Stay The Fuck Away From Me, World

As my wife and I walked hand-in-hand up the path to the front door of my parents’ house, we spied an unfamiliar sticker affixed to the screen door.

If my mother could be summed up in a sticker, it would be this one.

Fearful, paranoid, constantly warding off the evil eye or evil bacteria or evildoers in general, she is a 5’2” hundred-odd-pound bundle of anxiety with stylish short hair and librarian glasses.

And, we love her. And not just because yesterday was Mother’s Day either.

Being greeted as we were by this new sticker last night made me smile, because nothing says “my mother” quite like a “stay the fuck away from me, world” sticker on the front door that’s approximately a full foot tall. If she could enclose the property in razor-wire without it looking institutional, she would do it. Because, really—why take a chance?

We do not take chances in my family. In fact, when my wife texted me while I was at work Saturday to let me know that she had an idea percolating about something special to do next weekend to celebrate my birthday, this was my reply:

“As long as it doesn’t involve me performing and/or socializing too much, or potentially risking my life or our lives outside of the normal risks, you should be okay. I love you.”

Ah, good old genetics. Thanks for those hand-me-down worry-warts, Mom.

Not only are my parents proudly displaying this boldly-hued burglar warning on their screen-door, they had two more of them, they had two more of them, in case my sister and I wanted one for either or both of our houses.

I politely declined. The previous owners of our house, also apparently scared straight by the wicked world, had already placed an older version of this sticker on our front door years ago. My sister declined because she’s an asshole.

The previous owners of our house also have metal grates on the basement windows, three locks on the basement door, and auxiliary locks on all the windows in the house, operated by small keys. I think we must be distantly related.

I love my mom and her paranoia and her fears, many of which I have inherited. While I don’t wake up covered in sweat after having nightmares about thousands of half-naked Koreans storming the beach like she does, I am, basically, afraid of everything. Seeing that sticker on the front door of their house reminded me of the day when I was in fifth grade and I stayed home from school sick. And I called the police because some scruffy-looking guy was crawling through our bushes in front of our house. Three radio cars with emergency lights ablaze responded in under three minutes. When he didn’t comply with their directions fast enough, he was taken down.

It was the guy from the water company trying to read our meter.

I was worried that, when my mother got home from work and found out what I'd done, that I'd gotten a menial public servant thrown to the ground because I was a tightly-wound, neurotic child who watched far too much "Rescue, 911" for his own good, that I would get in trouble, that she would be disappointed in me, ashamed of me, mad at me, bewildered and confused by me. But she wasn't any of those things. She held me close and said,

"I'm very proud of you-- I'd have done exactly the same thing."

Of course she would have.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love your crazy, I love your sticker, and I love you.

The Piano Man

"Why did your grandparents buy that piano in the first place?" my wife asked me in Borders while she was thumbing through a lavishly illustrated book on bathroom remodeling, "did they just get it to match the living room shades?"

At first, this question struck me as rather odd and possibly even slightly offensive. Lately, my wife has exhibited an observably decreased tolerance for criticism or joking surrounding her parents, and I suppose I've gotten a little touchier and protective of my family, too, of late. I don't know why, though. Some peoples' skin gets thicker over time, some peoples' doesn't. In any event, I've learned to lift a lighter foot when issues about my wife's family come up, and I usually save my harshest critiques for when my wife's younger sister is visiting, because she's usually game for that sort of thing.

Anyway, the more I thought about my wife's question about my family piano, the more logical it became. I thought about my grandfather, and that man barely had the manual skill-set required to work a motor vehicle, so I doubt very much he had the coordination and touch, much less the inclination, to manipulate the black-and-whites of a piano. My grandmother was much too ill and, with her "crippled" hand, piano-playing was not really part of the deal for her. Then I thought about their kids. My uncles were only happy when running around our old neighborhood wearing coonskin hats and playing at Davey Crockett or Injun' Joe or whatever the fuck it was kids in the 1950s ran around neighborhoods doing. My mother, who was known t don a coonskin cap herself on occasion, was the only child with musical ability, though I have a hard time picturing my grandfather plunking down serious waddage for a piano just for her.

