Dating Lesson Number 1

I promised a new friend, whom I met through work and who has a website dedicated to the concerns of single women (http://singlemindedwomen.com), that I would occasionally pollute my blog with some of my dating experiences. Bear in mind that most of these were in the 80’s, after my second marriage collapsed. I was in my late 30’s-early 40’s, working at first, then in grad school for two years, then working again. This was in Buffalo, and I have named no names (to protect the guilty).

If you’re one of my sons reading this, it might be in your best interest to suddenly remember that you have something really important to do and won’t get back to my blogs for the next month or so.

I have no intention of turning this into a tell-all kind of thing, because I know that my boys think I’m as pure as the driven snow, so I do need to keep it neat. That being said...

Without a doubt, the sleaziest man I dated was a guy I’d met from my downstairs neighbors at a party they had. He sounded intelligent when I talked with him, and he wasn’t an Adonis by any stretch, but not hard on the eyes either. I liked him, but of course this was before I knew him! Around this time I bought my very first answering machine, taped my greeting, and waited for all the calls from potential suitors. The very first message was from Sleazeman, and I was so excited! I called him back and he invited me for dinner and I accepted.

There is one cardinal rule in the sisterhood. You never break a date with girlfriends to go out with a guy. But my mother never taught me that rule, and she could have taught me better to play a little hard to get. She may have tried, but I was so eager for male attention from the age of 11 that I paid little attention to what my mother said. What did she know? She was from another generation if not from another planet!

So, after I said yes to Sleazeman’s dinner invitation, I called one of the girlfriends I had a date with the same night as the dinner invitation, and when I told her why I was cancelling out of the girlfriends’ date, she read me the riot act over the phone. I’d never even heard her yell at her kids, and you should have heard her language and her volume! I felt terrible. I don’t deal well with friends yelling at me. I’d been used to a husband yelling at me, but my girlfriends? This wasn’t fun yelling. This was real. She was livid!

I went to dinner with Sleazeman. Wasn’t a fancy place, but good food. (It was a German restaurant in Buffalo, so of course it was good food.) We sat at the bar, and he recited poetry to me. One poem after another. Good poetry. Literature. Shakespeare sonnet kind of poems. Oh, I was such a patsy!

After that date, we got together a few times, and on each date he had increasingly nothing of any interest or depth to say. He was coarse, boring, and bordered on rude. He had no money and less ambition. To think that I had almost destroyed a friendship because of this boor!

My girlfriend, the one who yelled at me, came by my house to apologize a couple of days later, but I was so ashamed of myself that I couldn’t let go of the shame for a long time. Not days or weeks, but a few years! From time to time, I’d run into her at a grocery store near where I lived and she worked, and we’d chat a bit. I couldn’t believe she’d forgiven me; I hadn’t forgiven myself. All that angst and wasted time with a dear, dear friend for the possibility of a relationship with a man.

He wasn’t the last sleazy guy (I’m a slow learner), but I did learn that unless your husband, father, fiancée, or son is in a life-threatening situation, you should never choose a date with a man over a commitment to your girlfriends.

Training Cats

I used to have a cat, Pouncer, who loved Pounce Treats. (He was named before I discovered the treats.) Pouncer would see the little can, about the size of a small can of tomato paste, or I’d rattle the can, and he’d go nuts. One day I thought that perhaps I could train him to do something…like sitting up and begging! Yeah, that was a good idea! It took less than a week. I’d hold a treat up, he’d raise his paw and I’d praise him lavishly and reward him. At the end of the week he was sitting up just the way a dog does, with the little paws cutely flopped over at the ‘wrist’. I could show him the can of treats and he’d sit up and beg. I could say “sit!” and he’d beg.

It is not in the nature of a cat to beg. Cats are deciders. If they have to resort to asking, they’ll usually meow, or weave in and out of legs. But begging is unbecoming to a cat, as is any form of subservience. I vowed I’d never to that again to my cat.

Now, I have another cat, who for years has been unmoved by anything other than her regular food and the water in the can of tuna I just opened. Sheba is a Bengal and an indoor cat. I won’t risk losing her to a speeding car, so she stays in. It’s not her choice, and whenever possible she’ll sneak out the garage when I open the door to get the car in or out. She refuses to come when I call her, and she either stays in my neighbor’s bushes or leads me on a merry chase from the front yard to the back yard, evading me the while and chuckling under her breath.

Sometimes she’s gone around the corner of the street. I’ll go after her, calling the while: Sheba! Sheba! Soon she’ll answer me with a chastising tone, eventually show herself, and then she’ll more or less follow me home. But it’s her decision and it’s in her time. I began to wish there were a way to incentivize Sheba to come when she’s called. Certainly training a cat to “come” is different from training a cat to “beg”, I told myself.

