I can tell by your eyes that you've probably been crying forever.
And the stars in the sky don't mean nothing to you -- they're a mirror.
I don't wanna talk about it: How you broke my heart.
But if I stay here just a little bit longer....If I stay here won't you listen
To my heart?


Funerals, Part I

There were seven Fitzgerald kids, and there were six of us. Our parents were -- literally -- lifelong best friends. They owned vacation homes together. Our families combined seamlessly for summer vacations in the desert, snowball wars in Arrowhead, lizard safaris, cherry bomb detonations, trips to the emergency ward, Marco Polo tournaments, ice skating, birthdays, camping, beach treks, and always, always, Catholic ceremonies that defy description to outsiders (Corpus Christi mass in the blazing sun at Monastary of the Angeles in Hollywood, Holy Thursday vigils till midnight. Just tip of the archaic iceberg.). But here, at the huge wake in honor of their father, I count only six Fitzgeralds.

I have not seen many of them in years. I have spoken with Theresa on the phone as her father's heath faltered, but most of them have been relegated to a vivid, happy place in my past. Until today. It's weird, and that, my friends, is a loaded phrase. Paul, whose name I see occasionally in movie credits as a producer of some kind, is hard to approach: He's understandably very torn up. Tim is genuinely happy to see us all, here at the corner table littered with beer bottles and empty glasses, where we have staked out a family territory, holding court at this festival of melancholy. Thomas looks insanely the very same as he did when he was 11, despite the fact that his youngest son is now 11.

Theresa, with the bawdy laugh and mile-wide mischievious streak, winks at her smiling husband across our table and grabs my hand to drag me out to the patio for a smoke (still, she smokes). She looks, sounds, smiles, talks and gestures, exactly the same as she did when we were teenagers. She says the same of me. Making our way across the huge room to the patio, she lays a hand on her brother Dennis' arm and says, "You holding up?" Dennis, who has been lurking alone at the margins of the room, barely nods in her direction and says, "Holding up, yes."

Dennis was the middle kid. The scary one -- the cute one -- who moved to Santa Cruz. The one you always ended up smoking pot with behind the church, the reception hall, the service entrance at the hotel ballroom, the cul de sac. The one who always knew a great bar to hit after the wedding, the party, Christmas dinner, whatever.

Now he can't even look up. I ask Theresa if he still lives in Santa Cruz, and she stops in her tracks, and says, "You just witnessed history. I haven't seen or heard from him in 8 years."

How do you not hear from your brother in 8 years? I get no answers. Theresa just shrugs and sighs as she drags on her smoke and shakes out the match. And why, while we are on the subject of dysfunction, is your sister Patricia very noticeably not here? Why have 2 members of your family been MIA for years and why can they not come together for this occasion?

The day, which to this point has been a happy-sad, melancholy, sentimental trip down memory lane through my ridiculouly, happily cliche'd childhood, has become crowded with bitter hypothetical questions. And resolutions.

Resolutions that I will not let the same thing happen to my family. Resolution that I will not lose Theresa again. Resolution that I'll thank more readily, more effusively, more sincerely (Thank you, my dear brother Rick, for driving us all here safely across the misbegotten freeways of Los Angeles). Resolution that there will be no festering wounds that keep me from my family for years at a time.

Death continually teaches me lessons in how to live my life. "The grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul." So said Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Hamstring Chronicles

I read in GQ (just lay off, OK?) a list of 50 Things No Man Really Needs to Do Before He Dies. I love lists. One of the items is Run a Marathon. Very timely piece of advice for me. My hamstring is back in rehab after a very painful incident reminiscent of my Boston Marathon Agony. The short version has me sitting in the doctor's exam room, as he talks waaaay down to me in a voice so sarcastic I could easily be offended. But he's cool, and we're kind of like friends, and we pass each other running on Sunday mornings, so I know he knows the score.

"I tell you what," he says to me. "Why don't you get a bike. Why don't you run mebbee three days a week. Ride your bike a little. Take a yoga class. Lift weights. Stretch. And see if that strategy gets you farther without injury and chronic pain."

He's telling me I am an idiot, and I am listening. I have been hitting it so hard and I am in so much pain -- all day and all through the night. It's just crazy. I am crazy. Fine.

Movie Review: Dear Frankie

This movie has to be about a year, maybe 2 years old. A woman is raising her 10 year old son alone. But she writes to her son regularly, pretending the letters come from the boy's father, who is a sailor in the far corners of the world. The boy and his "father" write back and forth for years. But one day, the ship that the mother has invented for the father is due to pull into port, and the boy is expecting to see his father. So the mother has to "find" someone to play at being Frankie's father, just for a day.

