SOL March 19: Punctuation Lesson

One of the editors I work with was having trouble with punctuation and parentheses (she’s new and young). I had fun coming up with this explanation.

 

            The rule is that if the complete sentence (quote or not) that's in parens is totally within another sentence, then the period goes outside the parens, but if the complete sentence (quote or not) is not within another sentence, then the period goes inside the parens. Take this example:

 

Her instructions for raising animals are brisk (“Try to remain businesslike—they are not your pets").

 

            The quote in parens belongs within the sentence because it's illustrating the point of the sentence, so the period belongs to the sentence as a whole, not to the quote in parens. (Parenthetically, if the sentence or quote functions like an aside, as this sentence is doing outside of the preceding sentence, the period goes inside the parens.)

            Further complicating matters, if the quote or sentence within parens is a question or exclamation, that punctuation would go inside the parens (like so! and is that clear?). And you see the period for the sentence as a whole still goes outside the parens. (Is this clear? And does it make some sort of sense?)

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SOL March 18: Substitute Copy Editor

I freelance copy edit for the magazine I retired from as managing editor. Copy editing is the part of the job I really love, so when I decided to stop working full-time, we arranged for me to continue to the (for me) fun part of the job, at first on an occasional project basis, then for the past couple of years about eight hours a week. Occasionally, I agree to sub for the staff copy editor or the current managing editor, when they take days off or go on vacation.

            Last week I agreed to sub today for the other copy editor. I had my usual three hours of work, but there were news articles that needed reading, and they ended up occupying way more time than I expected.

            One story was written by the news editor, who really has no one who edits him, so I was essentially his editor as well as copy editor. This meant I had to pay attention to the overall purpose of the piece along with the details. Even though 75% of the piece consisted of quotes, there was still a lot of thinking involved. That’s what took so much time. I did have one good editorial suggestion, an anecdote near the end of the story that really needed to be near the top; it was funny and leavened the seriousness of most of the piece.

            Because I had to work so many more hours than I’d thought, I wasn’t able to go out for a walk or get in my stretches and exercise. Well, it was raining all day, so I wouldn’t have gone out anyway. Maybe I’ll think more carefully next time I’m asked to substitute.

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SOL March 17: Hair Color

My bangs have been pink for about six years now. When the color is fresh, it’s bright neon, but it fades with washing to a pale pastel.

            Why pink? Why not?  As a teenager, I pulled out the first gray hairs that popped up against my natural dark brown. Into my twenties, I decided to let them stay; I had natural streaking, something my friends paid lots of money for. My mother became all gray when she was in her forties, made no attempt to hide that fact, and looked terrific.

            Over the decades, I played with hair-color color as the balance turned more gray than dark, my hairdresser coloring strips dark and leaving other strips natural. When I hit 70, I had no idea what my natural hair color was, so let everything grow out. That’s how I discovered that it was mostly white. After a couple of years of all white hair, I found it to be boring. My hair hadn’t been one color since my twenties., but I wasn’t going to try to make my hair a “hair color.” What other colors are out there?

            When I found this neon pink, I knew that was what I wanted. Usually, I get the color refreshed every six to eight weeks, but pandemic conditions have worked against a process that’s indoors at a salon for at least two hours. (Just doing the bangs is a delicate process that I want my hairdresser to do; it wouldn’t look nearly as good if I did it myself.) I’d gotten the color refreshed just before the pandemic locked us down, and it faded almost to invisibility until last November, coincidentally the day that Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election.

            Then came the winter Covid surge. No more hair color appointments—until today. I feel so much better.

 

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SOL March 16: Fiction as Life, or Vice-Versa

 I read the following essay in the New York Times about why so many readers think novels are really autobiographies, which prompted this recollection of my own fiction attempt.

