The Kate Chronicles

The Messenger

I'm slowly on the mend and last night I went to see a preview of the movie  "The Messenger." The movie stars Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson, who play soldiers assigned to "bereavement notification." That is, they are the angels of death, the duo that deliver the knock on the door that every military family dreads.

This film has no explosions, no blood and no combat scenes, but it conveys the horror of war in an especially affecting way. One of the young soldiers, Will, is an Iraq veteran, quiet and self-contained, suffering from his own wounds, both physical and psychic. The other, Tony is a volatile, recovering alcoholic, ambivalent about his own service in the Persian Gulf War. Every time they knock on a door, you don't know what to expect, because the grief they deliver is met by a variety of responses. 

The movie was directed by Oren Moverman, who served in the Israeli army for four years. He was present at the screening last night, and someone asked him if he meant to make an anti-war statement with the movie. Moverman explained that many veterans had seen the movie, and one Viet Nam vet had told him that there were three views of war: anti-war, pro-war and in-war. "The Messenger," Moverman said, had an "in-war" point of view, that is, this is what it's like now.

Even if you have shied away from other Iraq movies (as much of the movie-going audience in this county has) please go see this one. 

Cats and Flu

Between the oral surgery and the flu, I have had a rough week. I logged a lot of time in bed feeling pretty miserable. But I've been well taken care of by my loved ones. The Weatherman delivered soup and plenty of liquids, and My Daughter and The Boy checked in on me daily.

And then there was Dr. Cat. Lawson, my older and - it must be said - larger cat was in constant attendance. He always knows when I'm down, and he curls up next to me to provide comfort. He is a very skittish kitty (he was a stray and we think he had a very traumatic kittenhood), so he did sometimes startle and bolt at loud coughs or sneezes. But he returned faithfully to my side each time and saw me through my illness.

This morning I was awoken by a peculiar noise. It was Lawson, and he had let out a cat sneeze, which sounds remarkably like a human sneeze, only more high pitched. And now I have just come to find out that a cat in Iowa was diagnosed with HINI virus. I didn't have swine flu, but I will feel terrible if I got my kitty sick with what was ailing me. 

If I did infect him though, I will return the favor and hang out with him until he feels better too.

PTSD

Amidst all the horror of what happened at Fort Hood, I keep wondering about the soldiers who went to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan for counseling after they returned from war. What could he have told them? How could he have offered them any sort of counsel or help? Did he make them feel even worse about what they had done?

The difficulties of returning from the horrors of war have been documented since the time of Odysseus. The suffering and dislocation from which soldiers suffer has had a lot of names. Currently we call it PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder. It has also been called "battle fatigue" and "shell shock." But I think the most poignant description is the one they used after the Civil War:  "Irritable Heart."

Flu

Bleah.

Daunted

You know how people casually ask, "How are you?" and they don't really mean that they want a full accounting of your physical and mental state?

There is a corollary for "How's the book coming?" The polite response is "Fine, thank you." The one I usually give is, "Uh....it's coming along slowly." But even that doesn't begin to describe that mess that is my office, my head and my manuscript. 

The most daunting thing about writing a book - at least to me - is not the writing, or the research or the self-discipline involved. It is the complete lack of feedback. I am used to writing for a newspaper, where every paragraph you write is immediately read by an editor, who sends it back with questions and comments and generally guides you to where you need to go next with your work. 

In this world, I write for months on end, without having the slightest idea if what I'm doing is any good or not. OK - that's a slight exaggeration - my agent is reading the first few chapters and says that when they are in decent shape (which evidently they are not yet), she will send them to my editor at the publishing house. And then if I'm really lucky, she can secure me an extension, which I will no doubt need.

Oh, sorry. Did you ask how the book was going? "Fine, thanks."

Local Politics

The rest of the country may be mulling over the significance of the Virginia and New Jersey governorships going from Democrat to Republican.