I mean, she was a girl. She wasn't worth a college education, and she certainly wasn't worth a piano. Let's be real here, people.

So, realistically speaking then, the only possible conclusion we can draw here is that my grandparents purchased the black upright Gulbransen for their house because it matched the asian-inspired rice-paper and black wood window shades. If you want to get really cynical about it all, they most likely bought this piano because their interior decorator told them to.

"I think," I said to my wife as she turned to a page in the book showing a thoroughly ornate and orange bathroom, complete with pumpkin-hued bidet, "that, in that time, upper-middle-class Jewish living rooms were supposed to have fireplaces, Ben Shahn paintings, and pianos. And my grandparents' living room had all three."

While I have trouble believing she was the intended recipient, my mother was was definitely the first beneficiary of the piano. She had perfect pitch, was a quiet, humble star in choir, and was recommended for a spot at the prestigious Interlochen summer music program, to which, of course, my grandfather refused to send her. Again, his stoic logic was, "why waste money on her? She's just going to get knocked up and/or married at seventeen anyway."

This, by the way, is exactly what happened. But that's a whole other blog post.

No doubt my mother played piano and my grandfather grudgingly paid for lessons for her, but her at one time assuredly sonorous voice went nowhere and she got a job stringing tennis rackets in a pro shop while my eldest sister played happily under the counter, until she finally found her calling as a librarian. My sister, now 41, no longer plays under the counter, though I'm sure she's inquired about the possibilities.

My wife and I have talked, since we moved into our own home and even before, on and off about getting a piano for ourselves. My wife took piano lessons from first through eighth grade, though she rarely ever practiced. I took piano from I think fourth or fifth grade through seventh grade, though I'm fuzzy on the details.

If you asked her, I'm sure my piano teacher would be equally fuzzy on the details, as she would be if you asked her any question, including what color car she drives or what her middle name is. Francine* (*name changed, lawsuit possible) was, and probably still is, operating under an alcohol-shrouded haze. I didn't know what the brownish liquid in the tumblers that sat on the piano beside us was, go-juice that she sipped gaily as my lessons proceeded, and I didn't know what drunk elderly ladies behaved like back when I was nine, but I now know that Francine was undoubtedly shitsmacked during most if not all of my piano lessons. The notes that she scrawled on my sheet music were totally indecipherable and looked as if they were written by a mentally-challenged person with Parkinsons who wrote them whilst driving a bulldozer. She was always dressed in a pastel-colored muumuu by 5:30. Sometimes, while I played "Stars" from "Les Miserables" or Loesser's "If I Were a Bell," Francine would dance laconically and disturbingly around her living room, twirling her muumuu behind her. Francine's house was dark, musty, unwelcoming and smelled like the stuffing of a Victorian fainting couch inside of which a mouse had excreted itself and perished somewhere around 1885.

My mother was in the habit in those days of dropping me off for my lessons. One day, midway into my 7th grade year, I began to catch on that something was amiss with my teacher, and I asked my mother to stay and observe a lesson, as I was somewhat prone in those days to telling tall tales, and I thought maybe my mom should see this spectacle with her own eyes. She agreed, and that was my last piano lesson.

Now that I'm doing Gilbert & Sullivan operettas with some degree of regularity, and now that my wife has gotten the musical itch back under her skin, a piano seemed to be worth chatting about. I got an email at my office last week that a woman wanted to donate a small spinet piano to the place where I work. Because we already have a piano on every floor, we really had no need for one there, but I asked her if she would consider selling it to me and my wife. She said she would, and, yesterday we went to go on a date with this little guy, and it appears that he wants to come home with us.

