Nessa's List of Arcane, Obsolete Job Skills

This morning I was pondering the many ways I've made a living over the years, and I realized that I have acquired a bizarre collection of skills, not one of which is practicable or useful in this post-post-modern world. Because many of you reading this were but oocytes when my work life began, I thought I would share the list with you (kinda like, "Gee, Grandma, what DID you do before TV was invented?!" Please note that, in fact, television was invented and adapted into a large, viewable screen size before I was born. However, I did live through the Wizard of Ozian transition from black-and-white to color...and dang it, I still like black-and-white.)

Herewith, the list:

1982: Laundress. Yes, laundress. Every Saturday morning, I was paid $25 for five hours' toil in the basement of a Manhattan restaurant. I washed and dried four loads of tablecloths, napkins, and (no shit) the owner's shirts in silvery industrial machines...and after they were all dry, I had to iron each and every one of them by hand. Which is why, decades later, the palms of my hands are pretty insensate to heat. And why I can still iron a man's shirt like a pro. There's a job skill for the ol' resume.

1982: Supermarket cashier. Polyester three-quarter-sleeved jacket with store logo, a foot pedal to move the groceries forward on the black belt, and here's the real dilly: no scanners. I had to ring up every single itemon a keypad. Throughout that summer, I would wake up in the middle of the night to find my right hand ringing up independent of my conscious mind: 1.99 Grocery, 5.50 HBA, 9.98 Meat, 4.99 Txbl Item....

1983: Operations Assistant. I spent a summer working with my older brother and a hilarious crew of co-workers in a Wall Street computer room. We were responsible for data processing financial transactions for numerous high-end firms (geez, now that I think about it, that's scary). The room was a byzantine array of whirring, humming IBM hulks, exactly like this:


It was windowless and glaringly lit, and every day we went through the same exact paces, as dictated by the mainframe's programming. My mind was constantly racing from the monotony...but luckily my co-workers were inventive (they used to make a baseball bat out of rolled-up greenbar paper, and a ball out of a wad of tape, and voila--instant diversion!)

This job taught me how to operate a punch card reader, a 1960s contraption that endured for a surprisingly long time as a data storage and retrieval method:


I was also the tape librarian, collecting plastic, circular "scratch tapes" from big tape drives and refiling them in numerical order on massive storage racks:


The awesome thing about this job--besides the spontaneous baseball games--was getting paid more than I'd ever made in my life. I bought scads of records at Tower on 4th Street that summer, plus my brother and I had a crowd of friends who worked downtown, so Friday nights were a guaranteed blowout at the Raccoon Lodge and other Tribeca haunts.

1984: Database developer. Another obsolete computer system--the DEC-10--and another repetitive, summer-long task: catalog every single photo in Bowdoin College's Office of Public Information. I actually had a blast doing this; among the hundreds of photos were 19th century glass negatives, pics of every faculty member as a novice, and relics from the protest-laden 1960s. I still use the archivist skills...only, not on a computer with a tiny black screen and glowing, dot-matrixy orange letters.

1985: Film projectionist. Yup, I was the shadowy figure in the flickering little window-box, high above the theater seats, loading huge film reels onto creaky equipment and hoping my manual transitions from one reel to the next would be seamless. I also ran filmstrips--BOOP!--in classrooms. Doing this job made me feel invisible.

1985: Disc jockey. Two turntables, a microphone, and moi, broadcasting jazz over the airwaves. Bowdoin College had a massive vinyl LP collection, and I never tired of fingering the spines in the shelves and finding new/old music to play. Three years later, the station went digital, and hundreds of LPs were ignominiously disposed of, upended into trashcans. Oh! my heart! I salvaged some, but the station managers chucked them faster than I could rescue them. Heathens.

