This one killed me dead

Look, it’s not that I hate Natalie Portman . . .

Ah, it’s that time of year again, when fresh-faced, barely-trained, minimum-wage retail employees go head to head with customers who hate Christmas shopping, don’t put anything back where it belongs, and want everything to be on sale. Speaking as a veteran of eight Christmas seasons in book retail, including one year actually working on Christmas day (which cut a holiday so-called getaway with an ex-bf and family mercifully short), the customer traffic can be relentless, but with properly administered doses of candy those eight-plus hours can glide by like a Hummer with bald tires on black ice.

Was I always nice to customers, you ask? No. I wasn’t. I was nice to people who begged for my attention and asked, with averted eyes, “I’m so terribly sorry to bother your no doubt important and intellectually fascinating conversation with another employee, but could I ask you to point — no, no! please don’t come out from behind your elevated counter to show me! — would you just crook your pinkie finger in the general direction of the cookbooks?” Thus approached, I would smile benignly and direct the appropriately obsequious customer toward the objects of his desiring. I believe Frank Burns summed it up best with that immortal line: “It’s nice to be nice to the nice.”

Yes, it’s nice to be nice to people at the head of a thirty-person check-out line who will happily pay cash (don’t you dare get out that checkbook, lady!) when the credit card machine breaks down. But if you, the customer, give off one whiff of frustration or indecision, well, you’re on your own, pal, this register’s closed and I’m going to go smoke a cigarette on the loading dock.

As a result of my gross neglect of the needs of those I’ve been paid in M&Ms; to serve, I’ve had to face my share of bad retail karma backlash. Oh, yes! And naturally, when you’re on the receiving end of bad customer service, well, it’s not your fault, this guy who’s supposed to be helping you is a moron.

Absolutely Real Example #1

Me, in housewares department of large store: “Hi, could you tell me where your cheapest sheets are?”

Irritable Dispenser of Karma: “Well, normally people ask for sheets by color.”

Me: “I’m sorry, I forgot, I must ask for your help in the mysterious and unknowable way that you want me to ask for it, for ye mighty retail gods are not flexible enough to respond to a variety of individual communication styles. I beg you to allow me to withdraw the question.”

I.D.O.K.: “Granted. Be gone.”

Absolutely Real Example #2

Me, in discount beauty supply store: “Hi, can you help me? I’m looking for something that will make my hair curly. It’s normally kind of wavy, but this weather makes it frizzy and I thought . . .”

Lofty Dispenser of Incorrect Hair Products (interrupting): “Most people want their hair to be straight.”

Me: “Yes, well, I could be mistaken, maybe I don’t want bouncy curls, maybe I want to look like my mother pressed my hair on her ironing board, you’re absolutely right, how could I want something different from everybody else! I must be insane! Thank you for bringing me back to my senses. Please sell me an overpriced jar of goo that does the exact opposite of what I wanted.”

L.D.O.I.H.P.: “Here you are.”

Me: “I’m not worthy.”

That’s why this year I’m doing all my shopping online.

Several years back I used to work around the corner from the Native American Community Center in New York. I had an aquaintance who worked there (he was the tallest gay Apache Indian I’ve ever met), and he invited me over one night for a ceremony honoring a member of the community who had died. There was a drum circle, and singing led by a woman whose tribe I don’t remember but she’d spent several years touring with a Duke Ellington-style orchestra, and never before or since have I heard such incredible prairie wails belted out with the Andrews Sisters’ tone.

Then there were speeches. A kid named Cochise got up to speak. He looked like kind of a punk, but he seemed perfectly comfortable in front of the crowd. And I’ll never forget what he said.

“What I’ll miss most about [the dead person] is that whenever she saw me she’d say, “Hey! Toe Cheese!”

So today as you scrape whatever variation of that first pilgrim/Indian meal you manage to conjure up into the garbage, remember Cochise, whose name rhymes with “toe cheese.” And remember to recycle, and for god’s sake don’t drink and drive.

I had a teacher once who advised us to take a poem of someone else’s that we liked and copy it out longhand, word for word. He said it would slow down our reading and make us think about the poem differently. I liked that, and started copying out poems in a special notebook. One day I showed the notebook to a boyfriend and he shut me down by saying “Why, so you can pretend you wrote them all?”

There’s a woman named Robyn who practices yoga at the same place I do who just went through her first pregnancy. She did variations on third-series ashtanga until her belly was as big as a sack of groceries and she had modified her practice down to, like, two poses. One of which was handstand. She’d just float right up there and serenely stand on her wide hands for minutes at a time. I guess it felt good. It certainly kept her arms strong, and the rest of us amazed.

The other day I was about three-quarters of the way through my yoga practice when it came to the point in the middle of backbends where you do handstand and balance by yourself for twelve breaths. I’m more of a flinger than a floater, so my teacher catches my hips, then he stands there and counts slowly to twelve while subtly, telepathically adjusting my posture and watching for signs of collapse.

I didn’t collapse; though I’ve been sick on and off for two months and my attendance at practice has been abominable, I still managed to stand there on my hands by myself for twelve breaths and then float my feet down to my mat like two delicate, giant flakes of snow. And my teacher said, That was good. And I told him, I was imagining Robyn while I did that. And my teacher said, That’s a Vedanta technique called Sampad. It means “same foot.” Where you imagine your foot standing in the foot of the Vishvedevas*. Or in your case, your hands in the hands of Robyn.

