An Off-Grid Sort of Town

In a couple of previous blog posts, my dog has advised me on love. He has even shown a reasonable amount of aptitude for the role. With the caveat that he is still a dog and dead skunks in the road are viable objects for him to show a keen interest in.

Lately, I have been kind of discouraged. A love interest of mine proved to be regrettably one-sided, and the side was mine. The other side, well, not so much interest. In fact, I’ll just be honest here: none at all. 

But once again, small fluffy off-white mutt Buddy to the rescue. I didn’t even have to tell him what was going on. Like all dogs, he just looked at me, and he knew. I encountered him at my old house where I was dropping off my daughter, and after he had done the insane body-wagging greeting thing, he stopped and looked carefully at me. You need to get out of town, he said. My thoughts exactly! I replied. But how did you know? He placed one of his grubby teddy paws into my outstretched hand, a trick we taught him so he could get little pieces of reward cheese. I’m your dog, he said. Book yourself into the Mendocino Hotel for a night or two. 

I will, I said. But I’m sorry, I don’t have any cheese.

The Mendocino Hotel was built in 1878 and every single inch of it feels that way. It has the kind of old world charm that you can’t create, it has to have been laid down gradually over 140 years. It’s the only place in town where you can find a double room for $109. Sure, it’s a room the size of a postage stamp, and you share a bathroom, but you also have access to the wraparound balcony that skirts the entire hotel, including its oceanfront, not to mention the hundred cool nooks and crannies around the hotel where you can just sit and soak it all up. Cosy armchairs in front of the blazing fire. Plush barstools in the Garden Room bar, where the sun slants in across the lacquered wood and threadbare velvet upholstery. Quaint wrought iron chairs and round tables on the patio. This place is magical.

Taking Buddy’s advice, I booked myself a single night on a whim. It was indeed time to get out of town. Hospice work had been unusually draining, my daughter was heading to Oregon to see a friend for the weekend, and I just couldn’t countenance two days home alone reflecting on how very disinterested my love interest was.

Friday morning I headed out on my solo roadtrip early. The Bay Area was shrouded in smoke from the Camp fire near Chico. The sun shone weakly orange through the haze and the whole scene looked apocalyptic. I drove north on Highway One and hit Freestone at the perfect time for breakfast. A mid-morning cup of coffee and one of their excellent scones. Meyer lemon, mango, and white chocolate. I’m not making this up! They made this up!  

I was just savoring the white chocolate aspect of my scone and wondering how life could get any better, when a text came in from Jessie. Oregon trip fell through. Can I come to Mendocino with you? I was an hour and a half drive from home. Would I go back and pick her up? 

Two minutes later I was on the road back home. It was a little odd to be retracing my steps, but as my dad would say, all part of life’s rich pattern. And heading to the Mendocino Hotel with Jessie instead of alone? SWEET!

It was an eerily beautiful drive north along California’s most stunning stretch of coastline. The air quality was awful. We could not open the car windows. But the sun shone through the haze with a surreally gorgeous light and we played favorite music and savored the set of random circumstances that had led to us spending two days together on a road trip.

Mendocino, always an understated town, was even more muted than usual. We arrived at dusk, but it was hard to tell, the air was so heavy with smoke. We checked into the hotel and sat together on the high wrought-iron framed bed in our tiny room. I checked the fire news. 70k acres, still only 5% contained. The whole of Paradise town was gone, most of Magalia, burned to the ground. 27k people displaced, having lost everything. We tried to imagine what it would be like to lose everything. People had been found burned in their cars, trying to escape. We tried to absorb this. It was very quiet in our room.

The air quality was too bad to safely go outside, so we ate dinner in the hotel. I went down and secured us a table while Jessie stayed in the room talking to her boyfriend. I sat alone at the table, thinking about how I would have been sitting here alone all weekend, and that would have been okay. But waiting for Jessie to come down from our room and join me? That was much better.

