Little Voice

Here's the situation and grim doesn't begin to describe it:

I've just found out that my dad is dying fast and although The Good Doctor has told me that he thinks Dad's got as many as five days to live, I just don't see him lasting much past three. It's Thursday afternoon, and just five days ago, on Saturday, we were all sitting at the dinner table together at my parent's house. Since then he's gone into the hospital, deteriorated, spiraled, and now we're breaking him out of the joint to take him into hospice care at our family's summer home at the Jersey shore. So, to recap: In five days he's gone from a man feeling not quite himself, eating a sandwich at a dinner table, to a man unable to walk, strapped onto a gurney, with the knowledge that he's got a few days to live nestling into his psyche. And my head is about to explode.

It's an hour and a half drive south to the beach and Mom will be riding in the ambulance with Dad. Since we've all descended from different points on the map, everyone-- both sisters, my brother-in-law and me-- will each be taking one of four separate cars. And everyone's left. I'm last to leave.

Now, for reasons too tedious to go into, I'm driving my beat-up, second car-- the station car-- with a near empty gas tank. It's a twenty-year-old manual shift junker that I adore madly, but it's seen better days. There are no airbags because they weren't mandatory back then, and there's no right rear view mirror, because they were optional at the time. Optional! There's no AC or FM radio, no lighter and not a single computer chip to be found. The car is totally off the grid and looks it. There are bumper stickers of varying degrees of irony and a bit of a side swipe-y looking dent over one of the back fenders. It's a work horse of a four speed with manual windows and manual steering that got me back and forth safely across country and through years of parallel parking in Boston, San Francisco and L.A., but, let's face it, it's a glorified golf cart.

And it's out of gas.

Then. For reasons involving the chasing down of nurses, doctors and hospice coordinators in the ICU, and the magazine article Mom read once years ago about hospital theft, my wallet is in my mom's purse. My mom is in the ambulance with my dying dad and the ambulance has left. I have to get my car out of the hospital garage, pay for parking and put gas in the car with no money. And I'm crying pretty hard. Nope, scratch that. I'm probably crying harder than I ever have in my life. This is a pre-verbal cry of such depth and anguish, that I don't feel exactly human. We've held it together for five, long, dizzying days, and now, with no more information to leech out of anyone, no patient to advocate on behalf of, and no loved ones to hold it together for, I've lost it.

I'm rolling down the window to tell the nice shift worker in the little garage tollbooth that I have no money to pay the seven bucks for the garage. She manages to decipher what she can from the hysterical gasps and sobs coming from the crazy, sallow-eyed lady in the little, blue shit-heap and waves me through saying, "Drive carefully."

Now that I've cleared that hurtle, there's the problem of gas. I'm thinking, thinking. Every one's left. I guess I could have gone back into the hospital and ask one of the nurses for ten bucks, but I didn't think of that at the time. I considered driving directly to a gas station and asking the pleasant, swarthy, foreign man who seems to manage every gas station in New Jersey now, if he'd give me some free gas. Honestly, he might not give two hoots. I just couldn't be sure how the sympathy card might be received across cultural boundaries or how much fudge factor a small business owner has to play with at the pump. On this day of all days, I couldn't chance it.

I know, I thought, I'll ask some stranger for money. Over the years I'd handed cash to strangers. Maybe some one would hand some to me.

There was the midwestern looking mom and her teenage daughter who I noticed crying to a cop in Times Square once. I walked up to the mom, asked if I could help, handed her forty bucks, and smiled and walked away. There were the three other people I shared an uptown cab with the day of the black out. They were low on dough and I'd just been to the ATM so I handed them each twenty bucks, just in case. In seventeen years of living in New York City I'd lost my wallet three times and each time it was returned to me with everything in it. I felt I'd seen the magic of money karma at work in my midst and that there must be some errant pixie dust floating around somewhere, perhaps in my glove compartment. So I looked around.

A man in a dark suit was about to cross just in front of me. Bingo! I thought. If this guy is in a suit, there's a good chance he's employed. He looked like a pharmaceutical rep; mid- forties, maybe not the countenance of a super benevolent guy, but not the look of a total jerk, either. I wiped my pink, puffy eyes, tucked my greasy hair behind my ears, brought my sobs down a notch and craned my head out the window.

