For a short while, calories and a frozen treat weren’t my only focus. I was there for the ride. The drive itself is an exercise in imagination. It’s the kind of road that feeds dreams. It was a balm for our overtired bodies and underworked minds. It’s not that there’s a canopy of trees, no; there’s a tunnel of Australian pines and Cuban laurels that stretch long enough for you to stop and think, “Why do the trees know to curve toward each other like that?”

In the back of my grandfather’s car, Lea and I would call dibs on the mansions. “That one’s mine!” Much the way we did with everything, though with years we twisted dibs into damnation. Of the flatulent Boss Hogg doppelganger, “There’s your boyfriend.”

“Too bad your boyfriend is that guy,” she’d say, cursing me with a man whom, upon first sight, made me think of wild boar.

At random moments, usually from the back seat of a car, we’d play our boyfriend and house game, cursing each other with a series of objectionable suitors and hardscrabble shacks. For laughs, to instigate, but mostly to “make the food come”—an expression blanketed over all situations involving waiting (a visit to the bathroom or a look in a fish tank often does the trick).

When afflicted with a future beau who tried—and missed—to power snot out his window, Lea responded, “At least he’s got good taste.” And I would wet myself. Even years later, today I found myself shaking my head then abruptly breaking into laughter. Because my sister loves to eat her boogies. “Nature’s Candy.”

I love that a road can bring you that far back.

Family traditions are simply routines with the bonus of distilled spirits and a weird uncle. More infrequent, one hopes, than brushing your teeth, family traditions are rarely tied to necessity. By design, however simple, they’re decadent—red velvet, cream tights, and a dress coat on a Wednesday.

Though, when you’re the one stuck having to endure (or cook) another traditional family meal of flanken, you might beg to differ.* Still, I’m a fan of traditions and want to create that magical whimsy, however scheduled, for my Beer hops (yes, their last name is Beer). But summer traditions? Huh?

I guess there are families who go camping (I’d kill to do this, but Phil won’t go there. And I won’t go there alone). Real families (cough, Housewives of NJ) who spend a stretch each summer making tomato sauce from scratch, enough to last the entire year. Families with annual summer vacations in far off lands where a translation app is as essential as sunscreen. Aside from the sweeping list of activities that fill hot-as-balls days of Texass heat, aside from July 4th, and running through sprinklers, what’ve we got? No, I said aside from the simple joys of late August. What’s the fill-in for this blank: the one thing my family does every summer is ______. No, you can’t write, “sweat,” no matter how actively you might do it. Same goes for “complain.”

I’ve always believed that the really important moments happen on the side streets of our lives. The truly big moments aren’t as important as the smaller quiet ones. The events we cling to aren’t about the big holiday or fireworks. It’s about climbing into bed with your parents. It’s not about which restaurant or club in the Hampton’s. It’s about the car ride recaps, laughing until you have to pee (No, literally, pull over. Fine, give me your Venti cup), as you sit in hours of traffic back to the city. Pay attention to the sidelines; it’s where the good stuff is.

It’s why, on some level, entertaining is so important to me. Small touches and small tastes of memory. The colors, the setting, the foods served, music played. I can remember my childhood in meals. Grilled shrimp with cappellini primavera in summer. Filet mignon and lasagna come Christmas. I still know the serving utensils, the patterns on the different plates, the hand-held nut grinder for chocolate chip cookies.Napkin rings and place-mats, I swear. These are things I want so much to give, my favorite thigs. When people come to our home, even if it’s just game night and Popsicles (though ice cream sandwiches trump Fudgsicles, period), I want to give a memory and a taste for it.

It’s so much a part of what I had growing up: company. I’d fall asleep with a sheet for a blanket, a breeze through the screen windows, listening to the crickets and muffled voices of my parents’ guests. After swimming at the club, my father would light the grill, and I could smell it the way you can smell burning logs in someone else’s fireplace come winter. Lea and I would zip-line across our backyard, back and forth, holding onto the bars until our grips let out, waiting for our parents’ guests to arrive. People filling our home, drinks made, a ballgame muted. Corn on the cob holders. I want so much to make these Taco Tuesday moments of meals and meetings remembered. Because it’s what I love remembering.

*Oddly enough, a most foul tangent sprang from this thought. I’ll be plating it up tomorrow.
 

In general, "dumping" is a word I try to avoid. Those of you who take issue with "moist" know what I mean. There’s just something completely unpalatable about the word. I won’t even refer to Lucas’s truck by its proper name, preferring to call it a Tonka. Even if it is made by Fisher Price. Yet, I’m the first to admit that I’ve been an offender in the past: at sleepaway camp I once broke up with a boy across the dining hall by way of metered clapping and song.

Quiet please…
Dedicated to Steven Matty from Stephanie Klein
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Trash is dumped,
And so are you.

