Month: March 2019

NYC DINER SPYING: Why Eating Eggs Alone Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I had a plan, and it didn’t involve eggs. Early this morning, I set out to buy books at Shakespeare and Company; I figured I’d have a cappuccino and a scone at their cafe and read for an hour before I took barre class.  It sounded decadent, a little like Paris.   Sugar and dairy were the prices I was willing to pay for a few good books. The web said Shakespeare and Company was open at 8, so I off I went.

Next time, check the real-live sign, stupid.  8 am openings are for weekdays only, as I found when I pulled the door open at 5 after 8 and was promptly shooed out.  “Not yet, not yet.  9 am on Saturdays,” said the enforcer who blocked me in the alcove. Then she promptly locked the door.

What if I were willing to buy $150 worth of books?  Would they open 20 minutes early for that?  Maybe they’d open now if I upped it to $300.  I did not offer either of those things. I’d been unceremoniously dismissed to the sidewalk.

That’s how I ended up at a solo table at the West Side Diner a few doors down with just my cellphone for company. Now I had an hour and a half before class.   Luckily, this diner has a veritable wall of windows.  Eating alone isn’t bad because I can pretend I’m there to offer trenchant commentary about what’s going on in the neighborhood. Unfortunately not much — at this time on a Saturday morning in NYC, the only things dumb enough to be awake are dogs, little children, the people who take care of them — and me.

At least the neighborhood obliged quickly with a distraction.  Right after I ordered my spinach and eggs, a woman outside the diner window tied a young dog to a fire hydrant.   She motioned for the dog to sit.  Then she walked away.  Was she abandoning the dog?  Should I do something? Leave my eggs and go outside for a doggie intervention and rescue?

As soon as the woman had gone, the dog stood up, strained at its leash and barked incessantly.  “Save me, save me,” it seemed to say.  Well, that’s exactly what I would have done if I were tied to a fire hydrant.

Maybe this would play out like the opening of an episode of Law and Order. The dog might have been barking for totally non-selfish reasons — to alert everyone in the immediate vicinity that there was a dead body ten feet away.

This is what your mind does when you’re having breakfast alone, you’re bored, and it’s eight ten on Saturday morning. Make stuff up.

In under five minutes, the woman returned with her cup of to-go coffee and untied the dog from the hydrant. Drama ended.

But not entirely. Respite from tedium arrived in the form of a tiny little boy and a dad who sat down in the booth across from me.  Soon, they were engaged in a heady game of “I Spy”.  “I spy something black,” the dad said.  With his face peeled to the window, the little boy gestured at a passing car.  “Nope, that’s blue,” the dad said.  OK, really?  The dad was obviously cheating or color blind.  The car the boy found was clearly black; it should have counted, and I was about to say so.

Instead I told the dad that I thought his son was adorable. When I tell someone his kid is adorable, it’s often good for a three-minute conversation. Typically I explain that I’m the grandma of a 3-year-old and wait for the person to say I look much too young to be a grandma.  Things didn’t go that way.  “We’re busy playing I Spy,” was all the man said.

Ok.  Conversation ender.  Maybe the guy thought I was flirting, but that was ridiculous.  He was young enough to be my son.  Perhaps he was afraid I planned to snatch his son. He might have even been a kidnapper himself, concerned that if he and I talked too long, I’d grow suspicious and… Nope. The blue in his eyes was a pretty direct match to his son’s.

End of story: he was just a run-of-the-mill dad doing his sleeping spouse a favor on a Saturday morning.

Ok. Back to the grind for me, which meant my head’s inevitable return to my phone. Even though all I was doing was texting friends and scrolling through Facebook, let this stupid guy with a cute kid think I was closing a 10 million dollar deal. Talk about overcompensation.

When I paid my check and headed over to the bookstore, I realized I didn’t have to buy any fiction. I’d created enough of my own.

THE SHOWER’S STALLED: What A Bathroom Renovation Reveals About My Character

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

When we moved from a house to a townhouse six years ago, I swore to my husband that my days of renovating bathrooms were over. (For the record, it’s the same thing I told him about a new puppy after our old dogs died. Maisie, our rescue, is now almost five years old.)

It’s weird to say I feel more alive when I’m picking out toilets. But I never want to think of myself as too old to take on a project. There’s something incredibly hopeful, or maybe just really stupid, about remodeling a space to make it yours.