"Excuse me, Sir," I said, "you look like you have money."

My god. Can you imagine? I could have said, "I hate to trouble you, Sir," but no. I said, "You look like you have money," like he's from an old, New England family. Like some pick up line from the Great Gatsby. And if you've forgotten what kind of shape I'm in or what kind of car I'm driving, re-read the above. I'm a blithering mess. But I have gotten his attention. He walks towards me with a slightly pained look on his face-- the kind of face I make when someone asks me if I have a moment to take a brief survey.

I stammer. "I'm s-so sorry to ask, Sir, b-but my muh-om's in the am-bu-lance with my f-father and she's g-got my wah-hallet and I'm-m out of gas and, he's d-dying, and I'm-m s'posed to f-follow and could I puh-please have t-ten dollars?"

He glances down at my ridiculous car and my wet cheeks and bleary eyes and his furrowing eyebrows say to me, Really, lady? I don't have time for this. Are you serious? Can this really be what they're teaching in Small Con School these days? But he's reaching for his wallet-- albeit slowly and with a look of achy, quasi-resolve-- so I continue.

"I just nee-ed enough to g-get me an hour and a half-f down the parkw-way. Ten dollars sh-should be enough."

He hands me a five.

I nearly laughed. 'Th-thank you s-so much," I said, "thank you, Sir, th-thank you." He gestured meagerly and I drove off. And I gotta tell ya, it cracked me up. It actually made me smile. For a brief moment in an otherwise dark, forbidding stretch of time, I had to laugh at the guy who thought, Yeah, what the hell, I'll give this dame some money, but I'm sure as hell not giving her ten bucks. She'll take five and like it. Jeeze, I gotta be crazy. Women, today. Criminy.

So I drove to the station and put gas in my car and made it all the way down to the shore where I joined my family in helping my father die; which he did, incidentally, a day and a half later. And I couldn't have done it without that surly guy, in the navy blue suit, who didn't really want to help me, but did anyway. He'll always be part of the motley cast of characters that made that incredible week even more surreal that I ever could have imagined. And the next time I'm at a dive bar I'll order a cold Pabst in a can and toast to the little voice inside that man that kicked his ass into leaving the trajectory of his morning, to walk over to a shit-heap of a car, where he took one look, pried open his wallet, and spotted some hysterical broad a fin.

Artist, Funny Guy, Dad

The thing about funny people, that is, if they're really funny, they're funny 'til the day they die. Such was the case with my dad.

He died a couple of weeks ago, and if you think there's anything funny in that, there is, remarkably.

On the oncology floor of the hospital, Dad was king of the A jokes. His style was dry, his timing spot on, and every single joke killed. Even as the nuances of his delivery and subtlety of his facial expressions went over the nurses' heads, he kept us in stitches. We laughed for five days straight, my mom, two sisters, brother-in-law and me. Doubling over behind the fabric curtains, hiding behind hospital promotional packets, our bodies shook with muffled laughter. That is, when we weren't crying. Or trying to hide the tears. Or laughing through them.

Then one or two cancers morphed into three as we pried the truth from his doctors. When Dad figured out he was dying, he asked my sister point blank. She answered yes and he told her that he wanted to go home. So we unhooked, untethered and untangled him from the ICU, and off we went-- home again, hospice, jiggity-jig. We settled him into his favorite sun lit room, with his own sheets and favorite squishy pillow, down at the Jersey shore where he loved to paint the skies and sail his boat and watch his grandchildren swim in the ocean. He was now very, very home.

He continued to make us giggle although things were growing darker even as the sky outside was bright. Two of his dearest friends came for a visit and brought more mirth and thoughtful conversation. Even the minister had a great sense of humor. Very thorough and exceedingly honest, he spoke to my father with tempered delight which, in turn, gave Dad great comfort. Dad listened, saying, "Wonderful, wonderful," as he heard the wise words with closed eyes. After the good reverend left, Dad asked us repeatedly if we were OK. We lied and said we were.

