We're Not Gossiping, We're Networking

We are all searching for connections. Serena and I are lucky that we found each other swimming laps at our local community pool. While doing our endless laps, garbed as we are in Speedos, caps, goggles, earplugs (me), fins (Serena) and often Lycra long sleeved shirts to shield us from the harsh rays of the sun, it is difficult to chit chat. It's in the locker room where all the networking takes place. We have no Deconstructionist Tinklers at our club, but we do have a lot of moms. And moms the world over gather, whether around cooking fires, community wells, or busy playgrounds, to discuss their issues. Their issues with kids, husbands, employers, others.

Finding kindred spirits in classrooms, jobs, volunteer gigs, the kids' swim team, and locker rooms is something Serena and I have in common. To connect with others is to peel away the every day layers of our lives and find meaning in what we do. It might look like we are hedonistic exercise junkies. We have found however, that it is by exercising that we cope with the stresses of life. We live charmed suburban lives for the most part. But there are days when issues with a kid or two make us want to turn our mini-vans toward the coast and head like lemmings to the sea.

There are days when venting to another soul makes us feel way better about: the highschool robot voice calling to report a child's unexplained absences in first, third, and fifth periods, and the spousal disagreement over what in the light of day seems trivial. I love being able to connect and discover a really good book, the best shoe store salesguy who can deal with "weird" feet, and to learn the good, the bad, and the hideous about local summer camps. We keep our eyes open, even underwater (love those goggles). We listen. It's amazing what you can hear when you stop to pay attention. It's amazing what you can hear when people think you are not listening.

The unexamined life is not worth living. --Socrates in Plato, Dialogues, Apology. Greek philosopher in Athens. 469 BC -399 BC

Just Like Everyone Else

While Samantha was keeping her neighborhood safe for posterity, I was in graduate school at an unnamed university, getting a Ph.D. in a ridiculously useless field. At the time, I did not know this was a useless field; I was convinced that everyone cared deeply about post-colonial discursive practices, narrative desire in the novels of Balzac, and semantic instability in Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Why wouldn't I think so, when all my other grad student friends who lived in under-furnished apartments with cats and ethnic art on the walls and terrorized naive undergrads in discussion sections were convinced that we were all doing something urgently meaningful?

It did not occur to me until later -- much, much later, after I had two children and couldn't get a teaching job to save my life -- that there was a whole world out there where people did not give a rat's patootie about Lacan's Mirror Stage or Heidegger's inscrutable rants or Adorno's Marxist tirades, that what we were all doing was nothing if not some big-time collective navel-gazing. But my funny friend Lawrence, the one with the mind and the sense of humor of a 15-year-old boy, the one who had stolen my desk copy of Boccaccio's Decameron and inscribed "To my good friend Samantha, From G. Boccaccio" in red ballpoint pen on the fly-leaf, he knew. He was not taken in at all, and when a major superstar in critical studies who happened to be a good friend of the professor paid a visit to his theory seminar, Lawrence knew what was really important. During break, he went to use the restroom and found himself hip to hip, as it were, with the great man himself. As soon as the seminar was over, Lawrence sprinted to the room where the teaching assistants congregated and breathlessly announced to his rapt audience that he had just been to the restroom with the great man, and -- well, we wouldn't believe this, but... the great man tinkles just like everyone else.

We should all be so grounded. Or at least be friends with grounded people who pay attention to what goes on in restrooms at major universities and are willing to share that information with others.

Why We're Doing This

Serena's sense of humor just kills me. Because we are more than a decade apart age-wise, I cannot remember much about Bewitched episodes. While she watched re-runs, I was probably watching Samantha doing her witchy business in Prime Time. Looking back it was Prime Wasted Time. But I did get one thing out of it: Gladys Kravitz. Although at first recollection I was sure her name was Edith.

I've lived in the same house for 27 years. During that time, the neighbors have come and gone. Some have indeed died. Most have moved away, replaced by other neighbors. Sometimes we have traded up, and sometimes we can't wait for the replacement neighbors to move away. Once, when talking about how our street should really be called Divorce Court, as it appeared very few marriages were lasting, my brother called me Gladys Kravitz. Who? Me? Just because I make it my business to know who lives where and with whom? Just because I was once a BLOCK CAPTAIN of the street? That was back when the police were too busy to catch some serial creep. People were scared, and motivated to come to a meeting where they agreed to do more than drive in and out of their garages each day. They agreed to be neighborly and look out for each other. That was then, and this is now. Creepos are eventually caught or they move on to other neighborhoods. Over time people forget to look out for each other. It takes a Gladys or two to make a neighborhood, to have their fingers on the various pulses that make a block, a street, a neighborhood, and indeed a community work. Want to know what's really going on in the parenting department of our charmed suburban community? Ask Gladys...or in this case, ask Serena and Samantha. They are right behind the lace curtains and...they know.

