In which Kelly and I take the train back from Machu Picchu

I feel as if I should be labeling these posts "Peace Corpse" or "Peace Corp." There are people who were in the Peace Corps who spell it that way. Honest.

I told you I would tell you about the train trip back from Machu Picchu. And I will.

After the tax us to incremental death drama in Tacna, we arrived in Cuzco without further incident. We found a pension that was perfectly quiet at 11 a.m. but that was within drunken shouting and urinating distance from a cantina at night, so we did not sleep tranquilly.

Actually, we suspected something about the urine, both because we smelled evidence and we saw signs saying, "Do not urinate here." You can tell a lot about a place by what is forbidden. It's usually not necessary to tell people not to pee in a spot where they are not going to pee anyhow. In Ecuador, I saw signs on the buses pleading, "Don't spit here!" I tried not to touch anything.

In France, the sign on the train said, "No smoking." Well, what it really said was, "Defense de fumer." And, in a perfect example of French, "You're not going to tell me what to do," insouciance, a Frenchman was sitting in front of it, smoking. When I asked him why he couldn't just move to the smoking coach to smoke and let the non-smoking coach be smoke free for those of us who would prefer a smokeless environment, he just looked up and blew a smoke ring at me. I don't know if that was a commentary on my abysmal French or on what I had intended to ask him.

We verified that the shower had hot water. I had learned my lesson on that during my post-grad school travels in Europe. In Greece, I had discovered that the showers had hot water only in the afternoons after the water had had time to heat. It was held in barrels on top of the roofs. If you wanted to bathe in the morning, forget it. I mean, you could, but not with hot water. Nope, only in the late afternoon, after you had spent the day roasting at the beach and were hot already anyhow. Then you could cover yourself with more hot water.

Now I knew to ask. And to verify. Trust, but verify. That was my motto. Verify that the shower had a heating source that would not electrocute me. It wasn't until that evening that we discovered that they didn't actually use the hot water tank the manager had shown us. Electricity is too expensive, they said. Instead, there was a solar shower that gave hot water between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Who knew the Peruvians and the Greeks had so much in common?

Then we discovered it didn't matter at all that there was no way to heat water in the evenings because after 8:00 p.m., there was no water at all. Which lends a new meaning to the concept of a "dry" city and put a new question on my checklist before choosing a place to stay.

Speaking of "dry" places. Have I told you my joke about dry? There was a Peace Corps volunteer in my group who was from somewhere on the East Coast. He liked his beer. A lot. He was applying to PhD programs. He had applied to Texas Tech, in Lubbock, where I lived as a kid for several years.

"You know Lubbock is dry, don't you?" I asked as I watched him drain the last drop from his Genessee.

"Yeah, I know it doesn't rain a lot out there," he answered.

I tilted my head as I considered how to answer him. "Maybe there's something you should know," I said.

Kelly and I got up the next morning and took our cold, cold showers in the cold, cold bathroom. Cuzco is cold. It is high in the mountains - 11,000 feet. We had been taking diamox to prevent altitude sickness, but all that does is keep you from vomiting or passing out. It doesn't keep you from being short of breath or really, really tired after walking just one block. So we were cold and had no energy.

We trudged our way to the train station for the early-morning train to Machu Picchu. I won't even try to describe Machu Picchu. I can't do it justice. I will leave that for writers far more talented than I. Besides, I think it's kind of boring to describe what a place looks like when all you have to do is look at a photo. I will say, though, that it's about the only place I've ever been where I didn't think, That's it? That's all? The buildup actually did not do Machu Picchu justice.

The train ride back, though. We had reserved train seats on the ride there. Even though we had seats, that didn't stop the train company from selling additional tickets and cramming people in the aisles. People and their goats and their chickens and their children. You can fit a lot of living beings in the aisles of a train if you don't care about knocking into the people who are sitting in the seats. That they have paid for.

On the ride back, not only did we not have reserved spots, but it appeared that there were three times as many riders as seats. I don't know if there had been multiple trains out to Machu Picchu in the morning and only one train back or what, but there was a mad dash for seats. The guidebooks and word of mouth warned us that one had to throw onesself through the window to get a seat. It wouldn't have been such a big deal except it was about a four hour ride and who wants to stand that long?

When the train finally arrived, we pushed our way to the front of the crowd and jumped onto the coach, hoping to be lucky. But the people in front of us kept moving, so we knew there were no seats - until we saw one next to three Peruvian men, who were guarding it jealously from all takers. When they saw Kelly and me - remember, this was almost 20 years ago, they motioned to us eagerly. Not above using our sex and our blondeness - I was blonde once upon a time - to our advantage, we squeezed into the small space and looked smugly at all the long-haired, unwashed hippie backpackers crammed into the aisles. The cold shower that morning had been worth it.

But there was a price to pay for this seat. We had to sit next to these guys, none of whom were particularly couth. One of them was finishing his supper, which consisted of greasy meat (guinea pig, perhaps, and no I am not joking - in the depiction of the Last Supper on the wall of the cathedral in Cuzco, Jesus and the disciples are eating cuy, which is roast guinea pig) on a paper plate. He sucked the bones, licked his fingers, burped, and casually tossed the plate out the window.

Kelly said, "Oh gross," but even this was not enough to make us budge. We were not going to be grossed out of our seat by a finger-licking litterbug.

Then they started talking to us. "You're not from around here," they said perceptively.

We tried to pretend we didn't speak Spanish, but had to come clean when one of them told us he was getting off in two stops and we could have an extra seat then. We decided to be polite and suffer their conversation.

Don't be all, "Oh you girls are bitches. They were just being nice." This was a different culture. Latin men look at American women traveling alone and think, "Slut." They've seen American movies. They know what American women are like. They'll sleep with anyone! You don't think so? What's the plot of Mama Mia? Even I cringe at that one. A woman invites three old boyfriends to her daughter's wedding because she doesn't know which one of them is the daughter's father. It's a little crass, don't you think? Not that that sort of thing doesn't go on in South America - there was plenty of shacking up and sleeping around going on in Chile, but it's a little more discreet.

I got tired of being hit on in South America. I assure you, I was not the poster child for being hit on in the U.S. But by mere virtue of being a young American woman back then, I was easy in the eyes of Latin men. We were tired of it. We did our best to ignore the approaches.

But in this case, we decided to be minimally polite in exchange for a place to sit.