Over dinner, we had fun pegging all of our fellow diners. There was the table of three women, one of whom completely monopolized the conversation. We eavesdropped shamelessly for a minute on her description of a cruise she had been on. I notified my daughter that she should feel free to smother me with a pillow if I ever went on a cruise and then tried to tell her about it. Don’t worry, mom. She instructed me then on the art of scanning a room and immediately identifying the people who were happy. It’s not about smiling or looking upbeat. It’s about who looks genuinely interested in their companion. As usual, she was bang on the money.

Saturday morning, we woke before dawn. I was sure that Mendocino, despite its sleepiness, would have a cafe where I could procure some coffee before 7am. This proved optimistic. It was also 38 degrees and after the weird heat of November in Fairfax, our faces instantly froze when we went outside. However, turned out the hotel provided free coffee and tea in the bar, so we availed and sat by the fire reading and writing until the first cafe opened and we could reasonably expect eggs and more coffee.

My favorite cafe in Mendo is the Goodlife. They have a stunning array of excellent beverages, including one I had never heard of which I will cover in a minute, and an even better array of pastries and healthy type foods, plus all manner of quirky patrons proving that this is the coolest place in town to breakfast because it’s where all the locals go. 

I was standing waiting for our hot beverages when it struck me that the conversation I was having with a bearded stranger in a straw hat was actually a flirtation. Out of practice! His beard was braided and his hair was long and curly and he opened the conversation by asking if my hair color was natural. I laughed and told him that I was touched by his politeness, but that the strange hue of my hair was not intentional. I recounted the circumstances that had led to my hair becoming so unintentionally and, some might say, violently purple. (This was the subject of a previous blog post, so I won’t go into it here.) He laughed at my ineptitude in self-hair-coloring and mentioned that his own hair had a small amount of grey in it but that he was fine with that showing. I didn’t point out that he was at this time covering up said grey hair with a very tatty sort of straw hat. 

We got our drinks and he explained to me that the weird concoction he was purchasing in a jelly jar was known by some Italian name (I have forgotten it now) and it was a shot of espresso covered with quantities of whipped cream. We mused on how this might help him begin his day, and went off to our respective tables. It was nice to flirt. It felt like maybe something had opened up in me. The freedom from longing for something that was never meant to be, perhaps. 

As I sat with Jessie and she ate her breakfast and I drank my coffee, I noticed that straw hat guy kept glancing my way. When I was sure he was deep in conversation with his mates, I glanced his way. As we left the cafe, he caught my eye and waved and wished me a beautiful day. I wished him the same. So it goes. 

Later in the morning, after our tradition of trying to sit in every nook of the Mendocino Hotel that we could, we wandered around town. I didn’t expect us to find anything we could afford, but we were sure to have fun looking. In the basement of a building on Lansing Street, there was a new clothing store called Treasures. As soon as I walked in, I was transported back to Florence, to clothing stores I so unexpectedly found there brimming with lace and silk, all at crazily affordable prices. The owner was a cheery individual called Drea who laughed when I complimented her on her excellent taste and said disbelievingly I get to go around shopping for this stuff...for my work! I picked out about twenty items and had fun trying them all on. 

From the changing room, I could hear Drea giggling softly to herself outside. Turned out she was trying on her own wares: a new pair of pants with lace and flounces at the three-quarter length hems. Too theatrical? She asked me, as she modeled them. I told her they were indeed theatrical but I thought she could more than carry them off. She laughed her infectious laugh. It’s fun to be me! She said, as she rang me up for a madly floppy pale pink fur coat that was only $39. You’ll get lots of hugs in this, she said. I told her how good that sounded to me.

As I left her store, I thought about how, if I lived in Mendocino, Drea and I could be friends. And I could also be friends with straw hat guy! Maybe more than friends! Maybe I should move to Mendocino? Of course, it was four hours from an airport. But I could have coffee every morning in the Hotel. I could live in one of the wooden water towers. An off-grid sort of town, I had heard a resident call it earlier that morning. After a week of mass shootings and midterms, off-grid had a nice sort of ring to it. I could nurse dying folk up there, by the sea, in the maritime mists and fogs.