Trés nice of me. Too bad (and thank God) Karma’s an even bigger bitch than I am. But today I awoke with a smear of thoughts, items I’m still trying to nab up, and figured it was time for a brain throw down. Sometimes it’s just plain essential to unload all the thoughts that keep bubbling to the top—to skim, if you will. Here’s the fat at the top of my mind:

A thank you. I need to say it. It can be very isolating and embarrassing to face the dysfunction in your marriage, or life, even. I realize it’s a growing process, but it shouldn’t feel shaming. I haven’t answered my phone in over a week. Haven’t even listened to the ten voice messages, still waiting for me. So add sorry to this note of thanks, too. I get that not everything needs to be shared on a blog, but when it’s something I’m in the thick of, something I feel alone in, it’s when I need to write about it most. For support most of the time, and in this case, I needed to air and share it so I’d confront it. Once you blog about it, you can’t just sit on the sofa and watch The Good Wife, as if nothing even happened. You can’t pretend it away. The only way out really is through. And that’s where we still are, working through.

Another sorry. I can’t respond to every email, but I do read them all. Some of them I keep open (yet minimized) for months, intending to respond. Others, to which I believe I’ve responded, only nope. Wrong, lady. Totally ignored ‘em. Worst offense: reading the emails on my phone. Because as much as I try to remember switching to "mark as unread" so it will in fact appear on my computer, I don’t always do it. And then I’ve gone and read this heartfelt email, really intending to respond, but I don’t. And I’m sorry. Especially to the unwed, no recent prospects, reader who confided that her parents wanted to buy her a birthday gift of paying for her to freeze her eggs. I think of you often and hope you’re in a better place (and quite frankly, I would have taken them up on that deal).

And another sorry. I don’t update as often as I’d like because sometimes it feels like I have nothing to say. Or there’s too much on my writing to-do list. At other times, like today, I have too much to say and don’t want to—forgive this unsavory expression—blow my whole load in one shot. Hate myself for that, but damn, it’s true. So to that point, I’m going to hoard all my other scattered thoughts, hoping to share them, one by one, like a normal person, each day on this here loverly nest of blog.

In the meanwhile, I’ve got a Sex & The City flick by way of chick for which to dress this evening. Now, excuse me while I figure out how to turn an Hermes scarf into a turban… or blindfold from what I’m hearing.

Or breasts for that matter?

At what point in a man’s life does he grow beyond referring to a woman’s breasts as "a chest?" As in… "So, he was dating this fat chick… What? She was. And there’s a point to my saying that. I think she had a big chest, which might have made her just look heavier than she really was, you know? Well, you know, it can kind of take over, and it’s all you see, her… chest."

All I can think when he says this: You must stop watching Jersey Shore. Then I think: he’s still that kid. The high school boy in him just stands up sometimes, digging his way to the surface, reminding me without a long drawn out story of "Wait, I think that was his name… anyway… wait, what was I saying? Oh, right, so…" that he was once a boy. A boy who was nervous around girls. A boy who hadn’t even seen Notting Hill because that wouldn’t come for years. A boy who was had to work up courage, a kid afraid of a telephone, a hallway, a locker room. And I love the innocence of it. The reminder of who he was long before me, when a girl had a "chest." Not a rack, not tits, yams, hams, breasts, or dinners, but a "chest," one that usually came with a padlock and front-closure bra. When the getting was hard, when it was earned, when love was measured in bases yet somehow still felt free.

I went to the artsy movie theatre dressed in black, my hair bump-it high, wearing soft leather flats. I don’t do berets, but if I were the type to smoke, I’d have a pack of something spiced with ground cloves, something beatnik, or at the very least imported.

For dinner, I’d have ordered steak frites. But I’d only take a few bites, favoring my red tumbler of wine, followed by espresso, sweet and black, then I’d walk away in a boatneck top, with a canvas bag, fresh baguette sticking its neck out.

Instead, I was there with me, settled in my seat, ready for the journey back to 1961, when the film An Education is set. Nick Hornby adapted Lynn Barber’s memoir. Currently adapting my own memoir, I now know just how hard it is and am tragically impressed. So moved, in fact, that I should like to read the book for pleasure, while listening to the fantastic soundtrack, pecking at pots of sweet and black espresso. Only instead of black, I’d wear creams.

When our sparkle of a lead (Carey Mulligan) gets caught in a downpour with her cello, a man (Peter Sarsgaard), approximately ten years her senior, rescues her… cello. He offers it a ride, since proper young ladies themselves wouldn’t dare get into a car with a stranger. He is, after all, a patron of the arts, and wouldn’t want to see that cello of hers ruined. She agrees, allowing him to put her cello in the back seat of his car. It rains harder. He drives slowly, as she walks alongside this stranger, in his warm dry car, with her cello.