And then we cast our indignant principles to the wind. The door opened and in walked two gorgeous Brazilian men. They tried to place themselves and their backpacks in the aisle behind us, but the people sitting there wouldn't let them. Kelly and I looked at each other and it was as if we were communicating telepathically. At the same moment, we turned to the men, beckoned to them, and said, "You may stand next to us!"

Yes. Complete hypocrites. That's what we were. Superficial hypocrites. We didn't want the finger-licking Peruvian guys, but the Brazilians? Come to Mama, Mia.

We turned our backs on the Peruvians and focused all our attention on the Brazilians, keeping their interest by promising them they could have our seats when we got off the train.

We would have had a perfectly charming evening with them except for the fact that Brazil had just won the World Cup and some idiot just had to bring it up. Actually, that idiot was one of the Peruvian guys sitting next to us.

The next thing we knew, the entire coach was involved in the discussion. What were the pivotal plays in the series? What had Brazil done since the last time it won the Cup? What would have happened if Italy's best player had actually played?

"Wouldn't have made any difference," boasted Brazilian Number One.

"How do you feel about that?" I asked the tight-lipped Italian who was sitting across from me.

Men were shouting their opinions from all sides. When we made a stop, the guys standing outside yelled through the windows. Sports hell.

A woman sitting behind us - American - tried to get the Brazilians' attention, which we had lost for good, by feigning illness. Kelly and I rolled our eyes at each other. "Oldest trick in the book," we muttered. For the next three hours, we had to occupy ourselves by debating whether the "Can't be younger than my brother" rule applied to the Brazilians, whom we had discovered were all of 19 years old. For the record, we decided that the rule did not apply in the southern hemisphere, where people mature faster.

The rule turned out to be irrelevant, though, as all they wanted from us was a place to sit. Oh well. There were plenty of old Peruvian guys who thought we were hot.

In which Sly and Doris give us something to laugh about

On Sunday morning, when I wanted to bake cookies, Primo got all, "Whoooooo!" because he thinks the kitchen will turn into a big mess and it's soooo stressful. "There will be dishes all over!" he said. "How can I relax?'

"Because I'm not going to ask you to do any of the dishes?" I suggested.

"But you don't do them right," he answered grumpily.

"Your standards are too high," I told him.

"Yours are too low."

"Your parents think it's the opposite," I said.

We both laughed. How to unite people: Well, you know.

In which Kelly and I go to Machu Picchu but get sidetracked by the airport in Tacna

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, thanks to my country director's very liberal interpretation of the Peace Corps vacation policy, we got five weeks of vacation a year. Not that being in the Peace Corps wasn't already like being on vacation all the time, although I did go to work every day from nine to five and try to improve sales, cut expenses, and reduce accounts receivable.

Unfortunately, although those were my objectives, what I ended up spending most of my day doing was telling the interns that even when I wasn't in the office, I didn't want them to smoke - yes, I could tell that they'd been smoking in there the night before, I could! I could smell it!, asking my co-workers not to put their crap on my desk, locking my toilet paper in my desk drawer, and sitting through eight-hour meetings in which we debated should the mission of the organization be to serve Mapuche women or young Mapuche women.

And I was cold all the time, which is not my idea of vacation. And when I rented a room from Maruja la Bruja, I had to heat water on the stove to bathe because it was too dangerous to try to get hot water to emerge from the shower. [See: How I almost electrocuted myself taking a shower.] And there were bedbugs. So maybe it wasn't like being on vacation at all.

But the five weeks away was like being on vacation. Because you know, it was. A vacation.

My friend Kelly and I decided to go to Machu Picchu. Just one small country away. Might as well. As long as we were there. We took the bus to Arica, in the north of Chile in the Atacama desert, which purports to be one of the driest places on earth. No recorded rain in hundreds of years.

I believed this when I discovered I could not flush the toilet in any public place. Our bus stopped at a remote outpost. I, who had been experiencing some distress, ran to the bathroom. Then realized there was no way to flush. Emerged. Asked the bathroom attendant what there was to be done. She explained that after everyone had taken care of their needs, she would take a bucket of water into the stall.

Oh no, I explained. That would not be a good idea.

But that's how it's done, she said.

No no no, I said. I must have the bucket now.

But one must wait until everyone is finished!

I assure you you do not want to do that.

I insisted. And insisted. She surrendered. Gave me the bucket. I know the people who followed me thanked me, even though they didn't know why. And we'll leave it at that.

We got back on the bus. Stopped again a few hours later in a small Aymara village. Waited for the llamas to get out of our way so we could look inside the whitewashed church in which crucifixion scene painted on the wall showed Roman soldiers dressed as Spaniards.

When we got to Tacna, on the other side of the Peruvian border, we decided we'd had enough of buses and that taking a 26-hour bus ride through the mountains at night was probably not the wisest thing to do. I don't remember if it was because we were concerned about the roads, the driver, or the Sendero Luminoso.

Instead, for a mere US$45, almost 10% of our monthly stipend, we could fly from Tacna to Cuzco, the base city for Machu Picchu. Oh, the travel agent added, there is a $5 airport usage fee. We assumed she meant that fee was included in the price of the ticket and wondered why she was even mentioning it to us. Whatever.

Smug in the knowledge that we had gotten a real bargain, we arrived at the airport the next morning at 5 a.m. and pushed our way to the front of the mob waiting at the ticket counter, which we had to pass even though we already had our tickets.

England, Costa Rica, and the U.S. are the only countries I have ever been where people actually line up.

The mob seemed to be unusually grouchy, even for 5 a.m. We discovered why when the ticket agent told us we had to pay an 18% value-added tax on our tickets. There must have been a pact amongst the travel agents in the region that none of them would breathe a word of this to clients. Not a single customer there had heard about the tax before and boy were they mad about it.

The idea of collecting the tax when the ticket was sold had apparently not occurred to anyone. It would have occurred to Kelly and me because we are both organized businesswomen who would say, "Why not collect all taxes, fees, and other monies related to the ticket at once and disburse them to the appropriate agencies later as this will make things easier for the customer and also reduce manpower and operational costs associated with collecting said monies," but they hadn't asked us. They never do.