1985: Telephone operator. Ever see those Movietone films of ladies with a clunky headset, seated at a big console full of plugs and holes? That was me, every weekday lunch hour, when I would cover for the college operator. I developed an operator patois: "MmmmmBowdoinnnnCollege," I would say as I picked up the incoming calls. They'd ask for an extension; I would pull up a thick plug, find the corresponding hole with the extension number, and ram the plug home to connect the callers to their party. And even better--once I plugged in, I had to manually ring the extension with a toggle switch. Once the call ended, the line would emit this irritating errrrrnnnnn noise to remind me to pull out the plug. If I fell behind, the console became a befuddling, crisscrossed maze of flexible wires. It was all very I Love Lucy. 

1985-86: Secretary. Smith-Corona typewriters, keys jumpy with electrified juice. Liquid paper and Correctype--lots of it. Index cards. And phones with flashing hold buttons shaped perfectly square.

1986-94: Editorial Assistant. Yet another useless computer skill: laying out a tabloid-size newsletter on a minature Macintosh screen. You learn how to scroll, squint, and cross your fingers when you hit "print".


This job also trained me in manual layout of newspaper advertisements, which required use of a waxer: a handheld metal roller with an electric plug. Inside the roller is a block of wax that's heated to sticky goo (which means it's hot as a mofo. See above for iron-acquired hand insensitivity). To do newspaper layouts, you'd scissor little paper images into the desired shape, run the roller over the back of the paper-bit, then press it into place on the master page. 

I am a master of lost arts, of machinery that clunks and whirs, plastics that are hard and inflexible, metals that gleam with the patina of use and the sheen of oil. My fingers have been smudged with typewriter ribbon, reddened by unsafe levels of heat, and numbed with keypad entry. My first dalliance with minimum wage saw me getting $3.25 an hour.

The world turns.

Sister Grace Agnes

One of the strongest influences in my life, apart from family members, was a woman who routinely bullied and occasionally whapped kids; whose eyes burned with thwarted ambition; whose demeanor was 85 percent sour; whose intentions were simple, if difficult to divine: to elevate her charges whenever and however possible.

You couldn't say that Sister Grace Agnes went about her intentions the right way. In this society, harassing and haranguing students in your classroom is completely unacceptable. Not to mention the open-palmed smacks in the face that she delivered when a student misbehaved.

Moreover, if Sister Grace had taught math, I would not be writing this piece about her. I would have had no reason to seek anything admirable in a tyrant who ruled mathematics, because I despised that subject. But Sister Grace clutched golden keys to the land of my ambition: English grammar. And so, in sixth grade, when I was assigned to her homeroom, I was kind of glad--in a flinching way, because she was definitely the most feared nun at Most Precious Blood School [pause to insert laughter over ironic school name here].

Sister was in her late fifties when she taught us, not much taller than we were, with a dollop of steel-grey hair peeking out of her white-rimmed veil and a piercing gaze. She had a slight limp when she walked, and while she wasn't large in girth, her shoulders were squared off enough to be intimidating. Legend told us, and experience bore out, that she would not hesitate to take a swing at anyone, even the roughest students in the class. And she kept even those kids off-balance, so that order reigned in her classroom. There were times when she smiled or chuckled, and her face would be transformed into someone's daughter, someone's friend. But when that light moment faded, she was all business. As the old-fashioned saying goes, she brooked no foolishness. 

Sister Grace's teaching method never varied from year to year. From Day One, she possessed a set of index cards upon which she had written (in her flawless penmanship) the names of each student. In your hard-bound, black-marble-cover notebook, from Day One, you would transcribe the definitions of every grammatical rule. Sister dictated; you scribbled furiously. And then, you memorized. If you knew what was good for you, that is. Because within a few days of those scribbles, you would be asked to recite the rules she had dictated. "Asked" is not the right verb, actually...demanded. Sister would stand at the front of the classroom with the afore-mentioned index cards held firmly, at viewing distance from her bifocals. And she would bark the surname of a student, randomly, followed by a part of speech. As in: "Martinez. Predicative nominative." And Martinez would be expected to immediately say the definition of that rule, word for word as it was in the notebook. (Only, without the notebook.) "The predicate nominative follows a verb of being and refers back to the subject." (See what a little fear will do for you?)