What a memorable start. One I remember dreaming would happen to me, alone in my room, her age, wanting to be taken seriously, certain I was already grown up. It wasn’t that I needed to prove it to my parents, for more responsibility and trust. I already had that. I was missing the sophisticated escapades to go with all my fanciful dreams. It was as if my adolescence was experienced as "going through the motions." I already felt grown up, an old soul, but the adult exploits were lacking. So I’d sit in my bedroom and dream of strangers who hadn’t yet become my lovers and friends.

The soundtrack of An Education is its own meal. It tastes like brie, a loose paddle full of it, smeared on crusty bread.Yes, it’s worth mentioning twice. It’s so lovely.

What I valued most about this film, aside from its score, is the way it sits with you. It’s a quiet film, but not sleepy. Aware. You’re always waiting for a shoe to drop, yet it’s still a lovely world to visit. Nightclubs and busty singers with velvet voices, champagne saucers, jewels and clothes, chic–Paris chic meets Oxford blues. It’s relatable; you’ll find yourself in it, whether you’re the prep who wants to learn and grow, or the flirt who wants to be adored, or if you’re like me, the type who wants it all.

Ican’t delete him from my cell phone. I haven’t tried to dial the number because it would be sad to hear a disconnected recording. I already know the number won’t work, or maybe someone else will answer, a young mother, frenzied and breathless. I’d want to hear him, and I wouldn’t have anything to say. I’d just listen, then wait for her to hang up.

His, theirs, was the second phone number I memorized, the one I could always dial and expect an answer. Because as far as I knew, other than visiting me, my paternal grandfather, and his beloved wife, my grandmother, only left the house to buy groceries and yarn on Austin Street. Occasionally, they’d slip beyond Forest Hills in search of puffy liquid stickers for my collection.

My father’s parents loved me in a swollen way—in the call collect anytime way in which we all want to be adored. I treasure most how they loved me for simply being born. For being theirs. I didn’t need witty banter, no awards of recognition, no proof. I was their conversation with strangers, their brag. They were proud of the way I slept. All I could offer in return was me.  A call, a visit, a letter. We should all be loved and love like that.

My maternal grandparents are the other kind, the type who’d rather. Rather dance, rather fix a few rounds of margaritas, rather love from a distance. I get it: I’ve wiped my fair share of asses; I’m done. Instead I’ll play with you when you’re dressed in your Sundays, and how nice, your parents already gave you a bath. Then, I’ll go keep my plans and talk about you as if you’re news. "The grandchildren are visiting." Saying it aloud is like a declaration against lonliness. Some grandparents simply don’t love in the details. They love in setting up an easel and handing over a box of crayons as they read a magazine.

Truth: as a mother, I am sometimes that kind of grandparent to my children. I want to get things done, and sitting still knowing all that I’d like to do, makes me restless sometimes. I just have that gene—my mother’s "roadrunner gene." But when I’m aware that I’m doing it, not slowing down and paying attention, I stop and realize these are the details I’m going to miss one day.

There’s something so storybook about the love between a grandparent and their grandchild, so romantic about the way mine made me feel that I was the most important person in their lives, because if it were a movie, Grandma would be knocking down walls and getting vaginal rejuvenation. In a movie, she’d create a rich life, full to the gunwales with friends and a frenzied schedule, having her grandchildren rearrange their schedules to accommodate her film therapy class. She’d have spent a home life with a spatula in hand, and now, with an empty nest, she’d be ready to fly, not wanting to fill it again with the next generation.

There are grandparents like this, with their own vibrant lives, stuffed with curiosity, carpe diem-ing their way through happy hours, dinner parties, and line dancing. But ask them to be a guardian in your will, and they’ll politely decline. Or, they’ll say, "Of course!" But if the shit came down, they’d look for a loophole. They’ve already been there, wiped that. As far as they’re concerned, their life is theirs again. To live the life they’d always imagined, the one they wish they had more of in their parent-teacher conference life, the one spent running errands, driving to ballet–a life of carpooling and compromise. They would rather live it than watch someone else living it for the first time. They’d rather do and go than stay and be.

I genuinely wonder which I’ll be. I know there’s a loaded "wrong" when we think of the grandparents who’d rather. That they should know by now what matters in life: family, a legacy, spending our time sharing our wisdom. Ideally you can have it all, can have an abundance of girlfriend grandmother getaways and also be the first call when there’s news, good or bad, in your grandchild’s life. I don’t know which is more important because I haven’t lived it yet.

A lot of elderly people get depressed because they lose their curiosity. They’ve outlived their friends, their rabbi, and the family doesn’t get together every Sunday anymore. So they live life waiting, not trying. They live life for the collect calls, meddling even when they know they shouldn’t, because it gives them something to do.

Right now, as a mother, as a granddaughter, as a mother with children who have grandparents, I’m siding with the "you are my brag because you were born" as being what matters most. It all goes by so fast. You have to squeeze it, and lick up every moment by paying attention.