Over the din of protesting flyers to be, we looked at each other, chuckled indulgently, and noted that indeed, when one is in a third-world country, one must expect this kind of thing. One must expect inefficiencies, some of them deliberate. Sometimes, they are means of increasing employment. Sometimes, they are means of reducing fraud. The more people involved in collecting money, the harder it is to steal it. Think about that, churches that have only one person counting the collection plate. I am always shocked to find that any church in this day and age can have money stolen from the collection plate. The way you do it is you grab three people from the congregation to count after the service is over and their counts all have to tally. It's that simple, people!

We paid without protest, then passed through the elaborate security system - the hall - to the waiting room. I guess they didn't care if they were hijacked. Hijackers never want to go to nice countries. They just want to go to hellholes. Peru was already a hellhole. I mean, it's a beautiful country with good food, but the Sendero Luminoso was making things a nightmare for poor people. I don't know how Cuba could be much worse. Actually, at least in Cuba, people would be warm. Peru is cold as heck in the mountains. So yeah, they didn't seem to worry much about hijackers. Although buses got hijacked. So go figure.

We wondered when we would eat again. There was no cafeteria - this was a minimalist airport. Apparently, the government had figured out it could make money by taxing the heck out of passengers but not by selling them food? Peru, I'm disappointed in you. Or I am disappointed in the 1993 you.

At five minutes to 6:00, we lined up to board the plane, which allegedly left at 6:00 a.m., although time has a totally different meaning in the southern hemisphere. Six a.m. could mean "any time once it gets light."

The ticket taker looked at my ticket and told me I hadn't paid the airport usage fee.

We shall leave the debate over whether one should be charged for walking into a building to get to an airplane for another time.

Yes, I did, I told him calmly. Had we not cleared this up yesterday with the travel agent? It was included in the ticket price.

He said no, I didn't have the appropriate orange sticker on my ticket.

Well, I demanded, Why didn't they tell me this when I paid my 18% value-added tax and they re-wrote the entire ticket?

He just shrugged and pointed me to the Airport Usage Fee Pay Window.

Confident that this was a mere administrative misunderstanding that I, because of my command of the Spanish language, could clear up in no time, I strode with determination to the Airport Usage Fee Pay Window and waved my ticket in the agent's face. Note that this window is not to be confused with the 18% Value-Added Tax Window. That was a separate window staffed by a separate agent.

I have paid this tax! I announced to the agent. It was in my ticket price!


He shrugged and indicated that I lacked the orange sticker.

NO! I maintained. I paid it, I paid it, I paid it! My voice rose with each declaration and tears of anger and frustration welled in my eyes, but to no avail. The agent merely stared past me with blank bureaucratic indifference - he would have been a Miami DMV employee had he been American - at the passengers behind me who, in an attempt to board the plane before it left, were reaching over my shoulder and frantically shoving US$5 bills into his hand.

Just pay! Kelly hissed.

Oh like I should trust someone who packed all white clothes for a three-week trip to Peru and Bolivia?

Pay! She said. We're going to miss the plane! Then she remarked conversationally, This is a perfect example of commitment escalation like we learned in business school.

I looked at the runway. The line was getting shorter. I looked back at the agent. He was looking at his fingernails. He didn't care. He was paid no matter what. He was quite unlike the bus drivers in Chile, who got a cut of the fares. This was good if you wanted to catch a bus. All you had to do was wave one down and it would come to a screeching halt, but not so good if you were already on a bus and wanted to get somewhere already. The bus was always stopping! For other people!

I pulled five dollars out of my pocket, threw it on the counter, hissed that I knew I was being cheated and that I hated his stupid country, thrust my ticket at the agent for the sticker, gave my ticket to the ticket taker, and ran on the plane.

Whereupon after some reflection and thought I realized that the ticket price had not included the airport usage fee after all and that I had wasted a perfectly good fit.

Next time: We take the train to Machu Picchu and sit next to two beautiful Brazilian men who are too young for us.

In which Sly and Doris take the kids for a special treat

Remember how I told you about the summer we spent on my grandparents' farm? Did I tell you the part about how my grandfather rented a pony from the Amish so my siblings and I would have a pony to ride? Well he did. They might not even have charged him. He used to drive them to the doctor and other such things. Maybe they just lent him a horse to be nice. Or maybe not. Those Amish are capitalists. Which is fine with me.

There are a lot of Amish in that part of Wisconsin. It's not unusual to see a horse-drawn buggy on the road. Even more not unusual to see horse-drawn buggies in the parking lot at K-Mart in Medford. Then, if you go to the Amish grocery just off Highway 29, from which I have bulk spices that are almost 15 years old - when I bought them, I thought I was going to be using a lot of mace and allspice, but really, does anyone need a half a cup of that stuff at once? - you really see the buggies. Young Amish women, wearing their caps and their dresses with white aprons pinned to the front, run the store. You can get some good deals in there, but you have to know your prices. Just because something is in a plastic bag with a white sticker on it being sold by the Amish doesn't mean it's a deal.

Anyhow, my grandfather probably got a good deal on the pony because he was always doing favors for his Amish friends. My brother, sister, and I had a pony to ride for the summer, although all we really did was go in a circle while my grandfather held the long rope that he'd attached to the pony's neck. There was no galloping out through the hayfields.

That had to wait for when we visited my Aunt Mary and Uncle Hugh in Colorado. My uncle is a real cowboy. He grew up in Prussia, which is now part of Poland, on a farm with horses. During the war, his mother taught him to embroider. He embroidered the beautiful rose on my aunt's wedding gown. When the Russians came, they fled over the hill in front of the soldiers. He found some American soldiers and asked them for food. The cook told him they'd already eaten but he could eat what he could find in the kitchen. My uncle crawled inside the big soup pot and licked what remained on the sides.

He made his way to the US and worked on a ranch in Kansas. Put himself through college. Started buying land and horses in Colorado. By the time I was old enough to care, he had several horses. We lived in Texas, so would drive to Colorado to visit. Each visit included at least one horseback ride, which was about as glamorous a vacation as I could imagine as a kid.

I got to ride horses with my relatives. My grandmother taught me to make bread, apple strudel, and pie crust. I knew how to make pie crust from a very young age, which is one of the reasons I was so annoyed with Doris the time she tried to teach me how to make pie. I KNOW HOW TO MAKE PIE! And she didn't even do it right.

My other grandmother let my brother and me clean the bathrooms at the Shell station she owned. You might not think that sounds like much fun, but we thought it was cool. When we were done, the mechanics would pull a bottle of Coke out of the machine for us and hand it to us, icy cold. As my mom never had pop in the house, this was a special treat.

