Age Maps

“Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together. In this fusion a jump-of-time is established at the tear.”

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You really find out how many clothes you have when you get a washer-dryer. Jackson has at least twenty pairs of underpants because up until last month I could never get our laundry to over to Launderland more than once a week, so we had to have extra everything. Thousands of pairs of socks; hundreds of towels; there’s not even a number funny enough to describe how many turtleneck sweaters I own. Of course, now that we have the cutest, tiniest, stackablest washer and dryer, we all get to experience the joy of little loads of warm clean clothes almost every day. But there was a time when I needed fifty-dozen rock t-shirts to make it through the retail work-week, and now that I don’t it’s time for round two of It Went To Salvation Army!!

Hank Wangford is this country-and-western act that came through Edinburgh when I was a student there in 1985, and I was so besotted with the idea of some English guy with wang in his name trying to sound like Bill Monroe that I spent my last three pounds on this fine piece of memorabilia. I probably wore it about six times, and then carried it from apartment to apartment, stuffed into one Hefty bag after another, for twenty years. The front says “Hankie Goes to Holyrood” — get it? If you don’t get it, I don’t want to explain it to you, apart from the fact that Holyrood is the name of both a house and a park in Edinburgh. Which is in Scotland. Ever hear of it? Good. You had me worried there for a second.

Yup, that’s the back.

I loved this shirt, but I bought an XL because I was in my awkward post-punk, mid-feminist bodyhiding period. Later, when I moved into my slightly less awkward, better-posture, post-pregnancy, body-showing period, all the big-ass t-shirts went to the back of the drawer. I went to this bar, McGovern’s, my last night in NYC before moving to California; a guy I’d slept with very intensely for about two weeks was playing that night, and for some reason — some badly constructed ideas about closure, perhaps — I brought my new boyfriend to see intense-two-week guy’s band play. Everyone was underwhelmed with each other. It was also the last time I saw my friend John (Hi, John!) — John and I once wrote a song that I still have on tape somewhere, and we called it “Fuck You, Michelle” because at the time John was mad at his brother’s girlfriend, whose name was . . . Michelle! I played alto sax on that one. God, I’m so talented, you had no idea, did you? It’s true.

I love this little drawing on the pocket — “glug glug.” But not enough to keep the t-shirt around for another fourteen years.

Vintage Denver pie shop; the t-shirt is circa 1983. My friend Brian gave this to me after high school graduation because we used to go to the House of Pies after the movies and talk about stuff and eat pie. I remember once we went there and I just ordered coffee and Brian got some coffee and a piece of pie, but he stopped eating his pie about halfway through, and while we talked, every once in awhile he’d nudge his pie plate a quarter of an inch toward me, just to see how close it would have to get to me before I’d give in and start eating his food. (Hi, Brian!) I think he probably performed this little experiment several times before I finally started noticing.

This is the real reason Brian gave me the shirt. I never ordered the Barvarian pie. I wonder if the person who made this t-shirt saw Conan the Barbarian and then someone told him that the movie’s star was from Bavaria, and then it all became charmingly mixed up on this strangely tapered beige t-shirt that I never wore but, again, carried around for twenty-plus years because I thought Brian would be hurt if he found out that I didn’t frame it or something.

I went to Bread Loaf, laid in the grass and tried to relax, went to readings and mocked other people’s poetry, and when it was all over I bought this giant green t-shirt. One night there was going to be a party and some of the students were talking about it in the parking lot and Tim O’Brien looked over at me and shouted, “Hey! Make sure you forget to wear a bra!” I went back to my room instead and probably wrote a tortured poem about having a bladder infection. Good times.

I should have sold this one on eBay. I know it doesn’t look like much, but it was handmade by the very own hands of Internet Superstar Sarah Brown. It fit, too. (Here I am wearng it.) I’m sure some blogfan would probably have paid top dollar for a Sarah B. iron-on original from the old orange-template days.

My wildest, fondest hope is that someday someone will pick up one of these shirts at the Salvation Army and then whimsically turn to Google to find out more about it, and they’ll find my post, and they’ll get in touch and tell me how my old t-shirt is doing, and maybe send me a picture of themselves wearing the shirt and throwing up in front of a national monument or something. Best-case scenario.

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A primer on parental cruelty:

Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing

via Belgian Waffle

This had me crying with laughter — and guilt, for laughing at fellow parents, because you’re supposed to step back and say to yourself, “Well, they chose a baby name that’s good for their family, if not for mine.” But I didn’t say that, I just laughed and laughed at all the stupid things people name their poor, defenseless children. I’m sorry if you find your child’s name on the list and are angry at the fact that I laughed at you, but considering that my name is on the list, too, I’m pretty much cleared of all charges.

