Tag Archive for: Maggie Barbieri

The Fountain of Youth

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I was out to dinner with a group of friends the other night.  As a way of describing us, let’s just say that we are all past forty and looking forward to the wonder that is fifty; in two cases, anyway, the women are experiencing the wonder of fifty.  In any event, we were discussing the idea of plastic surgery and wondering if any of us would pull the trigger and go in for any procedures.  Having been the only one who had had a massive, unplanned surgery that didn’t result in the extraction of a baby too big to birth, I cautioned them that having elective surgery was something that they all should consider thoughtfully.  I let them know that surgery is not for the faint of heart. 
One friend’s response to the question of plastic surgery was the old Coco Chanel trope, “You can either focus on your ass or your face.”  My friend had chosen her ass but I have to say, her face looks pretty damned good, too, mostly because she’s Italian and Italians, in my opinion, age much better than the Irish.  (You’d think with all that rain, we’d have perfected that dewy complexion thing.  We haven’t.  In addition to the rain thing, we’ve got the booze thing, and that’s hard to shake off, even after generations of good dermatology.)  Another friend said she might consider an eyelift.  I, for one, would consider having the fat sucked out of my chin and then remembered the massive, unplanned surgery and put that idea to rest.  Another friend is so thin and so fit that she doesn’t have a line on her face and still looks like a sixteen-year-old.  We hashed this out over a few glasses of Chianti and then it finally dawned on me:  plastic surgery is a slippery slope.  It’s kind of like painting your kitchen and then looking at your dining room and thinking, “Wow, that looked ok before, but now?  Not so much.”  Where do you stop?  Do you stop with the chin and hope the rest of the face continues to look good or do you go whole hog and get the whole kit and caboodle done?  I suspect that if you get one “problem area” taken care of, you find that you need to get another one done, and then another, and then, all of them done until you’re deciding to get your ears—now too low on your head—moved up to accommodate your new, stretched thin face.
I had put this whole conversation out of my mind until this past weekend.  Every Rosh Hashanah, despite the fact that we are the goyest of the goy, we head to Massachusetts to visit my mother’s brother and his family.  The kids are off from school, which makes it the perfect time for a road trip.  My aunt and uncle couldn’t be more hospitable, but something I always forget until we’re there is that a) we eat a lot (making trying to stay on Weight Watchers fruitless) and b) there is not a light bulb in the house that is less than one hundred and fifty watts (which makes seeing yourself for the first time in the early morning light the most frightening experience you could ever have).  As I was putting my makeup on Friday morning, I regarded my reflection with alarm.  Had I sprouted a full beard and mustache overnight?  Did I have more wrinkles now than when I had gone to bed?  When did my eyes start drooping like that?  Were my teeth always the color of corn? What exactly had happened to me while I slept?
I came down to breakfast, a little defeated, wondering how I went out in the world without being chased by villagers with pitchforks.  It wasn’t until I was in the car with my mother—the only person you should ask questions of if you want totally honest answers—that I had the nerve to ask her, “Is it the lighting in the upstairs bathroom or do I look as bad and as old as that mirror would have me believe?”  I held my breath while waiting for the answer but her hysterical laughter was all I needed to hear.  Turns out that under the harsh light of an operating-room set of marquee lights, none of us look that good.  Including my twelve-year-old son who was mumbling about Botox on the way home.
So, I have determined that it’s not plastic surgery, or visits to a pricey dermatologist or esthetician, or shooting your face up with unknown products that harden under your skin and smooth out the wrinkles that are the key to aging gracefully.  Rather, it’s really simple:  good lighting.  A quick trip to Target for some forty-watt bulbs and I’ll be all set. Hubby will think that I slept in a time machine and have emerged looking like I did in 1991 (without the bad perm and the shoulder pads).   I’ll look dewy, fresh, young, and rested.  Now, I just have to figure out how to change the light bulbs in my aunt and uncle’s house every Rosh Hashanah without them catching on.
What are your secrets to the fountain of youth, Stiletto friends?
Maggie Barbieri

Living the Dream

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Time was, long ago, before I was published, that I thought that once I had a book out, everything would be perfect. (It’s the same thought process that tells me that if I just weighed twenty pounds less, well, the laundry would do itself, I would always have on the perfect outfit, and my kids would do their homework the second they walked through the door.) I would have attained my dream and the birds would sing and all would be well. It wasn’t until I was on my third book, or maybe closer to my fourth, that I realized that living the dream meant something completely different that what I had envisioned.