It has a lot to do with what are you willing to do for your child, how far would you go, what sacrifices would you make. As pieces of the puzzle fell into place, my husband kept saying, This is so messed up! This is so messed up! The story ends elliptically, but hopefully, with the final message for me really being that parents need their kids in order to become whole at least as much as children need parents. I had to use the subtitles, as the Scottish accents zipped past me far too quickly.

My sister said that despite the PG-13 rating she watched it with her two daughters (10 and 8). I think that's way too much to put on a child...it's a weighty story.

Current Family Argument

Who will host Christmas Dinner this year? I think I definitely need to be skiing. Better get on the cabin rental soon or I could get roped into dinner for 26.

Avoidance Tactics


Write...edit...erase. Create...destroy. Any writing that comes out of me lately is trashed almost immediately. Not the most mature idea, especially for a blog in which I profess to be trying to "figure it all out."

There are a few profoundly sad subplots running through my story lately, and writing about them makes me feel carnivorous and parasitic. My sister observed pithily the other day that for many years it seemed like our families and friends saw each other at weddings, baby showers and baptisms. Lately, funerals seem to be the points on the map that connect our paths.

I'll talk more about funerals some other time. Because while they do fascinate me, I just cannot find the correct words to define and describe. Lazy. And sad.

This meandering and wallowing could easily turn this into another blog entry deleted before it see lighht of day.

Halloween For My Kids: Part I

For some appallingly flimsy reasons, my children's school has decided to turn its back on Halloween. The school carnival is now a western-themed, spineless little pageant of hoedown mediocrity. It used to be a traditional neighborhood Halloween carnival with gypsy fortune tellers, apple bobbing, costume contests, cake walks and the most endearing Haunted House I had ever seen.

One year I took my niece inside. She was about 7, and straddling the fence between "too big to be scared by such things" and "scared out of her wits." I held her hand through the dark hallways festooned with cobwebs, dust, flickering candelabra...ghostly moanings and chains rattling, whistling wind sound effects...A group of 8th graders dressed as zombies sat at a long dining room table enacting a ghastly family dinner scene. She was barely holding it together when a Lurch-like butler crept up behind her and dropped a heavy hand on her shoulder.

She freaked. Completely.

In an instant the lights came on and all the zombie 8th graders began singing "It's a Small World After All" to make her unscared. It was so cool.

No more. The school caved to some pressure from some extreme corner of the church and decided not to embrace Halloween any longer. Total copout.

But here at home Halloween is second only to Christmas in anticipation, preparation and decoration. I scare pathetically easily, but I dearly love Halloween. Happily, my kids do too.

Gleaned from a conversation with my Halloween-loving sister, our favorite Halloween movies, in no particular order:


The Hunger (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie)
Dracula (1979 version directed by John Badham)
American Werewolf in London (More for nosatalgia than anything else)
Near Dark (Underrated, overlooked, Lance Henrikson and Bill Paxton are very effective present-day vampires)
Rosemary's Baby (Gold standard for tension and subtlety)
Fright Night (Totally cheesey but so fun)
Shadow of the Vampire (John Malkovich fans need to see this)
Nosferatu (Atmosphere!!)

To be continued.

Hall Pass


So I looked through the window
And out on the road
They're bringing me presents
And waving Hello

--Neil Young

I got me a Hall Pass.

"What's a Hall Pass?" you ask?

You, my friend, do not have children. Or if you do, they are grown.

A Hall Pass -- sometimes called a Kitchen Pass -- A term that must somehow have its roots the Military. A Hall Pass is like "Shore Leave."

A Hall Pass is when you say to your spouse/co-parent, "Hey! Listen, it's my birthday and really, you know I don't want anything. Birthday...Who cares, right? But what I do want is a Hall Pass." And than you decide on a time at which Hall Pass commences. And when your Hall Pass kicks in, you're Free.

Free as in free to spend the afternoon, evening, day, whatever in any manner you choose, and you choose to spend it that way you spent so many afternoons/evenings when you were single, childless, at loose ends, between boyfriends. The way you contentedly spent so many hours, and now spend almost none. Alone. Hanging.

A Hall Pass is when you take yourself and a book into a friendly neighborhood bar or pub. Not a hot spot or a crowded restaurant. No no no. It's early afternoon. It's uncrowded, except for that group of men in the corner animatedly arguing about...something. Empty except for the two women sharing a sandwich with a shopping bag on the table between them. A Hall Pass means you are at your leisure to park it at the completely empty bar, order a beer and open your book, tilt back in your barstool and read, looking up only to sip occasionally, and take in your surroundings in tiny, half-conscious draughts. Read, read, read. Sip, sip. Read. Read. Readreadread.

Order another beer, yes, thanks, that would be great. Can you make sure this one is headless, please. Yes. No head. Thanks.