 But here in little old Westchester County, we are reeling from the surprising defeat of three-term County Executive Andy Spano. I covered Westchester for 18 years for the NYT, and for 12 of them, Andy was in power. And he was "Andy" to me - after all those years of hanging out at the same events (he was speaking and I was scribbling down what he said on paper) we were on a first-name basis. 

Westchester is solidly Democratic (home to Bill and Hill, after all).  That Andy got ousted by a young, relatively inexperienced Republican is big news around here.

Andy's been around a long time and he'll be fine.  But I am thinking of all the people I know on his staff, especially all the folks in the press office, who will soon be joining the swelling ranks of the unemployed. 

PS On another note, thanks for the calls about yesterday's oral surgery. It was very unpleasant. I did not know it was possible to have a hammer used inside your mouth. It can be done. Repeatedly. Ouch.

Back In the Dental Chair

More oral surgery today. Another implant. Today they are putting another titanium screw in my jaw. It takes several hours. I have my "mellow at the dentist" playlist ready on my ipod.

Really, honestly, I take good care of my teeth and floss daily. It's in the genes.

Looking forward to a few days of pudding and soup.

And I'm accepting all sympathy.

The Long Haul

We celebrated an amazing occasion this weekend - my parent's 60th  wedding anniversary. My mom and dad's marriage is a real love story - all these years later, they remain devoted and get a huge bang out of each other. Just to show you how much they have lived through together, here are some highlights from what the world was like when they exchanged vows in 1949:

-The average cost of a new house was $7,450 (which sounds amazing until you realize that average wages per year were $2950).

-A gallon of gas cost 17 cents.

-The cost of a first class stamp was 3 cents.

-The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb.

-The New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. (Not such a dramatic change!)

-RCA perfected a system for broadcasting color television.

-The first Volkswagon Beetle was sold in the U.S.

-George Orwell's classic, "1984" was published. (By the time the real 1984 rolled around, my parents would be celebrating their 35th anniversary.)

-South Pacific debuted on Broadway. (My parents saw it together then, and again 58 years later as a revival.)

Congratulations to two amazing people with one inspiring marriage!

Getting Paid, One Way or Another

Here's a local news item that caught my eye: a man enters a nearby Taco Bell. He brandishes a gun at the counter and tells the cashier to empty the register and lie down on the floor. Evidently before he collects the cash, however, he wanders back to the manager's office and asks for a job application. According to the police, he was no longer waving the gun and the manager didn't know about the attempted hold up. But there must have been something about the guy, because the manager refused his request and asked him to leave. Meanwhile, another Taco Bell employee had left the store, gone to a nearby Wendy's, and called the cops.

You have to wonder what this guy was thinking. I guess he needed cash, but wouldn't you think he'd have planned ahead of time whether he was going the legal route or the robbery route? Both at the same time seems pretty risky.

I don't think either his criminal or legitimate career prospects are too good. 

What A Mess

Sometimes when my office is really tidy, it means I'm procrastinating. What better way to avoid writing than to do some really fun filing? 

Judging from the current state of affairs - I snapped these pix this morning - you might then draw the conclusion that I am hard at work on the book. And you would be correct. I spend hours every day trying to make progress. Unfortunately the mess in the room also illustrates my mental state. I'm overwhelmed. 

Yesterday while I was on the elliptical machine at the gym, which usually helps me clear my thoughts, it occurred to me that I should take the time to make a much more detailed chapter outline and figure out what material goes where.  And that is precisely what I am going to do today. As soon as I clean some of this stuff up.

21

Today is The Boy's 21st birthday. My baby is 21 years old. It is a significant milestone for him, of course. But it's also one for me. What does it mean when your youngest child is an adult? (Aside from the obvious that you yourself must be getting kind of long in the tooth.) 

I am really proud of both of my kids (am I still allowed to call them that?) and the adults they are becoming. But there is a sadness too, as the curtain has definitively come down on the part of my life that was about the early amazing stage of being a Mom. A Mommy. You know.