And it’s twenty years too late to tell the snarky ex-boyfriend**, but I guess that’s another reason to copy someone’s poem, so you can gain understanding from standing within a stonger person’s words. For the time being.

*“The mind is certainly infinite, and the Vishvedevas (high beings) are infinite. Through this meditation one wins an infinite world.” From the Brahma Sutra Bhasya of Shankaracharya. Footnote: “Vishvedevas occupy the mind for the time being.”

**Why, yes, I do seem to hold grudges.

One day, when I was about six years old, my dad dropped me off at kindergarten, and I wept in my little plastic seat all morning. For no other reason than because my mother always took me to school, so to my thinking there was ipso facto something wrong with the way my father took me to school. Hence: tears.

Off and on through the years I’ve looked for reasons to blame my parents for everything deeper meanings beneath that desolate morning long ago. Did my father do something to make me cry? HAVE I REPRESSED THE MEMORY OF SOME FORGOTTEN BRUTALITY??

Then, this morning, Jackson asked me for a cup of apple juice. Jack poured it out for him and handed him the cup, and Jackson grew another head and yelled, “I want MOMMY to give me my juice!”

And the little 10-watt bulb that sometimes warms my brain began to glow. Oh, I realized belatedly, my father didn’t do a goddamned thing wrong that day. Sometimes you just want your mom.

Sometimes, though, you need your dad. Jack and Jackson were traveling a bumpy road for a while there. Jack would say, “I love you, Jackson,” and Jackson would say, “No you don’t! MOMMY loves me!” and my heart would crumple up into a little crumpled up roadkill squirrel on a dark country road, and I’d say, “Why do you think Daddy doesn’t love you?” and Jackson’d say, “Because he spanked me.”

We’re not real big on physical punishment, I gotta say. We’ve both swatted Jackson’s biscuits a couple of times, after “Please?” and “No!” stopped working, but the difference was that I always felt really bad afterward and would say I was sorry and when Jackson calmed down I’d hug him and we’d talk about it until we understood what happened and we both felt better. Jack, on the other hand, felt like Jackson was now big enough to cope with the consequences of whatever, throwing macaroni and cheese at the television, after being told not to several times, so there wasn’t a lot of hand-wringing and apologizing on his part.

Then, over the summer, I was reading a 99 cent copy of The Nanny Diaries after I saw the summary on Robin’s reading list. I quite enjoyed it. And there was one part in there where the nanny’s father, who’d been a school teacher, was advising her on how she might discipline a four-year-old boy. “Glinda-the-good-witch him,” he said.

“In essence, you are Glinda. You are light and clarity and fun. He is an inanimate object, a toaster who happens to have a tongue hanging out. If he goes too far again–I’m talking the door-locking routine, physical violence, or anything that puts him in danger–BABOOM! Wicked Witch of the West! Two point four seconds–you swoop down in front of his face and hiss that he must never do that again–ever. It is not okay. And then, before he can bat an eyelash, back to Glinda. You let him know that he can have feelings, but that there are boundaries. And that you’ll let him know when he has pushed too far. Trust me, he’ll be relieved.”

I wondered if maybe that was what’d been missing with Jack’s discipline, Daddy Bad Cop and Daddy Good Cop all rolled into one, so I told Jack about the split-personality technique, and he said Hmmm.

One day a few weeks later Jack took Jackson to the grocery store. They were standing in line and Jackson started whining that he wanted some gum. And Jack was all, “I have a bag of Cheetos and some ice cream bars in the cart with your name on them, so you can forget about the gum. You have gum at home. Acres of gum. No.” But Jackson, as three-year-olds will do when surrounded by judgmental strangers in a confined space, started to whine even louder. So Jack decided to Glinda him.

I wasn’t there, so I can’t say exactly what happened, but it seems that after Mr. Margaret Hamilton threw a few fireballs and sent in the flying monkeys, a sparkly and cheerful man in a long white dress* magically appeared to kiss Jackson and and tell him he still loved him. And when Jackson saw that Scary Daddy was gone and Nice Daddy was hugging him, he backed off on the gum, kissed his dad, and henceforth they were cool, from that day forward.

Really. One little paragraph in a forgettable best-seller has changed our lives.

Jackson now spontaneously tells Jack he loves him all the time. I mean, he says “I hate you, go away!” all the time, too, but now it balances out.

See what happens when you read books?

*Sorry, the metaphor is breaking down here

This morning as I dug through my underwear drawer a shallow thought-sperm penetrated a fertile idea-egg floating (oh so very lonely) in my brain, and I began to wonder how we decided to call these things “thongs.” It used to mean flip-flops, a sandal that’s anchored between your toes. Now it means underwear that anchors your camel toe?

As usual, Internet, I’m just putting it out there, I leave it up to you to tell me what it means.

My Exciting New Recipe for Accidental Feta Cheese

Ingredients:

One pumpkin-shaped drink container from the zoo

8 oz. 2% milk

Pour milk into pumpkin container. Give to child. Let child carry pumpkin container into car to drink on the way to school. Hear child cry from back seat that he has dropped his pumpkin container. Say, “Don’t worry, I’ll get it when we get to school.” Wait three to four weeks, then feel around under the front seat for a lost squishy ball and find pumpkin container. Shake. Get drop of viscous fluid on hand; smell hand; say, “Oh my god, how long has this been in here?” Take into apartment and release mysteriously pressurized contents over kitchen sink. Watch with a mixture of disgust and curiosity as white chunks of matter that smell exactly like feta cheese fall out of pumpkin container.

Et voila! Le fromage extraordinaire mais peut-etre toxique!