I was at lunch the other day with a large group, sitting alongside a woman who is writing her memoir. She asked me, “so what is it like now that you’ve achieved your dream of being a writer?” I looked at her, and very thoughtfully said, “Here’s the thing. When you have a dream and you achieve it, you have to live the dream in the context of your reality.” And then I wondered why nobody from the Oprah show had ever called me to be a guest because that sentence alone a) sounded like something I had heard on one of her “Live Your Best Life” shows and b) didn’t sound like me at all.

But the more I thought about it, and what a horse’s rear end I sounded like, I realized that there was a kernel of truth there. It’s putting all of the pieces together around the achievement that’s hard. It’s living day to day when you think things should be a certain way and they’re not that’s challenging. That’s why a “dream”—a word whose synonym is also “vision”—is exactly that: it is never what you think it’s going to be. Fortunately, while living this dream, I’m not naked and I’m not being chased by people with no heads, two situations that dominate my regular nocturnal dreams.

I have dreamed of being a writer for as long as I can remember. I wrote stories and novels and poems from the time I was small. Curiously, they all had dead bodies at the center, but that’s a post for a different time. And now that I am a writer—and those of you who read this blog regularly know that it has taken me far too long to admit that I actually am a writer and not just a “freelance college textbook editor”—I run into people all the time who ask me what it’s like to be a writer and how I feel about attaining what has long been a dream for me. They are often surprised to find out that I still work full time or that I don’t have a regular writing schedule. Writers, it would seem, don’t have regular jobs and spend every day, from eight to two or some other reasonable time frame, writing.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works in the real world.

I was at a family party a few weeks ago and a relative of my husband asked me why I continued to work full time if I was a “successful writer.” I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to say, “because my kids like to eat” because she was genuinely interested and not passing judgment on my doing both. So, I explained the vagaries of the publishing world and e-books and royalties and advances and such until her eyes glazed over and she was sorry she ever asked. (That’ll learn ya.) Thing is, we live in an expensive part of the country and we’ve got a kid going to college in a mind-numbingly close eleven months and those textbooks don’t come cheap. Just ask me—that’s my day job. But the truth is that the joy I get from writing can’t be measured in dollars (thank God) and despite not having a “writerly existence,” I am still living the dream of putting pen to paper every day (or fingertips to keyboard, as the case may be) in between dealing with smelly soccer socks and a garbage bin that smells suspiciously like death and water that seeps into the basement at the first sign of drizzle.

None of this is a complaint. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But the older I get, the less wise I seem to become, and the more surprised I am on a daily basis. I wonder if I’ll ever be that full-time writer who labors in my attic, only to emerge at a decent hour to continue thinking about plot, structure, and characters while drinking a whimsical white Rioja, but then I remember that if I did that, no one would have clean soccer socks.

And we don’t want that.

Tell me, Stiletto readers, what dream have you attained in your life and how has it been different from what you imagined?

Maggie Barbieri

The End of Summer

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We here at the Stiletto Gang try not to get thrown by a month that has five Tuesdays or five Wednesdays, and always make provisions.  Hence, it’s two Maggie Barbieri posts in as many weeks!  Your lucky day or unfathomable disappointment that you’re not seeing Bethany Maines?  Don’t worry—she’ll be back next week.

