Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (16 page)

I don’t scrapbook.

I don’t even know what scrapbooking is, or when it became a verb. I figure it means putting your pictures in a scrapbook, then labeling and dating them, or writing captions that preserve your important family memories and moments.

Doesn’t that sound so nice?

If you don’t do it, how could you not feel guilty?

Scrapbooking is like the pearls around June Cleaver’s neck.

I want them, and I want to scrapbook. I’ve booked, but never scrapbooked, and I feel like it’s time. Even though glue guns may be involved.

I’ve never shot a glue gun.

I’m in favor of glue gun control.

Any woman who scrapbooks has to be a great mother and wife, because she takes the time and care to do the little things that make life worth living.

I don’t do that.

I don’t take the time for the little things in life, unless they have fur. As a result, though my life is worth living, I won’t remember any of it.

I took tons of photos of Daughter Francesca when she was little, but they’re scattered around the house, stuck in junk drawers, cardboard boxes, and my jewelry chest. Some of the photos have made it into nice picture frames on end tables, but it’s like survival of the fittest, photo-wise. The weaker ones won’t make it, undoubtedly chewed up by the dogs.

This is wrong.

Nobody’s family photos should die in a Darwinian struggle.

I know it seems silly to equate keeping a scrapbook with being a good mother, but still, if you don’t save the photos of your children in a scrapbook, what are you saying to them?

“I love you, kid, but I don’t care about your past. Let the dogs eat it.”

Or:

“If it were important enough, you’d remember it.”

Or:

“What’s your name again?”

Technology doesn’t help, either. Nowadays, I take photos with the digital camera, but they remain there, forever. I never have the time to upload them into my laptop and don’t even know how to print them out. They all live inside the camera, forming their own family of family photos.

Maybe they’ll find a better photo mother.

The only photos that get any currency are the ones I take with my cell phone, which I email and post. But they never get printed or saved, either, and are too blurry to be any good anyway. In fact, I’ve gotten way out of control with the picture-taking on my cell phone, so that all of the most important moments in my life look as if they’re underwater. This will be disastrous when I’m 82, because my eyes will already suck and then I’ll be looking at all those sucky photos.

Then I’ll be not only a bad mother, I’ll be a bad grandmother.

This must change.

I vow to start scrapbooking.

I’m sure I can do it, I used to be kind of crafty. When I was in high school, I actually taught arts and crafts at a playground. It was a great summer job, playing with kids, building houses out of Popsicle sticks and weaving potholders out of synthetic loops. I actually liked those potholders, but they weren’t the kind of thing you’d see in Williams-Sonoma. They were too small, curled up at the edges, and generally mixed bright red with chrome yellow. I used to imagine the kids taking them home to their mothers, who threw them out immediately.

Bad mothers.

The kind who don’t scrapbook.

So I went online and read some of the scrapbooking sites, to get up to speed. It turned out to be more complicated than I expected, involving The Rule of Odds and The Rule of Thirds.

I didn’t know there would be rules in scrapbooking.

The Rules of Odds is that the “eye finds things arranged in odd numbers more natural and pleasing.”

Who knew that your eyes followed rules? My eyes don’t. They find everything natural and pleasing, especially George Clooney, and there’s only one of him.

But if there were three, my eyes might like it better.

And what’s the Rule of Thirds? If you draw two vertical lines and two horizontal lines on the scrapbooking page, “where those lines intersect are points of prime visual interest.”

My eyes started to glaze over, and I wasn’t even at the glue guns. And then I read that people who scrapbook are called scrapbookers, and I gave up.

It looked too hard.

I’ll stick to being a booker.

The Moon and I

By Francesca

I figure, if something happens once every 372 years, it’s worth staying up to see.

At least, that was my logic at 3:17
A.M.
, as I stood at my window and peered up at the lunar eclipse.

Last night was the first time a lunar eclipse occurred on the winter solstice since 1638. To take you back to eighth-grade Earth Science for a minute: the winter solstice is the longest night of the year, when the Earth is tilted as far away from the sun as possible. A lunar eclipse is when the moon passes directly behind the Earth, and thus the Earth blocks the sun’s rays from striking the moon’s surface, leaving it in shadow.