But by early afternoon, Jessie and I were restless to be back on the road home. We packed the car, and set off for the four-hour drive that, for us, is a large part of the fun. I drove, my co-pilot was on music detail and started creating a suitably awesome queue for the freakishly twilit smoky world outside. Off-grid still had a lovely ring to it, but I put moving to Mendocino in my bag of dreams. Lots to accomplish in Fairfax first.

Single Mom Acquires Relationship Manager

I have been post-divorce and single for two years. It has been Important. And I’m really ready to meet someone. Please notice the capitalization of Important. It’s not just poor editing. It covers a whole two years of solo evenings on the couch and waking up alone. But also what is known in divorce circles as doing the work. I don’t really know what a divorce circle is, but I’m intimately knowledgable about the work of emerging from a long marriage.

Last Monday night, I went to bed at 8:30pm. This was because daylight savings had ended, so I was now waking up at 4:30am instead of 5:30am, and because I’m a chronic insomniac, and I lie awake for hours every night planning my next novel. So by 8:30 that night, I was preternaturally tired and I just fell onto my bed and sank into an inhumanly deep sleep. Sort of like the sleep that hibernating bears sink into in caves in the arctic. Only I was in Fairfax, shortly after dinner on a Monday evening.

I was woken at approximately 12:13am by the ping of text coming in. Please don’t judge me. Yes, I leave my cellphone on by my bed at night, thus opening myself up to harmful rays and probably brain cancer and maybe even hydrocephalus, though the science isn’t quite in on that one yet. But I’m a single mom of a teen who sleeps elsewhere several times a week. Thus my phone is sometimes on by my bed. She could have a teen crisis at 2am. It has happened.

The text said that there was a fraud alert from my credit card company. It asked me whether I had recently made a purchase from Walmart. This is like asking a Republican whether they want to go on Ellen and do contact improv with Barack and Michelle. I immediately called my credit card company.

The nice chap who answered (after midnight PST, what time could it possibly have been where he was?!) introduced himself as Russell, my Relationship Manager. I felt a momentary surge of excitement. Relationship Manager? Could he be about to...But no, I quickly woke up enough to realize that he was not talking about finding me a loving life partner who cared about how my day was, wanted to bring me lilies and hoped to take me out for lobster dinners. Clearly, relationship manager in terms of my credit card meant managing the relationship between me and...what did it mean exactly??

While I was puzzling over this, Russell deftly exacted from me the last four of my social, my date of birth, my mother’s O-Level math result, and the details of my last credit card purchase. I had no idea of the latter, it was after midnight and I couldn’t even remember my name too well, but I hazarded some kind of guess that seemed to satisfy him. Plus I mentioned, probably with more heat than necessary, that there was no way I nor anyone I knew had made a purchase at Walmart in the last hundred years.

Russell very kindly reassured me that my card had been compromised and there would be no charge to me. We chuckled together in a moment of weird connection about how the scumbag who had stolen my credit card information may have got away with some lousy purchase at Walmart but would be stalled at their next attempted crime. I hoped it was the intent to purchase a gun somewhere. Maybe even at a Walmart. But I didn’t mention this to Russell, because some part of my very sleep-addled brain was still sort of hoping that he was Managing my Relationship. And it wouldn’t do to come across as emotionally brittle.

After we wished each other a very good night, and he assured me my new credit card would be arriving within seven to ten business days, I reflected on how very many phonecalls I was going to have to make to change all my autopays to the new card number. Then I drifted off into a sort of doze again. It was now 12:38am, and my defunct credit card information was sort of floating round the universe waiting to stick in vain to some criminal malcontent. 

Meanwhile, I was cosy in my bed, feeling thankful that the crazy amped-up tech industry made it possible for my card company to text me about possible fraud just minutes after someone used my stolen information to make a purchase at Walmart. But most of all, I was feeling sleepily grateful that in some call center somewhere, Russell was busy being my Relationship Manager. Surely, given his laudable efficiency, by the time I woke he would have found me the perfect man?!

