Nom de Plume

In the mid-80s, we lived in Bucharest. My mother was the director of the American Library, a part of the U.S. Information Agency. One day, an American man and his wife waltzed into her office. “My name is Sidney Sheldon,” he said, “and I’m writing a book. Can I take you out to dinner and get some information on how embassies work?”

Now there are two things you have to understand. The first is that my mother’s idea of light reading is the latest installment of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which means that she’d never heard of Sidney Sheldon. The second is that this was Romania under Ceausescu, and there were virtually no places to go out to dinner and actually get something edible. And thus, she blithely did what she always does: invited them to dinner.

We were still living in the diplomat apartment complex at the time, a hulking gray paean to the worst of monolithic socialist architecture. It was before heat became such a problem that the embassy moved all its employees to houses so it could ship in heating oil from Vienna (but I do remember how the elevators always got stuck between floors; fun for a 11-year old who always relied on the–very cute–armed guard to get her out). The apartment was quite modest and very cold; when they arrived, we gathered three space heaters in the dining room to point at our feet. My mother and Sidney Sheldon discussed Embassy hierarchy, while I chattered away to his wife, who grew roses and liked making perfume. When the evening ended, they thanked us and said, “The next time you’re in L.A., you must look us up.”

The next summer, we were on our way to San Diego and we flew through LAX. We had a day to kill, which we were to spend with Father de Souza, a Jesuit priest who had been the president of St. Xavier’s college when my father taught there. “Oh!” exclaimed my mother. “We should call the Sheldons!” She riffled through her address book at a pay phone. They invited us for tea.

Father de Souza pulled up in the monastery’s station wagon, an old, rusted boat of a car. He threw our suitcases in the trunk, tying the hatch down with a length of chord. Armed with directions, we clattered onto the wide, quiet streets of Beverly Hills. The security gate was made of wrought iron with three cameras and a buzzer. Slowly, the gates swung open and we climbed up a winding drive to the biggest house I had every seen.

We drank tea–hot chocolate for me–and ate cookies on cream silk sofas, looking out at the gardens through French doors. Mrs. Sheldon not only gave me a tour of her roses, but also cut a huge bunch for me. I clutched them the rest of the day, and through the hour flight down to San Diego.

A couple of years later, Windmills of the Gods came out. My mother splurged on the hardback, reading it on the plane. And she was outraged. “This is wrong,” she kept saying. “This is beyond wrong!” I tried reading it a couple years after that, and was bored to tears. The writing … well, it was popular fiction, after all.

But I will never forget just how gracious the Sheldons were.

Charlotte’s excellent Green Meme.

1. What do you for the birds and the bees? According to the report, we need to plant a pollinator garden to counteract the effect pollution, pesticides and habitat destruction are having on birds, bees and insects. Bees, for instance, like yellow, blue and purple flowers. I attempt to do things, but I kill plants. Steve, on the other hand, has a lot of stuff in the garden that qualifies. I think.

2. Household products. Chemical or organic? Household chemicals contribute to indoor and outdoor pollution.
Whatever’s convenient, to be honest. However, my soapmaking has yielded a lot of green stuff to clean with. I use soap scraps and the soaps I don’t like to wash dishes, counters, the bathroom, and so on. Sadly, organic laundry and dishwasher detergents don’t work as well as their chemical counterparts. I keep trying, but end up going back to the polluting kind.

3. Do you junk?
I really hate all the junk mail we get. I’ve taken us off credit card offers, and as much junk mail as possible, but I really don’t think the “remove me from the list” services work all that well. We still get stuff.

4. Air-dry or tumble-dry? Line-drying saves money and stops carbon emissions.
Tumble, all the way. But I hate doing laundry and do my part by doing it as infrequently as possible.

5. Old gadgets. Recycle or toss ‘em? According to the report, we have to find a way not to fill up landfills with electronic objects. Charlotte says, “Here’s my current solution: fill up the cellar instead.” I concur wholeheartedly. I have good intentions.

6. Lightbulbs – incandescent or fluorescent? Fluorescent light bulbs use 70% less power and last ten times as long.I hate to admit this, but incandescent. I hate the light produced by fluorescent bulbs.

7. Meat or veg? Meat production is energy inefficient. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. After about seven years of being a vegetarian, I’m a wholehearted meat eater now. My concession is that I try to buy meat that comes from local sources.

8. Loo paper. Virgin or recycled? The paper industry is the third largest contributor to global warming. If every U.S. household replaced one toilet-paper roll with a roll made from recycled paper, 424,000 trees would be saved. Recycled. Though it’s still bleached and all that. I do wish all those recycled TP companies would skip the bleach.

9. Tap or bottled water? According to Newsweek, it takes a lot of oil to make and ship water bottles, and most end up in landfills. Tap. This whole bottled water craze is one of my pet peeves. First, the materials and transportation that go into it. Second, the fact that most tap water is cleaner. Just get a Nalgene bottle and you’re good to do. And if you must distill, get a Britta. The exception is fizzy mineral water. We usually have a case of that stuff around.

10. Dating – metrosexual or ecosexual? Newsweek says two recyclers are better than one. Dating? What’s that?

For those of you not in Seattle, we were positively deluged with snow a few days ago.

I’ve missed snow, and it has been fun frolicking around in it. However, our street runs downhill and is a solid sheet of ice. I can’t drive my car down it. (We won’t get into the effects of the neighbor running his sump pump into the street.) And, as a result, I’m feeling a little housebound.

In other words, waking up to more snow this morning was NOT a good thing.

A better poem for today would be:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
I’m in meetings all day
P.U.

More bad, bitter poetry about exes.