This is a photo of the cake I baked and My Daughter decorated for The Boy's b-day. We served it to him a few days early, since we were all together. I hope you can make out the tiny car and roadway - a tip of the hat to his obsession with cars from when he was a little guy. 

Happy Birthday Pocket. I love you!

Viewer Discretion Advised

I had both my kids home this weekend, which was a rare treat. The Boy was home for a fall break from college and his sister came out from the city to visit us. Saturday was  cold and rainy and we all hunkered down, spending most of the day together reading, talking and eating.

After dinner (a really delicious spicy turkey lasagne) we talked about playing a family game. Not everyone was enthusiastic (probably remembering the last time I beat everyone in Scrabble - heh, heh, heh! ) and then I foolishly suggested watching old family movies.

We popped an old tape into the VCR. What was I thinking? There was The Boy, at age 2, just starting to talk and toddling around with his favorite pillow. There was My Daughter, beyond excited at her 6th birthday party. Christmases, family vacations, birthday cakes. We all laughed as we watched, because despite the fact that nearly 20 years had passed, we hadn't changed all that much. Physically of course, the transformation was dramatic. But as we watched the children, we could see in retrospect that their personalities were already there. The Weatherman kept letting the camera drift to capture wind in the trees or snow on the ground. At one point I was watching a scene from Christmas Eve, and said out loud, "Why am I giving the kids scrambled eggs on Christmas Eve?" and then my voice rang out on the video, "Please don't record that I am giving the kids scrambled eggs on Christmas Eve!"

Of course what the videos really captured was how quickly time passes. They were great fun to watch, but also almost too poignant to take. Now the Boy is now back at college and My Daughter back at work and will return tonight to her apartment. It's just me and The Weatherman and a very quiet house.  

Loving Westchester

One of the many reasons I love Westchester is because of its diversity of landscape. You've got easy access to Manhattan but you also have rolling hills, horse farms and country. About 10 minutes from where I live, we have the Rockefeller Preserve, where the Weatherman and I go for walks at all times of year. (We've also done cross country skiing and snowshoeing in the winter.) 

It's particularly delicious in the fall. Yesterday we brought The Boy and the Boy's girlfriend, who is visiting, for a hike there. Not only was it beautiful, but we particularly enjoyed gazing at the farm animals there. What is it that is so calming and relaxing about staring at sheep and cows?

How handsome is this dog?!

Along the walk....

The Boy's Girlfriend is from California, and she says the cows are happiest there. But this guy doesn't look too miserable.

Now - this is an order - try to get outside today before you miss things like this:

The State of Marriage

Here are some fun facts about marriage: 

-The young brides are in Oklahoma and Arkansas, where half of the women who head to the altar for the first time are 24 or younger. (Guess what - they also had the highest rate of divorce between 2007-2008.) And there's more - roughly 10% of ever-married folks in these two states have had at least 3 spouses.

-In New York and Massachusetts, which you'd think are more liberal places, things are a little more stable.  The grooms are older - half of the guys who have ever married were 30 or more when they first got married. These states also have the lowest divorce rates between 2007-2008. And for what it's worth, only 2% of folks in NY and MA have been married 3 times or more.

-Overall, a shrinking percentage of people in this country are married, and those that are taking the plunge are doing it at older ages. The median age of a first marriage, which has been climbing for decades, is 28 for men and 26 for women. 

These fun facts, and more can be found in a study done by Pew Research. 

Newspaper Death Watch

Here's a memo that came out at the NYT yesterday: 

Colleagues,

I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I've been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don't want to add insult to injury by spreading infection.

Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.

We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. On Thursday, the Company will be sending buyout offers to everyone in the newsroom. Getting a buyout package does NOT mean we want you to leave. It is simply easier to send the envelopes to everyone. If you think a buyout may be right for you, you have up to 45 days to decide whether you will accept it or not.

As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won't happen, but it might.

Our colleagues in editorial and op-ed, and on the business side, also face another round of budget cuts.