But you will have to wait for the next blog post to find out

Spoiler Alert: Her Cat Dies at Minute 90

Last night, I had tickets to see a favorite singer/songwriter at a favorite club in San Francisco. But my daughter, who was supposed to be coming with me, was doing an excellent impression of a chipmunk (see previous post) and not up for it. 

I thought about going alone. I also tried to cajole various single friends into coming with me. Come on, it’s Blanco White! He’s 27 and sexy and a fabulous singer! At Cafe du Nord! But nobody was available, and although I think of myself as resilient and strong enough to drive into the city alone on a Saturday night to go to a gig, it turns out I’m not.

So I went to the movies. I tried to get the same friends to come to the movies with me, but they had all the same excuses about why they couldn’t go to Blanco White. Lame. So I decided I was definitely strong and resilient enough to go to a movie on my own. I’ve done it tons of times and usually I love it. Sitting in the dark, feeling mysterious, trying to block out the stench of popcorn and not check my phone too frequently to see if anyone is texting me.

I had a hard time deciding between Bohemian Rhapsody and Can You Ever Forgive Me, but decided that the former should really be seen with someone so I would have good company singing along, and someone to share my favorite Queen memories with afterwards. So Melissa McCarthy it was. CYEFM had the added bonus of Richard E. Grant. And it was in the fabulous art deco Rafael Theater, really the only venue suitable for viewing a Richard E. Grant movie.

I’d seen the trailer, so I knew this movie had the potential to be really quite depressing, but I’m talented at ignoring red flags, and it was about a writer who lived in New York City and did I mention it had Richard E. Grant, so I committed myself to it with touching optimism. Even when I drove by the theater looking for parking and saw the length of the ticket line and nearly just turned around and drove home.

It started out great. Melissa spends the first scene quaffing whisky on the job and getting fired for telling her boss (inadvertently, it must be said) to F off.

But no more spoilers.

Except the cat thing. Sorry about that. Slipped out.

But as the movie progressed, Melissa proved to be a failed writer (not many of those about, huh) who couldn’t pay her rent or get help for her sick cat (this is all in the trailer). Plus in one scene she actually mentions that she is 51. MY AGE! This rankled with me for two reasons. 1) Melissa doesn’t look nearly 51. Her skin. Way too smooth. She even sort of choked on saying 51, as though her acting talents temporarily deserted her cos hey, she’s only 48 (I googled it just now). And 2) I’m 51, and I actually look my age, especially in the mornings. There’s a third reason, involving my stalled writing career, but I don’t have time to go into that now.

The important thing to know about Melissa McCarthy in this movie is that although she develops a completely wonderful and very funny relationship with Richard E., which really could have saved the movie if she had appeared to enjoy it more, she sort of spirals downward throughout the entire thing. I’ve seen too many spiralling down movies lately. I need some spiralling up movies. 

In fairness, she may well have spiralled up at the end of Can You Ever Forgive Me. I don’t know, because I left. At minute 90. It was a tough decision, having invested two hours of my life in getting to this movie and sitting through it. But her cat died (did I mention that?) and it was all just too much for me. I stood up in that crouchy way you stand up when you are leaving a movie in the middle, and hyperaware that it was just me standing up, and not me and my date, or me and a friend, giggling together about how we were leaving a Melissa McCarthy movie because it was just too depressing.

I walked to my car in the nearby parking garage, and I reflected on the fact that the best thing about my evening was that parking is for some unknown reason free in San Rafael on Saturday nights. Maybe the reason for this is to give some glimmer of joy to 51-year-old single women whose writing careers are spiralling in a direction we won’t examine too closely and who have just left depressing movies that they went to on their own on a Saturday night. I don’t know. But I’m thinking of calling someone on the San Rafael town council to find out.

