Illegal

Montana. None of us knew anything about the category, the state, and even logical guesses, correct guesses, were pushed aside for equally logical, incorrect answers.

"How many of Yellowstone's five entrances are located in Montana?" the announcer asked.

"At least two are in Wyoming," I whispered to my team, even though we were in a room by ourselves. "So no more than three."

"Are there any?" someone asked.

"Yes, I went out one to get some cigarettes," another explained and we nodded, accepting his authority on tobacco, states and national parks.

"Three," I said.

"There are no more than two," another mused. "And if someone were holding a gun to my head, I'd say one."

The man with a pen held his hand in the shape of a pistol and pointed at each member of the team.

"One."

"One."

"I have no idea."

"I could go with one."

"Three."

He wrote down one.

Ages later, despondent and certain we had already lost the game, we heard the answer. Three. I shrugged. I hadn't contributed much and wasn't sure of my answer. I wasn’t sure of anything but the fact that I enjoyed sitting on high stools, leaning on a barrel and playing trivia with friends.

Four of us wore t-shirts that two of the men sold from a table outside the bookstore where they sometimes worked. Melancholy Ninja. Red Rover. Do you trust your kids alone with high fructose corn syrup?

"Women in Montana are not allowed to dance on a bar unless their what weighs 3 pounds and 2 ounces?"

We stared at each other blankly, our own private images running through our heads. I hadn't danced on a bar since… Had I ever danced on a bar? I'd definitely danced on a table in a bar in Mexico. I believed I had stood on a bar; though, I couldn't remember where or why. I could only remember the smooth, worn wood, faded under my feet. Ducking my head. Trying to avoid glasses and the raised edge of the bar.

"Women in Montana are not allowed to dance on a bar unless their what weighs 3 pounds and 2 ounces?"

We looked at each other and struggled for answers.

"Bra?" one woman asked, erasing images of my feet on a bar.

"That would be a really heavy bra."

"Skirt?" I asked.

"Shoes?" suggested the man with the pen.

"Lasso?" I threw into the mix.

"What?" the cigarette man stopped and looked at me.

"I'm sticking with lasso."

"That's a heavy rope," he replied.

"It makes more sense than a bra."

I think we went with shoes, but a skirt would have made more sense as a woman in Helena cannot dance on a table in a saloon or bar unless she has on at least three pounds, two ounces of clothing. Apparently, it is also illegal for married women to go fishing alone on Sundays, and illegal for unmarried women to fish alone at all, which seems safer than the law stating "seven or more Indians are considered a raiding or war party and it is legal to shoot them."

Fortunately, we weren't in Montana or Native American or from India, as the law didn't seem to make a distinction. We had enough for a raiding party but the only thing that seemed in danger came in little silver cans with a red stripe and a big blue ribbon. That and a plate of sweet potato fries made the night almost perfect.

I don't know how we placed or where. We lost. Our best round came in the form of philosophers and our worse in identifying facial hair – the Hulihee? The Balbo? The Anchor? The French Fork? At least we knew that William Howard Taft was the last president with facial hair. It served as little consolation as we muddled through numbers and game shows and I went back to thinking about dancing on the bar, on a table, and wondering how much my clothes would have weighed ages ago.

I probably would have broken the law in Montana. Mexico seemed a little more lenient. If only I hadn't been with coworkers...


Tag: Trivia

18:18 and unknown numbers

I knew better than to pick up the phone. The screen displayed "unknown number," and unknown numbers mean people I don't know. People I do not know do not deserve either the unexpected wrath of phone Kristin or the few minutes of phone nicety that I manage to eke as often as Smurfs are born, otherwise known as once in a blue moon. With any luck and clear skies, one might next catch a glimpse of it on December 31, 2009.

I hate talking the phone, the fact that I cannot hear very well and have to close my eyes, to turn off the TV and focus, seriously focus, on words that barely register, even with the phone turned up high. I hate the strange, almost painful vibrations in my left ear, which I swear mean that I'm going deaf. Most of all, I hate the sudden interruption in my life, changing gears, trying to figure out what to say on the fly.

