Tag Archive for: Murder 101 series

New Year’s Resolutions

/in /by

Some parents—like me—have this misguided notion that everything will always be the same and that the kids will always be there to celebrate holidays, good times, and everything in between.  But as my kids get older—almost 18 and 13—I’m finding that, just like they are supposed to, they are enjoying making their own connections and traditions and branching out on their own.
Every year, we get together with another family whose oldest is my oldest child’s best friend; they also have a son, who although more than three years older than mine, will always watch a game or play with Barbieri child #2.  This year, the girls had two different parties to attend, one right on the same street and another in town that they had to drive to.  My friend’s daughter was dressed to the nines in gorgeous ankle-strap black suede pumps while my daughter went for a more casual look.  One came home early, the other late, but both had reveled with their own friends and didn’t kiss their parents at the stroke of midnight.
I am working hard to adjust to this change.  I used to scoff at people who would coo over one of my adorable children, still a baby, and say, “Enjoy it now.  It goes really fast,” meaning that in the blink of an eye, your baby would be all grown up and ready to fly the coop. I would laugh.  What did these people know?
Everything, apparently.
I told my husband that I am now the person doing the cooing and telling people to enjoy their babies now because before they know it, they’ll be off on their own, living their own lives.  And the people I tell this to look at me like I’m crazy.
I once heard it said that when raising children, and particularly when caring for babies, “the days are long but the years fly by.”  A truer statement has never been uttered.  As you trod the floor at night with a screaming baby, it seems like that night will never end but just when you think you have this sleeping thing nailed down, the kid is up all night again, but for a different reason:  they are a teenager and teenagers like to stay up late.  Granted, there’s no crying anymore, hopefully, but you’re still up and you’re still worried, especially if they are not home.
I am loathe to make New Year’s resolutions but this year, with a daughter going to college in the fall—the longest stint of sleepaway camp known to parents—I’m going to try to remain focused on the present, enjoying every bit of the time we have together, not focused on what will happen in the future.  I know that once she leaves here and experiences the world beyond the doors of our little Village colonial, her eyes will be opened to all the great things she can accomplish.  And as Martha would say, “And that’s a good thing.”
Maggie Barbieri

A Tale of Christmas Eve (or how a seven-year-old picks out gifts at the last minute)

/in /by

By Maggie Barbieri

We celebrate Christmas Eve hard in my family.  The reason for this is that when I was young, my father was a New York City police officer who worked many a holiday but usually seemed to be around for some of Christmas Eve, making it easy for my mother to load gifts under the tree and have them ready for us to open at midnight (really, eight thirty…it was dark and we couldn’t tell time).  Usually, the day before Christmas Eve, or earlier in the actual day, my father would realize that while he had been busy keeping the citizens of New York City safe, he had forgotten to get my mother a gift and had to go into serious shopping mode if he was going to have something for her to open.  This particular year, I guess I was around seven, he grabbed me, dusk just about to fall as snow dropped from the sky, and dragged me to a neighboring town where a boutique was still open.  It was called The Pearl Shoppe and sold things like giant pairs of white underpants, enormous bras, girdles with lots of snaps and elastic and some fancy duds that the well-heeled women of Rockland County wore to holiday parties.  We wandered in, immediately assaulted by a woman covered in Jean Nate cologne, and given the hard sell.
Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the most gorgeous silver lame (and apologies that I don’t know how to put either an accent ague or accent grave over the e) gown, hanging close to the window on a hangar, clearly an item that was being highlighted as something every woman should have.  It was hanging alone, calling to me.  As a devoted Barbie aficionado, it seemed like something my leggy doll should wear.  From there, I made the leap that it was something that my mother—the parent of four children under the age of seven, two still in diapers—should have.  After all, she could wear it to all of the holiday parties that she and my father would go to, I thought, not taking into account that the parents of four little children rarely get invited anywhere.  I posited my theory to my father.  He had a wad of cash and little time. 
He was in.
The Jean Nate lady was more than happy to wrap it up in a big box with a giant silver bow, reminding my father that here at The Pearl Shoppe, there were no returns for cash, just store credit.  But we were both blinded by the silver lame gown—it even had a bolero jacket that you could wear when it got chilly—so it didn’t matter.  In our minds, my mother would never return such a glorious item.  Why would she? 
We were both trembling with anticipation when my father handed her the box. 
“Oh, The Pearl Shoppe,” she said, clearly not as excited as we thought she might be.  She undid the beautiful bow and riffled through the tissue paper covering the most exquisite silver gown this side of Garnerville.  While two of us fought over the bow, she let the baby play with the tissue paper.  She uncovered the silver gown, throwing my grandmother a look that said, “where in God’s name am I—the mother of four little kids—going to wear a silver ball gown?” but to my father she proclaimed it the most beautiful item of clothing she had ever seen and would ever own.
It may come as a surprise to you to find out that my mother never did wear the silver gown or that I was with her when she went to return it to The Pearl Shoppe.  The Jean Nate lady was not amused.  Nor was my mother when she found out that the only thing she could exchange it for were a dozen packets of giant white underpants and an enormous bra.
I learned a few things that year:

You can never have enough giant white underpants or enormous bras.

