BLACK SUNDAY

I bought something today that makes me very happy: a Bialetti Moka Express. I have always wanted one, mainly for the way it looks — like a corseted Victorian matron: simple and sturdy and squeezed in the middle. No frills. No nonsense.

I had never had coffee made from one. I didn't even know how it worked until I opened the box today and read the instructions. They were a paragraph long. That increased my passion immediately — the fact that the operating manual could be read in 20 seconds and mastered by a first-grader. I have a brand new car stereo that I can't switch from CD to radio because I'd have to dig out the 100-page instruction book to learn how to perform that simple maneuver. I have a digital camera at home and a state-of-the-art iMac at work that will be grossly underutilized because I can't bring myself to wade through the how-to manuals. I'm not a Luddite or a helpless female or retarded or anything — the other day I hooked up a VCR to the TV, didn't I, Christy? — I just find instructions mind-numbingly tedious and a little intimidating, and I get agitated when I'm reading them and find myself getting more confused instead of less confused. It's like when I ask the HR lady at work a simple question about my health insurance and she gives me a ridiculously rude and Byzantine answer. Call me finicky, but I like my Human Resources people to be human and resourceful, and I like my directions to be direct.

Here is how the Moka Express works: You give the clerk at the store $19, then you put the contraption in your car and fondle it all the way home. In your kitchen, you unscrew the two halves. You put cold water in the bottom half. You put espresso in the filter that fits between the two halves. You screw the top back on and stick it on a hot burner until the top half fills with coffee.



I expected that the coffee would be delicious, and it was — viscous and dark and slightly smoky. But I didn't expect the joy of watching it being made. It turns out you can open the lid and see the chocolatey rich liquor gush and spurt up into the top half. It gave me the same unadulterated joy that I'd get every time I watched the opening credits of "The Beverly Hillbillies" — you know, where Uncle Jed misfires a bullet and up through the ground comes a bubblin' crude. Swimmin' pools, movie stars.

Another great thing is that I finally got to use my tiny green cups that I bought with my friend Amy last spring in Atlanta. I consider the demitasse one of the great inventions of humankind — a promoter of civility, gentility. You just act better with a tiny cup in your hand. Think about it.

While I'm on the subject, here's a quick rundown of some significant coffee moments for me:

• Drinking coffee with my dad as a preschooler. He worked the night shift on the railroad, and about 10 every night he'd make a big thermos full of milky, sugary joe. He'd put so much milk in his thermos that there'd be coffee left over in the pot, and he'd pour himself a big cup and me a little cup, all white and syrupy sweet, and I'd drink it on his lap while he smoked a Marlboro. One of my dad's charms, although my mom would disagree, is that he sees no problem whatsoever with pumping a 4-year-old full of caffeine and sugar — in a cloud of secondhand smoke — at 10 p.m.

I credit this early exposure to coffee for caffeine's having no apparent ability to keep me awake. I built up an immunity.

I remember my mom telling my dad that coffee would stunt my growth, and he said something like, "Petite women are prettier anyway."

One time I got in trouble because my mom caught me dumping about half a pound of sugar into a cup of coffee. For some reason, I thought the sugar was what made it white like my dad's. She told me it was the milk.

After they divorced, when I was pushing 5, I started taking my coffee black. Because I lived with my mom and that's how she drank it. Any time someone asked her if she wanted cream or sugar she'd sneer real big, like they asked her if she wanted a turd in it, because cream and sugar reminded her of my dad.

• The first time I was old enough to stay home without a baby sitter, age 11 or so, my parents went to a cocktail party and I made myself a big old pot of Maxwell House and drank the whole thing like it was a pitcher of Tang. I sat in our green recliner in the rec room, fueled by a wicked java buzz, and wrote a short story. I still recalled the experience vividly in college while reading DeQuincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater.

• When I was 16, I lived in France for a year. It was my first exposure to espresso drinks — cappuccino and cafe au lait and just straight black espresso. The question there was not "cream or sugar?" but "un sucre ou deux"? referring to the ubiquitous sugar cubes, which some people would just dip in their cafe and let melt on their tongues.

The town I lived in, Toulouse, had a large Arab population from former French colonies, so there were a number of Middle-eastern restaurants. A girl I was crazy in love with took me to one and bought me Turkish coffee and — worldly teen that she was — said, "Don't drink the debris floating in it."

