By Margie Reins Smith (11/23/09)

I’m working on a list of things that make men tick. Men are different, in spite of what any scientific surveys or psychological tests say.

Boys (who are little bitty men) are different than little girls from the get-go. In addition to the obvious topics (sex, power, food, messy hobbies and things that explode) that apparently stir men’s souls, there are other, subtler, more baffling topics that, given a chance, men get passionate about.

I know a man who slows his car, stops, leans across the passenger seat, points to an empty lot near Oxford, Michigan, and gets nostalgic, even teary-eyed, because we’re driving past the site of a store where he used to buy bait.

Bait. That’s worms; minnows; slimy, wiggly stuff.

The store was demolished decades ago. The site is an empty lot full of weeds and litter. I find this nostalgia rather odd. I tried to explain the curious phenomenon to this man’s grown son.

"Oh, that bait store," his son said. "I remember that. They had night crawlers and red worms and his wife worked there too and . . . what was his name?"

Father and son wandered off and spent the next 15 minutes reminiscing about mutual fishing experiences with something called "spotties."

Men also can get on one of those professional scales where you have to slide a weight up to 100, 150, 200 or whatever, then move another weight in five-, 10- and one-pound increments until the little bubble fits between the two black lines. Men and women both can do this.

But men, incredibly, will step off the scale and walk away, leaving the weights in place. Anybody! Anybody could mosey up to the scale and check the weight of the person who just used it.

Bizarre.

Little boys are also hardwired at birth, probably due to some extraordinary Y-chromosome configuration, so that from the first moment they pick up a toy car – or any toy with wheels – they know how to imitate a motor.

Nobody teaches them these sounds. They just know them.

"Rmmmmmmm-rmmmmm, vroom, vroom," they say.

And, as little boys grow older, they increase their repertoire of motor noises to include the sounds of airplanes, trains, powerboats and helicopters. They also perfect their renditions of special sounds – multi-car crashes, for example, police and ambulance sirens, 18-wheelers going uphill and a variety of different kinds of squealing brakes. They learn to imitate explosions, bombs, the sounds of gunfire and, as a bonus, an incredible variety of gross bodily noises.

Also, by the time they’re 6 or 7, little boys compete to see who can get the most disgustingly dirty in one day and who can develop the most extensive arsenal of sounds depicting speed, power, mayhem, mishap and indigestion.

By the time little boys have become senior citizens, they’re routinely looking back with fond memories to things like their first catchers’ mitts, their favorite sports heroes, their first bikes, first cars, memorable girlfriends – and the store where they used to buy bait.

This essay first appeared in The Grosse Pointe News.

By Margie Reins Smith (11/16/09)

Socks have improved remarkably in the last 60 years. In fact, socks should be near the top of a list of the items of clothing that have improved in my lifetime. Other items on the list: stretchy pantyhose, disposable diapers, relaxed-fit jeans and the demise of what used to be called a "foundation garment." It was a girdle and it was hell.

Socks are 500 percent more comfortable than they were when I was a kid in the 1940s. I have happy childhood memories that would have been much happier if they hadn't been marred by annoying socks. When I was little, girls wore ankle-length cotton socks, ribbed at the top. The ribbed part was folded down. They came in a variety of colors and you were supposed to either wear white socks or socks that matched your dress. Little girls wore dresses to school every single day when I was a kid, which reminds me of another childhood clothing malfunction.

Many of these dresses had sashes that your mother tied into a bow in the back before you went to school in the morning. The bows soon came untied, of course. When you went to the bathroom, if you didn't grab the ends of your sash and hold onto them, the tips would fall in the toilet. Then you had to wring them out and re-tie the sash.The straps on bib overalls often got wet too, and you had to wring them out and re-button the soggy ends.

I digress. Back to socks. Most little girls in my circle had a pair of school shoes, gym shoes, play shoes and dress-up shoes. The dress-up shoes were called Mary Janes. They were made of shiny black patent leather, had a strap that buckled over the top of each foot, and were reputed to reflect up. The reflecting up thing has never been proven to my satisfaction.

Mary Janes were usually worn with white socks. As soon as you put your socks on, whatever their color, whatever the shoe, whoever you were, wherever you went, the socks' self-appointed devious and determined mission was to gradually and unobtrusively slide down your heels and hide inside your shoes. Whatever little girls were doing, they had to periodically bend down and yank their socks up. The socks, in turn, became even more perverted and doubled their efforts to disappear inside shoes.

As the day wore on and your socks crept out of sight, you were left with naked heels, annoying lumps inside your shoes and red, raised blisters on the backs of your feet.

Today's socks are disciplined with elastic. The technology of combining elastic with sock yarn is one of the wonders of the late 20th century. Today's socks stretch. They fit better and are less likely to turn or twist or disappear. Theoretically, if you purchase socks in the proper size, put them on in the morning with the heels in the right place, you'll never have to readjust them.

Better elastic has solved other wardrobe malfunctions. When my mother was a young career woman in the 1930s, she characterized the elastic in women's underwear as: "unreliable."

One day, my mother, a young 20-something career girl working in an insurance office in downtown Cincinnati, was walking back to her office after lunch when she felt the elastic on the waistband of her Skivvies snap. She felt the newly liberated garment sliding gently earthward. Within half a city block, it was in the vicinity of her knees. She tried to walk slowly, keeping her knees clamped together.

Too difficult, she decided. "I just looked the other way," she said. "I stepped out of them, and walked on as if nothing had happened."