I’m purposely going to keep it light this week. Today, as I write this, school begins, but for some reason, not everyone has left the building, so to speak.  Why is high school starting at ten o’clock on the first day?  That’s a question I haven’t been able to get an answer to and one that will perplex me all day, but I’m just going to go with it.  Child #2 left at his appointed seven twenty-five this morning, his lunch sitting atop the kitchen counter.  Husband took off a little past that, and child #1 remains here, the ten o’clock witching hour fast approaching.  Soon, it will just be me, the dog, and the cat, and a basement full of water if this morning’s rainfall is any indication of what’s ahead.
So, summer is over, and with it goes all of Maggie’s bad habits.  I see the beginning of school as being more of a chance to break old routines and enjoy some new ones than I do the beginning of a new calendar year.  Despite having begun a walking regimen this summer that amounted to anywhere between eighteen and twenty-five miles per week, I have not lost a pound.  Truth be told, I probably gained a few.  So today begins the healthy eating program, a declaration that makes my family groan in dismay.  Out are the homemade trays of macaroni and cheese, the ones that harden your arteries with just one glance in their direction, and in is the whole wheat pasta, organic beans, and lots of salad.  The case of wine I just bought?  Well, we’re saving that for a dinner party or a special occasion.  Cracking open a bottle every night and remarking on the rich texture of the Chilean Chardonnay or the fruity undertones of the Argentinian Malbec is a thing of the past.  Sparkling water or lemon-lime seltzer is now de rigeur.  And the Magnum ice cream bars—the ones that I had coupons for and which were practically free?  Bye-bye.  The family in this household has seen their last richly decorated box, their last gold-covered ice cream bar.
Summer should be a time of healthy eating and outdoor activity but I find that it’s really just a constant round of barbecues, parties, and celebrations.  Everything centers around food, or frozen cocktails, or delicious desserts.  Sure, we’ve got our wonderful corn on the cob and Jersey tomatoes, but when you serve them with country-style barbecue ribs or a thick, juicy flank steak, the calorie quotient gets amped up considerably.  And even though we’re moving into braised meat season—pot roast, beef stew, sauerbraten—it doesn’t compare to fried chicken and potato salad or any of the other wonderful summer meals that my friends—all fantastic cooks—put together.  We socialize a lot and eat even more. 
The beginning of school, consequently, signals a return to less excess and more rigor, and truth be told, it feels good.  Does anyone out there have similar feelings about the end of summer and the beginning of school?  Are you glad to get back to the routine that September brings?
Maggie Barbieri

In Defense of the Food-Borne Illness

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I just saw a report that says that 90% of the perishable food in our kids’ packed school lunches get to temperatures high enough to induce food-borne illness.