I have a feeling that I just ended this post on a sort of down note, and that’s really not my style. I like to give a little uplift at the last second, so people don’t come away from reading my blog thinking jeez, if this woman writes another post about dying people I’m unsubscribing. So I’ve been trying to come up with the so-called Uplift Ending. And here it is: when I got home I texted some of those same friends who had turned down a night on the town with me, and I let them know what a good thing it was they had said No to the downward-spiral experience. And in the process, I cracked myself up, because I like to laugh at my own jokes. And I got some very funny responses in return, which also cracked me up. So on balance, I got more laughs than tears from the experience. And that, to me, is a good Saturday night

Why You Should Never Give Your Daughter A Norco and then Start Coloring Your Hair

So I may have given away a little of the plot there. And maybe you don’t have a daughter. Or hair. Or if you had a daughter, you would never give her Norco. Nor, if you had hair, would you ever color it. But you shouldn’t stop reading. Because you never know.

Yesterday my daughter had impacted wisdom teeth removed. Never a good candidate for the dentist’s chair, and very squirrely around general anesthesia, this was not a happy event for her. She came home and her face swelled up like a balloon. Despite tons of ice and ibuprofen, there was quickly bruising, sinus pain, jaw pain, and pain in her throat and straight up to her temples. I dosed her and iced her and got her smoothies and soups and special drinks. I finished my work day charting on the couch, and getting up every five minutes to fetch her something from the fridge. Things were jogging along okay and I felt like a reasonably good mom. A mom who is also happily a nurse. A nurse who is a mom. It was all fairly good.

This morning, the swelling was worse. She iced and dosed and iced, and we lay around with me making fun of her for looking like a chipmunk. We watched the videos she had inadvertently made of herself while emerging from anesthesia. She didn’t remember taking them. They were really funny. And we laughed about how she had called a store during the same time, with her mouth stuffed full of cotton, and tried to speak with the saleslady, who just kept saying honey, I can’t understand a single thing you are saying.

But around 10am the pain spiked. She was miserable, and I decided she should take the Norco that was prescribed to her, as the ibuprofen just wasn’t cutting it. She’d had a Norco right after the surgery and had been okay. She took the Norco and got in the shower. Then I took my shower, and I began to apply the strange-smelling burgundy goop that is my do-it-yourself hair color. You wear plastic gloves and old clothes and it’s messy as hell. You’re supposed to carry out this complicated ritual with cotton balls and face cream to prevent your forehead and ears from being colored the same color as your hair. Because apparently that looks sort of weird.

I had just applied some, not even all, of the goop and had not yet started with the cotton balls and face cream when my daughter called out that she was feeling dizzy and nauseous and “really weird.” I immediately did nothing. She often feels really weird. But shortly thereafter, she called out that she was feeling really really weird. I quickly realized that to be coloring my hair at this moment was in fact a bad idea. I slapped on the rest of the goop and a plastic shower cap and a towel and went in to minister to her.

This was the start of an hour of seriously bad reaction to narcotics. I did everything I could, but nothing made her feel better. Her dad called in a prescription for Zofran and dashed to CVS to pick it up. I gave her ginger fizz and tried to talk her through the nausea. I googled natural nausea remedies in case we happened by some fluke to have them growing in our garden. 

Meanwhile, under the towel and the shower cap, my hair was turning purple.

A friend arrived and comforted her. Her dad delivered the Zofran, and she got quick relief. It all started to resolve. I stopped feeling like the worst of moms for giving her the Norco. How could I have known?

Meanwhile, my hair, my forehead, and my ears were all purple. The goop was supposed to color my hair a chic reddish brown, but it had been in my hair for a lot longer than such goop is supposed to be and there had been no face-cream-lathered cotton balls to prevent my skin from being purpled also. 

The good news was I knew my daughter was feeling better because she started to laugh at me. Our friend laughed at me too. I went into the bathroom to shower the goop off and see the extent of the damage.

My skin reverted to a normal color after lots of showering, but my hair, it’s pretty purple. And not just uniformally either. I slapped the color on so rapidly that it’s sort of uneven. So some of my hair is really purple, and some of it just a bit, and some is sort of its own natural color shining cheerily through. With a bit of grey, just for good measure.

This all points to the fact that if you have a daughter, and she gets her wisdom teeth out, and she’s in a lot of pain, and you decide to give her one of her prescribed Norco, do not attempt to start coloring your hair. And if you do, don’t come crying to me.