While I relish spontaneity, I have to get my head around something before I enjoy it and I generally prefer preparation and order. My closet is organized by garment type and color. My Christmas list includes pivot tables, status and tracking information. Dollar amounts. Stores. The number of gifts per person, by family. Despite the fact that I smile before answering, I'd rather not answer at all unless it's my sister, and that's a different story altogether.

I didn't have a caller ID for years and wouldn't have known an unknown number from my office but these days I do. I recognize the almost-daily calls for Rent-A-Center, which apparently has my number or had my number or has a number something close to my own. I didn't even know there was a Rent-A-Center in the District or that so many people suffer from the sheer inability to dial a phone correctly.

The Rent-A-Center mistakes are peppered with infrequent calls from family and friends who try email, my cell phone and/or smoke signals once they realize they haven't talked to me since Christmas. Even then, they seldom call me at home.

For reason as unknown as the caller, though, I picked up last night. I picked up and smiled. I answered questions along a hollow, echoing connection between DC and the nether regions of outsourced customer service and telemarketing. Desperately, I wanted to ask, "Are you in India?" and "When was Holi?"

I could hear myself on a two-second delay, answering questions about fast food restaurants and advertising, how often I ate out, where and how. Eat in, drive through, carry out and delivery. Breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack. About dusty places from the recesses of my mind, places I hadn't visited in years, if ever, and the place where I bought my lunch.

In front of me, across the room, a paused picture faded to black and a logo bounced around the screen as I focused on understanding the questions. The accent. The man at the other end of the wireless to cable to wireless line pronounced the L's in tortilla.

"How many times in the past year have you eaten at California Tor-till-a?" he asked. "How many times in the past three months? The past month? How many times of the one time have you eaten there for breakfast? For lunch? For dinner? For snack? And of the one time you ate there, how many times were 'eat in'? And carry out? Drive through? Delivery?"

Before he hung up, he asked if he could call back with additional questions, and I said yes. I agreed. It felt like hours. Hours of painful, echoing, hard-to-interpret questions about food that I ate maybe once or twice a month.

I looked at the screen when I hung up. Eighteen minutes and eighteen seconds. The longest 18 minutes of my life, or so it felt at the time. I'm sure I've had longer, but future phone nicety would definitely have to wait until the end of 2009.


Tag: Telephones

Mechanical difficulties

The train stopped somewhere between Rosslyn and Courthouse, still in the darkened tunnel for a minute or two. It had happened on other mornings, other commutes. It would happen again.

"This train is experiencing mechanical difficulties," the conductor announced. "Please bear with me."

Twenty minutes earlier, I had noticed her voice, her clear resounding voice as she announced, "Orange Line train in the direction of Vienna. Next station... Capitol South." The latest announcement was equally clear if far less welcome.

It took two or three attempts before I left the house. I'd forgotten my SmarTrip and forgotten my phone. I forgot a pair of shoes to replace the rain boots when I got to the office. I almost forgot the magazines for the shelter, the children's book about chickens and bed time. I unlocked the metal gate to let myself out and locked it behind me. Unlocked and locked. Unlocked and locked. To the sidewalk, the apartment and sidewalk again.

I worried for a moment that I'd missed my train. The board outside the turnstiles read Vienna, three minutes, but from the top of the escalator, I saw an orange line servicing the platform. I might have made it but I'd never found much use for running in a Metro station. I waited and another came along. Two orange. I thought of all the times I'd been thrown off by a pair of blues running end to end, realizing my mistake as I emerged from night into day at Arlington National Cemetery.

The announcement, the clear resounding "Orange Line train in the direction of Vienna. Next station... Capitol South," brought a smile to my face as I settled in with the Express and then with my book. It wasn't until we stopped somewhere between Rosslyn and Courthouse, somewhere on the uncomfortable line between near and far, that the smile faded.

"This train is experiencing mechanical difficulties," the conductor announced. "Please bear with me."

I sank back into my seat and back into my book as the train pulled forward 10 feet, 12, 15. It rolled back three or four and lurched forward again, crawling up hill. Limping.