Miss Cranky Pants

It's official: I am a cranky pants. I am drawn to blogs and books written by cranky middle aged women about how other people annoy them to no end. Then I get mad because I could have written them, if I had time and were organized and capable of finishing a project. To wit: http://open.salon.com/blog/joan_h/2010/02/08/the_old_lady_in_apt_202, a lovely rant about noisy and inconsiderate college students (yeah, yeah, I was once a noisy and inconsiderate college student, but that I was like, 500 years ago and now my 15-year-old listening to music in his room bugs the bejeezus out of me even with the door closed). Or this -- http://theharperstudio.com/authorsandbooks/lisa_kogan/the-book/someone-will-be-with-you-shortly/ -- Lisa Kogan's collection of vintage O Magazine pieces and new tirades about the indignities of growing older (no one says "No way are you [fill in the age you currently are]; you look at least ten years younger!"), people who clip their nails in public elevators, the decline of civility (and with it, Western Civilization) and other assorted horrors and affronts which become more and more appalling as we become older and more decrepit.

Why We Did This

When I was 11 or 12 years old, I discovered Bewitched reruns on Channel 44. I would return from school, unlock the front door (I was a latch-key kid, which in those days did not constitute child abuse on the part of my parents), make myself some toast, spread it liberally with cream cheese, and top the cream cheese either with tomatoes sprinkled with salt or my grandmother's homemade plum jam. Then, toast in hand, I would watch, enraptured, as spunky Samantha Stevens negotiated deftly (or with charming ineptitude) the demands of her glamorous, eccentric witch and warlock relatives, her depressingly normal husband Darren, Darren's humorless boss Larry Tate, and the nosy next-door neighbor Gladys Kravitz, who was convinced (and rightly so) that something funny was afoot at the Stevens house. Although I was way too old for magical thinking, it was my secret conviction that if I managed to wiggle my nose unassisted, like Samantha (not like her adorable daughter Tabitha, who had to resort to the forefinger-on-the-tip-of-the-nose trick), I too could make magic happen. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, as much as I scrunched up my nose in front of the bathroom mirror, it never wiggled spontaneously, no melodious chimes sounded in the background, and my seventh grade nemesis, Tony A., did not, alas, turn into an ottoman or a yapping lap dog.

In due course, I grew up and started doing what grown-ups do: losing my sense of humor, the metabolism that allowed me to consume six or seven toast and cream cheese and jam sandwiches before dinner with no ill effects, and the conviction that I could make magic happen just by wrinkling my nose the right way. Oh, and getting married and going to graduate school and acquiring cats and children and minivans with indiscriminate abandon entered into the equation as well. It had been years since the last time I watched a Bewitched rerun, but it all came flooding back when my husband, sleepily rolling over in bed, called me, not Sam -- oh, noooo -- but (wait for it) Gladys Kravitz. Gladys Kravitz! The dowdy, pudgy, middle aged woman with badly styled hair and a strident New Jersey accent who spied on Samantha from behind lacy curtains. All because I sprang out of bed in the middle of the night to peek out from behind the curtains of our bedroom window in our rented duplex to see some major police action going down on the next-door neighbor's lawn. Honestly -- who would not have done the same had they woken up at 1 a.m. to the sound of feet pounding on the pavement and a hoarse voice yelling, "Freeze! Police!"? Wouldn't you pull back the curtains just a wee bit to get a better look at the four police cruisers parked every which way right in front of your bedroom window, red and blue lights flashing like mad, and a dozen uniformed policemen with guns drawn standing over a guy lying face-down on the next-door neighbors' front lawn? Gladys Kravitz, indeed.

Long story short: my husband may not be a fan of peeking out of windows and spying on the neighbors, but a few months ago, I found my soul-mate -- a partner-in-crime, if you will, although we have not committed any crimes (yet) -- who relishes doing exactly that, exactly as much as I do. Unbelievable as it may sound, she too has been called Gladys Kravitz by her husband -- also for spying on police action on her street in the middle of the night while shivering in her nightie behind the curtains. Separated at birth much? To top it all off, we know the same people. We gossip like mad. We are funny and clever individually, but put us together and we are a laugh riot (at least we think we are). Above all, with children ranging in age from 8 to 23, we have seen just about everything -- and we're more than happy to share our impressions, because we're generous like that. We have ventured forth, and we have peeked -- from behind curtains, into classrooms, into children's bedrooms that look like they'd been hit by the proverbial tornado, into other people's shopping carts, wondering what we might make for dinner considering that we have to drive multiple children to and from multiple engagements all of which conflict with the dinner hour. We have mentally rolled our eyes at the woman who takes five samples at a time from the Trader Joe's free sample area while her three-year-old stands up in the cart, looking like he's about to topple over on his head, and we have smiled politely through gritted teeth at moms who feel compelled to recite every detail of their child's social calendar when all you really want is to set up a time for a simple playdate. And we have discovered along the way that true magic lies not in the nose, as I thought when I was young and foolish, but in the eyes. And in the telling. Here's to you, Gladys.