at a stop light. At night I’m on the comp, with my eighties YouTube hip-hop and iced 7-11. Or hot Lipton. Or both. 

And since I’ve gotten serious, the universe has been meeting me halfway. And here’s how:

• I found a great book in the lobby of my building called “How to become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead.”

• The pet lizard has crawled into the role of muse and cuddles on my collarbone over the keyboard all night.

• I discovered a wonderful community of self-published writers on Medium.

Mind you, I’m not quitting the day job. Not now. Maybe never. I actually love the day job; those teens supply open-ended inspiration. But I’m also committed to writing daily, and nightly, and saying those three words out loud: “I’m a writer,” and not just into the bathroom mirror, but to friends and strangers alike. The kitchen floor hasn’t been mopped in a month, but I’ve never been happier.