This essay first appeared in The Grosse Pointe News

By Margie Reins Smith (11/02/09)

I want music. Really gorgeous music. A first-class organist for the church service. If the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is available, great, but a string quartet will do. Screw the expense. On the chance that all decent live performers are busy that day, a recording of Samuel Barber’s "Adagio for Strings" would be nice. Also "Air on a G String," by Bach. Or consider the grand fugue from Beethoven’s Third Symphony – the funeral march movement, I think. Later, something romantic and schmaltzy, like Tchaikovsky might compose. 

For the organ selection: Bach’s "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" might reverberate nicely inside church before the service begins. Then some old-fashioned hymns, then Barber; then, more Bach. I love Bach.

It should definitely be in church because I like churches. An old stone building, preferably, with gothic arches and stained glass to die(!) for, lots of carved woodwork and a nice big pipe organ. My church.

A decent program would be nice, too, with readings and hymns and a speaker who won’t put any of the older folks to sleep and who will give all the guests some insight into that perplexing enigma, "the human condition." But he/she should have a wry sense of humor, too. I want people to chuckle. Laugh. Guffaw, if possible.

A beautiful day would be great. If it’s fall, one of those breezy slanted-sunshine days, with a chill in the air and cascading leaves that make swooshing sounds when you walk through them. If it’s spring, a day when tulips are blooming, the grass is so green it hurts your eyes and the magnolia trees are in full flower. If it’s summer, not too hot. If winter, a no-school day of pristine new-fallen 12-inches-plus snow and blinding sunshine that glints off the drifts. Kids should be sledding on the hill at the foot of Moross and grownups should be cross-country skiing on golf courses and on the water side of Lakeshore Drive.

And a party. With good wine and a full bar. Lots of food. Shrimp and crab legs for sure and oysters on the half-shell, even though I don’t like the disgusting, slimy things. It should be arranged on a nice cloth-covered table with the good silver and the good china and linen that has to be washed and ironed afterward.

I’m talking about my funeral, of course.

I know it’s coming eventually. (For the record, I’m feeling fine!) I hope it’s a party I’d want to attend if I could. Invite my beloved family and their friends and my friends and all the people I love, even those to whom I’ve been close for only brief periods. I’d like them to stand around in small clusters and laugh and tell jokes and eat and drink and gesture wildly and act silly. Some of them can even get tipsy, as long as they have designated drivers to see them home.

I hope someone – perhaps an older gentleman with twinkly blue eyes who can imitate an Irish brogue and pretend to speak Yiddish – will break the ice by telling a slightly off-color joke. "A Rabbi, an Irishman and a Presbyterian minister walked into a bar . . ."

When the laughter dies down, another guest will try to top his joke. Then another will have to top both of them and by then the party will be off and running.

I’ll already be cremated by the time the party begins. No open casket, pulllleeeze. I don’t want little kids gripping their parents’ legs and getting squeamish because there’s a dead body in that box. And I don’t want anybody to sigh and say, "She looks good."

I won’t look good, for God’s sake. I’ll look dead. Anyway, I’d never convince my family to lay me out in my favorite outfit – Ralph Lauren jeans, a light blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up twice and my thin gold necklace.

If things go right, most of my body parts will either be used up or donated anyway, so there will be stuff missing – eyeballs and skin and kidneys and maybe a heart or a liver. It’s hard to put a body back together so it looks like it hasn’t been chopped up and passed around.

No bagpipes. No Irish music. No drum solos. No accordians. No rap or hip hop or whatever passes for music these days. No flowers either.

OK. Maybe a couple vases of loosely arranged daisies. I love daisies. Send the flower money to a charitable organization but be sure it’s one that will use it wisely.

As for former boyfriends and lovers. I want them seated in a roped-off section in the front of the church, so they can think about what might have been. I’d like the ones who dumped me to be escorted politely to a front pew. To the ones I dumped – second row. And I’m sorry.

I’ve just been to a funeral for a friend of a friend, a man I knew slightly, but liked. His sons spoke about him with truth and love. The party was at his favorite hangout and it rocked. The whole thing was nice and . . . well . . . it got me thinking.


　

By Margie Reins Smith (10/27/09)

Olive isn’t easy.

She’s a retired high school math teacher – "the scariest teacher I ever had" – claim several former students. She’s overbearing, overweight and over-sensitive. She’s sometimes loud. Sometimes pushy. She’s smart, level-headed, practical. At times she’s compassionate and kind.

When they’re older, many of those same students claim she was the best teacher they ever had.

The most poignant vignette in Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge, is when Olive’s husband, the long-suffering, affable Henry, comes back from the grocery store with a bouquet of flowers.

"‘For my wife,’ he said, handing them to her. They were the saddest damn things. Daisies dyed blue among the white and ludicrously pink ones, some of them half-dead.

"‘Put them in that pot,’ Olive said, pointing to an old blue vase. . . . Henry came and put his arms around her; it was early autumn and chilly, and his woolen shirt smelled faintly of wood chips and mustiness. She stood, waiting for the hug to end. Then she went outside and planted her tulip bulbs."

A week after the incident, Henry steps out of his car in the parking lot of the big Shop ’n Save and collapses. The stroke leaves him mute, blind and wheelchair-bound. His mind is mud, but he wears his usual smile.

"The tulips bloomed in ridiculous splendor," Strout tells us.

Olive Kitteridge is not a novel, but a collection of short, razor-sharp stories, reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. We see the inhabitants of a fictional town in Maine from multiple perspectives. Each story also offers a glimpse or sketch or an in-depth look at Olive.

She’s accustomed to thinking one thing : "Oh for God’s Sake!" and saying another. She sits next to her estranged son in the cramped, cluttered apartment he shares with his second wife and the wife’s two unappealing children.

