Five and Ten

Fifteen years ago today, I met the man of my dreams. And though the expression is a cliché, the experience has been anything but.

I sensed right away that he was different, and by the time we were halfway through our first date, I was thoroughly hooked. Not only was he nice to look at, he was smart, funny, thoughtful, sensitive, engaging, and playful—practically a custom order from the Man Store. The appeal of those qualities is even stronger today. There’s no one I’d rather be with.

Let’s be honest: it takes a special person to put up with me day in and day out. Throw in a progressively debilitating disease—in the first year!—and the odds get even slimmer. I marvel regularly at the good fortune of having someone who’s a partner in every sense of the term, at my side on sunny days and dark ones, through epic highs and lows and the rolling terrain of ordinary life, making the bad moments bearable, the dull ones fun, and the great ones even sweeter. I can’t imagine the experience without him, and I’m grateful every day.

Happy anniversary, Dan. I love you.


Photo by Marty.

Overheard in the Holler

Dan: A coworker's kid was handing out chocolate bunnies the other day. I bit off the head and almost hurled: it was marshmallow inside. Why do people do that?

Overheard by: Little Slow Peep

Whipping Boy

I've never named a single dog. Except for Zap, whom Dan named long before I entered the scene, they've all been rescues, and it didn't feel right to change something that fundamental, especially when the dog had been through such upheaval. Even if the name made me cringe.

Devo was named by his first owner. It's allegedly a common name for whippets, although we've only met one other. I got it right away, as does almost everyone who was an adolescent in the early '80s. I can't tell you how many strangers have urged our dog to "whip it good." He's even been serenaded.

The reference tends to be lost on older people; many just assume it's the male form of diva, which Devo is anything but. Alas, explanation doesn't always bring enlightenment. My mother once returned from a trip and announced: "I heard 'Devo' by The Whippets on the airplane!"

Our little rocker is 14 today and still whipping it good, albeit very sedately. Having ceded primary security duties to Sparkle, Devo's grown into an elegant old man, docile and sweeter than ever. He's spending this beautiful day dozing in the sun in between walks, looking forward to tonight's cheeseburger.

Rosebud

My mom wiped my ass the other day for the first time in 40 years. It was a moment I'd been dreading for eons, yet it proved surprisingly nontraumatic ... at least for me.

Overheard at the Lake

Dan, scanning a shelf: My god, they already have the George Bush book. George W. Fuckhouse Bush.

Overheard by: Miriam Webster

My Favorite Toy

A year ago today, we added a little Sparkle to our lives. Since her actual birthday was a mystery, we decreed it to be December 6th. So today she's nine.

Normally we celebrate canine birthdays with cheeseburgers, but when we did so a couple of weeks ago in memory of Zap, Sparkle threw up. In the middle of the night. In my bed. So we'll see.


Photo by Danny Leibovitz.

Cut Down to Size

Naked in the kiddie pool, I assessed my French cousin and loudly announced that he was missing something. Whereupon the adults, laughing, informed me that the deficit was in fact mine.

I've felt incomplete ever since.

The Week in Review

Photos by Dan.

Wing Haven

We're visiting the Iglfolks this week, and yesterday I left the compound for the first time since Saturday, when we arrived.

The draw was Wing Haven, a quirky garden and bird sanctuary in an unlikely location: a residential area near downtown Charlotte. I'd heard rumors that there were some nice old neighborhoods within the city's numbing, soulless sprawl, but this was the first time I'd seen anything historic there since the Ramesses II exhibition when I was in college.

From a decidedly inauspicious beginning in 1927 - one city lot with a single tree in the red Carolina clay - the garden eventually grew to three densely planted acres, an oddly successful mix of manicured formality and natural landscape. With narrow, comically buckled brick paths, it wasn't exactly wheelchair friendly, but I took my time and saw almost all of it.

Photos by Dan.

Overheard in the Holler

Michael, watching Sparkle sprawl inelegantly in her bed: I could totally see her in a housecoat with a cigarette hanging out the corner of her mouth.

Dan: Smoking in bed, falling asleep ...

Overheard by: Rita Delvecchio

Fourteen Candles

Photo by Tina.

Overheard in My Teens

Mom: Oh my god, that dog is sopping wet. Someone's gonna have to give him a blow-dry job.

Me (smirking): Um ... okay. Do you wanna do it, or should I?

Mom (glaring): That's disgusting!

Me: You said it; I didn't.

Moldilocks and the Three Beds

"This one fits just right."

The Week That Was

Overheard at the Lake

Dan's dad, peering into a carton of key lime ice cream: What's the brown stuff? It looks like shit.

Dan's mom, laughing: It's graham cracker.

Overheard by: Cracker Jack

Dog Day Afternoon

A warm, sunny day on vacation with his pack ... boat ride ... cheeseburgers for dinner ... federal and state tax refunds ... What more could a whippet want on his 13th birthday?


Photo by Danny Leibovitz.

Road Worriers

We're at the Iglfolks' for the week.