You don’t say?
I could have told you that.  That’s why, like every other good mom in America, I buy an insulated lunch bag every year for child #2—child #1 is almost an adult and usually purchases her own lunch so she’s on her own—which inevitably gets misplaced around November 15th, only to reappear around February 1st, between which dates we’ve already purchased a brand new insulated lunch bag.  Or two.
This, like many other reports that come out, always give me a chuckle and begs the question:  how did those of us born before the year 2000 survive to adulthood?
Here are some things that we used to do as children:
1.     Ride in cars without seatbelts.
2.     Not ride in car seats.
3.     Play stickball in the middle of the street only moving when a car approached.
4.     Lay out in the sun (ok, that’s a bad one and something that almost killed me—glad we don’t do that anymore!).
5.     Eat lunches that had been prepared either the night before or in the morning, shoved into a brown paper bag, and carted around in the overheated school building until it was time for lunch.  Said lunch was consumed with a warm carton of milk that cost ten cents.
Consuming a warm—and in this case, I mean “not good kind of warm”—lunch day after day at a barely clean lunch table surrounded by other children eating the same was a routine back in the day.  I can trace my hatred of onions back to one particularly gross offering of egg salad mushed into two slices of Wonder white bread into which my mother—in a fit of pique obviously brought on by watching Graham Kerr’s “The Galloping Gourmet”—had the idea to spice things up by chopping up little pieces of white onion and putting them into the egg salad.  Call me crazy, but when I bite into something that is supposed to be smooth, don’t mix things up and put something crunchy in there.  Ever since that day, I amuse/bore/offend anyone I’m dining out with (I’m looking at you, Northern half of Evelyn David) when I ask my intrepid server, “Does your ___________________ have onions in it?”  Northern half of Evelyn David is now so used to this that before I prepare to order a chicken salad on rye with lettuce and tomato at our favorite Kosher deli, Epstein’s, she pats my hand gently and says, “Remember.  There are no onions in the chicken salad.”
But back to my original question:  How did we survive?  And beyond that, what are we supposed to do, now that we know that all of the lunch food our kids are eating is probably contaminated?  I’m drawing the line at sending the kid to school with a Playmate cooler and since he walks, it probably isn’t realistic to put ice packs in his lunch; he’s weighed down enough as is with massive tomes of fantasy books for “free reading time.”  There are just so many days in a row you can eat peanut butter and jelly before you start to go mad and I refuse to send him with those prepackaged lunches that contain more nitrates than anyone could ever consume in a lifetime, let alone during a twenty-minute recess.  Sure, they’re safe…for now.  But who knows what they’ll do to your internal organs down the road?
Like with most topics/revelations that inconvenience me, I’m choosing to ignore this and continue to send child #2 to school with a lunch in an insulated bag.  I could always do what my mother did for as many years as I brought lunch to school:  on Sunday, she would purchase two pounds of baloney (and I refuse to write “bologna” because it’s not pronounced that way so I’m not spelling it that way), two loaves of the aforementioned Wonder white bread, two boxes of Devil Dogs, and put my grandmother to work.  Grandmother would make twenty baloney sandwiches on white bread, put them in plastic bags and stick them into the freezer, where the Devil Dogs already resided.  In the morning, each of the four of us would come down for breakfast and right before departure, grab one frozen sandwich and one Devil Dog from the freezer. We had already been given our dimes for the lukewarm milk, so we were ready to go!  By lunchtime, depending on the weather, your sandwich was somewhere between semi-frozen and overheated to the point of almost being a baloney Panini, its flatness only rivaled by the steam coming out from between the two slices of bread. 
I’d like to say that it was a little slice of culinary heaven, but I can’t.  It was horrible.  I can’t imagine giving my kids something like it.  But to my mother’s credit, it was brilliant.  No more making lunches at seven in the morning.  No more wondering if one of the four kids needed something different; everyone got the same thing.  It was budgeting and time management at its finest.  But whenever one of my siblings or I think about taking a shortcut without kids and stress about doing so, we can always comfort ourselves with the fact that we’ve never sent any of our children off to school with a previously frozen baloney sandwich made by our septuagenarian mother after Sunday Mass.
Food-borne illness be damned, I think we need to harken back to the days when everyone pulled a flattened pbj, or a onion-speckled egg salad sandwich, or a cryogenically frozen baloney sandwich out of their Partridge Family lunchbox and wouldn’t think anything of shoving the whole thing in their mouth while talking about the latest “Planet of the Apes’” movie and washing it down with ten cent warm milk.  Because those, my friends, were the good old days.  Not only did we not know what food-borne illness was, we wouldn’t have thought of bringing an insulated lunch bag to school, for fear of a schoolyard beat down. Who needs an insulated bag when you’ve got a frozen sandwich?
Tell me, Stiletto faithful, do you have any tricks for keeping your kids’ lunches fresh and tasty?  Or like me, and my mother before me, do you think your kids will be fine with whatever they pull forth at the noon hour?
Maggie Barbieri

The Comfort Zone

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I’ve been thinking a lot about my comfort zone the past few weeks, and in another week or so, I’ll be able to tell you why. (Insert smiley face that looks like the cat swallowed the canary.) It seems like that term is popping up all over the place. Is it because I just had another birthday and feel like I have to push the envelope even further with the passing of another year? Or is it just the effects of the waning summer when fall is approaching, schedules will be reinstituted and new endeavors seem to be the norm? I’m not sure, but I do know that I’m not the only one thinking about the comfort zone.

I ran into a dear friend the other day while walking along the beautiful Hudson River walkway a few blocks from my house. She asked me what I was thinking about before I approached her and I told her—my comfort zone. She looked at me, surprised, and said, “I was thinking about the same thing!” She said that she was reflecting on her diverse group of friends and how each one pushes her to go beyond what she feels is comfortable, most often to great effect.

I picked up the New York Times a few weeks back after seeing a news report on one of my heroes, Diana Nyad. No, I can’t swim, but I have always admired this world-record holding swimmer and her determination. She has circled Manhattan in the water, swam from Bimini to Florida over a two-day period, and now, had plans to swim from Cuba to Key West. At age sixty-one. Color me impressed.

According to the Times piece, while swimming, she would ingest a liquid cocktail of predigested protein (I don’t even want to know what that is, let alone taste it), maybe a little banana or some peanut butter. She would probably hallucinate and be stung by jellyfish repeatedly. Her tongue would swell as a result of ingesting salt water, and her skin? Well, suffice it to say that it won’t be the same as when she jumps in the water.

