Month: March 2019

KEY FIASCO: What A Hasty Car Departure Says About Family Dynamics

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

As a passenger in a car, you don’t have too many responsibilities. One of the main ones is not to leave the driver without a key fob when you get out. It’s amazing how many times I’ve done just that; I’m blissfully unaware, as I wave to the person driving away — usually my husband — that I have doomed him to be marooned at the next stop. Clearly, it’s a flaw in my remote keyed car. When the car realizes the key is out of range, it should scream, “No, you idiot; put the key in the damn cup holder before you take another step.” At the very least the car ought to beep when someone is about to be stranded. No. The car, which buzzes like a screech owl on steroids when it comes within 12 inches of another car or a large insect, goes strangely silent when the key disappears. It’s like a sadistic game the car plays. Somewhere deep in the innards of its unfathomable computer system, the car must be keeping track. “63 times these owners have done the same stupid thing. Thank god I’m on a lease.”

This time when I got the call from my son, my head was in the sink at the hair salon. “I drove off without the key,” Brian said. He’d dropped me off with 45 minutes to wile away before his dentist appointment. When he turned off the car in the driveway at home, he realized he had no way to turn it back on.

I looked into my open bag and sure enough, the key, which I can never find except when I don’t need it, poked out from the inside pocket of my bag.

Our appointments had aligned. One car could serve us both with time to spare; he could get his teeth cleaned and return to get me with my clean hair and buffed nails and still get back to NYC for dinner. The driving schedule had seemed foolproof, but it didn’t account for the presence of two fools.

Brian’s next question was logical. He asked for the spare key. Oh, glory days when I had two keys to the car. The extra was lost long ago in someone’s pocket. Never mind that I will probably be charged for this missing key when I turn the car in in nine months. That’s bad enough. Now we were both stuck. What to do.

This was clearly a case for Dumb and Dumber — or Uber.

This raises an interesting question — who should take the blame for this key myopia? Is it the person who drives away without thinking or the bon vivant who runs from place to place with a car key she cannot possibly use without a corresponding car?

I’ll have to get back to you on that. Right now I’m in an Uber in between appointments, hoping to deliver the key to my son, so he can take the car to the dentist.

SPINNING THE DIAL: How A Pathological Avoidance Of Gym Lockers Led To A Near Jacket Fiasco

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Lockers are painful for me, and not because they bring back awful memories of sitting on the dusty floor of the high school gym waiting patiently to be the last one to be picked for the volleyball team. Every time I create a locker code, it’s as if I’m transported back to my other worst moments in high school, and I end up standing and spinning the dial like it’s some kind of non-winning roulette wheel. It never pays off by opening. I’m tired of being the almost- 60-year-old who has to go to the front desk after class to ask the 20-something behind the desk to escort me to my locker and open it with a special key. (Where were these people when I needed them in high school?) These receptionists are always gracious, willing to share stories about the woman last week who had the very same issue. I say nothing. I don’t want to let on that it was probably me.

It was precisely to avoid this kind of trouble that led me to the idiosyncratic decision not to carry my pocketbook or anything other than my coat to the 9:30 Flybarre class in Lincoln Square, Manhattan, yesterday. I had my phone and $50 and my glasses in the pocket. That’s it. My husband had the single key to the apartment, the only one we have since he lost his about four months ago. To avoid the indignity of closing my coat in a locker and abandoning it to an uncertain future, I folded it on the floor next to the coat hooks. When the 8:15 class let out, I hung my jacket on a hook that opened up and, in an attempt to look busy, went around the corner to check out the fascinating collection of two-pound weights. After that, I tried to get into the barre room to claim my mat but was told when I opened the doors that the room was being cleaned and I had to wait. Thank god for that. I walked back to the bench across from the coat hooks. When I got there, I saw a woman who was about to leave wearing a jacket that looked identical to mine.

