Yes, my friends....

I married a mad man....The product of two prime numbers with transposed digits???? I mean really!!!!!

The Early Bird

It's been far too long since I've posted, but since the alarm went off this morning at 5:30 instead of 6:30, I've got a few minutes to spend.

It's been a good weekend so far.  After we took two more loads of cardboard to the recycler on Saturday morning, I mowed the lawn before the pending rain.  I'm starting to understand the pattern of our lawn,which means I'm more efficient and the lawn looks nice and stripey, like a golf course.  I never thought I'd turn into Hank Hill, but I've got to say that the John Deere X300 is quite the machine.  42" mower deck, height adjustable in quarter-inch increments, and two cupholders (one for the working beer and the other for the backup, apparently).  After you send in your warranty information, they send you a card for a free John Deere cap, in classic green with the yellow logo or in... pink??  A PINK John Deere cap??

Wouldn't catch THIS Vermonter in a pink Deere cap! Gotta instill the right values.

We also took friends out for a birthday dinner, planted a new shrub and some old bulbs, read and talked and celebrated our 400th anniversary.

And today, I become a Vermont citizen.  I'm changing insurance policies on Habanero, and then going to the DMV to register the car and get myself a Vermont driver's license.  (Can I just say that one other thing I like better about Vermont than about Massachusetts is that they know that it's DMV, not RMV?  California, Oregon, North Carolina, New York, Virginia, Nevada, Florida, Delaware, Connecticut, Nebraska... all DMV.  But Massachusetts isn't a state, it's a commonwealth; they have a Registry of Motor Vehicles rather than a Department; traffic circles or roundabouts are "rotaries," and every two-dollar construction site has to have a police officer on safety duty, with the car running and the chase lights on.  And the pronunciation of Massachusetts place names is its own post...)

I don't think there's a Vermont citizenship test, but just in case, I do know the name of governor Peter Shumlin and senators Sanders and Leahy (on their own, two outstanding reasons to move to Vermont), the state motto (Freedom and Unity, the same motto as Tanzania) and that Montpelier is America's smallest state capital.  I also bought Nora a chainsaw for Christmas about four years ago, and that oughtta count for something.

I know that I'll never be a Vermonter.  That's a title reserved for multi-generational tenancy.  But I do feel a belonging here that I haven't felt in many, many years.  This is home.

These green hills and silver waters
are my home. They belong to me.
And to all of her sons and daughters
May they be strong and forever free.
Let us live to protect her beauty
And look with pride on the golden dome
They say home is where the heart is
These green mountains are my home.

Okay, I'm ready for my test...

A day in the life

Well, there’s good news and bad news…. All of us are fine, but….

It is a dark and stormy night. Don't you hate that? If it is night, it is obviously dark.  Anyway, it is both dark and stormy.  After days of drought, I admit that I am looking forward to the stormy part. But the wind has been quixotic for several hours, and though they are predicting one inch hail, so far there have been only a few drops...sort of like a sprinkler that someone forgot to turn off. There is thunder though. And I am looking forward to being in our house in a storm, and seeing how it rides the wind and rain. I actually pulled the car into the garage for the first time, just in case...

In any case, I started out the day with plans to write, as soon as I had finished paying some of mom's bills. I did the bills but couldn't find any envelopes, and I wanted to mail the checks when I went to town later in the day. So that led me upstairs to the office that has had no work on it since we moved. H set up the computer speakers and has been up there writing, but I have barely passed through, much less set about unpacking the books and the "priority" work boxes that I packed weeks ago.  It is the room I like the least in this house, thanks to its 60's vintage paneling and the Home Depot nasty doors. So I unpacked about 35 boxes and put books on the built in shelves. I filled two file drawers and put surplus office supplies in the little closet under the eaves. I opened several boxes of papers that went back downstairs and were stowed in the garage. Even with this big house, I don't want my 2009 tax files on the upper floor, adding to the weight on these old beams. It felt good to sweat and good to finally get acquainted with that room so that it feels less alien., but after 35 plus boxes I still hadn't found any envelopes and the writing plans had gone to hell, along with my plans to walk the property line, walk up the road, go to do some shopping in town, and to remove the molding around two of the 19th century window frames so that I can take the windows in for repair.