The station is gone, replaced by some other brand. The house my grandma lived in is gone, too. The people she sold it to smoked in bed, set the house on fire, and killed themselves.

Don't smoke in bed.

Granma Sylvia would also take my siblings and me to the Shopko in Marshfield, 35 miles away from her house, and give us each a dollar to spend, which was a lot, as we only got 25 cents a week for our allowance. On the way, we would say a prayer to St Christopher, a small statue of whom stood on her dashboard. St Christopher has been de-sainted. But we never had an accident. I say those results speak for themselves.

My uncles would take their teeth out for us. When you are six, that is high comedy.

My grandparents and relatives did cool things with us.

When Primo was a little boy, his grandfather taught him to play pool. He would visit his grandparents at their little retirement village in Florida and do grandparent things like go to the beach. He says his maternal grandparents - the ones Sly thought were stupid, uneducated, and unsophisticated and hence not worthy of respect - were the nicest people he had ever been around.

Now I am getting to the point of this story.

Guess what Sly and Doris did with their grandkids the other day?

Guess.

What would be a fun thing to do with your grandkids who are home from college for spring break? What would you do with your grandkids whom you hadn't seen since Christmas? How would you form sweet memories that your grandchildren would later pull out of their minds after you were dead and say, "Oh I loved spending time with my grandparents! They were so sweet and so fun and they just wanted to make me happy?"

What experiences would you want to share with your grandchildren?

Here's what I would do.

I would know what my grandchildren liked to do and what they thought was special and then I would try to make that happen. If it were something extravagant or expensive, it might not happen exactly, but I would try to get close. Suppose my granddaughter wanted a trip to Paris. If I couldn't take her to Paris, I might suggest that we put together a scrapbook of things about Paris. Maybe have a Paris-themed movie marathon. Cook a French meal. Do something Paris-y and French.

If my grandson wanted to be a ball player, I would take him to a ball game. Go to the batting cage with him. Collect baseball cards.

Sly and Doris' grandchildren like basketball, bowling, listening to music, going to the beach.

They are not political activists.

They are college freshmen.

Sly and Doris took them to a lecture on global warming.

Which is pretty darn lame.

It doesn't even matter where you stand on the issue. I am not getting into a global warming debate. But taking your grandchildren to a lecture on global warming is dull, dull, dull.

Why didn't they just say, "Yes, we know you're on spring break, but we think you should still be in class, so we're going to drop you off at your old school for the day."

Or why didn't they say, "Hey! We've rented a bunch of documentaries about wood from the library! Seven of them!"

Or, "How would you like to spend a few hours cleaning the cat box and the bathrooms? For free? While we criticize how you do it?"

Sly and Doris = most boring grandparents ever.

What did your grandparents do with you for fun?

In which my yenta dad doesn't forget his mission

I was hanging out with my dad and his cancer roommate, Jim. Jim had prostate cancer. It had metastasized.

Prostate cancer confined to the prostate is not the worst, but prostate cancer that has metastasized is very bad news.

Jim had almost no visitors. He and his wife had divorced years ago. He had a stepdaughter who lived a few hours away who came to visit once on a Sunday but couldn't come very often because she had work and it was a long trip.

My dad had lots of visitors because he and my mom had lived in San Antonio for about 15 years before the Sicily adventure. So we shared our visitors with Jim. He was a nice guy and we didn't want him to be lonely or feel left out.

He had nobody to take care of him when he left the hospital. He lived far from his stepdaughter, not that she would have been able to do much. When you work full time, it's hard to take care of a sick person.

Primo and I watched the movie 50/50 last night, about a man who gets cancer at the age of 26. He tells his artist girlfriend of a few months that if she wants to break up, that's OK, because it's a lot to ask of someone to take you to chemo and take care of you when you are throwing up in the middle of the night. She refuses to break up, saying she wants to take care of him.

I rolled my eyes. "This is not going to end well," I said.

Even when you love the person you are taking care of and have a lifetime history, it's very hard. You resent the cancer. You hate that everything in your life is about cancer. You hate the damn hospital and the fear and the despair and the not knowing. Towards the end, we all, my dad included, just wanted it to be over. He would wake up in the morning and say, "Why didn't I die last night?" He felt guilty that our lives were consumed with his cancer. All we wanted was to spend as much time with him before he died. But we still all hated the cancer.

Someone I'd only known for a few months?

No way I would take on his cancer. No way.

And of course (spoiler alert, so skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the movie, which you should because it's not often that you see a cancer comedy), she does ditch him, but only after being a really bad cancer girlfriend. She didn't want to ruin their karma by seeing him getting the chemo, so she just dropped him off at the front door of the hospital and then forgot to pick him up. I didn't blame her for not wanting to be his girlfriend any more, but I do blame her for not breaking up with him right away.

Back to Jim. He was being released, probably because there really wasn't anything else they could do.

"But who will help you?" I asked, which was, in retrospect, not the most sensitive question I could have asked.

"I have a plan," he assured me.

Dumb me. I thought he'd lined up a home health nurse.

He hadn't.

He had a plan for everything not to be an issue any more. When I found out, I was very sad. Nobody should have to die alone.

Unless the person is a real meanie jerk.

But a nice person like Jim shouldn't die alone.

Back to when Jim and my dad were still alive and in their room. I was sitting on my dad's bed talking to him. Yet another doctor made his way in to check my dad.

My dad introduced himself and me, then asked the doctor about himself. He always asked where the doctor was from, then about where else he had been stationed, then about family. He did the same thing with the chaplains. He got several visits every week from the hospital chaplains. His favorite was the Episcopalian chaplain, a woman. My dad, a lifelong Catholic, liked to talk to her about theology. When she showed up, he would tell us that we could go get lunch or take a break.

With this new doctor, my dad went straight for broke. "Are you married, Doc?" he asked.

The doctor shook his head. "No."

Have I ever told you that when I was in grad school and my parents were working in Saudi Arabia that my dad told me in a letter that he had started a support group called "Grandfathers without Grandchildren?" He was dying to be a grandfather. He loved little kids.

My grandmother was on the same bandwagon. She sent me a letter asking me if I had considered marrying a widower who needed help raising his young children. (Because that's just what every unmarried woman wants: the chance to raise a dead woman's kids.) "A friend of your mother's married a widower. They live in Marshfield now. She is very tall."

