Conspiracy

Dear Cleaning Crew at my Office Building:

I very much appreciate the job you do. I'm happy that you take out the garbage, although you don't give me new garbage bags. I note that you haven't stolen any Diet Coke cans for recycling, which makes you better than the last cleaning crew. And thank you for not rifling through my desk, although that thank you might be premature. I'll wait until I get my next Visa bill.

What I like best is that you put the seats of the toilets up. Because this gives the illusion that you may have, oh, I don't know, actually cleaned the toilets. It serves the same function as the paper band on a toilet in a hotel. The seat is up in the women's bathroom and you think, "oh, the cleaning people were in here. And they cleaned the toilets!"

But you and I know differently, don't we. I see the ring at the water line. I know what you are doing, late at night, turning on the fan in there and doing a one-hitter. Don't worry, your secret is safe with me. You just go right ahead leaving the seat up.

Buckey

Every morning, when I come into my office, I visit a list of websites. One of them is TomatoNation.com. I was rolling when I read the comments to this post this morning.

When I was a child, growing up about a block from Lake Erie in Cleveland, my parents used to walk me around the block for hours and hours. I knew every inch of that block. The neighbors' house next door with the two sisters and one of their husbands, all incredibly elderly, all of whom adored little girls. The golden retriever next door, the reason for which my first word was "dog." The rock on the other side of the block, that I'd insist on climbing, only to jump off with great fanfare, every single time we passed.

One day, while walking with my mother, a woman was walking, heading toward us. She was, to put it mildly, huge.

To preface this story, I should tell you that, in our house, the preferred toddler word for butt was "bucket" or "buckey."

So this woman was walking toward us. And I was probably 3. And had no filter.

"Mommy," I said, as the woman got closer and closer, and certainly within hearing distance. "That woman sure has a big belly!"

I'm sure my mother just clenched my hand and smiled at the woman, willing the words to disappear in thin air.

We passed her and I turned to look at her retreat. She made it about four steps away.

"And a big buckey!"

Living Large

The capture of Radovan Karadzic was the subject of a morning email exchange with an old college friend of mine. We're both up on the various histories of former Soviet republics, as he is Latvian and well-traveled and I...well, I had sex in Tuzla once.

Anyway, I was telling my friend how beautiful it is there and how I wish I could go back to the areas in which I travelled--amazing rocky gorges and rolling green hills fading off into the distance, groves of plum trees and sheep grazing on rocky soil. The country air was amazing.

The city air? Smelled like burning garbage.

One of the most overlooked and underappreciated facets of life in advanced western cultures unaffected by war is one of the most basic...sanitation conditions. We put the garbage out. Someone comes to take it away. We drive past landfills on our way to the lake or to the country. They smell like natural gas. We have garbage disposals and dumpsters and, frankly, trashcans in our bathrooms.

Others are not so lucky.

When I was in Bosnia, there did not seem to be any sanitation system in place. There were no garbage trucks. There was no garbage day. Recycling anything but old furniture was unheard of. Unless you count taking over your neighbor's abandoned house. Roadsides were littered with all kinds of waste. Diapers. Toilet paper. Old hoses. Tires. Shoes. Everything.

The countryside was better, as there were less people. I stayed, the first time I was there, in a fairly small town that was less war-torn than most. But there were no garbage pails in the bathrooms. And sometimes there was no water in the bathrooms.

I did not plan well. I mean, I brought everything I would, or could, ever possibly need. I brought things I'd never need. But I didn't...well, plan well. As a woman. A woman in her child-bearing years.

Let's face it, I had my period somewhere with no running water and no garbage system.

This? Was not fun. It was not educational. It was not an adventure. It tested my creativity. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. But I was not a happy girl until we got back to the big city and some semblence of garbage removal, even if there was water only one hour a day.

I won't tell you how I managed.

I will tell you that, until you have squatted on a mountain path, uphill from a medival-style farm, having searched for land mines, with black tights down around your ankles, trying to figure out what to do with your tampon...well, until you've done that, you haven't really lived.

Cross Road Blues

I used to do things ahead of schedule. I used to get papers done days before they were due, so I would have enough time to proofread them, review them, move sections around and polish the entire thing. I used to pack several days before a trip. I used to set out my clothes the night before, checking to make certain I had hose with no snags. I used to make lunch for school the night before.

