Valentine's Day Weekend Prose Poem

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Love Sickness Healed

It started last weekend when I read Gary Shteyngart's reminiscence on
Falling in love with Becky (Scroll down) while reading *Tom Sawyer* at nine.
Flashed back and realized that I felt similarly moved...or maybe I fell in love with
Romantic love then. It was the literary version of the awakening I felt at 10 -- and
I've mentioned this here before -- when(ever) I heard Minnie Riperton sing, "Lovin' You".

Earlier this week, I read Karl Ove Knausgaard's "Come Together" in "The New Yorker" and
Identified with both the boy and the girl, but especially the boy, who was smitten with
The girl, but didn't know how to handle it gracefully. I identified with the girl because
I had been in hapless kissing situations with boys during bar mitzvah parties when we were
In middle school, where I felt I was supposed to count on the boy to know what he was doing.

Yesterday, a boy from my Modern Orthodox Jewish day school sent me email -- a boy with an
Identical twin brother, and whom I hadn't seen since I was 17, during my dad's funeral and
We didn't speak then, just mourned; we hadn't talked since we were 13, when we graduated and went off to different high schools. I called him and we had a warm conversation. I hung up,
Trying to remember which twin was the one who might have had a crush on me back then.
I felt sad. Wistful.

Why couldn't I have been heterosexual and have ended up with him, or my Israeli, male,
Childhood friend, or my high school/early-college boyfriend, or the new Lehigh alumnus I met
In New Rochelle at the Young Jewish Singles Dance the summer before my Junior year of college,
Or any of the men I met during my year in Jerusalem at 20? Why did I fall for Tom Sawyer's
Girlfriend? Why did "Lovin' You" feel like it was being sung to me? Why did I want to kiss my
Female day-school classmates more than my male ones?

Why couldn't I have been someone else? Isn't that what I'm asking? How ungrateful, if
Reasonably human-nature-ish. Suddenly, I feel the urge to find out which classic rock band
I am via a Buzzfeed quiz. (The Eagles.) And then I hear my beloved wife, laughing heartily
Downstairs. I'm drawn to learn more.

Longevity: What It Can Buy

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

In My Experience of Observing My Mom & Some of Her Memories So Far:

• Reminiscences of her red-bearded grandfather when she meets the orthopedist earlier today; the doctor has bright-red hair and a bright-red goatee
  
• A spine that curves at the bottom like a slippery-when-wet sign -- the X-ray doesn't lie
  
• A University of Wisconsin Journalism B.A.
  
• Father loss by her early-20s; she says he looked Swedish and people would buy furniture from him and say, "Thankfully, I didn't have to buy from a dirty Jew," and after completing the transaction, he'd say, "Would would you say if I told you you just did?" (Their name had been Prensky, but Ellis Island officials turned it into Prens, which was not identifiably Jewish)
  
• Marriage to my dad, a tall, handsome, creative, funny, toy-designing, child co-producer x3
  
• Three good daughters who are there for her when she needs us, which is not as often as it could be, considering her advanced age
  
• Trips to Majorca, England, Israel, Maine, France, Nova Scotia and more with various family members and alone
  
• Widowhood at 56; my dad (z"l) died of bile-duct cancer within six months of his diagnosis
  
• Grandmotherhood x4 beginning at age 67, of three gifted, gorgeous boys and a super-creative, beautiful girl
  
• Good friends from 40+ years in metro-Stamford, a number of whom have died; today, she was missing Jane
  
• Lush, Jewish cultural enrichment through her love of Jewish folk art and fiction
  
• A super-active brain that is the cognitive equivalent of a bodybuilder's physique, still!
  

Flickering Lights

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies.

Lending Urgency to My Blogging Desire

Will we have a power failure during this first bit of 2009 snow? Will I be able to complete my blog-entry before the lights and network shut off?

Will I have enough time to write about how a friend feels that I can help him achieve immortality?

And how sisterly and overwhelming at the same time it felt to go to a Korean spa with my two sisters last weekend, being naked in front of one another for the first time ever in one case and in another, for the first time, since childhood, and also in front of a number of gorgeous strangers?

Will I be able to write about my sadness at my mother's transition to car-less-ness? Even as I know it's safer? And even as I consider what a big change it is for someone like her, who has been such a free spirit historically?

Will I manage to express the pleasure I felt, reading about Meredith Baxter in "People" magazine, including the sweet pix with her partner and children? Will I be able to explain why the pleasure is a mix of team-spirit pride and desire? Will I be able to describe how she was a vague object of childhood attraction for me, ever since "Bridget Loves Bernie?"

Will I have time to express the depth of my nostalgia for the neighbors who were my childhood friends, their parents, pets and lovely nanny? All prompted by a Facebook exchange earlier today with the friend who is my age and who also recalled our winter-time fun together?

How can I blog about all of that before the lights go out and the network goes down? Or before my appetite for dinner distracts me too much to continue...which it is now doing?