MARCH 2020
I WANT TO APOLOGIZE FOR still talking about my weight. By now, the script has to be tired and boring. It is for me. Nothing is drearier or more unproductive than the well-worn path from my bed to the scale, and yet it is the rare day that I can avoid that route. I need someone to put up a detour sign. Just pee, wash your face, and go straight to the coffee maker.
TMI?
Sorry.
No matter how old we get, I think everyone struggles with this question of what to hang on to and what to discard from the past. These can be habits, routines, or material things. It starts when our parents put our favorite stuffed animal on a shelf instead of letting us sleep with it or tell us to quit sucking our thumb, explaining, “You don’t need that anymore,” and we go from there—or we don’t.
I know people in their fifties who still keep their baby blankie nearby. Forty-five years later, I still wake up and head for the scale.
Enough already.
I’m trying.
But the stuff we hang on to is not all bad.
A friend recently asked me if I felt grown-up and I answered without hesitation. Yes, I feel like a grown-up. I don’t feel finished—and I don’t know if I ever want to feel that way. I want to believe that I am still learning, developing, and acquiring new insights, tricks, and wisdom. In other words, I am still growing—or trying to. But I definitely feel like a grown-up.
It happened gradually. I did not feel mature when I bought my first house at nineteen, and my twenties were a disaster. I am ashamed of most everything I did and said back then. The turning point was Wolfie. Giving birth to him was what caused me to grow up. I was thirty and suddenly responsible for a new life.
Well, not suddenly. I had nearly ten months of pregnancy to adjust. No drugs, no partying, no kooky diets, no crazy high heels. I remember that voice of God in my head—or maybe it was my mother: You’re having a baby. Grow up. Pushing a fully formed human being out of my body did the trick. If that doesn’t get your attention, nothing will. I remember telling People magazine how Ed and I brought our newborn home, sat on the sofa with him, looked at each other, and asked, “What now?”
I learned.
It took Ed a bit longer.
Now I am nearly sixty and Ed is sixty-five. I know how that happened. But how did it happen so quickly? Where did the time go? The time—that’s really the thing we all try to hang on to, whether it’s the yearbooks we refuse to throw out, the plastic surgery some people get, or the habits and the hurt that are so hard to shed. I can’t believe I am the age I am now and still dealing with thoughts and issues that plagued me as a teenager. Then again, I will never part with some things from my past.
As Shakespeare wrote—or maybe it was Marie Kondo—to toss or not to toss, that is the question.
* * *
I still have my favorite pair of Wallabees from seventh grade. I think they are officially called Clarks desert boots. They are tucked somewhere in my closet. They cost one hundred sixty dollars now. Back then, I think they were around twenty-three dollars, which was considered expensive. I don’t even know if they were marketed for women and girls then. They were sold as crepe-soled hiking boots for men.
When I got mine in the seventies, we were only a few years past the school dress code’s being modified to allow girls to wear pants to school. If I remember correctly, girls were allowed to wear pants only on Fridays at first. A year later, we could wear them every day. Good grief. The idiocy of girls having a dress code. Don’t get me started.
In 1975 I was cast as Barbara Cooper, the youngest of two daughters being raised by a divorced mom, on Norman Lear’s new sitcom One Day at a Time. Bonnie Franklin starred as the mom, and Mackenzie Phillips played my older sister. It featured Pat Harrington as our apartment building’s superintendent. The show broke new ground in that it was the first sitcom about a single woman raising children on her own. It changed my life. I literally grew up on the show and in front of the entire country.
It was such a different era. One Day at a Time was among top-rated series that also included All in the Family, Laverne & Shirley, The Bionic Woman, Sanford and Son, and Happy Days. In the days when there were only three major channels, twenty-five to thirty million people tuned in each week.
One week that first season, I wore my Wallabees on an episode. With either jeans or a skirt, it was a good look. More than that, it was my look. Straight out of my closet.
Every time I clean out my closet, I keep those shoes. Whether I have moved, decided to downsize, or grown bored with the choices, those Wallabees remain on the shelf. They are an old friend I check in with once every few years. Just a quick conversation.
“Hey, there you are. Are you good?”
“I’m good. How are you?”
“I’m good, too. Okay, see you later.”
I was starting Robert Frost Junior High School when I got them. Every year, before school started, my mom bought us new clothes. My brothers got a new pair of pants and a couple of T-shirts, and I got a new outfit, and we picked out a new pair of shoes at Thom McAn. I got the Wallabees. They were soft and clean and exactly what I wanted.
I was an alternate cheerleader that year. I remember wanting to fit in. Of course, I had no idea that everybody else had the same fears and anxieties about being accepted and popular and wanting to fit in. I picked out the Wallabees because the cool kids had them and I was going for cool by association. I was never cool, and as I recall, one girl was always excluded from the in-crowd, and when I was that girl, it sucked. But that was rare. I was a spunky, fun-loving kid who played sports with my brothers and laughed often and loudly.
Those shoes sit on my shelf as a reminder of what it felt like to be happy through and through and, even more important to me right now, that it was possible.
* * *
My father was a pack rat, maybe even a borderline hoarder. But he was organized and very proficient with a label maker.
Me, not so much.
I have been talking to Ed about returning a pair of his Dr. Martens boots that somehow ended up at my house. They are on one of the bookshelves in my library, and it seems like they have been there forever. I don’t remember when or how they appeared. He must have taken them off and forgotten them one time when he was here. I know he loves his Dr. Martens. This pair is black and heavily worn. One boot even has tape wound around it. I keep mentioning that I want to return them, but either I forget or he is in the hospital.
“I’ll just wait till I can go up to your house,” I tell him.