Blessherheart. I loved my sweet grandmother who gardened, taught me to make bread, walked to 6:00 a.m. Mass every morning, and made sure everyone around her, including my schizophrenic second cousin, was fed, but we had different ideas about life.

I wrote back to my dad and told him I could start my own club: Unwed MBA Mothers or Daughters Without Children.

I knew what he was getting at with the doctor. I had to head him off.

"Not married?" my dad mused.

I casually leaned over and took my dad's hand. I squeezed. Hard.

"What's your specialty?" I asked the doctor, trying to change the subject.

"What a coincidence! My daughter here is sing- OW!" my dad exclaimed as I squeezed his hand again.

The doctor looked confused. Jim jumped a little.

I looked at the doctor, blocked my left hand with my right as I pointed to my dad with my left, mouthed, "Morphine," and looked back at my dad. Except of course my dad was stone cold sober. He was just a father with a mission.

Jim looked at me and raised his eyebrows. He knew my dad was sober. They'd been talking about their days in Vietnam and my dad's mind was as sharp as a tack. He would get worse as he had to have more and more morphine, but on that day, he was just fine. He'd even been to physical therapy.

"He's the only patient I've ever had who asked to go to therapy," the therapist said.

"I'm bored and I want to exercise," my dad shrugged. He didn't feel too awful once they got the fluid off him and started him on painkillers and got him through his first round of chemo. The first time wasn't so bad, at least not in the first few days. It got worse every time, though. Chemo is really nasty.

The doctor told me his specialty. Which I don't remember because this was 15 years ago. He wasn't a surgeon or a nephrologist because those guys had already come and gone and said they couldn't do anything. This was a teaching hospital, so maybe he was just a wandering student doc, although he looked older than that. But cute. Older but cute. I wouldn't have minded knowing more about his singleness, but it was too weird to have my dad broker the deal.

I had nothing to say about his specialty. What are you supposed to say. "Oh! Cardiology! Well, there's a profession to love!" See? It looks stupid in writing, too. Here it is, 15 years later, and I still have nothing clever to say back to this guy. I probably just smiled and mumbled. That was my usual strategy when put on the spot. I might even had said something stupid like, "I was going to go to med school, but then I took freshman calculus and chemistry and realized I was not smart enough. Plus I realized I don't like being around sick people." Which is not the right thing to say when you are around sick people, so let's hope this sentence stayed in my head and did not come out of my mouth.

My dad tried to steer the conversation back to the doctor's marital status, but was unsuccessful. The doctor left and I was relived. I looked like crap. When your dad is in the hospital with serious cancer and you are spending every other night in the chair in his room, you don't spend a lot of time on style. You just wash your hair, brush your teeth, and hope that your socks match.

My dad scolded me: "I'm trying to take care of you! He could have been The One!"

Maybe. Maybe I blew it. But finding a husband was not at the top of my list at the moment. Bless my dad's heart.

In which my dad is a pincushion for a medical student

My dad was in the hospital. They'd diagnosed cancer and he'd started the chemo, which was brutal. His hair had started to fall out. We had a little head-shaving ceremony outside my mom's room at the temporary quarters on base.

Wait. Let me give you some more context. My parents had moved to Sicily in August 1996 so my dad, who had been retired from the air force for about 14 years, could take a job teaching junior high math and science to the kids at the American navy base on Sicily.

In November 1996, he thought he'd pulled a muscle running a 10K.

It wasn't a pulled muscle. It was non-Hodgkin's blue cell lymphoma. I think it was stage four. If it wasn't when he was diagnosed, it became stage four pretty quickly. Stage four is the last stage. Then you die. If you get cancer, you want stage one. Of course, you don't want cancer at all. That's the best situation.

He had had a major physical before the Dept of Defense schools hired him in August. They don't want to hire sick people to be teachers and pay to send them abroad. That's a waste of money. There was no sign of cancer when he had his physical, but it showed up very soon after that.

After being medivaced back to the US in December 1996, he was at Wilford Hall medical center at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. I was living in Austin and unemployed, so I spent a lot of time down at the hospital. My mom was trying to find a place to live - they had realized my dad would probably not be returning to teaching very soon - and get their stuff shipped from Italy back to the US. It was a time when organized people triumph and disorganized people crater. My mother could move an army with her logistical skills, but even as uber-organized as she is, doing all this while her husband was in the hospital fighting cancer was brutal.

She had to return to Italy to receive their household goods, which hadn't even arrived by the time my dad got sick, and have them shipped back. Even super organized women can't be two places at once. When she went to Italy, I covered for her with my dad. Even when she was in San Antonio, she had things to do that only she could do, so I spent a lot of time just sitting with my dad.

I had been very discouraged that I couldn't find a job after the Peace Corps, but now I am very happy that I had that time with my dad. It was a blessing and a gift. Back then, I was so worried about my employment situation, but if I had to be unemployed for a year to be able to be with my dad in the last months of his life, it was a fair tradeoff. Now I am unemployed again and apparently unemployable, but nobody in my family is sick. I'm not sure how to classify this one.

I want to say something about "fighting" cancer. I hate it - hate it - when people praise cancer survivors as being "fighters" and "tough."

What cancer survivors are mainly is lucky.

When you say someone who survives really fought or really wanted to live, what you are implying is that someone who dies from cancer just didn't fight hard enough. Just didn't want to live enough.

I know that's not how you mean it. It never even occurred to you. But when I hear it - when other people who have lost loved ones to cancer hear it, what we hear is, "Only the people who really want to live survive cancer. Only the people who do it right live. If you die from cancer, it's because you did it wrong."

Which is not true. My dad didn't want to die. We sure didn't want him to die. But not everyone is cured. Someday, maybe, I hope. But today, people still die from cancer and it's not because they gave up. It's because they were unlucky.

My dad was in the hospital. We got him a day pass to leave and spend some time outdoors - it was a nice February day in south Texas. He was too weak to spend much time doing anything but sitting, but we pulled some chairs out to the sidewalk in front of my mom's room and sat in the sun.

Because of the chemo, his hair had started to fall out. Chemo kills all the fast-growing cells in your body. These cells include cancer cells, but also include hair cells and white blood cells, which is why some people lose their hair and why most people going through chemo have to be very careful about germs - they have no resistance with their white blood cells wiped out as part of the cycle.