Well, he wants to come with the piano movers, that is. I mean, he's small, but he's not that small.

And so our slow, determined march on the road to Jewish upper-middle-classdom has taken another plod. We already have a fireplace, but it's fake. Just like any Ben Shahn we would ever put on our walls, if we had wall-space.

See You in Heaven

Because I live less than half a mile away from my parents house, I have the good fortune to be over there a lot. I'm not sure that many other people would consider such proximity to be fortuitous, but I do.

My wife and I were at my parents house on Sunday for a combined Mother's Day/Masonic Apron Birthday celebratory dinner. My father, who is a late bloomer in the kitchen, cooked his traditional garlic-swathed vegetables and succulent shrimp. (A side note: Yes, he is Israeli, and yes, shrimp are not kosher. We do what we want.)

My oldest sister was in attendance at the dinner, and, being the gossip maven, she kept me abreast of the latest important developments in our small little world:

1.) My aunt and uncle are selling their house, which burned to the ground in 2005 while my aunt was drunk and napping in the bathtub. She only survived because a neighbor saw the fire and ran into the house and got her out. They used the insurance money, and a lot of other money that wasn't theirs, to rebuild greater and grander than before. The house is going for $1.4 million. Cash or check. Paper or plastic.

2.) There is a Cryptosporidium outbreak in Montgomery County. Why does my sister know this? Why, because she elected to receive text message and e-mail alerts from the Montgomery County Health Department to aide in scaring the bejesus out of her, obviously.

Cryptosporidium, by the way, "a gastrointestinal illness caused by parasitic protozoa of the genus Cryptosporidium and can produce watery diarrhea lasting 1--3 weeks; one or two cases per 100,000 population are reported annually in the United States. Fecal-oral transmission of Cryptosporidium oocysts occurs through ingestion of contaminated drinking or recreational water, consumption of contaminated food, and contact with infected persons or animals (e.g., cattle or sheep)."

This information is taken, obviously, from the email message that she forwarded to me the following day. I have since taken steps to limit my intimate contact with cows and sheep, as well as putting the kabash on fecal-oral activities.

Thanks, sis.

If you weren't discussing gastrointestinal diseases at the dining room table at your Mother's Day celebration, I have no doubt that you were at least chit-chatting about death and cemetery plots. No? You're weird. We were.

I forget exactly how it came up-- I think we were talking about my Great Aunt who is currently living in Florida with her 3rd husband, who is 92 years old, in excellent physical condition, but whose brain is being turned into a cottage-cheese-like mixture, not by Hulu, but by Alzheimers. He is uncontrollable. When the two of them go out to dinner, he routinely approaches young, beautiful women and advises them to have sex with him, regardless of whether or not they are already accompanied by a gentleman caller. When my parents visited them in Florida last month, my father complained that the kitchen chair on which he was sitting was very hard. My Great Uncle cried, "AH! Like my PENIS!"

Always an Olympic-level alcoholic, this tendency has only increased with his Alzheimers. Where he used to begin drinking at two or three in the afternoon, my Great Uncle will now commence libation activities at around 9am, consuming twelve to fourteen glasses of vodka or gin (that are watered down with futility by my Great Aunt.)

"You know, she's going to leave him there (in Florida) when he dies," my father said to us at the Mother's Day dinner.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, not entirely surprised.

"Yeah," my father said, smiling mischieveously, "she said that the second he's in the fucking ground she's moving back to Philadelphia."

"Well, where will she be buried?" my sister asked while conducting a necropsy on her eviscerated piece of shrimp.

"With my parents, with us," my mother said with irritation.

"With us, huh? Where the hell are "us"?" I asked.

"My parents are in Frazier."

"Is that where you're going?" I asked.

"I'm going to Heaven," my mother answered with all the confidence of someone announcing that they were going to Trenton or to the gas station.

"Oh, really?" I asked, amused.

"Yes," she answered, cracking a smile.