In recent years, we've managed to avoid the disabling cutbacks that have hit other newsrooms. The Company has chosen to protect the journalism by cutting production and other business-side costs, and the newsroom itself has managed its resources frugally. These latest cuts will still leave us with the largest, strongest and most ambitious editorial staff of any newsroom in the country, if not the world.

I won't pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. But we've been looking hard at ways to minimize the impact — in part, by re-engineering some of our copy flow. I won't promise this will be easy or painless, but I believe we can weather these cuts without seriously compromising our commitment to coverage of the region, the country and the world. We will remain the single best news organization on earth.

I doubt that anyone is shocked by the fact of this, but it is happening sooner than anyone anticipated. When we took our 5 percent pay cuts, it was in the hope that this would fend off the need for more staff cuts this year. But I accept that if it's going to happen, it should be done quickly. We will get through this and move on.

In my absence, Bill Schmidt and John and Jill have volunteered to take your questions this afternoon. Feel free to bring additional questions to me as soon as I'm back, or check with Bill Schmidt or John or Jill privately, or save them for the next Throw Stuff at Bill session, which is in a couple of weeks.

We often — and rightly — voice our gratitude that we work for a company and a family that prize quality journalism above all. I hope you know that the company and the family, and I, feel an equal debt of gratitude to all of you whose sacrifice and loyalty have kept us strong.

Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.

Bill

(See title of this post.)

Making the Taliban Personal

Every day I read the paper and try to make sense of what's going on in Afghanistan. That in itself might be an impossible task. Knowing just a little bit about the country's history of unsuccessful foreign occupations, the miscalculations at the beginning of this invasion and the complete quandary of the current American military brass - well, it's all just overwhelming.

One thing that's made it seem accessible is NYT reporter David Rohde's account of his kidnapping by the Taliban. He was taken captive in Afghanistan and then held prisoner in Pakistan. Obviously he lived to tell about his experience. But his descriptions of his captors, the overwhelming hatred towards Americans, his assessments of foreign and military policy and the status of the Taliban are frightening and depressing. Here are just three sentences about his kidnapping:

"We arrived in Pakistan's tribal areas, an isolated belt of Taliban-controlled territory. We were now in 'the Islamic emirate' - the fundamentalist state that existed in Afghanistan before the 2001 American invasion. The loss of thousands of Afghan, Pakistani and American lives and billions in American aid had merely moved it a few miles east, not eliminated it. "

Sigh. Read the series. It's quite an education.

Pumpkins, Snow and Babies

Late yesterday morning I was reviewing some survey responses for the book, when The Weatherman told me to look out the window. Snow! Not just light flurries but real snow - in the middle of October. Here's an illustration of how odd this is: my friend's daughter just married a young man from Brazil. They are living in Westchester and yesterday he got to experience both his first snow and carving his first pumpkin, all on the same afternoon. Now that's scary.

Meanwhile, on the book front, here are some random responses on how mothers felt when they gave birth to their sons:

"How do I raise a boy? What do I know about boys?"

"Happiness for my husband who wanted a boy child to carry on his name."

"Boys bring a whole new dimension to motherhood."

"I felt a pang of disappointment with the birth of each son that he was not a girl." 

""I felt overwhelming love for him. I thought I was having another girl and when the doctor told me I had a boy, I exploded with love."

Campus Contagion

I spoke to The Boy the other day, and between coughs and sniffles, he says he's feeling so-so, though not too bad. He was ferrying food to his girlfriend, who has been confined to her dorm room. It's not that she has full-blown swine flu, but she had gotten the nasal-spray vaccine for H1N1 and it had gotten her sick. The Boy told me a lot of students had similar reactions to the nasal vaccine.

The Boy himself couldn't take that vaccine, because he has asthma, and the spray is contraindicated for him. He tried in vain to get a regular season flu shot, but the school ran out. Meanwhile there was suppose to be a sign-up sheet for the injectable H1N1 vaccine, which he would be able to take, but last I spoke to him, he hadn't found it.