A week or so ago I bought a little bag of tuna-flavored cat treats that are supposedly good for dental health and “fresh breath” (a real oxymoron for cats, if ever there was one!). Sheba loved them! So I began: “Come here, Sheba. Come here, Sheba.” Hold out the treat, make her come closer, give her the treat in my hand, praise her lavishly when she takes the bait…I mean, treat. Sure didn’t take long for her to learn: “Come here, Sheba” brings her from wherever she is. She got outside last week as I was ready to leave for work. I opened the door, said the magic words, and she bounded into the house. Now I have two more things to do. I need to call her and give her only praise, randomly, so that she never knows when there will be a treat and when there won’t. Yeah, I took psychology 101. Keep ‘em guessing, and they’ll continue to respond to the stimulus.

And then, who knows, maybe I’ll teach her to beg.

More to come...

When your Muse is out of town…

I’m pretty sure my Muse is out of town, or pouting, or sleeping really late every day. When she is around, she doesn’t stay long, sometimes leaves me before I’ve said what I wanted to say. Maybe I bore her. And, of course, she must be busy with so many bloggers out there.

Sometimes the words trip over themselves going from my mind through my fingers onto the page. Sometimes, they’re reluctant to show themselves, as if they’ve settled down into a comfy place and don’t want to leave. But what happens most often is that there are so many words and thoughts that are jockeying for place (take me! take me!), and they get separated from what connects them to other words. It must be the Muse’s job to herd the words so they can emerge as more or less meaningful phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.

Please, Ms. Muse, come back, stop pouting, or get up! I miss you.

More to come...

Wordaholics Anonymous

Hi, my name is Mary and I’m a wordaholic. Not only do I love to speak words, read words, and write words, I am pretty persnickety about the use of words as well. I was brought up by two parents who were determined that my brother and I would learn how to talk properly without adopting the Buffalo flat “a” accent. (When I was young, my mother and I went shopping for an Easter hat for me. One of the many I tried on brought this statement from the sales clerk: “There’s a gayap in the bayack of your hayat”. I’m serious; it was that bad. I was afraid to look at my mother, lest we both burst out laughing.)

In school, as well as at home, I learned to use the pronouns “I/he/she” when they are the subject of a sentence, and using “me/him/her” when the are the object of the sentence. I’m sure it helped that I took three years of Latin in high school, during which these difficult concepts were indelibly drilled into my head. It helped that my parents spoke flawless English. My maternal grandparents had both taught in “normal” schools, and my grandfather especially was unmerciful (but still loving!) in his corrections. We learned to say things correctly, my brother and I.

When my kids were growing up, I did my darnedest to ensure good English usage, but the prevailing winds of misusing “I” and “me” was, apparently, stronger than I was. One of my sons continually uses the pronoun “I” as both the subject and the object a sentence, but fortunately not often in the same sentence. I still correct him now and then, but somehow it doesn’t ‘take’. He’ll say, “yeah, that too.” I still love him. But when radio and TV newscasters, speakers that are assumed to be part of the intelligentsia, and writers (yes, writers! How does it get past their editors?!) misuse “I” and “me”, I am really upset and I lose hope for the future of correct English usage. I don’t understand enough spoken Spanish to determine whether this use of subject/object pronouns happens in that language (and others) as well. However, there used to be a Romanian software engineer who was appalled by the usage errors made by educated and native English speakers.

Besides the “I”–“me” issue, there are several others, many of which I grant various degrees of clemency. For instance, I am fairly lenient about “lie, lay, lain” and “lay, laid, laid”, especially in the past perfect tense (“I had just lain down when the doorbell rang.” or “I had just laid the baby down for a nap when the doorbell rang.”). If you don’t see the difference, you’re definitely in the majority; don’t worry about it. But here’s the skinny on lie and lay. (This “lie” is not the fib.)

The verb “lie” is intransitive (there is no object that the verb applies to; it can take an adverb, but not an adjective), and it is used as follows:

I’m lying on the couch. (present)
I’m going to lie down for a nap. (future)
I lay down earlier today and slept too long. (past)
After I had lain down yesterday, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. (past perfect)

The verb “lay” (meaning to place something somewhere) is transitive and takes an object. It is used as follows:
You can lay your coat on the bed in the room down the hall. (present)
When I get back from the store, I’ll lay the baby down for a nap. (future)
I’m sure I laid the keys on the table last night. (past)
I had laid the remote on the couch, but when I came back, it was gone. (past perfect)

Another common misdemeanor by the news media is the “less”–“fewer” usage. If you had 12 apples in a bowl when you left for work this morning, and you have only 6 apples in the bowl when you get home, you have 6 fewer apples, not less apples. However, if you had twenty dollars with you when you left for work, and ten dollars when you got home, you’d have fewer dollars, and less money. So: “fewer” is used when you are using plural units, e.g. dollar – dollars, and “less” is used before a word that is a plural noun used as a singular noun. “Money” can be a penny or a billion dollars, but you don’t have “fewer money”. You have less money with fewer dollars and fewer quarters. My rule of thumb, which works almost every time, is to use “fewer” with quantifiable plurals (e.g., dogs, bicycles, men) and ”less” with words whose singular refers to a plural ‘group’ (e.g., money, candy, jewelry).