• In college, my first date with the man I would marry was for coffee at a Perkin's Restaurant.

And we consumed several hundred gallons in the basement of the student union while he tutored me, rather unsuccessfully, in algebra.

At his apartment, he served me instant coffee out of a small jar, with powdery lumps of nondairy creamer. I didn't mind.

(There's an X-rated coffee incident involving him, but you have to buy me dinner before I tell you that.)

• In law school, I spent countless days at Rick's well-appointed apartment, bumming his liquor and java and vast CD collection. He made me delicious Turkish coffee in a copper-plated ibrik, but my favorite was the kind he'd make in a big glass bottle with a paper filter, and he'd sweeten it with half-and-half and hazelnut liqueur. He gave me a tiny espresso machine that belonged to his brother. Or maybe he just let me borrow it (?)

• When I was living with Beth, and camping with Beth, we made coffee in a cheap percolator on an open camp fire. Cold air. Sun rising. Whole new day ahead.

• When I met George, I got the pleasure of seeing a grown man order, with evident pride, a double grande decaf skim iced pumpkin mocha with sugar-free vanilla syrup, or whatever the name of that drink was. ("Dude! You can't order that with me standing here; people will think I'm a fag hag, in addition to being a lesbo"). But I've learned to love when hetero guys do totally gay things with a completely straight face. George never lets me down.

• When I met Ben, I asked if he wanted one spoon of sugar or two, and he said six.

• On my and Erin's trip to New England, when our detour to Salem led to a tourist trap, we tried to redeem it by ducking into a coffee shop and loading up on spice breads and latte. And then we went back for gelato. Coffee shops are on every corner now, like bars, conveniently located to redeem a lot of ill-fated hours and unfortunate decisions.

• After I married Steve — well, even before — he brought me coffee in bed every morning. Not instant, but made from a French press. It was a while before I understood that that was not a usual thing for a husband to do. I admit, I took him for granted. One winter day I was very depressed. I didn't want to get out of bed. I said something pitiful and melodramatic, like "Give me one good reason to get up, to live." And — I'll never forget this — he appeared in the bedroom door, in answer to my question, with his goofy smile and a raised, steaming cup, and said, "Coffee?"

BLACK FRIDAY

I don't need a $19 DVD/VCR combo or a game console, so instead of going shopping yesterday, I took Mabel and Rupert to the offleash/gay-cruising park. And — wouldn't you know it? — it was the busiest trysting day of the year. You think there are a lot of cars in that picture? By the time I left, there were twice that many, and they kept coming.

And they weren't there to play Frisbee golf — the course was dead empty, despite 70-degree weather — and they weren't there to walk their dogs — Mabel and Rupert were the only four-legged critters in sight. They were there — bless their hearts — to fornicate in the woods like jackrabbits, as evidenced by the steady stream of single men entering and leaving the trails. Two of them commented on my dogs. One very happy-looking gentleman said, "Those are some nice dogs." Another fellow said, somewhat mysteriously, "Maybe you should get some bigger dogs."

Being a cynic, my first thought was, "All these guys' wives got up at the crack of dawn to do battle at Wal-Mart for $6 toasters and an assortment of stocking stuffers, while these guys dashed to the park to frolic away Black Friday in some sylvan grove." (God, sometimes I really wish I were a gay man).

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Co-worker A: Good show, guys. Are you driving to Springfield tonight?

Co-worker B: No, I'm going in the morning.

Co-worker C: Goin' to see the man. Woo-hoo.

Co-worker B: I know I won't be able to sleep. I'm too excited. Last time I couldn't sleep until 5 in the morning.

Co-worker A: Oh, not me. Whenever I'm going to see Jim the next day, I fall asleep right away — it's like my body knows that the quicker the night passes the quicker the morning gets here.

Co-worker C: I wish my body knew that.

Co-worker B: Me too. I toss and turn all night.

Co-worker A: Not me. I fall asleep while I'm brushing my teeth.

Co-worker C: This is so bad. One time I was late — like not just late, but like four hours late — because I couldn't sleep all night and then in the morning I was out like a light! I missed my flight and everything. Ryan was at the airport with roses, calling me, like 'where are you?' It was so bad.