That perfect day would be his last and he died the very next morning. He died quietly and without physical pain, in the bosom of his family. He always loved to say, "In the bosom of my family." And he would linger on the m as his mouth turned into a grin. That very same impish grin, as it turned out, would follow him out of his body and off into the sunset he so dearly loved to paint. We laughed and sobbed as we watched him go. Like a transatlantic voyager, which in a way I suppose he was, leaving for an extended trip. We tried to be happy for him, knowing that he'd pondered this trip his whole life-- had been perusing its brochures for eons. And now he was finally off and it was so hard to comprehend. It had been just seven days since he'd gone into the hospital and he'd only felt odd for two weeks prior. But as rushed as we felt saying so long and farewell, he left us with calm assurance and full closure. He died with his ducks in a row. He left us with a smile on his face.

Days later, my mother, sisters and I would circle the dining room table with his random stuff spread out like at a flea market. The mirror ball he installed in the ceiling 35 years ago hung over our heads, still. My mom had wanted to do this. "It has to be done," she said. So we surveyed his life and we laughed.

My one sister asked for the scrolling LED light up belt buckle that he wore with a smirk and reprogrammed for family holidays. My other sister asked for his other belt buckle, the one with the pink lips that we all remember him wearing in the seventies, with an even bigger smirk. I asked for his Michael Jackson "Off the Wall" album cover imprinted-onto-mirrored-sunglasses, which I can promise you, we all begged him not to wear out in public. (He did anyway.) And we each got a Buddha. It took a while, but finally, it was all divvied up and done.

My mom mostly watched. She had already kept what was precious to her-- his Soupy Sales autograph, his saved ticket stub from the Newport Jazz Festival. This round was for us.

So now I've got to find a place for his Swiss army knife and his grandfather's pocket watch. I'll pack away assorted bow ties for my son, should he grow up to be the sort of man who wears them. It's a crap shoot, I know, and he's only 5 1/2, but what the heck. They're his grandfather's ties. And books, and pipes and a trucker hat that reads Tolstoy in curly red letters across the front, which I'll wear intermittently with my South Park baseball hat when it rains and shines. And I'll keep his T-shirt that heralds the onslaught of the menacing "Med Fly" folded up with my "Free Pee Wee" tee. And maybe I'll set his little carved, wooden man-scratching-his-head statuette next to my framed photo of my sister mowing her lawn in Vermont, topless.

And I'll be reminded of his sense of humor, as dorky, cornball and endearingly hokey as it could be, when it wasn't masterfully sophisticated and clever. And I'll be glad that I have mine and my mother and sisters have similar. And I'll thank him for it. And remember.

Because if there's ever a time to be grateful for a sense of humor...

Banter Addict

Let's say, for arguments sake, that a person could be addicted to snappy banter. What might the addict do to quell her craving?

I had plenty of time to think about it after the subway doors closed and the simmering, bubbling conversation I'd been enjoying ground to a halt with the sliding doors' bing-bong. I was pretty sure Penn Station's maintenance crew couldn't give me what I needed, and New Jersey Transit's conductor crowd wasn't worth it's weight in straight answers, much less snappy banter. So I came up with a plan.

After I've put my son to bed, and poured myself half a beer, I'll lower myself onto the floor and set up a Fisher Price bar.

I'll use two overturned beds for the bar, maybe three, and make the bald man with the little curly cue on his forehead the bartender. Then, the one with the black Prince Valiant hard-hair, I'll set in his chair, and I'll put myself nearby but not too close. Must appear elusive.

"What'll you have?" the bartender asks.
"The usual," I answer and spin once around in my yellow plastic chair that molds to me perfectly.
OK, maybe I won't spin around, dumb idea, but I'll sip my cocktail as Hard Hair Guy sidles over. I need a glass of some sort. This'll do: I'll use a teensy Lego gear shift as a stem glass which I can just reach if I slither down onto my stomach. It's at this point that I wish I wasn't the girl with the helmet of yellow plastic Pippy Longstocking braids, so I trade myself in for a Princess Leia pez dispenser. Now we're talking. Taller, leaner, lighter on my foot.

