Heps of Happiness

If you are craving laughter that doesn't involve meetings with Russians, you have got to read Paula Poundstone's new book, The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness.

Paula and I are kindred spirits.  If you are honest, most of you are kindred spirits with Paula Poundstone.  She reaches into my heart and tickles it.

I was so happy when she began to appear as a contestant on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me.  If you could do scans of my brain while listening to Paula, you'd see the happiness part light up over and over and over.  When she says something hilarious, I laugh because it is a combination of surprise and recognition.

For example, if you ask her how she ended up with sixteen cats, she will tell you she had fifteen and then got one more.

She does have sixteen cats, and a couple of dogs so that people will think of her as a pet lover rather than a cat lady.  She has three adopted kids.  She has wrestled with her own demons, and she has wrestled with her kids and her pets.

I believe the idea for this book came out of her appearances on Wait, Wait.  She stops the show frequently when Peter Segal describes the results of a scientific experiment to demand to know things like:  who on earth would think of this?  and:  why would you even want to measure that? and:  I would like to know just how they got somebody to do that.

Putting two and two together, she came up with the brilliant idea of unscientifically searching for happiness.  She tries exercise, the internet, organizing, movie day, volunteering and more, and pseudo-scientifically describes in great details and tangents the results.

Last night I dreamed of my son, who is nearly twenty-six.  In the dream he was somewhere around four.  His image in my dream was so real I woke up smiling.  But in the dream he had come up to me and asked me if I would listen to him read, and I (lovingly) told him that I didn't have time right now.  That is the effect of being let in to Paula Poundstone's family.  It is the acknowledging of infinite love and innumerable shortcomings.

This is Paula:

Alley chose a college in Oregon.  I drove her the seventeen hours from here to there in time for her freshman orientation before I realized, I can't do this every day.  So I just left her.

My daughter would recognize me in that story.

Paula decided her family needed a movie day.  I have lots of movie stories, but two stand out.

One day, we went to a matinee (lower price) of a horror movie.  They were advertising a horror double feature later that day.  So we went out and grabbed a burger and came back for two more horror movies.

Another time, when my daughter was reading Macbeth in class, I suggested we watch some movie versions.  There were three at the library, so we spent a day watching all three and comparing them.  None of us to my knowledge is a big fan of movies of Shakespeare's plays, and honestly it isn't my idea of fun, but that day was fun.

A couple of years ago, I saw Paula perform at the Charleston Music Hall.  She began by telling the audience that she would love to talk to us after the show.  And then she performed for two full hours.  I hope she enjoyed it as much as we did, and that she didn't do it because she just couldn't think how to stop talking.  At one point, she lay down on the floor, I think to show us her socks.

She always finds a person in the audience to talk to, which is why I specifically ask for a seat farther back.  It is amazing when this happens, but I believe I would be the person who just sat there, unable to say a word.

Paula wrote one other memoir, in 2004, titled There's Nothing In This Book That I Meant To Say.  This means that I could be 79 years old when she writes her next one.  I can't wait.

Meanwhile she has a new podcast, Live from the Poundstone Institute, in which she continues her unscientific studies.  So that will help me get by while I wait for her next book.

Today is my birthday.  I am not with my family, but I have been so happy to spend the time with Paula and her family.  Thanks, Paula, for all the heps of happiness you have sent my way.

Harry Potter and the Aging Parents

Imagine my surprise to hear that Harry Potter turned twenty in June.  We all remember where we were when tragedy happens; I think discovering Harry Potter is one of those few and precious unforgettable joyful memories.

I remember the review I read that prompted me to pick up the book at our wonderful Emma S. Clark Library.  And I remember reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on our patio in Stony Brook, Long Island, to my ten-year-old daughter and six-year-old son.  The dates don't seem to add up; it may have been an article about the book before the review, or it may just be magic.

It was always a beautiful summer day in my memory, so I will leave it as such.  In that following school year, in her sixth grade class, my daughter's teacher read the book to the students.

When we moved to Charleston in the fall of 1999, I began to volunteer at my son's school library.  When Harry and the Prisoner of Azkaban came out in 1999, the librarian, who was a wonderful woman who loved children and children's books, told me she would not be ordering a copy.  There were parents in the district who thought that the series was thought to advocate witchcraft, wizardry and... satanism.  She did not want to risk the can of worms that a challenge by an irate parent would open.  I was horrified.

