It’s Quiet Around Here

Too quiet.

While other projects keep me from these pages, please read my recent essays in Jezebel and Salon and my weekly posts on the Massachusetts Civil War Sesquicentennial Website.

Life in the Big City

Toto, I don't think we're in Northampton anymore.

No matter how idyllic one finds life in the little city, sometimes you need a dose of life in the big city. So the family took a trip to New York to kick off spring break. It was like most of our trips to New York, with lots of love for the city and amazing little moments, and plenty of frustration: Ted’s awe at the Guggenheim (he’s a Frank Lloyd Wright fan, go figure), the quiet of Sunday morning in the city, breaking Passover with Joe’s Pizza in the Village, malts at the Lexington Candy Store, and happening upon a rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Washington Square Park. There was also too much walking, too much whining, and too many problematic meal choices.

As always, New York inspired a host of questions. Feel free to answer them. Or pose more.

Who are all these people? How did they get here? (If I had my way, everyone in the city would walk around with a bubble over their heads—à la Pop Up Video—noting who they are, where they are from, and how they came to be in the city at that moment.)

How can anyone afford to live in New York City?

How can there be enough rich people to fill all of those high-rise apartments, especially the ridiculous number of Trump Towers along the Henry Hudson Parkway?

Why do so many of them drive Porsches?

Why are there so many Porsche SUVs?

What kind of idiot drives an SUV in NYC?

What happens if there is a car accident? Does the whole city come to a standstill? It seems pretty clear that if one car stops for more than 3 minutes, all traffic stops everywhere.

How did my teenager get obsessed with high-end shoes, high-end headphones, and high-end cars?

With so many churches, bakeries, and gelato shops, how come everyone isn’t devout and/or fat?

How do those women walk more than ten feet in those shoes?

How do you do anything without getting totally overwhelmed by the options?

Where do all of the waiters and baristas, et al. live? They can’t possibly afford to live in the city.

Why is everyone speaking French?

The Soccer Chronicles: Using My Indoor Voice

I got cocky. After playing in our sweet pick-up outdoor soccer game for two seasons I decided I could move up to an indoor soccer team. Winter had finally arrived (or what has passed for winter this year) and I liked the idea of a new challenge. Friends on two separate teams mentioned that they needed a new player, and once again I replied, “Why not?”

Turns out, the stretch from the family soccer field to the indoor rink is a quite large, and no matter how pretty my new soccer shoes were, they couldn’t quite make the leap.

There is one venue for indoor soccer in our area, at the Three County Fairgrounds equestrian center. In the late fall they remove every sign of the horses and construct two playing fields and a practice area. The surface is an insufficient layer of Astroturf over concrete. For years, I’ve been watching my kids play on these fields. (Actually, Ted did a few soccer clinics here before we gave up on the concept of him and team sports altogether.) Chuck has played indoor soccer consistently for years and I’ve always been a fan. The games are fun to watch because they’re fast, and the kids are quite deft at playing the ball off the wall and taking advantage of the speed on the low-friction turf. Plus, the social scene is worth the visit. On any given winter Saturday, half of the Pioneer Valley parents make their way through the building.

My first trial game was with a co-ed team on a Friday night in December. At 10:00. As I asked on Facebook that night at 8:30: “Was I high when I agreed to play soccer at 10:00 p.m.?” I pepped up enough to get there, though I may have been just as effective in my sleep. At game time, I learned that “co-ed” means two women and four men per team. Those nice, intellectual/nerdy post-40 men who seem so gentle get really aggressive on the soccer field. I stayed on defense, but feared for my life.

Two nights later, I tried a team in the all-women Sunday night league. I felt more comfortable, it was more relaxed and the lack of a referee made it feel more convivial. I had one friend on the team (my son’s former soccer coach), so I didn’t feel completely out of my element. (That is, until she took a bad fall during my second game, hurt her knee, and abandoned me.) The game was fun, if nerve-racking, and I decided to commit.

In this case, committing was not only writing a check to the league, but finally investing in soccer shoes and shin guards. I had been wearing Chuck’s shoes, which were a particularly sweet shade of orange but didn’t quite fit. This led to the best moment in my indoor soccer career: while trying on shoes at Dick’s, I impressed the heck out of a 20-something guy when he learned that I was playing indoor soccer. My work was done.