In order to do that though, I needed to buy or borrow a special tool that will split the "bead" on the molding, so that I can pry it away from its sash and pull the window free. So rather than spend money on a tool I will use infrequently, I decided to borrow the one Emmet had used to repair the window I broke before I left for NYC last week. 

Meanwhile, when I wasn't unpacking, I was sitting at the computer planning my friend's day. She is going to let someone in to Mom's apartment tomorrow so that they can evaluate the clothing that mom left behind. I also talked with the accountant, made plans for a change of dates to have someone review the art and furniture in mom's apartment, and spoke to the broker who is hoping to handle the sale of mom's beach house. 

Simon had been rubbing against me and trying to drink from my water glass, and eventually he jumped on the computer and jammed his  his head HARD into the bottom of the water glass I was drinking from, and luckily my teeth were protected by my now very sore lips. I thought he wanted water, but finally I realized he wanted his canned fish treat, so I got up and put it in two bowls and began looking for and calling Ed. He wasn’t in any of the closets. He wasn’t in the bedrooms upstairs, or the cedar closet or the area where there are shelves beside it.  He wasn’t in the closet below the stairs. The door to the garage was closed. As the panic began to grow, I remembered hearing a door slam earlier when the pre-storm wind began to pick up. I hadn’t found the door that had slammed but I had figured everything was ok so I had gone on emptying boxes in the office and corresponding on the computer, until fish face had started asking for his treat, at least an hour after the door slammed. Maybe more. 

I kept calling and calling and then went to open the door to the garage thinking MAYBE he had snuck in there when I was decanting boxes from the office. The door from the garage to the backyard was wide open.  I kept calling (panic rising) until Mr. Ed started crying from under the mud room windows ---OUTSIDE!!!!!! Oy. Thank god it was Ed who is a fraidy-cat and darts for home when scared...or at least he used to when he knew where home was. And thank god he likes to vocalize. If it had been Simon, he would have been long gone. 

In any case, Ed is now lying beside me, snoozing and Simon is on the cat mat cleaning himself.

Many years ago, after living in 325 square feet for 25 years, I said that I wanted a house where you could open and close the doors for no reason. Not because you needed privacy in the bathroom or were closing off the public hall. I wanted a house that had doors between rooms that you didn’t actually need.  

Sometimes there are too many doors. And it is still not raining.

Vapor Lock

Hot.  Humid.  Worse tomorrow.  Can't concentrate; tried to write; nothing but scraps.

Drove from VT to Medford last night.  Last time I packed that suitcase, we didn't own a house.  Kept thinking that I was driving home, kept catching myself and saying that I was driving to work.  Home there, work here.

Met one of my former students in front of the elevator today; a big girl, tattooed, could be a boxer.  She was limping, and had an elastic band around her right calf.  "What'd you do to your leg?" I asked, because we'd gotten to trust one another in my class a year ago.  "I got shot," she said as the elevator door opened and she hobbled into the cab.  She seemed proud; another big-city badge of honor to go with the tattoos. 

One of my colleagues is resigning after more than a decade with the school.  He really is resigning, not "resigning," though it was one of those things where I just knew when he came to see me, before he ever said a word.

Here's a common pattern.  Someone walks into my office and says "Got a minute?" while simultaneously reaching down to swing the door stop away so they can close the door.  I have a lot of those, eight or ten a week.   Two today.  Three, if you count the phone call.  I'm not officially the ombudsman, but it's one of the things I do.