Teen speak is another bête noire for me; I keep wondering if their babies will say, “like, mama” as their first words. I’m not LOL! The shortening of words while chatting online, twittering tweets, and texting on a cell phone or in emails is another worry. Will the burgeoning generation be able to lose the teen speak as they go to college or out in the world? OMG, I hope so!

Slouching Toward Retirement

This morning I met with my financial advisor, a very knowledgeable young man, who listens to me, makes good comments and suggestions, and I’m feeling a bit more positive about my future. This is not a good time to retire—partly because I haven’t yet figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and partly because my retirement funds have really taken a hit in these economic times. But I do need to think about it and prepare for the time I will stop working at a full time job, and will undoubtedly need to dip into retirement funds.

So I’d like to think a bit out loud here. The way I see it, I have three options. There are probably more, but these are the ones that have continued to present themselves whenever I think about retiring. The order presented is not necessarily the order of preference, as it changes with the cycles of the moon (or something else entirely!).

1. Sell my house, which is worth far less than it was three years ago, and move to a much less costly place to live. Western New York comes to mind, since I grew up there, have one or two friends left, plus (a huge plus) my son and grandson live there, plus (another big one) housing is really cheap, at least compared to the Bay Area of California.

2. Continue to live in my house in San Jose and rent out the downstairs bedroom and bath, which is sort of a suite. I had a tenant for nearly two years, who was the perfect tenant. He didn’t drink or smoke, had no parties, made no noise (unless he was laughing at John Stewart or Steven Colbert), loved my cats and took care of them when I went away for a weekend or so, was of the same political persuasion. How can I find such a person again? A serious grad student would be good, but they would leave after a year or so, and I’d have to keep looking for others.

3. There are places for seniors that are less expensive than other places; whether they’re partially subsidized, I don’t know, but a decent and affordable place can be found. The ones I’ve been aware of so far, however, are full of old people! Who wants to live with a bunch of old people?! Don’t think I’m operating under illusions here; but I am quite ambulatory, I don’t want to sit around watching TV, playing gin or any other card game with old ladies. I don’t want to take bus trips to museums with the old ladies either. I don’t feel like an old lady, but then, I know some who are but who also don’t feel like them. I mean, they look like old ladies, but inside, they’re who they’ve always been. I need to give the old ladies a break—their hair may be white (however little they may have), but if their hearts and souls are young, then they probably don’t want to sit around with a bunch of old ladies either.At any rate, I’m sure there are places where only some people are old ladies; many are people like I would be: newly retired and needing a less expensive place to live.

There may be other alternatives as well. I’ve heard that in some cities they’re building structures with, say, four apartments that are connected to common areas, so people can eat together if they choose to. The common area includes sitting areas so that people can play cards and games, or watch TV together. And these places are not necessarily for seniors, but for people who want to share resources, such as purchasing food at places like Costco, which is a real money saver unless you end up throwing unused food out.

I’ve talked with my friends about starting a system of sharing perishable food items from Costco. The same could be done with farmers’ markets. But the idea pretty much got shot down. No one wants to manage it and/or has time to manage it. Well then, perhaps a pot luck dinner each week, so that buying something in bulk would be more effective.

Anyway, learning to live on less is something that all of us can benefit from. If we can live on less and also meet some social needs, so much the better!

This is one of the uncomfortable places my head is lately—all this stuff, these thoughts and ideas run around, sometimes crash into one other, and are looking for a place to light. Somewhere, hopefully, that they can take root and grow.

When I think about retirement, I think not only of how I’ll manage financially, but also how I’ll manage without someplace to go during the week where I feel valued and have people to say “good morning!” to. As difficult as my workplace can be, I’m thankful that I have a place to be where I feel like I belong. What would that be for me once I retire and don’t have that structure? I was unemployed almost 20 years ago for about 6 months, and it was great for the first couple of months. It was Spring and Buffalo literally blooms in the Spring. I could go visit my son, who worked from home. I could stroll the Elmwood Strip, since I lived only a block away. My father needed help after he fell and had a cast on his right arm, so I felt useful for a few months. My daughter-out-law needed me to babysit my grandson a couple of times a week, and since I was home, I could do it. I could read, write letters, sleep late, stay up late. I could do anything I wanted! Until what I wanted was people on a regular basis. People I could greet and shoot the breeze with. After I interviewed for a few jobs that didn’t lead to anything, I began to get depressed. I felt useless and worthless. I had problems with friendships, probably because I was so needy. How will I handle those things when I retire?

I’d best figure it all out beforehand. The place to live, the finances, and even more importantly, how I will take care of the less concrete needs. How will I fulfill my need for people contact, my feelings of self worth, my sense of place and belonging?