You should never take gift advice from a girl whose fashion icon is a twelve-inch doll with inordinately long legs and is made of plastic.

Always marry a man who thinks that despite the fact that you spend the better part of your day changing diapers and wiping up spilled milk, he always think you should look like a princess.

Happy holidays from all of us at The Stiletto Gang!
Maggie Barbieri

Why the Dog Will Never Die in My Books

/in /by
When we were young, we had a host of animals, mostly cats and dogs, but with a couple of Guinea pigs and hermit crabs thrown in for good measure.  One of our best, and most ill-behaved, pets was a sixty-pound Golden Retriever named Dusty who had a habit of escaping at the first sound of the open screen door, usually taking my frail grandmother down with him as he bounded outside, happy to be running free and in the fresh air.  I can speak favorably and lovingly of him now because he’s been dead for thirty-five years but back when he was living with us, well, he was a royal pain in the tuchus.
My parents both worked in those days so my grandmother was charged with getting us off to school with our frozen bologna sandwiches and Devil Dogs, a dime each for the carton of warm milk we would buy when lunchtime rolled around.  My grandmother didn’t drive, so getting us on the bus was imperative because once the bus left, if one of us hadn’t made it on, we would have to walk close to two miles to get to school.  Now that doesn’t sound like a long distance now, but back then, our legs were shorter and the miles seemed interminable.  Suffice it to say that we would ran, en masse, when we heard the squeal of the breaks, someone older pushing someone younger ahead so that we didn’t have to hoof it.  We always made it.
Except for one day.
Dusty had a travelin’ jones that beautiful fall morning and was just waiting for the chance to get out and run pell-mell throughout the neighborhood.  I went out after him, chasing him all the way down our street toward the reservoir, begging him to come back home.  I knew I had all of five or six minutes to make this happen, but as luck would have it, he was out without his leash or even his collar so I had to pin him to the ground and basically drag him up the street, his sixty pounds feeling like a thousand as we inched our way up the street toward home and the bus stop.  We were about halfway up when I heard the familiar siren song of the bus coming down the street and saw my siblings running toward its open doors.  That’s when I began to cry.
Through some sheer force of will, I did manage to get the dog the two hundred and fifty feet back to the house, where I threw him inside and cried to my grandmother that not only would I have to walk to school, I would now be late and probably have to serve detention, meaning that I would have to walk home, too.  She cried right along with me, apologizing for never having gotten her license and trying to figure out what we could do to get me to school in time for the bell.  Desperate, I ran outside and spied my neighbor, Bobby, getting into his brand-new Mustang convertible, the one with the white leather seats, the one that he didn’t let any of us near.  He was on his way to his job as a first-year teacher at a local high school and while I won’t go so far as to say that he was unhappy to see me, let’s just say that, well, seeing me crying in my uniform with my book bag wasn’t the way he wanted to start his day.  I begged him for a ride, explaining the tale of dragging Dusty up the street and missing the bus, the same one that two of his younger brothers rode with me to St. Catherine’s.  He finally relented after my grandmother intervened, making me sit at the edge of the passenger-side seat, lest my plaid uniform leave some kind of deleterious stain on the white leather upholstery.
I spent the day smoldering with rage at the dog, who was a colossal pain in the butt about 90% of the time.  In addition to escaping, he ate our socks, our sweaters, our shoes; he stole things from kids disembarking the school bus; he barked at things we couldn’t see; and he needed to be loved and petted constantly even in the middle of dinner.  But when I got home, and he ran to me, slobbering and jumping and just so excited to see me, I could do nothing but hug him and kiss him because when all was said and done, he was just a dog.  And a beautiful, fun, loving one at that who adored me in spades and who had a bad habit of escaping when he should have been napping next to my grandmother.
Dusty died at the age of two, after a brief, but horrible, illness, right around the time that he stopped escaping and started becoming the dog we always wanted.  I will never forget my mother, painting the trim in our bathroom, crying and telling me that she didn’t think we could ever get another dog because she just got too attached and it was too painful when they died.  She cried for several days and while I couldn’t really understand it then—the kids and I moved on with extreme alacrity—I do now.
Intellectually, when we get a pet, we know that they are only ours for a short time in the grand scheme of things but the comfort and pleasure we get while they are here on earth with us is so powerful and all-encompassing that we can’t resist the pull to ownership.  With my dog advancing in age, I’m already thinking about getting another dog so that when she goes—and it will happen—I’ll have someone else to comfort me in her absence.  She is a part of our family and plays just as important a role as the humans who make up our little band of Barbieris.
I was thinking about our pets—both past and present—this weekend after I got a call from a good friend telling me that her beloved dog, a miniature Schnauzer named Stella, had died suddenly and unexpectedly.  The shock of hearing that, coupled with the knowledge of how much I love our little Westie and our big, giant cat, made me so sad that I burst into the tears, my friend and I crying over the loss of this twenty-pound animal who loved to bark at squirrels, who played with my dog in the summer while the kids swam in the pool, and who loved to bury her bone in the couch cushions to protect it for later consumption. So while this blog may seem like just a bunch of ramblings about a disobedient Golden Retriever named Dusty, it is a tribute to all of our beloved pets, the ones who grace our lives for a short time but who bring us so much joy and happiness while they are here.
To Stella—I hope you are enjoying a big, giant JumBone in heaven.
Stiletto faithful, tell us about your favorite memory of a beloved pet.
Maggie Barbieri