But only a couple of years later, as an employee of the Charleston County Public Library, I saw that the tables had turned, and Harry Potter could not be stopped.  Not only were new books bought as soon as possible, but as soon as the book was on the library website, hundreds of requests for holds were placed.  In what I think was a questionable move on the administration's part, library employees were not allowed to place holds, not even when the book became available for hold to the public, until after the book was actually out and available.  No matter, it was one of the few purchases that was a given in my home.

I recall the excitement when the boxes came in to the branches, were loaded onto carts, as requests were filled and people came in to grab their copy.  I have never seen anything like it.

We had a tradition then in my family, that we would read the book together.  It is a tradition that I believe my daughter resents to this day.  Because she wanted to be first to read it, with all her friends.  I understand that now, but still put my foot down.  It was a family tradition that was golden, and I hated to let it go.  We sped the reading up, though, each of us grabbing the book to read chapters silently and then getting together at night to read one together.  A compromise, one I hope Antoinette understands.

Then there were the movies.  The search for Harry Potter.  Yes, I know I'm his mom, but there is no mistaking the resemblance:

I believe this is Harry with the Golden Snitch

Not just me -- for years his friends and even strangers would comment on Nik's resemblance to Harry Potter.

In 2004, I decided to start over, on my own, with Sorcerer's Stone.  I don't usually reread books; as the adage goes, "So many books, etc."  But this was special, and well worth it.

I know the play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, got great fanfare last year.  I read the book, and it was fine.  The movies were not as bad as the critics might lead one to believe.  But those seven books are miraculous.  They made our kids laugh and the dramatic adventures didn't just keep them on the edge of their seats, they were battles of right and wrong.  Kids that were averse to reading learned the pleasures that come from the pages of books.  They fired the imagination, created writers as well as readers.  They inspired independent and creative thought.  And they won the battle over censorship here in the town where my kids were growing up.

The other thing about Rowling's masterpiece is what the series did for children's literature.  Writers were inspired to write children's books that challenged the imagination.  Publishers, learning the lesson from those who had rejected Sorcerer's Stone, were willing to take a risk on new voices.  Stories were more courageous.

So, twenty years later, they may be fond memories for me and millions of others (and I may just take the time to read the series yet again), but Harry Potter and his adventures could be the most influential books in the history of children's literature.

So, if you haven't been to Hogwarts lately, you might just want to grab a handful of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, and that well-worn copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and enjoy the journey.

All I Know -- Mothers Day Ruminations

I became a psychologist, as many do, to find answers to my own questions.  Much of the time I can sort my way through my angst and agita, but right now I am at one of those points where there are just too many bits colliding.

Part of it has to do with missing family.  Part of it has to do with the chaos and destruction going on in a country which liberties I had taken for granted most of my life.  Right now quite a bit of it has to do with chronic pain, and the piece that makes all the other pieces throb: money.

I am a smart person, I was a good psychologist, later I had a job I loved at the library, but a combination throughout my life of bad luck and timing and tough decisions has meant that, except for very short periods, I have lived with financial insecurity.  And right now, there are unique aspects to this financial insecurity, not unique to me but unique in this later part of my life.

My mother's death in 1983, at 63 years old, was the first tectonic shift in my perspective of mortality.  Over the years after her dying, I realized that I had come to see my own life not moving past 63 years.  When my husband developed pancreatic cancer and died at age 77, my fear of death and denial-based perspective finally went out the window, but not in a bad way.  I would no longer play that game of, “when my daughter is _____ years old, I’ll be….”

Somewhat to my surprise, I turned a fairly healthy sixty-three.  And during Stephan’s dying, I talked and read about mortality.  Christopher Hitchens had died too young of cancer; Terry Pratchett was dying at the time, and gave us a last gift of allowing us to walk with him awhile as he approached his death.  Today, I don’t do that math game, but think more short-term of family visits.  I appreciate the fact that despite my bad knees and arthritic body, I am playing tennis again.  The most exciting part of which is the feeling of being totally in the moment:  watch the ball, anticipate your opponent’s next move, and get there.  When I am on the tennis court, I may occasionally spazz out as my hand loses its grip on the racket, and when I run I still don’t get there fast enough, but I feel more graceful than I do anywhere else in my life.  And for that, that I thought I had lost forever, I am grateful.

