“Incorrect. I’m the only one going a safe speed. Every other single person on the highway is going an unsafe speed.”
Mutual unhappiness ensued.
The only time I felt relaxed was when when we drove through a work zone, where the speed limit lowered to 40 and everyone else drove at snail’s pace, too.
World Order, restored.
I love the work zone. I would live in the work zone if I could. Orange really is the new black.
Everyone else complains about highway construction.
I pray for it.
Otherwise, I felt most scared by big trucks, and when I saw them behind me, I would put on my hazard lights to let them know that I was a nervous author driving at a speed limit that doesn’t exist anymore.
Some of them passed me, but others rode my bumper, flashed their lights, and gunned their engines, and I can’t tell you that I thought nice things about them. That is, until a lovely woman at one of our signings said that she loved our books and also that she was a trucker.
She bought a book, and I liked truckers all over again.
I’m easy that way.
But by the end of the trip, which also took us over the Falls River Bridge in Massachusetts, as well as the Bourne and the Sagamore Bridges in Cape Cod, I hated driving altogether. Even when Francesca was doing the driving, which she was, in all of the above.
So this is my message to my amazing daughter, who showed skill and courage behind the wheel:
We survived thanks to Francesca!
Thank you.
And this is my message to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, who made me feel unsafe on the roads of my very own state:
Okay, forget it, I’ll keep it clean.
The American Dream
Lisa
You may remember that I wrote previously about wanting to add a little room onto my kitchen so that I could look at a blooming garden instead of a stainless steel wall.
I went back and forth about whether I was entitled to spend money that was supposed to be for my retirement on a home renovation that I might not even live to see, since I am half-dead already, at sixty-one.
Well, thanks to your wonderful encouraging emails and also my innate selfishness and inability to delay gratification, I am building the garden room, and we just broke ground.
And rapidly thereafter, we ran into a wall.
Literally.
They dug a big hole for the concrete pad and found an underground wall, which of course led to heavy orange equipment and costly change orders, but I’m not complaining.
I’m getting my garden room and praying I live long enough to enjoy it.
My current dilemma is typical of the kind of thing that construction presents, which is that as soon as you fix one thing, you need to fix another.
As in I thought it would be nice to have a little fenced-in area around the garden, so the dogs could enjoy the garden, too, and hang out with me when I weed.
Wait, that’s a lie.
I don’t weed anymore.
I used to weed, in fact I was becoming vaguely compulsive about weeding, but then I realize I had to quit cold turkey, mainly because it was making me crazy, a job that is never ever done like making your bed, another job I ignore.
Plus I realized that summer is only three months long and even weeds can’t grow that much in three months, so what I’m doing now is waiting the weeds out. They can take up residence through August, because that’s all that’s left, but they’re going to be dead by September.
Joke’s on them.
So there you have it.
Weeds grow in my garden.
Guess what?
The world didn’t end.
In fact, I’m going to call my garden room my weed-and-garden room, and it will still be great to have, even if I don’t get to retire until 2085.
To stay on point, I thought it would be fun to have the dogs run around the garden, but there is no fence there, and they can run onto the driveway or even the street. So I’m going to put up a fence, and what I’ve secretly always wanted is a white picket fence.
Am I a walking cliché, or what?
I grew up hearing all about the white picket fence, and knowing that it meant you were supposed to be married, have 2.3 children, a dog, and a cat. Then later, the white picket fence became a dumb thing to want, signifying oppression of all sorts, or bourgeois taste in general.
To this, I plead guilty.
Because I want a white picket fence. Even though I’m divorced twice, live alone, have one cat who won’t speak to me, and five dogs—one of which is in a wheelchair and a diaper and still manages to poop on the floor.
That’s the kind of talent that runs in the Scottoline blood.
I called up a fence guy and told him I wanted a white picket fence. He told me the prices were very reasonable, except they doubled when we got to the white part. “What’s the deal?” I asked him.
“It’s really expensive to paint a white picket fence, and it’s a lot of trouble and expense to maintain. You should just get the cedar. That’s what everybody does.”
“But whoever heard of a cedar picket fence? It’s not the same thing.”
“You’re right, it’s not. It’s half as much money.”
“But a white picket fence is the American dream. The fences are supposed to be white picket, not cedar picket. These are clichés for reason. I know, I’m a writer.”
The fence guy didn’t laugh. “I still think you should get the cedar. Everybody else does.”
I gave up, looking at the costs. “Okay,” I said.
I gave up on the white picket fence.
Like everybody else in America.
But you know what happened next, because you get who I am as a person, as a woman, and as a spendthrift in general.
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted a white picket fence. I pictured it with white climbing roses and a trellis, which would add to its cost, and as we all know, the goal is for me to spend every last penny of my retirement fund.
The climbing roses would be dripping petals over a lovely trellis, with blooms the exact hue of the fence itself, which would be white.
A soft white, like cream.
My American Cream.
Friends, I’m writing that check, right now.
The View from the Ferry
Francesca
That weekend in August, it felt like the city had a fever about to break.
The moment you stepped outside, the heat made you weak, and the humidity made you woozy. It made you mad it was so hot, and that anger gave you the little energy you needed to get wherever you had to go.
I knew I was in for it when it felt this way at eight in the morning. My friend and I had made plans to spend the day at Rockaway Beach, since being outdoors and not near a body of water seemed unthinkable. My friend was biking to the beach from her apartment in Brooklyn, while I planned to take the 9:30 A.M. ferry for the first time.