Love

coupole.jpgSure it's a cliche, but Paris really is a tremendously romantic city. The grand brasseries like the art nouveau Bofinger or the art deco La Coupole don't just transport you to another place, but another time. They are joyful places where you want to be extravagant and order bottles of wine and big platters of seafood. When I think about my time in Paris with my husband-to-be at the time, I remember the feeling of indulgence and even decadence as if nothing beyond those gilded dining rooms mattered at all. And I remember the seafood, those big multi-tiered platters brimming with oysters, clams and lobster.

Anyone who has been through it will tell you, getting married is not nearly as stressful as the wedding itself. The relatives, the seating charts, the guest list, the cost. Oh I could go on and on. But I won't. Instead I'll tell you about the night before I got married. After weeks of handling last minute details, celebrating a birthday, entertaining and seeing to the needs of out-of-town guests and relatives, it felt like the night before our wedding was the first moment we had alone in ages.

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two_hearts.gif I am not a social butterfly.  I can dress, dazzle, chat, and spin with the best of them, but by nature, I am a loner; it’s who I am and I embrace that label.  I relish my solo evenings.

I work, I write, I visit E-bay checking in on the gold and white pottery auctions, tearing pages from magazines, cataloguing the furniture I will buy in my next life. I eat pasta doused with weird combinations of toppings I dig out of the pantry and eat it in front of the TV watching back-to-back episodes of any Law and Orders I have tivoed. I like to hang alone, finding peace in the quiet, finding my voice in the empty air of my house. Even after J-date, after tapas and wine and a dance that never slowed and still hasn’t with the man I now love, I still longed for time away. Even when everything became more entertaining with him there, and the funny things I saw and did had weight because I finally had someone to share them with, I needed my time alone. While the kisses on the Ferris wheel, the late night phone calls from LA to Idaho, the electricity when we touched excited me and made me happy, I still needed to lack, to be without. 

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50dove.jpg My husband Mike points out that the room goes silent as I watch a quivering gooey strand of icing bridge a hunk of pastry being pried apart by delicate hands in an Entenman's commercial. And when a pool of thick, rich Dove chocolate swirls around and folds itself magically over a brick of vanilla ice cream, my eyes glaze over. Then, when the caramel and chocolate of a Milky Way is fully exposed in delectable close up, my jaw goes slack. He tells me to face it: these commercials are, for me, like watching porn. Yes, I embarrassedly admit that I have fallen prey to the sexualized enticements of sugary things. 

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06-17-00_soda_jerk_sign_at_beerfest.jpg  She leans in toward me, her elbows on the counter. She is tall, blonde, and very slender. She’s wearing a tight black skirt and a white blouse open one button just past modest. A maid’s apron circles her waist. She begins to speak but I raise my hand and gesture for her to wait. I am listening to the teenage girl with the long legs and short shorts standing to the blonde’s left. She is a regular but, tonight, she wants more than usual.

“I want my pint of chocolate chip but I also need a cheese steak, to go and a regular hoagie without onions. They’re so busy at the sandwich counter, can’t you take my order?

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lobsters.jpgLast week, on Martha’s Vineyard, while eating lobster on the docks of Menemsha, my 20 year old daughter asked, “Where do lobsters come from?” She always stumps me! I’m still having trouble with chickens and eggs, so I looked it up and what I found was utterly fascinating.

With a characteristic similar to some humans I know, the female lobster is always attracted to the bad, dangerous alpha in the hood. The male lobster is a mean and aggressive beast. Being the most powerful fighter has earned him the respect of the other males and the pick of the females.

When the female lobster is ready to mate, she approaches alpha’s den and secretly squirts a pheromone, subtly mixed with her urine into his lair. Sensing an intruder, the male rushes to his door with his claws raised aggressively, but he is already sufficiently ruffied, and after a brief fight, the female places her claws upon the love drugged male’s head, who then obediently escorts her over the threshold of his cave.

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