If Martinez faltered, Sister would flip the card and bark the next name...noting the faltering, so that grades could be rendered later. It was Grammar Boot Camp. And for me, it packed all the thrill of a game show, because I adored the subject matter and strived to know it.

Sister Grace's other major task in sixth grade was teaching us to diagram sentences. Universally, everyone groans about this seemingly pointless exercise, and guess what? I loved it. I was, in fact, exhilirated by it. To me, diagramming was a puzzle that I relished solving, each new sentence a challenge to my burgeoning writer's mind. I never, ever got less than 100 percent on a diagramming test (and we had them at least once a week).

Despite such successes, did I fear this intimidating nun? Indeed, frequently. I dreaded the thought that some minor motion of my hand, some facial expression, some lighthearted glance at another student might cause Sister to barrel down my row and wallop me silly. I saw it happen to many others. My abject terror was such that Sister Grace assigned me a classroom name: Nervous Nellie. Boy, was that fitting for the geeky, jittery kid I was.

So you're wondering where my admiration for this bizarre creature comes in. Well, at the rear of Sister Grace's classroom was a little library. I don't remember any other teachers at Most Precious Blood maintaining a library such as this. It held Scholastic books of the day (nothing too topical, mind you), as well as numerous older books of the Cherry Ames, Student Nurse variety. In a previous blog, I mentioned that my mom resisted my incessant pleas to buy books. "You already have plenty," she'd say. I know now that we were pretty strapped for cash, but it never made sense to me then. Anyway, Sister Grace, for that year, supported my insatiable reading habit by allowing me to take her books home. This was a privilege, and I was extremely careful, never allowing those books to dog-ear or get grease spots at the kitchen table. 

After school, there was a tradition that kids would throng around teachers they liked and walk them down the block towards the avenue, where everyone went separate ways. Someone would volunteer to hold the teacher's bookbag. It wasn't a brown-nose thing, it was more like an informal way to end the school day. Needless to say, Sister Grace had only a smattering of students who ever wanted to walk with her to the convent.

One afternoon, Nervous Nellie found that Sister Grace Agnes had fallen into step alongside her. "You've been reading the books about student nurses," she said to me. A flat statement it was, delivered in her strident voice.

"Y-yes, Sister," I said. "I really like those series." (I did.)

"Are you thinking you might like to be a nurse someday?"

"I don't know...I guess I've thought about it," I said, not accustomed to having adults ask me things like that.

In the slow walk to the convent, Sister proceeded to tell me about how she had wanted to be a nurse as a young woman. (Pre-nun, this was!! The sisters never talked about pre-nun days.) Unfortunately, she contracted polio and became sufficiently weakened that it was deemed she would not be able to handle the rigorous life of a nurse. Thus...teaching.

Thus...the burning ambition that I thenceforth saw in her eyes, thwarted and dulled. 

Thus...my appreciation that she tried, albeit not in the best manner, to at least give her students something: proper English. Which, Lord knows, the streets of Queens were not offering to us on a regular basis.

I found it impossible to defend Sister Grace Agnes to my peers. But many times after that, I walked with her to the convent door. And as the year went along, I came to understand that she had ambitions for me. That was a secret that I held like a jewel. It buoyed me to an excellent high school, and an even better college. Brought me out of Queens, which was a transition I needed to make. More to the point, her support helped me believe in myself. Family members can reassure you all they want; you're never sure if they're just saying that because they love you. But when the woman who rules class 6-305 makes it clear that she knows your worth and expects you to fulfill it, you are persuaded.

Before I launched into this, I googled "Sister Grace Agnes" and actually found a fellow alum of Most Precious Blood who cited her influence:
http://trafcom.typepad.com/blog/2005/11/break_some_rule.html

My fellow alum, Donna, is a writer and an editor. What do you know...Sister Grace nurtured at least two of us. I've e-mailed her, of course, because what are the odds? In the meantime, her blog provides the ultimate capping line for this piece:

"You have to know the rules before you can break them. Amen." 

The dance

A moment in my day froze today, while I lived it. Paused and assembled into a memory that would last, with all the sensory elements recollected.