Are you bored? I don’t blame you. So were all my friends when I tried to rally a few of them to stay up and watch with me. There are plenty of things my friends will gladly lose sleep over—a “surprise” Kanye concert at the Bowery, the new iPhone, the latest Harry Potter film, pretty much any party with free drinks—but natural phenomena don’t generally rank among them.

But that’s why I was so interested in the eclipse; anything natural in New York City is a phenomenon.

So I refused to let everyone’s lack of enthusiasm dampen mine. I felt fortunate to discover that I had a decent view of the moon from my very own bedroom window. Bolstered by Diet Coke and the lilting brogue of Craig Ferguson, I patiently awaited the evening’s performance.

Around 1:30
A.M.
, a shadow crept over the bottom left-hand corner of the moon. I peeked out about every ten minutes to watch as the shadow took a larger and larger bite out of the white, sugar-cookie moon.

I expected the moon to go completely black when the shade passed over it, but it remained visible. Without the sun’s spotlight on it, the moon’s three dimensionality was easier to see. It looked like a little toy ball, hung in a schoolchild’s solar system project.

Closer to 2:30
A.M.
, the moon became imbued with a soft red color. I looked online and came to this shaky understanding of the cause: If you were standing on the moon looking toward Earth, you would see the sunlight slipping out of sight from every point on the Earth’s circumference. So essentially, the red color on the moon is a reflection of infinite sunsets.

Wow.

I wanted to tell someone, to shake someone awake and point out the window, but there was no one around. I looked over at Pip, who was stretched out on my bedspread in a Superman pose, fast asleep.

I was hoping for a howl at least.

I considered calling someone, maybe my mom, but it was too late. I held up my dinky cell phone camera for a picture, but it couldn’t remotely capture it. I was sure I could find fellow amateur astronomers chattering online, but what for?

Why did I want someone to look at me looking at it? Why did I need someone to acknowledge my acknowledgment?

So I put down my laptop, my phone, and my camera, and I stood alone at my window. I decided to experience the eclipse, just for myself.

For a change.

Watching the moon’s blush deepen from a pale rosewater to a dusty rouge, I was struck with the paradoxical sensation of feeling both insignificant and privileged, small and special, at the same time.

I felt small because what I was seeing put myself in perspective. Every day, I walk around and take the physical world for granted—in my world, I am the center of the universe. But at that moment, I was looking at the perfect alignment of a star, a planet, a moon, and me. I was suddenly aware of my physical position in a universe infinitely larger than myself. I was but a tiny organism, a few stories above the Earth’s crust, watching the shadow of my modest planet pass over its little moon. But tiny though I might be, I was connected to that moon, and to everything beyond, all of us on the same line, tethered one to the other.

With the moon awash in sunsets, I felt the dawning of a sense of unity and peace. On that longest winter night, I felt grateful and warm.

“Lunar Eclipse” was trending on Twitter the next morning, but instead of people sharing their experience, most were re-tweeting a link to NASA’s slideshow of high-tech, professional photographs. Every one of the slides showed a clearer, closer, and more vivid picture of what I saw last night.

And yet, nothing compared to the view from my window.

Big and Me

By Lisa

I’m in love with Big.

But in my case, Big is my Big TV.

I work all the time and keep the TV on in the background, so I’m spending every day and night with Big. This is my best marriage ever. If my third husband will be a dog, my fourth with be a Sony.

This is also the summer of every sports final in the world, including the World Cup, and bottom line, I am glued.

I mean, working.

It started with the Stanley Cup finals, and though I never watched ice hockey in my life, I started and couldn’t stop. I’ve never seen a more exciting game in my life. Big guys skating at top speed, slamming into walls and each other, slapping pucks and faces.

Wow!

It wasn’t just exciting, it was stressful. The dogs were riveted, even the cats. I defy anyone to watch only five minutes of a Stanley Cup game. Ice hockey is the potato chips of televised sports.

The Stanley Cup finals gave shape to my weeks, because games were held every other night or so, bringing an unprecedented level of excitement chez Scottoline, especially on a Wednesday night. And when the Stanley Cup finals ended, the NBA Finals began, and my chair was still warm. Of course I started watching.

