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Midnight at the Walgreens Oasis

I am no longer the parent of little children. Young children, but not little.

On the plus side, after the kiddos go to bed, my husband and I can binge watch House of Cards. Sometimes, we’re even able to stay awake while we watch it.

But, when I am walking along the sidewalk with my children, no child automatically reaches to hold my hand.

I can take a shower now without interruption. Sometimes even a bath. With a book.

But, no more lazy mornings cuddling on the couch and waiting, in great anticipation, to find out “the letter of the day” on Sesame Street.

Taking our children to a restaurant is no longer an act of daring. We arrive, we sit, we order, we eat. We even talk. It’s like we’re people in the world. We no longer send a steady stream of urgent, telepathic messages to the kitchen to “hurry!,” or eat like we’re being hunted.

But, no more chubby cheeks, bright eyes, and big smiles greeting me from a crib in the morning, as sunlight streams through the window. No more little person whose whole world lights up just because I entered the room.

So it’s a mixed bag, to be sure.

It’s easy sometimes, when I am missing those big belly laughs and outstretched arms, to start feeling wistful.

Also, at the moment, there are babies everywhere. Everywhere! Okay, by “everywhere,” I mean my Facebook newsfeed. But in 2017, that counts as everywhere, right?

I was on the older side when we had our daughter, our third and final child. As she has gotten older, I have become Facebook friends with some of her classmates’ mothers, many of whom are young and just starting their families. Similarly, college students who I taught a dozen years ago and with whom I am Facebook friends are having children, too.

I am far enough away from the infant years that when I look at these posts—babies with crazy hair, snuggly PJs, and big yawns—it can be easy to forget just how hard parenting these sweet, adorable little people can be.

Enter Walgreens.

Whenever I am tempted to wander down the “Oh, I wish my children were little again” path, I remember Walgreens. More specifically, I see it.

I drive past the Walgreens near my house nearly every day, and I am reminded that there was a time in my life not long ago that everything felt so overwhelming, so exhausting, so hard that a solo trip to Walgreens used to feel like a vacation.

When our two boys were little, they contended with a number of ailments and medical issues—everything from your everyday assortment of infectious delights to an “unusually intense” case of rotavirus, and more challenging conditions like colic, gastro reflux, and pyloric stenosis. (Fortunately, they emerged healthy from the maladies of these early years, and for that, we are grateful, grateful, grateful).

Between their health issues and our need for everyday necessities, we ran to Walgreens a lot. I mean, a lot.

Usually—if it wasn’t the middle of the night or the middle of a subzero snowstorm—I volunteered.

My husband frequently noted that picking up one prescription for medicine or buying one loaf of bread took me far longer than it should.

He was not wrong.

Walgreens was my oasis. It was like my very own personal spa, but instead of a masseuse and fluffy white towels, I was surrounded by rows of cleaning products and toilet paper.

No matter. I was alone. Blissfully, wonderfully, marvelously alone.

No one needed me. No one was crying for me. Well, maybe they were, but if they were, I couldn’t hear them.

I meandered down aisles studying make-up and face lotions that I had no intention of buying. Toothbrushes. Random bargain bin books and DVDs. Greeting cards. Candy—so much candy. And all of it in its place, sitting there quietly and neatly, under the fluorescent lights, wanting absolutely nothing from me.

Mostly, though, I hung out with the magazines.

I was shameless. It would be nice to say I just skimmed the promos on the covers as I walked past on my way to the pharmacy to pick up my sick child’s medicine. But, no. I would stop. I would open the magazine. And I would read it.

I had my rationalizations.

Really, I just needed a break so badly. So badly. The good people of Walgreens would surely understand, right? My children, too—that is, if they were old enough to be capable of understanding.

If only I could have fifteen minutes to find out just how Katie Holmes escaped from Scientology with her daughter Suri, I would come home revived. Ready to throw myself into the breach again. Ready to be loving and devoted. And it wasn’t just my children who would benefit from my stopping to read that article about Katie Holmes. No, I would be a kinder, gentler, more patient person with all of mankind if only I could have a few flipping minutes to myself to read celebrity pop culture garbage. So, really, it was for the good of humanity. Right?

