Meet Me at Emotional Baggage Claim Read online

  My mom and I also bond over football. Like a lot of guys, we have a baseline understanding of the sport—meaning we’re low on stats, high on smack talk. It was my mother who raised me to be a proper Philly sports fan. That means you rag on the Eagles constantly, but you’d fight any out-of-towners who spoke against them. They are ours to hate, and ours alone.

  We hate because we love.

  I have this weird idea that my mom would be a great professional athlete, largely based on her ability to high-five. Her celebratory smacks feel like catching a fastball with your bare hand. At five-foot-two, she has the high five of LeBron James.

  She will crush you.

  After sports, another bastion of brohood is alcohol. Neither of us is a big drinker in our normal lives, but in recent years, whenever I’m home, my mom wants me to make us cocktails. She thinks that by virtue of living in New York City, I am now a certified professional bartender.

  In reality, I only know how to make one drink really well, but it’s the only drink you need: the margarita.

  Tequila has a bad reputation, but like so many of us, it’s just misunderstood. Forget shots, this spirit was made for sipping. I gave my mom a little education and now she’s a tequila snob. She doesn’t speak Spanish, but she knows the difference between anjeo, blanco, and reposado, and has opinions on each. Thankfully, we’re on the same page that a true margarita has only three ingredients: tequila, triple sec, and fresh lime.

  Don’t even think about adding orange juice or sour mix in our house.

  What is this, Mohegan Sun?

  So we drink margs, catch the game, then watch Role Models again, and giggle if somebody burps.

  How did we get this way?

  Until a couple years ago, we didn’t so much as have a male dog in the house. There were bras drying on the towel racks, Midol in the medicine chest, and a spare hair elastic in every drawer. It was all girls, all the time.

  Maybe that’s it. Maybe because for so long there was no man in the house, our sense of gender roles got softened. Or maybe those roles are just myths created by TV sitcoms anyway.

  As they say, boys will be boys.

  And sometimes, so will girls.

  Motherhood Has No Expiration Date

  By Lisa

  I have a scientific theory the bonds that tie mothers and daughters are love and worry, like the two strands in the double helix of some very twisty DNA.

  In other words, if I love you, I worry about you. And vice versa.

  Let me explain.

  The moment Daughter Francesca was born, I started to love and worry about her. And my worry, like my love, had no bounds. I worried if she was sleeping too much. I worried if she was sleeping too little. Same with crying, nursing, and pooping. If I was breathing, I was loving, and worrying. And my biggest worry, of course, was whether she was breathing. I’m not the only mother who has watched her baby sleeping to see if her chest goes up and down.

  I still do that.

  My theory also applies to grandmothers. Because they’re mothers, too. Just grander.

  Mother Mary worried about Francesca, and all of our conversations back then were consumed with my worries and hers, and together we aimed our laser beams of worry on this hapless infant, which is undoubtedly why she turned out so great.

  Or guilty.

  Francesca knows we worried about her, uh, I mean, we loved her.

  Likewise, I know, in turn, that Mother Mary worries about me. She worries that I work too hard. She worries when I fly. She worries when I drive. She worries when I’m not at home, and even more when I am at home. For example, she worries that I could put too much food on my fork and choke.

  Let me suggest that this last worry isn’t so dumb. You’ve never seen me eat.

  I used to feel guilty that she worried about me, but now I don’t.

  She should worry about me, constantly.

  It proves she loves me.

  I realized this when I understood how much I still worried about Francesca even though she’s living in New York, on her own. I don’t mean to make her feel guilty, and she shouldn’t. But I can’t help it.

  Motherhood has no expiration date.

  And what just happened is that the worry has boomeranged, so that I’m starting to worry about Mother Mary.

  Well, not starting.

  But recently my worry, and my love, have come to the fore because of Mother Mary’s health. In particular, her nose.

  It’s blue.

  No joke. The last time she came to visit, the first thing that I noticed was that her nose had a distinctly bluish tinge. I told her so, in a nice way, and she told me to shut up.

  But still, I worried, big-time. Her circulation has never been good, due to a lifetime of smoking, but she finally quit at age eighty-two, when she got throat cancer.

  Better late than never.

  Anyway, she beat the cancer, which is remarkable enough, but she’s supposed to use oxygen at night, according to the doctor. But she won’t do it. Our conversation today on the phone went like this:

  “Ma, why won’t you use your oxygen?”

  “I don’t like the tube. It smells like popcorn.”

  “So what? Popcorn is good. Who doesn’t like popcorn?”

  “I don’t, and that’s what it smells like, so forget it.”

  “But it’s doctor’s orders, Ma.”

  “Hmph! What does he know?”

  I don’t know where to begin. “Everything?”

  But Mother Mary wouldn’t listen even though I eventually raised my voice, which is another thing that mothers/daughters do to prove our love.

  If I’m yelling at you, you know I love you.

  Because I want your chest to keep going up and down, whether you’re my daughter or my mother.

  Or whether I’m your daughter or your mother.

  It’s all the same emotion, which is worry.

  Or love!

  So the next time your mother is worried about you, don’t tell her to shut up.