This is not as big a coincidence as it seems since I recently caved and bought myself the Orolay. It sounds like some kind of weird Swedish sled, but it is really a lightweight down jacket with a comfy hood and about five zippered pockets that sells for $129 on Amazon. Every other person in Manhattan has it. “How do you like it?” I asked pointing to my jacket in the very same color, safe on the hook. This question is always good for a one-minute conversation with someone who seems, in the jacket anyway, like a member of the same tribe. “It’s great,” she said “for sticking things in pockets. I have a three-year-old and it fits all her stuff.” Given that in mine I already look like a polar bear on steroids, I couldn’t imagine adding a zipped-up sippy cup to my heft. I nodded enthusiastically anyway. The woman started up the stairs and unzipped one of the pockets. “Oh my god,” she said sticking her hand in. “This isn’t mine.”

I went over to the lone black Orolay that hung on the hook and felt around the pockets sure enough; when I jiggled one, it was heavier than the two pounders I’d just been playing with. These days, I strive to keep my pocketbooks a little more than the weight of a collection of cotton balls; no way I’d overrun my coat pockets with heavy stuff.

Okay.  She had been about to leave the gym wearing my jacket. This was something the geniuses at Amazon who priced these terrific jackets exceedingly well never considered. They don’t come in that many colors. In New York City, not that many people are going to choose beige or even olive green. The city is overrun with women wearing the same black Orolay jacket, no doubt in the same size.  What did I expect?   This woman has a three-year-old.  She’s probably busy enough labeling things for the preschool cubby. Why should she have written her name on the label? I never thought to do that.

For an extra $15, Amazon should have thrown in a tracking device.

“My key is in mine,” she said.  “I wouldn’t have gotten far.”

I’m so glad I said something,” I told her. ”  Mine has my phone and some money.  I guess I wouldn’t have cared about losing the $50 in my pocket. But my phone….”

What was I doing?  Why did I say that out loud?   I was about to go into a class for 45 minutes and leave my jacket on a hook in a public place.  I should have put a sign up on it that said “Steal from me.  It’s okay.  I don’t care about the money.”

We exchanged jackets.  I never did find out what else was in her pockets.

THE AUDI CAN DO IT: How One Man’s Inimitable Faith In His Car Turned Him Into A Humanitarian

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

When I was in high school, I lived one major street and a few blocks away from a girl in my French class named Deena Rabinowitz. I didn’t know too much about Deena, except that she didn’t like to conjugate French verbs, her father had died, and she lived with her single mom in a much smaller house than mine. One day after school it snowed, and it wasn’t one of those piddly storms we have today, the ones that close down schools and end up being three inches at best. This one was a show stopper or at least a small car without tire traction stopper. Deena and I were studying over the phone, and she mentioned that her mom’s car couldn’t get up the hill to get to the grocery store. Never mind that nowadays 24 hours before a storm comes, when it’s still only a vague prediction, people swarm supermarkets and the stores run out of things like milk and bottled water. Deena’s mother did not swarm. And apparently she was out of milk. I don’t know how my father found out. It was probably because the whole thing upset me so much that I told him.

In our refrigerator at home, we always had a veritable library of milk arranged by expiration date. I was forever getting in trouble for “taking out” the wrong volume; I can still hear my mom scolding me for opening and drinking from the carton dated March 5 before the one from the end of February. There was a prerogative in my house never to run out of anything. Deena didn’t have the chance to experience that luxury.

My dad listened to my story about Deena’s mom — he couldn’t have known that 23 years later, I, too, would be a widow — and he said that he’d drive her to the grocery store. He wasn’t afraid of a snowy hill or if he was, it didn’t matter. “The Audi can do it,” he told me when I expressed doubt about any of us getting up the hill.

I didn’t know about the Audi, but my dad insisted, so I called Deena back to tell her my dad would drive her mom to the grocery store. It was if he had asked Deena’s mom out on a date. From her end, there was a lot of whispering and giggling. Deena said it was okay, her mom liked her coffee black anyway. The more she told me they could do without, the more my father insisted. I had to call a second time to convince them we didn’t mind. Ultimately my father didn’t end up driving Deena’s mom to the grocery store. He ended up driving Deena there with me along as a chaperone. I didn’t hesitate. Instead, I recall being proud of my dad and his inimitable faith in his car. The sentence “The Audi can do it” has stayed with me for more than 40 years, which is odd, because it wasn’t the Audi he was talking about, not really. He meant that he, Norman, could do it. And he would do it, even when he had to convince the skeptical that his offers were genuine.