I mean, working.

I had never watched an entire basketball game in my life, but I got into the basketball finals, even though I didn’t care about either team. It turns out that basketball is exciting, too. Big guys running around like crazy, passing balls and throwing elbows, plus there’s tattoos and celebrities. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out who has which tattoo, and also trying to catch a glimpse of Jack Nicholson. If Jack Nicholson got a tattoo, I’d be a basketball fanatic.

All of which flowed naturally into soccer’s World Cup finals, another sport I never cared about until my deadline. Now I have soccer on all the time, and boy, is that fun to watch!

I mean, work.

Big guys running around at speed, kicking a ball, their sweaty hair flying, and all of them superhot, with exotic names. I bet they even have accents, though who cares if they talk? The hotness and the accents are what’s keeping me glued to soccer, and the only drawback is the air horns. Sorry, I can’t work with the constant air horns. It sounds like emergency sports. I say, let the spectators have the horns and turn the sound down, for the authors on deadline.

Of course, my nonstop viewing of sports I don’t care about has led to a considerable weight gain. This isn’t that surprising. It happens when you’re happily married, and Big solved this problem for me, too.

I was scrolling around the onscreen TV Guide the other day and came across Fitness TV, then clicked through to Yoga. I found Beginning Yoga and decided to give it a whirl, then and there. After all, I was already dressed in loose-fitting clothes, as that’s all I ever wear and had never before thought of as exercise gear.

Anyway, I set my laptop and pretzels aside, got out of my chair, and put a bath towel on the rug and tried to imitate the lady on the TV, herself a pretzel stick. Our session started with sitting and breathing, which is my kind of exercise, and I was really good at it, not to brag.

I bet you can do it, too.

Try it at home.

Sit down. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Yay!

Then we moved onto Sun Salutes, which is basically standing, breathing, and waving your hands in a way that looks like a little kid doing ballet but is in fact a greeting of a major planet.

Hi, Sun!

Hot enough for ya?

This would be yogic humor.

This pose got the cats’ attention, and then we segued into Downward Dog, which got the dogs’, for obvious reasons. I was upside down, red-faced, and already sweating, with my butt in the air, and all the dogs came over, sniffing, nuzzling, and licking crumbs off my shirt and shorts.

You know you’re in trouble when your clothes are delicious.

Luckily, Big isn’t complaining.

What a guy.

Birthday Wish

By Lisa

There’s nothing like your birthday to take you back to your beginnings, so it made sense that I spent mine in Ascoli-Piceno, Italy. The town is two thousand years old, and being there made me feel like an infant, as I was turning a mere fifty-five.

For my next birthday, I’m going to Stonehenge.

Then the more I travel, the younger I’ll get.

Ascoli-Piceno was the hometown of my grandparents on my father’s side, Mary and Antonio Scottoline, before they emigrated to America. My father and brother had been there once, but I never had, which is something I’ll explain later.

Ascoli-Piceno lies on the Tronto River in the Le Marche region, in the middle of Italy. The trip from Rome took four hours by car, and the highway passed by insanely picturesque farmhouses and olive groves until it narrowed to a skinny road with hairpin turns that wound around mountains. I kept my eyes closed for the mountain part. Everyone thought I was sleeping, but I was terrified.

I like my hairpins in my hair, only.

I was traveling with Daughter Francesca in a bite-size Fiat packed with my Italian editor, publicist, and translator, which makes me sound like I roll with an entourage to rival a rapper. I don’t, except when they’re kind enough to promote my book in Italy, and because my publisher is also from Ascoli-Piceno, it was his great idea to take me there.

You may be wondering why it took a complete stranger to bring me home.

So am I.

The oldest section of the town is hewn from travertine marble taken from the surrounding mountains, and it lends a lovely gray cast to the medieval-scale houses that line the cobblestone streets, many only as wide as an alley. A town square called the Piazza del Popolo is the heart of the city, and it’s ringed by a breezy arched walkway, the gorgeous Cathedral of Sant’Emidio, and a historic Town Hall. Wikipedia says the piazza is “considered one of the most beautiful in Italy,” and for once, Wikipedia is accurate.