But over the years, even though I have exercised some discipline with a budget, there was always a little more savings.  I’ve always loved to get away, family visits and beach vacations, and even on a budget they have been times away that I lived for.  And then I realized that the savings were really finite.  And shrinking fast.  And the wolves in congress are circling the poor and middle class, which angered me but didn’t frighten me, until lately, as the dollars and cents of health care costs have been eating away at my savings.

I worry about leaving the house, more so since my old car, getting ready to roll over 200,000 miles, finally had that big breakdown that I knew was inevitable.  The getaway I had planned so I wouldn’t be at home alone on my birthday just wouldn’t work with the thousand dollar car repair.  The car repair is a gamble; if it is going to be the first of many I will be shoveling money into it that I should be spending on a “new” car, but if it is going to be fine for awhile, it is a bargain.

And yet, it is a bargain I can’t afford.  I can’t afford all the insurances that we all pay out, but I have to pay them out.  With less than 18 months left on my mortgage, that $500 a month is a modest cost for housing, but last year began with expensive plumbing repairs and ended with Hurricane Matthew finishing off my roof.

I am really, really good at stretching a dollar.  But at this point, the things I know I will need to cut are those things that give my life meaning.

I’ve talked in my other blog about the greed and ignorance by which most Americans are victimized, so I won’t go on about it here.

But that financial insecurity is at the root of the sadness and depression that play in the background of my life these days.  My desire to close myself off from others has more to do with the cost of leaving the house than any wish to be alone.  The anxiety of being stranded by my old car, exacerbated by the costly and somewhat frightening breakdown, can’t be understated, because that is my lifeline.  The cost to visit my family, all too busy and far away to come here, breaks my heart.

The mental math I try to avoid these days has to do with whether my meager savings will last as long as I do.  If I have a short few years remaining, I may not have to wrestle with running out of savings.  But I get tired, tired, tired of the acrobatics it takes to save a few dollars, only to get hit with an unavoidable bill that mocks the dollars saved:  after paying $300 for a fairly routine dental visit, I got a bill a few weeks later for $58.  No, it wasn’t a mistake.  No, they didn’t know why I hadn’t been billed at the time of the visit.  Did I want to split it into two payments?  No, I said, because I wasn’t going to have any more next month than this month.

And I don’t mind not living high.  I don’t need all that much.  But having to agonize over every dollar I spend wears me out more than the chronic joint pain.

So as I am sitting on the porch this beautiful Mother’s Day, I am wishing I had more energy and more joy.  I know I am not special.  In this time, in this country, too many of us share these anxieties.  My daughter and son won’t have the luxury of going from good job to good job the way I did; they won’t have the pensions, and maybe not even the social security that has been chipped away at for decades.  I was lucky to have savings so many others don’t have.  When the powerfully stupid went to war in Iraq and spent our fortunes, it was the fortunes of people like me and you, not the fortunes of the rich.  As they are about to do again.

And yet I am going to turn off my computer and go outside and continue to read a gripping mystery by a writer I enjoy immensely.  I may not find joy today, but I will sort my anxieties out here, and then put them aside for today.

And that is all I know.

Burnt Bologna Sandwiches and Other Comforts

When I realized a year ago just how much my frequent "really inexpensive" vacations were costing me, I decided it was time to stay home.  Of course, trips to visit family were non-negotiable, even though they weren't of the bargain variety.  But I have a comfortable home with a front porch where I can spend hours reading in my jammies in the mornings, and an old but wonderful pool where I do laps after dinner, as long as the season allows.  My liquor is well-stocked, as is my freezer.  I have hours and hours of movies on my DVR and a fresh supply of DVD's and books from the library every week.

So I haven't been to Hilton Head since my lovely Christmas on the beach last December,

and my last trip to the Gulf Coast of Florida was in April (I know, but I booked it way early the year before, and glad I did).  I am in the process of selling for peanuts my albatross of a time-share in North Carolina and, although I enjoyed 25 years of vacations there and elsewhere through exchanges, it will be a relief to no longer have that annual maintenance fee and the burden of renting it.