The falling hair was becoming a nuisance. He asked us to cut if off. My mom had gotten an electric razor from somewhere. She must have borrowed it from some San Antonio friends. She is one of the most prepared persons you will ever meet, but even my mom doesn't carry an electric shaver around with her as a matter of course.

She does carry her gardening and house tools with her when she travels by car, though. The first time she came to visit me in Memphis, she spent the days doing minor repairs on my house and working in the yard while I was at work.

My mom is the houseguest you definitely want to return. She does not lie around waiting to be entertained. She doesn't complain that she can't watch TV and she doesn't drink all of your booze. She finds problems to solve and solves them and then she helps with dinner.

I asked my dad if I could give him a mohawk first. He rolled his eyes, maybe remembering my brother's mohawk when he was in high school.

At least my brother never got a tattoo. Hair grows. Tattoos are forever. I am very glad tattoos had not become fashionable when I was in high school. Not that I would have gotten one - I faint when someone pierces my skin with a needle, which is the appropriate reaction.

I shaved the sides of his head, then my mom took a photo of him smiling uncertainly with his mohawk.

It was not a pretty picture. He'd been in the hospital for over a month and had gained a bunch of weight (edema from when his kidneys started to fail before they started the chemo), then lost it. He was now much thinner than he had been, and he would get even thinner yet before the chemo was over. His normal weight was about 170, which is average for a man of 5'8". At its lowest, he was about 120 and skeletal. He was too weak to move. When the young airmen would change his diaper and his sheets - oh, yes - that is one of the things that happens with chemo - you lose control of your bowels - the one would lift my dad in his arms like a baby and hold him - a cancer pieta - while the other stripped the bed and re-made it with clean linens.

The entire time he was in the hospital, I never heard any of these young men ever call my dad anything but "sir." None of this first name business. Bad enough to lose your physical dignity but to lose all psychic dignity as well? That would be too much.

I shaved the rest of his hair off his pale head. He smiled again. A very small smile. It's hard to smile when you feel like crap and know you are probably going to die a lot sooner than you had planned.

A few days later, they wanted to give my dad a lumbar puncture. The test was to see how far the cancer had spread. The doctor came in with a team of medical students. The one intern was about to do her first lumbar puncture.

They can't anesthetize you for a lumbar puncture. I guess it's because you can't anesthetize bone? Any physicians reading please chime in.

My dad was wearing a hospital gown and nothing else, which was fine because he was covered with the bed linens. But the intern needed to have his back exposed to her. "Lie on your side and be perfectly still," she instructed as she pulled back the sheets and lifted his gown away from below his waist.

"I'll wait in the hall," I told my dad, as I could see that he would be almost naked for this procedure.

I stepped into the hall and stood next to the door. A few moments later, I heard a smothered scream. "Come back in here!" my dad gasped.

"I don't want to see your penis!" I told him in a loud whisper as I leaned around the door frame. And I didn't. Sooooo inappropriate.

"I don't care," he breathed. "Come back in here and hold my hand."

I walked back into the room carefully looking at my dad's face and not anywhere else. I sat next to his shoulder, still looking toward his face, and holding his hand. He clenched it so tightly that it hurt.

The intern couldn't get the right spot. Her face set with determination, she tried again. And again. She poked that needle in against the bone.

My dad squeezed my hand harder. He bit his lip, but I could still hear his moans. I felt the tears rolling down my face. I hated that intern. I hated her.

She finally got the needle in the bone. "Be very still," she warned, as she sucked out the fluid.

I stroked my dad's bald head and squeezed his hand back as the intern pulled his gown down and put the covers back. I didn't even look at her. She was dead to me.

I know she was just doing her job and that everyone has to learn somehow, but maybe she could have practiced on something or someone who wasn't my dad first. I felt sick to my stomach then as my dad breathed heavily and quivered in pain and I feel sick to my stomach now as I write this, 15 years later. I can still feel his hand squeezing mine so hard that it hurt. But I didn't mind: I was glad to share his pain. If I could have, I would have taken it from him and felt it all myself. Is there anything worse than watching someone you love suffer?

The tests revealed nothing. The cancer had not spread that far. Yet. Extra pain. For nothing.

In which I could have been Mrs Robinson

UPDATE:

You guys, I am mortified to find that I already wrote about this story two years ago. I am losing either my memory or my mind or both. I am also apparently running out of material.

When I was still working at Consolidated Buggy Whips, a younger co-worker developed a crush on me.

By "younger," I mean, "I could have been his babysitter when I was in high school."

By "younger," I mean, "I had graduated from high school before he started kindergarten."

So there you go. I have it. Or I had it. Whatever it is that draws men.

Much younger men.

We had been working together for years. Billy was a nice, nice guy. Quiet. Shy, I thought. Sweet, sweet boy. I liked him. He was very good at his job and I was happy to have him on my team. He was a baby - a baby - when he first started working at CBW. It was his first job out of college. I was already a wise older lady.

After I had broken up with JT and during the Navy Pilot Who Kissed Mushily Drama but before I met Primo, Billy asked me out to lunch.

I wasn't suspicious. Colleagues lunch together all the time. No big deal.

But when we got to the restaurant, he told me this was his treat. I protested, but he insisted. I stopped arguing and accepted graciously, although I think lunch between colleagues should be dutch treat. But it’s ungracious to argue when someone makes a generous offer like that. When I offer to buy lunch for someone, I mean it, and find it insulting to have the person make more than a token protest.

What is the protocol for ordering under those circumstances? What if I'd been willing to pay for something more expensive for myself (OK, you may stop laughing now) but wasn't willing to have someone else pay it? If I know someone else is paying, I always try to order something not too expensive. When I treat someone else, I usually wait until we're done eating and then I just take the check. That way, my guest doesn't worry about overspending and orders what she wants. I'd rather not know if someone is going to pay until after I've ordered.

We had a nice conversation. On a big project we had worked on together, I frequently made brownies for the team. Chocolate is an amazing motivator. I might not have been able to give my team members a raise or a promotion - I was not their manager, but I could keep them well supplied with baked goods. “No brownies for you!” became a mantra when I was teasing someone.

Billy told me there was a guy on his team now who was always bringing elaborate desserts to work and that he – Billy – wanted to make something even better. (Men are so competitive.) Did I give dessert-making lessons?

No, I told him, but I would send him some recipes. And, I said, he might want to consider taking some cooking classes – that would be a great way to meet girls!