  And don’t feel guilty either.

  Try and understand. She can’t help it. It’s in her DNA.

  Chalk it up to mom genes.

  Ode to Vance Packard

  By Lisa

  Computer companies are full of great ideas, and I’m stealing one of them.

  I’m selling my rough drafts.

  Rather, uh, I won’t think of them as rough drafts anymore. I’ll think of them as earlier versions. I’ll call them Scottoline 1.0.

  Yes, that’s right. I’m going to start selling unfinished things to make money.

  Why not?

  Granted, it won’t be as good as the final product, but it’ll be as good as I can make it in the time I took, and there’s no reason not to sell it that way if people will buy it.

  Dumb people, like me.

  I bought two iPads at Christmas, one for Daughter Francesca and one for me, only to see Apple come out with the iPad 2.0, three months later. The new iPad has a camera and a better way of turning on and off. Why they couldn’t have done this at Christmas, I don’t know. Why they couldn’t have told me at Christmas, I do know.

  And so do you.

  Apple makes fraud cool.

  iFraud.

  It’s been doing this for so long that everybody accepts it as normal, and I’m not going to whine about it, herein. If you can’t beat em, join ’em, right?

  So I don’t know why I have to wait until my sentence is in final draft to sell it. I don’t know why I can’t make it work for me, like this:

  Today Mother Mary

  In my opinion, it

  Unlike Spanx, granny panties have been known to

  My feet are so crusty they

  Maybe I can sell my sentences the way they are above, even if they’re unfinished and missing features.

  Like verbs.

  I could also sell them in draft form, so that they have all their features, but they’re not really good enough, like this:

  My feet are c
rusty enough to be pies.

  Now if I worked on that a little more, I could come up with:

  My feet are crusty enough to make pies jealous.

  Now, that’s pretty good. I like it better. I might even say it’s final.

  But only for now.

  Until I think of a better sentence.

  At least it has a verb, if not a camera.

  Let’s call that sentence Scottoline 3.0. We can agree that Scottoline 3.0 is the latest and greatest, and I could stick that sentence in a book and sell it, with a lot of other 3.0 sentences. But who’s to say a Scottoline 2.0 sentence can’t be sold as well, or even a Scottoline 1.0 sentence?

  Especially if I put it in a white case.

  This way I get people to pay for my rough drafts, and since I do about ten drafts a book, I can make Money 1.0, Money 2.0, and all the way to Money 10.0.

  Ten times the amount of money.

  I could be iFilthyRich.

  If people think I’m being greedy, I’ll explain to them that, no, on the contrary, it’s just that I’ve never really finished anything, on account of my being an Innovator in a Relentless Quest For Perfection.

  iScottoline.

  By the way, Apple wasn’t the first company to come up with this genius marketing idea. Back before computers even existed, car companies in Detroit would change their models every year, making the earlier version look dated, in what was called planned obsolescence. Reporters and consumer advocates railed against it, and everybody thought it was evil.

  Those days are over.

  That idea became obsolete.

  Evil didn’t.

  Evil just dressed better.

  Back in those days, in 1960, an author named Vance Packard wrote a book called The Waste Makers, which took American business to task for spending millions in advertising to convince people to buy expensive products and throw them away prematurely, when they’d become unfashionable. He thought this practice made American society wasteful, debt-ridden, and generally discontent, as we grew unhappy with what we had, because it wasn’t the hot new thing.

  I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  That has no resonance today.

  At all.

  And so I’ll keep my old iPad, though I’ll be cranky about it, you bet.

  The happy ending is that Francesca has been so busy since Christmas, she hadn’t opened her iPad, so now we’re going to take it back to the store and trade it in for an iPad 2.0.

  Gotcha, Apple.

  iPayback.

  Cushy

  By Lisa

  This couch potato is getting a new couch, and it’s harder than you think. I’ve chosen the wrong couch before, in my life. In fact, my couch mistakes rival my marital mistakes, though my couches have lasted longer than my marriages.

  I’m not only unlucky in love, I’m unlucky in lounge.

  We begin back in the Dark Ages.

  In other words, my marriage to Thing Two.

  When one of us had the great idea that not everything in the family room needed to match, so we acquired a red plaid couch, a floral chair, and a green-patterned chair-and-a-half. For those not in the know, a chair-and-a-half is just what it sounds like, big enough to accommodate dogs, laptops, and a double-wide tush.

  That would be Ruby The Crazy Corgi’s.

  Anyway, the bottom line was that none of the furniture looked like it belonged together. Thing Two thought it was sophisticated, and he might have been right about that. Only problem was, I’m not sophisticated. I thought the furniture was too smart by half, especially the chair-and-a-half.

  If you follow.

  I thought things should have something in common if they were going to live together.

  The same is true of furniture.

  As soon as I was on my own again, I vowed to remarry wisely, that is, to get myself a couch and two chairs that matched. Yes, it’s true, I’m “matchy-matchy.”

  I like to keep it simple. To me, that’s how you know how things belong together. They look alike. So I reupholstered the furniture in a lovely gold honeycomb fabric, and I saved money by not buying new furniture. This was good financial planning, as it enabled me to afford the divorce, which was worth every penny.