In front of me or behind me as I rode backward, a girl stared absently toward the door, an earphone hanging down. The snapping of her gum pulled my attention and held it as she stared at the men waiting by the door.

I looked back at my book and tried to read as we lurched, rolled and jumped a few feet at a time. Heaving. Swaying. My stomach heaved and swayed with it. I looked up from the book and stared out the window at a flat expanse of unbroken cement draped in cables.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

The girl continued to snap her gum. The men still stood at the door. I weighed my options, deliberating between my messenger bag, tote and Strawberry Shortcake lunch sack. None seemed ideal. Neither did vomiting on the morning commute.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

We limped toward the station. With every pull, I hoped we'd break free of the cement, of the walls, and find ourselves at a platform. Even if only the first car made it, we could open the doors between cars and walk single file. We could find our way out.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

The girl snapped her gum. The men waited at the door. I longed to pry open the doors and walk along the tunnel in my pink rubber rain boots. Avoiding the third rail. Avoiding the lurch, roll, jump of the train and the roiling nausea, and the girl snapped her gum. The men waited at the door, and I tried to read. I tried to focus on anything but the nausea.

I would have rested my forehead against the window if only I had not seen the windows on a Metro train.

The words blurred together on the page, even with all of the different typesets, with the different voices, even the different colors. House in blue. And the girl snapped her gum while the men waited by the door.

The bag, the messenger bag that I'd hooked over my knee to make space, rested between my feet, tugging with each lurch of the train. Eventually, I pulled it beside me. Nobody needed the seat.

Lurch. Roll. Jump.

I longed for a horizon to steady my gaze, a window through which to hold my hand, swimming against the breeze, diving through it, as the girl snapped her gum and the men waited at the door.

"Mechanical difficulties," I thought. "It will be worse if I throw up."

With a final lurch of the train, one final heave, the tunnel birthed us into the station.

"This train will be going out of service after this station," the conductor announced. "All passengers please exit the train. This train is out of service."

As I walked toward the door, I saw a man that I knew. He'd been in the car with me the whole time. Somewhere in front of me or behind me as I rode backwards.

"Well, that was fun," he said.

"Interesting," I replied.

My 20-minute commute took something closer to an hour and a half. I wanted to retch; I almost did. But I was still the first one in the office. Mechanical difficulties.


Tag: Metro Washington DC

Games

Six and a half hours. It took more than six and a half hours to make the 250-mile drive. On the way down, we made it in something closer to four but the rain, a detour to the book fair, running out of gas somewhere along I-81 sidetracked us and hours after we left, I crawled into bed, ready to sleep.

When I opened the door to the apartment, I thought a smell from the trash under the stairs had followed me, and I quickly closed the door. Seconds later, I realized that the smell came from the apartment itself. Something resembling death permeated the air and I gagged as I walked back toward the bedrooms, along the dirt-lined hall to empty the dehumidifier.

My rug, my beautiful old rug from Turkey, showed spiky patches of over-dried tufts and damp, mildewing spots. The clothes in the bathtub had bled onto each other and stubbornly refused to dry, even a little. I hung them from the towel rod, the shower basket and a handful of hangers, sniffing each garment and poking forlornly at new, dye-based stains.

In the living room, I lit a candle and prayed the scent would overpower the stench of rot and mildew. I knew my nose would stuff shortly and my eyes would swell. I'd smell and see precious little of it before dumping the water basin again in the morning.

At some point, though, I would have to clean the floors, the clothes, the everything. I would have to strip my bed and wash the bed skirts, the sheets, the washable throw rugs and the shower curtain as well as the clothes marinating in the tub. I would have to do it sooner, rather than later, expecting houseguests when I left for Argentina in a week and a half, but it could wait another day, maybe two, while I targeted individual pieces instead of the whole.

I was exhausted, and I needed to sleep. Desperately. Operating on days, weeks, months of sleep deprivation. The drive tired me as well, even though I didn't take the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat, reading questions from a box of trivia cards, adding details, commentary and songs in my own off-key way.