But everything I have is getting old, including me.  Last year I was dealing with shower faucets that leaked and when they finally got repaired in the spring turned out to be far more than crummy washers.  Then the cold water flow in my washing machine went down to a drizzle and I resorted to running pans of cold water through the kitchen for awhile before I got that fixed.

My five-year-old lawnmower wouldn't start, even after I did an honest-to-gods tune-up, leading me to imagine that it was the carburetor.  For the cost of a carburetor, I decided to get a new lawnmower.  To save the $75 delivery fee, I ordered it from Amazon.

I have a remote control for my bedroom light/fan that I had to resort to waving around in the air to get it to work and decided in the interest of not spending money that I would ignore it.  Then in the thick of the summer, the fan on my porch (where it was 80 degrees at 8 a.m.) went out, and I broke down and found an electrician to take care of both.

Then, in August, in the course of two weeks:  the toilet in the spare bathroom -- that nobody uses -- just started leaking and wasn't found out until the water flooded into the hallway; the toilet in my bathroom started to make strange, haunted sounds; and finally, when I reached under the bathroom sink for a roll of toilet paper, I found that the hose under the sink I don't use had all-by-itself sprung a leak, and soaked my Costco-sized supply of t.p.  A grunch of plumbing repairs.

And last week I noticed a small ceiling stain and the narrowest crack in the stucco ceiling in my bedroom.  I can almost remember noticing that years ago and having some roof tiles replaced, but I'm not sure.  Hurricane Matthew ought to resolve that question this weekend.

Are you exhausted yet?  I haven't even begun to complain about my own parts that are getting old and worn out.  Fortunately, when my blood pressure hit the ceiling and wouldn't come down, I eventually realized that it was because of my arthritis medication.  When I stopped taking the arthritis medication, the blood pressure went back to something closer to normal.  Leaving me with the option of joint pain or my head potentially exploding.  But, unlike the plumbing, I have learned to deal with body malfunctions philosophically.

So what does all that have to do with burnt bologna sandwiches?

Here I am, in Union, SC, a refugee from the hurricane.  I was resentful initially of having to spend money on a forced trip, but figure that it might be peanuts if Matthew has its way with Charleston.  So I booked this hotel quickly, the price was right, it was over 100 miles from the coast, and based on the photos it looked like it might be the best of the several two star hotels in the area.  In other words, for no really good reason.

Then I packed the essentials:  a bag of books, a bottle of gin, and my tennis racket and bag of old tennis balls.  And of course the less important stuff like toothbrush and undies.

I left sooner rather than later.  I hate being home alone when there are torrential rains -- the power inevitably goes out, which means no water, no phone, no internet -- and in the best of circumstances I am always a bit amazed when I can make it off my poorly maintained (read, not maintained at all) dirt road off Bears Bluff on Wadmalaw Island.

As Kinky Friedman would say, I left my cat in charge.  She is okay with that, she just assumes I am on another of my vacations.

The trip was slow but uneventful.  The proprietors of The Magnuson Hotel were friendly and welcoming.  We talked about what is happening in Charleston, past storms and past evacuations.  They were kind enough to let me be flexible about how long I needed to stay.  They gave some good restaurant tips.  Just next door is gas that is a few cents less than Charleston before Matthew, a diner, and a market where I can buy a six-pack if need be.  The pool was cold and green and closed, but I asked for (and got) one of the chairs so I can read outside my room.  And a couple miles away, a park with tennis courts.  HBO and TCM (the one without commercials), neither of which I can afford at home.

Once I checked in, I revved up my computer.  One of my home pages is The State newspaper and no longer feeling the urgency of the storm, I clicked on the headline "Where to Find SC's Best Fried Burnt Bologna Sandwiches."  Go ahead and laugh, but damned if one of the places mentioned wasn't Dairi-O in Union, SC!  And if that weren't enough, a check with TripAdvisor had raves about their soft ice cream (I have a soft spot for soft ice cream; you aren't surprised, are you?).

As I unpacked, I realized that sacrificing my vacations to save a few dollars just hasn't been working.  It is too much time at home agonizing over stuff breaking down, chores that have to be done, bills that have to be paid, stuff, stuff and more stuff.

When I'm away, if something breaks, somebody else fixes it.

When I'm away, the most stressful decision I have to make is where I am going to eat, or whether I should take a walk or go for a swim.