Irony

I think of you pressing
tomorrow’s pleated
presentations
and creased newspaper
seams, smooth
collared eyes, hot buttons
sealed with wax.
White and starched,
your mind, so clean.
No wrinkled abstractions,
and I–
a distraction–
your hiss of steam.

It didn’t start auspiciously, that I can tell you.

I opened an etrade account a week ago. Wow, I thought, this is great! I can transfer funds automatically. Tweedle dee, tweedle da, I blithely linked up my bank account and transferred a thousand bucks. Done. Easy as pie.

Come to find out that if you type 1,000 with a comma, as any civilized person would do, the etrade system reads aforementioned comma as a 0. And suddenly, that carefree transfer becomes a harbinger of doom. It sucks $10,000 out of your bank account, defaulting into your savings where you had been storing your tax money. Sadly, you are now going to be late paying your quarterly taxes.

It takes five full business days to clear. Poof! The money seems to be gone; it’s not in your bank account, nor is it in your etrade account. It has seemingly … vanished. Where does it go? Into a high-yield escrow account? Probably.

But finally, you have the money wired back into your bank account. All is well. Uncle Sam is happy. You are happy. Etrade is happy because you just bought three probably completely worthless penny stocks that are environmentally friendly.

Anyone have any good tips?

Huge windstorm on Thursday night, 1 million houses without power. We’re back up power-wise, but no cable, which means no Internet. So here I am at Starbucks, feeding the need.

It was fine. It was nice. But despite the decent food and the freeflowing booze, you know what the best part was? Taking off those three and a half inch heels. What was I thinking?

Elizabeth just wrote about getting into the holiday season with trees and ornaments and all that jazz. She says she had a little mailbox that she used to write letters to Santa for all her pets. Our letter-writing routine was that I wrote a letter and then we burned it in the fireplace. My mother claimed that the charred bits flew to the North Pole and reassembled in Santa’s hands. I think there was something about the fireplace purifying the letter so only the nice kids’ letters made it.

At the time, this seemed normal.

But what I want to know is whether anyone else had this same tradition. You see, my mother really had a lot of fun screwing with my head when I was a kid.

Take the Easter Bunny, for example. According to Mom, the Easter Bunny was actually a woman. Every Easter, before she went off to work, she would deliver eggs to households around the world. And being a successful, entrepreneurial sort, she delivered them in style: from her green and yellow briefcase. There were vague mumblings about an unemployed Mr. Easter Bunny.

Then there were the supermarket seeds. Noting that grocery stores seemed to appear out of nowhere, she claimed there were supermarket seeds. Grocery store owners would buy a seed, plop it into the ground and –sproing!–the very next day, there would be a brand-new supermarket. (The sproing! was her very word, BTW, and was accompanied by a throwing up of the hands.) I think I was 10 or so before I realized this wasn’t true. I casually mentioned supermarket seeds to a friend. She stared at me wordlessly, and then cracked up. I never lived it down. She sproinged! in front of all the kids at recess for months.

And of course, I shouldn’t neglect to mention that my mother had me so well-trained at five that she would trot me out at cocktail parties just so she could ask me what my purpose in life was in front of amused guests. “To support you in your old age, Mommy,” I would chirp. Then the kicker: “In the style to which you would like to become accustomed.”

You have to hand it to her; getting a five-year old to say that last convoluted bit is no mean feat.

I’d like to think that I’m not terribly warped by all this, but who knows? So back to the original question. How did you get letters to Santa–and was she screwing with my mind there too?

Two weeks ago
It’s about two in the afternoon. Steve calls. “For my company Christmas party, do you want steak or salmon?”

“When is it?”

“I’m not sure. Which do you want?”

“I don’t care,” I say, running through my schedule in head. “Can you forward me the e-mail?”

“We’ll get one of each then.”

“Forward me the e-mail.”

“Okay.”

Later that night
We’re sitting in the hot tub. All of a sudden, Steve says, “For the company christmas party? I put you down for the salmon. I’ll get the steak.”

“Okay. When is it?”

“Oh, like the week before Christmas.”

“Can you find out and tell me?”

“Sure.”

“Just forward me the e-mail.”

“Okay.”

A week ago
It strikes me that I might have to go get a dress or something for his party. Which reminds me, I still have no idea when the party is. I call him and ask when it is.

“It’s the 14th. That night.”

I pull open that darn ubiquitous thing — my Outlook calendar. “That’s a Thursday,” I say.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“Okay, I’ll mark it.” We hang up. I note it on my Outlook calendar, and also on the wall calendar in the kitchen.

Three days ago
Laura is here visiting from Bellingham. I have just spent $400 dollars on vintage chairs. The lines are great, and match the couch perfectly. Alas, the blue is far brighter than I thought. I am irritated. (Granted, a normal state of being.) Steve says, “Oh, by the way, it’s formal. I have to wear a suit. It’s at some place called the Woodmark Hotel.”

Great, I think. I need to go shopping. Both last week and this week have been crazy busy with work. But it’s Thursday, so I have time. Maybe Wednesday night. I have a meeting on the east side at three. That should work. I can do the shopping over there and miss traffic. Plans unfurl in my head.

But it’s Steve, so I doublecheck anyway. “It’s next Thursday, right?”

“Yep. At 6.”

I am pleased. I have managed to pin Steve down. He has given me all the information I need. Thursday. 6. Kirkland. Formal. YAY! Or as YAY as a company Christmas party can be.

One hour ago
The phone rings. It’s Steve. “My party? I made a mistake. It’s Wednesday, not Thursday.”

I won’t be able to make it home in time, so am going to have to change over there in some bathroom on the Microsoft campus. Then, squander an hour and a half.

“I am going to kill you,” I say.

“But I’m so cute and adorable!”