You're My Cocoa

It might be a winter scarf, or a pair of glasses, or a handwritten card  that brings your memories flooding back. In my case it was a can of Hershey's cocoa. It's the day before Thanksgiving, and I'm picking up a few additional items, and I see this damn can of cocoa staring at me from a grocery store shelf... and all I can think of is my mother, who has been gone almost three years now. Why cocoa? At first I didn't make the connection, but all of a sudden I remembered a Christmas many moons ago, when my mother wrapped up a can of cocoa each for me and my three sisters, with one of her favorite dessert recipes. At the time we thought it was silly - a mom thing - and I'm sure we also felt gypped out of one of our "real" presents. Today, I see the love behind it, the desire to give something she did well (baking) to her girls. Today, it seems that can of cocoa held all kinds of messages and affection. And today, the day before we will gather without her (again), I'm thankful to have had a mom who was a little quirky and offbeat, but also generous and funny and sweet and unpredictably delightful.

It makes me think of all the other people in my life, here on earth or peacefully departed, who have helped shape my intellect and heart, and made me laugh or made me funnier; who have given me such gifts of kindness and knowledge and indescribable kinship. The longer I live, the more magical it is to have had a lifetime of such riches. So if you're reading this, you're in my life for a reason, and there's something you should know: you, too, are my cocoa.

A Brilliant Conversationalist

I talk to myself. Not like an insane person (I don't suddenly rise out of a reverie on a train and scream things, and then quiet down again). But I'm a bit of a mutterer, and it gets worse when I'm anxious about work or have too much going on in my personal life. Which is just about all the time.  

I tried to trace back when it started, and I think I was around 27. Or 21. Or 15. It started simply, maybe with me saying, "Now where did I leave that jacket?" and has evolved into entire conversations that go way past the location of a missing garment. 

I don't always realize when the dialog that's happening in my brain finds its way out into the world. Like when I was traveling with a colleague, and she called my hotel room (she was next door) to ask who I was speaking to. Or when I thought I'd finished a cell phone call with my sister while we both were driving (before the crackdowns), and she and her passengers listened to me continue talking for two minutes (yes, it would have been nice if she had shut off HER phone, but reverse the situation and I absolutely would have eavesdropped, too—how delicious to catch your sibling in a lapse of normalcy). Or in the ladies' room at work, which is especially tough to carry off—sometimes I find myself speaking (to be fair to me in this confession, I'm just listing the things I still need to address that day, and not reciting lines from Monty Python or wondering aloud how many miles are left before I need an oil change) and—gasp!—I hear someone else come in.  Then I wait behind my stall door so the intruder can't identify me. Like they would never recognize my voice, or my shoes, or my name on the datacard I left on the sink.

I know that this was cute 20 years ago, is mildly concerning now, and will be de rigueur if I make it to 90. Provided the actual chatter stays at a minimum, I can keep the crazy at bay. But to be safe,  if you ever see me on a train, you might not want the seat right next to me. Just in case...

Fun With Facebook

I started visiting Facebook frequently earlier this year because social media moved from a back burner to a front one in my job, and I needed to understand the communication options it offered.

Like others, I reconnected with school friends and family members. I knew better than to try to friend my 18-year-old nephew, even though I'm dying to see what he puts on his page. (Or not...yeah, probably not.)

I even suffered for awhile from Facebook envy - you know, where everyone else's life looks so much better than your own that you want to either jump off a bridge or start staging pictures of yourself in gorgeous locations, surrounded by people who look like they adore you and find you absolutely hilarious (and who, by the way, are not nearly as attractive as you are).

But I'm over that, and now I revel in the unintended humor and the inadvertent hiccups from people's posts. Like the dad with his 8-year-old daughter sitting on his lap who titled the photo "Date Night." Or my colleague's young son who didn't know the full meaning of his observation when he wrote, "Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, write on walls, and get poked by people you don't know." Or the guy who congratulated a female pal on the new fellow in her life after seeing she'd posted a different profile picture, and she said, "What? That's my friend Emily!" (Note to Emily: I might have made the same mistake. Except that the necklace and earrings tipped me off.)

And don't even get me started on the uproar that occurred when a few fastballs were thrown at us with the "new Facebook," and oh, the torture: we all had to LEARN something else about how to post on a FREE service. If we could have harnessed that indignation and energy, we could have changed the world. In a week. 

Still, it's good to know that this platform is there to immortalize pictures of our drinks and appetizers; count the days down to our vacations; increase the audience for YouTube videos of salsa-dancing dogs; and help us publicly humiliate ourselves, because lord knows we weren't doing a good enough job on our own. Ah, Facebook. Can't live with ya, can't kill ya.

She's So Vein

Now showing: Shawshank Redemption

On many a weekend morning at 7:00 a.m., I head out to Parklawn Drive in Rockville for a film fix.

If you're a treasured friend or close acquaintance of mine, you likely have received one of my "go give blood!" e-mails over the years. I'm a big proponent of blood donation: it helps cancer, burn, sickle cell and other diseased patients, as well as accident victims and newborns; it doesn't take long; our bodies replenish quickly; and if you are someone with the best intentions toward volunteer work (who doesn't get to it as often as you'd like), it's a big check mark in the charitable outreach column.