There’s also a circus-like quality to renovation that reminds me of being a young mom. Someone’s always in the house, and usually that person needs something even if it’s only an extra tape measure. Sometimes, someone completely unexpected, like the caulker, rings the bell the way the kids’ guitar teacher once did. And now, as then, I’m just happy I remembered to be home.

So a sense of optimism pervaded my latest project. The bathroom in my townhouse was going on ten years old which is a great age for a kid but for some bathrooms it’s more of a finale. Demolition began in October and now in April, we are nearly done except for the planned installation of a small TV over the tub. Essentially if I put in a refrigerator and a sleeping mat, I’ll never have to leave my bathroom.

Our townhouse was meant to be lock and go, no fuss — our empty nest, something we occupied but didn’t necessarily inhabit. So, my plan when we bought it was to let it stay exactly as it was. No more TV in the bathroom, I told myself. Did I really need to be in a towel while dealing with Trump? I also swore I wouldn’t have as many books in my house as a mid-sized municipal library. That didn’t last. It wasn’t only about adding things.  In a philosophy that could as easily be applied to my post-pregnancy stomach, I decided I wanted certain things gone.

Funny — the time of my previous renovations is still vivid for me; it was far more complicated, too, with children home. As I said goodbye to the boys every morning when they left for school, I waded around workers installing fixtures, hammering shelves, ripping up floors.

It was loud. It was noisy. It was perfect. Maybe my life now would be too damn quiet if I weren’t willing to depart with a few sinks.

K1s, MEET MY CHOCOLATE OBSESSION How To Sweeten The Pain Of Tax Time

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I just ate my dog’s body weight in Trader Joe’s dark chocolate almond candy. Maybe I should get a pass because at least the candy had coconut flavoring in it. According to some nutrition tables, coconut is considered a fruit. It’s also, according to what I read, known as a dry drupe. That’s exactly how I feel about myself after my chocolate orgy — like a dry drupe. I behaved like a veritable savage in my own kitchen, all because I didn’t feel like doing my taxes.

My friend Julie tells me when I feel this way about something, I should go to the basement and work out on my exercise bike and stay as far away from my pantry as possible. I did not do this. I walked right into the caloric minefield, having told myself it was okay because I had no carbs at dinner. Really?

I used to think when I stopped getting my period, I would no longer do this horrible thing with the candy. Yes, there’s that and the other fairy tale I live by, that I’ll do 13,000 steps a day, including on days I do other forms of exercise.

To make myself feel better about the shock of chocolate my body has just absorbed, I think about something I read that said if you eat enough chocolate, it will make your skin shiny.

So with a shiny sheen, I begin combing through what is left of 2018, a pile of composite statements that should be beyond familiar to me because I see them year after year. I put them in piles, aware that because I can’t find the tax organizer that was sent over email six weeks ago, I’m collecting papers without a map. I feel like I do when I agree to play video games with my sons. I’m pressing buttons randomly and getting nowhere.

This process of “getting the taxes ready” plays into my biggest fear: that I’ll miss something and get audited and not be able to account for my own financial behavior.

First off, I don’t remember year to year how many papers I should be looking for. Yes there are my husband’s K-1s. But in terms of tracking expenses for my own small business? I love to throw things away, especially crumpled pieces of paper that invariably end up not in my files but instead in my pockets.

And then there are charitable donations — there’s no reason to be chasing them down like an animal in heat at the end of March. I could be disciplined and track them as I go. Nope. I never do this. So I end up spending hours reading through old credit card statements and scrolling through old accounts to find out how generous I was back in September.

Based on my search, I discover what I already know. There’s no set time during which I contribute, and while a few regulars appear every year, many donations are new, unexpected, and hard to ferret out. I make charitable contributions spontaneously, the way I buy art.

I’d rather be doing anything than this: shopping on Amazon, paying bills, sweeping out my garage. Taxes point up every one my shortcomings. I don’t enjoy reading directions. I’m kind of lukewarm about numbers. Look, I get numbers as a concept but I don’t particularly enjoy them as individuals.

It turns out that in 2018 I was generous, clearly to everybody –except myself. It is now a lovely end-of-March evening. The Voice is on. I am stuck in my office, filled with regret not solely because of taxes but also because of all the chocolate I ate

Finally I’m done at least for the night. And I do what I should have done when the evening began. I go back into the pantry and pick up what’s left of the Trader Joe’s box of coconut-flavored chocolate almonds — and unceremoniously dump it into the garbage.