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When I was packing everything for the big move I ended up with one pile of stuff that I didn’t really want to pack but was sort of afraid not to — because we had history, this stuff and I. One morning as I dropped Jackson off I was telling another mom, Lorraine, about how I felt as though packing this stuff would be like strapping a bunch of tombstones to my back, and she gave me a great suggestion for getting rid of something to which your attachment is primarily sentimental. “Take a picture of the thing you want to give away but can’t,” she said, “and then give it [the thing, not the picture] to someone who’ll appreciate it.”

Well, “someone” mostly turned out to be the Salvation Army. But here are a few of the pictures.

I remember my mom shopping for this at a woman’s store on South Broadway in Denver, sometime in the seventies when she’d lost a bunch of weight and was rewarding herself with some new outfits. I snagged it from her closet about twenty years ago and I think I wore it once to a party with some black pegged jeans. I love the garish colors and the gold thread, but it also hung on me like a burlap sack, so into the Sally bag it went. But still, I think half the reason I kept it was for the label:

Think young
Bobbie June

Is Bobbie June still around, urging women to think young? When I Google “Bobbie June” I get a lot of obituaries, so maybe not.

A souvenir of the Las Vegas airport. There’s something about spending time in Vegas that makes you think wearing a hat like this is a good idea.

Jack’s going to kill me when he finds out I gave my leather pants away, but I’m too old for these, people. The last time I wore them was to an Eddie Izzard show in L.A., the summer before I got pregnant with Jackson. They still fit, but I’m a mom now, for chrissake.

I got this sweatshirt at Forrest Yoga down in Santa Monica after we’d done a photo shoot with Ana Forrest for the goddamn magazine I used to work for. Can you see what she’s doing? She’s balancing on her hands with her legs in splits. It’s one of her signature poses. We photographed her doing it, which meant she had to hold it for a couple of minutes while we dealt with our puny logistics. At one point I had to adjust the crotch of her leotard very carefully because some pubic hair was bushing out. Boy, she didn’t flinch.

A grey cardigan my mom knit for me. I loved this sweater and I wore it to death. It’s a fair isle, but instead of using contrasting colors for the yoke she just varied her stitches. Fantastic work, mom, but this thing was so full of holes it was pretty much unfixable.

Pregnancy jeans! I wore this pair of 40-waist Levi’s for my entire pregnancy. I was lucky to have been working in an office where shorts and flip flops were de rigeur. I think I spent about $50.00 on pregnancy clothes: two pairs of giant Levi’s and a bunch of big-belly shirts from Target.

One day I was digging through a sale basket at a lingerie store in the East Village that I used to like when I came across these boxer shorts. I had to buy them because they were designed by a woman I dated for about a week in college. I used them to sleep in when I had my period. Finally, the elastic lost all its stretch and they ended up in a wad in the back of my closet, but I always loved those two shades of blue fabric.

Another find from my mom’s closet, this time a negligee. This must be fifty years old. Scratchy.

Here’s my old neighbor Lance accepting an ancient Wilson T-2000 tennis racquet. Lance is a tennis pro and he collects old racquets. My dad won this one in a sales contest back around 1976 and gave it to me after my wooden racquet broke in the middle of a match against a girl in the fourteen-and-under age bracket (I was in the twelve-and-under). I knew I was going to lose, so after my racket snapped returning one of her serves and I had to borrow a replacement to finish the match, I started pretending that my wrist was really sore and rubbing it between (losing) points, the implication being: (1) Quit hitting the ball so hard, I’m injured; (2) Look, everyone! I’m injured! So don’t expect me to win this thing; (3) My coach is an asshole for making me play a bigger, stronger kid who has INJURED ME.

My best friend in high school, Tamara, gave me this sweater; her grandmother had knitted it for her dad, whose name was Skip. I could write 2,000 words on Skip alone, but here are a few facts: he went to Williams and was Donald Hollinger’s roommate. He taught law at CU Boulder, and he represented the ACLU in their fight to get the Christmas decorations off the lawn of the Denver City Hall. (“There needs to be a clear division betwen church and state!” I remember Tamara shouting once at dinner at her house. Since our family didn’t really talk at dinner, Tamara’s house was high drama for me.) Once when we came in from school Skip was making pot brownies in the kitchen, but he wouldn’t let us have any. Sometimes when I spent the night we’d wake up to Skip playing bongos in the basement and singing along with Stevie Wonder records. Skip wore love beads. I once went on a beach vacation with Tamara’s family and got sun poisoning. The night before we left I drank a pina colada from a slushy machine and danced with Skip on the beach. He came up to about my collarbone. He had a blurry little tattoo of St. Anthony’s crutch on his shoulder, and after he died Tamara told me he’d always wan
ted to turn it into an apple tree. When I heard that, I realized that was the tattoo I wanted to get (as some of you know, my first name isn’t “Mrs.”, it’s Eden.) I got an apple tree tattooed on my shoulder and when I went to Tamara’s wedding I showed it to her mom and she kind of laughed and cried at the same time.