I don't do those things anymore. A paper is done the day it is due, frequently overnighted to wherever it needs to go. I run to the grocery store across the street, in order to buy some L'eggs for the office. Lunch is a cup 'o soup from my drawer. Packing is done the day I leave town.

While the long, slow slide into procrastination has taken place in my actions, I admit that I've always been a procrastinator when it comes to decision-making. I suppose I'm usually of the "if you wait long enough, you won't have to make a decision" school of thought. If I was worried about telling my father about the ding in his car, and I waited long enough, I probably wasn't going to have to tell him. If I didn't have a good idea of what to do after college, something would come up. If I really didn't want to be dating that guy much, if I waited long enough, that would probably take care of itself, too.

I'm trying to motivate myself to do better. I'm approaching a crossroad in my life--slowly but surely I can see the yellow sign approaching as I crest the hill. Tom Hanks is standing there, still trying to figure out which road to take, after getting back from his desert island. I don't plan to wait there that long.

But, in order to make those decisions, take those actions that need taking, I need to be a bit more courageous. I've been a bit of a chicken about life over...well, for much of my life. I rarely take stands when it comes to...well, when it comes to doing the best for myself and for others personally. I've sat back and let things happen, rather than making things happen. And that needs to stop. Even if the things I make happen aren't the things I want to happen.

So I need to get a little courage. I need to be able to let go of the rope when it swings out over the pond. I need to take my foot off the clutch and hit the gas. I need to look into myself and 'fess up to the things that need to be admitted...and then admit them to others.

Time to pick a direction.

Murder, Inc.

When I was a kid, I used to plot crimes.

I have no idea when I first started creating these fantasy projects in my brain. Probably the first time I read about the perfect murder having been committed with an icicle. The murder weapon melts, get it? Sigh.

There was one long summer when I was obsessed with crime. I spent long hours picking out the houses in my neighborhood that I would burgle. I'd scout out locations for hiding caches of weapons or jewels. I would eyeball areas of overgrowth for body dump spots. I spent a lot of time playing Clue, in order to learn all about various weapons.

I never said my research methods were fool-proof.

In reading the various true crime books about Charles Manson, the Son of Sam and others, as well as the random Agatha Christie picked up at the bargain bin at the libarary, it seemed as though there were some simple rules for criminals to follow:

1) Work alone. Don't bring your buddy or your boyfriend or your mom. They have big mouths. They'll end up talking and sending you to the Big House. And I don't mean the stadium in Ann Arbor.

2) Never let anyone see your face. I spent an entire summer avoiding cameras at pool parties and barbeques in my preparation for entering a life of crime. My mother, I'm sure, just thought I was going through "that awkward stage."

3) Always pick your victims at random. This was probably the most important rule. The less contact you have with the victim, the less of a reason police would have to connect you with them. Of course, this limited my potential pool of robbery/crime victims to a paltry few, since I couldn't ride a bike and knew pretty much everyone in the neighborhood.

4) Avoid looking for messages in albums by the Beatles.

I began to realize how difficult the perfect crime would be. I learned about fingerprints and trace evidence, footprints and hair samples. I started walking around in my father's shoes, with socks stuffed in the toes, just for practice. I'm surprised I didn't end up at the kiddie shrink.

I spent so much time plotting that, by the time I'd crafted the perfect crime in my head, it was time to go back to school, depriving me of the precious hours I'd need to do things like digging large holes in the woods to store stacks of money. And, by the end of the summer, I'd started reading books about the occult and started haranging my mother to buy red, black and purple candles so I could start practicing witchcraft.

The neighborhood was safe, for a time.

Bottle Rockets

My family is from Ohio. Two places in Ohio. My mom grew up near the city. The actual city, Cleveland. Not the one in the middle or the one in Kentucky. We visited my grandparents there fairly regularly, over the years. I knew their house and was fairly comfortable there. From the Jacques Cousteau books in my uncle's room to the seafoam green bathroom with the etched glass shower doors. I knew where the cereal was kept, where Uncle Robert left the candy corn and how to hide in the attic.

My father was from elsewhere. Not too far, about an hour and a half. On the outskirts of a steel town near Pennsylvania. A mafia town. A football town. A river wound through his neighborhood and you could walk to both the high school and the Dairy Queen within five minutes.

His family was all from that area. His grandparents owned a big old house...the type of house Neil Simon movies in the 40's take place. They lived there and raised their children there. And one of their children raised her children there. Aunt Marg.