"Hello," Hard-hair says and I tip him forward in his chair ever so slightly towards me.
"Hello yourself," I say with a tall, brunette, pezzy nod in his direction.
"Sorry I'm late," he says with a grin.
"Day late and a dollar short, pal," I say in Carrie Fisher film noir-eze.

The bartender asks Hard-hair what he's having. I rip off a tiny corner of a gently used Kleenex left on the coffee table for him to use as a bar wipe, and find an errant dust-covered dime near a chair leg to use as a coaster. The perspective is off, but it's all I can find within arm's reach and I am not about to get up off the floor. Besides, the over sized coaster thing is all part of this swanky bar's shtick. And I am a swanky, over sized gal.

Hair Guy says, "What's a girl like you-"
I cut him off, "Doing with a face like this?"
"Well, now that you mention it-"
"I just did."
"You might have," he says. "but you didn't answer my question."
"What was the question?" I ask.
"What does it matter?"
"How could it not?" I take another sip.
Then I look at him squarely for the first time and smile ever so slightly. I pause for effect but I'm way too tall. So I turn my self sideways and lay down a bit to get right in his face. My pez head is too big. Big coasters, big head. I suppose that's my shtick, too, but I'm stalling.

I sigh. These four sips of beer are really going to my head.

Banter is just not the same using hard, wooden children to talk to plastic candy dispensers while leaning on my elbows. Not the same as being a live adult sitting up straight, fingernails tapping a thickly varnished bar. Sure, I could do the bantering "for us-- for all of us," as Ingrid said to Humph, but I'd rather go to sleep. So I haul my tired, sorry ass off the ground and up the stairs and will myself to dream of conversations that skip across the water like a smooth, flat stone.

I know they're out there. My sparing partners crop up from time to time for coffee or lunch and we occasionally IM on facebook. They are men and women who, like me, can get giddy from snappy banter when it's taught and brisk the way I used to get giddy jumping double dutch for much longer than I'd ever imagined possible. But then someone has to get going and some door eventually shuts and there is a resonant buzz that floats along side me until it quietly, eventually fades. I feverishly look to the man in the crosswalk, waiting for the go-man signal, wishing we could pick up where I just left off, but something about his brown suit tells me it's not gonna fly.

Every so often I'm pleasantly surprised. A tired, detached postal worker behind the counter asks if she can help who's next. "I'd like a table with a view," I say as I pile my neatly addressed packages onto the counter and get out my credit card. She answers, "All I have is the one near the kitchen," as she weighs them one at a time.
"As long as the food is decent," I say.
"In this place?" and she raises an eyebrow.
"True," I say, "but I come here for the ambiance." And we smile as she asks me if there's anything perishable in my packages.

It's nice to be reminded that snappy banter is out there. Elusive, like Princess Leia, perhaps, but out there.

Bring It

I'm writing a book about pregnancy and infertility and I've just reached the part in the proposal where my son is born-- you know, The Boith.

Let's go there now, shall we? Picture a wiggly flash-back cross fade to an earlier time, a gentler time. I'm in my hospital bed, waiting for my slacker anesthesiologist to saunter by and give me an epidural, which I requested some time ago.

And this, ladies and germs, is what's going through my pain-addled mind:

In birth class, our nurse/instructor/lie monger had told us to bring in a photo that we might tape to the side of our beds and draw strength from-- really hone in on during contractions. So, do I bring in a photo of a warrior? For example, a sweaty 6’1” Venus Williams reaching for an outside court shot, teeth gritted, brow furrowed, a look of rage and fierce determination on her face? No. In what I don’t realize until it’s too late as a stunning lack of forethought, I tape a photo of Jim and me standing under a palm tree on a warm, sunny day to the side of my hospital bed. The contractions come at me like great spears of white hot heat and all I can think about as I look at the photo of these two unknowing dingbats, standing there like garden gnomes in Hawaiian print clothes, grinning at me, is, “Youuuu idiooots!!”

