emlocke

Category: La Familia

  • What my mama gave me (besides the straight eyelashes)

    Earlier this month, my mom and I went to a bridal shower together. We were one of several pairs of Mother & Daughter, but it was the first time I’ve ever attended an event with my mother and not felt like she was only present because I was or the other way around. She wasn’t there to be my chaperone. I wasn’t there because she didn’t have time to drop me off at home first. We received two separate invitations at our two separate homes and brought two separate gifts accompanied by two separate poems (the poems were Mom’s idea).

    I’ve heard my mother called by her own name by other adults my whole life, but it totally threw me off to hear us introduced as “Emily” and “Elizabeth” and not “Emily and Elizabeth” or “Elizabeth and Emily.” The other guests kept talking to us like we were two separate entities, two separate people. Was it not clear that we were together? Maybe I should have pointed out that we arrived in the same car.

    It was a bridal shower game that outed us as “Emily and Elizabeth,” unmistakably Mother and Daughter. Each guest dumped out her purse and tallied up its contents according to a list that gave a score for each item. Stamps, pens, mints, pain killers, lipstick, sunglasses, the keys to someone else’s house, and the like were all worth 5-25 points to the person hauling them around.

    After taking inventory, we started scoring with a show of hands: “Who has 10 points? Who has 20? 30?” Hands started to drop as the total climbed past 70 points. Only four or five women had 100 points-worth of stuff in their bags. The last three standing were the bride’s grandmother, my mom, and me.

    “Who has 130?” Grandmother-of-the-Bride lowered her fingers. A knowing groan rolled through the room as my mom and I stared each other down.

    “Anybody have more than 140 points?” Mom couldn’t hack it. She dropped her arm as I raised my other one in victory, waving my winning item like a trophy.

    My eyelash curler was worth 50 points and it was the only one at the party.

    “You carry that with you everywhere?” Not even my own mother could believe it.

    When we got in the car to go home—together!—my mom said, “I don’t know why I bothered to dump out my whole purse. I knew exactly what was in there.” I think I could have guessed the contents of my mother’s bag, myself. That’s where I get all my stamps.

  • (I can’t get no)

    My theory is, the same way my body craves proteins and vitamins when they’re lacking, I get cravings when there is an emotional or intellectual deficiency of some kind. I go through phases of fixation on one particular element of my life.

    Material cravings have me browsing online and mail order catalogs like it’s my job.  Next, I’ll spend every free moment working out or planning a workout, my refrigerator is stocked with fresh, lean organics, and I get my hair cut and revamp my skincare regime.  Then I’ll read three books in two weeks and entertain the notion of going back to school for an advanced degree.  And when that passes, I sprout social butterfly wings and make a point to catch up with everyone I know before retreating into a domestic phase.  That usually involves a comprehensive scrub-down of the entire apartment and the rearrangement of furniture and decorative accessories.

    Sometimes it leads to attempts at creating decorative accessories myself.  That’s a warning sign for a creative spell.  The creativity cravings are the most difficult to satisfy.  It’s like craving something, but not knowing what it is.  Because what I want, what I crave, is somewhere within me, unseen, and if it gets stuck, simply wanting it to emerge isn’t enough to make it happen.  Sometimes I feel just desperate to conceive something of words or colors and when I can’t draw it out, it’s like I’m imploding and exploding at the same time.

    What’s unsettling is, lately, I haven’t craved much of anything.  It’s like I’m caught in the trough of a wave, just riding it out.  It’s odd, though, this absence of want.  It’s like a deficiency of deficiencies, but that doesn’t mean I’m thoroughly satisfied.

    {P.S. What are you non-gastronomical cravings? Material? Physical? Intellectual?  Social? Domestic? Creative? Or otherwise?}

  • Right there, under the rainbow

    I was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1984.  A few months before my parents moved to Connecticut in 1986, my pediatrician relocated to a new office.  It featured a rainbow sculpture that arched across the sidewalk leading up to the front door.

    The rainbow is my earliest memory; the first image imprinted permanently on my brain.  For literally as long as I’ve possessed the ability to remember, I’ve had the image of this rainbow in my head, a little hazy around the edges.  It’s what I’ve always contributed to conversations about San Antonio: “I remember a building with a rainbow in front of it . . . ”

    But it was the one thing that we didn’t have a photograph to look at.

    My coworkers, bless their hearts, brought me to the rainbow on the way to the airport after our conference in San Antonio last week.