 

Peter and I d.j.'d a wedding reception tonight. This was the latest in a series of stressful events in our lives, and getting ready this afternoon, I cracked. (PMS, you are no friend of mine, and my family wishes you would get lost also.) I snapped twice at Pete because he just wasn't doing things at the frenzied robotic pace I was maintaining. Why isn't he dressed? Why aren't the speakers in the van yet?? my mind was ranting. I prefaced one of my outbursts with "I'm realLY PANICKING HERE!" which came out escalating, just like that. Maybe this sounds minor or stupid, but I just don't get mad very often. And never like that at Pete. Even worse, it wasn't really him I was mad at—it was my stress, my nerves, and my eternal penchant for taking on too many things that have honking deadlines and tons of associated details.

 

That wasn't the moment I had in mind, anyway. It's just a mortifying preface moment to the actual one. I never had time to apologize to Pete, that's how busy we were...and my resultant internal discord seemed so at odds with the wedded bliss we were soundtracking in the reception hall. Finally, six hours into the job, the last song slid into the CD deck: "You're Still the One" by Shania Twain. The bride and groom collapsed into the familiar fit-together of a slow-dance, as they'd done about a dozen times already. I stood up to stretch...and when I opened my eyes, in front of me was Peter's extended hand.
 

In the semi-darkness of the d.j.'s corner, we slow-danced. And here's the moment: my face pushed up against his chest. The tweedy jacket texture, that man-scent. And the flood of connection, forgiveness, and gratitude I felt in his arms. We fit together too, his tall-guy chin resting on my head, his hand caressing my neck, mine on his back, low. That moment: our married experiences, compressed into one dance. 

 

They said, "I bet they'll never make it..."
But just look at us holding on,
We're still together, still going strong.
You're still the one I run to,
The one that I belong to,
You're still the one I want for life.
You're still the one that I love,
The only one I dream of,
You're still the one I kiss good night.

 

Writing this, I'm crying for joy, not the first time today. I'm used to crying for others' joy—it's a by-product of providing first-dance music for people whose love shines all around them. Now it's mine, ours, his.

 

Enough writing. He's waiting for me.

One year ago

Exactly one year ago right this minute, I was in the Boston Greyhound station, impatiently waiting for my connecting bus to New York City. Frantically rushing to my mom's side, because after a few uncertain weeks of tests and questions, the doctors had finally honed in on ovarian cancer as the cause of Mom's illness. The oncologist was due to visit Mom the next morning at 6:30, and I had to be there. Science writer, daughter, friend, I had responsibilities. 

My bus deposited me at Port Authority at 4:30 a.m., and I snagged a taxi uptown, dragging a suitcase that was weighted with the uncertain length of my stay. Mom had already apprised the Lenox Hill security staff of my unusual arrival time, so in I went at 5:15, when the hospital was still and gray with dawn.

Thank God I got there when I did. Other than some annoying symptoms, Mom was fully herself. She'd been crossword-puzzling, watching the city from her windowside chair, chattering with her roommate about the other people on the floor, red hair as resplendent as it could be under the hospital circumstances.

She waited for me expectantly in her chair. I'll never forget the sight of her leaning towards the door, her face yearning. I was yearning too. As we hugged, her mother-scent enveloped me and I felt young in a heady moment. That was all too fleeting, because with the arrival of the oncologist, I became mastermind interpreter and keeper of the medical details...roles I held firmly, with fire in my eyes, until the day she died.
 

That day came too damned soon. The woman I first saw at Lenox Hill, while slightly impaired physically, was cognitively and emotionally my mother. However, once chemo treatments began, everything about Mom faded and paled...except for one thing: the keen, unbearable pain. Soon she would never sit in that windowside chair again. Soon she would require a walker to get from her bed to a commode. Soon she would not be able to get to the commode in time at all.
 