            I wrote a novel once. (The very messy first draft still sits in a box on a shelf.) The only consciously autobiographical aspect is the setting, where I lived at age 12 in 1954 West Haven, Connecticut. One element of the plot involves the mother of a 12-year-old girl having an affair with the man who lives across the road. At some point I wondered whether I was "remembering" something — so I asked my mother whether she'd ever had an affair when we lived in Connecticut. There was a long pause, until she mused, "Not in Connecticut." You can imagine my astonishment. My rather prim mother, apparently admitting to an affair! I pressed her for details. It seems that around 1960 a couple they had been friends with since they'd all been young marrieds in the early 1940s were visiting (we were living in a Philadelphia suburb at that point), and the male half of the other couple said they'd done so many things together, but there was one thing they'd never done, and that was have sex with each other. My father wasn't so eager at first (he was even more prim), but eventually agreed, and there were maybe two or three episodes of "wife-swapping." Then that was over — and a few years later, my father decided the other man had given him bad investment advice, and they never spoke again. I can't help thinking the wife-swapping also played a part in my father's withdrawal.

            There's so much I didn't ask my mother about this, but I couldn't get past the child's inability to consider the parents’ sex life. But my mother did once mention that my father had a "low sex drive." Did that have something to do with the couples' estrangement? Did my mother want to try some tricks she'd learned from the other man? Did my father find this disturbing? Did he feel his marital-bed-authority challenged? Was this one more little piece that nudged my mother to leave my father years later, when they were in their 60s? They are both long dead now, so I can only make it up. Another messy first draft?

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SOL March 15: Magazine Exchange

 

I subscribe to too many magazines. For years, I’ve gotten “The New Yorker,” “The New York Review of Books,” and “The Nation.” A few years ago, I added “Poets & Writers” and “Milk Street” (food, if you don’t know it) to the mix. Then last year I  used points I’d accumulated to also get “The Atlantic,” “Wired,” “Vanity Fair,” and “Consumer Reports.”

            Yikes! Who has time to read all those magazines? For years, I’ve used the following system: as the magazines arrive, they go into a basket in the living room. After four or five months, I move them to a basket in the bathroom and discard whatever magazines are still in the bathroom basket. Then I read through whatever looks interesting while I’m in the bathroom, so I’m reading most issues months late. If there’s something particularly urgent, I may read it when it first arrives.

            The other day the “Consumer Reports” that arrived was its annual auto issue. I’m not buying a car, so there was no need to even think about moving that issue into my recycling system. Instead, I sent an e-mail to my apartment building’s e-mail list asking if anyone wanted it. Within a few hours, I got a bite, and this evening I took the issue up to his apartment. Back home, there was e-mail interest from another resident, so I put the two of them together. Now I feel virtuous about not throwing away that magazine.

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SOL March 14: Sunday Afternoon

It’s windy, so that pesky wind-chill comes into effect if one is not constantly moving.

            Today I went for a walk along Riverside Drive, but I timed it so I could listen to the Anderson Brothers Jazz Quartet, who’ve been playing on the Drive at 106th Street (aka Duke Ellington Boulevard) in decent weather on Saturdays and Sundays, 3-5 p.m. They play mostly standards — they did a Benny Goodman tune today, and the leader actually asked how many of us had heard of Benny Goodman. Of course, there were lots of us gray hairs out there, and we’ve all heard of Benny Goodman. A couple of people who look like they might be professional dancers do dance, and others of us sort of bounce around. Byt I do not understand people who sit on the benches without even tapping a toe. Music is movement. One toddler rode her scooter around the dancers, sometimes getting off to dance herself, but sometimes she looked like she thought riding the scooter was dancing.

            It was too cold to sit, but also too cold for me to relax into dancing. It was appropriate that as the group began to play a rousing “Riverboat Shuffle,” by Hoagy Carmichael, the wind roared through and set dried leaves to dancing.

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SOL March 13: Reminiscence

I walked today from the neighborhood I have lived in for more than 50 years to the neighborhood my husband and I lived in when we first moved to New York City.

            I was ostensibly checking out a restaurant some friends are planning to meet for lunch next week. But because it was my old neighborhood, I tried to remember what remained and what was new.

            Almost everything was new. The area has gentrified considerably. Restaurants that didn’t exist then line Columbus Avenue. Joe’s Seafood Restaurant, really a classic New York coffee shop,  is gone; where it stood is a string of storefronts under construction, the building above them for sale. The Cuban deli on our corner is now a fancy hair salon. What had been the Sloan’s supermarket is now Gristede’s; the two chains appear to have been part of a series of mergers, according to a Google search. What had been a seedy, even dangerous bar called Donohue’s is now a trendy café, with lots of pandemic-generated outdoor tables.