I've been donating since I was 18, when my friends and I would go out for drinks afterward (precisely because the nurse told us not to). About a year ago, I was asked to switch from whole blood donations to platelets. It's more of a time commitment - about three hours from intake to finish, instead of the hour or so it takes to give whole blood. And you can give platelets every two weeks, rather than two months. But the person who called me must have known my two soft spots:
1. Flattery: Apparently my blood has so many platelets that just one of my donations is like 2.5 or 3 of another person's. So of course I must share my riches with the universe, right?
2. I get to watch a MOVIE!: Turns out my Red Cross visit isn't much different from the kid who goes to Cartoon Cuts and doesn't squirm under the scissors because he can have a dose of Tom and Jerry. Put a good movie on, and I wouldn't notice if you drained me dry. Until, of course, the movie's over.

There are some other benefits, too - the Red Cross staff I see on my platelet mornings are some of the nicest people I know, and I can call for blankets and drinks of water and to have my shoes removed and my head scratched and my headphones adjusted in a way that doesn't work for me at home (maybe because both of my arms aren't hooked up to IV lines there).

But at the root of it all - no kidding around - I love knowing that over the years, no matter how flawed I may be as a human being, something of mine that was so simple to give may have helped out in such a remarkable way - perhaps in a national emergency, or for a child battling leukemia. And in a world where we can find so many differences between us, I am grateful that our blood doesn't make those distinctions. It just heals. And that beats watching a movie any day.

©2011 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie

Wherever you are in the world, please give blood as often as you can.

It's much harder on the people who need it than it is for us to give it.

Uh...What Zone Was That?

I think the mix of entendres was foreshadowed when, on my way to a bridal shower on Saturday, I saw a hand-lettered sign that said "Crabs at the Sunoco station." (This being a coastal region, there was all likelihood they were advertising a local catch for dinner, but just in case it was a cautionary alert, I drove right by.)

The shower was as much fun as I thought it would be: amusing and appealing guests; fetching bride; great weather; beautiful pool to relax in and around; lots of liquid refreshments of the grown-up variety and of course, the requisite naughty gifts among the "real" ones. And, always up for wordplay—especially when it's unintended—I loved it that my most charming malaprop-y friend pointed out that one of the presents was for the "erroneous" zone. (You know...that's the zone that is most frequently mistaken for something else, and subsequently mishandled.)

©2011 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie

For Valerie, 10 Years Later

Valerie was the smart, sassy redhead across the street. All of seven years old to my six when I met her, she already knew how to laugh from deep down, was bitingly witty, and glittered with an excitement that we kids wanted to be near. The first Seventh Day Adventist I’d ever encountered, she tried to convert me, offspring of a zealous Catholic mother, within days of our first hello by luring me to her bible study group: “We have cookies there—does your church give you cookies?” (I have to say that communion wafers placed a weak second to the mouth-watering prospect of actual Seventh Day Adventist cookies.)

Our two families intertwined on that street with another, also full of girls, and our three moms became fast friends. We all moved freely in and out of each other’s homes, played Beatles records, sunned together on our front lawns, put on plays in our backyards, dressed up like clergy and pretended to conduct Mass (because we just couldn’t get enough of it on Sundays, I guess) and, feeling the power of a couple years’ seniority, snubbed our younger sisters from time to time. We grew up, and over the years Val and I lost touch, occasionally converging at weddings or neighborhood gatherings; once in a while seeing each other in New York, after my sister and Val both landed there with husbands and jobs.

When the planes hit the towers on 9/11, I heard the news and didn’t recall at first that she worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, the company that inhabited the floors just above the impact zone, with the unspeakable loss of nearly 700 people: Val among them, only 46. I spent time afterward trying to get to know the adult that Val had become when I wasn’t watching, and her generosity, compassion, hard work, coolness, success and humor—always humor—were mentioned, over and over again. One of my favorite stories about Val is from her early days at Cantor Fitzgerald… a senior trader gave her some shoes he wanted repaired, and Val acted the part of the dutiful newbie, took them to a shop, and returned them with taps on the toes and four-inch heels. When she was ordered to reverse her mischievous additions, she had the shoes bronzed. She knew how to make a point.

Her husband Sam said of Val that “she collected people.” Her brother Steve said, "Val could talk with a homeless person or the chairman of the board. She would empty her purse to someone in need. Despite her professional and financial success, she never lost touch with what mattered—relationships and people, not money."

It seems surreal that it has been a decade since 9/11, since the shock and the pain and the bittersweet beauty of the world working to heal this unfathomable hurt. I silently remember you, Valerie...you were—are—a shining example of what we have learned again, over and over, since that day: relationships and people are what matter. I hope wherever you are, you’re glittering with excitement, surrounded by those you love, laughing so hard you can’t stop, and wearing a slammin’ pair of shoes with four-inch heels and taps on the toes.

© 2011 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie

 

Cat Fight

Peaches

I have to laugh when I think of myself as a cliche in other people's eyes: single woman with a cat. There are no pastoral scenes in my house with my feline; no moments of purring and sweetness; no sleepy kittenish stretching that makes me go "Awwww."

I have the most frustrating cat in the world. She's absolutely beautiful, but gives me no love. If she deigns to come out when I have visitors, I have to warn everyone not to pet her—even when she's winding around their legs as if she can't wait for a rub behind the ears—because they're liable to need surgery afterward. She has been known to bitch-slap me when I'm trying to carefully extricate her claws from my ankle, as if I'M hurting HER; has destroyed two sofas and numerous carpets; and made my wrists look, at times, like I'm self-mutilating. But every once in awhile, like a disinterested boyfriend who throws out an unexpected compliment, she is nice to me. Just a little. And in my mind, I paraphrase Michael Corleone: "Just when I thought I was out...she pulls me back in."

© 2011 A Bit of Brie/Anitabrie