Then I got nosy. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I asked that in a big sister way, not in a I wonder if he's available for me way. If I had actually been interested in him for myself, I never would have been so bold as to ask if he had a girlfriend. I would have been far more subtle. Asking, "So, what did you do this weekend?" or, "What are your plans for the holidays?" often gives one the necessary information.

“No, not right now,” he said, blushing. He’s a quiet, reserved guy – not the sort who would be out on the town all the time, I would think.

“We’ll have to figure out a way for you to meet a nice girl,” said yenta me.

Then he told me that he had gotten a cat and we compared kitten and cat stories. “You need to come over and meet my cat,” he suggested.

“OK, sure,” I said. I love cats. I like visiting other people's cats. Although some of the thrill of cats has worn off now that Primo and I have two Siamese/tabby blend cats who got not the best of each breed - no shedding and little talking - but the worst - constant constant talking and constant shedding. I love my kitties but I wish they would just SHUT UP sometimes.

Then he told me about the business trip he had taken to India. I was really interested to hear about such an exotic city. How come I only got to go to the convention center in Orlando? “I have photos,” he offered. “You can come over and see them if you want.”

“Email me some!” I said.

By now I was starting to wonder, but thinking, No! I am THIRTEEN YEARS OLDER than he is! I am completely misreading things here. (I did not pick up any gaydar, either, but I have completely lost my gaydar in the past few years.)

My friend Leigh thought he was interested in me and not in a I-am-old-enough-to-be-his-big-sister way.

I disagreed, but still took action. I tried to set him up with a young woman in the accounting department. “She’s your age!” I emailed. “She’s very cute.”

I asked her if she wanted to be set up. “I have a boyfriend,” she said.

Rats. I passed the disappointing news on to him.

“I’d really be more interested in getting to know you better,” he replied.

Holy smoke. Leigh was right.

What do you say when a co-worker (strike 1) who is 13 years younger than you (strike 2) is that direct (not a strike at all)?

I was hot enough (I blush as I type these words because they are so boastful and really, so inaccurate) to attract a much younger man. I was impressed with myself.

But I was also completely uninterested.

I consulted friends. "Why don't you go out with him?" my brother asked.

Not useful.

"Tell him you're not interested," said one friend.

Ouch. That seemed unnecessarily harsh. Especially considering I still had to work with him. I didn't want things to be awkward.

"Lie," another friend suggested.

That's the ticket.

I lied. Sort of. "Billy, I am so flattered," I said, which was probably not the best way to tell him because it is the opening line that leads to a "but." I should have just said, "Wow! Thanks! But I'm seeing someone."

Which is what I did say, more or less, after the first line. I thought that would be enough.

"Is it serious?" he asked.

I was getting more and more impressed with him. What guts! What woman doesn't like a man who is open about his desire for her? If only he were older.

That's when I lied. As I said, I was seeing the Former Navy Pilot Who Kissed Mushily and Who Still Shared A House With His Ex Wife. Neither quality appealed to me. And indeed, after the mushy kiss, I didn't see him romantically again. All we had were awkward encounters during the many, many meetings we had together at work, which is why you never date someone you work with.

But I told Billy I was dating someone and that yes, it was serious.

It was so far from serious you couldn't see serious from there with a telescope.

It was one kiss past over.

But it gave me a way out that let him save face. I liked Billy. I didn't want to hurt him. I just didn't want to kiss him.

In which I go to the beach as a babysitter and get bad cramps

You know that we lived in the Panama Canal Zone when I was in high school. All except for my senior year - we moved the summer before senior year and I got to be one of two new students in a class of 648, most of whom had known each other since kindergarten. Which stank.

However, the first part of my high school career wasn't awful, even though we were all convinced that if we were in THE STATES that our lives would look like the commercial where there were all these gorgeous people at the beach drinking something and the Beach Boys were singing Good Vibrations. What was that product?

Sunkist! That's it. That's what I suspected and the google confirmed it.

The irony of it is that our lives were far more like that commercial in the Canal Zone, where we wore shorts and flip flops to school and could go to the beach whenever we wanted because it was a mile away, than they would have been had we been back in THE STATES. We discovered when we returned to THE STATES that soda was really expensive and that you couldn't get Purple Passion or Tahitian Treat and they didn't sell empanadas in the school cafeteria. The beach was a few hours away. We couldn't wear shorts to school. Welcome to school dress codes.

One of the really good things about living in the zone and on base was that my friends and I had a lock on the babysitting business. There were lots of young families around and we had as much work as we wanted. With my babysitting money - I think I was charging $1 an hour by then, I saved enough to buy a bicycle, a 35 mm camera, and most of my clothes. That camera cost over $300.

I babysat a lot.

A new family asked me to sit. When I got to their house, I discovered they were Jewish.

I had never met anyone Jewish before. At least, not knowing they were Jewish.

Don't laugh. It's not like there are a ton of Jews in the air force. Yes, the base chapel was used as a synagogue when required, but I usually saw it as a Catholic chapel (they put the crucifix behind the altar) or a Protestant one (crucifix was replaced with a cross).

When we lived off base in Lubbock, we may have had some Jewish neighbors, but if we did, I didn't know they were Jewish. I just googled: there is one synagogue in Lubbock. The entire county has about 278,000 persons. The big religious accommodation that the schools made for religion was that there were no school activities on Wednesday night. Wednesday night is the night that the Baptists and some of the other serious Protestants have extra church. As Catholics, my family went to church once a week plus Sunday school and that was quite enough for me, thank you very much. But there were no Friday night/Shabbot accommodations, which made me think the Jews didn't have much power there.

Interestingly, Memphis has about the same number of Jews as it does Catholics. Memphis actually has the largest eruv west of New York City, or so I think I read once. Memphis has Catholic churches and synagogues and Catholic schools and Jewish schools. Once you get out of the city, though, and into the country, you find only Protestant churches - and not very many of them are Episcopalian. Memphis is not a southern city - it is a river city and river cities develop in very different ways from cities in the interior.

In Memphis, the Catholics have just surrendered and they have Wednesday night church stuff, too. I don't know about the Jews. The more conservative Jews were in their own schools, so maybe it just wasn't an issue.

Back to the family. They were from New York. I hadn't met any New Yorkers before. I loved their accents, but it took me a little while to understand. They kept kosher. Mrs S showed me the two sets of dishes and explained all the rules to me. I was terrified of doing something wrong, so theirs was the one house where I never ate. Usually, I plowed through the good stuff - the Captain Crunch, the Cheese Nips, and anything else my mom never bought because she said it was overpriced crap - when I was babysitting, but not at the S's house. I didn't touch a thing in the kitchen.