Part of our building has had no air conditioning since early May.  (Not my part, fortunately.)  It shouldn't take ten weeks to replace air conditioning, but it's one of those cascade failures — the upgrade to new equipment required new connecting parts, it's larger size means that it has to be put onto a different part of the roof, that part of the roof needs new steel beams to support the AC chiller, we had to find a crane operator to lift the beams and chiller onto the roof, and the crane operator had to get permits from half a dozen city agencies to work from the sidewalk.  Might be working next week, maybe.  Hallways filled with fans.

Had the mail held for three and a half weeks.  Today was the delivery day.  No delivery.  Had to find the USPS confirmation code, call the 800 number, arrange to pick the bundle up at the Medford PO tomorrow morning at 7:30.  We'll see if it's there.

Calling Nora every two minutes to see if she can echo-locate her missing cell phone.  Hoping it's in the car, or in the apartment in NYC, and not at a New York Thruway rest stop somewhere.

I have to move offices again, the fourth office I'll have had in six years and the third in one year.  I'm moving into the part of the building where the AC is broken, but they won't make me move until it's re-installed.

I fixed up my CUR presentation and sent it to the dozen or so folks who asked for it.  Also sent it to a few colleagues within my school, but we don't really care about outside scholarly work, so it'll be mostly idle pixels.

No luck on the phone so far.  Nora's calling Verizon; if we're lucky, they might be able to electronically locate it within a few yards or so, and we can find out if it's in Paramus.  But we both have dumb phones, so it may have no GPS hidden within it.  They all did in the spy movies, though...

Need to look up resources for Nora.  Almost 10 pm, only 80 degrees, but still damp.  Tomorrow, 95, so count my blessings.

Pleasure and shade

When my mother was alive, she was perhaps the strongest voice in support of my writing, or at least its most enduring. She wanted me to turn full-time to the work that I have flirted with for decades. Worrying about its practicality, my ability to adequately voice anything of value, I have never felt empowered as a writer, but she cheered me on, and often it was that cheering that made me sit down to the keyboard to "speak" my thoughts. Now she is gone. And writing feels an odd task without that spirit hovering. In fact, I have not stopped long enough to write a  single sentence, much less something more substantial. There is always something to do. The bills must be paid, and now I am doing both mine and hers. The garden needs weeding, and a prodigious garden it is in this new house.  Actually it is many gardens, each with their own needs. The fact that they are planted with perennials that "do not need watering"  is deceptive. There are weeds that encroach from the forest that surrounds us, and Japanese beetles gorge on lily petals. Oddly, they seem always to be paired in connubial bliss when I find them. It must be a good life: constant sex and tender flower petals for food.

The cardboard boxes are at last completely gone from living room, bedrooms and bathroom, but there are others that encroach behind the wood stove in the dining room / kitchen, the tiny office nook, the mud room and of course the office which remains substantially untouched. We drove three car loads of flattened boxes and peanuts and bubble wrap and packing paper to the local dump on Monday, thanks to prodigious work by my husband, but there remains a lot to do in the garage that houses the remnants of the move. And much of it feels vaguely Sisyphean. I emptied spices into bottles in our new 48 bottle spice rack, in hopes that I could free up a Tupperware, but found that there were still remainders in many bottles, and some spices that were not amenable to being decanted, so now we have both, and I suspect I will continue to paw through the Tupperware first, in an effort to get rid of the spare bottles.

It seems that there is a theme here. We make progress toward a goal but there remains something that grounds us or pulls us back, a past that lingers. And so it is. Each day as I sit at the computer or open the mail, there is a remnant of my mother's passing that echoes in the abiding quiet here. There are "in memoriam" cards and emails from associates of my mother's from 50 years ago. Friends look into my eyes and ask how I am, as though I could have completed the grieving by now. (In fact, I think I have yet to begin.)  Instead, as we craft each day in our house of boxes and petals, of morning and evening light, of insects that flutter beneath the old beams, I find myself thinking of how very much my mother would have loved this place. The first house I lived in, had doorways that opened onto other vistas of inside and out. My mother always commented on how open everything felt, and that is even more true here. As I sit at the dining room table, the tiny office nook is in front of me, the living room to my left with the lattice that bounds the potting shed visible through the northwest window. To the right are two of my mother's sculptures that came back with me from New York, and the still blooming lilies from her friend Annette, on a window sill overlooking the shade garden of Hostas, Hellebore and Canadian anemones.