PIROUETTE ANYONE? The Sad Tale Of The Ballerina Dress

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I do prophylactic shopping. It’s an activity that sounds as if it should be conducted with a test tube and gloves —  but isn’t. The bottom line is I buy in advance in the event of an emergency. First let me clarify that there never seems to be an unforeseen event that keeps me from shopping. So this emergency story is a lie I tell myself, so I don’t feel bad.  This way,  I can continue to think of myself as an efficient, productive person instead of what I am, a shopping zealot.

I pride myself on knowing that at any given moment I have the absolute right thing in my closet. A last minute soirée in Paris? I’m yours. A day at Bonaroo? It’ll never happen, but if it did, I’d be ready. This level of fastidiousness does not, unfortunately, apply to my pantry where, because I  rush to be done in the supermarket, I  have six  jars of tomato sauce and no applesauce.

But just humor me for a minute. My obsession for getting things done insanely early led to my recent purchase of Exhibit A, heretofore known as the ballerina dress. I found the ballerina dress in my last 20 minutes at the mall last Monday. The wedding, which was “its intended,”is scheduled for Memorial Day weekend, and for me this counts as last-minute shopping. Keep in mind it’s just now the third week in March. And — oh, goody —  I just learned that the dress code is the dreaded “black tie optional”. Optional? Optional for whom? I don’t want to be the sole sucker in a sundress.

But more to the point, the ballerina dress is a misfire for another important reason. This is an Orthodox wedding, which I did know. What I didn’t realize is that at Orthodox weddings, no one goes sleeveless even at receptions. This is the kind of knowledge that adults ought to automatically have at their disposal: that and things like the exact number of minutes needed to soft boil an egg, which, incidentally, also eludes me.

Sleeves, or the lack thereof, define this dress. Wearing a cover up would be criminal (well maybe not as criminal as wearing a sexy, short dress to your niece’s Orthodox wedding, but I digress.)

I could have returned the ballerina dress if I hadn’t been so efficient. You see in the 20 minutes I had, I also got the damned thing altered around the shoulders. It’s now mine. Forever. I like to kid myself that I will have a number of other occasions for which this dress would be perfect. And there is this outdoor garden wedding that we’re invited to June 8. But wouldn’t you know it? I already bought something else.

The dress pictured above is not the ballerina dress. But you get the idea.

CURTAINS TO SHOWER CAPS: How I Lost My Dignity And My Coat On A Trip To The Hair Salon

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I am that idiot who invariably has a hair blowout scheduled on the day of the downpour. Essentially I pay a lot of money to look wonderful mostly inside the salon, where everyone has nicer hair than I do anyway. It’s curtains to sleekness once I step out on the street, where good hair might actually matter.  That’s how I found myself leaving my hair place with a shower cap on my head, as I ran to get my son a cup of cold brew.

“Take a second shower cap to make sure you stay dry,” Svetlana told me, as if wearing a single shower cap wasn’t indignity enough. Wait till you’re out the door to put them on, she said, because someone will think you’re leaving here with a treatment on your head.  God forbid.  It’d be better for them to think I was walking the streets of Millburn the way I was because I thought shower caps were sexy.

Let me set the scene.  It was raining.  I had paid $50 to get my hair blown straight in monsoon-like conditions.  Where is your umbrella, Svetlana had asked.  The answer was three of them were happily dry in the trunk of my car.

I figured I’d be able to camouflage my one-step-up-from-a-Grandma-in-rollers look with the hood of my winter jacket. But when I went to pull my Amazon jacket from the coat rack, it wasn’t there.  Granted, it is a generic black jacket with multiple zippered pockets and a furry hood.  But I’ve had black jackets with hoods before.  They’ve never gone AWOL like this one has.  This is the second time in two months I’ve come back to a coat-rack to find my jacket gone. I looked around, and sure enough there was the imposter — the jacket that kind of resembled mine but really didn’t.  To be honest, I liked this one a little better; if it weren’t for the used tissues in the pockets and the car key I didn’t recognize, I might have kept it.  So now I didn’t have a hood I could use to go even somewhat incognito. No way was I heading out.  Sure, it was day two of Purim, and maybe in some land far, far away, it was okay to run around in a costume. Still in my shirtsleeves and my two-ply shower cap, I looked more like a bag lady than Queen Esther.