Co-worker A: Oh my God.

Co-worker B: Oh my God.

Co-worker C: I know. Now I set like three alarms and tell my mom, "Mom you HAVE to call and make sure I'm up."

Co-worker B: I'm leaving in like eight hours and I haven't figured out what to wear. It's been so long since I've seen him.

Co-worker A: Did you buy some hot new outfits? I always do.

Co-worker C: So do I.

Co-worker B: I bought a few things. My problem is I can't decide what to wear. I mean, I got this real cute outfit to put on when I actually see him, but I haven't decided what to wear in the car. I always wear something in the car, and then I change when I'm almost there.

Co-worker A: That is so smart.

Co-worker C: Yeah, I do that too, so you don't get all wrinkled.

Co-worker B: OK, well I'm going to go home and try to sleep, after I figure out what to wear in the car.

Co-worker A: OK, good luck. Happy Thanksgiving.

Co-worker C: Happy Thanksgiving. See you Monday.

"IT WON'T HURT MY FEELINGS"

So my aunt from New Jersey sent back a bunch of stuff with my mom, who has just visited her — stuff that she thought would "look good" in my house. This has happened a couple of times now in the four years I have lived here, and each time my mom says, "It's a good thing we didn't take the truck, or she would have sent everything in her basement."

"Yeah, it's a good thing," I agree, although I understand that my mom means something quite different by "it's a good thing." What she really means is, "it's a damn shame."

Whenever my mom gives me stuff like this she always says, "Now, you don't have to keep it if you don't like it. It won't hurt my feelings one bit. I'll just give it to the blind."

"The blind" is her way of referring to a charity for vision-impaired people. Every couple of months, some lady from "the blind" calls my mom and asks whether she has anything she wants to donate. And my mom will assemble a grocery sack full of Capri pants that don't fit her anymore, a seashell nightlight, an old cordless phone, some cinnamon-scented potpourri, stuff like that.

Every now and again she says something like, "The lady from the blind hasn't called in a while. I have stuff just piling up." She says it like the stuff is threatening to overtake house and home, when really it's a tiny stack neatly folded in the corner of a closet in her immaculately clean house.

I don't think these items actually go to blind people. They go to some thrift store where they're sold and the proceeds benefit blind people — the ones who need benefiting, that is. Still, I think when my mom is putting together her quarterly charity bag she is thinking things like, "I just bought this a year ago. It's in perfect condition. But no one is wearing teddy-bear prints anymore; a blind person might appreciate it, though."

One time a leukemia lady called, and my mom informed her that she was sorry but she gives all her stuff to the lady from the blind.

My mom would never admit this or talk about it in any way, but I think she has a soft spot for the blind because I am half blind. And she feels very bad about that. She thinks it is her fault somehow — if she hadn't left me with a bad baby sitter, it wouldn't have happened. I'd like to tell her sometime, "Yeah, Baby Sitter A wasn't a great choice, but maybe Baby Sitter B would have backed over me with a car or something. Who’s to say?” My point being that I'm totally past what happened and she should be, too. Maybe we will have that conversation someday; until then, I think she'll collect things for the blind, secretly thinking that I could have been among them, I could have been totally blind, and if I were it would be nice if someone gave me a pair of orange Capri pants that cost $50 new and have hardly been worn.

Anyway, back to my aunt's donations. Her name is Gerry, by the way, which is short for Geraldine — a name that made me laugh and laugh as a kid. I would ask her on her rare visits — she lived near San Francisco — if her name was really Geraldine, and we'd both giggle as she said, “Yeah. So?” Behind her back, my mom would say, "It sounds just like an old black lady's name — not that there's anything wrong with being black."

Here's what my Aunt Gerry sent: a paisley twin bedspread of indeterminate material and age (but definitely not cool 1970s paisley); a brand-new etched mirror that she and my mom touted as antique-looking (they think because I live in an old house that I adore anything that "looks old," even if it’s ridiculously shiny); and a cheap-gold-framed print of some old-timey milk-maid-looking damsel in various shades of mauve.

(These things sound way better in writing than they actually are. Trust me.)

I was aghast.

I could not believe my mom transported these treasures half way across the country to my doorstep. I wondered whether she seriously thought I might like these things, or whether she just couldn't bring herself to say no to my aunt's generosity.