    My parents had sent me the addresses of the hospital where I was born and of my first home, the names of a park where I split my little chin open and of a few Texan landmarks that we visited as a family, but all I really wanted to see was the rainbow.

    I wanted to confirm that fading mental image with my own eyes.  It’s the one memory of my infancy that hasn’t been influenced by my parents’ memories, like the chin accident in the park, or reinforced throughout my childhood, like the rooms in my grandmother’s house, which is where the three of us lived when we first left Texas for Connecticut.

    I felt a little homesick in San Antonio.  Without many concrete memories to represent it in my mind, I think of it as a place that I’ll always share with my mom and dad.  Before my brother or my dog or pre-school, it was just the three of us among the bluebells.

  • Learned behavior

    In a moment of ingenuity (that, or creative desperation), my parents affixed springs to the feet of two legs on my crib.  “We would have tried anything,” my mom explained after she revealed this for the first time, half-pleading for forgiveness from my astounded face.

    Twenty-four years later, I know how I learned to rock myself to sleep just by jostling one knee until the repetitive motion carries the rest of my body along on a gentle sway.

    Convenient, isn’t it, that childhood amnesia effect?  I wonder what else they’ve been keeping from me.

    And I wonder where I could find springs large enough for the feet on my full-sized grown-up bed.

  • Word to your mother (and father) (and Gail Collins)

    There are only three things that could get my parents to leave the house on a weeknight after the hour of 8PM:

    A family emergency
    A Doobie Brothers concert
    A TimesTalks event

    The New York Times Presents:

    TimesTalks Presents Election Night Live at TheTimesCenter

    Tuesday, Nov 04, 2008 6:00 PM EST
    at TimesCenter Stage

    Spend Election Night LIVE at The New York Times.

    Get insight and perspective on the battle for the White House from key New York Times political reporters and editors, including executive editor Bill Keller, managing editor Jill Abramson, assistant managing editor Richard L. Berke, editorial page editor Andrew M. Rosenthal, Op-Ed columnists Gail Collins and Frank Rich, national political correspondent Adam Nagourney and others.

    Discussion moderated by Times Magazine contributing writer Matt Bai, author of “The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics,” with Sam Roberts, Times reporter and host of NY-1’s “New York Close-Up.”

    Discussion: 6 – 8 PM
    All-American Food & Drink plus Televised Returns: 8 – 10 PM

    And so I will be spending Election Night with my mom and dad, Gail Collins, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, and other members of the Times Editorial and Opinion teams.  I wonder how they’re planning to get us to leave at 10PM?  You know the results won’t be final by then.

    My first question: Do I get to dress up?  I have a navy blue, semi-formal dress that would look just splendid in the red and blue light cast by the U.S. Electoral map!

  • Halfway between Ryder Beach and Fisher Beach

    My dad and my brother and I went off on an amateur art history scavenger hunt down the Cape Cod Bay beach this afternoon to find the house where Edward Hopper and his wife spent summers painting, journaling, and sailing from the 1930s until the artist’s death in 1967.

    We surmised that the big bay window that takes up the whole north side of the house had been added in the last fifty years, but here is a portrait of Edward Hopper, his wife Jo in the background, showing the window as is in 1960. A great perspective for Hopper’s naturally lit, moody dunescapes.

  • Clocks and chandeliers

    My brother told me that he’s interested in clocks. He said it as though it’s something innate that he discovered about himself, maybe even that surprised him, that he couldn’t control. It’s been there all along, but it’s just bubbled up to the surface all of a sudden.

    I told him that I’m interested in chandeliers. I don’t think that it’s an innate thing that I’m drawn to chandeliers specifically, but I’m intrinsically attracted to their sparkliness and structural grace.

    Those elements are embodied by the thirty-three starburst chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera. The eleven that hang in the lobby have been sent off on holiday in Vienna. They will be repaired and refurbished, all expenses paid by Swarovski.

    My brother and I take off tomorrow for a beach holiday, though I don’t expect to encounter many chandeliers—or clocks—on the Cape.

  • I settled for a front stoop

    In an unexpected coincidence, Caitlin’s twin brothers are visiting at our apartment the same weekend that I’m down in DC to visit my brother. As Caitlin helped Neil unfold the futon last night, I threw my full line of hair and skin care products into a suitcase, knowing that I had to go well prepared.

    Is it the difference between men and women or the four year age gap that tells me Caitlin’s brothers can come to New York knowing they’ll be provided for, but I feel compelled to travel as though I’m bound for the Peace Corps when I go to stay at my brother’s house?