There is something fungible in this time; something without temporal bounds. I am celebrating our new home and braiding that celebration with my mother's passing. The two are twined in ways too deep to yet understand. But I know that she no longer rails against the lingering debilitation that she felt humiliating. I know that she knew that we had found the home that she predicted we would. I know that she took some pleasure in the chronicle of the move, a mere 48 hours before she died. But each act, is shadowed with something that lingers; each pleasure has its shade, each shade, its pleasure.

Estelle Ellis Rubinstein, 1919-2012

We love you, Mom.  Rest well.

Estelle Ellis Rubinstein, a trailblazer in corporate and publication marketing and the author of At Home with Books and At Home with Art, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.

The youngest daughter of Russian immigrants, Estelle Ellis and her older sister Muriel grew up in Brooklyn. As a young girl, Estelle Ellis dreamed of being an international news correspondent; by her teen years, she was employed by the Works Project Administration to write radio scripts highlighting the work of WPA artists and writers. 

The first in her family to attend college, Ms. Ellis graduated from Hunter College in Manhattan in 1940 with a major in Political Science, and a minor in Journalism.  Her dual interests in social research and writing laid the path for the next sixty years of her career.

After working with Popular Science, Design for Living, and Click magazines, she worked in 1944 with editor Helen Valentine to launch Seventeen, the first magazine successfully to identify young girls as a distinct and economically significant market. Ms. Ellis combined emerging techniques in market research with a strong marketing and design sense to awaken advertisers to this new market. To personalize the research data, she created the fictional character “Teena” as a narrator of the thoughts and desires of the typical Seventeen reader.

In 1950, Ms. Valentine, Ms. Ellis and art director Cipe Pinelas moved to Street-Smith publications, where they launched Charm, the first magazine to position working women as a separate market segment. 

To persuade advertisers to address young women, Ms. Ellis conducted and wrote the very first market research studies to establish working women and teenage girls as distinct and economically powerful markets.  Her  promotional items frequently highlighted the uniquely female qualities and concerns of the Seventeen and Charm audiences; she created a price guide in the form of a handwritten shopping list on a paper bag, a press release tied in ribbon like a bundle of love letters.

In 1958 Ms. Ellis and her husband Sam Rubinstein formed the creative marketing firm, Business Image, Inc., dedicated, in her words,” to helping business understand the impact of social change on business trends.” Magazines continued to be important clients, especially Conde Nast’s Glamour (which incorporated Charm), House and Garden, Bride, and Vogue.  Other publishing industry clients included the Girl Scouts of America’s American Girl magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, and Elle.

Along with advising the magazine industry, Ms. Ellis helped other corporate clients to re-think the meaning of their products.  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, she worked with Kimberly-Clark to recommend new feminine hygiene products, and guided the development of its Life Cycle Center, a resource for women of all ages headed by a professional education director. The Center’s booklet series gave Kimberly-Clark—then a virtually all-male paper-making firm—an understanding and authoritative voice to address women’s concerns around reproductive health.

In her seventies, Ms. Ellis turned her attention to two of the loves of her life, books and art. She collaborated with another writer and a photographer to create At Home with Books: How Booklovers Live With and Care for Their Libraries (1995) and At Home with Art: How Art Lovers Live With and Care for Their Treasures (1999), both of which explore the relationships between personality and home design. Her third book, The Booklover’s Repair Kit: First Aid for Home Libraries (2000) offers professional advice and supplies for the bibliophile.

She donated major parts of her professional archives to the Smithsonian and to the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Estelle Ellis Collection, 1944-1994, is available to researchers in the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History.

Contributions in her honor can be made to Connect to Learn or Scientists without Borders.