Mr. President

I remember sitting in class as a child and thinking to myself, “It’s 1981, I’m in kindergarten, and Ronald Reagan is president.”

I didn’t know then what being president meant, and President Reagan was a symbol to me, like our flag. I associate him with the part of me that still tears up when I hear the national anthem, and the part of me that knows I am fortunate to have been born here–even as I cringe at how our actions as a country have alienated much of the world.

President Reagan was the first president I remember, and I thought of him as a five year old thinks of her parents: benevolent, wise, infallible. I now know that isn’t completely true, of him or my parents, but it’s the memory of that feeling I miss, as much as the man.

Ronald Reagan was my president, and I adored him. I’m sorry he’s gone.

Family

A: When I was a kid and we played imaginary games, I was always the boss. If we played house, I was the mom. Or if we played work, I was the boss. I was such a brat. I used to always fight with this one neighborhood kid over who got to be mom. Mark Smith, remember him?

M: Oh, yeah!

A: He came out of the closet a few years ago. His mom was crushed. The rest of us were like, “Surprise.”

M: Ha!

A: Really no one wanted to play Dad, except my little brother. Dad was so boring. We’d just give him a briefcase and say, “Go to work now.” And he’d have to march off into some back room and play by himself for awhile.

M: Oh! That’s sad.

A: Yeah, he’d leave for a minute and then come back and be like, “OK. Work’s over!” So he’d pretend to read the newspaper.

Word of the Day

When we travel, I’ve started to take my own teabags along so I’m not stuck with Lipton when the hotel room offers hot water. On our honeymoon, I took ginger peach tea along. I was having a cup recently and suddenly I felt like I was on our hotel patio in Malaysia. I could practically hear the ocean.

What I like about the word “redolent” is that it’s a perfect expression of the relationship between smells and memory. It means:

1. Having or emitting fragrance; aromatic.

2. Reminiscent; suggestive

Things That Happen

When I was little, our kitchen sink had a bright light just above it. In the summer evenings, Mom would leave the back door open for air, and moths would come to knock stupidly against the light. One night, a moth flew into my momï¿½s ear while she was washing dishes. It was still alive, so she could feel it fluttering in panic as Dad drove her to the hospital to have it removed with an extra-long pair of tweezers.

After twenty years, thinking of this incident still provokes my gag reflex.

Bridge Over Troubled Water

When I was in Junior High, I was looking to fill an elective and the guidance counselor cajoled me into taking an emotional-sensitivity class that she’d developed. Whenever one student said something nasty to another, the counselor would snap, I heard a put down. Two put-ups, please. Whereupon, the kid would laugh long and hard, then find a way to disguise two more insults as compliments. Nice pants, I’m way into rainbow stripes. I also like your eye shadow. It’s really purple. Then we closed our eyes and listened to Simon and Garfunkel.

It was like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel–we fell in love when the butterflies were mating. I drove home between fields of corn, and hundreds of yellow butterflies chased one another across the road. The setting was idyllic, the relationship proved less so. He was an entrepreneur without a lot of extra time for romance, I was too young to be thinking about happily ever after. A year later, I was upset, and disappointed, and ready to call it quits. Driving home one night, I realized the butterflies were mating again. I smiled and watched two of them dance around each other. Then they hit my windshield.

10:36 a.m.

My Girl Scout troop leader once said that raising boys was easier than raising girls because you could let them run and climb trees without worrying that they’d hurt themselves.

2:18 p.m.