"She wanted to say, ‘It’s awful good to see you, kid.’ But she didn’t say anything, and he didn’t either. For a long while they sat together like that. She would have sat on a patch of cement anywhere to have this – her son; a bright buoy bobbing in the bay of her own quiet terror.

‘So, you’re a landlord,’ she finally said, because the oddity of that struck her now.

‘Yup.’"

The stories are about partnerships. Some partners are married; some are not; some are young; some are in their 70s; some in their prime. Strout shines a particularly sharp laser on long-term partnerships. Jane Houlton, now in her 70s, compares her long-term marriage to Bob: "It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert." Ah hah – read on. Things are not as Jane describes.

Other themes – suicide, gossip, unexpressed anger, anorexia, infidelity, lonliness, doughnuts(!) and the desire of all people to feel needed and valued by others – run through Olive Kitteridge. The book is dense with comedy, tragedy, introspection, pathos and a razor-sharp examination of the human condition.

It’s also laced with humor.

"You could laugh your head off with that one, ha-ha thud," said Olive to no one.

I’d give it four stars out of four. It’s one of the few books I’m anxious to re-read.

By Margie Reins Smith (10/19/09)

Some people are paranoid about food expiration dates. In the olden days, when I was growing up, if something didn’t smell good or look fresh or taste quite right, you considered it spoiled and threw it away or spit it into the sink.

If your Rice Krispies were wiggling, you made a face, yelled "Eeeeeeuooo," and dumped them in the trash. If the lettuce on your sandwich was wilted, you picked it off with thumb and forefinger and disposed of it. Then you ate your sandwich.

I attended a summer camp where we were instructed, up front, before the first meal was served: "If you take a sip of milk and you think it’s sour, drink it anyway. Sour milk won’t kill you."

Expiration dates are perplexing. You could come home from the supermarket with $150 worth of fresh food packed in 40 flimsy, two-pint plastic bags, one item per bag. While unloading the goods and stashing stuff in the freezer, refrigerator and cupboards, you might note that some items carry a "sell by" date; others are stamped with a "consume by" date, still others have a "best when used by" date and a few are labeled with flat-out "expiration" dates.

Are these suggestions? Rules? Laws? Are they guidelines? Or are they cryptic clues for different degrees of spoilage?

On the "best when used by" date, the baby spinach leaves are crisp and green; the lemon smells lemony; and the cottage cheese is creamy and white.

On the "sell by" date, the spinach is floppy; the lemon has shrunk somewhat; the cottage cheese is watery.

On the "consume by" date, the spinach has wilted; the lemon has morphed into a lopsided version of its former self and sports an interesting patch of blue fuzz; and the cottage cheese smells odd.

On the "expiration" date, the spinach is downright slimy. The lemon is squishy and furry. The cottage cheese has turned blue on one edge.

If we ignore the cautions, do we face agonizing, painful, lingering illnesses, followed by excruciatingly malodorous, disfiguring, brutish deaths? Or are these dates yet another sign of our times – blatant overreaction to an infinitesimal danger, followed by the passage of complicated laws requiring:

* Federal, state and local funds
* An engineering team
* A go-around with the National Fresh Spinach Advisory Board (or whatever)
* The creation of a mission statement, written goals, a public advisory committee, policing policies and stiff penalties for those who don’t toe the line.

Give me a break. Who would willingly eat blue cottage cheese?

The mother of two of my grandsons was raised with expiration dates. She is the Expiration Date Nazi.

When she discovered I had given the boys some yogurt that was two days past its prime, I had to prove it was OK by grabbing the yogurt out of their little hands and eating it myself.

This is not a good example for children.

This essay first appeared in The Grosse Pointe News

By Margie Reins Smith (10/12/09)

When I was a teenager, my mother periodically took a stand outside my bedroom door, hands on hips, and ranted about the Collyer Brothers.

Homer and Langley Collyer were reclusive bachelors. They were wealthy and well-educated. They both earned degrees from Columbia University. They were members of a well-respected New York family and they lived in their deceased parents’ pricey three-story Fifth Avenue apartment. Langley, who fancied himself an inventor, worked diligently creating what he claimed would be a forever-current "dateless" newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need. Homer, who was blind and a pretty good pianist, described his brother as "eccentric" and "intellectual."

Langley was neither. He was nuts.

So was Homer.

Homer & Langley, E.L. Doctorow’s newest novel, is loosely patterned after the Collyer brothers, who were found dead in their apartment in 1947, amid some 130 tons of trash.

Nuts is politically incorrect. Langley probably had what today would be called Compulsive Hoarding Syndrome, a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For decades, he prowled the streets of New York City collecting "stuff." He dragged home thousands of magazines and books, broken furniture, empty milk bottles, candles, machinery, surplus military paraphernalia, musical instruments (14 pianos!), guns, rubber tires, umbrellas, scrap metal, and you-name-it. He never threw anything away. The newspapers were bundled, tied with string and stacked from floor to ceiling. The bales were pushed against the walls, eventually forming a warren of tunnels and passages through the rooms of the apartment.

Doctorow takes liberties with the details of the Collyer brothers’ story, extending their lifetimes into the ’70s and fleshing out the reasons they might have gotten themselves into such a mess. He brings a colorful parade of his own made-up characters through the apartment, too.

Doctorow’s 1975 novel, Ragtime, a best-seller, was the first of this genre, often referred to as "fictionalized" history. The imagined characters in Ragtime interacted with celebrities of the day: Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, Henry Ford and more.

Homer & Langley is a mini historical survey of Manhattan in the first two-thirds of the last century, seen through the eyes of a couple of eccentric recluses. Langley was damaged in the Great War, probably by mustard gas. The Collyers’ parents died in the 1920s. That’s when the brothers begin getting goofy. Doctorow traces their deterioration through the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, right smack into the Age of Aquarius.