A sweater my parents brought back from Copenhagen. The yarn pilled up a lot, and though it was soft it always looked kind of weird on me so I rarely wore it.

You know what? This is kind of exhausting. I have some more, I’ll do them later.

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It’s Father’s Day and the entire neighborhood smells like bacon.

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Things people have said to me recently while stopping to pet my dog.

Girl who works at Otherworld Tattoo: “Oh, she’s licking my toes.” (Pauses, steps back.) “Sorry, that’s creepy. No matter who does it.”

Guy sitting at a cafe table on State St., leaning over to pet Katie: “Uh oh, I’m going to be in trouble when I get home.”
Me: “You have a dog waiting for you?”
Guy: “Yeah.”
Me: “You’re being unfaithful.”
Guy: “Nah, a biscuit will fix everything.”

Seventyish lady in a green sweater set who saw Katie in my back seat and stopped me in the Gelson’s parking lot to tell me this story through my car window: “I was just in New York and my husband and I were on the upper east side when I stopped to pet a beautiful boxer dog. And the man holding his leash said, ‘Here,’ and handed me the leash and then went into the deli that was right there. He got whatever he needed and then he came out and took the boxer’s leash from me and then walked away without saying another word. I must have a trustworthy face.”

Miscellaneous interjections:
“Is that a boxer?”
“Is that a pit bull?”
“Is that a French bulldog?”
“What is he?”
“Does he bite?”
“Does he drool?”
“Is that an old dog?”
“Is that a puppy?”
“We have a dog like that. His name is Mr. Bubbas.”
“I know a dog like that. His name is Winston.”
“That looks like the Zelda dog.”
“Katie? That’s my girlfriend’s name.”

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So hey! Bonjour, everybody!

After dropping Jackson off with the family he was staying with, driving down to L.A., and then making a fifteen hour flight from LAX to Charles de Gaulle (with a short layover in Cincinatti and a not very restful two-hour nap in my seat), I was confronted once again with California-style traffic, except with itsy bitsy little tennis shoe-sized European cars. The taxi driver had pas d’Anglais and I wasn’t in the mood to dust off my conversational French, so the ride was long and slow and I was queasy with exhaust fumes, just the thing when your body is desperate for sleep and the continent you’re on is just waking up and smelling the cafe au lait.

An hour later we got to the fancy hotel with the jazz club where Jack was staying and I called him on my cell phone from the lobby to come down and pay the taxi driver because all I had was a twenty and the guy wanted euros! As if! Seriously, the exchange rate was for shit, the ride from the airport cost about a hundred bucks. Welcome to France, you want a baguette? That’ll be ten dollars. Now get out.

After a joyful reunion with my husband and restorative nap I woke up to find that I was about to be force-fed several glasses of water . . .

. . . and several pounds of nourishing, nourishing cheese.

Then it was time for a short walk over to the Arc de Triomphe without my camera and then back to the room for another nap! Which is pretty much not the way you’re supposed to adjust to a time zone that’s nine hours ahead of your own, but because Jack’s gig was going to go until 2:00 a.m. I figured I’d want to be up late anyway. So I went back to bed at 7:00 p.m. and woke up about 1:30 a.m., tried to flatten down my hair with a wet comb, and then went downstairs to the club to catch the end of the second set, again without a camera because I still wasn’t ready to look like a goddamn yahoo. But here are some pictures from the next night:

Here we see Frank Goldwasser and Jack Kennedy backing up Ms. Sugar Pie DeSanto. As you can tell, Sugar is one of the wee people. She has one of those great belt-it-out voices, though. She’s also fond of doing shit like this:

Can you see that? It’s like some kind of musical performance Pilates, and the audience loved it. Loved it! So happy to see a sixty-nine-year-old woman’s panty liner.

One of the stories I loved about Sugar is that, according to Jack, all week long at the end of each set when it was time to introduce the band she’d go through everyone and then say, “On bass — the bass player!” She had no fucking idea what Jack’s name was. Even after they’d played together for ten days and he’d humped her luggage through two countries and off a broken down bus, it was, “Hey! Bass player! Where’s my bag? The blue one!”