The Minefield that is Halloween

Halloween is a very dangerous time of year. It is a time when I am likely to see someone walking along the street and say admiringly Nice costume and be met with a blank stare. The kind of stare that tells me fairly quickly that this was not a costume. It is the awful Halloween equivalent of asking a woman when she is due only to discover that she is not, in fact, pregnant at all. Rapidly dig deep hole in ground. Hide in hole. 

But being Irish, and thus politically incorrect by birth, what I really want to say to these people is: for goodness sake, could you PLEASE not wear outfits that look like Halloween costumes when it’s close to Halloween? I mean, this just creates a MINEFIELD for the rest of us! And by the way? This is not the Renaissance! 

Then there’s the minefield of what to dress up as myself. Ever since I became a hospice nurse I’ve wanted to go one year as The Grim Reaper. But in this situation, it’s the thought that counts. Plus I don’t possess a scythe.

I would also love to wear elaborate costumes: Marie Antoinette comes to mind. Queen Elizabeth I. Something with a bustle. But those things cost, so over the years I have gone more for the do-it-yourself creative costumes, with mixed success. In my early twenties I once went to a Halloween party with my boyfriend Steve. I spent hours cutting out paper moon and stars and applying them diligently to a black outfit. The night sky! Steve was not one for dressing up. In deference to the occasion he dabbed on a bit of mascara and eyeliner. However, he had long curly red hair and his usual garb was tight black jeans, suede boots and a suede jacket. When we arrived at the party, people completely ignored me and my paper stars, but they took one look at Steve and went Alice Cooper! Cool!

Then there was the year I went as a Shakesperian sonnet, but I won’t revisit that. My daughter was about seven at the time. Even ten years later she doesn’t like to be reminded.

These days I figure that wigs are the way to go. All those sexy costumes just make you look like it would be much better if you were ten pounds lighter. But a wig is simple, cheap, and entirely transformative. I used to have a Marge Simpson blue beehive wig, and I had a mermaid one that went all the way down to my feet. This year, I found a long shaggy blond thing in a local consignment store. It makes me feel like a 70s groupie, so I’m going as Kate Hudson’s character in Almost Famous. Found the round mirror shades, and already had the suede/fur coat. Add a pair of flared jeans, a low-cut top, some hoop earrings, boots and bingo! Halloween for $24! Plus I can wear it to my hospice team meeting, as I think it just about fits in that narrow category of office appropriate.

One thing I have never understood about Halloween is Halloween-themed sweaters. A costume is one thing. But just wearing an orange sweater with a picture of a witch on it? That’s neither one thing nor the other. Have the courage to paint your face green and wear the pointy hat! Or just go in your normal clothes and if you run into me, I’ll tell you great costume!

Hospice Nurse Gets Her Irish Back On

Before I was a hospice nurse, I worked in the software industry. For twenty years. And that is all I am going to say about that. Previous to the decades long software debacle, I was a graduate student, and before that an undergraduate student. And now you pretty much know my whole life story, and can stop reading.

Last Wednesday, a friend from the Deep Past showed up in San Francisco. As we go through life, the past accumulates layers and John is from a layer that now has numerous layers on top of it. We were undergraduates together in Trinity College Dublin in the late 1980s. It was a time of relative hedonism in Ireland. After the 3rd world austerity of the 1950s and 60s (while the Haight-Ashbury was gorging itself on pot and the Jefferson Airplane, Ireland was still economically considered a 3rd world country, and with good reason), the 1980s featured cheap university degrees for many, cheap housing, cheap beer, and just the glimmerings of the tech boom that came to be known as the Celtic Tiger.

But none of this was of any interest to myself or John the other night as we arranged to meet in the foyer of the Zephyr Hotel on Beach Street in San Francisco at 6pm. I drove in directly after my 4-hour weekly hospice team meeting. He was flying in from a meeting in Vegas. I found the Zephyr, and a handy parking spot right outside for a mere $5.75/hr. I sank down in one of their trendy beach-themed bucket seats and tried to let the hospice day drain off me for a few minutes while I waited for my old friend to show.