When we ran out of gas, I found a box of cookies in the back and joked with the driver who'd missed the warning signs. I looked for a number for AAA. I considered walking three miles back to the closest gas station in my capris, T-shirt, cardigan, dress coat and pink rubber rain boots with the blue plaid umbrella, fully aware that none of the above matched, fully aware that it would take me well into nightfall to walk three miles in my pink rubber rain boots, buy a gallon of gas if I could find a container and walk back along the road, mere feet away frighteningly-fast-moving traffic. In the end, I sat in the car with the trivia questions.

Hours later, closer to home, after a rescue from AAA and a stop for a proper tank of gas and some food, I read the questions by the light of passing cars, using a cell phone when I found myself without. It had been a day of games and they'd made the time go faster.

Before lunch, I played hide and seek with a couple of toddlers.

"Play with me?" the 3 year old asked.

"What do you want to play?"

"Hide and peak," he said and I agreed. I would have agreed to anything but I wanted to know how his little mind worked.

I followed him into the living room where I covered my eyes and counted to 10 time and time again. He and his sister hid in the bedrooms, the bathroom, the closet, reusing hiding spaces and giggling loudly. They never really gave me a chance to find them, poking their heads around doors or out from under the beds as soon as I stopped counting.

After the 15th or 50th time, I asked to play something else and we scattered memory cards across the living room floor.

"Good job, Charlie," I said, shooting for positive reinforcement.

"Good job, Kristin," he repeated when I found my own match. His younger sister took my cards and squealed with glee.

"I have a match," she piped unintelligibly, waving them over her head.

"Good job, Emma," I smiled.

We gamed away an hour or so while their mother napped and others cooked. The rain started falling sometime between memory and fondue, so we waited to leave, playing dominoes on the dining room table, scattering the tiles, the bones, across the table where we'd so recently broken bread. By the time we finished, the rain had cleared and we headed out into the sunshine.

It stayed clear for a while, through much of the drive, the detour, the wait for help, but closer to home, the rain started again. Drops splattered on the roof of the car, the windshield, the road. We hydroplaned for a second and my voice shook as I read the next question by the light of the car behind us. I'd make it through dozens of cards or so plus dozens of songs, movies and useless facts that I wrestled from dusty corners of my mind to entertain my friend.

Six and a half hours. It felt shorter until I walked into my apartment, the dirt, the mildew and the smell of death. I needed to sleep.


Tag: Road trip Friends

Happy Mother's Day

Trains

From where I sit, I can hear a fountain bubbling outside, birds screeching and voices raised as the grownups try to find a bandage for a toddler's booboo.

 

"Mama," he said. "I tore the skin on my hand."

 

On his arm, a tattoo of Thomas the Train smiled cheerfully, oblivious of booboos.

 

"He has a booboo," his 2-year-old sister affirmed in an almost incomprehensible 2-year-old voice.

 

"What, honey?" his aunt asked. "Oh, you're right. He does have a booboo."

 

"I have a booboo on my leg," she said, lifting her little, capris-clad leg and croc-covered foot up the stairs and into the house. She placed a hand on the wall to steady herself and I imagined a trail of tiny, shin-height hands lining the fresh white paint. She, too, had a Thomas on her arm, remnants of the morning's adventure, of a shiny red caboose and balloons twisted to look like trains and bears, hats and swords.

 

We'd played with Thomas and his friends the previous night as the 3-year-old brought the roundhouse, the engines and a cash register out to deck.

 

"Can I buy one of these?" I asked, holding up one of the cars.

 

"No, they're on sale," he replied.

 

"They're on sale? Then, I'll take two."

 

"No, you can't have them. They're on sale," he replied. "You can buy the roundhouse."

 

He counted out his pennies.

 

"I'll buy it for you," he said and opened the drawer. "That's one vanilla and one chocolate milkshake and one straw… one st… one stra…"

 

"Stawberry?"

 

"One strawberry," he said. "Which one do you want?"

 

"I'll take chocolate," I said.

 

"It's not chocolate," he told me. "I call it chocolate milkshake."