Sugar travels with many, many costume changes. I love this picture, especially because Frank looks like a weary extra from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Also in the band was a lap-steel player named Freddie Roulette. In his hands the lap steel guitar becomes the velvety vehicle for psychedelic make-out music. Seriously, he’s like a quiet, sedentary, pipe-smoking Jimi Hendrix, and his music was mesmerizing. After the show a gray-haired Frenchman came up to Freddie and asked him to sign a record album and I looked over his shoulder at the cover and it said “Sweet and Funky Steel.” Dear God, I want a copy of that album to make another baby by.

This is Leon. You don’t even know what a ladies’ man is until you meet Leon. Jack told me that earlier in the week a gorgeous woman showed up at the club by herself and started dancing in front of the stage like she was in an iPod commercial, just swinging her ass around like she was the only one in the room. After the set she was at the bar and Leon went over and started talking to her and then fifteen minutes later they left together. And the next morning Jack was all, “Leon, what’s your secret?” And Leon said, “I have a big dick!”

After the last set we all had a few drinks and then we decided to go downstairs to the hotel employee cafeteria to get something to eat. The employee cafeteria was back through a huge stainless steel maze of a kitchen, which is pretty empty at 3:00 a.m. except for room service waiters and folks prepping for breakfast. And Leon had this thing worked out where he’d give the cooks a couple of bucks and they’d give him a steak. So Leon headed over to the kitchen and Jack went up to our room to get a couple bottles of wine, and the next thing I knew I was at a fluorescent-lit Formica table with a bunch of blues musicians and immigrant hotel maids eating a big, flat steak and pommes frites and feeling perfectly fine; gregarious, even, which, if you know me, is a state of mind only brought about by the rare confluence of alcohol, rest, good company, and a mysterious star in the trifid nebula going supernova, all at the same time. Gregarious doesn’t happen very often, is what I’m saying.

The second night, after the gig Sugar, Leon, and Freddie all had to drive back to Belgium at 4:00 a.m. to catch a flight back home, so we all stayed up again and then went to Danny’s room to kep drinking, and at some point we ran out of wine and Danny pulled out a bottle of calvados, which is Spanish for don’t make any fucking plans. Calvados until 7:00 a.m., until the hotel buffet opened for breakfast and Danny, Jack, and I went downstairs for some eggs and croissants and coffee and then went to bed. I would have easily slept for about ten years at that point. Unfortunately, it was Sunday morning and everyone left over from the band went from being temporary musical employees to being permanent musical freeloaders, so we had to check out at noon and move our shit to another hotel. On four hours of sleep and a calvados hangover? Fuck you all the way to Boulevard St. Michel, I cannot describe how unbelievably, irredeemably malevolent I felt when I woke up and had to pac
k up my shit and stuff my ass into a taxi and check into some sort of medieval hotel on the left bank that was wall-to-wall ghosts. Seriously, this hotel was about five hundred years old and was probably filled to the brim with fucking ghosts. Nice, benign ghosts, but all the same. Haunted. Hotel. With chipped furniture and slanted floors. It was like a Batman episode. So what could I do but unpack and lay in bed moaning while Jack, being the total prince that he is, went out and got some flowers to spruce up the room:

Here I am later, making a go of it, feeling like utter crap:

And taking pictures like this:

It’s a trash bag! Instead of a trash can! Fucking amazing!

Cops! On roller skates! Wrap your tiny American brain around that.

Excuse me, monsieur, is that Notre Dame or the Louvre?

I just about fainted in the Louvre. Seriously, the whole week I was having such grave insomnia and then trying to make it up in time for breakfast and get with the local schedule, but the sleep deprivation was making me psychotic. And then, I mean, look at all these assholes trying to look at the Mona Lisa. This painting is so famous it has its own wall.

So I gave up thinking I’d take pictures of anything but the street below our hotel window. Back at l’Hotel de Troll, I’d seen this dandy in red pants come through the lobby at breakfast with a handsome priest wearing a floor-length black cassock, get into the hotel elevator (which Jack called “the coffin” because it was just about the size of one), and then at dinner time I saw them go back out and wait across the street for a cab, chatting avidly all the while.

I have no idea how that person was ever going to get out of that parking space.

The week wasn’t a total loss, I revved it up enough to take a trip with Jack to see Uncle Charlie. Charlie is Frank’s uncle, and he’s this charming man with great skin who’s been a tailor in Paris all his life. Except when he was a baby.