I played each week, from mid-January until a few weeks ago, only missing a game to go to an Oscar party (I have my priorities). While I have risen to the level of “OK” in outdoor soccer, I’m only up to “Suck” in indoor. I had very little ability to control the ball—or even catch up to it—because it moves so much faster on the Astroturf. I also never got used to the speed with which another player could kick the ball off the wall, flash by me, and pick it up on the other side.

The women I played with and against were uniformly impressive, ranging from “clearly played on the high school team” to “clearly played on the college team.” They were fast, agile, smart, and generally fearless. With me, they were remarkably patient and encouraging. At the start I was worried about my endurance, but that turned out to be the easy part. Basically, I was a warm body that could keep running. A good game was one where my effective moves out-numbered my dorky ones. I worried about getting badly hurt, but I wasn’t really aggressive enough for that to happen. I was actually delighted when I discovered that I could take a hit or fall and it wouldn’t be all that bad. (Note to rookies: you can get hit in the thigh with a ball and it will hurt for a week. But you’ll feel awfully hardcore.)

This story does not end with me in traction, nor does it end, Bad News Bears style, with my development into a star player. It ended prosaically with plantar fasciitis. Running on concrete floors, no matter how cool the shoes, caused my downfall. After a few weeks of limping, I had to give it up. However, when I returned to outdoor soccer last week I discovered that I had become a better player: more aggressive, less fearful, and a little more knowledgeable about what the heck to do with the ball. With a little practice, I may just work my way up to “Capable” or “Adequate.”

Anyone need a sweet pair of indoor soccer shoes?

Depending on the Kindness of Strangers

I’ve never believed the canard that people are no longer neighborly. People are no more or less inclined to help others than they were 100 years ago. A likelier explanation is that people are far more mobile and we no longer live in the same communities for generations, so we’re less likely to know our neighbors. (And don’t get me started on the assertion that “things used to be better.” Sure, if you weren’t female, homosexual, Jewish, a person of color, or a fan of indoor plumbing, things used to be better. And even then…)

Earlier this week, our dog, Selkie, climbed the fence. Again. She hasn’t done this in about a year, so we weren’t expecting it. She started escaping when we were having work done on our house. She was in the backyard, and the carpenters were throwing debris from the third floor to the dumpster in the driveway. She’s wildly skittish, and this scared the pants off of her. So, propelled by some supercanine power, she got over the 3-foot picket fence and tried to find a less noisy home. Fortunately the folks at the organ tuning and repair company around the corner snagged her and brought her home. (Yes, there is an organ company in the middle of my residential neighborhood. Messrs. Czelusniak et Dugal, Inc., to be exact.) This became a habit until we wised up.

I thought she had forgotten how to get out, so we’d let down our guard. (We don’t know exactly how she does it—we’ve never seen her in action. She’s stealthy.) Earlier this week, Ted and his babysitter were playing with water in the yard, and apparently water is terrifying. Without either of them noticing, she took off.

Cut to the railroad tracks near downtown. A woman running on the bike path spotted Selkie on the tracks, which are separated from the bike path by a fence. She didn’t know Selkie (or us), but guessed that this wasn’t a good thing. First she tried to get to the dog by climbing the fence, but it is topped with barbed wire, so that wasn’t an option. So she called her boyfriend in their house on the other side of the fence. He successfully nabbed her, they found the address and phone number on her collar, left a message for us, and then walked her home. Ted and the babysitter, still playing outside, hadn’t even noticed that she’d gone.

Later, after I was done imagining all of the horrible things that could have happened to her (hit by a car or a train, taken by doggie white slavers), I called Selkie’s rescuers to thank them. Neither of us could pick out the other in a line up, but they went out of their way to bring our pup home. I’m certain that most people in my neighborhood—mostly strangers—would do the same.

Selkie looking contrite

All Wayward Creatures Great and Small

Illustration: ©Fred Zinn

This time it was a horse. Hamp Scanner reported last week: “There is a loose horse running in and out of the road near the Florence Road, Burts Pit Road intersection.” Last May, it was a loose bull running in and out of Audubon Road in Leeds. The Monday after Ted was born, Chuck returned to his camp program with great news: He had seen a bobcat that morning. There was no mention of the infant at home.

I grew up in the Detroit suburbs. We had squirrels. It was a banner day if we saw a deer or a raccoon (especially when it was a baby raccoon in my parents’ fireplace, much to the dog’s surprise). In Minnesota it got a little more exciting. Living very close to the Mississippi River, we had regular sightings of bald eagles. I learned to differentiate them from vultures, and not crash my car while doing so. One spring afternoon, I watched an eagle mug a hawk for its lunch near downtown St. Paul. I also saw Garrison Keillor on a regular basis, but that’s as far as we got with the Minnesota fauna.