I went to the front to inform my friends at reception that my coat was gone.  Are you sure, they said.  Remember, given the plastic on my head, I was not terribly credible. I pulled out the key and put it on the counter.  “I don’t even know what kind of car this is,” I said.  Everyone stood there, unsure about what to do until Svetlana suggested I take off my shower caps.  As she pointed out, there was no point in wearing them if I wasn’t going anywhere. And incidentally neither was the person whose coat I had, considering I had her keys.

“She couldn’t have gotten far,” someone said. That was true.  The odd thing was my coat walked in a couple of minutes later on the body of a woman who was completely unaware she was wearing it.  “I just came back for my keys,” she said.  Apparently. We did the coat exchange.

At that point, I finally left the salon with my hood over my shower caps.  You’ll be happy to know my hair remained intact — even if little else did.

RACCOON ALERT: How My Phone Kept Pace With My Mood On A Jarring Morning Walk

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I walk to relieve stress, so when I spotted a raccoon carcass on what what is known as the reservoir trail, you can imagine my surprise. The animal’s body, or what was left of it, was upside down in full view of the walking path in between McLoone’s and a patch of grass.  “Oh my god,” I said to my friend.  “Look at that dead turtle.”  These were obviously not the words of a keen naturalist. (At first I thought it was some kind of dinosaur fossil.)  My friend pointed out that the thing had teeth that didn’t look like a turtle’s.   When I looked it up later, I learned turtles don’t even have teeth.

For me, nature’s not necessarily bad.  Seeing ducks sleeping with their heads tucked into their feathers as they float aimlessly in the water can be as good for mood elevation as 20 minutes of yoga.  I draw the line, though, at death on the path.  As I walked, I became obsessed. What had happened to the poor creature? Had it frozen? Been mauled by a hostile goose? I couldn’t focus.

I use a fitness tracker on my iPhone so I can record my steps every day.  But when I looked at it at the end of my walk, the tracker was frozen at 3,053 steps.  My friend had close to 8,000.  It didn’t make sense.  It was if my phone had picked up on my emotional state and gone into shock after the sighting of the raccoon.

All the things my friend and I were talking about fell away: getting older, our kids’ reaching an age that seemed like it was us just yesterday,  the real reason we don’t call our in laws.  I began to muster all my conversational energies on behalf of the dead raccoon.  We should call someone to get it, I said.

I’d like to think I wanted the raccoon gone for humanitarian reasons.  It was a living thing.  Its demise shouldn’t be advertised to the world.  It needed a little dignity.  Or  maybe it was just that I thought the carcass was disgusting. Well there was that.

And there went my nice calm walk.  Every time, I circled the track after that, I was terrified I was going to see the raccoon. If I was five, it was the kind of thing that would have given me nightmares.  I am 57.  I had to contain myself.

Ultimately, my friend switched position with me on the pavement, so I’d be on the inside of the track and she’d be on the outside, closer to the site of the raccoon casualty.  Look at me, she advised, when you talk.  You’ll forget about the raccoon.  She’s a psychologist, so she has some understanding and appreciation of people — particularly of me, it seems — and of science.  I was an English major. While I’m okay reading about death in books.  I’m not so sanguine about it in life.

Eventually we met up with a public works  groundskeeper who told us he’d be in touch with the vets on call.   It’s hard enough to see an animal floating on the water, he said. But this….  I wanted to know if the point of the vets was to diagnose the raccoon.  If it was rabid, could they figure that out after death?  Would there be a public health warning?   No, no such thing, he said — apparently, there are vet-specific scoop-up bags.

I never did figure out the reasons behind my phone’s step counting problem.  But I’m beginning to appreciate how in synch with me my phone was in those moments around the reservoir. Oddly enough when I checked my steps later in the day after I’d done some errands, it was working.  It showed I had 5,088 steps.

 

PROSTITUTING MYSELF FOR THE SHINGLES VACCINE: Advocating For A Shot I’m Sorry To Need And Don’t Really Want

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I’m officially in the age group that requires shots for diseases  I didn’t used to think about.  Let the new two-round shingles shot serve as Exhibit A in a discussion of things that people my age are oddly hot for; personally, I’d rather use my chits to clamor for good seats to “The Ferryman”.

Many of my friends who’ve gotten the shot have ended up with flu symptoms 24 or 48 hours after the first dose.  High fevers, body aches, and chills are not my idea of enjoyable mid-week activities, so I put the shot on hold until I  felt I had time to slot the flu into my schedule.   

