Monthly Archives: May 2014

We’re Back …

19 Monday May 2014

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Sunday morning.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

… expect snafus!

The “fresh look” we promised upon return after our week-long hiatus may not be evident at first glance.

That’s because the change is behind the scenes. Julie is learning the technical and administrative end of the blog, and starting today (on the 18-month anniversary of The Write Side of 50), she’ll be running the back end now, while I extend my hiatus to pursue other ventures.

And like anything new, there’s a learning curve. (And lots of laughs.)

So if you get an e-mail from us that makes no sense – like yesterday’s inadvertent Happy Memorial Day, a week early – or if a blog is posted, and then it disappears (or if the whole blog disappears), laugh with us! And stay tuned.

You may notice a dangling participle, an errant ellipsis, or (no!) a misplaced em-dash. There may be a blank space where the headline should be. But no doubt, with each accidental click (Uh-Oh – I hit publish!) or slip of a finger, as with anything that is in transition, the blog that was built over the last year and a half may very well, through brilliant mistakes, deconstruct and manifest into something better.

And know that I’m still here for my friend, Jule – just a martini, a text, a phone call, or an accidental click away.

Happy Mother’s Day to Mom and Her “…isms”

08 Thursday May 2014

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My brother (top), my mother, and me.

BY BOB SMITH

Why, when we were kids, did our mothers all seem to say the same things to us? Was there a playbook, or were they just passing on the same things their moms had said to them? Are mothers today reading from that same script, or have new momisms crept into the lexicon?

In any event, in honor of Mother’s Day, here are a few of my mom’s classic zingers:

I’d done something stupid like smashed a lamp with a baseball bat or duct-taped my little sister’s hand to the coffee table, and Mom had caught me (and crying little sister) red-handed.

“What’s this, Bobby? What did you do? You wait till your father gets home.”

Just that ominous, amorphous threat. No spanking; no banishment to my bedroom for the rest of the day (which would have been real punishment). This was the 1960s, after all, long before smartphones, computers with Internet, TV’s, and video games had turned kids’ bedrooms into electronic pleasure arcades. My bedroom was furnished with my bed, my brother’s bed, two nightstands with lamps, a dresser, and a shared electric alarm clock. That’s it – not even a radio. If you were sent to your room, you could read all day, or count the cracks in the ceiling, but little else.

For a sensitive, impressionable eight year old like me, delayed sanctions were an incredibly effective tactic. First I felt guilty because although I’d done wrong, Mom hadn’t yet punished me directly. But then the mental punishment set in. I stood in the shadows by the side of our house waiting for the endless afternoon hours to tick by, steeped in guilty thoughts and vague, free-form anxiety about the expected retribution at Dad’s hands. I wanted the time to pass, so it would be over with, but there was no relief.

When Dad finally got home I trudged into the kitchen and stood staring at my sneakers, expecting the worst. And Mom said nothing. The crime was forgotten! I looked at Mom, and she nodded knowingly at me – she hadn’t forgotten at all. This time around, my only punishment had been the agonizing anticipation of punishment, unfulfilled. We both knew that the next time I did wrong, she could make me suffer all day, and then either stay execution again, or drop the dad-hammer on me anyway. And I owed her one for this time, too. Brilliant.

Here’s another favorite: Two or three of us were fooling around, throwing sofa seat cushions at each other, and Mom shut us down.

“What’re you kids doing? Those aren’t toys. Put those cushions back right now.”

Chastened, we started gathering up the pillows, and out of nervousness or just a frivolity hangover, I started giggling uncontrollably. Mom didn’t appreciate my attitude.

“What’re you laughin’ at? You’ll be laughing out the other side of your mouth in a minute!”

What does that even mean? I thought it meant she’d smack me (“I’ll smack you one!”), thereby displacing the grin from half my face. This called to mind the incongruous image of one side of my face laughing while the other side streamed tears, which I tried to emulate by simultaneously frowning on one side and laughing archly on the other, which made me laugh even more.

Which brought on the next momism: “You better wipe that smile off your face, young man.”

Which I emulated by theatrically swiping my hand down the “laughing” side of my face, which made me laugh more still. Which resulted in Mom giving me a sharp smack across my bottom, which made me really cry with my whole face. She hadn’t hit me all that hard. I was crying more out of shame, and surprise, than pain. Which prompted the next momism:

“What’re you cryin for? Come here, I’ll give you something to cry about.”

Which finally shut me up. And one of my all time favorites, for whenever one of us couldn’t find something that was right in front of us, as in this classic case of refrigerator blindness:

“Bobby, grab the mayonnaise.”

“I can’t find it,” I mumbled, staring listlessly into the open refrigerator.

“It’s right here,” Mom snapped, brushing past me to grab the jar screaming HELLMANN’S in big blue letters, front and center on the top shelf. “If it had teeth it would’ve bit you.” My brothers and sisters around the dinner table started giggling, and failing to wipe the smiles off their faces, they were soon laughing out the other side of their mouths.