The trek is 103 miles and infested with sharks. If that’s not going outside your comfort zone, I don’t know what is. So why did she decide to do it? Nyad said that turning sixty had a powerful effect on her and made her want to “stir up her energy and ambition.” She had failed once to do this swim and wanted to try it again. She was in a bit of a malaise and needed to snap out of it. To put my own spin on it, she wanted to push herself out of her comfort zone.

Update: Nyad didn’t make it to Cuba, only about halfway. It was treacherous, yes, and filled with sharks, and jellyfish, but she basically just swam off course. I am wondering if she’ll give it another try, maybe when she’s seventy? I hope so.

We need to shake things up every now and again. I’m not saying that we need to attempt a one hundred and three mile swim in shark-infested waters, unless that’s the one thing that we think we need to do. For me, it was getting outside of my writing comfort zone and doing something totally different. I was terrified to tackle a new and different project. What if it was bad? What if I couldn’t do it? What if I failed? Ultimately, I decided that all of these things were keeping me from pushing myself farther, from becoming a better writer, and am more fulfilled person, creatively. I took a deep breath, jumped in, and went into the shark-infested waters of my mind.

And you know what? It wasn’t so bad. It actually may be good. But I never would have known unless I tried.

I’m not sure if Diana Nyad, the most bad-assed sixty-one-year-old woman I have ever read about, will undertake this swim again, but if she does, I’m going to send her a silent thank you for being a champion against malaise, complacency, and all those things that stand in the way of us getting out of our own way.

What types of things do you do to get out of your own personal “comfort zone”?

Maggie Barbieri

The Follow-Up Question

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My picture pops up every few seconds above…does this look like the face of someone you should tell everything to?  No?  Well, if so, you’re in the minority, because everywhere I go, I hear at least one life story in a day.
No kidding.
My husband always remarked on my ability to make small talk with people around me, perfect strangers even, and wonder what it was that made me a magnet for people who have stories to tell.  It was our friend, a retired New York City Police detective named John, who came up with the only theory to explain this phenomenon.
Apparently, I ask the “follow-up question.”
What is the “follow-up question,” you ask?  Well, seemingly, it’s that one extra question that will get the person telling you the most intimate, darkest secrets of their life despite the fact that they’ve never laid eyes on you.  It’s the question that I guess lets the teller know that you want to hear every single detail of their story—of their life, even—and that you won’t rest until you do.  It’s the question that keeps you molded to the same spot in the local pharmacy or in the parking lot at Target or on the phone with “Marco,” in India, who is helping you reconnect to the internet after a recent storm.  It’s the question that separates me, just your average writer/housewife/mother/textbook editor from anyone else I know.
A less generous friend calls me a “psycho magnet,” but I don’t think that’s what I am.  I am just a person who is interested enough in some lonely—or maybe just talkative—person’s life to ask the one question that will set the monologue wheels in motion.  John, the detective, said that if the textbook thing (my day job) ever went south, I should apply to the police department and focus on interrogations.  Jim says that if assigned to the terrorism task force, I would be busting terrorists left and right.  People tell me stuff even if they’re not supposed to.
Unfortunately, I usually hear a lot about intestinal trouble or a diatribe about the horrendous service at _________________ where the person telling me tried to buy ___________________ only to have no one wait on them.  That usually dovetails into a more personal story about their spouse, or their children, or a wayward niece of nephew.  Don’t ask me how we get there, but somehow, we always do.
But there are other, more interesting stories that come out of the follow-up question.  Case in point:  the day my first book, MURDER 101, was published, the only place that had copies was a local gift store which was owned by a dear friend who had placed his order early and had what seemed like the first copies printed.  He had set the books up on a large round table in the middle of the store, announcing their arrival with much fanfare.  He called me the minute the display was up and I headed over to the store to see what it looked like to have fifty copies of your first publication displayed in the middle of my favorite store in town. 
It was fabulous.
As I was gushing over the incredible display, a woman sidled up beside me.
“These your books?”
They were, I assured her.
“What are they about?”
This was back in the day before I had perfected my “elevator pitch;” you know, the one-sentence description of the book and the series that would perfectly describe what it was and let the potential reader know if it was right for them.  I set about describing the book from start to finish. 
The woman held her hand up to stop me when I got to around page fifty.  “So the murder is fiction?”
Rather than tell her that I thought it was compelling and leapt off the page, despite being “fiction,” I let her know that it was and asked her what she liked to read.  She shook off that question.
“I know about a real murder,” she whispered, clearly dismissive of my character, Alison Bergeron, and the body in the trunk of poor Alison’s car.  (In the interest of full disclosure, this was not a confession on her part.)
By this time, my husband and the owner of the store had wandered off to peruse the latest men’s offerings from Crabtree and Evelyn and I, despite my internal warning system, said, “Really?  Who got murdered?”  Most people, when confronted with a woman with wild hair, and even wilder eyes, would have probably joined Jim at the Crabtree and Evelyn display to see if their razor balm really did cut down on razor burn, but to me, this was too good to pass up.  The woman proceeded to regale me with stories of her “research,” and how she kept it all in a safe deposit box lest someone else get a hold of her ideas and the story.  It was just that good, in her mind.
I let her ramble on and then the kiss of death: I asked the follow-up question to the follow-up question in the form of “have you started writing?” which led her to a list of reasons as to why she hadn’t. (She, apparently, was very busy.  At the time, I had two children, a husband, a dog, and a full-time job.  Oh, and daily chemotherapy to attend to.  I wasn’t busy at all.)
I never did find out who got murdered and I also don’t know if she ever wrote her story, never mind get it published.  I used to see her around town and she would always give me a look that would either say “Do I know you?” or “Now that you know about the murder and the safety deposit box, I have to kill you, too!” but I couldn’t tell which it was.
 So there you have it, one example of where the follow-up question can lead.  And trust me:  it’s never good.
Hey, Stiletto friends…are you one of those people to whom others tell everything?  Do you ask the follow-up question to your own detriment?  And thanks to my friend and fellow Stiletto blogger, Susan McBride, for prompting the topic of this post.  After reading about her sharing with her A/C repairman, it dawned on me that I, too, had this special gift called “tell me your life story.”  Thanks, Susan!
Maggie Barbieri