“That’s fine,” he says.
“They’re just sitting on a shelf in my library,” I say.
“I wonder how they got there.” He laughs.
“Me, too.”
I think both of us know that the odds of my returning them are slim. I can look around me and see other things that I will never part with. Like the wooden high chair I used for Wolfie, and the old wine cart that my mom treasured and used for parties when I was growing up. I also have all my scripts from One Day at a Time and Hot in Cleveland. There is a lamp from my first house that still works and the gorgeous old piano that I also bought for that house. It’s broken and missing keys, and I have been told it is not worth the money to fix it, but one day I will turn it into bookshelves or an art piece. It ain’t going anyplace without me.
On a shelf in my dining room’s breakfront hutch, I have a small collection of blue delft miniature houses. Ed and I got them on our first trip to Amsterdam, where we looked up his family roots. It was a phenomenal trip. The miniatures were giveaways in the first-class cabin of KLM airlines. They were beautifully made and filled with liquor. I remember putting them in my bag to keep as mementos of the trip. When we got home, they went on the shelf, where they have sat ever since.
But they haven’t gone untouched. One day about fifteen years ago, I was looking at them, reminiscing about the trip, and I wondered how the booze inside them tasted—if it was still even good after all these years. I picked up one, removed the cork, bottomed up, and . . . nothing. It was empty. What? I picked up another. And another. All six, though still corked, were empty. I made a call. Sure enough, Ed drank them a few years before I got to them.
I know I can’t keep everything. Though it’s rare, once something doesn’t fill a need or spark a warm emotion, it’s gone. Just the other day I threw out a little magnet on my refrigerator that said, MIRACLES HAPPEN. KEEP THE SKINNY JEANS. I wish my scale were next. It’s unlikely, but the batteries in it died the other morning and maybe that’s a sign.
* * *
I am in my office when Wolfie comes over to the house and calls my cell phone to see if I am there. I still remember the sound of his voice when he walked in the house after school and yelled, “MA!” What happened to yelling, I think, as I answer my phone. I ask if he wants to come down and hang out. He politely declines and says that he has just stopped by to spend time with the cats.
Even though he’s allergic, he comes over to play with them whenever he has the urge. I am happy whenever that urge strikes, which is frequently.
About an hour later, I walk upstairs and see him through the window. He’s curled up on the sofa in the den, petting Bubba and Beau, the two cats I inherited from my parents. My rock star is still a little boy at heart. He looks like he did when he was a kid.
I like that he is not giving that up, and by that, I mean the comfort of coming home and lying on the couch even though he is an adult. It is a feeling all of us need. I bet I could do a gangbuster business if I opened a store where people could come in, lie on a couch for an hour, and have a gray-haired bubbe tuck them under a blanket and tell them that everything is going to be okay. Just shut your eyes and rest.
Of course, that’s also called therapy.
* * *
I could use some counseling now. I have a photo shoot in two days, and the stylist for the shoot has dropped off a bunch of clothes for me to try on. I don’t want to try them on or do the shoot, period. I am in a mood where I would rather pull on a T-shirt and call it a day. Sometimes I like these shoots; it’s fun to get dressed up in fancy clothes and be fussed over by a hairstylist and makeup artist. Other times, I feel like the camera lens is a microscope zeroing in on the flaws and places I am trying to ignore. This is one of those days.
I am definitely not feeling the joy. I step in front of the mirror and see places on my body that remind me of the junk drawer in the kitchen, that drawer everyone has where things pile up and collect no matter how often it is cleaned and curated. Like the mystery of the one missing sock in the dryer, the junk drawer defies logic. Maybe that’s the origin of the phrase “junk in the trunk.”
Whatever.
I get anxious. I go for a walk. I have tea. I page through magazines. I read. After a while, I pour myself a glass of wine, sit outside, and try to meditate as I watch the sun glide in slow motion over the far western hills of the valley to wherever it lands on the other side of the Pacific. By then, I am definitely calmer but still engaged in a debate with my more insecure, critical self. Why didn’t I go on a diet and lose five pounds? Ten would have been perfect. If I had lost ten, I wouldn’t be torturing myself like this.
Then I hear myself, and think, Oh my God, I am truly insane. I can’t hear this song one more time. I do as Angie has advised. I acknowledge it, understand what it is trying to tell me and how it is trying to protect me in its own twisted way, then I say no thank you and Marie Kondo those voices.
That doesn’t make me any thinner. Neither will it make me any more comfortable when I get in front of the camera in two days. But it does stop the chatter and allows me to think rationally. I tell myself that the public already knows what I look like and that losing ten or fifteen pounds might help my knees but it won’t affect my smile. I will also be surrounded at the shoot by people I trust whose only goal will be to make me look good. So . . . STFU.
Later that night, I log on to Google Maps and look up the first house Ed and I shared before we were married. It was a cute little New Orleans–style three-story place in the hills with a nice view. I remember fans coming by at all hours after word got out that Ed was living there. People drove by all night with their radios blasting Van Halen, honking their car horns and yelling, “Eddie. Eddie, we love you.” I used to think, Can’t you love him in the afternoon?
Then I look at my childhood homes in Delaware and Michigan and California. I have done this a few times in the recent past as a way of connecting the dots. Where I thought I would see nothing but nostalgic street views and trees that have matured beyond recognition, I instead find memories that let me time travel with a great big smile on my face. I picture myself running through fields, getting stung by a bee, and jumping off the old wooden dock into Walters Lake. I see my dad shoveling snow off the lake so I can go ice-skating. I hear myself laughing as I run around the backyard in cutoffs and bare feet while waiting for my dad to take hot dogs off the grill. And I see myself putting on my Wallabees.