Talking about the olden days:
Jennifer lived in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn with her stepmother, father, half-brother Alex . Her brothers Tommy and Miles lived there too. Jennifer was also Canadian but from Hamilton, Ontario (which always seems like another planet to me being from Montreal) so we had that bond; but we also had the going out and partying bond. We were young and early 20s and beautiful so we had a lot of adventures.
Working for the Phoenix had its drawbacks because the manager, Mike Armstrong, was perpetually short of cash. This impacted payroll and of course ultimately our paychecks. We knew they wouldn't be covered if we went to the bank, so we'd cash them at the local vendors because Jennifer was the salesperson and she knew them all and they trusted her. Of course we had to go to different ones every two weeks because those checks would bounce.
Once some of the vendors came in and removed all the typewriters as collateral until they were made good for their losses. We hid under the desk til they were gone. They were the huge, old-fashioned wooden oak kind so there was a lot of room to hide. Judy Linscott was the editor and she also would hide under the desk when this guy Nino would come in and and wanted to bug her with stories of local politics that she didn’t want to hear about.
Thursday night were going-to-press nights. I hung out in the back room with the production and editorial staff and watched the pasting up of the boards with a wax roller. I was fascinated with the process of creating an actual printed newspaper. So I’d watch and learn and flirt with Jon and we’d all eat pizza and drink beer til 2 in the AM. Then there was a mad rush to get the boards to the printer for publication early Friday morning. I’ve never learned things formally, always on the fly, and typically if something interests me enough I eventually make it into a passion or career. In this case I made graphic design and production into a career that landed me at The New York Times, working with Lou Silverstein who was the design editor for all the sections.
This flood of memories has only come about recently. I came here last week directly from New Orleans and in my fantasy, thought that the baby would be born the minute I got here or at least within 24 hours. Every day I thought that; it wasn’t until yesterday when I got that text about the moon being new and thus not labor-inducing that I stopped “expecting”. Seriously, I didn’t dare stray more than 10 blocks away from my daughter’s home in case she went into labor. That meant not reaching out to any of my friends, not going to hear music, nor running around to museums or even Broadway shows like I would normally do when I’m back on the East Coast. Every hour I expected something to happen. In the middle of the night instead of turning off my phone as I always do I kept it close by my bed.
Over the past nine (!) months, I’ve been following my daughter’s pregnancy progress via text, phone and weekly midwife baby update emails forwarded to the close family. But now that I’m in the same town as she is, something that I looked so forward to, I thought the whole situation would be different. I guess maybe I thought she would be lying around with her feet propped up on cushions sipping lemonades and wearing a little maternity dress. Instead she’s running around like she always does, stressing a little bit, doing errands, walking the dog, doing laundry, painting shelves for the baby’s room, taking the subway here and there. Nothing really seems to be different except she has a big basketball in her tummy.
This afternoon Ama and I went to get a latte for me at the Brooklyn Roastery and talked about Elliot Spitzer the once governor caught with a prostitute. He inherited and is managing his father’s real estate empire, and is building a multi-billion high-rise in South Williamsburg with 2 rooftop swimming pools. Ama thought that soon we wouldn’t be able to even see the skyline of Manhattan from the waterfront because of all the re-zoning and development. We saw a man dressed in khakis and polo shirt taking pix of buildings up and down the street and decided he himself was an evil developer.
By this time it was really really hot out - around 3 o'clock - my daughter was wilting and she had to leave soon to go to her sonogram. It was humid really high percentage of humidity got back to the apartment and ate our sandwiches that we had picked up at the corner deli after my coffee. Collapsed on the sofa and she then braved the subway and waddled off, whereupon I watched three episodes of “Orange is the New Black” starting from the very beginning all over again. Somehow this waiting just makes me exhausted; either that or the heat. I feel like I’m pregnant myself: my tummy is bloated and my back hurts and all I want to do is lie on the sofa and watch TV but then that’s a common feeling that I have.
A few hours later my sweet son-in-law came in from work and started making dinner. Then my daughter came in with my ex-husband, both of them exhausted from traveling on the subway and the sonogram which didn’t seem to have been eventful. I felt that she shouldn’t have gone since she has another one scheduled on Monday at 41 weeks. But she is determined to be following the midwives' instructions to the letter: making birthing lists, buying nipple cream, depends, coconut oil –all these things that I never heard of when I was pregnant 30 years ago.
We ended up the evening nicely, the four of us, watching "Game of Thrones” - the last episode - whoohoo! and eating calzoni and a beautiful salad.
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