"Wow. I didn't realize that's where you were going. I guess I should engage in more air travel after you're dead, maybe I'll see you out the fucking window."

My mother laughed at that.

"Sure, you will. I'll be floating around the clouds."

I stared at her.

"Hey, it's better than thinking I'll be stinking and rotting in the ground."

"Well, yeah, you got me there," I said. My father continued eating, no doubt completely disengaged from the current conversation. My father is like HD-TV. Sometimes he's totally tuned in and impressive, and then *poof!* the signal goes out.

"What exactly is it that makes funerals so expensive," my sister pontificated, "is it that people haven't pre-purchased their plots, or is it the service, or.... I mean, what is it?"

"Well, I think part of it is the fucking casket, for Christ's sake," I blurted out. "I mean those fucking boxes alone are, like, $3,000."

"Really?" my sister asked, stunned. I was surprised she hadn't already exhaustively researched and vetted them on Consumer Reports.

"Really," I said, "and those aren't even the ones with power windows."

I asked my mother if they had their plots purchased.

"Yup. Picked out, purchased and paid for."

I admired her businesslike attitude about the whole thing. She's always been a no-nonsense type person, like Margaret Thatcher without the business suits, handbags and cool accent. I guess it was her stoic practicality that made her comment about ascending upwards in a white robe to hobnob with St. Peter and Gandhi so surprising to me. My mother can smell bullshit a mile-and-a-half away and no greater bullshit story has ever been written to surpass Heaven. If there is a Heaven, my mother will be there. I just hope they'll let me have visitation sessions.

Ten or so minutes later, the conversation had moved onto another topic-- God knows what-- I think my wife was putting my sister onto the Consumer Report hunt for a new gas stove for us. In a week, we will have a dossier on ovens bigger and more detailed than J. Edgar Hoover's file on Marilyn Monroe. Ever the perseverator, I turned to my mother.

"So, let's say you decide to get cremated and have your ashes spread in the ocean. If I go snorkeling, will I see you?"

Mother Apron

Lots of my bloggie pals participate in a phenomenon widely known as "TMI Thursdays" where they regale their readers with blush-inspired OMG, LMT offerings from their unfortunate days of yore. Because the vast majority of my blog entries already offer up what most people who don't live underneath cars would classify as too much information, I feel little reason to engage in the TMI Thursday clique.

That said, in recognition of rapidly approaching Mother's Day, I'll use today's Blog Entry #2 to chat about my mother, and to formally nominate her for whatever the Jewish equivalent of sainthood might be. "Jewhood" doesn't sound quite right-- I keep seeing images of gritty, downtown Yonkers.

And so, as much as I hate the idea of having my mind and my blog controlled by Hallmark, I wouldn't be a very good mama's boy if I didn't compose an eloquent paean to my mother dearest, so here we go:

I get a little overwhelmed when I try to think about something to write about my mother. Writing about my father is easy. His personality, his questionable grasp of the finer points of technology and the English language (paternal text message regarding dog-sitting: "Finley wasGREAT. He ate at 4;30. I know he slept good. He made a very healthy BB .i should have taken a photo and mail it to the art museum. R u on the way? love dad mcnab") make him pretty prime material. I mean, be fair: how can mom mcnab compete with that?

My mother is quiet wisdom. She doesn't speak much (because it's impossible to do so when my father is, and he usually is) but, when she does, it's memorable, important and funny. She's a Jewish mother, but she's not. She doesn't obsess about when we're having babies (she's never mentioned it to me or my wife once), she doesn't ply us with food ("Eat, nu?!") and she doesn't insist that we cook her recipies, although my wife makes me her chicken approximately thrice annually. She's traditional, but she's not. She couldn't care less that the man my sister is dating isn't Jewish, but she is very displeased about the fact that my sister is pregnant and unmarried.