Mrs S was gorgeous. She was round and voluptuous with thick, glossy, curly dark brown hair. Mr S, who was a JAG, which is a military lawyer, was not so cute. I thought she outranked him in the looks department, but he was nice, which is what really matters over time.

They had two gorgeous plump dark-haired little girls. Bethany, who was four, and Sarah, who was one. I had never heard the name Bethany before and I thought it was so exotic. I still think it's a beautiful name, but now it's been tainted by that Real Housewives of New York who said in a national magazine that she and her husband had not had sex in six months and there were cobwebs on his penis, which made me think, "Wow. And I thought I might reveal too much personal information on my blog that a few hundred people read. I can't hold a candle to this lady." Then I thought, "She must not be interested in repairing her marriage because she just completely dissed her husband in public and that probably won't go over well."

Yes I am embarrassed that I even know about this. I have never seen the show, but I have stood in many a line at the grocery store and waited to get my hair cut, so I do read those magazines. Please don't hate me.

I became their babysitter. I liked the girls and Mr and Mrs S were nice to me. What wasn't to like?

One day, my mom said, "Mrs S called me. She wants to know if it would be OK to ask you to go to the beach with them next weekend as their babysitter. They would pay you [whatever - I don't remember] and they would want you to watch the girls at night while they went out and help them during the day."

It sounded like a great deal to me. A free trip to the beach!

I agreed to go. The first night was fine. I watched the girls while Mr and Mrs S went out to dinner with their friends. We were staying at a resort. I think we were at Santa Clara on the Panamanian Pacific coast. Once you get away from the canal and water isn't being churned up by all the ships going through, the beaches are nice.

The next day, on the beach, with Mr and Mrs S, I forgot that I was the babysitter.

Parents - take heed. Even when I was a lifeguard and being paid to watch your kids, I couldn't watch all of them at once. Don't think you can drop your kid off at a pool full of children and just leave. It only takes a second for a kid to go under and sometimes, nobody, not even the lifeguard notices. If your child is not a super strong swimmer, then do not abandon him to the pool. Do not trust that the lifeguard will be watching only your child. Because she won't. She is praying that nobody drowns on her shift and she is watching as closely as she can, but when there are dozens of kids, there is only so much one person can do.

Not to mention sometimes - just sometimes - I was distracted by a cute guy (rare, because the cute guys didn't hang out at the Converse city pool) or (more likely) thoughts of the Frito Pie I was going to buy from the snack stand for my lunch.

If you have never had Frito Pie, I feel sad for you.

What is this mysterious Frito Pie of which you speak? you are asking. You are especially asking this if you knew what a taxi medallion was before you took Econ 102 in college. I don't think I had ever ridden in a taxi before college. I may have, when we first moved to Spain when I was six, but I don't remember. I had always lived in places where people drove their own cars. Taxis were not part of my world. When the econ textbook used taxi medallions as an example of restricted supply, I had NO IDEA what they meant.

I was also too timid to ask the prof, so in the end, my ignorance was my own darn fault.

Still, textbook writers - not everyone who reads your book lives in New York. That's all I'm saying.

If you live in Texas, you might not know what a taxi medallion is, but you will know what Frito Pie is.

It is Fritos covered with chili, cheese, and raw onion. The best way to have it is in the bag. That is, you cut open the bag of Fritos, then pour the chili, cheese, and onion on top of it. Mix it all up and eat it out of the bag.

It is divine.

I bought myself Fritos for Thanksgiving this year. Primo spent Thanksgiving with Sly and Doris, but his Christmas present to me for the past three years has been that he will visit them without me. I didn't like not having him for Thanksgiving, but then, I am not the one threatening suicide (I am not making this up) if he is not present.

Just a wee bit manipulative, don't you think? I wish he'd call her bluff. Honestly. What kind of mother does that? I guess the same kind of mother who says two weeks before the wedding that she's not coming.

Back to the story about Bethany and Sarah and beach. I forgot I was in charge. Bethany was in the water. I looked away for a while. A wave knocked her down. Mr S ran to get her and yelled at me. I can understand that - he was terrified that his child might have drowned. I didn't like being yelled at, though, but now, as an adult, I understand. I understand that he probably also felt guilty because he had entrusted the life of his child to a 14 year old girl.

The main point of this story, though, is I got sick that afternoon and Mr and Mrs S were really worried.

They didn't have to be.

I got cramps.

Which always happened to me. I got really bad cramps every time I got my period. The doctor had suggested that I go on the pill, an idea that horrified me. Perhaps if he had explained it a little better, I would have been willing, but all I knew was that anyone I knew who was on the pill was a Bad Girl.

Crazy crazy crazy.

I don't think I even knew of a single girl who was on the pill. There may have been some. Maybe other girls had problems with cramps, too.

For years, I was miserable every month. Painful cramps, sometimes vomiting. I took prescription painkillers that were apparently so strong that when I got my individual health insurance when I quit my job to go to grad school, the policy excluded any diseases of the reproductive organs.

I finally surrendered and went on the pill when I was in grad school and I thought, Where have you been all my life?

No cramps.

None.

Over ten years of cramps and now they were gone and they could have been gone the entire time but I was too ignorant and dumb. Dumb me.

But I had cramps and I was miserable and this was before I started taking the motrin, which was available only by prescription at that time, or at least it was only by RX in the dosages I was taking.

I had an upset stomach and I was in pain and I was sweating.

Mr and Mrs S were very concerned. They thought I might have food poisoning. Or sunstroke. They didn't know what.

And I wouldn't tell them because I was too embarrassed.

Here's another hint for parents: if you hire a teenage girl to accompany you on a vacation as the au pair and she gets sick, keep in mind that she would rather D-I-E die than tell a man she is having her period.

I might have told Mrs S if she had asked me on her own, but she and Mr S were hovering over me together. They asked if they should call my mother. They were so worried.

I could have alleviated their concern with one simple sentence, but I was fourteen! Nobody talks about that stuff when she is 14!

After two hours, I was fine. They went out again. Bethany, Sarah, and I hung out in the condo. We had a lovely time.

But they never asked me to go out of town with them again. And I never told them what had been wrong.