  But then the dogs took their toll, and the couch and chairs started to pop threads and look shabby. I liked the fabric so much that I had the couch and chairs reupholstered again, in the exact same fabric. You would think I’d move on and find a new fabric, but I wasn’t ready to love again.

  I yearned to commit to my couch.

  But that was five years ago, and more dogs took their toll, and I decided it was time to get a whole new couch and chairs.

  Of course, you may be wondering why I keep letting the dogs on the couch, and the reason is simple. If I didn’t let the dogs up, how else would the ticks get on the couch?

  So you see.

  Which brings me to this morning, when I found myself in the furniture store, trying to decide between a bewildering array of fabrics: damask, tapestry, Jacobean print, plaid, patterned, bagatelle, and chintz. I also found my old honeycomb fabric in case I wanted to use it yet again, which is like ex sex.

  I spent two hours there and still didn’t know which fabric to pick, so I brought home a stack of swatches and arrayed them on the couch and chairs.

  My method of choosing?

  See which one Peach sat on. She’s my Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and she has the best taste.

  She chose a yellow-and-pink chintz, but her compadre, Little Tony, liked the gold linen covered with birds that looked vaguely annoyed.

  Angry Birds.

  I didn’t know which to choose.

  And if you’re wondering about price, they’re both the same, which is costly. Oddly, chintz is not chintzy.

  By the way, I didn’t bring home a swatch of print fabric covered with Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. If I had, there would be Cavalier King Charles Spaniels sitting on Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, and I’d be certifiable.

  Also, Ruby would be so pissed.

  So my choice was between Angry Birds and Not-So-Chintzy Chintz.

  The Angry Birds was lovely and classy, but I was partial to the chintz, despite the saleswoman’s warning that chintz wears badly because it has so few “rubbings.”

  “What’s a rubbing?” I asked.

  “Rubbings are how many times your body can rub against the fabric before it wears out.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Who’s rubbing their bodies on their couch?”

  She blinked. “I don’t know. I’m just saying.”

  I bit my tongue.

  I’m going with the chintz.

  If I want to rub my couch threadbare, it’s my business.

  Field Guide to the American Male

  By Francesca

  As a young nerd growing up, I used to love to read field guides. I owned field guides to insects, snakes, wildflowers, Hawaiian tropical fish, and North American songbirds. I had a collection of breed encyclopedias as well, including several on dogs, horses, and cats—wild and domestic. I loved the books’ floppy faux-leather covers and the rows of glossy photographs, but what I really loved were the names.

  Imagination is overrated—give me Latin classification any day!

  It’s a miracle I had any friends.

  In high school biology, I remember learning about taxonomy, the science of classifying organisms, and how my teacher stressed the importance of proper nomenclature. Taxonomists estimate we’ve cataloged around 2 million species of animals so far, but that there remain between 3 and 100 million more species yet to be discovered.

  Similarly, there are 8 million people in New York City, roughly half of them men. And I’ve only discovered about … well, that’s private. The point is, well-organized classification is the first step to understanding. So I carry my very own field guide in my pocket every day:

  My cell phone contacts list.

  My contacts list has its own system of nomenclature. When I
meet a guy in the field, so to speak, I don’t always learn his last name. That’s not as sketchy as it sounds, if you think about it. It would be weird if we all introduced ourselves with our full name. It worked for James Bond, but so did wearing a tuxedo every day.

  I feel awkward asking a man I just met for his last name. It screams, “I’m going to Google you later.”

  I prefer to be discreet with my stalking.

  Researchers in the field frequently work with limited information, but still, everything must be recorded. So I’ve developed a method of classification for these instances. I’m scanning my phone right now for an example … aha!

  Aaron McManus.

  Looks like an average name, right? But to my studied eye, I know that that entry is “Aaron,” a guy I met at McManus, a local pub.

  The formula is: First Name, Location of Discovery.

  Entries like this are sprinkled throughout my contacts, forming a little scavenger hunt through my usual haunts.

  There’s Tony Pomme Frites, which sounds like a French mobster, but in fact, Pomme Frites is a restaurant that sells only fries and is open until 3:30 A.M. on weekends. I recall he complimented my shoes, we talked during the endless line, and I never saw him again.

  Fries are bad for you anyway.

  I also see the recently added, John Grassroots. Grassroots is a bar in the East Village. We met on a Friday, he called me on Monday, and I’m excited to see him this Thursday!

  Mr. Grassroots has potential. If we have a nice time on Thursday, and I see him again, then he can earn a proper classification. But if it doesn’t pan out, he’ll languish in my contacts list, sandwiched between layers of G last names, frozen in time with the cute smile and the Ray Bans tucked on his shirt collar.

  A Contact Fossil.

  My system is mainly designed to help me remember people when I pick up the phone, but sometimes it reminds me when not to pick up. A few examples:

  Lucky Never. This guy works for my building-management company, but that didn’t stop him from hitting on me outside my apartment. After I’d introduced myself, he actually winked and said, “You can call me, ‘Lucky.’” I smiled, but what I wanted to say was, “You can call me never.” Hence, his entry.