The college keeps sending parents updates about the flu - there have been enough confirmed cases on campus that the school is no longer sending cultures to the CDC - it's clear the virus is all over campus. This morning they sent an email saying that there are so many sick kids, they have to close the health center at night. (It sounds counter-intuitive, but they need to conserve nurses for the daytime shifts.) Meanwhile for the kids, there are the usual pressures of midterms, papers and multiple other extra-curricular activities.

All I want to do is airlift my son out of Maine, bring him home, tuck him into his own nice clean sheets, feed  him chicken soup and have him rest. Luckily, he will be coming home for a fall break next week. The antidote to H1N1: TLC.

Nooooooooooooooooo!

Guess what I left back in North Carolina? My lap top power cord. Left it plugged into my friend Sally's wall. I can't say anymore on this - no time, no power. Sally says she'll Fed-Ex it. Until then.... I got nothin'.

Where Are The Hippies of Yesteryear?

I can tell you exactly where the hippies have gone - they are down in North Carolina. Specifically, they seem to be congregating at Shakori Hills Music Festival, which is a 4 day event located a little ways outside of Chapel Hill. This is where Sally took me on Saturday. I haven't seen so much tie-dye in one place since....1967. The funny thing was there were hippies of all ages, at all stages. You could see the 20 year old young hippies, and the 40 year old ones and the 70+ versions, the latter of whom tended to have a kind of Rip Van Winkle look. Think I'm kidding? Here is example one:

Wait - I promised you tie dye, right?

OK - maybe that doesn't fully illustrate it. Let's just say that most people evidently got their clothes from this place:

Here is a random festival attendee:

See what I mean? Or how about this umbrella "sculpture"?

There were some participatory events, like this African dance class:

 

Wait -this was a music festival. How was the music, you may ask? Er....mixed. Some good groups, and some that need to go back to the garage to practice. I'll leave you with a photo of a band of cross dressers who played a kind of celtic folk music. Look carefully at the guitar and accordion player. And New York thinks that it's a happening place!  P.S. I had a GREAT time at the festival and everywhere else down here.

Scenes From North Carolina

When ever I visit my friend Sally in North Carolina, I ask her if I need to bring my passport. That's because the world down here is SO different. We have been having a GREAT time, and I just wanted to share some pix.

On Saturday, we spend some time on the campus of UNC at Chapel Hill. There was a football game that day and we caught the band practicing. They were amazing.

I must say, though, that the fans can get a little out of control in showing their support.

For lunch we went to Allen & Sons for some authentic N.C. 'Que. (That's bbq, my northern friends.)

By the way, those round things are hushpuppies, which are fried corn meal. I was going to post photos of the music festival that we attended yesterday, but y'all gonna have to wait for them. (Please note that I am starting to speak the local dialect.) 

Off To See My "Roomie"

This morning I'm flying to North Carolina to go visit my best friend and former freshman college roommate Sally. OK - this may not be exactly what we look like, but this is exactly what we will be doing - laughing. We have been making each other laugh helplessly since we were 17 years old. Geez, that means we have been laughing for.... oh, right. Like I'm going to tell you that!

She's got all sorts of things planned for us, but I know we could have a great time doing absolutely nothing. Except laughing so hard that no actual noise will come out, of course. Can't wait! 

PS - Sally recently moved from Charlotte to the Raleigh-Durham area. If only I were flying to Charlotte maybe I could have gotten Captain Sully. Those of you who know me know just how much I love getting on an airplane. Not. 

Writing

Guess what I'm doing today? 

Photo is courtesy of George Guitierrez, a photographer, Pulitizer Prize winner, and former colleague at the NYT. My favorite memory of working with George was when we were covering a story on road rage. We were both in the back seat of a police car, which was chasing a car going 95 mph on the Sprain Brook Parkway.

I was terrified and had my head in my lap. I took comfort in the fact that at least the photographer would be on the case, snapping pictures of the dramatic chase. But then I looked over and George also had his head down, hands covering his eyes. I always enjoyed working with him. 