 

"One chocolate milkshake," I repeated and he handed me my change, his change, the cost of a roundhouse or a frothy ice cream drink in the form of a gold plastic coin. I wasn't sure which – he was 3 – but we continued to play with the register, the imaginary shakes and the trains until his mom called him to bed.

 

After that, the adults played with dominoes, making up our own rules and racking to remember distant games of Mexican train. We read the rules and understood even less, but I didn't mind. I won.

 

In the morning, as the kids waited in line for caricatures, my friend and I slipped into the museum to see the photos of O. Wilson Link, of the last steam engines, brilliantly lit, brilliantly shot pictures of the Norfolk Western at night.

 

We returned to the museum, my friend and I, to see a documentary on train car graffiti, a film 18 years in the making. I picked up a copy of the filmmaker's book and asked for his signature. He drew his own car art on the title page.

 

As we walked through a day filled with trains, I'd think of my grandfather, who built miniature steam engines with hand-tooled pieces. His trains were donated to museum in North Dakota when he died and I have copies of his Popular Mechanics magazines with covers about flying cars and the race to the moon.

 

He would have enjoyed the photographs, telling me how things worked even though it wouldn't understand it. He would have enjoyed the documentary, the fact that I bought a roundhouse with dairy coins and the fact that I bought a book for myself. He would have enjoyed the time with family, even though it wasn't our own, and he would have loved the trains.

Flooding

Apparently, my apartment flooded while I slept peaceably under the rumble of the thunder and rain. And I mean my entire apartment flooded.

I awoke to an icy splash as I stepped out of bed. I thought/hoped/believed it might be confined to my bedroom. To both bedrooms. I found standing water in both of my bedrooms, the hall, the bathroom, the living room and the kitchen. I slid on the slick tiled floors.

The hand-tied, 70-year-old Turkish rug, the one I bought in Selcuk, along the Aegean Sea near Ephesus? Sopping. As are the little red dots and red rug beside my bed, which is bleeding pink onto my black and white tiles.

The guitar that yesterday I wanted to pick up with the strains of Neil Young running through my mind, because I'm still in love with you on this harvest moon. The clothes I set out to pack. The suitcase. The bag of papers from when I cleaned off my desk in a moment of career indecision. Soaked.

The dehumidifier is running but that will fill in a matter of hours and I won't be back until Sunday. I could use the ShopVac - I own a ShopVac - but I'd rather crawl back into bed and pretend that it didn't happen or, at the very least, that I didn't know.

I need to pack for a weekend away. I need to get to work; I have a half day of meetings.

It's never been like this. Water? In my kitchen?


UPDATE 6:39 a.m. I did use the ShopVac, lifting about 10 gallons of brackish water from the Turkish rug and another five gallons of pink tinged suds from my bedroom floor. I really am going back to bed.

UPDATE 11:51 a.m. My apartment's a mess, with puddles of muddy water in most of the rooms and streaks of sediment and grime striping the tiled floor. Bubbly footprints from my pink rubber rain boots and multiple detergent spills show where I've slipped, almost falling dozens of times.

Trying to pack, in boots and skirt and sliding over the wet tiled floors, I blew a fuse in my bedroom. Everything I meant to take ended up in the bathtub where I meant to hang them up. Instead, they lie cold and clammy, seeping into each others' fibers.

I also need new drain plugs for my Jeep. I seem to have lost mine. There are holes in the floorboard to let water drain out. Unfortunately, in the case of severe flooding, they also let water in, an inch of standing water right now.

Nevertheless, I left it all behind for my half day of meetings, for my weekend out of town. I can't make it dry any faster.


Tag: Flooding

Even more trivial

"I'm really drunk," he said.

"That's OK," I replied. "Last week, I almost quit my job. I got drunk then."

"What would you do if you quit your job?" he asked in drunken exaggeration, listening, caring.

"Move to New Orleans," I replied without stopping, without thinking, without anything, and he looked at me in abject horror.

"You can't move to New Orleans. How would we get our cookies?"

I laughed.

"I could mail them."

"We could set up a FedEx account," he mused.