"It won't hurt my feelings if you don't like them," she inevitably says.

And yet she tries to sell me on them. She takes the mirror into my dining room and holds it up on the wall. I am noncommittal. I display a lack of enthusiasm, which — from decades of knowing me — she takes for "I'm not interested." She lets it go. Then she brushes her hand across the bedspread and comments that it's in really great shape.

"It doesn't match any of my colors," I say.

This is something of a turning point for me, because normally I just go along with the game. But I feel the time has come to be assertive — to at least hint that I'm an adult now with my own house and my own tastes, and not some college kid who's desperate for any old hand-me-down. I feel ungrateful when I say it, but there it is.

"It doesn't match my colors," I say again.

My mom reluctantly agrees, but she looks a bit wounded.

I back up a bit: "But I can use it for an extra blanket when company comes. That would be nice."

"Oh yeah," my mom smiles. "You can never have too many blankets."

Then she holds up the picture. It fills me with so much disgust that I risk hurting my own mother's feelings again.

"I really don't like that," I say flatly. And I'm emboldened by my own honesty. If I don't draw the line somewhere, I really am going to wind up with a truckload of stuff from my aunt's basement, and then what will I do? Give it to the blind, sack by sack, for the next six years?

My mom looks wistfully at the picture, then puts it next to her purse, and we go out and work in my yard together.

I feel bad because I do have a soft spot for this particular aunt, perhaps because she is always proclaiming that I am her "favorite niece." This is a great compliment because she has dozens and dozens of nieces. Of course, she might tell all her nieces that, but she seems quite sincere when she's saying it. I also really liked her as a kid because she was different from all my other aunts. For one, she looked nothing like them. All my mom's sisters are like my mom: fair, blue-eyed, very Anglo Midwestern. But my Aunt Gerry, for some reason, looks like a Mexican. Dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin — but the exact same parents. I found that very exotic as a child, and even more so when I found out that her first husband, the one who carried her off to California, was an actual Mexican named Joe. (I had a huge thing for Latin men after becoming acquainted with Ricky Ricardo on “I Love Lucy”). My mom told me as a kid that Joe was a real bad man, so bad in fact that he got "kicked out" of the state of California. I never knew what that meant exactly, but I found it very intriguing. Gerry had six kids: five with Joe and one with some married dude she had an affair with. Then she ended up marrying this really smart, well-off guy who had three kids, and the two of them bought this fantastic 20-room house near San Francisco and lived there happily — and chaotically — with their nine offspring. One thing I remember about her visits is that she would always cook something new and fun. I had never had guacamole until she made it in my mom's kitchen, lamenting all the while that these avocadoes were not like the ones you get in California. I imagined that the ones in California were 10 times bigger and purple or something. When my mom would come back from visits to Gerry's house, she'd have tales about how polite the kids were, but how they stood right in the backyard and enjoyed a "marijuana cigarette" just like it was a popsicle. They'd plant the stuff right in my aunt's lawn, and she'd pull it up like a pesky weed and say "those damn kids." It was the first time I conceived of pot as something that normal, everyday people might do vs. something that only evil degenerates would even think of doing. Later, after Gerry and her husband ditched the kids, they lived in Europe for a few years, then set up house on the East Coast. Shortly after he retired, her husband was diagnosed with liver cancer and, the next month, he was dead. In the same week, her son died of some strange hemorrhage. Unfathomable. When all this happened, I remembered something she told me as a teenager. She said, "Love your mom a lot; she's had a really hard life."

When we come in from the yard work, my mom catches a glimpse of herself in the glass of my kitchen cabinet.

"I look like a wild Indian," she says, patting her wind-blown hair.

As she reaches into her purse for a comb, she spots something.

"I almost forgot this," she says, handing me an old envelope. "Gerry wanted you to have this."

I take it, thinking, "What could this possibly be?"

I open it and pull out some yellowed black and white snapshots: pictures from the early-1960s wedding of my mom and dad, who divorced when I was 4. It suddenly occurs to me that I have never seen a picture of their wedding. Why would I have? They both threw all that stuff out when they got remarried.

I look at the pictures for a long time and don't say anything. They are so young — two 19-year-olds photographed by my mom's older sister, Gerry, who, at 23 or so and the mother already of four, knew a few things about married life that my mom, in her sweet white dress, had yet to imagine.

