Paid in Full

So, the moment I’ve been working toward for months – no, make that years – occurred Friday evening when I sat down to pay bills, Friday being pay day on alternate weeks. I logged on line to chase.com – the keeper of my most-used (and lately, the only-used) credit card, the one that nets me mileage for every dollar I spend and which has flown me to London, to Venice, to Istanbul, and soon – Paris…. that credit card, noted the balance of $386.27, and PAID IT IN FULL. Read zero balance. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. 

This moment has been a long time in rehearsal. I remember the first credit card I got when I was about 20 years old. It was to Sibley’s, a family-owned department store in Rochester, NY, (sadly) long out of business, but similar to Macy’s.  They wisely gave me a credit limit of $100 because, after all, I was only making $100 a week. The first item I bought was a long-sleeved pink and white dressy blouse, costing around $30. I was so nervous about handing over that card for something I really could not afford, but at the time was desperate to have. I paid the bill when it appeared in my mailbox, writing the check standing up in my kitchen before I even took off my coat. I didn’t want Sibley’s to be sorry they’d trusted me. Although I no longer have the blouse, somewhere I still have that credit card.

My most embarrassing credit card moment was when Mobil (gas) asked me to return my card to them. I was in my late twenties and I had charged way more than I could pay for gas for my car.  I was in film school making my thesis film, and driving back and forth a lot between New York where my cinematographer and actors all lived, Syracuse, NY where I was in school, and Batavia, NY where I was shooting. The specific details have faded but I missed a payment or paid less than the minimum or I was late – something that understandably infuriated them. So after a couple of angry letters back and forth, they demanded their card back. I slunk away in credit card humiliation.

Several years later, with an income finally beyond the student level, American Express took a chance on me and I was back in the credit card game. What yuppie wanna-be ever turned down AmEx? Even Mobil eventually emerged as a contender for my now steady income although I held my breath waiting for them to realize their mistake after I sent in my application. As with many families in today’s world, I used my credit cards primarily to keep my kid clothed, bejeweled, lessoned, vacationed and tuitioned. However, by the time she was no longer my responsibility, the habit of whipping out that card was entrenched.  I’ve tried many times over the years to get rid of pesky balances.  But for some inexplicable reason, approaching zero has always triggered the permission to buy syndrome from which, I suspect, many of us suffer. Sometimes it has corresponded with my itchy feet urge to travel, or Christmas, or the need (I use that term loosely) to decorate. No matter. There’s something about zero that heretofore has freed the often-suppressed wild and crazy shopper that resides within.

I revealed my tango with zero balances with all the seriousness I thought it merited to the person I know as my “heart mother.” She laughed at me. I bristled – she’s not supposed to laugh. “I’m laughing,” she explained, “because I do exactly the same thing.” She knows I’m compulsive, but in the 26 years we’ve known each other, she swears she never knew I was a compulsive shopper. “I’m a binger,” I explained. As proof I offered up my birthday last May as an example. I met my daughter at her apartment early, before we went to dinner and the theater, as we often do to celebrate my birthday. “I want to stop at Cold Water Creek before we go,” I said. CWC is a women’s clothing store with which I have fallen in love (I use that term loosely) since they started carrying items small enough to actually fit me and it happens (dangerously) to be about two blocks from her place. “Sure,” she said. Whatever momma wants to do on her birthday, we do.  FIVE HUNDRED PLUS DOLLARS LATER, we staggered out under the bag weight. That’s what I mean by a binge.

In the scheme of things, my binges are relatively harmless. I’m not like the QVC shoppers who have intimate (I use that term loosely too) relationships with the UPS driver, with a constant stream of boxes coming and going. I’m not like the Gymboree-obsessed moms who buy up every new over-priced themed outfit, which their children will outgrow before they have a chance to look worn.   My mortgage and other bills still get paid. I rarely suffer buyer’s remorse. What I buy (or bought, in that case) is used, and likely will be for years to come. That’s where the influence of my mom comes in. She couldn’t throw anything out. “It’s still good,” she would say. Or “it might come back in style.” Or “you never know when this will come in handy.”  Remember slouch socks? They were big in the 1980s, the growing-up years of my sweet daughter. That’s all she wore at the time. Of course, she gave them up long ago, fashion maven that she is. But here’s a secret – I still wear her cast-off slouch socks under my jeans on weekends and only lay them to rest when the elastic is so dead and gone that they threaten to slouch over my sneakers and drag on the ground. Until then, they’re still good, as mom would say.