            What remains the same? The Spanish-language Mision Bethel still has its sign, but the building is for sale or rent. The elementary school on 83rd Street and the high school on 85th remain. That’s about it.

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SOL March 12: Mail

The U.S. Postal Service is suffering because people send e-mail and e-cards now rather than postal mail, bt I still get tons of mail. If I don’t open it every day, it piles up alarmingly. I’m also having time management issues, and today I had four days of mail to tackle. Here’s what came into my mailbox.

1. A packet of new checks. Yes, I still write checks rather than have money automatically taken out of my checking account. I feel more in control and using my brain; too much convenience leads to loss of brain power.

2. Reminder from the Museum of Modern Art that it’s time to renew my membership. I will do that.

3. My bank statement. I always balance my checkbook. My husband never did, said the numbers were all in his head. We kept our money separate — but that’s another story, for another slice.

4. Visa bill. I’ll go through that statement, too, writing down what everything is for in case there’s taxable stuff in there.

5. Statement from one of my TIAA retirement accounts, and separately a prospectus. Maybe I shouldn’t get those on paper anymore. (Take one away from the Post Office.)

6. Postcards from two of my retirement accounts that the shareholder’s reports are online and including links. (Take two away from the Post Office.)

7. A letter from the editorial department of the Marquis Who’s Who. This deserves its own story, perhaps tomorrow’s slice.

 

That takes care of the personal mail, the mail I need to open and attend to. But it’s a tiny percentage of what else I received in the past four days.

Magazines and catalogues

The New Yorker, Mar. 15 issue

Eating Well, April issue

Consumer Reports Annual Auto Issue

Catalyst (publication of the Union of Concerned Scientists)

The Vermont Country Store (I did recently order from them)

Garnet Hill (never ordered from them)

Parachute (never heard of this company)

Whatever Works (or this one)

Marketplace (a nonprofit selling clothing from India; I’ll look through this one)

 

And finally, the solicitations for money, first, the political

Democratic National Committee (2)

Senate Majority PAC (identical appeal to different versions of my name)

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Democratic Governors Association

4 individual Democratic senators and congressmen

 

Some of these nonprofits I’ve donated to, others not, but the appeals keep coming

American Heart Association

Amerian Jewish  World Service

American Prairie Reserve

Americares

ASPCA

Cohen Children’s Medical Center

Feeding America

Fresh Air Fund

Inner-City Scholarship Fund

Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (this organization helps gentiles in Nazi-occupied Europe who helped Jews; many are now quite elderly and poor)

MAP International (medical services)

National Wildlife Federation

New York Public Radio

New York Restoration Project (supporting parks and open space in the city)

Oglala Lakota College

Planned Parenthood

Polaris (fights sex and labor trafficking; first I’ve heard of it)

International Rescue Committee (with beautiful note cards)

Rosenberg Fund for Children (founded by a son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the organization helps children of progressive activists)

Simon Wiesenthal Center

Wounded Warrior Project

United Farm Workers

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SOL March 11: Ancient Expenses

I spent more time than I wanted to today looking for bank statements from 2010 — which I no longer have. The bank doesn’t have them either; they purge records after seven years. But in the bottom of a closet I found some really old checks, as well as the lease for an apartment my husband and I lived in, in the mid-1960s.

            So what did things cost more than 50 years ago? Rent for that small but recently renovated apartment was $135 a month, and that seemed like a lot of money at the time. A therapy session cost $12.50. A doctor’s visit was only $5.

            And W-2 forms. For eight months of work at a new job, as copy boy at the New York Post, my husband earned $3,170. For a full year of work as a secretary at Bantam Books, I earned $3,804. And we lived a normal life, eating out, drinking in bars, going to the movies (probably $2.50 or less; a movie ticket didn’t go to $5 until 1972, and I remember the first film we saw at that exhorbitant rate, “Last Tango in Paris”).

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SOL March 10: Taxes

I took all my documents and numbers to my tax preparer yesterday and sat across the desk from him for more than an hour and a half. Some of the time was taken up by chit-chat — he had covid last year, but has recovered. The company had installed a plastic shield across his desk, with a slot for papers to be passed through, but my preparer took them from me from around the edge of the shield.