It was a interesting read. I like fictionalized history. I enjoyed Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan, a fictionalized biography of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The book was written from the point of view of his second wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the women for whom he left his wife and six children. I also loved T.C. Boyle’s The Women, which viewed Frank Lloyd Wright through the eyes of each of his four wives. (FLW is a fascinating genius/rascal.) I loved American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld, which was loosely based on the life of Laura Bush. (If I were Laura Bush, however I’d be furious – FURIOUS – at the liberties Sittenfeld took with the intimate details of my life. Remember the sex scenes? The bathroom scene?) I also enjoyed The Importance of Being Kennedy by Laurie Graham, a fabricated biography of Rose Kennedy.

The Collyers just aren’t as interesting as Frank Lloyd Wright or Laura Bush or Rose Kennedy. Homer and Langley were nuts. I give the book, Homer & Langley, one-and-a-half stars out of four.

My mother, who wasn’t nuts, gets five stars for exaggeration.

By Margie Reins Smith (10/5/09)

The Editor’s Intensive, a two-day event sponsored by Writer’s Digest magazine, is designed for aspiring writers who are working on a project (a novel, for example, or a non-fiction book or a children's book) and are wondering if they’re on the right track. It’s also for those who have completed a book and are trying to figure out how to get the dang thing published.

I attended the Editor’s Intensive workshop last weekend at WD’s Cincinnati headquarters, along with nearly 40 other (mostly) unpublished writers from places as far away as Texas, Alabama, California, Florida, New York and Georgia. We immersed ourselves in writing and publishing and soaked up buckets of information during a full day of talks by WD editors and publishers. We were sponges.

The lecturers talked about how to get published in what they called "transformational times." Publishing is no longer limited to hardbound and softcover books. New writers can consider options unthinkable as few as 20 years ago: Web sites, print-on-demand books, blogs, self publishing, subsidized publishing, e-publishing and more. Some new publishing gimmick is probably being developed as I write.

Jane Friedman, WD’s publisher and editorial director, assured us that some 400,000 new books are published every year, 75,000 of those by five big publishing houses. So we can still aim for that nice new, hardback book with the colorful dust cover, propped seductively on top of a pile of its clones just inside the front door of the local book store.

One of the attendees at the conference had a Kindle, Amazon.com’s electronic book reader. It was the star of the afternoon. We all gathered around to check out this new way to read books. We marveled at its lightness, its huge capacity, its portability and its price (which, surprisingly, is decreasing).

Some nuggets I plucked from WD’s Editor’s Intensive:

* Writers today have to be actively involved in the marketing of their books. This is more important than ever before.

* Writers – particularly those who write non-fiction – must have platforms. These aren’t shoes. Platforms are the myriad ways authors can reach potential buyers of their books. Boiled down, it’s all the ways they can get involved in the marketing process. They can give talks, write blogs, teach classes, send out mailings, make personal appearances and/or promote their books in various creative ways involving print and broadcast media, the Internet and more.

* Writers must be visible online. With blogs, like this one. Facebook. Even Twitter, which I am resisting, since I can’t see any earthly reason why anybody would give a rip about what I’m doing now, unless it was either illegal or immoral.

* My novel (working title "Goodnight, Gracie") needs to be tweaked. Friedman, who provided a one-on-one critique of my first 50 pages, offered solid suggestions for getting conflict into each scene and hooking my potential reader right from the get-go. I’m enthusiastically tackling a rewrite of the first few chapters.

Postscript: How many readers of this blog – both of you – either have or are considering buying a Kindle or another brand of electronic reader? Send me a note about how you use it, how you like it or why you want it. I’m at ms0006@comcast.net. I’ll gather some facts about e-readers and blog on it.

(Blog on it: That sounds nasty, doesn’t it?)

By Margie Reins Smith (9/28/09)

A well-known author – I wish I could remember his/her name – advised beginning writers to figuratively march up to a reader, look him in the eye, grab him by the lapels and begin telling the story. A good writer should be able to let go of those metaphoric lapels after a few pages because the reader will drop everything to follow him around, asking: "What happened next?" "And then what?" "And then what happened?"

Kathryn Stockett, a first-time novelist, has gotten the hang of the lapel-grabbing thing.

The Help is the story of three southern women. They all live in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, just as the civil rights movement is stretching and flexing its muscles.

Two of the women, Aibileen and Minny, are maids. Their mothers were maids. Their grandmothers were maids. Their great-grandmothers were slaves.

The third woman, Skeeter, is a newly minted graduate of Ole Miss, a young woman of privilege, class, education and money. Skeeter was raised by a caring, nurturing maid.

Aibileen and Minny, of course, are black. Skeeter is white.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, written and unwritten rules for interaction between an upper-class white woman and her maid were crystal clear. Among those rules:

* The maid follows orders, without question or complaint. "Yes, ma’am," is her standard response.

* The maid never sits down in the presence of her employer.

* The maid never has a meal at the same table with her employer.

* In fact, the maid has separate dishes and eating utensils which are washed and stored separately.

* The maid has her own bathroom.

* . . . Not to mention her own neighborhood, library, church, schools, retail stores and . . . outlook on life.

Nevertheless, these three unlikely co-conspirators get together, in secret, to write a tell-all book about what it’s like to be black, female and unquestionably subservient in the pre-civil rights South.

This is the lapel-grabbing story.