But back to zero balance and freedom from the monthly tyranny of paying back. I got through all day yesterday without running it back up, which usually would be my modus operandi. It would be easy to do. Set me loose in a bookstore or a bead store or on amazon.com with a zero balance and I could do some serious damage. Or reveal a whole new listing of coming-soon-to-Broadway shows and my entertainment for the next year could be established in one charging frenzy. I’m going to try hard to stay clean, to borrow a phrase from the addiction world. I’m very much liking the concept of conscious decision-making ahead of time about how to spend (or not) limited monthly funds. Shall I go to the theater OR the ballet? Which organization do I want to contribute to this month? How much do I want to save (what a concept)? The possibilities are endless. The money is not. It’s about time I acknowledged that.

Imagining A Life in Danger: Empathy for the People of Japan

As I watched the horrific events in Japan unfold during this past week, a few thoughts kept surfacing: 1) that we humans are not in control, no matter how much we like (or need) to believe we are; 2) that disasters don’t discriminate or privilege anyone, and 3) that safety is a relative and temporary illusion. Watching the faces of the survivors and hearing their translated tales, I tried to recall if I ever felt my life to be in danger.

There was the time when I was 9 and in the 4^th grade. It was October 1962 and all the grownups in my world were worried. I heard whispers about Cuba and bombs and Russians (who I’d decided were very dangerous). I was mostly mad because the Russians were responsible for the forbidding of costume-enhanced Halloween celebrations in school for fear costumes might interfere with our ability to respond to a crisis. And then there was the rehearsal for that portended emergency when we were all herded into the gym and directed to board school buses, though confusingly different ones from normal. My worries were the whereabouts and safety of my little sister who was somewhere in the crowd with her second grade class, and whether I would remember the right bus number to look for in a real crisis.  But not death…. I was not afraid I was going to die.

There was the sunny morning in September 2001 when I emerged from my morning subway commute just before 9 a.m. and overheard snippets of a conversation between a food cart worker and a customer as I headed for a meeting at another university. Airplane…. World Trade Center….Crash. Instinctively, I looked south though I was heading north and saw clouds of smoke. I kept going, looking back again and again in disbelief as the beautiful morning turned grim and dark. I listened to the swelling street buzz that hadn’t yet solidified the reality of intent to kill. The next two hours were a blur as confirmation came from different sources that we were under attack. Pentagon bombed…. Another plane headed possibly for the White House….. Air traffic grounded all over the country…. Terrorists… A tower collapsed. Frantic I-love-you’s whispered through increasingly impossible to establish land and cell phone connections. The not-quite-believing eyes of fellow New Yorkers en route to nowhere fast as public transportation ground to a halt. Screaming, screeching sirens raced south. People of every kind clustered around cabs against curbs with open doors, their radios blasting the news as it evolved. I was scared, of course, but my worries were about maintaining contact with my daughter, being able to reach my mom, who would be frantic, to let her know we were ok, and finding a source of accurate information. But not death….. I was not afraid I was going to die.