I tell this long-winded story about a girl I barely remember to show that my dad lives to take care of people, even those he doesn’t know.

Yesterday when I called him, he was upset because my mom wouldn’t let him drive her to Montclair so they could see the movie Green Book. He couldn’t understand — he knows Montclair, has driven there hundreds of times from at least three different homes. But now he’s 87 and without my mom as a human GPS sitting next to him, he forgets where he’s going even on familiar streets. “I’m the best driver there is,” he says. “Except for Brian.” Brian is my son, and my dad taught him to drive nine years ago when there was no question that he was the man to do it.

My dad should have practiced being a passenger a lot more often when he was younger. Now it is hard for him to move into that seat and into that role.

After my first son was born, I had to fill out a form at the pediatrician’s office asking for “father’s name”. On my first pass, I wrote in Norman Shaw. In view of what happened to my husband less than 10 years after that, my original answer didn’t end up being entirely inaccurate.

In 1991 as a new mom, I found it hard to imagine my dad filling a different role than father. It’s even harder now.

FREE-RANGE BLAZER SHOPPING: What An Unhealthy Obsession With Jackets Communicates About Character

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By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I have a blazer fixation that can, under duress and with enough encouragement, morph into a jacket fixation. Yesterday, I was in a local store that offers coupons, i.e. discounts, every time after I make a purchase. They text me, so I know exactly when my new coupon has vested, if you will. It’s marketing genius.

These coupons are like crack. I don’t mean to belittle drug addiction in any way. But when I know these coupons are available to me, I’m like a homing pigeon heading back to the place where I know my trough is full.

You know you’re in trouble when you walk into a store and the salespeople greet you by name and say, “We missed you last week. How was your vacation?”

So yesterday, one of my best friends and I decided to meet at Willow Street in Summit. We said we were just going to browse. Yeah, right. That’s what I always tell myself before I shop. It’s like when I stand in my pantry for five minutes pretending I’m not going to rip into the bag of dark chocolate that’s there and really meant for baking.  Just browsing is really not in my repertoire.

Yesterday, I carried a sweater with me that I’d purchased online after seeing a photo of Kate Spade wearing something like it on a vacation on Nantucket where I’ve, incidentally, never been. (And undoubtedly never will go if I keep up my shopping habit.) Anyway, the sweater had flowers and multiple colors on it; need I say it is just gorgeous, and I swore I had at least five tee shirts in my closet that would go perfectly with it. Until it was clear I didn’t.

And then in addition to these tee shirts, there was this great pair of pants and this gorgeous, flowing white shirt that is nothing like anything else I own. So of course the idea that I’d just browse was a sad fiction. A little story I told myself to avoid feeling like a profligate.

And here I am a day later, and there is this little jacket I’m still thinking about. I don’t need this jacket. In fact just this week, I just got rid of a surfeit of summer-weight blazers, many of which haven’t seen the sun in three seasons.

This new jacket thing is becoming unhealthy. If you must know, it’s grey with pinstripes, but the bell sleeves on it make it less serious, a little funky. It looked great with one of the tee shirts I bought, which is yellow and has the message “Mellow Yellow” on it in black letters. For 24 hours, obsessing about this stupid jacket, I’ve been anything but mellow.   I don’t know what brand the jacket is, but it’s the perfect length for my relatively long torso and relatively short legs. And it wasn’t over-the- top expensive for a jacket. I should know.

When I spoke to my sister this morning — it’s her birthday — I told her I wanted to buy this jacket for her.  This is not true.  I want to buy this jacket for me.

Growing up, I remember my mother telling me there were colors and styles she wouldn’t wear.  I don’t remember the styles, but the colors olive green and orange come to mind. I have no such restrictions; when it comes to shopping, I’m more free range.  In a chicken, this is a good thing; in a person, not so much.

 

The jacket pictured above is not “the blazer,” but one I found on line by FreePeople.  I like it, too.