            While he entered numbers into my file, I played videogames on my phone: Sudoku, Solitaire. I wondered why I was there, then realized it was to answer questions — like why there was no 1099 from one company, but a 1099 from a company he’d never seen before (one replaced the other).

            It was also to be told that I was missing some numbers. How much was my first stimulus payment? Had I paid the long-term care insurance premium, and how much? How much did I pay in premiums for my medigap insurance? Had I paid any estimated tax last year?

            Once I got home, I had homework: to supply those missing numbers. Today, that is done. Next, I’ll learn how much I have to pay (because I didn’t pay estimated taxes last year; the tax preparer who’d done my taxes last year, when my usual guy was out sick with covid, hadn’t sent me any of the necessary forms). As Daniel Defoe wrote in 1726: “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

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SOL March 8: Communities

Growing up, I thought I wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t belong to any groups in school or college. I didn’t know how to just join something on my own, I had to know someone or be invited. But women’s liberation changed all that. It was the first place where I felt that I totally belonged. And women’s liberation gave me the courage and confidence to join other groups.

    And now... I belong to so many groups. Groups that have kept me sane through the pandemic. Social isolation has meant isolation from face-to-face gathering, but  Zoom has been a lifesaver. I know there are people who hate Zoom, but without Zoom, I would have been really isolated. Seeing people, even on Zoom, has been better for me than the telephone. But back to groups. Here are the groups I have been Zooming with over the past year.

    1. Women’s group. This group has been meeting for more than 20 years. It’s a group I organized in my mid-50s, after a conversation with a friend about whether I was thinking about women and aging and sex. In fact, I had been, and began asking my friends whether they’d like to be in a group to discuss these issues. Once I had a critical mass, six or seven women, I think, we held a meeting, and we were off. There’s much more I could say about this group, but let’s get on to my other groups.

    2. Writers’ group. I joined this group a few years before the women’s group started. I was teaching journalism at the time, and one of my students invited me to a reading by her writers’ group. I had been thinking about a writing project, and I wasn’t going to get tenure at my teaching job. I went to the reading, each reader was better than the next, and I got up the courage to ask if I could join them. Of course, they said, and that writing project go underway. I could say lots more about this group, too.

    3. Book group 1. This is a group I joined when I noticed that a friend in my writing group was reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, which I was also reading. She was reading it for her book group, and I asked if I could join them for that discussion, because I wanted to talk about this novel. Of course, she said, and I was in a new group. This group alternates fiction and nonfiction, which

    4. Book group 2. Initially, this group started to discuss aging and retirement. It was mostly historians, many at the university where I had taught, and soon it evolved to be a political group once Trump was elected. But after almost three years of politics, our organizer felt she was in so many other political groups, she wanted respite. Let’s read novels, she suggested, and that’s what we’ve done for the past many months — though even the novels we’ve read have had a political bent.

    5. Book group 3. A woman I’d known for many years had terminal cancer. Years earlier I had invited her to my women’s group, but she was already in a group talking about retirement — they called it “refirement” — so after she died, I asked if I could meet with her group, and stayed. Many of the members were midwives, ret. It had become a book group as well, but relied more on books that were available at the library, so not the latest titles.

    6. Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon. I learned about this salon from the writing friend whose book group I’d joined. This group, started by a lawyer by day, poet by night, meets monthly with a featured writer who holds a brief workshop, reads from her (occasionally his) work followed by a Q&A, and then an open mike. From one of the members, I heard about the next writing community.

    7. Creative Expression NYC (originally Open Expression in Harlem). This group also meets monthly, and also includes a featured writer and an open mike, though with the open mike first.

    8. Movie group. Another friend started this monthly group. We agree on a film in advance, see it on our own time, and then meet to discuss. Once we couldn’t agree on just one film, so for a while we would see two movies to discuss, often a foreign film. When one of our members’ macular degeneration made subtitles hard to read, we’d always have one English-language film along with the non-English-language film. There’s also a strong political bent to the movies we choose.

    Is there another group I’ve missed? Aren’t these enough?

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SOL March 7: Fragment

Found in my journal from 2010, possibly a note for a story (which I never wrote)?