"You can't do that," the other protested. "Part of it is just you dropping by, on a boring Saturday, and bringing us cookies."

They decided I could not move to New Orleans, that DC had everything I needed, and I agreed to stay for a while longer, based on the recommendation of the boys I knew so well but didn't know at all.

I baked for them. I knew who preferred spiced cookies, white chocolate chip, banana bread and pumpkin cranberry bread. I knew what they read and why, and I knew how they acted when drunk. I knew why they got drunk. I knew who hid, who shutdown, who did not. We had known each other for years; I barely knew their last names. I tended to do things backwards, knowing the details before the generalities, the little things before the big.

When they invited me to join them in trivia, in poker, I figured they were just being nice. I had been a couple of times before, part of a large group, but last night, it was just the three of us. One very drunk man, one very undrunk man and myself.

We lost.

We lost big time.

Through the fifth round, we had done pretty well. Held our own. Tied for first for the first three before slipping into second. And I contributed with the painters, chick flicks, Star Wars trivia. Even with South America, a little, although the undrunk man had lived in Peru for three years, maybe four.

"Really?" I asked, somewhat surprised. I had only just discovered that he grew up in Missouri, spoke Spanish and disliked the Impressionists.

The anatomy questions threw us and we floundered with food and drink. I shared a plate of pasta and a fork with the drunk man who got exponentially drunker as the other and I stared at each other and struggled for words from high school biology. Striated muscles. The pituitary gland. Ossicles.

We didn't place and they sent texts to all who normally bolstered the team.

"I'm sorry," I apologized. "I should have known the Matisse."

"At least you were here."

They waited at the back gate. I stopped en el baño on the way out and figured they'd left but they waited to walk me home on a perfect May night. I didn't need my jacket but didn't mind it either. Comfortable.

"This is the kind of night when I would just sit on a porch reading Faulkner," the drunk man said as we walked.

After a block or two, stopped at a corner, at a light, I turned and asked, "Really? Have you ever sat on a porch and read Faulkner?"

"I have. In Colorado, I had a nice porch."

"It's not the porch. It's not even the free time. Faulkner makes my head spin."

"I can see that," he said, knowing I had Faulkner on my shelf, knowing that spinning heads wouldn't stop any of us from reading.

Even after the beer, my friends used words like "verisimilitude," words I barely remembered hours later, words I could not contrive, in conversation as we walked. When I needed to turn, they turned with me, even though it took them out of the way of their own walks home.

"This is the longest walk ever," the undrunk man said.

"You cannot imagine how much I need to pee," the drunk man said.

I laughed and enjoyed the walk, thinking it the perfect length on a perfect night.


Tag: Trivia Friends

Cyclone Nargis

I work with numbers every day. I am, or I was until a week and a half ago, a financial analyst. All day, every day, working with numbers, trying to make them make sense to myself and others, putting things in layman's terms, but the numbers of people dead in missing in Myanmar make my head spin.

On Tuesday, state media reported more than 22,000 dead and 41,000 missing.

The death toll equals roughly twice the size of my hometown. Everyone I knew until age eight and just about everyone I knew until I was 17, everyone I saw, and a lot more I didn't.

Parents and teachers. Little sisters and big brothers. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. The local pharmacist. And the other local pharmacist. And the ones at the stores I never even saw.

Every man, woman and child in each of the seven elementary schools, the junior high and the high school, including my gym teacher with the leap year birthday and grey poly shorts, the art teacher, the band director, and everyone in every class I ever had. Their families. Their friends.

The people who scooped at the three ice cream parlors and everyone in each of the 41 churches, including First United Presbyterian Church across the street from the Second and Third United Presbyterian Churches. All eight Baptist churches.

Double that and I might get something close to the number of people who lost their lives Saturday to Cyclone Nargis.

It's beyond my grasp.

I'm not even sure I know what a cyclone is. Until this weekend, the name evoked images of amusement parks and roller coasters. One of the X Men. Somebody in Marvel's stable of superheroes and mutants. I'd never heard or taken note of one in real life.