We had two new companions on the drive down: Sparkle and a TomTom GPS unit. Sparkle was quite good, except for periodic little anxiety attacks. It must be stressful not to know where you're going, especially when you've been wrenched from the only two homes you've known. But, then, how to explain Devo's love of road trips?

The GPS was also largely well behaved, except for twice, mysteriously, attempting to detour us. Clearly the system had been hacked into by evildoers. Had we been gullible enough to follow, there's not a doubt in my mind that we would have been raped and carjacked, our bodies dumped in a tobacky field, blood oozing from the gashes where our kidneys had been cut out. But they didn't count on the street smarts gleaned from my longtime "Law & Order" habit. Better luck next time.

Aside from some slight nagging, I was surprised by how mild mannered the TomTom was. Nary a trace of recrimination if you didn't do what it said. I guess that's why they're so popular. If I designed one, I'd make it thin skinned, needy, vindictive. Don't want to follow my advice? Suit yourself, Columbus. But don't come crying to me when you find yourself up Shit Creek.

Near Richmond we saw a car with antique plates being ferried on a flatbed trailer like a rare and prized collectible. It was a Chevy Vega.

Late in the trip, "Eight Miles Wide" came up on the iPod and I had an epiphany: "It's Sparkle's song!"

As we savored the raunchy lyrics, Dan suggested: "You should play it for my parents and see if they notice."

"I'll put it on the intercom," I said, remembering they'd installed an iPod dock. (Haven't done it yet, but I have three days left.)

The weather's been perfect, and we're having a great time -- no one more than Sparkle, who is every bit the mistress of her new domain.

This Never Happens Here

"I met the new neighbor," my uncle told my aunt. "His name is Ben something. His voice sounded familiar, but I couldn't place him."

Later, the wheels turning, he asked, "What's that show you watch every day?"

Thinking a moment, my aunt suggested: "'Law & Order'?"

"Yes!" he said. "He's on that."

Head spinning, she tried to think of a Ben on "Law & Order."

"Do you mean Benjamin Bratt?" she asked, incredulous.

"That's it."

Little Lady Kenmore

Among my odder childhood fixations was a passionate affinity for washing machines. I had a couple of toy washers, including one that would actually "wash" small things when you added water. And I still have a scrapbook whose contents consist solely of washing machine pictures cut out of catalogs.

I liked 'em all, but if you parked me in front of one with a window in the door, I'd stay happily ensconced through the entire cycle. (Now that I think of it, maybe it was a mild form of autism. Whatever the allure, it's long gone now.)

Sometime in my mid 20s, I reminded my mother of the fetish. We had a good laugh, and I thought that was that. But a few weeks later, she mentioned that she had a birthday present for me. When I failed to claim it promptly, she pressed: "When are you going to come get your present?"

So I schlepped out there to unwrap -- surprise! -- a toy washer. It was very small, and when you wound a knob, plastic "laundry" tumbled around inside. Cute.

As I got ready to leave, Mom said, "Don't forget your present."

"What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Well, what am I supposed to do with it?"

"Why don't you give it to your grandson and make him gay, too," I suggested.

Gasp.

"Just kidding," I said.

At least I didn't take things this far.

Link from Kristine.

Sorry I Asked

My father spent the first half of his childhood in Woodley Park, where his parents had a gracious semidetached house from the turn of the last century. It was across the street from the zoo, and one of Dad's fondest memories was spending summer nights on the sleeping porch, listening to the lions roar.


Later they moved out to Chevy Chase, trading a bigger house for a bigger yard. I once asked why.

“You want the truth?” Dad said. It was because black people had moved across the Calvert Street Bridge from Adams Morgan, which apparently signaled the end of civilization – at least to my grandparents. Ironically, Woodley Park remains to this day one of the whitest neighborhoods in Washington.

Here’s another irony, this one from the other side of the family. As my great-grandmother risked her life hiding Jews in occupied France, her daughter’s young family was settling into a restricted community in the “land of the free.”


This might never have occurred to me had I not met an elderly woman at a New Year’s party. She asked Dan and me where we lived, and it turned out that Parkfairfax had been her first home when she moved to the area in the ’40s. With housing incredibly scarce, her husband had come down from New York ahead of time to find a place. Parkfairfax, then new, was considered very desirable, but they informed him that they didn’t rent to Jews. Only after pleading his wife’s pregnancy and begging did he secure a lease.

As I mulled this over in the days after, I remembered the neighborhood handbook that I occasionally flipped through when I was young. Along with prohibitions on keeping livestock was a ban on renting or selling to “a Negro or member of the African race.” By the ’70s it was a shocking thing to see.

I called my mother, told her the story, and asked if our neighborhood had ever had a religious restriction.

“Oh, probably,” she said, quickly adding: “But it was never enforced.”

When she was growing up, there were exactly three Jewish families. They lived in the next block, all in a row, curiously. I don’t know what the count was a generation later, but there was only one black family the whole time I lived there, and I don’t think much has changed. Not that I’m casting stones. Parkfairfax may have dropped its restrictions, but it’s still Honky Hills.