Here’s Jack standing in front of the sign for Uncle Charlie’s shop, which is across the street from a building where lots of Algerian immigrants live and they hang blankets from their balconies and you’re NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT and it gives Charlie an aneurysm every day just looking at those blankets.

Charlie makes all his jackets and suits by hand, so Jack had been pleased to pick up some new threads after he realized that all the gig wear he’d brought (jeans, t-shirts, Pumas) was totally inappropriate for a venue with a dress code. After visiting Uncle Charlie, Jack took me to a cafe near the Pompidou to have a bite and watch the world go by and we decided to call home and see if we could talk to Jackson. He was staying with our old neighbor, the one I used to be afraid of, and as soon as I got him on the phone we had this conversation:

Me: What are you doing?

Jackson: Eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal! (Which he’d wanted for ages but I’d never buy for him.)

Me: That sounds good. I miss you!

Jackson: WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME??

Back when I was dropping Jackson off at our neighbor’s house he said, “I don’t want you to go away,” and I started getting all teary and I said, “I feel kind of funny about it myself,” and I guess it was good for him to see that I was upset about it too because then he put on this brave little brave face and started laughing about how he was going to see Madagascar while I was gone! And maybe even the new Star Wars, too! And I knew that talking to him while we were gone would reassure him but it just tore me apart to hear him be so sad and not be able to give him a hug, so that on top of my sleep-deprivation and inability to adjust to my new haunted environment I now added a heaping helping of guilt and separation anxiety.

You are enjoying your Paris vacation, no? Have another baguette.

So I was a total fucking emotional loser the entire trip and Jack hated my guts. I couldn’t make it out of the hotel half the time without thinking I was going to barf all over the street. What fun Jack was having, bringing food back to the room for me and spending days in bed not having sex but watching the French Open on TV with his anxiety-crippled wife who was waking up at 3:00 every morning and reading Nancy Mitford until the sun came up, when she’d promptly fall asleep again. What a good traveling companion! So flexible. Up for anything! As long as it involved staying in bed with a pillow over my head.

Then the evening before we were going to leave we were walking back from Le Bon Marche department store, where I refused to buy anything for myself because it was all so goddamned expensive, and I said to Jack, You know what? I actually feel pretty good. Do you, ah, want to go out for dinner? After he was done punching me in the face we walked over to Le Petit Zinc and had a fantastic dinner with oysters and veal, and then we went back to the room and had really hot sex until I made Jack stop because I thought we were going wake up the neighbors and that was it, that was the final straw, he finally just lost it with me because THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO WHEN YOU’RE IN A STRANGE GHOST-FILLED HOTEL, HAVE REALLY LOUD, HOT SEX, BECAUSE YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO SEE THESE PEOPLE AGAIN AS LONG AS YOU LIVE SO WHO CARES IF YOU FUCKING WAKE THEM UP FOR FUCK’S SAKE!

We woke up the next morning after four hours of sleep and packed our bags and got in a taxi and got halfway to the airport barely talking to each other. Jack f
inally broke the ice by asking me to ask the taxi driver to open a window because it was so stuffy in the back seat, which I did, and then we were able to resume polite conversation all the way through check-in, shoveling out our remaining euros in the duty-free shops buying souvenirs for people at home, a bomb scare that pushed all nine hundred people in the terminal over to our gate to wait for the all clear, and a flight delayed two hours because the food service people went on strike.

And then we made it back to California without crashing or exploding and the first thing I did was get Jack back to work! Because I needed cabinet pulls, goddamnit!

Then we got Jackson into one of his souvenir soccer shirts . . .

. . . and went for a smoothie.

The end.

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Hi. You know what? Boy. I have so many pictures to show you and stories to tell you and I can’t wait to write a big fat post about the last two weeks but right now I’d just like to say that I have stitches in the roof of my mouth. You know how they say that getting a shot in the roof of your mouth is one of the most painful thing that can ever happen to you? It’s not if the microsurgeon (who’s taking a patch of skin from this strange and tender landscape in your head and sewing it back into a different place in your head to help restore your damaged gums) puts some numbing goop and then a little freezy Q-tip on the spot where the needle’s going to go. Then the whole barbaric procedure turns out to be surprisingly endurable. Easier than getting your teeth cleaned, in my opinion. But still. Doritos are a challenge right now. Because I have stitches on the roof of my mouth! I asked Jack what he wanted for Father’s Day and he said, “A blow job,” and I said, well, these little sutures are kind of poky in there, and he said, “It doesn’t need to be from you.” I’m not sure what Jackson’s excuse is going to be but if he can dig up fifty bucks he’ll be off the hook, too.

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