The characters, especially the black women, are wonderfully, carefully, lovingly drawn, with details and dialects and motivations that ring true. The white women are a bit over the top – almost cartoons. Miss Hilly is too cruel and vindictive; Miss Celia is too Dolly Partonish; Skeeter’s mother is too controlling. And Mr. Johnny, given his past history with Miss Hilly, would certainly have figured out why the Junior Leaguers were ignoring his wife.

But the lapel-grabbing story carries them all along, hurtling toward a conclusion that is both satisfying and surprising.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is a good read. I’d give it  three out of four stars.

By Margie Reins Smith (9/21/09)

A few hours ago, I murdered a bulbous brown spider with hairy brown- and black-striped legs who had the nerve to dangle herself from the top of my screen door exactly at my eye level. The murder weapon was poison: three squirts from a large red and green can of something labeled ROACH, Ant & Spider Killer.

"Kills on contact," it promised. "Guaranteed."

Just in case I didn’t get the point, the manufacturer placed three menacing pictures on the can – one each of an ant, a spider and a ROACH.

I wondered why the word ROACH is in bigger letters than the words ant and spider. ROACHES are more disgusting, I suppose.

When I was growing up, my parents were friends with a couple whose names were Floyd and Maxine Roach. This couple owned a restaurant. They decided not to use their last name for the restaurant. I think it was called Floyd’s Lunch or something.

But I digress.

The arachnid murder reminded me of my youngest daughter, now in her 30s, who still works herself into a virtual seizure when she encounters a spider. For whatever reason, she can deal with yellow jackets, mosquitoes, ants, ROACHES, flies, wasps and whatever six-legged creature sashays across her field of vision. Only spiders send her into overdrive.

When she was a little girl, she used to wake me in the middle of the night to kill a spider she spotted in a remote corner of the bathroom ceiling. Never her father. Me. Kids are like that. No child ever padded into his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night, leaned on Daddy’s shoulder and said: "I think I’m gonna throw up."

Always mother.

This daughter insists that when a spider is murdered, even though it is squashed beyond recognition, it must not be place in a wastebasket. It must be flushed. She examines the toilet bowl post-flush, to be sure it went down. "If you put them in a wastebasket," she insists, "sometimes they come alive again."

Does she think these spiders will regain consciousness and stalk her?

Once, when she was in her 20s and living in her own condo at least 45 minutes across town from me, she called in the middle of the night because there was a threatening-looking spider in her bedroom.

"Smack it," I mumbled.

"It’s so big I can see its eyes," she said.

"Smack it anyway. Spray it. Step on it. Hit it with your shoe. I’m going back to sleep."

That night, she actually talked a friend into getting out of bed, getting in his car, driving to her condo and killing that spider.

She should be in sales.

Normally, I consider spiders Mother Nature’s good guys. I rely on them to patrol my basement. I know they will slurp up centipedes and millipedes (who, if given enough time and some space, will grow to be as big as mice.)

However. If a spider flaunts its bloated body and its wiggly little legs and its beady little eyes smack in front of my nose in broad daylight in my house, even though it’s a good guy, it’s gotta take the consequences.

By Margie Reins Smith (9/14/09)

     The difference between a garage sale and a trash pickup is how close the items are to the curb. When it comes to garage sales, I've been around the block a few times. As a seller and as a buyer. Ditto for putting the trash out.

     By the time women my age (motherly/grandmotherly types) have traded in our training bras and tubes of Clearasil for heavy-duty underwires and Botox, every one of us has collected way too much stuff.

     Having too much stuff is like having clogged arteries. It keeps you from running at peak efficiency. It makes you groggy and sluggish. I want to be free of all my 33 1/3 LPs, rusty fireplace tools, circle pins, bell-bottom maternity pants, decoupaged cigar boxes, 8-track tapes and my mother's knee-length skunk fur coat.

The typical garage sale goes something like this: A few women get together and set a date, select a garage and place an ad in the community newspaper. Each one goes home and sorts through her old stuff. The old stuff gets hauled out, dusted off, polished, fluffed up and carried to the designated garage, where items are grouped according to type, placed on wobbly card tables and "priced to sell."

"Priced to sell" means ridiculously cheap. Readers' Digest condensed books and dog-eared paperbacks are 5 cents apiece. Plastic patio chairs go for $2. Ski boots are $5. Woven baskets, figurines, mismatched coffee mugs, Styrofoam
snowmen and framed posters are 10 cents each.

I am always amazed at the different points of view between vendors and vendees at garage sales. It's a game.

Take a chipped, gaudy turquoise-and-brown flower vase that has served as a home to hundreds of generations of spiders in my basement for 50 years. I see a chipped, gaudy turquoise-and-brown vase. Someone else sees a rare piece of Art Deco pottery manufactured in Ohio by Rookwood. She snags it for $5 and brags about it.

Boo. I should have done my research. I lose.

Another vendor offers a crudely crafted wooden goose covered with peeling paint, wearing a droopy, stained, dust-catching brown plaid ribbon around its neck. I see a charming piece of folk art. I whoop and holler that I got it for $2.

Yippee. I win.

Watch out when planning a garage sale with a bunch of neighbors or friends. Be careful. Trust me.

In theory, the idea is brilliant. You all clean out your basements – which is good. You recycle your usable items – also good. You get to sit around on a driveway on a Saturday morning drinking coffee with friends, watching the items fly off the shelves. Good.

Uh oh. Your first clue comes as you're arranging the stuff in the garage on the night before the sale. You see a toaster oven that your neighbor wants to sell.

"Sure, it works," she says. "I bought a new toaster and I just don't use this one anymore."

Then you spot a pair of cross-country skis that, for sure, would fit your daughter and keep her from borrowing your skis. As you paw through a pile of paperbacks, you notice two Peter Mayle books you haven't read yet.