    I made absolutely sure to pack extra hair elastics because I don’t want to be stranded in a house full of boys with my hair stuck to the back of my neck.  I think I brought three different kinds of moisturizing lotion for a two-day trip. On top of that, my mother sent a bag for me down with other friends of Will’s: the Aerobed, a set of sheets, a bath towel, a pillow (which I recognize, by its lopsided shape, from my own bed at home), and three Diet Cokes. (Also, an artifact from my grandmother’s house: a faded pack of playing cards with classic literary figures on their faces.)

    And after all that, Will has proven my theory wrong. Will has inquired after my health, carried my luggage, and offered to take the air mattress so I could have his bed. Since arriving in Washington, I’ve been offered a sandwich on whole wheat (and a bottle of water!), handed a prepaid metro card, fed a slice of our mom’s homemade banana bread.

    My brother has this chair on his front porch. It only has one arm, but it’s rugged, solid. No wobble. I knew I wasn’t cut out for the Peace Corps anyway.

  • My superpower is: I am impervious to external and internal distractions

    I think my grandmother can smell electricity. Is that crazy? Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe she’s crazy. I guess it does sound crazy, but I really do believe that the unidentifiable aroma she claims to detect sporadically in arbitrary locations are electrical currents sparking around her.

    I heard about her bizarre sensory phenomenon several months ago when I was at home for a weekend and Grandmom came up to the house to visit. My mom asked her about the funny smell (they must have discussed it before) and Grandmom reported that she noticed it at indiscriminate moments—sometimes near the stove, sometimes in the hallway, sometimes in the car. She couldn’t name the scent and couldn’t pin down a source.

    A bit later, my mom booted up the dinosaur PC in our family room. She might have wanted to look up “imaginary odor” on WedMD (or I might be making that part up). I heard the computer crank up and Grandmom said, just then, “Now, there it is again. How odd.”

    “There what is?”

    “The smell,” Grandmom said. She sniffed. The PC hummed and whirred beside her.

    “It’s the electricity,” I said. Grandmom must be picking up on collective bursts of electrical power.

    “Oh, no it’s not,” my mom said as she Googled “insane asylum” +”family weekend retreat.” Okay, I made that part up.

    Right or wrong, my diagnosis makes me ponder what super sense I’d want if I could choose one. I don’t think I need to smell electricity. It’s driving my grandmother crazy. I thought about smelling trouble, but I know that would cause nothing but trouble. I wish I could sniff out my size on sale.

    All this was called to mind by George Saunders’ shout and murmur in last week’s New Yorker. “Antiheroes” is about a world full of people who think they have superpowers but don’t.

    Not only do they not have superpowers, but the superpowers they think they have aren’t actually that super. A cheerleader feels entitled to be “impervious to physical harm.” The boy who can throw a wad of paper into the trashcan thinks he ought to be able to make every shot. His grandfather believes he can make it to the bathroom in time, every time, because he remembers that he used to be able to and yeah, wasn’t that nice?

    As I read the piece, I kept thinking of that half-glib, half-wise expression that defines insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

  • Everything I need to know about life I learned from my dad

    Twenty-five lessons

    – Proper broom sweeping technique
    – When I get a raise, that means it’s time to work harder
    – That it’s a woman’s responsibility to step in and out of an elevator first, otherwise she just holds everything up while men are trying to be polite
    – The grammatical difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’
    – That it’s entirely unacceptable to have the tag of my underwear showing
    – That most people only read what will confirm what they already know
    – Not to read just to confirm what I already know
    – That it’s okay to hate apologizing, but I still have to do it
    – That I deserve a man, not a boy
    – It’s just not the same to record the game and watch it later
    – To wash the car from the roof down
    – To tolerate feeling a little hot in the summer and a little cold in the winter
    – When someone calls me a ‘bad word,’ it’s not necessary to repeat that word excessively when I tattle on them
    – To take at least a moment to be proud of myself when I know I deserve it
    – If one thing isn’t working, try something else
    – To check my work
    – If my passenger has to wonder whether or not I’ve seen the stop sign or light, I’m approaching it too quickly
    – Just do the best that I can
    – Find a hobby; when the passion fades, find a new one
    – How to fold a newspaper
    – The posted speed limit is the speed limit, not the discretionary ballpark speed guideline
    – There isn’t always a reason; sometimes I just have to trust my instincts
    – To take the time to “just look” out the window sometimes, at everything and at nothing
    – To offer wine to dinner guests
    – To appreciate music without lyrics