I did not intend for this entry to become a catalog of Mom's illness, because having lived it, I would just as soon erase it. An impossibility: I will bear the images, the memories, and the extreme emotions of those three months forever. But what I was trying to convey was the rapidity of my mother's decline. Bizarrely, in the midst of it, each day crawled, twisted, and distorted. However, with that year thankfully in the rearview, I now find myself stunned at how quickly Mom's sickness became a life-threatening wrestling match. And how stacked against us it all was--when I was in New York, that thought truly didn't sink in. I pushed every resource at the fight because I believed.

 

I am a fan of believing. In fact, despite the overarching, soul-threatening suckiness that was 2/05-2/06, I remain an optimist. Kind of my trademark, I guess. And it's exactly what Mom wanted from me: not only in the hospital, but throughout our entwined lives. Hard to convey what a profound realization that is for me. Makes me cry, surfacing it.

 

When this blog began to take shape, iTunes tossed this song at me. It says absolutely everything that I'm feeling on this unwanted anniversary (not to mention the wrenching minor-key accompaniment). 

 

Hello, how are you.
Have you been alright,
through all those lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely nights?
That's what I'd say, I'd tell you everything,
if you'd pick up that telephone.

 

Hey, how you feelin'?
Are you still the same?
Don't you realize the things we did, we did
were all for real--not a dream,
I just can't believe
they've all faded out of view.

 

Doo wah, doobie doobie wah, doo wah doo lang
Blue days, black nights, doo wah doo lang
I look into the sky
(the love you need ain't gonna see you through)
And I wonder why
(the little things are finally coming true)

 

Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight
Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight

 

Okay, so no one's answering,
Well, can't you just let it ring a little longer, longer, longer....
I'll just sit tight, through shadows of the night,
Let it ring for evermore....

 

Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight
Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight

 

From 1982 on, my relationship with Mom was primarily conducted by phone, pretty much daily. We were each other's checkpoints. 

First Mom blog. My friends, this is a huge milestone for me. I miss her to the point of tears every day and had begun to fear I'd never get anything said. Muse, inspiration, whatever it is...now I know the words will come. The other thing that Mom always expected of me.

"Super" Bowl

Not a football fan. Never have been. Okay, I liked the Jets in the '70s because Namath was ultrahot, plus they played in my "backyard" at Shea...that's about it. 

So in my world, what made that game "super" last night? 

 

Well, we had friends over. Two frat brothers who've recently relocated to our area (one brought his sons, ages 10 and 9). And another guy, a work friend of Pete's. I was initially irked about this gathering, because Pete didn't ask before he extended these invites, and I knew what an abject wreck my home was. 

Thus I spent Sunday surrounded by the dizzifying scent of cleansers. (Lest you think this resulted in a spanking clean house, fret not--it only produced three usably clean rooms [LR, kitchen, downstairs bath]. I remain true to my messiness.) I merged the cleaning whirlwind with a cooking frenzy: chili with rice, homemade guacamole, spinach-cheese bars, chocolate-chunk cookies. All my food was raved about and no leftovers!--that felt awesome. Ergo, wifely success.

However, what made the evening super was the opposite of my wifedom: camaraderie, for lack of a better word. No, in fact, I can do better: shit-shooting, hanging-out without clock-watching, beer-swilling (one non-alki, but I nursed that), pointless conversations about the rather large-looking panties that were thrown onstage for Mick (were they panties? we couldn't reach consensus) and the monster-baby-Hummer ad and whether that ball was really over the line. The me that I had forgotten about when Pete told me we were having people over. I had pictured myself wrangling 4 kids plus 2 extra while the guys hung out. In reality, 3 of the kids immersed themselves in Pokemon battles, my 2 youngest went upstairs to invent puppet shows, and my eldest drifted happily from group to group. 

 

Freed, I reinhabited the persona that two of our guests know best (and that Peter married, BTW). And the third guest fit right in--in fact, he's the one who encouraged us to flip over to Animal Planet while the game was winding down, so we could all watch Puppy Bowl II...a bunch of adorable little doggies in a "stadium" playing with chew toys and rolling around together. 

 

I paid dearly for all of Sunday's hoopla. Pete's apnea is always compounded by beer, so I truly didn't get deep sleep until 6 a.m. when he got up. I had a migraine-with-aura at work this afternoon (like looking through cut crystal, all rainbow shards and flashes and wavy distortions). And I should be in bed now, but I napped after dinner, which bought me some extra time on this end.