 There was the snowy night in mid-January 2004 close to midnight when my daughter and I were on the road, less than twenty miles from our destination after having driven over three hundred. My father had been given a few weeks to live and we were driving “home” to see him. We were chatting, the roads were snow-covered, the painted lines and the edge almost impossible to discern. But with over 30 years of experience driving in wintry conditions, I was not afraid. Mom was expecting us and there were sure to be cookies frosted and ready to eat. We had climbed a small incline and coasted down to almost the bottom when my wheels hit the edge of the road. I overcorrected and suddenly we were spinning once, twice in slow motion, spinning off the road. I knew not even which side of it, I was so disoriented. It was pitch black; a two-lane rural road without overhead lighting, and thankfully, little traffic at that hour.  I knew when we left the road because of the thud the tires made when they hit the snowy piles of whatever lay invisible beyond the shoulder. Then the car was on its side – my daughter’s side. I stopped trying to steer. I looked at her, her gaze was fixated on me, her eyes round with fear, her mouth opened in a scream that I don’t remember hearing. Then we were upside down, suspended in place by our seatbelts. I heard the back window shatter all over the back seat. I remember thinking I wished I knew where we were going to end up – in a tree, a phone pole, water, down an embankment. I struggled to recall the terrain during daylight hours. Then the car was on its side again – my side, and finally we landed right-side-up and stopped moving.  Obviously, we lived to tell the story though the car did not. My worries were around how scared my child looked, about being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a thoroughly disabled car, and having to call mom to tell her what happened. But not death.  I wasn’t worried about dying, although I probably should have been.

That’s it. I am unscathed and very, very fortunate. I have tried to imagine how truly terrifying it would be to have the earth knocked off its axis underneath me, to have nowhere to go to be safe, not inside, not outside. And what it would be like to have a wall of black turgid water carry away my home, my car, my pets, my family, my town, making the danger of death real and likely. Stir in the insult-to-injury threat of nuclear meltdown and my imagination simply fails. As I read articles on line published by every major news outlet that began, “Japanese officials acknowledge slow response to nuclear danger was the result of being overwhelmed by the earthquake and tsunami,” I just wanted to scream, “YA THINK??”

I know no single person in Japan although I am aware that a child of the person-who-does-not-want-me-in-their-life lives there somewhere, hopefully safe. My personal connections to Japan are limited to my Honda, my electronics, and wonderfully uniform beads for weaving.  My heart aches though for the human faces I see and do not know. All I can do is to press the “Help Japan” button on my Yahoo! Homepage, which will allow me to donate to the Red Cross effort there.  But that just does not seem like enough.

Shopping.... Sugar..... Sh**!

My daughter and I spent several hours in the car together this weekend. In the early evening, with still a few hours to drive, we got off at an exit for coffee and gas. There was a big shopping mall between those two points. “I’m feeling lately like I want to go shopping,” I admitted to her as I drove past the mall entrance. We marveled that we are in month 8 of our commitment to not shop, and to date neither of us has cheated. And I won’t, despite those recent yearnings, which will be ignored.

We talked about “the end” of this commitment in four months, and what that might be like. I told her that I fully expect to stay on the shopping diet even when the year is over; she agrees. We both like zero balance on our credit cards, and we like not accumulating. Honestly, there is not one thing I need or that I anticipate needing. I got through the fall and winter without a single day of panic over what I should wear – there were always plenty of options for whatever my mood, the occasion, or the weather brought. My recent yearnings to shop are surely due to the sneak peaks I’ve taken into the few spring catalogs that have been in my mailbox of late. However, I also believe that resisting shopping has been made easier because every free moment of time I might have had to shop is consumed with school work. If I were truly free during my non-working hours, it surely would be harder. I really just have no time to wander about in stores, peruse catalogs, or browse the internet. My busyness has been a blessing. But I wonder what will happen when the excuse of school work evaporates.

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The last time I entered the pharmacy at Grand Central Terminal, I ran into an immense rainbow-colored wall of marshmallow Peeps. My heart rate increased, my taste buds went into overdrive, and my willpower …. well, it won but mostly due to the immutable timetable of a commuter train and a very long checkout line. But those bunnies (no chicks for me -  the beheading of a bird even when it’s made of marshmallow is just too Ozzy O for me) will be taunting me for the next six weeks. Once Easter is behind me, the confection torture that started in October with candy corn will lighten until Halloween is upon us again. 

