Category Archives: Confessional

A Wedding for the (Middle) Ages

30 Tuesday Jun 2015

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Julie bride

BY LOIS DESOCIO

This past Saturday, my dear friend, Julie, was a 59-year-old, first-time, bride. No less lovely and ebullient than a decades-younger bride, she was beautifully gowned in sequins, her hair was uplifted and curly; her smile an eight-hour ear-to-ear. Her whole self sparkled. And the party, thrown on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, was a celebration for the ages.

The room of 100-plus people, who ranged in age from 5 to 90, pulsed with love and gratitude, topped off with an unspoken, all-inclusive aura; an acknowledgment that to have all these people gathered together in the same room — Julie’s and Steve’s closest friends and families — was a gift.

A self-professed worrier (a sampling from the weeks before: “…the logistics are making me so nervous!” “I’m checking weather every hour!”), Julie was engulfed in the moment on her wedding day and impervious to any intrusion of anxiety. (“How is she?” I had texted our friend Laurie, who was helping her get ready. “Incredibly calm,” wrote Laurie.)

The weather was as bad as it could be — pretty much a notch or two below Hurricane Sandy. Many of us walked (some of us galloped in high heels) the two blocks down the boardwalk from the hotel to the restaurant while battling double-digit wind gusts and slanting sheets of drenching rain that undid hair; ran make-up. But the storm was not a wedding crasher. It, instead, escorted an intimacy and warmth into the room. Mazel Tov! C’est La Vie! Bring It On!

I’ve often said that Julie and Steve are the most solid couple I know. Together for just under ten years — independent, both, but purely devoted to each other. They are in love. And simply by virtue of the wisdom that comes with being middle-aged, no doubt, they know what to do to remain committed and in love for the rest of their lives.

This was also the first marriage for Steve. Unencumbered by previous marriages, children from other marriages, and the uncertainty that may accompany a marriage at the age of 20 or 30, he and Julie both exude an air of settling in for the long haul. A comfort level that can only come with an awareness that there may be less days ahead than behind, so let’s get at it! An all-knowing, we’re-in-this-together comfort. True companions, who, as Julie has said, “will forever have each other’s backs.”

(And that middle age, laugh-it-off, don’t-sweat-the-small-stuff insight was tested the next day, when the caterer for the post-wedding brunch for 70 people didn’t show up.)

So, because there’s no such thing as too many “Mazel Tovs,” Mazel Tov!

And never stop laughing:

I’m James Brown in the Morning

23 Monday Feb 2015

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BY JULIE SEYLER

This is my personal concert hall.

Every morning that I emerge from the swimming pool,

swimming pool(and isn’t that one inviting pool?), I belt out “I Feel Good” by James Brown and dance around the shower stall.

Through my 20s, when I swam 6 days a week, and my 30s, when I clipped a day; all through my 40s, when again another day was shaved off and now in my 50s where it seems I only make it into the pool 3 days a week, I have sung “I feel good dah dah dah dah dah” as the chlorine is washed away. I feel a little smug and very satisfied because my laps are over with and I deserve breakfast. In the old days I treated myself to a bagel and melted cheddar cheese, but with age and creeping glucose levels, I try to get excited about oatmeal or yogurt.

And as I approach my 60s, my resolution is to maintain the 3-day a week regimen for forever. Swimming has sustained me through thick and thin, love and loss, angst and subliminity. How could I ever give up something that makes me feel so good?

I Slid Down Something

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

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tubing

I slid into (and down) something more comfortable.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

For years now, I have been known to wax poetic about how much I love and miss playing in the snow — specifically skiing in it. Last year I publicly pleaded for comrades to “slide down something!” with me.

So when a good friend invited Julie and me to spend the long Presidents’ Day weekend at his sister’s house on the mountain in Killington, Vermont, we were in. And for the first time in my life that I can recall, I was afraid to have fun. I was afraid to ski.

For Julie it was a “no-brainer.” She’s never skied, and in her words, “has no balance of power,” and “has been known to topple simply standing on skis.” She’d be happy to “head for in for a bloody.”

For me, I’ve been a skier for most of my life (often with a bloody before, during and after).

But I haven’t skied in eight years. And the last time I slid (and ran through, and jumped into, and rolled around in mud) , my madcap self was shut down by a back injury that incapacitated me for almost three months. And my eyes were opened by a recovery period that humbled me for the rest of my life.

This weekend was the first test of my mettle. Therefore, I wanted to forget all that I learned and wrote about — the wisdom that sprouts during the recovery from a devastating injury. That “intellectual renewal” that can emerge from “physical pain.” I was contemplating ignoring “the gift of aging,” including the pronouncement that “fear can serve to gather perspective – quickly.” It can offer “…levelheadedness … a re-routing … a savvier path.”