Lowering Your Expectations

/in /by

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I have had the pleasure of hosting the past several dinners here at Chez Barbieri.  This year, we will play host to hubby’s family—twelve of us in all—and perhaps a friend and her family for dessert.  My turkey is known in the family for its moistness and fabulous flavor, success attributed to the brining process that takes several days.  My mashed potatoes are laden with butter, garlic, and sea salt, and although not the same recipe as the one that comes from Jim’s family, a crowd pleaser nonetheless.  I apparently also make great green beans, and for Jim’s brother-in-law and me, I make roasted brussel sprouts, a dish no one else would touch with a ten-foot pole but which he and I love.

I guess I’m what you would call a pretty serious home cook.  It is the rare dish that requires me to follow a recipe and I’ve become more adept over the years with complicated vegetarian dishes in order for child #1, an avowed non-meat eater, to get the nutrients she needs.  Baking is not really my forte, but only because I don’t like to measure and child #1 works at a bakery.  Problem solved.  There is one thing, however, that I’ve never mastered and that is gravy.  Can’t do it.  Have tried and failed repeatedly. And there’s nothing worse at a Thanksgiving meal than putting out an entire meal and then standing over the stove attempting to get the proper amount of roux to make a thick, but not gelatinous, gravy.  There’s something about the preparation of gravy that makes me anxious, and I think that’s because gravy is a staple of many meals, Thanksgiving being the most important.  My entire culinary reputation is riding on it and that’s just not a chance I’m willing to take.

I tried for years to make the right gravy, standing beside my mother and mother-in-law, watching what they did and trying to replicate it.  It just doesn’t work.  So, for the past few years—and with full disclosure to my holiday guests—I buy gravy at the local gourmet store where it is made fresh from the turkeys that they roast and which I serve it in my china gravy boat.  It’s delicious and the right consistency every time and all I’m required to do is heat it up.  Voila!  Perfect gravy.
Maybe it’s age, or maybe it’s just that my usual perfectionism just doesn’t translate to pan drippings, but I’ve decided that I’m going to make things easier on myself in order to enjoy the holiday. I’ve also decided the same will be true for writing because no matter how many times I decide I’m going to write the perfect first draft, trying to follow some self-created recipe for writing, it doesn’t happen.  (I bet you didn’t think I could connect gravy and writing but YOU’D BE WRONG!) You’d think after six books, I’d be smarter and know that the perfect first draft is an urban legend, kind of like the multi-city author tour or the alligator that lives in the New York City sewer system.  Or that everyone can cook gravy.