I had just settled into a mellow sort of post-work now-I’m-in-the-city sort of vibe, when I felt a pair of hands grab my shoulders. Oh Jesus! I cried out, rather over-loudly for a public space, and I turned around to find not just John but several other hotel patrons laughing at me. He had just checked in and he wanted to head up to his room “to put on something slightly less ridiculous” before we set out on the town. Indeed, he was wearing shorts, a clothing item I had never before seen on him. We grew up in Ireland, remember. If you wore shorts, you’d have the legs succumbing to frostbite. But he had just flown in from Vegas. What happens there....

We wandered round Fisherman’s Wharf and settled on some touristy bar with a nice shabby sort of deck where we could have a beer and look out over the water listening to the croupy bark of the seals. As we enjoyed our beers and the start of a catch-up, we watched the giant floating prison of the Princess cruise ship sail with iceberg calm out past the lesser prison of Alcatraz, fossilized on its tiny crop of rock in the San Francisco bay.

John works in finance and he owns his own company. I am a hospice nurse and I do not. I attended his wedding in a castle in Cavan in September 2001. A Thursday, he reminisces, what the fuck were we thinking? He did not attend either of my weddings. Between us, we have three marriages, three kids, two divorces. So it goes.

The great thing about our sporadic meetups over the years is that like many old friends we slip back into what was great about the friendship to begin with. In my opinion, this is primarily humor. John is a storyteller. It was one of the things I first loved about him, his ability to hold a group captive, to make people laugh with the simplest absurdities. In Ireland, humor is currency, and it is one of the things I miss most. Not that life in the US is humorless, but Irish humor is brutal, biting, and dark. When the Ethiopian famine was at its height in the 1980s, the Irish as a nation gave more money and volunteer hours per capita than any nation on earth. But we also had famine jokes. Really tasteless ones. That we laughed at.

Almost everything is fair game for a joke in Ireland. I reckon we are a nation that has been kicked in the head so repeatedly throughout history that we realized early on that the only option was to laugh about it. When I emigrated to America, I quickly learned that I had to tone my humor way way down, so as not to offend. I learned that PC did not just mean personal computer. And I had to stuff my Irish humor into the very back of my humor closet, where it waited impatiently to be set free. I could only take it out and let it rattle its chains when I went back home, or when someone from home came to me.

We dined at the fancy Waterfront restaurant. John, owner of his own company, expensed it. Does that mean we have to talk about your work? Payments and stuff? I said. We just did, he responded, perusing the menu. We made each other laugh for a couple of hours, and took the requisite selfies with the full moon and the lit-up Bay Bridge looking obligingly sparkly behind us. Then we wandered back to the Zephyr and I drove on home to Marin. John headed to the Buena Vista to watch the Chinese barman there line up 400 Irish Coffees.

Next day, he texted me that he was heading to the Haight and the Castro to poke around. I was waiting for my girlfriend to arrive from out of town, and having a preparatory glass of wine. A while later, he texted: Is it just me or has the Castro gone very gay? He took my recommendation to have dinner at the Sausage Factory, where, he reported, his waiter Jonathan was flirting with him. Jonathan just asked ‘Have you been to the restroom yet?’ In what possible scenario is that an appropriate question from a waiter? I have an emergency Uber booked.

I gave him my now lamentably belated advice that on no account should he visit a restroom in the Castro. Seeing how we’re both drinking on our own, he texted, we should just pretend we are out together having a very slow conversation, like drunks do. I texted back that I thought that’s what we had been doing for the past hour.

The next day, he was up at Tahoe. If you crossed Bray with Glendalough, you’d get Tahoe. It’s just a lake, people. Calm down. I was wine tasting in Sonoma with my girlfriend. For the second time in two days, we appeared to be drinking together without actually, as it were, being together. I am aware this contributes to the myth that all the Irish ever do is drink. We also, let it be known, make politically incorrect jokes. I asked him if he had been sexting with Jonathan a lot. Not my type, he wrote back. Turns out he’s gay.

