Super Tuesday, circa 1988

That was my first year in college and the very first year I voted. My options: Bush Senior, Ross Perot, and Dukakis (who is not in spellcheck, by the way).

I think.

See I'm not sure who the Democrat was. Because I didn't care. About the Democrats.

I was voting for Bush.

I was a Young Conservative, bordering on Libertarian, steeped in Ayn Rand and objectivist philosophy, and a rather ardent proponent of nuclear energy (in that apathetic, "Oh yeah, that could be cool way," but a supporter nonetheless.) I was studying physics! and living in a co-ed dorm! and using exclamation points with nary a second thought! (and because emoticons weren't quite in full use) and eyeing the, uh, "shapes" my roommate was snorting off my chemistry textbook!

College!

So, yes. I was one of those folks who started the dynasty. And why? Because of some passioned conviction in the Republican ideals? Because of Bush's stand on . . . uh . . . oh . . . right . . . busted.

Okay it was Walter. A short but very cute boy named Walter. Motorcycle-riding, Italian, Young Conservative, Bush-loving, strapping Walter.

He used to tell me, like every time I got on his motocycle, that it was the safest thing I'd have between my legs.

Oh.

OH!

Maybe I misunderstood his, uh, political persuasions.

Wherein I Get to Blather on about Books and Such Because Someone Actually Asked Me to So There

One of my students recently asked me for some book recommendations. She walked away some 30 minutes later (maybe dazed, possibly overwhelmed) with a bit more than she was asking for.

Silly girl, to ask such questions without a working knowledge of their potential implications. It's a bit like baiting a preschooler with candy before breakfast. Not done. (Unless, of course, he starts screaming.)

I toyed with giving her a rundown of what's on my bedside table: Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Matthew Collings' This Is Modern Art, Julian Barnes' Arthur & George, Ms. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (oh my God, did you read this? do you know? oh my God), Miriam Moss's Smudge's Grumpy Day, Mercer Mayer's I Was So Mad . . .

The titles at the end are the books at the top of the stack, re: most recently consulted.

I start strong.

That's what I could've done. But how do explain Mercer Mayer? On my bedside table? When we read to Finn in his room?

So instead, I started at 17 years old and gave her the Books by the Ages impromptu lecture.

Oh yes, I did. In rough order:

Heller, Rand, Morrison, Nabokov (which she hadn't read? what?), Garcia Marquez, Robbins (which she'd started. People still read that.), Jackson, Plath, Camus, Sartre, Bulgakov, Gogol, Turgenev, Lermontov (my Russian phase), Moore, O'Toole, Forester (which, if you'll remember, Finn has a head start on), Pynchon, Auster, DeLillo, Eco, Irving, Chandler, Austen . . .

(Are you seeing a pattern? Yeah, I saw it, too. Apparently not only do I have anger management issues (see bedside table and Russians and Camus), I also gravitate toward snarky white men.)

So that list took me to about 23, roughly and with some edits--and some lingering questions. If I had it to do all over again, would I do that much Kerouac? Would I even go near Gertrude Stein? Would I skip John Updike's "moral rectitude"?

But the point, I think, came from my realization that, like, everyone reads Ayn Rand at 18. That Plath (and Thompson and Miller and Nin) are definitely the reading material of weetwentysomethings. That I've met a lot of people who go through their Auster/Eco phase in their mid-twenties. Which got to me thinking, what would a book list look like for a midthirtysomething. What am I ripe for?

So I pose these two questions to you, dear reader, the very first questions I've posted to the blogosphere: What are your literary regrets? What should be included on a midlife reading list?

(And if you mention anything with babies or toddlers, it better be damn good. Damn Good. No Operating Instructions. No Little Earthquakes. No ZuZu Petals.)

(Don't make turn this blog around.)

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest

Sol LeWitt died on Sunday. Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.

And as I write those two sentences and think about the first time I read Vonnegut (Bluebeard, not Cat's Cradle, something like 10th grade) and the first time I saw Sol LeWitt (yummy art candy, probably my junior or senior year of high school on one of those many occasions when my sister made me choose art stumping over my biology final--and thank you, by the way), I question my own tact in mourning two relative strangers on my mother's 70th birthday.

What's up with that?

I could pretend to know. I could even write some stuff and maybe figure it out. But that's not going to happen. Instead I share this, by way of remuneration (a word I was doomed to misspell had I not just looked it up):

My mother lives in unassuming landmarks.

The high chair by the telephone, where she smokes her cigarettes, talks on the phone, drinks her orange juice, coffee, iced tea, coffee, water (in that order) and makes her holiday lists in stitchy, small and now nearly illegible letters. The chair used to be fashionable avocado vinyl, once upon a time, when my dad used to sneak up on her and plant raspberries in her neck, to crescent-scrunched, close-eyed giggles (my most treasured inheritance). She traded up for a tall wood chair, often caressed by small hands begging for a piece of her Hershey bar. The kind with almonds.