In Defense of Paranoia and Over-Protectiveness

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My kids say I’m paranoid.
They also say that I’m overprotective.
Yes, and definitely yes.
Being a parent is to know fear as you have never known it before.  Maybe I’m a little overly dramatic (ok, I am), but to wait for your teenaged daughter to come back from a run that inexplicably goes past dusk brings anxiety.  Or to have your twelve-year-old walk through the door ten minutes later than he is supposed to from his trek home from school is panic inducing.  I’ve tried to explain to the kids what goes on in my mind, but they still think I’m crazy, and I guess that’s ok.  To me, it’s a dangerous world out there, something I try to communicate to them without scaring the dickens out of them and making them paranoid like me but they still think I’m crazy and I understand that. I thought my parents were crazy, too, when I was both a tween and a teen. 
Now, however, I “get” it.
Last week, here in New York, an eight-year-old boy went missing on the first day he was allowed to walk home alone from camp.  After begging his parents to let him walk home from camp, they had relented, telling him that they would meet him half way.  He left camp, got lost, and encountered the one person—because I am convinced that 99 out of 100 pedestrians would have led him to his parents—who saw his situation as an opportunity to do harm.  The man, Levi Aron, a citizen in the tight-knit Hasidic community where this little boy lived and worshipped with his family, took him in his car—probably telling him that he would take him to his parents—brought him home and kept him in his attic apartment for a day. The manhunt that ensued after little Leiby Kletzy’s disappearance caused Aron to panic.  So, he killed the boy by suffocating him.
My husband read the story in the paper and looked at our oldest, saying, “And this is why we’re crazy.”
We’re crazy because one chance encounter can have dire consequences.  Sure, these situations are rare, but they are not completely out of the realm of possibility and that’s what makes them all the more horrifying.  Here in the New York metropolitan area, no one can get the image captured on a security camera of that little boy, walking along a busy Brooklyn street, his backpack on his back, walking toward a stranger who had more than one screw loose.  Every time I see it, I want to scream at the boy in the video to “keep walking!”  But he keeps going, not a care in the world, toward the stranger who will do him the ultimate harm.
All parents have been in situations where they have had to make a decision like the one Lieby Kletzky’s parents made.  “Can I walk home today?”  “Can I stop at the ice cream store on the way home from school?”  “Can I take the bus to the mall?”  “Can I go to the midnight show of ‘Harry Potter’?”  His parents, who are raising their family in an insular, and up to this point, practically crime-free city neighborhood, probably felt somewhat comfortable letting him go.  After all, the streets in this neighborhood team with other families, other parents, and people who would help the little guy find his way when he got lost.  I’m sure that they never banked on the fact that a lunatic walked among them on their quiet city streets, someone who would look for the opportunity to hurt a child.
The letters to the editor in our local paper were, for the most part, sympathetic, but of course there were the few that placed blame squarely on the boy’s parents for letting an eight-year-old walk home from camp, a distance of about ten blocks.  He was too young, they claimed.  He didn’t have enough experience with the world, they wrote.  It’s too dangerous out there, they opined.  Perhaps all true.  But once the decision was made the parents fretted a bit, I’m sure, but decided that in their neighborhood, one where everyone is very similar, very family-oriented, very religious and caring of one another, nothing bad would happen.  It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, the one where you make the decision that you have fought against only to acquiesce and have it turn against you in the worst way possible.
I read an editorial in yesterday’s paper by a mother in Los Angeles who allows her young child walk to and from school and who gives him freedoms that even my teenager doesn’t have.  Giving into fear, she posits, means the terrorists have won or something like that.  By not allowing our children some basic freedoms, she says, we are imprisoning them in our hysteria, creating fearful and dependent children not ready to take on the world. She’s right about one thing:  I’m not ready for my children to take on the world.  If that makes me an hysteric, so be it.  Intellectually, I know I cannot protect them from every harm or every monster that roams the landscape. I know that ultimately, I have no control over every situation.  But I have to control the things that I can in the hope that I can keep them safe.
I can’t stop thinking about the little boy in the striped shirt, walking down a safe city street, his backpack on his back.  In my mind, he turns around and goes the other way, away from the maniac who took his life and ruined his family’s.  I don’t think I ever will forget him, just like I have never forgotten six-year-old Etan Patz, a little boy who disappeared in 1979 on a New York City street on the day he walked to his bus stop, never to be found.  His disappearance changed how parents viewed freedom and independence for years to come.   So every time either one of my children asks me why I’m so overprotective, why I’m so paranoid, I’ll say a little prayer for sweet Leiby Kletzky and his family and tell my kids that some day, they’ll understand.
Maggie Barbieri