I even took my shameless Walgreens-as-Oasis show on the road.

One time at a Walgreens in another state, when my oldest was a baby and I was feeling particularly stressed, I went to a nearby Walgreens to pick up some Tylenol. At this particular Walgreens, there happened to be a metal folding chair that had been left, fortuitously, near the magazine aisle.

I took that chair, I dragged it over to the magazines, I picked up the latest Vanity Fair, and I read the lengthy first interview with Jennifer Aniston since her split from Brad Pitt. Yes I did.

I will not divulge more about the circumstances involved. You’ll have to trust me. Let’s just say I needed it.

In the song “On My Own” from Les Miserables, Eponine sings that, when she comes to from her magical reverie, “the river’s just a river.” Well, now, for me, the Walgreens is just a Walgreens.

These days, if I see a magazine with an article I want to read, I buy it. I take it home and read it there. Because I can.

When I see super cute baby pictures and posts, it serves me well to remember this other part of parenting. The part that made me choose to sit in the aisle of a Walgreens in a folding chair to read a celebrity interview because doing so felt like the only available life vest to keep me from drowning.

A few days ago, a former student who is the mother of a newborn, in a gracious act of “keeping-it-real-Facebooking,” posted a picture of herself looking disheveled and exhausted as she described her morning. I will spare you the details, but they involved the words “diaper explosion.”

It was another good reminder that all stages of parenting have their ups and downs. That evening, my son and I snuggled under a blanket on the couch as we took turns reading the seventh Harry Potter book aloud to each other. It wasn’t the “letter of the day,” but it was good.

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On Dance Recitals, Backbends, and Epiphanies

Tucking laces into ballet slippers, fluffing tulle, fastening bobby pins. It’s all part of that familiar spring ritual: the dance recital.

My six-year old performed in her first-ever recital last week. As she lined up in a hallway against a row of lockers with her fellow dancers before taking the stage, I thought she might be nervous, and I offered to stay with her. Some of the other mothers were staying.

Instead, she motioned to me as if shooing away a fly.

Go, go, go, her fluttering hands told me. I’m fine.

 That’s my girl. “I do by-self” may not have been her first words, but they were close.

I returned to my seat and waited. I wasn’t nervous for her, exactly. I assumed she knew the dance reasonably well. And no matter what happened, or how well the group performed (or didn’t), the audience was likely going to be smitten with the sight of five and six-year old girls in sequins, tutus, buns, and ballet slippers performing against the backdrop of a starry night and bright crescent moon, skipping and jumping to a Disney tune about dreams.

The event, however, did bring back some not-entirely-pleasant memories from my own childhood. To simplify, the equation boils down to two fundamental truths:

1. I love dance

2. I can’t dance

In the writing courses I teach, we might talk about how this could be considered a paradox. It would certainly at least pass the Alanis Morissette definition of ironic.

I took dance for four years, from about the ages of 5 to 8, at a small studio on the edge of our subdivision. The whole place seemed exotic to me in a wonderfully interesting way.

Our dance teacher wore tights—a grown woman in tights! She usually wore black, too. She was not the warm and fuzzy type, but she was not unkind. She had a dark tan and a big laugh. Over time, my mind has ascribed to her traits I know were not real—a vision of her standing in her black leotard, elbow resting on the grand piano that stood in a corner of the room, with a cigarette and a cocktail—but they seem like they should have been.

I tried. I really did. But even from the start, it was pretty clear that I was not catching on to things as quickly as the other girls.

My attempts at ballet resembled the famous Abbott and Costello skit more than attempts at ballet should:

What was first position again? Wait? Is everybody moving on to second? Are we supposed to be on second? Why am I still on first?

 Still, I pressed on. Ballet. Tap. Finally, in third grade, I added tumbling.

I blame Nadia Comaneci. As one does. I had loved watching her performance in the Olympics. My friends, who were going to take the class, probably had something to do with it, too. Some of them had been doing running round-offs for ages, while I could barely manage a cartwheel. One of my friends could even do handsprings—if you’re an eight-year-old-girl, there’s always that one friend who can blow everyone away with her handsprings—a whole bunch of handsprings, actually. In a row.