Hollywood’s Wild West Has Nothing on the Real Thing

07 Wednesday May 2014

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Photo by Frank Terranella.

Nothing says “Out West” like Monument Valley, in Arizona. Ever since John Ford’s time, directors have flocked to this site located on Navajo land to film westerns. Being here is like being on a backlot. Yet, it’s real, and that authenticity can’t be reproduced in Hollywood.

When a Relationship’s Private Moments Become Public

06 Tuesday May 2014

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The Big Heat Eats Woolf.

BY JULIE SEYLER

Is it true that every man and woman in a relationship tests each other’s patience to the point where sometimes each behaves like a raving maniac? The word “every” is heavy-handed, but I’ll bet that, at some time, for some people, both gay and straight, who are in long-term, monogamous relationships, vocal differences between intimate partners can get ugly.

I have a friend who said that once her hormones moved on and out, the screaming matches with her husband went south.

I know a clinical psychologist who affirms that managing, and maintaining, a relationship over the long-haul is harder than any job because we are not programmed for monogamy. She says the only difference between the 50% that stay together and the 50% who don’t, is commitment because frustration, and having one’s patience tested, is an inherent part of the deal.

These musings arose because there was an article in the paper recently that the singer Paul Simon and his wife of 20 years, Edie Brickell, had ended up in a Connecticut court house to explain that their screaming match had been an “argument.”

The police had gotten an anonymous tip about a domestic dispute with possible physical ramifications. The article was vague on whether this person heard only words, or whether someone had crossed the line. But because this duet is a celebrity pairing, nothing stayed anonymous.

A public explanation of the dispute had to be offered and so Ms. Brickell announced:

I got my feelings hurt, and I picked a fight with my husband. The police called it disorderly. Thank God it’s orderly now.

Who wants their fights aired in The New York Times? Certainly any type of physical abuse is on a whole different planet, but this seemed to be about a bad fight. Perhaps one that had escalated to a different level, but the idea that good relationships don’t have some really bad moments is a myth. I feel for the couple. How embarrassing to have such private moments be made public because of your success.

Let’s Put Our Shorts Back On

05 Monday May 2014

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More Short, Shorts: four, separate, brief, and self-contained shorts. With summer in the air, our line of thinking is returning to less is best:

*It will be a June divorce. And she will finally be un(bride)led.

*Every night he sharpened his pinking shears to a pointed edge so that he could cut the rosy sweetness that wrapped around his wife. And then, one evening, a thorn pricked his prick, and he fell on his beloved scissors.

*First kiss; second wind.

*He gazed with lust at the vision of beauty standing before him because here was a woman with hair that swung, eyes that danced, and a smile that knew the meaning of merriment.

Out West, Where the Weather is Vertical

02 Friday May 2014

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

One of the prime benefits of travel is to experience the unfamiliar. For example, if you want to see what it would be like to drive on the left side of the road, you need to travel to a British Commonwealth country. And if you want to see the Aurora Borealis, you need to travel to the far North.

Living in the New York area, we are accustomed to little variations in altitude. No matter where you start from, you never experience more than about a thousand-foot variation in altitude within 50 miles of New York. Even traveling to the nearby Pocono or Catskill “mountains” does not significantly change things. These are mere foothills compared to what they have in Colorado. In fact, the entire city of Denver is at a higher altitude than any of the peaks in the Catskills or Poconos.

So since New Yorkers have no concept of altitude, we don’t think of weather depending on altitude. This was brought home to me recently while traveling in Northern Arizona. We were driving from the Grand Canyon to Zion National Park in Utah. As we started our drive, it was raining lightly. This was fine for several hours, but then we began to climb up towards Zion, and suddenly, as we crossed over 7,000 feet, we were in a ferocious snowstorm.

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This lasted only until we descended down to 5,000 feet, and then it was light rain again. We were seeing first-hand that weather is vertical. That’s why out West, the weather forecasts don’t simply say that such-and-such an area will have certain weather. They say that the weather will be X, but above 6,000 feet it will be Y, and above 7,000 feet it will be Z. And this is all in the same town! We just don’t have weather like that in the New York area. Our weather is horizontal, not vertical.

The next day, it was a beautiful sunny day as we began our drive in Zion National Park at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. We were on a short drive to a mountain lake. As the road began to climb, we noticed that the temperature was dropping. At 6,000 feet it was 55 degrees. By the time we got to 8,000 feet it was 34 degrees. But the biggest shock was that, in 30 minutes, the terrain went from a green springtime pasture to a snow-covered winter wonderland.

The road actually became impassable with snow, and we had to turn around and go back, or risk being stuck there. Yes, weather is vertical out West, and that’s a foreign mindset for many of us. But experiencing the foreign is why we travel. And it’s usually a lot of fun!