Your friend takes a shine to the framed Golden Gate bridge poster you're selling, even though it's so faded, the only colors remaining are the blues and pinks. Another co-seller finds a roasting pan she needs, a pair of jeans that will probably fit her son and a pair of gold earrings exactly like the ones she sold at a garage sale last year by mistake.

At the end of the day you all will have sold many items, mostly to each other. You will still have a garage full of stuff.

This is the stuff that gets moved to the curb.


This essay first appeared in the Grosse Pointe News

By Margie Reins Smith (9/7/09)

I am more than halfway through a series of 12 Yoga classes. The brochure said it was for beginners. You’d think I would be getting the hang of it by now.

I’m not.

Our instructor is a willowy, 20-something, rubbery-limbed woman on stilts. She’s about 6 feet tall (five of those feet are her legs), and she weighs about 105 pounds wringing wet, including big jangly earrings. She doesn’t sweat.

She has long sleek dark hair wrapped up and pinned to the top of her head with something that looks like a spring-loaded clothespin, a dazzling smile, an aura of serenity and competence, and she can squat, sitting on her heels, indefinitely.

Really. She crouches, knees bent, feet flat on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees. She seems perfectly comfortable, poring over our class list and chatting affably.

She brings her boom box to class and plays lovely, chanty music. She dims the lights. She drifts around the gymnasium, sylphlike, speaking (verrry softly, mind you) about relaxing our muscles and feeling our own bodies; about breathing deeply.

"When you inhale," she says, "inhale deeply. Take three or four times longer to inhale. Exhale slowly, deeply.

"Close your eyes and gaze inward," she whispers. "Yoga is individual. It doesn’t matter what the person next to you is doing. Yoga is about you and what feels good for you, what your body needs. Your body will tell you what it needs."

I close my eyes and gaze inward and I see guts.

I see a stomach contorted with hunger, a slippery tangled jumble of liver and esophagus and spleen, a pancreas industriously pumping out insulin, some twisted coils of colon, a trachea and lots of frizzled nerve endings.

I sit cross-legged (sort of) on my $24.95 specially-designed-for-Yoga cushioned exercise mat and try to follow directions. I try to relax; I try to release the tension that she tells us builds up in our bodies during the day; I try to breathe deeply; I try to clear my mind.

Instead, I feel like a huge bloated slug. And I’m hungry.

She wraps her left arm behind her waist, throws her right arm over her shoulder and actually clasps her hands together.

Come on.

She tells us to be a table (both hands and both knees squarely on the floor, backs straight). She tells us to be a downward-facing dog (both hands and both feet planted flat on the floor, head dropped down). She tells us to close our eyes and not peek.

I peeked. Most of the other people were peeking back. Grimacing, too.

My favorite part of the class comes at the end. We all stretch out on our backs on our $24.95 specially-designed-for-Yoga cushioned exercise mats, arms at our sides, palms up, eyes closed, breathing deeply and evenly. She turns off the lights. She cranks up the shimmery music.

We lie there for what seems like 10 minutes. I love it. I go home greatly refreshed.

Sometimes I feel taller, too.

This essay first appeared in The Grosse Pointe News

By Margie Reins Smith (8/31/09)

I’m writing a novel, so, when people ask what I do, I say (albeit, sheepishly) "I’m a writer." I’ve wanted to say this since age 11, when I became enchanted with "The Secret Garden" and a series of sappy dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune: "Lad, a Dog," "Further Adventures of Lad," "Buff, a Collie," "Bruce" and more.

What do writers do? If I don’t have appointments or scheduled activities, here’s my typical week day:

Get up, shower, eat breakfast. Make coffee. Alas, no morning newspaper, so breakfast is short and sweet.

Take steaming cup of black coffee to in-home office. Fire up computer. Wait while some dumb program called Registry Booster does its thing. Can’t figure out how to get Registry Booster to go away. Welcomed it once, lured by slick ad that promised to make computer zip along at breakneck speed, then discovered Registry Booster wanted me to PAY for this service. Changed mind. Hit delete. Put in trash. Emptied trash. Registry Booster returned. Hit delete again. Registry Booster returned. Continues to return every time I boot up.

Say nasty things about Registry Booster, but put up with little dance it does every morning before my computer is ready to get down to business.

Should start writing. Chapter 33 is next. Almost finished with first draft.

Check email. Open five forwarded jokes and videos from friends. Chuckle softly. (All are mildly amusing, even second or third time around.) Answer email. Write new emails. Check grossepointetoday.com for new posts. Read posts.

Go to Detroit Free Press Web site. Flip through pages and read stuff that interests me, ending with Luann, Zits, Mother Goose & Grimm, Grand Avenue, Speed Bump and Non Sequitur.

Fire up printer. Print Freep’s daily Sudoku. Begin Sudoku. Put Sudoku aside.

Replenish coffee. Scrutinize backyard bird feeders and bird bath for interesting birds. Put load of laundry in washer. Take phone call. Make phone call. Empty dishwasher. Think about what to make for dinner.

Check email again. Answer new email. Check Facebook. Read new Facebook posts. Check blog. Check blog hit counter to see if anybody has read blog. Alas, nobody.

One game of Scrabble couldn’t hurt. Play Scrabble for 45 minutes. Check email. Check blog counter.

Open document labeled Chapter 33. Type "Chapter 33" at top of page. Format page. Kick self for not figuring out how to save format (line spacing, paragraph indents, page numbering) so every time new document is created, format will be same. Put laundry in dryer.

Replenish coffee. Horray for caffeine.

Go to bathroom. Boo, caffeine.

Make To Do list. Check email. Check Facebook. One more game of Scrabble because personal score is nearing 400, longtime goal. Lose. One more game.