R.I.P. Gourmet

I got my first subscription to Gourmet Magazine soon after graduating from college. It seemed like the height of sophistication to me - the gorgeously photographed food, the exotic travel destinations, the photo shoots of  attractive groups of people, eating a picnic with real silverware, perched at the seaside.

Even when I had the tiniest kitchen in my studio in Manhattan, I gamely tried challenging recipes. The Weatherman will not remember this, but I once successfully pulled off a Brie souffle in our apartment on West 89th St. (To truly appreciate this, you must understand that the kitchen actually had no counter. We had a little butcher block on wheels which we rolled into the kitchen to rest mixing bowls and the like while I was cooking.)

The apartment is long gone (a co-op now), and so, sadly will Gourmet Magazine be, come November. My Daughter has friends who work for Conde Nast so she gave me a heads up on this before it landed in the news. 

And now, a moment of truth. I myself canceled my subscription about two years ago. When I'm looking for a recipe I google it on the web. Those exotic spreads of places to go, that glamorous life style - they were starting to depress me. In my 20s, everything was still a possibility. Now, much less so. Plus I seem to have so much less time now. I still cook all the time, but the likelihood of my whipping up a souffle for fun is pretty small.

I know the magazine is folding because of the steep decline in luxury advertisers and not because I stopped renewing my subscription. But I still feel sad.

Goodbye Burgers?

I think I may be done with ground beef. Don't get me wrong. I love hamburgers, and am especially fond of The Weatherman's cheese burgers on the grill. I enjoy a good meat loaf. And chili. And various other things I prepare with ground beef.

But this weekend I saw Food Inc., a movie about the food industry. There were some pretty graphic scenes of slaughter houses. But honestly, it isn't the idea of eating slain animals that is my main problem. I have no real problem with the food chain. (When I see my angelic little kitties go after mice, it seems like nature's way.) The problem was seeing the disgusting way the cows and pigs are processed by huge agri-business, and the potential for contamination that got to me. Then Sunday, there was a cover story in the NYT about a girl who became paralyzed from eating a hamburger contaminated with a virulent strain of E. coli. 

Before this, I had no idea that the pound of ground beef you buy in the grocery store might be made up of scraps and bits from several different suppliers. The burger that nearly killed the young woman in the newspaper article had ingredients from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas, South Dakota and Uruguay. And the parts of the beef, the fat filler, and everything else that went in there...well, it was eye opening and a bit stomach churning.

I'm not sayin' I'm going vegetarian. I love meat. But I am going to start eating much more carefully. 

Food Pantry Issues

Sorry I didn't blog yesterday. First thing in the morning, when I usually write, I was instead frantically trying to find a substitute for a volunteer at our local food pantry. She's not just any volunteer, but the one who is completely bilingual and who knows a lot of our clients from the community.

We well meaning volunteers who speak only English can not do a good job filling in.

I ended up with a Belgian woman who speaks 5 languages - Spanish included. By 8:45 a.m., everything was running smoothly. As usual, we have a wide variety of folks coming for food - moms with newborns, elderly men, and everything in between. As usual we quickly ran out of eggs and chicken. And as usual, I couldn't get anyone to go for the frozen salmon burgers, which we get at a deeply reduced rate from the Food Bank and which no one will take. At least not a second time.

Phew! It is an important mission and yesterday was my responsibility. I would have felt terrible if I'd messed up. 

Bad Mothers

After doing more research for my book, I have come to the conclusion that mothers of sons should come with a warning label: "WARNING: The Love Of This Woman Could Be Hazardous To Your Health!"

I don't really believe this, of course. It's just that there is so much literature out there bashing the mother-son relationship. According to one book I just finished, one-in-ten men are "enmeshed" with their mothers. Among other things, this has led these men to be commitment phobic, to suffer from addictions (not just drugs and alcohol, but cyber-sex too!), to shop lift, to have low self-esteem and all sorts of other problems. Some are people pleasers. But some only want to please themselves. Basically you name a dysfunction in a man, and the guy who wrote this book can lay it at the foot of his mother.