I absolutely don't need a fancy, expensive vacation.  A beach or a pool is nice.  A bag of books is essential.  I believe there is ALWAYS good food, and it is my challenge to find it.  But I really, really need to get away.  Regularly.  There are just times when I am the only old breaking down thing I want to have to deal with.

As for Dairi-O and their burnt bologna sandwiches, they are worth the trip.

Hello... I Am an Old Woman

Hello, My Name Is Doris with Sally Fields has gotten a lot of acclaim.  Unfortunately, it is along the lines of the Rotten Tomato review that Fields' character has "geriatric gusto."

I was not at all surprised to find that the director is a man, who sadly co-wrote the script with a young woman.  As an old woman (a few years younger than Fields) I think I need to toss my two cents into the hat.

Sally Fields is a great actress.  Apparently they couldn't find a woman who looked the age of the character -- Fields, maybe thanks to the drugs she advertises -- looks like she could be half her age.  And she is gorgeous.  Because, as with women's roles throughout history, you can't have a homely woman.  You can have fat, ugly men, but the woman they end up with is always, always, gorgeous.  And thin.

So here she is playing Doris, who many years ago gave up her hopes and dreams to take care of her mother.  Like her mother, she is a pack-rat.  She has lived in the same house all her life.  She has had the same job for much of her life, even though the company has been remade with the times, with a younger, hipper staff.  Because these young folk are good guys, they have grandfathered -- or grandmothered -- her job into their new plans.  Their new plans include replacing office chairs with exercise balls.

What everybody seems to find so exciting and refreshing about this movie is that Doris still has sexual desires and fantasies.  Imagine that.  And what makes it a comedy and also poignant at the same time of course is that she ends up with a steamy crush on the newest hot, young member of the staff.

Moments after her mother's funeral, Doris' brother and wife start to pressure her to get rid of the junk, sell the house and move on.  Suddenly concerned about her welfare as they hadn't been in all the years Doris had taken care of mom.  And now telling Doris what she needed to do to join the  world.

This reminds me of the book, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, by Roz Chast,

which also got great acclaim.  Here too you have a couple of old folks who have gone along planning and living their lives quite adequately, and now that they are old, here comes their annoyed and annoying daughter.  She is annoyed at all that they have collected.  She is annoyed that they live so far away.  She is apparently annoyed that, as their only child, she feels responsible for them.

So too, from moments into the movie, the aggrieved brother-and-wife duo step in to tell her what she needs to do to fix her life.  I was not happy.  I cheered when she threw them out of the house, asserting her right to her memories and the stuff that reflects those memories.

And then she develops this instant crush on her new fellow employee.  With hot fantasy scenes.

I imagine these scenes were so delightful because they were irreverent and also made us all so uncomfortable.  Even though, in my humble opinion, Fields is so much more attractive than Greenfield.  And she does pull off making Doris' venture into the indie music scene great fun, although the undercurrent is always that it is the old woman's young behavior that makes her so fascinating.

Let me just put this into its proper perspective.  Flip the gender, and all we would have is another old man/young woman relationship.  Nothing to look at here.  I can think of an awful lot of older men/ younger women relationships that totally gross me out.  In fact, that whole fat ugly man attracting a gorgeous woman stereotype also puts me off.

I don't find the crush cute.  The fantasy sex scenes are uncomfortable not because they are of an older woman wanting to make love to a younger man, but because they reinforce how bizarre it is for an older woman to want to make love to a younger man.  Ageism is indeed a woman's burden, and I find it tiresome and offensive.

So how about a movie about an old woman written by an old woman?  About a woman who when her family tells her to sell her stuff and go quietly, she tells them to fuck off.

This surely wasn't the movie.  In the end, when Doris faces the fact that her love wasn't reciprocated, she grows up.  She gets rid of all the clutter and moves out of the family home, I imagine so a real family can take possession of all that space to which she is not entitled.  She leaves her job to the young innovators.  In a final act of rebellion, she does throw the exercise ball at her young boss.  And in a final nod to just how awkward this whole crush has been, she apologizes once more, he doesn't speak, she has one more romantic fantasy, and then, as the elevators close, he calls for her.  OMG, maybe he really is having second thoughts about their future.  Or maybe the screenwriters/director wanted us old ladies to have something to hold onto as the credits roll.