She told me around ten years ago that all she ever wanted to be was a mother. She got her chance probably earlier than she would have liked, at around seventeen. Nobody but her really knows all the details, and I guess nobody but her really needs to. When my father came into the picture, and the other guy went distinctly out of the picture, my father adopted my sister and that, my friends, was that. It's funny-- she was married when she had her first child, but it didn't help. I suppose, if it's to the wrong man, marriage offers very little of the protection, security and comfort it advertises.

My father and my sisters and I have put my mother through a lot. He, without telling her, depleted their entire savings and pumped the money into his failing business in a psychotic effort to keep his feet from getting wet on the deck of the Titanic. That was almost fifteen years ago. Eventually, he broke and admitted to her what he'd done. She was furious, but they worked it out and, all these years later, his work phone still rings and the lights still come on. My sisters are a ripe pair. One has emotional issues stemming basically from day one, and spends her day endlessly obsessing about probiotics, product recalls and emergency broadcast system alerts-- the other one is, well, unmarried and pregnant.

And then there's me. I kept her consistently harried throughout my youth as I showed her mole after rash after mole after rash in a seemingly endless quest to identify a phantom life-threatening illness. I was constantly pestering her with the most bizarre interrogatives, such as,

"Mommy, if someone throws up into someone else's mouth, would the other person have a heart attack?" Age 5.

and:

"When did Zayda have his first thrombosis?" Age 7 or 8

and, the big winner:

"If two gay men kiss each other hard enough, do their mustaches fall off?" Age 6

I bothered her ceaselessly with questions about death, craving her knowledge, her opinions, her best time estimate of her own demise ("so I can prepare myself") and I even went so far as to ask her to speculate about what I might die of. She didn't answer. I think we all know I'm going to stroke out majorly.

I thought her life would come to an end on the day I announced that I was going to enter the police academy. And, you know what? It probably did. I guess it restarted when I dropped out.

I can remember one day in 2006 when I was sitting in the ambulance while my partner was asleep inside the fire station where he volunteered. It was snowing outside and I had the radio on the dashboard in case we got a call. My cellphone rang and it was her, checking in. I hadn't been on the streets for very long, probably a month or two and she wasn't very crazy about this particular line of work either. Uniforms and badges and lights and sirens are not for Jewish boys to play with, you know. I was curious about her feelings, as I always was as a boy. We always want to know what our mothers are thinking, and if they love us.

"Are you proud of me?" I asked. I wasn't fishing for compliments-- there was, in my mind, a very real possibility that she was disappointed in me for not becoming a writer, or an actor, or a teacher. There was a little sigh on the other end of the phone.

"I'm always proud of you," she said.

A couple years later, after I completed my Master of Education program, I got a chance to become a teacher for a month. A private, Catholic girl's school was looking for a substitute for an English teacher who was going out for a month to have surgery for cancer. It didn't look good, and there was a very real prospect that, if I did well, it would lead to a permanent appointment for eighth grade English. On a stellar recommendation from my employer, glowing references and a relatively un-awkward interview, I was hired to start May 1 and finish out the schoolyear.

I used my full bag of tricks from my M.Ed. program, as well as some tricks of my own. I had the girls singing Gilbert & Sullivan songs to boost their lackluster vocabularies. They did freewrites inspired by quotes from authors like William Blake and Mark Twain-- on subjects such as sacrifice, human nature, happiness and heroism. They did creative final projects that emphasized their multiple intelligences-- some drew comics, some did monologues or scenes, some did diary entries, some did formal reports. The girls excelled and flourished, and we had a solid rapport. They were so obsessed with structure and formality, with what color pen they were "supposed" to use, and I can remember one of them getting so worked up for handing me a freewrite with the paper chads still attached from her notebook.

"Relax," I said, "this is school, it isn't the military. I'm concerned with the content of your papers, not with whether or not you used black ink or purple ink. That doesn't change your ideas, does it?"