Because the Pioneer Valley is agricultural and rural we see an entertaining array of wayward critters. The bears usually get the most attention. Because they’re bears. Seeing a bear in the hinterlands has its own caché, but there’s nothing quite like running into one downtown. Driving through the grocery store parking lot, I looked to my right and thought: “Damn that’s a big dog.” Double take ensued and I realized it was a bear lumbering out of the trees. A few hours later a bear was spotted in a tree in a downtown parking lot. I assume it was my bear, who had clearly strolled up State Street, hung a left on Center, a right on Masonic, and found a nice little spot.

Last summer, another bear decided that the tree next to the Northampton Chamber of Commerce would be a good location. That is, until the paparazzi showed up.

Several years ago, my friend Margaret received a call from the Department of Natural Resources to inform her that she had a bear sleeping in the crawlspace under her house. “No, I don’t.” “Yes, you do. She’s tagged, we’ve been tracking her.” They went on to assure Margaret that the bear posed them no harm because she was hibernating. Margaret and family named her “Miss Flo” after our local diner. After a few months of A BEAR SLEEPING UNDER THEIR HOUSE, the DNR tranquilized and relocated her to the woods to wake up, since she would likely return to the place she last hibernated.

I’m still disappointed that I was the only one home when the wild turkey appeared in our backyard. Wild turkeys are not unusual around here, but to see one standing on a large snow pile in our very small downtown yard was noteworthy. She did a few laps, leapt over the fence, and took off up the street. Unfortunately, I did miss the cow wandering the streets of my neighborhood in the early morning, just after the Sox had finally won the World Series. Fortunately, my neighbor, a reporter, didn’t miss it, and filed a sweet little story in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

I’m still hoping to see a moose, but not terribly close up. I’m sorry I wasn’t with Fred when he watched the UMass police try to catch a moose that was gamboling across the campus athletic fields (to the Benny Hill music, I like to imagine). The Holy Grail of sightings would be an Eastern mountain lion/cougar/catamount/puma/panther/mountain cat. However, since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared them extinct last year, seeing one may be a sign of looming insanity.

I suppose I’ll settle for a fisher cat.

Café Achiever

The view from here

On a regular basis I am obliged to explain that I am not a barista.

This is what people assume when I mention that I was “working at a café.”

“I didn’t know you work at a café?”

“No, no, I just work at cafes….”

“Who’s on first?”

“Yes.”

I am one of those people who spends time with her laptop at a cafe on a daily basis. It’s not that I fancy myself Ernest Hemingway or J.K. Rowling. It’s just necessary for my sanity.

I am an extroverted person working in a solitary field. It is not a great match. I can work at home in the morning, and if I need to, in the late afternoon and evening. But by midday, the last place I want to be is home. I get distracted and anxious, and I’m very likely to take a nap. So most days after lunch I pack up my Lexie Barnes computer bag, stick a podcast in my ear, and hit the coffee circuit.

Walking into a café has the effect of making me calm and focused. Perhaps it’s the smell of the coffee, the soothing atmosphere, or the presence of other people, but I am usually able to settle down, focus, and get to work. I always have earplugs on hand—I want to be near people, but I don’t want to get distracted by their conversations, especially the insipid ones. (I was once distracted by two young women having a mind-numbing conversation about their dentists and the fact that their breasts were different sizes.)

It has always been this way. In high school I did all of my homework in front of the television. I have a distinct memory of studying anatomy while watching Bosom Buddies. In college, I left my dorm room whenever I could, studying in hallways, lounges, and window seats. Rarely libraries—they were too quiet. This was in the hazy pre-café days, so it never occurred to me to go anywhere else.

During a short sojourn in France I fell in love with cafés. (Unfortunately, I fell in love with very little else in France, which is why the sojourn was short.) Returning to Ann Arbor, the best I could do was Drake’s, the ancient, storied sandwich and candy shop. I curled up in a booth in its dark recesses and absorbed the reading for “20^th Century American Wars.” Within a year, cafes finally found their way to Ann Arbor and I found my comfort zone.

In graduate school, I did most of my work in Dunn Brother’s Café in St. Paul, including writing most of my papers by hand. They roasted their coffee on site and that aroma still soothes me instantly.