Instead, I wanted to pretend that careening down a wind-swept, icy incline while buckled into two laminated slats would not be foolish for a 60 year old with an iffy back who hasn’t slid down anything snowy in eight years. I wanted the older me to be the old me — sometimes cautious, sometimes reckless, but always game.

The deadline-driven decision as to whether or not I should hit the slopes locked me into a tortuous head game for days. (As my friend noted — women forced to make a major life decision such as whether or not to have a child, probably spend less time deciding than I did on whether or not I should ski.)

If I skied and fell, re-injury was a possibility. If I skied and didn’t fall, redemption was a possibility. If I didn’t ski, and ultimately didn’t fall, a snowball effect was certain: “the gift of aging … intellectual renewal … perspective … levelheadedness … a re-routing.”

So, I opted out. And, along with my good friends, slid down a “savvier path.”

We went tubing. In record-cold wind chills and wind. Two 50-somethings, and one 60 year old careening and twirling down the hill amidst teenagers and youngsters (some with parents younger than us who simply pushed their kids down).

So — trading an icy ski slope for an icy tube hill? Smarter. Levelheaded. Older and wiser. So much fun! And brave.

On Pins and With Dr. ‘Needleman’

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

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BY BOB SMITH

I’ve got osteoarthritis in my right hip, and when I mentioned to my older brother Jim that surgery was an option if pain management didn’t work, he started raving about acupuncture. Apparently he’d woken up with a sore hip a year ago, and limped in to see an acupuncturist who fixed it in one visit. He walked out the same day, pain free.

This was high praise, particularly since I knew that, as a boy, Jim would break into cold sweats and/or faint dead away whenever he got an inoculation. I didn’t like getting shots, either, but if I looked away and didn’t dwell on the fact that a pointy piece of steel had been stabbed into my flesh, it was no more painful than a mild bee sting. So I decided to give it a try.

I made an appointment with a local acupuncturist of Chinese descent who’s certified by what appears to be a reputable national organization. His office, reassuringly, was in a standard brick professional building, and Doctor Needleman (my pseudonym), was about my height and dressed in a casual shirt and khaki pants. He looked at my tongue, felt around my lower back, and pronounced that my kidney qi (“chee”) was low.

I’d been there all of two minutes.

It reminded me of the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor to find out why he’s feeling poorly. He’s got carrots sticking out of his ears, and stringbeans and French fries jammed up his nose, and the doctor says “I can tell just by looking at you — you’re not eating right.” How could Needleman tell anything from such a cursory examination?

“Got low energy? Pee a lot?”

No to the first, and yes to the second, but the need to pee isn’t qi, it’s my 60-year-old prostate. He nodded knowingly.

“You get cold easily?”

“Only in New Jersey in January, which is why I’m in Florida, Doc,” I answered flippantly.

He told me to remove my shirt, socks, and shoes, and lie face down on the table with my hands relaxed on a chair positioned under the headrest. On the chair was one of those bells you see on a hotel front desk, which seemed random. Then the sticking began.

First Needleman palpated both sides of my spine, apparently identifying choice spots. Next I felt pressure and a hot jab of pain about midway down my back, punctuated by what felt like two gentle taps as he inserted the first needle. The pain subsided within two seconds.

He inserted at least twelve more needles going down both sides of my spine, and even a few into my left ankle and calf. Because I’d mentioned the arthritis in my left thumb, he put three there for good measure. I peeked and saw one hair-thin needle dangling from the meaty flesh at the base of my thumb, and closed my eyes again.

Except for the first needle, I felt no more than a mild pinch and slight pressure as he pushed them in. Then he spritzed my back with a cool liquid and swung a goosenecked heat lamp over the table.

“Okay, nap time,” he said cheerfully as he closed the door. “Thirty minutes. Just relax. Don’t move. Ring the bell if you need help.”

That wasn’t reassuring, although I couldn’t imagine what exactly might go wrong. He’d turned on a loud kitchen timer in harsh counterpoint to the piped-in flute and sitar meditation music that flowed into the room. As I began to feel the warmth of the heatlamp spreading across my back, I had the queasy sensation that something was going on in my body.

Needleman would say my qi was moving, but it’s just as likely I was overcome by the strangeness of lying there like a chubby white porcupine, waiting to see if panic would overtake me and make me ring the bell. But then, maybe 10 minutes later, I drifted into a deep calm. I no longer cared about the nest of needles sprouting from my skin, or my forced paralysis for a half hour, or even the timer’s relentless ticking — it all faded away. I was in a trance (or sleeping), dreaming about swimming with dolphins or how it would feel to be a loaf of freshly-baked bread.