No thank you.  I'll just wait for the role where Sally Fields rejects the smitten young guy who sees her for the hot, fascinating woman she really is.  

Put Down the Damned Pocketbook!

I have watched an awful lot of horror movies over the years.  When I first lived by myself, I wasn't able to read Stephen King or watch a horror movie after dark.  Now that I've pretty much seen it all, zombies, exorcisms, Freddy Krueger, that after dark rule no longer exists.  I do, however, have a loose rule that, from my stack of library DVD's, the horror movie gets watched on Sunday night.  Maybe a throwback to my Catholic heritage.  Like the white guys in my neighborhood that pull out their guns for target practice on Sundays.

If you've watched enough of the genre, you know the devices.  Each new generation of horror had to give a new twist, so the hands coming out of the grave at the end of Carrie, totally terrifying, had to be bested by subsequent directors just to stay a couple of steps ahead of the horror aficionados.

Even before Carrie scary sounds and subtle sights -- banging on the walls and creaking doors, lights flickering -- would be enough to build suspense.  Alfred Hitchcock knew how to mine that technique.  Back in those black and white days, with the exception of the shower scene in Psycho, women crept about old houses looking for the source of the strange sound, in high heels and toting their purses.  "Put the damned pocketbook down!" we wanted to yell, and by the way, run in the other direction, you idiot.  What fun.

Then there was The Blair Witch Project, which in 1999, turned horror movies upside down with a brand new twist:  the video camera.  Back in those days, I waited till a family friend, also of Catholic heritage, came to visit; we needed the security of each other's company to brave this insane new flight into terror.

These days I just yell at the TV, "Put down the damn video camera."  It has become such an intrusion, such a cheap gimmick, such a cop-out that I can't believe how many movies continue to get made with the camera as the central character.

I have in the past been a huge fan of M. Night Shyamalan, as appears to also be true of The Nightly Show's Larry Wilmore, who masks his disappointment by stumbling over the writer/director's name as he insults his movies.  If you loved The Sixth Sense, you just have to keep hoping that in the next movie he will rediscover his genius.

So with that hope in my heart, last night I watched The Visit.  Two fairly obnoxious, all-too-clever-for-their-own-good kids spend a week with grandparents they have never met because of a falling out with their mom.  The older child has the pretension of being a film maker, and thus is able to carry a video camera around with her throughout the movie.

Even stupider, I think, running away from something that is supposed to be terrifying while running a camera on it, right?  Also, while crawling around in the crawl-space.  Preposterous "interviews" with grandma and granddad, not to mention brother and even herself, was just about the clumsiest expository technique -- and done poorly -- that I've ever seen.

Here's the thing.  I think the movie had the potential to be great.  Turns out the plot was terrific, and each step towards the plot twist worked.  Except for the damned camera.  It was a totally cheap device.  To make the movie without the camera doing all the exposition would have taken work.  The kind of work Shyamalan did in The Sixth Sense.  That made you want to watch the movie again immediately so you could follow all the clues you missed.

But he didn't do that.  And while I'm glad I resisted the urge to turn off the TV after a few minutes of watching the two precocious kids toting their camera around, I really, really wish I could see this movie done right.

I continue to hope that the video camera conceit will go away, and maybe it will.  But I'm afraid what is going to replace it will not be pretty.  There have already been a couple of horror movies that feature internet and iPhone chats.  And can you possibly imagine anything more boring than reading an iPhone chat in order to follow the stalkings of some nasty creature?  On the other hand, imagine a scene where a bunch of teens are Skyping and the movie monster sneaks up behind and clocks them with a purse.  Truly satisfying revenge horror.

Where the Son Doesn't Shine

His sister talked early, read early, wrote early.  She charmed us all.  Just as it is with most second children, he didn't work as hard because he didn't have to.  He told us he would learn his ABC's when he started pre-k, and he did.  There was a chance that he wouldn't be let into the pre-school because he wasn't yet toilet trained, but that happened as soon as he found out it was a condition of starting school.  Then he said he would learn to read when he started kindergarten, and he did that.  He made up stories but didn't write them down, because his sister wrote them for him, and he supplied the drawings.