Of course not. But that was the culture I had entered-- where they were scared stiff to be different, themselves. I had no idea, for example, the unchartered, revolutionary waters I would be stirring by arranging the desks in a circle, as opposed to the rather Draconian straight rows. I can recall one or two of the girls gasping upon entering the classroom for the first time.

I admit that I felt a little out of my element in the affluent Catholic school, being neither affluent or Catholic, but I did fine. I couldn't stand the bitter, catty exchanges about the students that were favorite lunch-time conversation topics amongst the careworn old hagithas on staff-- so I often ate lunch alone in my room during a free period.

On my final day as their teacher, I asked the girls to write me some feedback. "It's my first time teaching," I told them, "and I have a lot to learn from you, too." I told them that their feedback, their critiques of our time together would be most helpful in my future teaching endeavors.

"It can be anonymous," I said, "though I can probably figure you all out by now by your handwriting." They laughed. I went home that day with my briefcase full of their comments, which I said I would read at home. I told them I would be back Thursday for their graduation ceremony.

The next morning, the Head Penguin called me at home.

"We've found something on your... your Google," she said to me. What? I didn't understand what she was saying. But then it became clear. Someone had been Googling me and had found a personal essay I wrote ten years ago, when I was single, dating, and horny. Foul language. You know me well enough by now to know the kind of stuff we're talking about.

"I don't think I need to tell you that you are not welcomed back here. I also understand that you have intentions of attending graduation. Do not return here."

I asked for an opportunity to speak, and she said, "Sure, say whatever you want."

"That piece of writing is a piece of fiction that is a decade old. I'm rather shocked to think that I am being judged and persecuted based on an old piece of creative writing. It has absolutely no bearing on my conduct at the school, which has been professional and of the highest caliber at all times."

"I have no evidence to the contrary," she said, "the girls have said only wonderful things about you. Goodbye."

And she hung up. And I sat in my desk chair for a solid hour, frozen. Horrorstruck. Blindsided. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Ridiculous. Destroyed.

Now you know why I write my blog under a pseudonym. Because this is the world in which we live.

I told my wife the day it happened, and she was furious at the school for crucifying me-- something Catholics know a lot about, I suppose. I told my best friend. I even told some not-so-best friends. The one I couldn't tell was my mother. I was too scared she wouldn't be proud of me anymore.

I kept it inside for almost a year. At every family function, every time I saw her, I wanted to cry and confess what had happened to her-- because I can't lie to my mother. But I couldn't do it. I made up some story about how they decided to hire someone else for the following school year. Whatever. It didn't matter.

Finally, one day a couple months ago I drove to my mother's house when I knew she would be home in the middle of the day. She and I were sitting in the living room talking and she got up to go to the basement to do laundry.

When she comes back, I said to myself, I'm just going to tell her.

And I did.

"You know," she said, "I'm not surprised. That's how those people are."

"Aren't you ashamed of me?" I asked.

"They're the ones who should be ashamed, not you. You just did something naive-- stupid. They did something cruel and malicious. They don't care about protecting those girls. They care about protecting their goddamn money."

She shook her head.

"You're probably the best teacher those girls will ever have at that fucking school."

The 60 or so sheets of feedback from those girls, written in their pens of purple and pink and green and red, chads hanging off some, little hearts floating above the "i's" on some, would seem to concur with her. I know that no matter how zealous I get about spring cleaning and minimalist living, I'll never throw those papers out. Never.

I think it's very telling that what I was afraid of most from this whole sad affair was not losing my position at that school, or not being psychologically prepared to enter a classroom again, or obscuring my online identity so that I could continue to write with honesty and humor, but it was my stomach-rattling fear of disappointing my mother.

I said to my wife one day a while ago in reference to this incident that I didn't think I would be able to truly move on from it until I 1.) told my mother about it and 2.) wrote about it. I couldn't do the latter without achieving the former, and I have my patient, perceptive, supportive, surprising mother to thank, as always.

Happy Mother's Day.