The left cushion of her plaid couch. Always the left one, always plaid, with tissues tucked in the cracks. Me or my sisters would sit on the right cushion and drape our short and then very long legs across the gap between us and my mother's lap. She'd tickle our feet with her long nails, until we tucked them, like her tissues, in the space between her back and the sofa's.

The chair on the right side of our oval kitchen table. My sisters would sit at the heads of the table. My dad and I shared a bench opposite my mother. It was probably covered in plaid. Or roosters. My mom has a thing for roosters. We'd inhale her pork chops with rice or her enchilada casserole or my dad's overcooked hamburgers, reaching for seconds, dropping scraps for the resident dog, reluctantly taking the dishes to the counter, fighting over who had to wash them, and rushing to watch Love Boat or Dukes of Hazzard, leaving my mother still eating, bite by excruciatingly and seemingly inhuman, slow bite.

The right side of the bed she shared with my father, accompanied by a pile of John Grisham or Patricia Cornwell books on the bedside table and one, open and face down on her chest as she sleeps, gently snoring. (She never could compete with the bear rattle of my dad, although she seemed to unconsciously try.) This is where I'd come for comfort, after pushing out of a nightmare , and this is where I found her, sitting up, her head in her hands, the night my dad died.

The porch. Or the sidewalk. Or the driveway. And for some reason, always in her slippers and robe. She's one of those people who believes a nightgown by itself is too immodest. Anywhere. Even in the house. She doesn't take more than two steps from bed without being more suitably, if not fully, dressed. And yet, she'll stand almost in the street and wave goodbye in her robe and slippers as, over the years, we have driven farther and farther away, to Austin and now to Kansas City. And as we pull out of the driveway and onto the street, she keeps waving, never leaving her post until we turn the corner and disappear.

Blinded by the Light and Woke Up by the dooce.com in the Middle of the Night

Yes, I have seen the light. Because of dooce (peer to the right please for the URL), I have begun the arduous yet liberating and exhilarating task known 'round these parts as: Spring Cleaning.

You've heard of it? Well, the oops is on me then.

I started with our coat closet. Apparently, we like coats (and cookbooks) very much. We have coats with my old company logo on them. Coats with at least a year's worth of dirt on them. Coats that the kid grew out of 24 months ago. Coats that I outgrew--on several levels and sizes--in 1988 (which, you will soon see, is a running theme of my spring clean).

Some I kept, like my black and white Fonzarelli motocycle jacket. Finn may want to burn that some day in effigy and I couldn't, just simply could not, rob that from his future angst. A teenage soul needs light--burning, yet controllable, flames, if necessary--to live.

I don't know that I can trash any of my cookbooks. I may want to try that mackerel jelly roll someday. You never really know.

So I closed the doors on the coat closet and took on the linen closet. And it needed a showdown. I mean, really needed a showdown.

I threw out several bottles of infant cough medicine, vintage 2003. I transferred some 30-thread count linens to the costume department. (Finn will be a ghost or mummy this year, methinks.) I sandwiched several bars of Zest between towels, tablecloths, and pillowcases. (To keep the odors spring fresh.)

And then I faced my nemesis.

I don't consider myself a packrat. Or collector. But I know what I like. And back in 1988, yes, 1988, I liked Victoria's Secret Raspberry Glace. It was one of the first fruity scents trapped in a body lotion--and it was less floral and more desserty than a lot of what you find on the shelves today.

So when VS discontinued it in something like 1989, I started buying up bottles. And because I would never, never, never find a scent I would like so much, I eased my use. I hoarded. I left bottles unsqueezed, unopened, unconsumed.

And then, because I taught seventh grade, had female relatives, and was of an age and disposition to care about and smother my B.O., I started receiving other kinds of body lotions. Kiwi and apple. Green tea and lime. Cucumber and melon.

And they kept coming. Fast.

So when I began to clean out my closet, I had a healthy supply of body lotions, aged between 2 and, eegads, 20 years. Stored, neatly and in chronological order, next to my collection of '80s plum eyeshadows (the real and original purples), '70s peach lipsticks I stole from mother, and chalky early 90s reds. And those were stashed neatly next to the wired buckets of free gifts, from every era, decade, and mood of my life. Free Estee Lauder gifts. Free Lancome gifts. Free Clinique gifts. My life, scented and branded.

My really rather entire scent and color-me-beautiful history was all contained on two shelves of a linen closet. I don't have any clothes or shoes left from high school (except for the aforementioned leather and a pair of NaNas). I've never been a big photo albumer. I suppose the multiple bottles of Raspberry Glace and pill boxes of eyeshadow are the closest thing I get to a scrapbook.

So to get all that--and I mean all that--into the trash bag took a lot of sucking air and pep talks. Out loud. Out really loud.

But I'm kind of happy to say that that history is off the shelves and in a Hefty cinch sack. And when you think about, it's rather nice company--a kind of conflating of personal and family history in the mingling of cosmetic tubes and medicine bottles.

It could be said.

(A quick addendum: I did take several bottles of VS on our backpacking trip through Europe in 1992. So for me, Raspberry Glace will always be the scent of youth, blisters--and a democratized Czech Repulic.)