Then Needleman was back, breezily plucking the metal pinpricks from my back. He asked how I felt, and I considered telling him I felt “perforated,” but that wasn’t true. My hip and thumb still hurt, but I felt better somehow. Was it all imaginary?

Have the Chinese been practicing acupuncture for millennia merely for its placebo effect? Could that many people be consistently fooled into believing they’re being helped when nothing is happening at all?

I’ve scheduled three more human pincushion sessions with Dr. Needleman to find out. I’ll keep you posted.

When My Words Collided With Björk’s

06 Friday Feb 2015

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I cry to my left; I dance to my right

“I Cry to My Left; I Dance to My Right.” Watercolor by Julie Seyler.

BY LOIS DESOCIO

Björk and me. As polar-opposite as Iceland and New Jersey. She’s a brilliant musician. I’m a brilliant … hmm. (I can’t recall being called “brilliant.”) She’s an international “queen.”

I’m a “Jersey Girl.”

She can write music like nobody else.

I listen to music — like everybody else.

She can sing.

I carry a tune by plugging myself into my phone and toting the music in me along with me, through dancing, from room to room.

But we do have a parallel. We both recently wrote about betrayal and a breakup. And in keeping with the disparity in our places in the universe — I wrote an essay. She wrote a best-selling, breakthrough album, out of which a MoMA exhibit will spring.

We are dead-on, though, with our innate use of a creative outlet to mine through life events that are coated with agony. Agony that words can’t recount. Until you find the words. We both found the words. We both wrote the words. And, in her big way, and in my little way, our written words hit a collective nerve.

A few days after Julie told me I had to read The New York Times’ article by Jon Pareles, “Sometimes Heartbreak Takes a Hostage,” a review of Björk’s “complete heartbreak” album “Vulnicura,” another friend sent me a link to the Web site Journal.ie, which ranked my BuzzFeed essay as last week’s number-three best read on the Web.

Number one was an interview with Björk about “Vulnicura.”

Cool. So I threw myself into everything Björk. I read what I could find. I bought and repeatedly listened to “Vulnicura.”

I feel her words — both in her music and in her interviews about her album and the process of creating it. The words were mine, but hers. For both of us, moving through betrayal and “the death of the family,” was for me, as was for her “the toughest thing I’ve ever done.”

For both of us it took years to write about it and muster the nerve to put it out in the world. We both wrapped our articulation around the arc of a timeline. We both had a run-in with the magic of karma. And we both came through liberated.

I relate to her metaphors: “You feel like you’re having open-heart surgery, with knives sticking in, so everything is out, and you have this urgency and immediacy. It has to happen right now, that you have to express yourself.”

And her letting-go: “She hopped out of the D.J. booth to dance on the pool table, rolling across it like something in a vintage MTV video. Around midnight, she led her flock to Prikid, a packed hip-hop club, where she danced nonstop, sang along and downed shots of birch schnapps until nearly 4 a.m,” wrote Pareles. (I would have been there, on the pool table, had I been there.)

When I write, I listen to music. I have a stable of songs that I draw from. They range from opera to ’60s pop melodies. I pick the song that moves me along with my writing. I click “repeat” and it plays over and over and over for hours. I blast it. It takes over my head and let’s nothing in but me. Rarely, do the words come to mind without music in my ears.

Sometimes I need violins. Sometimes I need a rousing choir. Sometimes I need Roy Orbison. Sometimes a voice hits me out of nowhere. (B.J. Thomas!?)

But for this piece, I needed Björk and “Vulnicura.” Specifically “Black Lake.”

So while I was formerly more in awe of pieces of Björk (yes, her swan dress, her avant-garde-ness), I am now a forever-fan of all of her. I hear her now.

Me and Björk. We were on the same page. The Icelandic queen and the Jersey girl — scribes of the separation; chroniclers of catharsis. All-consuming, heart-breaking, gut-purging, pool-table-dancing, shot-drinking reclaimers of us.

A Tale of Two Boxes

02 Monday Feb 2015

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Which box is it anyway?

Which box is it anyway?

BY JULIE SEYLER

The holiday season does not end the day after New Year’s. It ends the day after the Super Bowl. The game is as much about eating as it is about watching.

Every year, I make an effort TO WATCH the game because I purchase 4 boxes in the office Super Bowl pool. It increases the odds of a win in at least one quarter. Over a week before Super Bowl, I asked Steve if the boxes had been filled and he said “No” and I said “If you see Steve L., (head of the SB pool), mention I’d like a box.”