 

"History—the effort to connect the discrete moments of life into a narrative whole

"A person who tries to escape that narrative, but focusing on the moment-by-moment, always starting over, but the power of narrative overcomes his[her] resistance by creating alternative narratives that he[she] recognizes as false"

 

What kind of story could this be? an accumulation of "slices of life"?

 

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SOL March (5 and) 6: History

Just a week into the daily slice of life challenge, and I’ve already lost a day.

            Yesterday I could have written about going to the doctor about my eye (nothing serious, it turned out), but I didn’t want to go into the detail. So let’s say this paragraph stands in for Slice of Life 5.

            Today I am searching through old journals to find out what I can about the sale of my mother’s condo in Florida in the months after she died 11 years ago. Why am I doing this? Because last week I received a check in the mail, a check dated July 28, 2010 (11 years ago!), with an unsigned handwritten note on the stub saying, “Please note this is for the wire payment for the purchase of unite #680” — my mother’s condo. The amount of the check is far more than the amount I actually received at the time and the amount in the documentation I have. What is going on?

            So I am searching through my journals for that period to see what I noted at the time. What the journals are full of are my notes of going through my mother’s papers, mixed in with worries about the fate of the magazine I then worked for, which was either going to be sold or killed by the global corporation that owned it, in the midst of the Great Recession, as that corporation was selling or killing others of the hundred or so print trade journals.

            Death of people, and institutions.

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SOL March 4: Dreams vs. Real Life

I’m reading a novel in which a horror dream version of New York City's West Side coexists with the waking version. The night after discovering this facet of the plot, I had the following dream.

 

I’m asleep in bed, face down, my nose barely free to breathe. People are gathered around wondering if I am merely asleep or actually dead. I can see myself from above, and the sleeping me in bed wants to wake up to prove that I am alive, but I can’t seem to move. The voices talk around me as I try, try, try to move, to wake up in the dream. Finally, I wrench myself awake — and wake up in real life.

In the novel, the protagonist in the dream-city allows herself to be shot point-blank so as to wake up in the real-world city; as she explains to another character, “It’s like a dream—die in it, and you wake up.”

So, was I dead in my dream, though unaware of that, and that is what woke me up? My real waking up felt unexpected, almost violent, a visceral tearing from imagination into reality. Very unsettling.

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SOL March 3: Smartphones and Their Accessories

I grew up with telephones that had handsets with an earpiece that fit comfortably around your ear. True, you had to stay near the phone as you talked, you could not wander around your home, or talk to anyone as you walked down the street. But when you held the handset, you knew where your ear went and where your mouth should be.

            Not so with a smartphone. It’s a flat, rectangular object with no obvious location toward which to orient your ear or your mouth. I hate it. It feels like I’m talking to a pack of cards. Earbuds are the perfect solution to my annoyance. The earpieces go directly into my ear, and as an added benefit, my hands are free. I can be preparing dinner, washing dishes, knitting, while still chatting away.

            You know your phone can get old. But did you know your earbuds can get old as well? When earbuds get old, they start trying to take over your iPhone. (I didn’t think to ask the young tech at the Apple Store whether this phenomenon is limited to iPhones or also afflicts Samsung’s Galaxy or other smartphones.) When the following started happening to me, I thought it was the phone. Then I thought my phone was haunted.

            At first the phone would hang up in the middle of calls. I thought it was a reception problem; maybe some parts of my living room got less of a signal than other parts. Then a blue screen with Voice Control in white letters started popping up at random; sometimes it would appear then disappear, other times it would appear and remain. If it popped up in the middle of a phone call, it would kill the call.

            I had disabled Voice Control a few years ago. I have no desire to talk to my phone, only to talk to other humans through my phone. Had the phone turned Voice Control back on? I went into Settings and saw that feature was still turned off — yet the Voice Control screen continued to pop up.

            Next, the phone started turning off the audiobook I was listening to as I did my daily walk. (I had the audio version of Obama’s A Promised Land, which I wanted to listen to so I could hear his voice regularly again.) I would press start, hear Obama repeat his last sentence, and the audiobook would stop. This happened repeatedly during a walk a few days ago. Maddening.