But it was worth it. I learned something new (which ended up being something old...) and I'm always up for that.

Just a number, baby

Last night I bought an amazing thing on iTunes: Dion's new LP, Bronx in Blue. Have you heard about this?? Former doo-wopper (deservedly famous for the raunch that is "The Wanderer," and a bunch of other classics), morphs into plaintive folkie after Dylan hits ("Abraham, Martin and John"), slides into heroin disuse in the confusion of the 60s, and then works his way back into the biz via gospel, then blues. In the '90s I got his Christmas LP, and that was radical enough--the crag of his distinctive voice, combined with wistful awareness of how special it is to stop the world awhile, and realize it's Christmas. Definitely the first CD I pull out on December 15th, when it's time to launch the yule mood.

Dion is 66 years old now. And he's grabbed a resonant acoustic guitar, snagged a playlist of the most down-and-filthy blues ever written, and ripped 'em out into an album. You would never, ever know how old this man is by the sound of his voice and his guitar, friends. Dion is a playa. He's ready...he wants it...he's going after it. He inspires me to believe that age, yeah, is an inconsequential concept. I always try very hard to live by this credo...and here comes a new patron saint of defying convention.

I think what I love the most about Dion is his New Yorkness. I know where he comes from: the ridiculous self-confidence in the face of the odds, the swagger and sway, and the ability to see beauty in unlikely places. The street-corner jive of unaccompanied voices in harmony...magical.

Coincidentally, I also recently bought A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, by Dito Montiel—a memoir of growing up in my old neighborhood, Astoria, Queens. Honestly...I have not cracked it open yet. I'm kind of flinching about reading it, so I keep just touching the cool, shiny cover but not letting myself in. I have long aspired to capture Astoria in literary form, and here comes an upstart (yeah, younger than me) to not only get the book published, but also to get the movie made (coming soon, starring Robert Downey, Jr. Filmed on location. Sigh.) But I must get past the ego-jealousy, and allow myself to sink into flowing nostalgia for that unforgettable place. After all, how amazing is it that someone else valued it as much as I, to center a book on the neighborhood's influence on his life?

 

Queens in Green...okay, a little. Queens in Beautiful Blue...ah, forever.

To honor D.J.

This is partly blog as catharsis, and partly my need for the world to know someone whom they will never know if I don't write about him. It's raw and soaked in tears. I apologize.
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How do I miss thee? Let me count the ways.

 

I miss your raucous, scratchy, knowing laugh, roughened by smoke and years of wicked humor.

 

I miss that you called me "doll" and "darling" and "baby" and "honey" and "bitch". Words I am not likely to hear spoken in reference to myself again.

 

I miss the way you knew my every instinct, my failings, and the way you cheer-led every positive thing about me. I believed those things through you. Now, I am unsure, lonesome, more shrill in my need for guidance.

 

I miss your knowledge of soap operas. Dammit, who else would crow like me: Noah and Scorpio are BOTH back on GH!! Can Anna be far behind?! Are you engineering this from the beyond?? If not, dear God, I hope they have SoapNet up on those clouds.

 

I miss the TV shows you would select for me, tape and send, because you perpetually worried that I didn't get enough down time. The reality shows that we mocked. The dramas that we became hooked on (and dished about, as if those characters lived down the street). The Kathy Griffin outrageousness that was just an extension of our own. The porn you threatened to provide, but never made good on.

 

I miss talking to you about our friends and our families. Sharing the good stories, or raking over the coals as merited.

 

I miss telling you when Peter and I have had ecstatic sex. Eagerly. And I miss that you're the one whose encouragement helped me get to that suggestive self who still entices the man I love.

 

I miss describing women's health issues until you beg for mercy. And my triumph that you actually had a boundary that I crossed.

I miss the fucking phone. Honest to God, no one ever calls me. I guess I crammed in a lifetime of seated, hours-long, receiver-clutching conversations with you.
 