My daughter and I recently attended a three-week lecture series at The Open Center in NY. It was about gluten allergies (which she has) and sugar addiction (which we both have). I was hoping that there would be some magic or  at least ideas that I hadn’t already heard about to try to lessen my cravings and make this easier. I’m sorry to report there are none. The best the speaker could offer was a shrug of his shoulders and the suggestion that we eat some fruit instead or go exercise. I mean really. When I’m frantically scouring the cupboards and the refrigerator in search of something that will satisfy me, somehow the prospect of a banana just doesn’t do it. And the likelihood of my either heading to the gym or dropping to the floor and doing 50 crunches (even if I could make it to 50) in that moment of angst seems pretty remote.

I have been pretty “good” – managing to resist most extra sugar that comes in the form of baked goods, candy and the like. My sister and I made a pact. She won’t buy me any peeps or jelly beans at Easter. I can buy her one box of peeps but not the whole rainbow, which my usual compulsivity would dictate; if I buy her maple-cream filled eggs – her personal weakness, I’ll limit those to two. She rationalizes that the calorie count of the eggs is relatively low plus the chocolate around them is dark. We all know dark chocolate is a “good” thing.   My daughter and I have a similar pact except that it’s exception-less. I must get through this holiday without additional stress on my pancreas.

But despite these agreements, there is still a plethora of sugar in my diet. I need my coffee light and sweet. Two cups a day, occasionally three. My lunchtime yogurt has sugar a.k.a high fructose corn syrup as its second ingredient. I haven’t been able to eschew that in favor of plain (gag, gag) yogurt even if I put in my own fruit. My excuse? I don’t feel like getting out the blender every morning to create it. And then I don’t feel like washing the blender. My dinnertime salad dressing has the same thinly disguised sugar product as my yogurt does. And when I boil some water for a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in the evening instead of some ice cream, I wonder who I think I’m kidding. Marshmallows are sugar no matter their form. And liquid sugar is no better than solid sugar.

Some decision-points are easier than others. It definitely helps to have someone supportive in my presence when there’s a choice to be made. If my daughter is with me, between the two of us, we’ll do the right thing - food-wise and shopping-wise. My secretary no longer brings me pieces of cake or a couple of cookies when she notices food in our suite. But being alone at home is hard, especially during long weekend days or evenings when I’m writing and feel stuck or weary. Restlessness sets in and I start seeking solutions for those feelings in the form of sugar. I’ve thought about that a lot lately. When my mind is occupied and interested, and I am not feeling restless or uneasy, sugar doesn’t compete for my attention. But when I start to feel like I need a break or I’d rather do anything but what I’m doing at the moment, sugar surges to mind as the perfect antidote for my malaise. A snickers bar is sure to make me feel better although in my saner moments, I’m not sure what better is, really. Sated? Soothed? Stimulated? Or just temporarily distracted from something more painful than an unwritten paragraph?

What Goes Around, Comes Around

I’m impatient. I’m the first to admit it. And there are occasions in the past when my impatience has bordered on intolerance, a fact about which I am not proud. It’s either genetic (from my father) or learned behavior (also from my father). Either way, he’s implicated. My mother had nothing to do with it. It is probably her influence that kept me (mostly) civilized despite my feelings.  

I felt impatient with my younger sister when we were small. She attracted negative attention to our sibling unit, especially from our father, because she wasn’t always compliant and didn’t read his signals that warned of an impending blast. If we were fooling around and my father warned us to cut it out, she always pushed the envelope and earned his roar in our direction. I’d wish very hard for her to be good or be quiet so he wouldn’t erupt.

One time I tried to teach her how to say the word ‘kerchief’ – a common word in the fifties as we wore them tied beneath our chins on windy days. I started out patiently enough. “Say ‘ker’,” I directed.   “Ker,” she responded obediently.  “Say ‘chief’,” I followed it up. “Chief,” she complied.  “Ker-chief,” I said triumphantly. Simple, I thought. Just say it. She massacred the word once again and I wanted to tear out my hair (or hers). After several more thwarted attempts, I changed my tactic, “Scarf. Say ‘scarf,’” I suggested, giving up before I lost it.  

