Home stretch

Today, Tuesday, is exactly a week away from when we will be moving out of our lovely rose cottage. A week, no more, no less. This tree lined street will be the final place we will have lived as Angelenos. Our neighbors will become those names that we address on envelopes once a year during the holiday season. With electronic mail, we may write an email or two during the year that would precede those envelopes arriving in bundles early December. But life being what it is, those cards may be the only reminders we will have about life on this street.

After spending a leisurely weekend, I resumed my frenzy of organizing by day's end. I sat down with all those boxes containing photos of our son, and set to work on putting those pictures into books I had ordered long ago, but never actually filled. Pictures are such an elusive thing, really, if you think about it. As I pored over photos, none dated, so that I couldn't tell if they were pictures from the second year or the third, I couldn't recall why I had snapped that particular shot. The images that we capture--the word capture is apt since that is what we do in essence--becomes representative of time, which is elastic. It's a good marker for time, especially when you see a face mature, or in our age, fall apart, since that is the only way we can record passages. But the image capturing much more beyond that is something the medium can't accomplish. All art forms are limited by the form itself since no one form can fully express or represent the totality of life.

All those pictures of our son made what I had been ruminating and writing about-- the fleeting nature of relationships-- all the more true. There were so many photos of children whose names I couldn't recall. And endless photos of birthday parties, the bane of a parent's existence. The birthday itself is not the problem, but rather what we, the leisure class, have turned the parties into. It is no longer enough to have kids over for a rousing game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey topped off by cake and ice cream. No, now, each party has some theme, in our case, an action hero or two is usually involved. And there has to be entertainment, which I've decided is more for the parents than for the kids since kids being entertained means less for the parents to do. Since we are the leisure class, it involves providing refreshments for the adults. Chardonnay, anyone?

Yes, birthday parties where parents drop the children off are, I'm told, right around the corner. I'm sure that will bring with it another round of problems. Can you picture having to keep 10 or 12 seven year olds' from tearing your entire house apart? Or in our case, tearing apart your condo/coop apartment? And then there will be the one child, whose parents will use this time to full advantage by picking up him or her an hour or two late. Why not linger over that afternoon lunch of braised lamb shanks and a bottle of Cabernet with a skim fat latte since you know Johnny or Sarah is accounted for. Such are the joys.

I am happy, no, ecstatic to report that the book cataloging is now complete. It only took nearly three weeks, but there you have it. I have decided that each new book that I buy will be immediately put into my unsophisticated data base--it's not a database, but just a list, much like a shopping list. And I'm now on to phase two of music downloading or uploading. It all feels exhilarating to be done with these tasks that was the cause of so many sleepless nights. That's not the truth since sleep is something I get so rarely.

During this weekend of reading, I did rent the first season of "Weeds." What a revelation! It was subversive, hilarious, and biting. I wouldn't say that the writers are holding up a mirror up to those gated communities in Southern California, but when I thought about it, how far from the truth was it? Didn't we see such craziness in that show, "The Housewives of Orange County?" Yes, this woman is supporting her posh lifestyle by dealing drugs, but is her moral lapse any different than anything I've seen on reality television? This show did make me revisit my initial scathing comments about Leslie Bennett's newest tome, "Feminine Mistake." She asserts that women, all women, should continue to work after having children because if the ends up alone because of death or divorce,her economic well-being becomes dire. I thought her judgments toward women of a certain class--this question is again about class--was unduly harsh, probably because she is from this class. But when I think about it, there is much to be said about what she asserts. There are many women, who leave the work force, when faced with working again, find it challenging to find something that will provide an income commensurate with their needs. They will, more than likely, not have the necessary skills, so that they are relegated to taking those positions that require not much more than clerical skills. And yet, I know some women, who are my friends, who are quite thrilled by the "freedom" to stay at home. OK. Let me stop. All I can say is that watching, "Weeds," made me rethink Leslie Bennett's book. Maybe she does having something to say about the new trap we, women, are falling prey to in the guise of "freedom." Don't all freedoms come at a cost?