These days, as a freelance writer, I’m in a café every day, whether I have work to do or not. Northampton has almost as many cafes as sushi shops and yoga studios, so I have many from which to choose. Each provides a certain something. So, laptop, earplugs, and coffee in hand, I’ll take you on a little tour.

When the stars first aligned, bringing the miracle of a laptop and widespread wireless, I started my Northampton café career at Woodstar. Woodstar is ideal for the itinerant extrovert. Built into the former firehouse, it’s a long row of tables where you sit cheek by jowl with your neighbors. The eavesdropping is excellent. It is also the place where I’m likely to see everyone I’ve ever known. Great for socializing—not always great for accomplishing anything. I love their soups and toast, and in the summer they offer a fruity iced tea that’s like Kool Aid for grownups. On a bright day, its huge windows make it an ideal place to be, as long as you can keep the glare off your computer screen.

A few years ago, on a gloomy winter day, when Woodstar’s wireless was proving inconsistent, I stomped in a huff over to Haymarket. Haymarket feels like Woodstar’s opposite: dark and cavern-like, with an atmosphere we’ll call bohemian. I came because the wireless was more consistent, but stayed because the atmosphere proved to be perfect for me. It feels like a cocoon, and I see fewer friends, so I can do more focused work there than any place in town. Bonus: they are one of the few cafés with plenty of power outlets (though I have learned to never leave the house without a fully charged battery). Drawback: their adorable pastries are a constant torment.

I’ve dabbled in other cafes, but they haven’t enticed me to stay. I’m pretty certain that Northampton Coffee doesn’t want me to stay, as they are clearly not set up for the laptop crowd. But their Americano is so rich and delicious, it’s worth an occasional visit. And as it is modeled after my brother’s café, Rubi’s in Great Barrington, I have a warm feeling about it. The Yellow Sofa is another great spot, and you can always get a table. That may be the problem, it’s usually quite empty on weekday afternoons, which makes it far too much like my own living room. Sip, one of the newest contenders in Northampton’s coffee scene, is quite lovely, and it’s become the go to spot for my weekly writing group. The coffee rivals Northampton Coffee in its richness and the food looks dangerous. But also like Northampton Coffee, its small size doesn’t invite long work stretches (though the genuine working fireplace may counter that).

If I had my druthers, I would spend every afternoon at the Montague Bookmill. Located about 25 minutes away, it is a used bookstore and café (The Lady Killigrew) in an 1842 gristmill, alongside a rushing river and waterfall. The moment I walk in I am utterly at peace. Even if my children are with me. Environmental Prozac. I convince myself that I will head up there to work on a regular basis, but I rarely do.

Since the Bookmill won’t move itself to Northampton, on most days, you’ll find me at The Roost, my pied-à-terre since they opened last February. It gets extra points for being the first café in my neighborhood. There’s a downside to this—I get less exercise. It’s not as cocoon-like as Haymarket, but I seem to be able to tuck in and focus on my work. I see enough friends to make it interesting, but not so many that I over socialize. (Though it’s surprising that all of the regulars aren’t bosom friends by now). Most of the seating is far away from the display of desserts, so I can’t hear them calling my name. I like it even more as a place to cozy up on a cold night, sipping mead and quizzing Fred with the Trivial Pursuit cards.

In another day and age I might have spent my afternoons writing in bars like so many legendary writers. I might enjoy the camaraderie, but I wouldn’t be very productive, asleep and drooling at 2:45 p.m. after one glass of wine.

Maybe We Should’ve Called it “Nectar”

Chuck’s glee at chanting “Big Boobs” as we crossed the “Beep Boop” intersection was not the only time he came up with an awkward malapropism.

When Chuck was a baby, we joined a synagogue and began attending Friday night services on a regular basis. We wanted the synagogue to be a comfortable place for him so we started early. Plus, we had a baby and no childcare, so we didn’t have many other options for outings on a Friday night.

At this synagogue, it was their custom to invite all of the children up to the bimah (altar) for the kiddish at the end of the service (the blessing over the wine). Each child would get a cup of grape juice and try to make it though the long prayer without drinking (many wouldn’t make it).

By the time he was a toddler, Chuck was crazy for juice, so he loved this part of the service. One night, we walked into the sanctuary as the seats were filling and he ran up to the bimah to demand his juice. However, he didn’t pronounce “juice” correctly. Instead, he ran up on the bimah and shouted, with all his two-year-old might:

“Jews! Jews! Jews!”

We’re members of a different synagogue now.