What foolish naïfs these two? They are no help to me whatsoever. In fact, they got me into this mess. So I focus on the pretty, puffy clouds in the background. At least they have their dignity. Next time, I’ll bring in a photo of a mighty comic book heroine riding into battle on a snorting steed. She’ll be wearing a fringed bikini top of platinum to corral her mighty double Ds, red leather chaps on her stainless steel calves, and will be wielding a 25lb dagger forged from the spines of peevish dragons. Or maybe she’ll be standing on a precipice of fire and brimstone, legs planted firmly apart, torpedoes for thighs, H-bombs for boobs, wearing a chain mail unitard and chrome thong, leaning into the wind in ready position, a roll of quarters in each fist. Ready for what? Ha. Not a breezy day on the Big Island, that’s for sure. Ready for my epidural, you ninny. Ready for Child Birth.

The anesthesiologist has the bedside manner of a mortician and I stare at my husband's eyeball so hard while the giant Frankenstein needle's going into my spine that I fully expect Jim’s eyeball to explode from my awesome telekinetic powers. I'm barely breathing. Any air left in my body is leaking out my eyeball, which, thankfully, is firmly affixed to Jim’s. As I lean my spine into the Twinge of Salvation, Jim asks if I’m OK. I nod, yes, with my eyeball. Jim tells me later that he thought I was dying with my eyes open.

He asks me to say something. He looks terrified. I’d better say something, but if he looks away or takes his pupil away from me, my soul will collapse. I run through the catalogue of words I know: cat, spoon, flyswatter. None of them seem appropriate. He’s waiting for a word and I’ve entered a space-time rift where time stands still so that I can come up with the perfect word that will be the payoff to the story we’ll tell around the campfire when are children are teens. But I can’t think of anything.

Time’s up. I finally eek out a, “Hello?” in a teensy, cartoon mouse voice. Ah, well. So much for future ribald family lore. At least he knows I’m still alive, which he signals to me by blinking. I’m scolding myself for not knowing Morse code when I’m interrupted by a million little silver, icy, tingles, spreading out into my back and reaching down into my toes like Charlotte’s baby spiders crawling across a vast and intricate web. York peppermint patties fill my veins and I giggle. I detach my pupil from Jim’s retina and hoot like a cowgirl on the inside. The epidural’s kicking in and it looks like I may not die after all.

Hope Springs Eternal

I'm working on a book proposal, self-imposed deadline.
I'm writing all the live long day, yes, writing all the time.

My blog entry ideas pile up like unclaimed coat check stubs
Each corresponding to a story, makes me awf'ly troub'd.

I yearn to spend that ounce of time on posting to my blog,
But guilt abounds, the book cries out, my psyche do I flog.

Am I wasting all this time? Like time and time before?
The feature doc-u-men-ta-ry, short film, screenplays galore?

Is it all in vain, this writing, is it all for naught?
I 'spose I could just put down pencil, close the lid and stop.

But sneak I would to the computer, in the wee, wee hours,
Woken by my thoughts of nymphs beheaded by dark flowers.

So write I may as well and stockpile for a rainy day,
the stories that are brimming, seething with what I must say.

"Patience!," I call out to myself, anxious, full of ire.
Relax, you've days and days before ye, 'til you doth expire.

Your deadline's shrill song beckons as Shrew March's great thaw looms,
And with the garden, April's turn, another chance at blooms.

Hello, Gorgeous

One night I went out with an old girlfriend to two local bars. At the first, we were among the youngest and prettiest women there. The mean age of the clientele was roughly fifty-one and we felt dewy and svelte by comparison. We languished there, sipping our beers and reveling in our prettiness pecking order, which we re-ascertained every so often as a gust of frigid night air ushered in a new gaggle of women. This may sound mean spirited, this sizing up, but we meant it less in a catty, mean-girl way and more as an ethnological study in Bar Trends of the Average North American Single Person. It was an underfunded study.

What really struck me, after a while, as this pageant of ordinary and some would say homely women poured in through the door, was how beautiful they all were. Mostly to themselves, for better and for worse. But I started to sort of fall in love with each and every one of them.

