My first blog entry

Gentle Reader,

I have been stalling starting this blog for longer than makes me comfortable examining. Even now, as I reluctantly put aside the tempting turn-offs to color choices for background, text and links, or a quick check of a small but thought-provoking selection of fonts, my heart races in trepidation. A demanding anxiety pulses in my solar plexus, and I just started chewing my thumbnail. Hmmm, I think we call that fear.

It is one thing to talk for years about writing a book, but another thing entirely to write a blog. It will be a tad longer, give or take a decade, before the book is finished, and my son has been encouraging me (although it occasionally smacks of browbeating), to start blogging. "You're thinking too much, Mom! Don't think, write!"

The past year has been eventful, busy, and hard. My mother, known to all as Didi, suddenly got old. One year ago she was her regular 82 year-old self: up early improving the profits of AT&T with her daily lengthy call to her best friend in Paris and my brother in Geneva, reading the whole New York Times, serious gym class at the 92nd Street Y, errands, shopping, tea at the Carlyle to gossip harmlessly in four languages with her few remaining ambulatory & living friends, back home to read mail, watch the BBC World News, have drinks and watch the sun set over the Reservoir and Central Park West. Didi was the quintessential femme d'un certain age, still beautiful, smart, funny, vain, vivacious, physically fit and independent, traveling alone and making all her own decisions.

We had dinner together at Island, our favorite local haunt in Carnegie Hill, on that last night she was still a youthful 80 something. Once, at a chic nightclub in Beirut in 1943, my naive 19 year old mother was taught a dirty Roumanian ditty by a rakish old pal of my Dad's, and had ever since been bursting into song on meeting a Roumanian in a vain attempt to find out what the hell the words meant. Now, almost half a century later & worlds away on the Upper East Side, after two Stolichnayas on the rocks with a twist, she sang the song to our unbelievably appalled Roumanian waitress, who burst into tears and ran to hide behind the bar. After singing the song next day to Roxie, my Roumanian friend who gives me my rare and cherished manicures laced with raucous conversation, and confirming that it was a grossly graphic depiction of a reasonably routine sexual act that may still be illegal in NY, I told Mum that she could never, ever, ever under any circumstances whatsoever sing the song again. She promised to apologize to our traumatized waitress, but by the time the waitress stopped avoiding us and dispatching a waiter from another station to our table whenever we came to dine, she had completely forgotten the episode.

And then one day, not many days after I had taken away her song, she woke up and she was old. Her skin, dry and papery hung slack on her suddenly shrunken form. She began to fall, and then, much worse, became so afraid of falling that she stopped going out. She checked the park and Reservoir out her windows: if there were wavelets on the water or leaves moving with the breeze, she'd declare it too windy and stay home. She was afraid to be blown away. Admittedly, she lives on East 90th street, a notoriously windy block, but when I took her out for a walk she clung to me like a terrified child, whimpering. This was my mother, now 83, and so light and fragile she reminded me of dried leaf, bereft of sap.

She spends more and more time in the past. When I come to see her she is sitting in her den, surrounded by an avalanche of old photographs, not quite sure who all these people are and why they were at my father's 70th birthday party at the Plaza or my brother's bar mitzvah at the St. Regis. "That is your sister, Vicky," I tell her and I know from the cloud that flits in her eyes that she doesn't quite believe me and isn't at all sure she even has a sister. "You remember Vicky! She lives in Argentina with Solange. You and Christopher flew to Buenos Aires to visit last spring vacation." She's beginning to remember. "My sister Vicky eats too many sweets. She lies in bed and gets fat. When I was there she was angry with me -- no, she was jealous! -- of the fact that I can walk and she can't. She told me I was wearing ugly shoes and then she didn't speak to me again the whole time we were there."

Vicky has Parkinson's, and the poor old dear is neither angry nor jealous. Didi has atherosclerosis, which at this stage causes many of the same symptoms as Alzheimer's. In 1924, when Didi was born, Vicky was already 6. Now they are both old ladies.

In addition to seeing after my mother, my life for the past year has been consumed with getting Christopher, my 14 year old son, into the best school for him for his four years of high school. It has been harder and more time consuming than helping my daughter Julia when she was applying to college in 2006. The applications are just as hard and loaded with essays, and the anxiety is just as bad. And before you know it, four years later, it is time to apply to college all over again.

My very best advice to any parent trying to get their child into a city private school is this: try your hardest to get into a K-12 on-going school. It stinks having to apply out in 8th grade, especially when choices for boys in 9th grade in the city are so much narrower than for girls.

The excellent news is that Christopher did get in to his first choice, and will be going there in the fall. Why did we go the boarding school, and not the day school, route? People are constantly asking me this, so here are the reasons:

• Christopher did not have the grades to get into a first tier NYC day school such as Trinity, Dalton, Riverdale and so forth. He is a legacy at Trinity through his father, but his current Head of School guffawed and rolled on the floor clutching his sides when I suggested we apply. My first husband went to Collegiate, but he, alas, is dead, and thus of no use in furthering my son's ambitions. The best schools were not an option.

• He could get into many of the second tier schools like Dwight (no longer known, I'm told, by the acronym Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together), York Prep, Birch Wathen, etc., which make the students slave away at programs like the International Baccalaureate in order to add gravitas to their otherwise less than weighty institutions. Unfortunately, the second tiers were not an option either because as an old Spence girl, I am enough of a snob to not want to send my child to any of them.

• Public schools were out, because Christopher's LD (learning difference, the current PC name for learning disability) requires that he be in small classes, so he didn't even sit for the Stuyvesant/Bronx Science/Brooklyn Tech elite public schools exam.

• Scratching all these alternatives left us three choices: home schooling, dropping out, or boarding school.

• Boarding school! I went to boarding school! I loved boarding school!

• At this point, it is barely worth mentioning that I had to get myself kicked out of Spence in the second month of junior year, attend 4 schools, each rather briefly, over the remainder of the year, and get thrown out of the NYC public schools system for truancy before achieving my goal of finally being sent to boarding school. No self-respecting school in the United States was likely to accept me, in midsummer, a girl with 12 years at Spence under her belt (I repeated kindergarten as I was 4 and only spoke French), followed by 5 schools in her penultimate HS year, (not to mention the lingering blot of truancy), to a spot in 12th grade in just a few months. I was washed up at 17.

• Switzerland was the only answer, and I was dispatched to the Institut Montesano in Gstaad, Switzerland where by sheer coincidence my mother's childhood friend from Egypt now taught English. I was accepted to the school over lunch at the railroad station restaurant in Gstaad where we ate an assortment of swiss sausages and pommes vapeur and drank a bottle of Swiss fendant. My mother and John Nahman, as this teacher & gentleman was called, reminisced about a children's party at the British Ambassador's residence in Alexandria they had both attended with their Scottish nannies 'round about 1931, while I drank the wine and became quite happy. They didn't ask how it was that I found myself school-less, and we didn't ask if they were accredited. My mother and I were very impressed that that Candace Bergen had gone there a few years back, and that Elizabeth Taylor's daughter would be in my class, and it was all settled. Candace Bergen, if you are reading this, please write. We had all the same teachers and they always talked about you as the perfect American. Did you know that Henri Bauchau is still alive in Paris?

So there you have it: why Christopher is going to boarding school in September, why I went to boarding school 40 years ago, Didi, and a bit about the things that have been on the front burner of the old thinker these past twelve months. Please tune in tomorrow for further digressions.

Smile, and carpe each & every diem.

EarthMother