            Later that day, it got scary. Voice Control popped up on the screen, again, and I shook the phone — that sometimes turned it off. Then the Siri voice came on: “Calling Bob.” On the screen appeared: “Bob FaceTime audio.” Who is Bob?! There’s no one in my contacts named “Bob.” Had someone somehow taken control of my phone?

            I called Apple Support immediately. Of course, the phone hung up soon after I got a tech, who had said reassuringly that he was sure no one had taken over my phone. The next tech had no idea what the problem was and made an appointment with my local Apple Store for the next day. One of the first things the tech at the Apple Store asked me? “Do you use earbuds?”

            This is apparently a known problem. So if you have an iPhone, and if you use earbuds, if your phone begins to behave as if possessed, go to your Apple Store, but also be prepared to buy a new set of earbuds.

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SOL March 2: Addendum to Yesterday’s Yiddish

There is one Yiddish word that is native to me: gesundheit. It’s what anyone said when another person sneezed. I’d say it, too, not knowing what it meant. By the time I learned the English — bless you, or God bless you — I was atheist enough that those were words I would never say.

            A couple more language notes about my mother: In college she signed up to take German, having studied Latin all through high school. She was fluent in Yiddish, so she was sure German would be easy. Not only was it not easy, it was the only class she ever flunked. German was just different enough from Yiddish, yet with enough similarities, that she couldn’t disentangle the two languages. But again, the unasked, thus unanswered questions: what were were the differences, and what were the similarities?

            In her 60s, she traveled to China many times, and attended a month-long language class for “foreigners.” She learned Chinese and was one of only two students in that class who wrote their final exam using characters instead of the pinyin transliteration. 

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SOL March 1: Yiddish

 It’s Slice of Life March, meaning I am going to once again try to write a slice of life every day this month. I haven’t been that consistent with Slice of Life Tuesday, but let’s hope the daily slice jump-starts the memory projects I’ve been sputtering in fits and starts. Here’s the first.

 

Last week, a friend sent me a link to a Yiddish version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” on YouTube. Before I even listened to it, I e-mailed my friend that I wished I could read or understand Yiddish. She responded with a link that offers a Yiddish word-of-the-day.

            I listened to the first word on the list, which was about parents-in-law and learned for the first time that calling one's grandparents bubbe and zayde were signs of respect. I had no idea! I thought they were just the Yiddish equivalents for granny and grandpa, which were the words I used as a child, and which I felt were more terms of familiarity than of respect.

            Background: My family is Jewish, and all my grandparents were immigrants in the decade before WWI. They were also leftists, so their relationship to Judaism as a religion was pretty nonexistent. But Yiddish isn’t the language of religion; it’s the language of the people. There were times in my childhood when my parents and grandparents had lively conversations in this other language, and if I asked what they were talking about, I was told it wasn’t for children, only for grownups. I was sent to a Yiddish shul for a year or so, but I don’t have the facility for languages that some do, so what I learned didn’t stick.

            More and more, I am finding questions I want to ask my parents, especially my mother, now that it is impossible to get answers. Like, how did they feel about Yiddish? Why did they make no effort to connect what I was learning in the Yiddish shul with the rest of my life? Of course, I know the Yiddish words that have been adopted into English: schlemiel, chutzpah, dreck, kibbitz, klutz, maven, etc. But I know those words as English words, and if my goyische husband asked me what a particular Yiddish word meant, I often couldn’t tell him. For a while, I thought all grandparents should speak with a slight accent, and that I was depriving my daughter of something, I didn’t really know what, by giving her grandparents who spoke English like the natives they were.

            My father understood Yiddish, but didn’t speak it, and as a child I marveled as his participation in this conversation, yet his contribution was always in English. Did he have the same lack of facility for language that I have? My mother’s first language was Yiddish, and she didn't really start learning English until she went to school, but I never asked her what that experience was like. I did tell her about the Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, Mass., and we both contributed money to their efforts to collect books in Yiddish and hold Yiddish classes for young people. After my mother died, I kept her collection of books about Yiddish, but have only dipped into them, feeling they will raise more questions that can never be answered.

            As it happens, I recently used "tsuris" in an e-mail with another friend about a serious problem she was having. Now that I’m 78, will I finally start learning Yiddish?

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I’m participating in the 14th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!