Turning “Off”

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I’m the kind of person who when faced with nothing to do, a long stretch of interrupted peace, finds something to do.  I’m not good at relaxing.  Mr. Maggie often refers to it as my “on/off switch.”  He says that if I’m not “on,” I’m “off,” which usually means that I’m asleep.  I have a hard time turning off my mind and my body, which is why doing yoga has proven spectacularly unsuccessful for me.
The last few weeks, however, have forced me to do just that—turn off while awake.  I have just finished a day job project that required me to get twenty books revised and to the printer—all in India, no less—by the middle of June for a mid-July collective pub date.  To say that the project nearly did me in is not an understatement.  (For proof, you can ask either the northern half of Evelyn David or Susan.  They have heard enough whining to last a lifetime.)  I had to deal with the first round of edits on my next book (PHYSICAL EDUCATION, out in November) and then the copyedits.  I have a number of other projects for work in various stages of readiness, and with varying degrees of author compliance.  By say the twentieth of June, my brain was fried.
So, I decided to play against type and take a few days off.  At first, it was an unsuccessful experiment, with me going deep into the bowels of the Barbieri basement (you remember, the one with the vermin) and beginning to clean.  Three giant black plastic bags later and I was only mildly sated in my quest to bring order to the house.  Suffice it to say, we still have a long way to go, but we’re getting there. Then there was the issue of packing child #2 for camp.  That took all of two hours.  I still had a lot of energy and not a lot of things to do.
I decided to read a book.  And then another.  I took long, meandering walks down by the river, through town, and even through the woods.  I spent a lot of time at the Laundromat while waiting for the delivery of our new washer.  I bought a notebook and started outlining chapters for a new book I’m working on.  I wrote down a few ideas for yet another book.  I wrote the beginning of the new Alison Bergeron book.  And I started to see the benefit of this relaxing thing, this turning off of the mind.  By turning off the mind, I discovered, you are actually turning it back on, and are able to think.  And for a writer, that feeling is priceless.
I guess I’m finding that there is a lot competing for space in my over-packed brain so I’m going to have to think of ways to carve out time to get some thinking done, as sad as that sounds.  When do your best ideas come?  When you’re busy?  Or when you’re “off”? 
Maggie Barbieri

Redefining Infidelity (and oh yeah, stupidity, too)

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I live in the greater New York metropolitan area but I don’t think I’m getting any more coverage of the Anthony Weiner fiasco than those you elsewhere.   I have been treated to a variety of salacious and ridiculous front-page headlines in my local paper, thought, poking fun at Weiner’s antics as well as his name.  I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say, sometimes I wonder if my twelve-year-old son is the headline writer for the Daily News.