On Monday, a week ago, Steve L. came around and told me I could purchase a maximum of 2 boxes because the people in the weekly football pool got premier dibs. I inscribed my initials into 2 blank squares and reminded him to come by when I could buy 2 more. And in the midst of planning our annual Super Bowl fete, we have also been trying to get the back room into some type of order and cardboard boxes are indispensable. Steve has been bringing them home periodically. We are progressing.

Just before we left work Thursday evening (this was the crazy week with the blizzard that sort of deflated as it hit New York), Steve called to ask if I wanted any boxes.

I said “No”

He said “Are you sure?”

I said “Yes”

He said, “OK”

We hung up.

The Friday before Super Bowl, the 100% filled-in football pool was on my chair. Steve L. came in to collect for the 2 boxes and I asked him “Why didn’t you tell me when I could buy new boxes.”

He said, “Steve did”.

“No he didn’t”.

“Yes he did I was standing right there. He called you yesterday and asked if you wanted any boxes and you said “No”.

I play-backed the scene and blurted out “I thought he was talking about bringing home more cardboard boxes!”

It’s logical, my Steve=Cardboard Boxes and Steve L.=Football Boxes. Separate and discrete roles.

Regardless of boxes, I sat through kick-off and like every other year, promptly exited to attend to my chicken wings. I cannot focus on football but ensuring that those chicken wings are saturated with just the right amount of buffalo sauce and baked to a delicate crisp is endlessly engaging. I serve them in shallow bowls with a dollop of blue cheese on the side so that no one has to peel their eyes away from the action.

At half-time, we watch the spectacle performer outdazzling last year’s spectacle. This year Katie Perry entered on a mechanical tiger. I’m a rock ‘n roll failure so I find her predictability difficult to embrace.

And the ending of this tale of Super Bowl Sunday:

Less box is more. I won the final quarter in the pool!

Three Years Ago, I Went on a Blind Date …

26 Monday Jan 2015

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This personal essay by Lois DeSocio was first published on January 25, 2015 on BuzzFeed:

BuzzFeed Art

Jenny Chang/BuzzFeed

The First Date That Changed Everything

My Back Room: Memories Amidst the Dust Bunnies

22 Thursday Jan 2015

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studio pre cleanseBY JULIE SEYLER

I have been cleaning up and cleaning out the back room. It is the master bedroom of my apartment, but has always functioned as a studio — a place where I had my easel and oils and drawing books and pastels and thread and canvas and stretcher bars and papier-maché and beads.

But I am starting to move stuff out. The house in New Jersey has an attic and the attic is to become a working space of mine. I am organizing and gathering and chucking, and between the dust bunnies and crap, I found a cache of memories.

There are notebooks filled with slides of paintings, and drawing books filled with collages. I have photograph books that hold the two-dimensional representation of my three-dimensional papier-mache sculptures that took over my living room in my old apartment. It was so sad because they were too big to come with me when I moved to this apartment. Rediscovering my stash of work reminded me of the years when I would wake up and paint and come home from work and paint and in-between draw, sew, take classes, make collages, and paint.

I pored through my photograph albums and found forgotten gems like this one:

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I just cracked up. What a poem! What a poet!

I found a two-page photo spread of a 1996 ski trip to Vermont which included pics of Lo and her toddler sons, a dirty sink, a pot of fondue and a kitchen floor carpeted in bubbles. For some reason I have no recollection of that trip, probably because I don’t ski. I tumble and fumble. Best to forget those embarrassing experiences. But Lola had instant recall. She remembered who made the fondue, how the sink got completely clogged and that someone put liquid soap into the dishwasher, thereby leading to a bubble explosion.

So amidst the dreaded chore of cleaning, vacuuming and dusting, I got to “review” some ephemera of my life at this ripe old age of young middle age. (We are only young middle age, still, right?) I am sure when I again look back, the glow of the past will have an even more burnished lustre, but no doubt that, just like this time, I will be enthralled remembering how much fun I’ve had and how many fabulous people I have known and loved for these many years.

This Ex-Hippie is Old: My Hip is Osteoarthritic

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Is this my future anatomy?

Does my future include a prosthetic device?

BY BOB SMITH

I’ve had a persistent low-grade ache in my right thigh for over a year now. I wrote it off to too much running and not enough stretching, but lately the pain has gotten worse.  So I started getting regular massages, switched from the treadmill to the elliptical trainer, and did flexibility exercises hoping to erase the problem, but nothing changed.

Then, like Ebenezer Scrooge, I had a Christmas Eve miracle and revelation.