I am getting a little tired of all this mother-blame. As one friend of mine says, "A mother's place is in the wrong."

A Sign?

For the last week, my right palm has been itching like crazy. It's the weirdest thing. What could it mean? That I am turning into a werewolf or something? (The Weatherman says that if that were the case, I would more likely grow hair on the back of my hands and be itchy there.)

Anyway, I had lunch with two longtime girlfriends yesterday, and when I told them about this symptom, they immediately said the same thing, in unison no less: "You're coming into money!"

This was good news indeed. I believe in signs. I'll keep you posted if anything comes of this one.

Into the Belly of the Beast

Every week or so, we get an update from The Boy's college about H1N1, or swine flu. We hear about what school health officials are doing to isolate students with symptoms, what they plan to do if they run out of beds for isolation (which, oddly, is to send sick kids back to their dorm rooms and have their still-healthy roommates go find somewhere else to sleep) and that kind of thing.

I've read all this with passing interest, hoping The Boy doesn't get sick. The college has asked parents who live within 300 miles of campus to pick up their sick kids; we live 320 miles away but wouldn't want our son languishing in his dorm.

Anyway, we are heading up to Parents Weekend on Friday. And it occurs to me that parents all over the country are heading to Parents Weekends to campuses all over the country, most of them rife with HINI. Presumably, parents will then bring the virus back to our hometowns. If you were drawing a little epidemic map, this would make for some nice arrows.

The Boy called last night, and we talked about this. He said the college's isolation plan makes no sense anyway. He is taking a course on infectious disease, and they have learned a lot about the virus. He says people with HINI are most infectious in the three day period before they exhibit symptoms, in other words during the time they are still in the dorms, class rooms and cafeterias, but not reporting to the health center.

Ah well, lots of hand washing and maybe a few less hugs for his friends. But no less hugs, of course, for The Boy. 

Intrusive, Destructive Moms

Today I'm having lunch with my agent to go over her thoughts on Chapter One. We've already had a brief email exchange about it, and she told me she likes this version much better than the first one. That said, it still needs some work. In what is sort of good news, she thinks I have two chapters in there instead of one, which means I'm farther along than I think.

In the meantime I have been plowing along on future chapters, and am up to the point where I am writing about the multiple messages we get as mothers telling us that it is bad, bad, bad to be close to our sons. There is no healthy way to do it, you see. We're either enmeshed or controlling or dominating or inappropriate. There don't seem to be any scenarios in which a mother and son can be close, but at the same time maintain healthy boundaries and mutual respect.

Today's reading, as you can see from the illustrations, are more dire warnings about dangerous mother love. Beware the devouring Mom - she's everywhere. (That was supposed to be a sarcastic comment, folks.)

There Goes the Neighborhood

Over the last few days I've been getting these odd press releases from our County Executive saying that he was really upset about  Moammar Gadhafi, but there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

"What is he on about now?" I thought. "What has the Libyan leader got to do with Westchester?"  Well, it turns out that he-who-supports-state-sponsored-terrorism (I'm talking about Gadhafi, not our County Executive) has had his people pitching a Bedouin-style tent on the grounds of Donald Trump's estate in Bedford.

You can not make this stuff up. Gadhafi is in New York for the UN General Assembly. A spokesman for Trump said The Donald had rented the place to some partners in the Middle East, not directly to Gadhafi. To add to the absurdity of a crazy terrorist camping out on the grounds of one of America's most well-known capitalist's, enter the Bedford Town building inspector.

You see,  President Gadhafi had violated a Bedford Town ordinance. The guy didn't have a permit to erect a tent. But evidently the building inspector had trouble issuing a stop work order, because the fellows putting up the tent didn't speak English. My guess is that their boss isn't overly intimidated by Bedford town zoning regulations anyway. Let's just say he's flouted bigger authorities.

Unbelievable. And right in my back yard. Well, not literally. I wouldn't have let him set up camp  on my property.