The other thing I’ve been wondering about since the scandal broke is: What are we currently calling infidelity?  And why, overwhelmingly, are men at the heart of these salacious sex scandals?  Weiner has vociferously protested that his marriage to the gorgeous Huma Abedin—now pregnant with their child—will not end, and maybe that is so.  But did he really think that texting provocative pictures of himself was a minor thing?  The number of women with whom he has now been “involved,” albeit virtually, is almost reaching double digits but I think there are still some people out there who don’t think “sexting” is a breach of the marriage vows because there was no physical contact.
I heartily disagree.
A couple of rules of thumb:
-If you don’t want your spouse catching you do it, it’s wrong. 
-If you wouldn’t do it in front of your spouse, it’s wrong. 
-If you’re doing it in secret, it’s wrong. 
-If you deny that you did it, it’s wrong. 
Obviously, putting all those things together would indicate that you are either shamed by what you did or afraid of being caught.  By very definition:  wrong.
Basically, if you can’t figure out how to use Twitter, you really aren’t qualified to do many jobs, not the least of which is New York City mayor, Weiner’s aspiration.  Most kids I know are fluent in Twitter.  Most of them also know that posting pictures of yourself online, either on Twitter or your Facebook account, can lead to undesirable things happening.  Why?  Because we’ve told them.  We’ve told them to be careful and to not post anything that they wouldn’t, potentially, want the whole world to see.  So why does a politician do something so bone-headed?
I’ve been wrestling with this for the past week.  Why is it that seemingly not a month goes by that we don’t see a male politician taking to the stage to give his version of events, and his excuses for his actions?  Why is it that we rarely—or actually never—see a devoted husband standing beside his incredibly stupid and oversexed wife as she recounts what she did and how she got caught?  Sheryl Gay Stolberg tackled questions like these in her recent New York Times article, “When It Comes to Scandal, Girls Won’t Be Boys.”  A quote from Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said it best:   “The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody.”  The article went on to say that once elected, women feel more pressure to work harder, to prove themselves in a man’s world because even though we’ve made tremendous strides, let’s face it:  politics is still a boy’s club.  We’re just allowed to play sometimes.
Of course, there are women who cheat, female politicians who have been accused of adultery and other sordid actions, but they are in the minority.  And when that does happen, instead of not being surprised, we’re disappointed.  As the article points out so eloquently, we expect more from our female politicians.
Ok, so I know that this post has about three thesis statements and multiple main ideas, but that just goes to show you how hard it is for me to wrap my brain around this stupidity.  (Or just that I was having an “off” writing day.)  Men with beautiful, accomplished wives texting/sexting women they’ve never met…it boggles the mind.  Does it really just come down to the fact that these men crave sex of any kind so badly that they’ll risk everything for even a virtual encounter?  Are they still the uncool kid at the uncool table in high school, wishing a girl—any girl—would talk to them?  Or does it speak to a narcissism so great that they believe that they are invincible?  I’d love to know what you think, Stiletto friends.
Maggie Barbieri

Skin Cancer Awareness

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Hi, friends: I went the entire month of May–Skin Cancer Awareness month–without reminding all of you to bust out the UV protectant clothing and sunscreen. It’s not too late, though! We just had a weekend here in NY that was close to 90 degrees every day and very sunny, so I expect that we’ll just bypass spring and head straight to summer. Please, please, please remember to wear a hat, sunglasses, and slather yourself with sunscreen. If you don’t like sunscreen, buy yourself a lightweight UV protectant jacket (I got a nifty one at Coolibar). And if you need more of a reminder, please watch the amazing video below which includes my peeps–melanoma survivors–who tell their 16-year-old selves what to do. Happy viewing.

Maggie