Every year we host an elaborate Christmas Eve feast featuring all sorts of seafood as well as fresh, crisp-crust bread and exquisite pastries from the local bakery.  But to get any of those goodies without waiting on line for an hour, you have to get to the bakery as soon as they open on Christmas Eve morning.  My over-50 body forces me to toddle out of bed every night in the wee hours to use the bathroom, so I’m the natural for that crack of dawn bakery run.

When I got there at 5:50 the lights in the main serving area weren’t on yet, but I saw activity inside. My right leg tends to stiffen up if I’m sitting still for a while, so rather than leaping out of the car and running across the street as I would have years ago, I carefully eased out of the driver’s seat and stood for a second to gauge the pain and let the stiffness dissipate. Not too bad – after a couple of seconds it felt fine, and I walked into the bakery with only a slight hitch in my step.

Incredibly, there were already three people on line, waiting in semi-darkness for the women bustling behind the counter to recognize the start of business. By the time I had my three dozen rolls and box of pastries ten minutes later, there were eight people behind me on a line, growing by the minute, that was snaking out the door. I’d dodged the bullet.

When I got home, because of my achy leg and partly out of just plain laziness, I decided I’d carry everything (including my convenience store coffee and newspapers) in one trip.

That took some planning: first I put the coffee on the hood of the car, leaving the house keys hanging from my left pinky. Then I put my left arm around the bulging bag of warm rolls, and with my right hand folded the newspapers under my left arm.  I slid my right index finger under the red and white twine on the pastries so the box dangled below my hand, then carefully kicked the door shut using my pain-free left leg.

My left hand was still free (except for the keys on my pinky), so I used that to awkwardly reach down and grab the coffee cup from the hood while still hugging the bag of rolls and squeezing my armpit on the newspapers. I figured once I got up the steps, I could put the pastry box on the side table by the door, take the keys from my left pinky with my right hand, and unlock the door. Mission accomplished!

But my hip had other plans.

I began to climb the steps, but because of the pain I failed to raise my right foot above the riser, and tripped. Because I was walking so slowly, I fell in slow motion. The box of pastries rocked, my finger released the string, and the heavy box slid away across the step, unharmed, as my right hand came down to break my fall.

As my left side came down, I somehow placed the tall Styrofoam cup of coffee onto the porch without spilling a drop. Simultaneously, my arm splayed out and the bag of rolls plopped onto the step ahead of me – remaining upright and jostling, but not dislodging, any of the rolls sticking out of the top. Even the newspapers had fallen from under my arm onto the step in a neatly folded stack.

I stood there, feeling foolish, with the house keys waggling on my pinky.

The Christmas Eve miracle: I’d spilled nothing and was unhurt. The revelation: I’d fallen climbing my own front steps, and could have been badly injured. So I made an appointment with my doctor, got an x-ray, and a week ago was diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the right hip. So now I’m officially old, with an old person’s chronic ailment, an old person limp, and maybe a need for an old person remedy: a new hip.  We’ll see.

But it’s all good. Like Scrooge, I’m thrilled to be alive — even if it means hobbling around like Tiny Tim.

To All My Facebook Friends

12 Monday Jan 2015

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Thank you

…for taking the time to wish me Happy Birthday! on Facebook. Especially because I rarely do.

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I hate it. Except on my birthday, when I love it. My Facebook footprint treads lightly. I seldom “friend” anyone. I only “like” or “comment” if I really know you and you’ve moved me deeply. (Or I’m sipping wine.) If I really want to say something to you, I will call you, text you, or send you a private message.

But this year, on the day after my birthday, I had an urge to publicly thank each of you with an individual reply. But I’m told that’s not cool.

I even wanted to take the time to write a little vignette to each of you — a skip down Memory Lane — about something we did together, but there are some of you that I don’t know.

If I wasn’t such a hypocrite, I would take my birthday down to stay in line with my Facebook disdain — the part that I see as inspiring obligatory comments and unabashed self-promotion among the best of us. But what’s not to love about the dependable randomness of the Facebook birthday?

After all, if I ran into a stranger on the street, and discovered that it was his or her birthday, I would offer an enthusiastic and heartfelt “Happy Birthday!” And I’d give a hug.

And where else, in a 48-hour span, would I be able to stock up dozens and dozens of birthday wishes from people I really miss, people I love and don’t see anymore, people I love and see all the time but can’t get enough of, men that I’ve dated, cousins, old boyfriends, the children of adult friends, adults I knew as children, professional colleagues, old friends, new friends, and even “friends” that I don’t know.

So thank you all again. Given that the Facebook-curmudgeon in me will be back soon, you may not get a “Happy Birthday!!” from me on your birthday. But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish you one.

~Lois