Marg and Joe lived in that house for a long, long time. We'd go visit on occasion, mentally preparing ourselves to sit in the tiniest kitchen imaginable. Getting ready for the inevitable political arguments between my red-headed second cousin and, well, pretty much everyone else. Looking forward to really good food, excellent turkey on Thanksgiving, wonderful mashed potatoes and the ever-popular cranberry chutney, before chutney was fashionable.

I can remember the time we were all there, most of the cousins. I think I may have been the only grandchild on scene. Marg took us to the basement and showed us the markings on the rafters. Whenever they had family gatherings, everyone would go to the basement and sign their names in a new spot, marking the date as a special occasion. I think we signed our names that day. I think that was the only day I did.

I can't help but think of that home in eastern Ohio as the family home, the place where people gathered. There were many summer nights spent in the backyard, picking roses from the arbor, running around and capturing fireflies.

There was a July 4th that we spent there, although I cannot remember the year. I was young enough to think that running through the neighborhood in the dark was great fun, and old enough to be out in the dark alone. But you could do that then, run in the dark in a small town alone. Do people do that anymore? I was probably twelve or thirteen.

People in that small town all had their own fireworks, bought during weekend trips to Indiana, and shot them off throughout the night. I can still see the bottlerockets shooting off between the trees into the sky. The lights were flickering through the leaves of the trees, huge and overhanging the yards of the houses. I remember thinking that the light cast by the falling fireworks must have been what it was like in the war, in Vietnam, when flares would come down from the sky, red and white and shimmering. I remember wondering how something so beautiful could be so frightening at the same time.

The house was sold after my aunt and uncle moved to New York to be with their grandchildren. They both died. We have no ties to that town now, other than my memories of holidays, spent on porches and in kitchens and on couches, watching football.

But when I watch the fireworks this year, for the 4th, I will imagine myself back there, running through backyards, jumping through hedges, dodging friends in neverending games of tag. And watching bottle rockets fade into darkness in eastern Ohio.

If I Knew Then...

People think I have a good memory. I don't. Not really. There are certain events I can recall, places I can remember, things that I did. But the only reason I seem to remember things? Is because I write them down.

I've kept a journal since I was about 12. And I still have them all. Books with puffy, fabric covers. Sketch books with unlined paper. Composition books. No paragraph markings usually. A kinder, gentler version of Kevin Spacey's nutcase journals in Seven. I never vomited on anyone in the subway, either.

I went to visit my hometown this weekend and started thinking about summers in college. And I could not, for the life of me, remember what I'd done the summer between my sophomore and junior year in college. I couldn't remember if my parents were living in New Jersey or Ohio. I couldn't remember if I worked at the Civic Center or if I was hostessing. I couldn't remember who I hung out with and how I spent my time.

So, when all else failed, I went to the journals.

Last night, paging through them in order to jog my memory, I came upon some entries from college.

I was really stupid.

All these entries about boys I liked but was afraid to tell. Entries about boys I hung out with constantly but who hooked up with other girls. Boys I obsessed about who didn't give me the time of day.

My senior year, I was well and truly obsessed. He was the ying to my yang, the black to my white, the Brendan to my Brenda. But not in the creepy, incestuous way. Maybe, had it worked, we would have ended up hating each other for that reason that we were too alike. But then, it was perfect.

I was convinced that it would never work. I was overweight, as only college girls can get overweight. He liked little ditzy cheerleader types, in my mind, most likely because he talked a really big game without ever showing any results. We were just friends and that would be enough. And it was. He graduated and moved to away. I went on to more school. We've lost track of each other now, which makes me sad.

So I'm reading this journal, all about how he's calling me at 2 a.m. to chat. How he would make efforts to come sit next to me. How we'd be out together. And how he was in the bar, playing with my earring...

Huh? Wait, what? Playing with my earring? In a bar? Like, up in my personal space and all? In front of people?

I'm sitting on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by these books, and lightening strikes.

My God. I totally could have gotten laid.

Dumb. I was so very dumb.

So I closed the book and put it away and crawled into bed, secure in the knowledge that the summer between sophomore and junior year was the really cold and wet summer when I sold pool passes at the Civic Center.

And also knowing that, while I may have missed an opportunity, it was probably one I was better off missing. Because his friendship was worth more than the sex ever could have.

I hope.