Maybe if I took tumbling, I would catch up.

Alas, by the time our recital rolled around that spring, I was still miles away from a handspring. Even my cartwheel had remained stubbornly impervious to improvement.

Still, on the night of the big performance, I was optimistic. It was all going to come together at just the right time, like the scene in a movie, with a triumphant end.

I was wearing a periwinkle blue tumbling outfit with Olympic rings emblazoned around the collar, and I just loved it. My long hair was in braids that had been pinned up on top of my head—special occasion hair, to be certain. And I would be performing to “Tomorrow” from Annie. Tomorrow, for Pete’s sake!

The sun will come out, indeed!

Except it didn’t.

None of my passes on the mats, a series of slow and unsteady round-offs and front walkovers, were what I hoped they would be, though the audience clapped, I’m sure. The slightly nervous, well-meaning, kindly, “well at least that little girl up there with her fancy braids is trying” sort of applause that one gets when one is doggedly determined and visibly failing.

And then came the back walkover.

I was supposed to get myself in position by doing a backbend. That part I managed. Then, I was supposed to kick a leg up and over my head. The other leg would inevitably follow. I kicked. My leg went up, up, up . . . and back down. Nope. Didn’t make it.

Well that was embarrassing.

The audience was watching. My classmates—who had been flying and whirling past me in a blur of competency—were waiting to use the mat, lining up behind me.

That’s okay, I thought. I’ll try again.

I looked up at the bright stage lights, suspended so impossibly high above me. I was aware of the dark audience that watched beyond the stage, to my right.

Brave little Annie was singing her big brave song.

I just stick out my chin, and grin, and say . . .

Annie had moxie. She had pluck. She could do this. I had moxie. I had pluck. I could do it, too.

Except I couldn’t. My leg, it seemed, had not gotten the memo about the moxie.

Somewhere in that place, my back arched, my hands on the mat, my uncooperative leg stuck and suspended in midair, staring at the faces of my classmates waiting in line behind me (their exasperation plenty visible, though their faces were upside down)—it began to occur to me that I might not be the next Nadia Comaneci after all. I might not even be the next Annie.

I do not recall for certain how many attempts it took for me to get that leg over my head. Somewhere between 3 and 17 is a fair guess. Let’s just say it was three.

It may not have exactly been a moment of triumph, but I did take away a few valuable lessons that I have come to think of as “The Great Backbend Epiphany.”

First, like Kenny Rogers said, “You gotta know when to fold them.”

We get fed a lot of rah-rah “don’t quit!” advice in our lives. And often that is valuable. Certainly, it’s good to try. I’m a big fan of grit.

But once you’ve given it a good shot, and the thing that you are attempting is causing more pain than pleasure, it’s probably time to move on.

I want my children to know this.

Perhaps more importantly, I want my children to be able to recognize the difference between wanting to want something, and actually wanting it. Because there is a difference.

I realized after that recital that I had always liked the idea of being a dancer and the atmosphere of dance. But not the actual dancing. The world of dancing seemed beautiful and mysterious and enthralling. The actual dancing, however, caused me to feel little more than anxiety.

Life is short. Doesn’t it make sense to do things we actually enjoy? If someone had given eight-year-old me a list of choices of how I could spend my time, dancing would have been far down on that list. What would have topped it? Reading, watching movies, listening to music, writing, and drawing (pretty much the exact same list I would make today, as it turns out).

I have continued to appreciate dance through the years, in my own way—mostly by watching movies and reading books about dancers. In fact, I just finished the wonderful Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead.

It was fun to attend a dance recital again, especially one that did not involve my having to attempt a back walkover.

I do not know how many years my daughter will take dance or if she will turn out to have any ability for it, or how much she will enjoy it. But I do know that she will, inevitably, have a few of her own backbend epiphanies throughout her life. I hope when the moment comes, she is able to face it with courage and wisdom. And a Broadway soundtrack never hurts.

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The Dead Talk So My Husband Doesn’t Have To

By S.E. Trotter

If there’s anything more fun than watching a zombie show, it’s analyzing a zombie show. Such is the premise behind AMC’s The Talking Dead, a one-hour show that airs after new episodes of The Walking Dead.