I miss worrying about you, because I desperately wanted to help you get healthy enough for obesity surgery. And worrying was hope, after all. I also miss giving advice that you would gleefully harass your doctors with. Makes me proud, e.g.: I advised you not to take Fen-Phen. Now, when I read about improvements to bariatric surgery, or about some promising finding in a lab, I'm pissed off and thwarted.

 

I miss blabbing about the 70s with you. We both had the exact same outlook on that ridiculous, wide-collared decade. And our worlds both got shaken up by the decade that followed it. Only you know how much.

 

I miss complaining about my mom to you, because she's gone too, dammit, and I'd give anything to have something to say about her, to anyone, but especially to you.

I miss the relish in your voice whenever I told you about my diva Lydia. I know your spirit of impish rebellion and fashion sense has passed into her, but I wish I could update you on exactly how that's manifesting.

 

I miss the New York tang of your voice. The impatience of your tone, keeping the dang conversation moving. The microwave beep that meant your tea was ready. The intake of breath that meant your cig was lit.

 

I miss your advice. Fuck that, I crave your advice. How can I possibly contemplate my future without your input? How can I know if I'm totally crazy thinking something, without you telling me so? Because, honestly, most of the time when you told me that, it was news to me. My psyche needed your take on it.

 

I miss you reading my latest anything. I hate like hell that this blog phenomenon emerged after your passing. I wish you could have started one, too.

 

I miss hearing about your exploits. Your sense of daring outstripped anything I could ever imagine, much less would have ever attempted (or wanted to).

 

I miss the pride in my voice when I told someone about my "best friend." Because you were that, from the first time we met. Remember when we chat-roomed about that a couple of years ago? I saved it, baby, because it made me feel so good:

 

DJ: I thought you were stunning, and lest we forget you were wearing those boots the night we met...grrrrrrr

Nessa: Those boots, the Lil Abners!?

DJ: You were wearing these sort of mohagony colored boots up the knee....
High boots drive me wild....I'm sure I commented that night

Nessa: I have NO recollection of them! Oh man. Did they have spurs? I had spur boots with a spike heel back then....
But they were not past the knee. I never would have been allowed.

DJ: No spurs to my memory, but there were boots and those pants....what were they called?

Nessa: Gauchos??

DJ: No, to the knee

DJ: YES!

Nessa: I wore gauchos and boots. Geez, maybe I was a babe! LOL!!

 

It was like this: I walked up to you on 37th Street. It had rained for hours, and the evening streets were steamy and misty with it, making the orange streetlights glow brighter. We had never seen each other before, but your friend Tom was my burning crush, and I desperately needed intel.

So initially I had cold-called you, which scared me half to death at age 15 (I never did stuff like that). And we talked about music--always my raison d'etre--and you said you loved disco and hated the Beatles.

"WHAAAT??" I yelped into the phone, mortally offended. "What is there about the Beatles that anyone could hate??" (You didn't know it then, but they were my heroes.)

And you didn't back down to impress me, get flustered, or try to be cool. No, you said right back at me over that tinny Queens phone line, flatly: "They can't sing."

Such hubris. No one I knew preferred disco to the Beatles. And your VOICE. It was mesmerizing, dear. Even then, you could have hosted a radio show with that purring, opinionated, bitch-masculine voice.

And so we had decided to meet. And my anticipation was palpable. My hands shook, my heart pounded, I wore my fave of-the-moment clothes (see above). And while there was girl-guy electricity as we drew nearer to each other, coming into focus the closer we got...there was moreso a sense of relief, souls in the same orbit, yin to the yang. A conversation began immediately, no hesitation, and it was a shining thread that never ended until November 3, 2005.

 

Ahhhhh, life goes on, hon. All the ways I miss you are blunted by the busyness of my days. I must nurture my kids, work at a desk for pay, and deepen my love for Peter (an ever-renewing resource, as you well were aware). And I must be the person you always knew I was. Because I am. And I love you forever because you found that person in 1979, and walked with her into the future on a foggy, mysterious spring night.