"It won't hurt my feelings if you don't want those," my mom says, combing her hair. "Gerry just found them in her basement."

"Are you kidding?" I think. "I want a truckload of these."

But what I say to my mom is simply, “Tell Gerry thanks — for everything.”

PINK IS FOR EVERYONE

I love presents. And I love babies.

So why do baby showers blow?

I also love sherbet punch — LOVE IT! LOVE IT! LOVE IT! — and pastel mints and boxed wine. Can't get enough. Seriously.

And yet baby showers make me crazy. Why?

I was trying to figure this out on my drive home today from a shower in Kansas City. And the best explanation I could find was the oppressive conversation.

Here is a sample:

"That is cuuuuuuuute."

"That is toooooooooo cute." (said in a manner to outdo simple "cuuuuuuuute"; how would you top "toooooooooo cute"?)

"Isn't that darling?"

"That is sooooooo darling."

Put those four snippets on a two-hour loop and you'll get a pretty good feel for my afternoon.

Don't get me wrong. I go as ga-ga as the next gal over a plush toy or hand-sewn blanket, but my enthusiasm doesn't knock 37 years off my age and 50 points off my IQ (you do the math). Only playing with my dogs does that. But I can't help it. They are soooooo cuuuuute. I luff them sooo much. Oh my God, they are TOO, TOO awesome. (In my defense, what kind of lesbian would I be if I didn't fawn over my pets to a nauseating degree?)

Seriously. Why is it that when certain gatherings of women form it's like a competition to see who can be the most infantile, or most "feminine," as evidenced by being the most over-the-top ga-ga for lace borders and pastel colors and Disney characters? I think I have found a direct correlation between degrees of this behavior and lengths of fake fingernails and eyelashes, but I have yet to subject my hypothesis to rigorous scientific analysis.

Another thing I can't stand about these gatherings is the rampant sexism. You know the drill. If it's a boy, everything has to be blue, and if it's a girl, everything has to be pink, or else your kid will grow up to be some sort of FUCKED-UP GENDERFREAK, aka GAY. The mother-to-be at this shower — she's having a boy — opened a set of plastic pacifiers that looked like gangsta bling, and someone seriously uttered the question: "Aren't those sort of girly?" To which everyone was quick to point out that, no, not really, they're fine because yellow can be for boys or girls. Whew. Disaster averted.

Man, I'd really like to go to a shower and bring, I don't know, say an ORANGE gift with a card that reads: "Here's hoping your daughter is a great big dyke with a great big IQ and an equally large and age-appropriate vocabulary."

Another thing I find unpleasant about these events, especially this one, where a lot of people are relatives or old family friends, is that you get a sense that people are whispering behind your back. You get this sense mainly because you are whispering behind their backs. But whereas you are saying stuff like, "Did she change her hair color?" or "Has she lost a bunch of weight," they are saying, "Does she still not like men?" or "This must be hard for her since lesbians are barren." If you think I'm just being paranoid, you don't know my family and their friends. Very possibly they are thinking that I did not have enough pink things in my childhood. Or possibly too many upside down pink triangles — perhaps some ill-conceived pie-shaped mobile over my crib put me off men.

I don't approve of smoking, but I have to say my favorite women at this shower were the ones who ducked outside periodically to get a big lungful of bitter tar and nicotine — an antidote, as it were, to the sickly sweet girly sugar air inside. They'd come back all refreshed, fortified for another round of cotton-candy emotional display.

Some other things I liked about this shower besides the smokers: the cream puffs from Costco; the nut dish; this seventh-grader named Kaylyn or Katelyn or something who just got back from a trip to France, Italy and Greece (she was sister of the mom-to-be and, hands-down, the smartest person there); my mom, who wrote in a card to the mom-to-be, her granddaughter, that "Motherhood is the hardest and best thing in the world"; and my great aunt (pictured below with my niece), who was a nun for 28 years — who lived in a convent of scholarly women for 28 years — and who can sit in a gathering of unparalleled silliness and behave — bless her soul — as if every woman there were the most dignified and worthy human being on the planet.

THE HOUSE

Its 30 windows
dawned on me right away,
but not its three faces.