We knew he was smart, the way parents know their kids are smart, the way his sister was smart.  There was an odd intensity, though.  He was in his own head much of the time, what could be called daydreaming, although it wasn't to the point that he would withdraw from us.  At some point he learned how to do cartwheels and would spend what seemed like hours in the backyard doing cartwheels.  That turned into what we soon called "bouncing," where he would seem to throw himself from one place to another, again seeming to be wrapped (or rapt) in his own thoughts.  He bounced in the yard, and in the house, and as he grew bigger, I would from time to time resort to yelling to him to "stop BOUNCING!"

In school he had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then not having a clue why he was in trouble.  The other kids that had begun whatever trouble it was had known to stop when the teacher showed up, but not my son.  He was in the wrong place at the wrong time in his first year of high school and ended up getting arrested (a lie by a school bully and no clue as to how to defend himself).  The charges got thrown out, as did the bully by the end of that school year.

My son had a strong sense of right and wrong, and would not be pushed around.  That got him a punch in the nose and a detention in middle school, although the teacher that witnessed the altercation totally supported him for defending himself against the other kid.  It was his refusal to be pushed around that led to the false accusations that got him arrested in high school.  To this day he has strong feelings about justice, although since his arrest he has learned not to physically push back.

When we learned he wasn't just smart but brilliant I don't think we were surprised.  It was just a part of who he was.  He had his father's ability to recall details, and I imagine he spent a lot of time thinking about the way things worked.  I can only imagine that, because he didn't talk about it.  I do take responsibility for not fostering a desire for adventure, for the urge to experiment.

When we moved south he was not yet eight and I decided I would remedy my overly cautious parenting.  I bought an old phone at Goodwill and told him he could take it apart.  We sat at the kitchen table and he took up some tool or other.  He touched something in that phone and got such a shock that he ended up on the floor.  I believe that was the last time I tried to encourage him to throw caution to the wind.

In fact, during a summer research program after his first year at Harvard he showed me his research lab and I am ashamed to say that my overriding impulse was to tell him to be careful.  I am an idiot.

But he has adapted his genius to his upbringing and is pursuing a career in theoretical research.  And he continues not to talk much, to me.  I was surprised the first time I heard him engaged in a telephone conversation with his sister.  He paced around the house and talked non-stop.

He doesn't do that with me.  In fact, I send him emails which he mostly ignores.  Unless I ask him a practical question, for example about my computer, which he may answer, but in five words or less.  And he ignores follow-up questions, so I need to get it right the first time.

I don't know how to feel about my son.  I get angry and frustrated that he doesn't have any desire to talk to me.  I have absolutely no clue what he thinks of me, or who he thinks I am.  We have comedy and movies in common.  We share much the same political views.  He is learning to cook and seems to enjoy it.  But we rarely talk about any of that.  When he came home for longer than a few days we would do an elaborate cooking project together, but he's never here long enough anymore.

He doesn't tell me when he plans to see me until shortly before I see him, and no explanation from me of how I need to know if he is coming so that I can plan will move him any faster.  I don't know if he comes to see me because he wants to or because he feels obligated, or because he has no better offer.  I do know that when I see him he doesn't say much.  It is awkward.  At first I tell myself that's just the way he is, and I go about my business.  But then I wrestle with feelings of insecurity, because it appears not only do my grown children not need me, they no longer care whether they see me or not.  They don't seem to like me much.  And then I get angry.  And after it's all over, I berate myself for making a big deal out of it, so I get to feel bad about myself all over again.

Since Christmas, when my son graced me with his presence (and his silence) for a few days, I have gotten one brief email from him in response to several I sent him.  I asked a computer question and then a personal question (how are you doing...).  He responded to the computer question.  Follow up emails went unanswered.

So now I wonder whether I should call him or not.  On rare occasions (I know we both remember them because he referred to them during our argument at Christmas) we have had engaging conversations, but mostly it feels like pulling teeth.  And I don't want that.

I want us to talk freely, because that is what I usually do.  I assume that if we are not talking freely that:  1) it is because he doesn't want to talk to me, and 2) that it is my own fault.

And then a part of me says that I would never, ever try so hard to maintain such a frustrating relationship with anyone else in the world.

But he is my son, and I recall him bouncing in the backyard, and telling stories that his sister would write down.  And I even remember him on my lap, and I remember hugging him and making him laugh, and laughing with him.

So I keep trying.