A Hall Pass is when the cell phone does not ring because you have made a deal with Spouse that unless someone has been stepped on by an elephant, there will be no calls. No calls asking "Did you buy soy sauce and if so where are you hiding it?" No calls asking to pick up fabric softener or light bulbs on the way home. Because when you are on a Hall Pass, you are permitted to take your mental phone off the hook. To unclip your harness and yell down into the canyon, "I'm off belaaaaaay!!!"

It's when your brain is free to roll along with the pleasant buzz from 2 oh maybe 3 beers enjoyed in quite solitude, with a book that is best savored over long uninterrupted spells. And there is peace in letting your brain have its free reign, to think more than an inch deep on whatever rolls into your head.

For example, when you are on a Hall Pass you have world enough and time to ponder -- for more than just a second or two -- that really, if for some reason there were no men in the world (except on TV playing football), there would most likely be no women who enjoyed or professed to enjoy football. Sure, many women say they enjoy football, and maybe they really truly do. But without men around to originally foster this affection, I doubt many women would come to football of their own volition.

How many times (you can ponder this...take your time, you have a Hall Pass, brother) have you heard a woman say, "No way, man. I'll have to take a raincheck on that. I'm stayin home to watch The Game."? or "Did you catch That Game yesterday!! My God what a game!"?

It just doesn't happen. No judgment on this particular little point. It's just the kind of thing you can mull over in your head when you have a Hall Pass.

See, because when you have a Hall Pass, you can linger over your book, your beers, your thoughts, your observations. You can notice, looking up from your book, that the cocktail waitress and the bartender are barely tolerating the manager on duty. They roll their eyes. They snark when she walks away. When you have a Hall Pass you can become semi-invisible. You can pick up the resentful vibe. And who can blame them, these impotent underlings? The manager is an overly officious woman who is probably new here, and quite possibly new to management. She moves nervously and tightly. She talks at eleven...just a bit too loud and stridently. She is probably capable, but is not quite confident yet, either of her underlings or her own authority, and so she overcompensates by repeating herself and manically folding napkins and she hands out directions. When you have a Hall Pass you have time to see this stuff.

Or not.

When you have a Hall Pass you could end up calling your sister, K, and asking her, "Hey, can you get a Hall Pass and meet me for a beer?" even though she drinks chardonnay and hates beer. You could ask her to bring a newspaper so you can decide on a movie. And when she shows up, you suddenly remember, after hours of blessed and precious silence, how easy it is to laugh and laugh and laugh and talk on top of each other. So you do. And the bartender remarks on your resemblance to one another, and dips into his cache of Irish Jokes when he hears your first names.

And since this is a Birthday Hall Pass, and not just a garden variety Hall Pass, you get to trump her ace when you disagree on what movie to see, because, see, K does not like indie, quirky, or funky. But as I've mentioned...Birthday Hall Pass. It's like four-of-a-kind. You take the hand.

And since it's a Birthday Hall Pass, there is a dinosaur tea party waiting for you when you come home, courtesy of your kids. And a coconut cake so saturated with coconut cream that it's sitting in a puddle of itself. And best o best of all, there is a huge bowl of pasta carbonara and two forks to enjoy after Spouse has paraded the children to bed and turned the house into a quiet place.

Movie Review(s)

The Science of Sleep

I rarely see movies in the theater anymore. I am so glad I was able to see this. It is written and directed by the co-writer of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which recommended it to me immediately. I loved ESOTSM. How can you not? The Science of Sleep is messier and more undone and disheveled, yet more colorful and has a more low-budget look to it. Which I found endearing, and complementary to its odd, messy, confounding protagonist. From the very beginning it is hard to tell what is Stephane's real life and what is his dream life. Some of it is cartoonishly obvious, but other segments are unclear. The movie is spoken in Spanish, French and English, and somewhere along the line, you really forget that the movie is multi-language, so seamlessly do the conversations flow.

Stephane has problems with his dream life and his real life. He gets confused...and so do we. But in a good way. Stephane probably has something "wrong" with him. He's either immensely immature, or has an attention problem. Most of the time, he is embarrassingly honest and sincere, but he is also vulgar and discomfitingly forthcoming. He makes friends with his neighbor, the whimsical and independent Stephanie. At times their miscommunications and confusions are so hilarious, I had my hands over my eyes or mouth, and I was completely twisted up in knots in the theater seat in sheer empathetic embarrassment. Perplexing. Disconcerting. I'll see it again and I will almost certainly buy it. It's a cross between Amelie and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.


The Illusionist

This is killer. Sepia-toned, beautiful photography. Absorbing mystery/drama plot. And a really swoon-worthy romance. A grand cast from top to bottom. Love this movie.