 My impatience followed me to school.  Sitting in reading groups in first grade, I thought I might go crazy. S-s-s- e-e-e   S-s-s- puh- o – tt  rrr – uuu- nnn. “What is it you don’t get???” I would think, feeling nothing but frustration as certain classmates struggled to turn separate letters into words that made sense. I’d fidget in my seat, eager to get on with it, stifling sighs. Struggling to control my irritation, I’d read ahead to find out what was going to happen with Dick, Jane, and Sally, and by the time it was my turn, I’d be pages beyond where we officially were stuck, in search of something interesting. 

I was impatient in tap dance class when classmates messed up a routine and we had to start over. I recall Helen, who couldn’t remember the steps to the dance we did to Jingle Bell Rock. Since the dance was done with partners, it was imperative that she “get it” or she’d mess someone else up in the process. My teacher, Miss Joy, asked my mother if we might invite Helen over to practice the routine in our kitchen because my sister and I “got it.” We complied although I was irritated beyond words at the imposition. I had to reach very deep inside to summon up enough generosity to be able to drill Helen on the steps until she could keep up with her partner.  But I remember thinking, “What do you not remember about shuffle ball-change??”  I know – not nice.

I was also impatient in gym class when we learned square dancing. Now, granted, many kids, boys in particular, probably did not want to be there learning allemande left and allemande right – but for goodness sake, I would seethe silently, why can’t they remember their right from their left? It was humiliating when our gym teacher went around with a magic marker writing big Ls and Rs on our hands just because some kids didn’t get it.

Magnanimous? Not.

There are, however, dozens of my former research students who I’ve coaxed through math phobia who would not recognize me in those anecdotes. And certainly, people who watch me interact with my brother would swear I’m the epitome of patience.  I often laugh at myself, firmly believing that I received comeuppance for my impatience with other’s slowness the day he was born with Down Syndrome. 

I can wait easily and cheerfully in very long lines for entrance to some theme park ride or museum. When my daughter was young, while other parents abandoned ship and told their kids the line was just too long despite their wails, I would stock up on drinks for us, slather on the suntan lotion, and engage her in some conversation or game for the 60-90 minute wait. On the other hand, when she was a teenager, if I pulled into a strange driveway in an unfamiliar neighborhood to pick her up from a late-night party, and she didn’t appear right away, it would take about three minutes before I would start to feel ballistic.

Indecision has the same effect on my impatience meter.  I had a girlfriend who attended film school with me in the early eighties. She processed, reprocessed and overprocessed every decision she needed to make about her film, her personal life, her job – and even after she made a decision, she continued to question it.  I began to wonder why my insides did gymnastics whenever we were together, and one day I realized that I was stifling a primal scream.

But I also survived four years of shopping for prom dresses during my daughter’s journey through high school. Going from store to store, sitting in dressing room after dressing room while she anguished over body parts (which I couldn’t see anything wrong with) that didn’t look ‘right’ in one beautiful dress after another, somehow I managed to remember what it felt like to feel inadequate and followed her cheerfully to yet another store. 

       

So, when I saw the recent news article in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Get out of my way, you jerk!” I laughed aloud. The article was about sidewalk rage – which is akin to road rage, except that there are no cars involved. It is brought on for similar reasons – people make careless moves on the sidewalk (abrupt stops, sudden u-turns, signal-less lane changes), to which others react immediately and negatively. This is a “disorder” I understand. Sidewalk rage is also triggered by tourists who insist on holding hands and spreading out three or more deep, thus creating a walking wall through which no one can penetrate. However, tourists are the least of it – they come and go, and one can almost forgive them for they are blissfully unaware of the laws of the sidewalk. But New Yorkers should know better. I love the story one of my colleagues relates when he told someone on the sidewalk that he hoped they don't drive like they walk. I might think it but I’d never have the courage to be that blunt. I just swallow my irritation and keep going, fully and painfully aware that one day I may be the person in the way of someone impatient like me, wondering where everyone is going in such a hurry.