Google Alzheimer’s Disease. One of novel’s characters has it. Novel is about old people – scratch old; elderly people – scratch elderly; mature people – scratch mature. Novel is about senior citizens, their unique problems and relationships.

Take phone call from walking buddy. Go for walk with two friends. Consider this important, as Surgeon General says seniors should get 30 minutes of exercise most days of  week. Wonder why Surgeon General is labeled "general." Also, why Attorney General is a "general." Make note to self: Google this later.

Eat lunch. Open Chapter 33 again. Write.

When I visited Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West, I loved seeing the actual room in which he wrote. It was a loft above his pool house. He got to his workroom by walking across a catwalk from the second floor bedroom of his big, high-ceilinged Spanish-style Colonial home. The tour guide assured us that every morning, hangover or no hangover, Hemingway walked across the swaying bridge to this workroom and sat down in front of his typewriter, where he wrote. He worked from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and produced 300 to 700 words. Every day.

Then he took a nap or went fishing. By cocktail hour, he was on a stool in Sloppy Joe’s Bar. He stayed late and drank a lot.

But he was a writer. He wrote. Every single day.

I’m not a writer. Not yet.

Generation Xers and Ageing Baby-Boomers 
are much closer than I thought

By Margie Reins Smith (8/24/09)

I learned three cool things about Generation X last weekend.

Observation No. 1: Gen Xers (those born in the 1970s and 80s, roughly) are linked to each other by a tough, fibrous technological connective tissue. It’s stronger than a spider web. But it’s sticky, like a web. It’s wireless and digital. Gen Xers are constantly in touch with their significant others, their children and their extended families. They also communicate frequently with a string of friends and acquaintances. Daily. Hourly.

This is a good, not a bad thing.

I went shopping for a wedding gown with my youngest daughter – (who, by the way, is going to marry a Prince of a man) and three of her five bridesmaids-to-be.

I think I am a 21st Century senior citizen. After all, I have a cell phone. I’m on Facebook. I email. I blog. I know my way around the Web, even though I stick pretty closely to Google, Mapquest, Scrabble, my email account and Grossepointetoday.com, my community news Web site.

But I had no idea how good this Gen X bunch is at keeping in touch.

On Saturday, we had five cell phones among us. Somebody’s purse played a jingly tune on average, say, every 20 minutes, all day long. One bridesmaid and I had the same ring tone, so when we heard our song, we both reached for our purses. I pressed mine close to my ear to determine if the call was for me. It hardly ever was.

They all had fancy blueberries or blackberries or strawberries or whatever-berries, all stocked with dozens of thumbprint photos of their adorable children and snapshots from their vacations and recent family outings. They also had the names, addresses, home phones, cell phones, office phones, fax numbers and email addresses of hundreds of other people at their fingertips. Their fingertips are agile, too, and all four of them could thumb out a text message faster than I can think.

We caravanned around metropolitan Detroit for an entire day, visiting four different retail establishments that dealt solely in bridal gowns, bridesmaids’ attire and wedding accessories. By the end of the day, the bride’s two sisters, the two absent bridesmaids and various other friends of the bride and the bridesmaids had – right in front of their own eyes on cell phones or computers or blueberries – 10 or 12 pictures of the bride-to-be wearing the dresses she really, really liked.

The only person who didn’t have pictures of these dresses was the groom-to-be. He’s supposed to be surprised, next May, when she glides down the aisle into his loving arms.

Observation No. 2: Women are all – I’m talking about women of all ages, not just Gen X and Ageing Baby-Boomers – very, very conscious of our breasts. We talked about breasts all day long. Eighty percent of the bridal gowns we saw were strapless – so the topic was right under our noses, so to speak. How much cleavage is too much for a blushing bride in what is supposed to be a gorgeous, but demure, white gown?

We discussed breast feeding. Four of us are mothers several times over. Did we nurse our babies? Did our mothers nurse us? Did our grandmothers nurse our mothers? If your child has to come home from kindergarten for lunch because he’s still nursing, have you kept at it too long? We talked about una-breasts (the look produced by certain kinds of sports bras), breast cancer, mammograms and breasts that are (we each could check at least two of these categories) too big, too small, too saggy, too high, too low, uneven or pointed in two different directions.

One of the saleswomen, during our discussion of how much cleavage is good for a bride and how much is tacky, referred to breasts as "the girls." This is new to me, but apparently I’m the last woman on earth to hear this nickname for breasts. I love it. I came away from the day-long outing with the conviction that breasts are just as important accessories for Generation X as they are for my generation.

Observation No. 3: A woman over the age of 25 who is looking for a dress – a really special, drop-dead dress for a momentous occasion – will recognize that dress as soon as she zips it up and checks the mirror. Each woman worth her salt knows what makes her look terrific. Is this instinctual?

I think not. It comes from years and years of trial and error. It’s the result of feedback we’ve gotten from our male companions, our trusted girlfriends, complete strangers and even our enemies.

The perfect dress? Women of all ages know it when they see it.

I think she found THE dress. I love it. I love her, too.

By Margie Reins Smith (8/10/09)

Lisa Genova’s debut novel, "Still Alice," is about a hot topic: Alzheimer’s Disease. Genova’s story, however, is different.

Remember the movies "The Notebook" and "Away from Her?" Both were views of an Alzheimer’s patient from the outside, in. "Still Alice" offers us a look at this heartbreaking disease from the patient’s point of view, from the inside out.

Information about Alzheimer’s Disease is all over bookstore shelves. You can find books on the biology of the disease and its possible causes. You’ll see books full of clinical studies, pharmacological information, tips for caregivers and family members. You can read up on early signs to watch for, patient case studies, and you’ll even find dozens of heartrending memoirs about Alzheimer’s patients, penned by their anguished loved ones.