It’s crazy, looking at my calendar to decide on an optimal flu time.  Do I give up lunch with my best friend?  A weekend with my husband?  Three work appointments?  Exercise?  Ultimately, I did what I always do when I’m driving myself crazy about something I don’t want to do.  I jumped in.

Knowing the shot is in short supply, I called the pharmacy in the ambulatory care center near my home, where my internist told me “they have plenty of it”.  While they may have plenty of it, they apparently didn’t have plenty of it for me. “Oh, yes, we have it,” the woman on the phone assured me. “But we can’t give it to any new people.”

New people?  I think the issue is exactly the opposite.  I’m an old person or at least a semi-old person by the standards of the shingles shot.  I just squeak in to the eligibility pool at age 57.   When I asked the clerk what she meant by a “new person,”  she told me that because they don’t have enough of dose two, they can’t give dose one to new patients.  Yes, it’s ridiculous but true.  They’re sitting on a veritable stash of dose one  to make sure they have enough of part two to complete the course of the vaccination.

Keep in mind that between two to six months can go by between the time of the first shot and the second.  Did they really think they wouldn’t have dose two in time for my 58th birthday?  The woman told me she couldn’t be sure; supplies were iffy.  Really?  It’s hard to believe that there is such a run on a shot that seems to make every third person sick.

Something else occurred to me.   Shouldn’t they be obligated by law, or at the very least by the health department, to send the excess dose one back to the CDC or to another local pharmacy?  They weren’t behaving like a health organization.  They were hoarders. I flash backed to when my kids were little and limited-edition Beanie Babies would show up at certain toy stores for a short period of time.  Parents were willing to eat other people’s young to get a Beanie Baby for their kids.

Would I prostitute myself similarly for a shingles vaccine?  I’m still young, I told myself.  I have a healthy immune system.   I’m not afraid of a little shingles.  Fortunately, reason prevailed.

So I was in the ridiculous position of lobbying for something I was conflicted about getting in the first place.  But lobby I did. However, I was polite.  I asked if I could put my name down and reserve a dose one shot for later, for when dose two had arrived. “Oh, no,” the woman said.  “We don’t keep records like that.”  It occurred to me only after I hung up the phone  that if they kept no records, they couldn’t possibly know I was a “new person” unless I identified myself as such, which, unfortunately, I had already done. Oh, well.  Sayonara shingles vaccine.

Later at the gym, where I’d never be going if I ended up with shingles shot-induced flu, my friend told me she’d gotten her shot at the CVS in Springfield.  After being turned down by the ambulatory care center, I called over there.  “Yes,” they informed me.  “We have two batches of dose one left, so you can come over and get it.”  Oh, goody.  Two batches?  How much was a batch?  A single shot?  That sounded chancy.  Again, I asked if I could put my name on a list and  reserve one of the two for myself.  Nope, not allowed.  “What are the chances the shots will be gone by the time I get there?” I asked the woman. “They’ll be here,” she said.

It was a funny answer, given that I didn’t tell her how far away I lived. What if it took me three hours to get there?  But we had a deal. I felt like I’d been asked on a date.  I went over there yesterday, got dose one, and here I sit with a very sore shoulder waiting for my chills to begin.

 

 

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IDLING BY MAR-A-LAGO: How Our Palm Beach Weekend Got Hijacked By Trump

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

When I first knew Hal, he hated the heat. But now he has done a meteorological flip, and he can’t stand the cold.  So, we manage his dislike of winter by flying fairly often to places that rarely get snow.  Unfortunately for us, this weekend’s attempt to rid ourselves of the Northeast coincided with Trump’s.  While we’ve visited the same friends in Palm Beach twice before, this was the first time we ever experienced a Trump takeover.

As we sat in traffic over the logjam that masqueraded as a traffic lane, my friend said, “We never would have bought in Palm Beach if we’d realized Mar-a-Lago was going to turn into a Southern branch of the White House.”

Indeed.  It’s as if a fixture from my young adulthood, someone like Madonna or Mr. T., was accidentally elected president.  I can imagine telling my grandmother, who was hard of hearing when she died in 1996, about Trump’s presidency and her scrunching up her face and saying.  “Who did you say is President?  Donald Duck?”  Yes, well.