Now by most accounts, this crop, including us mind you, would not have won any awards-- would not have even been allowed to fill out the forms. These bodies were beyond pear-shape with booties and bosoms resembling all manner of cones and cups and bells and boards. From the very ample to the exceedingly wanting, these bodies defied convention in a variety of combinations rarely found in the media—actually more indigenous to factory town malls and the boardwalks of New Jersey. There were bad dye jobs and brittle blowouts, relentless wrists and unforgiving chins. There were too many hair cuts from the eighties and far too little clothing for their ages, but every one of these women looked beautiful to me and I finally figured out why.

And it wasn't because I was tipsy on my half a warm beer.

These women were beautiful because they felt beautiful. Having come straight from the triumph of Getting Ready For Saturday Night, every last one of them was beaming, emerging victorious from their quest.

They all took care to choose the right outfit, some spending fourfold the time and energy of the others, but all of them looking to accentuate the positive and play down what that lady in the dressing room at Macy's had referred to as her "challenge areas." They would hang up the clothing rejected on the bed when they got home later, they told themselves. They would touch up their roots next week. This was good enough for now. This would do for tonight.

Then they leaned in closer.

Some liked what they saw in the mirror more than others but they all pressed on. They futzed and tussled, smudged and scrunched, using a combination of what they'd learned over the years from magazines and big sisters, infomercials and best friends. Some still tried to recreate what that professional make-up artist had done at their cousin's wedding all those years ago, but most had it down pat. Then they all smiled, checked their teeth, said, "Not bad," and moved on.

Good taste did not come naturally to these women. In fact, it hid around the corner. Somewhere along the line, a woman grabbed a gold anklet that an old boyfriend had given her and another grabbed a sweater handed down from a sister too lazy to hand wash. Most of them remembered to tuck in an errant bra strap and forgot that their thongs were showing. And they all chose the dangily earrings that their best friends assured them, "Aren’t too young," even though, in the back of their minds, they knew they were too old.

Every choice was carefully arrived at because it made them feel beautiful, whether via the new voice in their head, recently replacing another after a milestone birthday, or a compliment paid twenty years ago still resonating in their mind. Each layer reminded them of ordinary events or traces of people that had brushed up against their egos, leaving them with just enough confidence to keep the momentum going. Then they threw on a coat, hit the lights and headed out the door.

And hopefully, if they were just a little bit smart, they didn't give it another thought for the rest of Saturday night.

As the bar swelled, I imagined other bars in Morris County, Vermont, Madrid, and Dubai. And as the dressing hour draped itself around the globe, I envisioned an enormous wave of self-esteem brimming in Ecuadorian women parting their hair to be braided, Tokyo teenagers buckling themselves into 4" wedgies, and Masai women adjusting collars of beaded rings. With the exception of Amish women and nuns, there were billions of women all getting ready for a night on the town, or the prairie or the tundra as it may be. Legions and legions of women all looking in mirrors or hubcaps or darkened clean windows on this Saturday night and at that critical moment, in an instant of radical acceptance, saying to themselves, "This is as good as I get," and then, "Let's go have me some fun." All of them arriving at the same notion of self-good-enoughness. Or else they never would have left the house.

And so we toasted to them, my friend and I, toasted, "To leaving the house!"

We finished our beers and slipped off our stools and as I snaked through the place towards the door, I mouthed the words, "You're all beautiful and I love you."

Then we went to the other bar.

The Other Bar was in another town, a fancier town. In the Other Bar, we were among the oldest broads, the mean age being closer to thirty. These women had also taken part in tonight's beauty ritual but with far greater results. We ordered a drink and stood off to the side and marveled at their radiant skin. Their round bottoms and perky boobs nearly saluted us. Their taught bodies and toned arms practically reverberated with gym-vim. They had expensive clothes and hair and shoes and wore it all so well. Taste had either been bred into them or arrived at via checkbook, but it all came together breezily and they all looked thoroughly divine.

My girlfriend and I sipped our cocktails in relative obscurity and quietly thanked the gazelles at this watering hole for giving us something shiny to look at. For adorning the room with glamour, dripping with desire, lousy with lust. They replied by giving us the occasional dirty look, which we took to be a local custom of welcoming and warmth.