Host Chris Hardwick spends the hour interviewing cast members, producers, writers, and fans, and dissecting the show.

My husband is a big fan. I don’t mean he likes the show that much, though he likes it just fine. No, what I mean is that he likes that the show exists. He likes that Chris Hardwick exists, and that Chris Hardwick spends an hour analyzing the nuances of each episode because it means that he—my husband—does not have to.

Let’s just say that when it comes to evaluating films and TV shows, my husband and I have different approaches. More importantly, different speeds.

Upon leaving a movie theater:

Me: I loved how the movie used color to signify the themes. Words, words, words . . . red jacket . . . words, words, words . . . shades of blue.

Him: Uh-huh.

Me: And it was really smart, the way they didn’t give the audience the cliché, expected ending. . . Words, words, words. More ambiguous. Words, words. Like real life.

Him: Uh-huh.

Me: And the soundtrack! Words, words! That Grace Potter song!

Him: Yeah. That’s a cover of a Bill Withers song.

Me: Really? Cool. Words, words, words x 1,000. What did you think?

Him: I don’t know. I need to process it.

And so I wait. Impatiently. When I ask a few minutes later if he is ready to give an opinion, if he has finished processing, he tells me this: “You can’t force it. You have to let it bubble up.”

Bubble up.

I have spent nearly twenty years with this man. That’s nearly twenty years waiting for the bubble up.

To be fair, my husband has plenty of interesting insights to offer. Eventually. But I don’t want them the next morning when we’re in the kitchen making coffee. If we have just finished watching something, I want them right now.

Enter Chris Hardwick and The Talking Dead.

Like millions of others, I am a fan of The Walking Dead. And there is nothing I want more after watching an episode than to analyze it. When a character makes a bold move to attack a herd of walkers is it brave? Suicidal? Both? Was the episode’s take on the future of mankind hopeful? Fatalistic? MUST. DISCUSS.

True, I am not a participant on The Talking Dead, so it’s not exactly a conversation. But the show tends to cover many of the topics I would want to discuss. It satisfies my Siskel & Ebert compulsion.

This is not hyperbole. When I was twelve, my heroes were Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. And, really, that probably explains all one needs to know about my junior high years.

I actually used to take notes on their show At the Movies. I would grab a spiral notepad and pencil and sit down on the carpet in front of the TV set (the big, square, piece-of-furniture kind with the fake wood paneling). What was it Gene Siskel just said about the masterful way that Debra Winger ate a piece of lettuce in that scene in Terms of Endearment? Better write it down.

On my closet door, I would tape Siskel’s reviews, which used to run in the Chicago Tribune. They would find a home somewhere amidst my posters of E.T. and Indiana Jones, and pictures of Rob Lowe and Duran Duran.

Decades later, waiting for the bubble up, I have often found myself channeling Steve Buscemi in Fargo, telling his taciturn partner, “That’s a fountain of conversation, man. That’s a geyser.” Chris Hardwick helps me channel Steve Buscemi less frequently. And channeling Steve Buscemi less frequently is always a good thing. (At least for, you know, a mid-dish-aged mother of three. No offense, Mr. Buscemi).

Plus, if I have found myself vexed at my husband’s reticence, it is fair to say he has found my impatient demand for WORDS just as aggravating. So, The Talking Dead is a win-win. Now if my husband could only convince Hardwick to tackle a few other dreaded items on his list—scrape the basement walls, clean the gutters, paint the den—we might make it another twenty.

 

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Indiana Jones, the Dodo Bird, and Me

By S.E. Trotter

There’s nothing quite like the blank, uncomprehending stare of a teenage video store clerk to make a person feel, well, old. Of course, I realize that acknowledging that one still visits a video store doesn’t exactly scream “young” and “hip,” either.

Here’s how the latest confirmation of my non-young-ness unfolded.

A recent conversation around the dinner table about the films of Steven Spielberg led to some Youtube searches after dinner, which led to my nine-year-old begging to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. My oldest son, who is twelve, had seen the film a few years ago; he loved it and wanted to see it again, too.