Most times when Hal and I travel, the goal is to get away from the kind of kvetching about politics we do on a regular basis nearly every day.  But four times this weekend, we waited for Trump.  Well, not literally– he was at his resort in Palm Beach, and because of that, the bridge between West Palm Beach and Palm Beach Island was all stopped up.  Every time we attempted to pass through, we slowed to a stop, accosted by traffic cones, traffic cops, and people without expressions standing guard in dark suits.

My friend was constantly chastising her husband for driving the route he’d chosen.  “You could have just gone left to avoid all this.” I could hear her saying.  However, he was ever-optimistic that this time we’d pass freely, and as a result we were unintentional groupies. Later that same day on a different street, we spotted actual Trump acolytes — a car of people with a dog, an American flag hanging out a car window, tattoos, and “Make American Great Again”  hats that they wore with the brims backwards. They had cigarettes in their mouths and placards in their hands.  Not that I’m generalizing.

My politics were not aligned with Ronald Reagan’s and the younger George Bush’s, but I can’t remember wanting to step out of my car and catcall  their supporters.  What was wrong with me? And why was I able to call up Trump’s more insidious sobriquets  — Lyin’ Chuck and Little Marco — and not remember the name of the Marriott we were staying at on our last night of vacation in Palm Beach?

So it was a lazy Saturday post-Farmers Market morning; we sat in Palm Beach traffic, and we weren’t even on 95 on our way to the airport.  The guards guarded and our cars  ran, no forward movement at all.  At least if it had been a different president, somebody might have come out with Greenpeace signs and told us to turn off our engines.

As it was, no one tapped on a car window or checked anything inside a sitting car, so what was the point of the hold-up? It’s as if we were lining up in some kind of strange homage to someone who was not even passing in a motorcade. If cars are forced to go slowly for no reason, the people inside these cars are likely to end up even more irate about politics than they already are.

Now Trump wasn’t only ruining the country; he was ruining what was left of our 72 hours of vacation. “Oh, hail beautiful resort that Donald Trump owns.  Let us pay our respects to him by being held up to behold you.” As we sat in the line around Mar-a-Lago, I started to wonder why Trump can’t  just go to Camp David on winter weekends like a regular president.  Maybe he’s like Hal and just wants to get out of the cold.  And that’s the problem.

 

 

 

NO TEETH OVER DINNER: The Hardship Attendant To Being A Retired Overprotective Mother

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

It’s hard to be the mother of two grown men with girlfriends. There is no definitive role for you. The other day over dinner, I hassled my 25-year-old son about not going to the dentist. That one went over like an abscessed tooth, especially because at that particular meal, we were a party of six with two dentists at the table. Even though I was told by my son that never again, under any circumstance, was I to speak of his teeth over dinner, yesterday he came out to see the dentist. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Last summer I got a frantic call from my other son at 8 in the morning; he was at a Weezer concert in Washington, DC, and his apartment in NYC had flooded. As we spoke, his girlfriend was collecting rainwater in buckets to stave off what were torrents of water flowing in after the collapse of a piece of roof right above their unit. My son’s question: should he go home and help, giving up Weezer and Washington? He sounded tortured; apparently, he was the designated driver for a group of friends who were counting on him for a ride home. Apparently, none of them had heard of Amtrak.

What I wanted to say was do you expect to marry Weezer? If so, stay right where you are. But I didn’t do that. I remained calm. I asked him what he thought he should do. I think he knew but didn’t want to say.

So I told him a theoretical story. I said to him that if I were his girlfriend and I were with a man who had chosen to remain at a concert while I collected pails from neighbors and mopped up water, forget it.  What he paid for tickets, be damned. I wouldn’t want to be with a person who chose Weezer’s “Africa” over Chelsea while I was trying to keep my apartment from being washed into the Hudson. But you do what you want, I said.

Sometimes, my boys, er men, say I butt in where no 57-year-old empty nester should go. Empty nests are overrated, but if I persist, I worry I’ll have even more leftovers than I already do at the holidays. I want my boys and their girlfriends to want to be with me.

However it’s hard to move from being a day-to-day mom to something far more ambiguous. I didn’t ask to retire.

In my dreams I still see their trusting little-boy faces, hear their innocent voices. I still smile when I think about the time my younger son said he didn’t like his day camp because the trees were taller than he was.

Incidentally my older son did come home early from his concert to offer support and scoop water. Of course he did. I’ll never tell him, but I consider it a significant maternal victory.