"The U.N. World Food Program says as many as 1 million people may have been left homeless, with some villages almost totally destroyed and vast rice-growing areas wiped out," the Washington Post reported.

I think I heard more about the rationing of rice at Sam's Club a couple of weeks ago than I have about the cyclone and the destruction of rice-growing areas in Myanmar.

As for the country, I know it better as Burma; though, I wouldn't say I know it at all. I do know about the "panty protest" of last fall in which activists around the world sent their knickers to Burmese embassies.

"Superstitious junta members believe that any contact with female undergarments - clean or dirty - will sap them of their power, said Jackie Pollack, a member of the Lanna Action for Burma Committee," The Guardian reported.

"Myanmar (or Burma) has been under military rule since 1962. Its government has been widely criticized for suppressing pro-democracy parties such as the one led by Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been under house arrest for more than 12 of the past 18 years," according to the Washington Post.

The Post also wrote, "Protests in 1988 led to a crackdown by the ruling military junta that left an estimated three thousand people dead and intensified the country's isolation and poverty."

The cyclone hit a week before a key referendum on a proposed constitution backed by the junta. The vote has been postponed in the hardest hit areas.

Even now, politics play a role as aid workers await clearance to enter the country.Entire villages were destroyed. More than 22,000 dead, 41,000 missing and 1 million left homeless.

It's hard to comprehend.


Tag: Myanmar Cyclone Burma

Then She Found Me

I hadn't heard much about Helen Hunt's directorial debut. I did see Colin Firth on The Daily Show, but he talked a little more about having his man parts photographed in a men's room somewhere in NYC during an intermission of a show than about the film. The clips looked decent, though. Of the film. Not his man parts. Jon Stewart didn't seem to have stock footage of them.

I hadn't heard much about it. I figured nobody else had either, but a line snaked past the concession stand, the water fountain, the bathrooms and up the stairs into the lobby. It doubled back onto itself.

"I didn't expect this many people," the man behind me said after they'd made people shuffle, move closer together, eliminate anything approximating personal space. "Do you think we'll get in?"

"I don't know," I replied. "I've never been farther back than the water fountain."

Neither had he. He tried to figure the number of people in line, those we could see, those we couldn't, the size of the theater and then he gave up. He asked if I'd heard anything about the film.

"No, not really," I said, thinking of the Firth interview.

"The mother?"

"Bette Midler?" I prompted.

"Is she old enough to be Helen Hunt's mother?"

"She did give her up for adoption; she might have been a teen."

Adapted from Elinor Lipman’s novel of the same name, Helen Hunt makes her feature directing debut with Then She Found Me, a story of schoolteacher April Epner (Hunt) and her very unlikely path towards personal fulfillment. Following the separation from her husband (Matthew Broderick) and the death of her adopted mother, April is contacted by her apparent birth mother (Bette Midler), who turns out to be a local talk show host Bernice Graves. As Bernice tries to become the mother to April that she was never able to be, April seems to find solace in the arms of the parent of one of her students (Colin Firth), only to find that the mystery to life’s questions cannot be solved by a simple revelation.

He pondered the teen mother aspect as we talked about ages, movies, free events in DC. A woman came around to collect entries for a mother and daughter spa giveaway. He asked if I'd take him if I won. I laughed nervously, wanting to win and hoping I wouldn't be faced with the choice.

We found seats and figured out the ages, the plots, the interweaving characters, with far too little Firth and absolutely no shots of his man parts. It was complex film, sometimes funny, sometimes not, that made some things look easier than they are and some so much harder. A little like life.

It made me think about everything from relationships to the soundtrack of sex. The movie reiterated that life, that relationships, aren't always easy, between siblings or lovers or parent and child. It reminded me that what we want isn't always what we need and sometimes, we don't get either.

I considered calling my own mother on the way home but couldn't remember her number. I could blame the cell phone age, directories and my frequent phone loss. A half dozen moves in a dozen years for each of us. A familial distrust of the phone as a means of communication. Shifting priorities.

I could blame any of a number of things, most notably myself and my failure as a daughter, but it was complicated. Fitting, given the flick.


Tag: Movies