knolin' around

I'm starting to acquaint myself with this new Google feature on blogspot which is supposed to let the world know what i know as a published author. i suppose i should get busy and create a knol now but i'm not sure i will ever determine how to get back to it! in the meantime i'm resting on my laurels for a few minutes today after a Google alert let my husband know that i've been quoted this month in Italian Vogue! The very same issue with that big much talked about spread on Linda Evangelista! Well, well, well, it's a smidgen of the big time.

Still it was just the teensiest bit annoying when J.B. called me today to pick my brains again out with that lobster fork she calls her brain. "Do you make any money writing those little books?" she asked. "Do you just crank them out? How do you write so fast?" It's amazing how insulting one slightly chubby complaining aging moderately rich woman can be in under 30 seconds. 

Am reading a wonderful old novel right now by Doris Lessing. Doris is 88. Wonder how many more books she's got in her.

baby jesus

our new cat, jesus, is sick. this is the cat we adopted a few weeks back from our friends who moved to oregon. jesus (they named him) has a severe respiratory infection and possibly pneumonia. i was away for the weekend at candlewood lake on one of those Girls Only 2008 versions of Lost Weekend where five middle aged women wore bikinis, ate, drank, smoked, gossiped our brains out and skinny dipped at a no-electricity rustic cabin on a remote portion of the lake that you could only access by boat. once you were there, you couldn't leave. anyway, upon my return to civilization, a mere half hour away, the cat was coughing and sneezing and hiding under the bed. this morning he lay crumpled on the daybed in my office looking as though it was hard for him to breathe,  gasping now and then with his mouth open. 

they didn't keep him at the hospital overnight, which i'll take to be a good sign. instead he came home with a bag of antibiotics which will be difficult to administer, and of course if he takes a turn for the worse, i'll bring him back, but in the meantime he's resting comfortably and hopefully tonite will sleep the sleep of all well-loved and cared for cats. i'm anticipating a full recovery. it's a responsibility, adopting a cat named jesus. you can't let your very own little baby jesus pass away. 

thriling

Incredibly i see the end in sight writing my latest book. Cheers! To celebrate, today i took a long ride in the woods on my pony, Buttons, who is the great 4 legged love of my life. I love my dogs Gigi and Basil, and my cats Leo and Jesus, but Buttons and I have an entirely different story. For starters, i ride him. He carries me on his back. This is profound, really.

In the woods we came across a startling sight that in all my years in Bedford, I've never seen. Three bucks, two with huge racks, traveling together in thicket near Beaver Dam. Now all these years I've been under the impression that once they got old enough to grow antlers, guy deer shun each other's company unless they're fighting over some dame, er, deer. A female deer. A doe. Doe, a deer, as the song from "The Sound of Music," says. But these three great big guys were all hanging out together. 

"It's a stag party," one of my riding partners said. 

That sounds about right.

The Fruit Man

Sometime in the summer of 1978 I was walking down West 4th Street in NYC when this guy beckoned to me from the back of a truck. Actually it was a step-van, but the guy was using it as a truck. He was selling fruits and vegetables out of the back of it to passers-by. He held out a big juicy peach and being from South Jersey that's a hard thing for me to resist. At the very last moment as I was about to take it from his hand, he put it in his mouth and took a big bite. Then he held it out to me and I took a bite, too, and the next thing i knew we were locked in an embrace and rolling on the floor of his truck. 

The fruit guy, whose name was Jeff, and I had a thing going for a couple of years. It wasn't the healthiest of relationships but we had some good times. He had a huge black dog named Walter who lived with me most of the time. Eventually Jeff and I split for good and he moved to Seattle to get married to this actress he'd met in NYC named Sherry. The main thing I remember about Sherry was that she Wasn't Jewish and that she was Born Again. I think for awhile Jeff was Born Again. 

Flash forward to me googling around on the Sunday night of 4th of July weekend, 2008. Randomly typing in names, I typed in his. Lo and behold, Jeff has become a playwright. He's had his play produced. He also seems to have had a fruit business in Seattle called Congo Fruits and now appears to be a mortgage broker who helps people buy houses. There's an entire page of testimonials from happy clients. But the most amazing thing is how the same Jeff looks after all these years. Maybe he looks so much the same because he kept all his hair. During our time together Jeff bought me a Movado watch. He bought me a Raleigh bicycle. He bought me Hanro underwear. But the thing I liked about him the most was that he brought me peaches, bushels of peaches. And huge boxes of Washington State cherries, too. 

4th of july

Just finished reading Lynn Biederman's new YA novel, "Unraveling," which is about a frizzy haired, big boobed, sexually precocious 15 year old who can't get along with her mother. Big news. But Biederman's handling of her tragi-comic heroine is realistic and at times emotional. It brought me right back to another July 4th, in Woodbury, N.J. 1969. On the holiday everyone in town went to the high school football stadium to watch the fireworks; old people, young families with little kids, and, of course, teens looking for a little excitement.  I had a plan to meet my friend Sharon in front of the stadium at dusk, but Sharon had already hooked up. She and her steady boyfriend David were nowhere to be found. I paid my little entry fee and passed through the gate, avoiding the bleachers and the crowd for as long as possible, scanning the huge berms on either side before you went down some stairs into the actual stadium to see if I could see anybody i knew. Finally I picked a grassy spot on a steep slope of lawn and sat down. Before very long a boy, a lone wolf, came and sat down beside me. I didn't know his name, only that he was in the class or two ahead of me at the high school. Did we speak? Probably not. The fireworks started. As always, it was a big showy display of explosives that lit the sky for miles around. Boom, boom, boom, it was so loud my ears rang. The boy inched closer until our shoulders were touching.  I can still smell the sweet aroma of his Brut cologne hanging in the heavy South Jersey air. At some point he slung an arm around me and then his tongue was in my mouth. We made out. When the show was over, we were done. He stood up, brushed off his pants, said goodnight and walked off into the dark. The rest of the summer I kept an eye peeled for him in the Hardees parking lot and at the Wenonah pool but I never saw him until September when we both returned to school. Slouched against the wall by his locker, a meaty hand wrapped around his text books, he didn't look like anybody I really wanted to know better and this made me feel glad, and triumphant. 

Drinks, anyone?

After spending a small portion of the day working on my new book, "101 Things You Didn't Know About Sex," specifically writing about oddball animal mating rituals, I began doing the research on a newspaper story I'm working on about a new law being proposed in Westchester called the Social Host Law that basically throws the book or a portion of the book at parents who knowingly allow their underage offspring to throw drinking parties. Or who provide the booze or turn a blind eye to what's going on in the pool house. Up until now, as long as you didn't buy the booze or if you happened to not be at home, you couldn't be held accountable. That's all about to change if this new, more Draconian law is signed into the county legislature. 

A friend who recently held such  party told me she's so upset by the investigation the police are conducting about her son's graduation bash (ratted on as she was two weeks after the event by her next door neighbor with whom she's been feuding for years -- over a pool house, no less) that she's literally shitting blood. "I have colitis," she informed me on the phone.  No one was hurt at her party. There was no property damage. No one on the street even called the police that night to complain of any noise. Off duty local police officers were even at the party, functioning as security and overseeing the parking of all the kids' cars. At the end of the day other than embarrassment and possibly having the family's name in the paper if they do indeed have to answer to some charge, the initial punishment for breaking the Social Host Law is a fine of $250. In Bedford that's not much money, about what it costs for 4 people to have dinner out. What, I wonder, constitutes a party? Can parents be arrested for breaking the Social Host Law if they offer their kid a glass of wine with dinner in their own home? Do "other people" have to be present to make it a party? I sure don't know.