Hardly any accounts are from the patient’s point of view.

Genova’s book is fiction, but it’s grounded in solid research. It offers a fresh look at Alzheimer’s as experienced by protagonist Alice Howland, a 50-year-old Harvard professor of psychology and an expert in linguistics. She’s smart, successful, happily married, the mother of three grown children, a grandmother-in-waiting. She runs. She travels. She lectures. She writes. She works.

She begins to note unusual lapses in her memory. She can’t find a word; she becomes disoriented in her own neighborhood; she repeats herself; she completely forgets to go on a business trip; she introduces herself to a colleague’s new wife a few minutes after they have already been introduced.

Alice chalks it up to menopause or lack of sleep or the ageing process. Then she thinks it might be a brain tumor. She worries. She makes an appointment with her primary care physician.

The diagnosis comes several months later, after dozens of tests and re-tests: early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Apparently, the current conventional wisdom is wrong. We’ve all been reassured: If you think you have Alzheimer’s Disease, then for sure you don’t have it. Alice knows exactly what she has and exactly what is going to happen to her. The only variable is how long it will take. She’s terrified. She denies. Rages. Bargains. Copes.

The remainder of the novel tells the month by month progression of the disease for which there is no cure, the disease that inevitably leads to loss of memory, personality and identity. During these months, Alice breaks new ground by putting together a support group for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. Caregiver support groups, she discovers, are a dime a dozen. It’s the patients themselves who need groups.

The novel has some lapses. Some of the scenes are predictable and stilted. The dialogue is often stilted or unrealistic. But the reactions of Alice’s three children and husband ring true and her own thoughts and experiences are based on actual cases and offer the reader a new view – more personal and private – of the agonizing deterioration of an Alzheimer’s patient.

Just before she is diagnosed, Alice prepares to make a dessert which had become a Christmas Eve tradition for her family:

"Alice took out the ingredients for the white-chocolate bread pudding and placed them on the counter – vanilla extract, a pint of heavy cream, milk, sugar, white chocolate, a loaf of challah bread, and two half-dozen cartons of eggs. A dozen eggs? If the piece of notebook paper with her mother’s recipe on it still existed, Alice didn’t know where it was. She hadn’t needed to refer to it in years. It was a simple recipe . . . and she’d made it every Christmas Eve since she was a young girl. How many eggs? It had to be more than six, or she would’ve taken out only one carton. Was it seven, eight, nine?

"She tried skipping over the eggs for a moment, but the other ingredients looked just as foreign. Was she supposed to use all of the cream or measure out only some of it? How much sugar? Was she supposed to combine everything all at once or in a particular sequence? What pan did she use? At what temperature did she bake it and for how long? No possibility rang true. The information just wasn’t there."

Alice reacts to her confusion with anger. She throws the eggs, one by one, in the sink, splattering the wall and the counter and the cabinets.

Months later, after she has deteriorated even more, her husband takes her to a hospital where her daughter has just given birth to twins, Alice’s first grandchildren.

Alice isn’t sure why her husband has brought her to the room and she doesn’t recognize the woman who is asleep in the bed. Then,

"A young man returned rolling a cart carrying two clear plastic, rectangular tubs. Each tub contained a tiny baby, their bodies entirely swaddled in white blankets and the tops of their heads covered in white hats so that only their faces showed."

The young man asks Alice if she would like to hold one of the babies.

"Alice nodded.

"She held the tiny, sleeping baby, her head in the crook of her elbow, her bum in her hand, her body up against her chest, her ear against her heart. The tiny, sleeping baby breathed tiny, shallow breaths through tiny round nostrils. Alice instinctively kissed her blotchy pink pudgy cheek . . . Alice inhaled deeply, breathing in the scrumptious smell of her beautiful granddaughter, filling herself with a sense of relief and peace she hadn’t known in a long time."

Genova holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard. She spent months on research, reading up on the disease and the neuropsychological tests used to diagnose it. She interviewed physicians, caregivers, facilitators of support groups, Alzheimer’s research experts and dozens of people actually living with the disease.

Genova decided to write the novel in 2004. She quit her job and began the research, then did the actual writing at a local Starbucks while her 6-year-old was in school. She completed it in 2006, then did all the right things to dangle the manuscript in front of agents and publishers. Nobody bit.

She self-published the book in 2007.

Ten months later, she found an agent who immediately sold it to Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster Inc., for slightly more than a half million dollars.

"Still Alice" was released the first week of January. It jumped onto the New York Times Bestseller List on Jan. 25 – in the No. 5 slot.

Genova is an online columnist for the National Alzheimer’s Association. "Still Alice has been reviewed – and generally praised – by Time Magazine, AARP, USA Today, the Boston Globe, The New York Times and more. She’s working on her second novel, "Left Neglected," the story of a woman who recovers from a traffic accident with normal intelligence and memory, but who has lost the ability to process information coming from the left side of her body.

"Still Alice" is reminiscent of Mark Haddon’s novel, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," which is narrated by an autistic teenager, 15-year-old Christopher.

"Still Alice" reminds readers that Alzheimers’ patients are still in there, still inside their bodies, living with their pock-marked, deteriorating brains. Alice is still Alice, even though she can’t remember her youngest daughter’s name (she refers to her as "the actress") or her husband’s name (she calls him "the owner of the house") or her connection to the newborn infant she cradles on her lap. Alice is foggy on the details, but she still has feelings and connections and pleasures and pain and love. "Still Alice" gives us a new way of looking at the tragedy of Alzheimer’s Disease.