For reasons unclear, I have somehow managed not to own a copy of this film on DVD. I know I had it on VHS.

I blame the children.

Around the time that my husband and I started switching our movie catalog from VHS tapes to DVDs, we also started having babies. For years, discretionary income that should have been set aside for important expenditures, such as ensuring ownership of all early 1980s-era Harrison Ford films, was gobbled up for items such as impossible-to-close strollers instead. I mean, I still have copies of nearly a dozen Baby Einstein DVDs in case anyone wants to watch a zebra puppet admire Monet’s haystacks to the music of Vivaldi. But no Raiders of the Lost Ark. Shameful.

To my surprise, Netflix didn’t have it either—and Netflix has not been spending its money on diapers, cribs, trips to the pediatric ophthalmologist, and birthday party goody bags, so it’s hard to know Netflix’s excuse.

But I digress.

Anyway, this is how I found myself at our neighborhood video store Friday night, searching not for Mr. Goodbar, but for Indiana Jones.

Now that we have Netflix and a smart TV, our trips to the video store have grown increasingly infrequent. I am almost surprised that video stores still exist. With physical CDs, physical books, physical DVDs, physical newspapers, physical brick and mortar stores—physical anythings—disappearing from the landscape like the infamous Dodo bird in 1662, my affection for the tangible has grown. Hello book, hello newspaper. Hello, actual thing I can touch. Thank you for existing somewhere besides behind a glowing screen.

Getting a Netflix account (it’s all Kevin Spacey’s fault—him and his treacherous House of Cards) had made me feel slightly guilty. Complicit, even.

Visiting the video store assuages my guilt a little. It makes me feel like I’m doing my part to help keep the dodos alive. Throwing the birds a few breadcrumbs, at least, on December 31st, 1661, as the clock marches to midnight.

I headed for the “Favorites” section. If Raiders of the Lost Ark is not a favorite, then what is? Not Raiders of the Lost Ark, as it turns out. ­­­­­­­­­­Failure to Launch, but not Raiders.

Okay, time to go to the archives. I searched out in the general populace, for movies that start with the letter “R”. Nope, not there either.

Finally, it was time to ask a clerk.

“Do you have Raiders of the Lost Ark?” I asked the ten-year-old behind the counter. Okay, okay. The clerk wasn’t really ten. She had to be eleven, at least.

“What?” She asked.

“Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“Readers of the Lost Ark?”

“Raiders.”

“Readers?” Again with the readers. What would readers want with a lost ark?

“Raiders. You know. With Harrison Ford.”

Nothing. No recognition fired in her matter-of-fact eyes, no smile of understanding crossed her unlined face. It was as if I was speaking in tongues.

“Indiana Jones?” I tried.

Nope. Nothing.

Oh dear God. That’s when it hit me. She was not mis-hearing me. She had not ever heard of the movie. Or Harrison Ford, for that matter. Or Indiana Jones. And then I saw myself through her eyes: just another middle-aged woman, slightly disheveled, in need of coloring some of those gray hairs that were showing through at the roots, with kids in tow, asking about some irrelevant movie from her equally irrelevant youth.

Maybe it was the stunned, perplexed and confused look on my irrelevant face that made her decide to try entering one more search in the computer. Maybe it was pity. Maybe it was just good old-fashioned customer service, indulging the middle-aged and the irrelevant, no matter how pathetic they may be. Either way, she tried again, this time typing in the words “Indiana Jones” instead.

Eureka!

“Oh, Raiders of the Lost Ark,” she said. “I thought you were saying Readers. Yeah, we have it.”

She pointed me to the “Must See” section, where my son quickly found the movie. It turned out the going rate for deep humiliation is pretty cheap: just $2 for five nights. I even bought a jumbo box of Bottle Caps at the counter to help numb the pain.

My husband and I watched the movie later that night with our boys, who loved it, but, let’s be clear: this was a Pyrrhic victory. I am, apparently, living in a world where it is possible for a young adult not to have heard of Indiana Jones. Who is the dodo bird here? I am. I am the dodo. Gobbling Bottle Caps instead of breadcrumbs. Make that request for Bottle Caps a double. I’m going to need them.