One of the terrible things about emigrating is that the friends you leave behind now live six thousand miles away from you and you only see them once every couple of years. John’s not really one for the letter writing, and we only text around meetups. The odd flurry of email. Still and all, I’m going home next Summer and he has promised to put ‘the crew’ together.  Plus he’s in the Bay Area till Sunday, so still the chance to drink together over text a couple of times. 

Mom of Teen Earns Cape

I have a friend with a 3-year-old. She has a sign on her desk: I’m a mom. What’s your superpower? I was wondering about this very thing the other day, so I took an internet quiz to find out. It was run by the Department of Incredible Things, so I knew it had to be legitimate. I answered a bunch of important questions about who my sidekick would be and where I’d situate my headquarters. Then I clicked the Activate button, wondering if something loud was about to emanate from inside my iPad. But instead I got sent an email that contained the secret of my superhero powers. Ready?

Congratulations! The email read. Your special power makes you a prime candidate for the Dept. of Incredible Things. Your special power? Telepathy and Telekenesis.

I’m sorry, maybe some people would be stoked to find out they are telepathic and telekinetic, but I was hoping for something a little more super. Plus I had to look up what telekenesis means. It’s the psychic ability, I learned, to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Like Uri Geller. But I prefer my teaspoons straight, and anyway, I also read that telekenesis experiments have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. That’s my superpower? We don’t even know if it’s real! 

Then I realized that the whole quiz was actually a clever ad for the Des Moines Area Community College department of computer science. This was an important lesson for me: never trust an Internet quiz to identify your superpower!

So I decided to identify it upon my own, all by myself, solo. Being a single mom, this did not take very long. At around 8am Saturday, my daughter came running into my bedroom. Mom! She said, looking completely stricken. I ran through the usual list in my head: Pregnant? Friend in the hospital having stomach pumped? Prom 2019’s been cancelled? But no, it was far more serious than any of those. Her HP Sprocket Photo Printer was out of paper! This, apparently, was a crisis I needed to get up early on my Saturday morning and solve. 

The reason why the absence of HP Sprocket Photo Printer paper was a crisis? It was her boyfriend’s birthday and the Sprocket was somehow part of her elaborate birthday plan for him. Thus, it transpired, I needed to drive to Best Buy, a half hour away, to be there the moment it opened and purchase some photo printer paper. She would do it, but she was too busy wrapping his present. 

I had many other fine things planned for my Saturday, such as completing my FAFSA (this is planned for every Saturday, but has not yet actually happened) and helping friends of mine prepare for their wedding later in the day. Not to mention the gym and maybe even a bike ride. But was my response a boundary-setting gee, sweetheart, I’d love to help you out but I’m really busy today, I think you need to go get the paper yourself? No. It was oh, okay.

I’m secretly happy to do these crazy nonurgent urgent things for my daughter. I love solving her noncrisis crises. It’s so much more fun than dealing with the actual crises that are a feature of our life together. Plus saving the day is part of my superhero genetic makeup and it makes me feel, well, powerful. Which is important, because most of the time being a single mom makes a person feel depleted and washed up on the shores of life.

I helped my friends for a bit and then I drove urgently to Best Buy. With all the roadworks that are somehow happening simultaneously in San Rafael these days, it took me well over half an hour and numerous expletives to get there. But when I did, I experienced one of those sweet shopping experiences that only come along once in a very long while. The sales assistant found me the little package of photo paper, which I never would have found by myself in the extraterrestrial experience that is Best Buy. It looked suspiciously like a package of printer ink, which I know from recent experience tends to be more expensive than you could possibly imagine it to be. How much? I asked warily. Twenty bucks, he said. Oh no, wait! It’s on sale. $5.99. 

I bought the only two packages left. You can call me Sprocket Photo Paper Woman. Solving teen crises is just what I do. The birthday was complete, and I really like how I look in the cape. But I’m only going to wear it when I’m home alone. Moms of teens know better than to draw attention to their superpowers.