I decided to love these women, too.

Yes, mine was an equal opportunity love, and I wasn't about to hate anyone because she's beautiful. Sure, this crowd probably arrived at their Good Enough Moment long before the last crew, but you never know, you never know. My "challenge area," gone undetected by the woman at Target, was that I had to try hard to love everyone for her efforts, applaud everyone for trying. So I made a concerted effort to find the inner beauty in even the most outstandingly spectacular long-legged, white-teethed, high cheek-boned, buxom natural blond in the room, regardless of her obvious personality flaws. It wasn't easy, but I did it. And I'm sure she's forever indebted to me. No doubt she would have thanked me as I was leaving. If she'd thought of it. Or even seen me. Or knew I was alive.

My girlfriend and I left and said our goodbyes. It had been a good night and we were tired. Happy tired, sated tired. We'd had our fill of beauty, inner, outer and under. And as I took my mascara off in the same mirror that had sent me off with a slap on the ass all those hours ago, I gazed at what would greet me on Sunday morning. Goodnight moon, goodnight body, goodnight face. Thanks for another Saturday night. Gotta love Saturday night.

Car Wash

The sun broke through at the car wash as I waited for them to finish up the part at the end, after the conveyor belt's wash 'n wind finale, when it's just mano a auto with rags on the dry tarmac.

Under cover of the cavernous, dimly lit garage, I stood keeping watch over all the detritus that I had removed from the car so as to get the Maximum Clean. A huge flat-screen television hung suspended, bolted to the ceiling, displaying our nation's very own Brittany Spears singin' as if nothin' had ever happened, as if most of the globe doesn't know what has. I watched for signs of emotional evolution in her every hip grind, arse bump and world weary head flick, but couldn't find any. I wasn't surprised.

A tall, very dark black man had been standing there also watching Brittany. It was his party that I was intruding on, so I kept to myself near the open garage door and tried not to interrupt his viewing pleasure. He wore big, baggy jeans and a loose hooded sweatshirt with orange squiggly designs on the front pouch pockets. He stood very straight and still as he watched and I started to wonder what was going through his head but then stopped my mind from going there as I would stop a child from storming the door to a private room that was occupied. Instead, I warmed my face in the sun.

As the three of us did our respective things, I anticipated my newly cleaned car. I'd been thinking a lot about money lately and how to cut back. Manicures were out as was the occasional back rub. Pedicures were further and farther between, as I let the polish growing out to the tips of my toes like gaily colored crescent moons. This seemed like an extravagance, paying to have the car cleaned by other people, and it was. But time was what it always is and I managed to rationalize it just this once, groping for a normalcy that was clearly floating away.

This morning had been the lowest ebb of the bleakest month of a notorious winter. A winter that had pitched a fury on the inside of my car, and I asked the maitre'd of the car wash if they really cleaned, I mean with a spritzer and everything, the inside of the car. Because that's what meant the most to me. (You know what they say-- it's what's on the inside that counts.) He assured me they they would do a good job so I went about unloading the contents of a small intercontinental container ship onto the floor of the garage.

The tall, quiet man finally spoke. "You take trip?" he asked. How could I tell him that the many bags of crap he saw splayed before him contained items that I consider impossible to live without-- not just for trips, but for always. There were two umbrellas and a child's car seat, a bag of assorted balls (soccer, tennis and foot), and the now ubiquitous bag of bags for grocery shopping. There's the glass break tool and the reflective roadside helper, our water bottles, my yoga mat and a sharpie. There was the bag of blankets for just in case I get trapped under an avalanche in remotest Piscataway, and the small duffel full of granola bars and space blankets, disposable rain ponchos and crayons, extra boy's pants, blank pads, a viewmaster and chalk for when we get trapped in a Delaware mud slide and have to spend a week in our car waiting for rescue crews to dig us out. There were three Dr. Seuss books, two car bingo boards and my travel make-up pouch so that I can look my best for the local news cameras and firemen who ultimately save us. And that, ladies and gentleman, is literally how I roll. A circus car of contingency with luggage for my baggage.