Starting a book without a roux—which is basically an outline or some kind of detailed plot diagram—is pretty scary but it is something I do every time I write a book.  (I’ve only written one outline in the past decade and it’s for a book I’ve yet to write.  We’ll see how that goes.)  It usually works out ok, though, with me figuring out halfway in whodunit and why.  The problem I have is that I hate every word I’ve written before I sit down to write again and I want to revise everything, every day, before I start again, kind of like how I always mess with the home-cooked gravy until it is the aforementioned gelatinous mess.  I can’t leave well enough alone.  This kind of self-critique, I’ve found, is detrimental to the process and just slows things down.  So with this latest book—the seventh in the Murder 101 series—I’ve just taken off the breaks, or to continue with the metaphor, bought the store-bought gravy, and am just dumping everything from my head into the gravy boat and figuring out how to make it work later. (I know…the metaphor is getting a little thing, but stick with me.)
So far, so good.  I have about 40,000 words to write to finish this book—piece of cake!  But lowering my expectations about what constitutes perfection has been a great lesson for me.  Interesting that after writing for all these many years, I’m still learning new things with every book.  I don’t have to make perfect gravy and I don’t have to write perfect first drafts.  That’s what the delete key is for.  What about you?  Anything to share on the topic of the perfect first draft?  Gravy?  Thanksgiving?  Let it fly!

Oh, and in honor of the release of PHYSICAL EDUCATION next Tuesday, one lucky commenter will be chosen at random (my cat will do the picking) to win a signed copy. 

Maggie Barbieri

In Memory of a Great Lady

/in /by
Now I know that I have officially turned into my mother:
1. I keep the “better butter” in the fridge (it’s whipped, not in a log);
2. I read the obituaries.
In my defense, my local paper, the Daily News, has taken to accepting long and beautifully written obituaries to anchor the page that just held the shorter, “just-the-facts” obits that used to reside there.  It is through those pages that I learned of another woman whose family called her “Maga,” just like we did with my beloved grandmother, and that my first boss—Sister Bartholomew Swayne—had passed away at the age of 84.  It was one of those moments where although I hadn’t seen or thought of Sister Bartholomew in years, memories of her came flooding back as I read the details of her long and productive life.
“Bart,” as we called her behind her back, was from the Bronx and entered the Dominican Sisters as a young adult.  She taught at a variety of parochial schools; managed the convent of the Dominican Sisters of Blauvelt; and in her later years, worked at Calvary Hospital, a place for terminally ill cancer patients.  From reading her obituary, it seemed that she had worked right up until she lost her life, presumably of natural causes.
I started working for Sister Bartholomew when I was fifteen, too young to get a working permit, but old enough so that she could get me a job in the sisters’ dining room at the convent.  My grandmother worked on a floor above, doing light housekeeping and keeping things running.  Truth be told, she hired me as a favor to Maga, but then went on to hire my best friend and my sisters.  To me, the convent was a strange and mystical place, but it did have its attractions:  one’s own room, a uniform (I still wear one to this day but it’s in the form of a pullover sweater, jeans and clogs), three hot meals a day (which were actually pretty good), and usually, a job teaching.  The disadvantages?  Living with the same group of women for your entire adult life, the job teaching (I’m not cut out for the classroom), daily prayer, and daily Mass.   When all was said and done, it was kind of a wash but I knew that a life in the convent was not for me.
Bart kept things light and jovial for the girls who worked there and made her life seem exciting and special.  She ran the convent with drill-sergeant precision, getting all of us to do mundane tasks like sweeping and washing every single step of the five-floor convent until they shined.  And when we started to flag in that onerous task, she would come by and clap her hands like the task master that she was, always telling a little joke before she left to let us know that she knew that what she was making us do was horrible but that it was necessary in order to make the convent a place where the other sisters would feel comfortable and cared for.
She reminded us almost daily that the place we worked was the sisters’ home and that we were to treat each and every one with dignity and respect, no matter how ornery or persnickety they were.  Every sister was to be greeted by name (and my sisters, friends and I to this day can summon up just about every name from memory) and treated as if she were special.  These women, after all, had given up everything for God and as such, served the poor and mostly, the children of the archdiocese and around the world.  We didn’t understand it then, but we get it now, all of us married, some of us with children.  In the world that is the Catholic Church, these women were what kept the whole machine going.  They were the cogs in the wheel and made sure that everyone had an equal opportunity to make it in a harsh world.
Bart went about her business briskly but with compassion.  When my grandmother, her good friend, died, she grieved right along with the rest of us.  And when my sisters and I went off to bigger and better things, she praised us, I’m sure still offering daily prayers for our success.  It’s no wonder that I write about nuns, having spent so much time in their presence, but it is Bart who sticks out most in my mind.  She was a wonderful lady and I hope—no, I know—she rests in peace.
Maggie Barbieri

The Fountain of Youth

/in /by
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

/in /by

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

/in /by

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

/in /by

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

/in /by

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