 

 

 


 

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Welcome to the Gen X Files

Here we are now, entertain us . . .

So goes the refrain of one of the most seminal songs of the 1990s, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” A few weeks ago, I kicked off the Composition 2 courses I am teaching by playing the song for my students. We’re working on critical thinking skills, and we’re talking about the pleasure-oriented, dystopian world of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Analyzing the lyrics to Nirvana’s song seemed like a good place to start.

Looking around the classroom while I played the video, I couldn’t help but appreciate the fact that not only had many of my students not heard of the song, the majority of them had not even been born when it was released.

I was born in 1971. So Nirvana, to my students, would be the same as the top 1946 artists are to me. Think Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, and Nat King Cole. I didn’t dislike these artists when I was young. They just seemed to be the relics of a different, dusty era. I.E., they were that dirtiest of dirty words in our Botoxed, bleached, filled, plumped, and lasered society: old.  Was it possible that for my students . . . Nirvana = Perry Como? Was it possible that Nirvana seemed old?

And if Nirvana was old, then what, exactly, did that make me?

According to the Pew Research Center, the answers are “neglected” and “stuck”.

I am a member of Generation X, the generation born in America from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. A few years ago, Paul Taylor and George Gao published for Pew an article titled, “Generation X: America’s neglected ‘middle child’.”

Like my fellow Gen X-ers, I am, according to Taylor and Gao, “smack in the middle innings of life, which tend to be short on drama and scant of theme.”

When they argue that my life is short on drama, I should note that neither Taylor nor Gao have been to my house on a morning when I’m rummaging through laundry baskets and hustling to get my three children out the door on time whilst also trying to find the required colored team t-shirts that said children are supposed to wear to school.

But okay. Here it is. The middle.

Taylor and Gao explain that not only are we Gen Xers at the midpoint in our lives, we are also, generationally, stuck between two much showier, flashier generations: the Baby Boomers and the Millennials: “Gen Xers are a low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths”.

With my oldest child in middle school and my youngest in kindergarten, I have been feeling my middle-ness more than ever, David Bowie’s “Changes” the current soundtrack to my life.

I don’t have the time for a mid-life crisis, nor the stamina. Nor the temperament, for that matter. This might be a Gen X trait—rolling our eyes at the cliché of it all: “What, a mid-life crisis? That’s so baby boomer. Please.”

A baby boomer feeling an existential middle-ness might have gone out, gotten a divorce, a new spouse, a second mortgage, and a shiny red sports car. A few years from now, I can only imagine, millennials feeling the same push and pull might chuck it all and decide to star on a reality TV show that they will share via Snapchat from the rooftop of their tiny house overlooking their tiny organic salmon farm. Or something.

But what’s a Gen Xer to do?

Probably something decidedly more Gen X low-key. Something like finally getting around to starting the blog they have been envisioning years.

Which brings me here. Welcome to From the Gen X Files.

What this blog won’t do: Offer advice, tackle serious world issues (which, of course, need to be tackled, just not by the likes of me), or attempt to tie anything up with a neat bow.

What it will do, I hope: Offer an entertaining respite from the drudgery and the drama, a little we’re-all-in-this-together half-smile. I know. A half-smile. I should probably aim the bar a little higher. But I’m a Gen Xer, and high bars bring out the sarcasm in me. So a half-smile it is.

Topics to be covered: Mostly parenting and pop culture, though I always admired radio DJ Chris on the show Northern Exposure, so there may be the occasional unexpected scat, the unplanned riff.

The middle isn’t all bad. On the day I played Nirvana for my students, I wore to class my longtime favorites, my great fashion item of the 1990s—my Doc Marten flower boots. Enough time had passed that the boots are no longer cringeworthy -outdated; they have graduated to a sort of retro cool.

Maybe that’s where we are as Gen Xers right now. Enough future still stretching in front of us to hold the promise of good times and adventure. A future that, like Lloyd Dobbler, has potential. The missteps of our youth far enough behind us to be seen with the proper perspective, what was once regrettable baggage now seen through the lens of wisdom and lessons learned, or at least nostalgic affection.

The boots still fit, by the way. And I’m not gonna lie. They felt damn good.