"Nope," I said, "no trip." There was a moment's pause as he surveyed the ground then looked at me. "You live near?" he said.
"Yup," I answered.
He continued, "The car wash is no so busy today. Some days, the cars are for long time, but today I go home early."
"It's a nice day for it," I said, because it was a nice day now as the sun warmed the ground and thawed my disposition. I smiled a wide, close-mouthed smile at whom I now knew to be a car wash employee then returned my attention to the TV where some humorless dude was singing his heart out in the same wide-legged stance as a generation of earnest rock guitarists before him. Mister Car Wash was obviously not from around here. Haiti, maybe or the Ivory Coast. I considered telling him that there was more to our fair country than music videos then chose not to take that one on.

Beyond the far open end of the garage, someone waved a rag and I gestured, that's my car. I began to make the first of what would be many trips to return the many bags of crap to their rightful place in my car and psyche. Half way through the second trip, Mister Car Wash asked if he could help me. I said, yes, thank you, because I couldn't think of a valid reason why I shouldn't accept, and as he stooped to gather three heavy bags in each hand, I got me to wonderin' about this tall, strapping man.

Sometimes I indulge myself in a sort of cosmic double dare fantasy, where I get myself knocked up with my second son, the one I should have conceived with my ex, the one we were supposed to adopt together. In my delusion I ignore the scientific and financial given that it's nearly impossible, this feat-- I've a snowball's chance in hell. But that doesn't stop me from my sitcom-y thoughts of luring some Harvard grad back to my sister's place in Cambridge for a night of carnal triumph and canned laughter that only happens in apartments with three walls. I've been thinking these contrived thoughts with nary a sidebar glance as to whether or not I would ever tell the donor or what I would tell my child should I raise him to cranky fruition. This is all assuming that the guy I have sex with has sex without protection, which would make him president of the kind of club I wouldn't want to be a member of. But Groucho Marx aside, none of that stops me from calling forth the fantasy and asking the cosmos to deliver him to me without delay.

As the last bag was loaded into the car I thanked Mister Car Wash and smiled this time with my eyes and teeth. He lingered there in the sun, taking out a cigarette, and putting it to his mouth I notice a largish cold sore on his lower lip. Huh, I thought. Bummer of a cold sore. And then he said, "You want to have date with me?"

Holy shit. He's standing right here. The man for my plan. My stud.

I looked at him with casual appraisal then flashed to the weekend ahead:

This 6' 4" answer to my dreams was no doubt a PHD in Haiti, I tell myself. And that cold sore is just the result of all the stress he's under from taking ESL night classes on top of his part time job at the car wash and full coarse load at Columbia Law School. Which he'll tell me all about as he cooks for me The Food of His Country, the beat of his favorite homeland music filling the air with novelty. I'll ask him not to make the food too spicy as I set a small table for two and he'll tell me how he plans to go back home once he graduates in order to help his own people. I'll make a mental note that I'll probably never see this noble guy ever again after tonight, which is OK by me, as I fold paper towels into triangle napkins and thank my body for ovulating. Then I'll scribble down his full name on the back of the car wash receipt tucked into my wallet, just in case my beautiful, brilliant, bi-racial child wants to Google his birth father one day.

Back at the car wash, he struck a match to his cigarette and I realized then what I would say.
"No thank you, I'm married."

And before it began it was over.

I guess all that baggage had been good for something after all. Maybe that's why I carry it around.

I wondered if I had some Ambesol in the glove compartment to give him as a parting gift but was pretty sure I didn't. Then I got into my car and drove away. The interior was pristine. It gleamed shiny black. It was cleaner than it had been in years. This car wash had done a way better job than the one I used to go to and I felt reborn, like coming back from a long vacation to a professionally cleaned house. My buoyancy was evident and there was a bounce in my manual shift. I felt like a million and seventeen bucks.

Then I sighed the sigh of a thousand regrets. The cosmos had double dared me and I had demurred. No thanks, I'd said to the heavens. But I've got me a spankin' clean car and you know, that'll have to do for today.